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Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

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Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#71

Post by rbanffy »

ryanmolden wrote: post #67
rbanffy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in a big Windows-centric company developing hardware and software for Windows CE (mid-2002), I had two desktops, one associated with the corporate domain, where I could print and read e-mails off their Exchange server, and another, where I had administrative privileges (VS required them to attach debuggers to processes) that didn't connect to the corporate network at all. If you develop pieces of the OS…

>VS required them to attach debuggers to processes I don't believe this is entirely true. VS will sometimes claim you need to be an admin and offer to restart as an admin, but you can click ignore in that dialog and debugging will work just fine. The one exception is if you are running as non-admin trying to attach to a higher privilege process, in which case you would need to be able to attain the same privileges as…

Since it was a long time ago, I am not sure exactly what we tried and why we failed, but I can tell you we tried hard. Corporate IT didn't like us much for having computers they couldn't manage.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#73

Post by xpaulbettsx »

dmn001 wrote: post #46
nhebb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition to the file movement features, Mouse Without Borders also allows the user to log onto all the PCs linked together by the program via just one PC. That's the big one. I use a commercial tool (MaxiVista) right now, and I've used Synergy in the past (buggy). The drawback of both is that you need a separate keyboard for each system to log in, and then you can use the software as a KVM. If Mouse Without Bord…

I have a computer that does not have either a mouse keyboard or monitor attached to it, to use it I switch it on and wait for it to boot, then use windows RDP to login. I can view the screen, move the mouse across monitors seamlessly, use the clipboard. The only thing extra here is the file sharing - I can just hook up an external drive or sync using dropbox.

RDP has file sharing too actually, go into the Drives tab on TS client.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#74

Post by xpaulbettsx »

robert_nsu wrote: post #7
mamp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question is do you need a whole separate unit within a company to create this "innovation"? Sometimes in microsoft land "innovation" == "not reading widely enough".

You don't, however, I think the article is playing up the word "innovation" a bit too much. All I see is some guy (who works for Microsoft) writing a program to make his life a little easier.

I would tend to agree actually, I always cringe at the words "grassroots" and "innovation".

The Garage is all about some people who are frankly way more like the HN crowd than most inside Microsoft, trying to bring back Hacker Ethos, DIY code culture to Microsoft. If it doesn't exist, hack it out and make things more awesome.

Trying to release what comes out of it externally is trickier, many of the things that come out of it just don't make sense outside of MS, but for the things that do, they should see the light of day (ideally, as Open Source, but that's trickier).

The point is, there are folks inside Microsoft who Get It, and they're trying to turn the battleship around, even if it seems like small beans to the rest of the world. Whether they are successful or not will determine whether anyone will care about Microsoft in ten years.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the people who was on the Garage Council)

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#75

Post by snow_mac »

snow_mac wrote: post #15
avolcano wrote: post #4

Before you pass this off as a Synergy clone, check this out: > As Microsoft's Steve Clayton explains, "I have two PC’s on my desk at work connected to 3 LCD screens and using Mouse Without Borders I can move my mouse between the 3 screens, even though one of them is attached to a different PC from the other two. What’s more, I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another.…

Yes. But Garage probably stole the idea. http://synergy-foss.org/pm/issues/47 Synergy isn't very developed but they do have an extensive roadmap, which Microsoft seems to have copied and implemented. This doesn't make them innovative, just coping a good idea. Maybe if this run on OS X I'd use it, but I'll stick to my separate Mouse/Keyboards for now. Btw, back in the day, I did love Synergy.

Why a down vote on this? It's not spammy!

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#76

Post by drivebyacct2 »

ryanmolden wrote: post #65
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS and after sending the email, I never heard back. I eventually gave up on that particular issue and took the only remaining option which was reimaging my machine. (A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was ca…

>Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS Yes, sometimes to trace down a problem dump files are necessary, and with full heap info they can be big. If you expect psychic debugging based on (often times) vague descriptions of your problems or a problem th…

Whatever. I've lost interest in participating in this thread.

I don't frankly care if you believe me. The crash occured and the .NET runtime kindly informed me that it was unaware of where the crash was occuring. I'd post it here, but I'd prefer it were not linked to my name as Googling the error message reveals my only post.

I had to reinstall Windows to resolve the issue. Reinstalling Visual Studio and the Azure SDK and SP1 and all the .NET runtimes did not resolve the issue.

Just so happy to see that I've been downvoted with no explanation to how my comments violated HN principles and I'm being accused of being incompetent and stupid. Fantastic. If I'm so incapable of reproducing issues and "demons in a machine" is so laughable, why exactly does the "Unhandled ExecutionEngineException" exist and why was it more than trivial for me to reproduce?

So now three MS people doubting me, mocking me, and suggesting #win32 as remotely comparable to open source style IRC rooms. This is just sad, and ironic as all get out considering the fact that my original comment was that Microsoft and community don't play nice together. Don't you see that irony?

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#77

Post by drivebyacct2 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what you're trying to tell me. How is EF related to developers working on side projects?

Sorry, I took "The Garage is a community" to mean non-Microsoft employees. More to that apology, a re-read of your comment leaves me wondering just what I was thinking. Alas, I'll continue with my thoughts; feel free to ignore them or consider them OT; I apologize. My point might be summarized or expressed in a different way. I worked with .NET for the last 12 months and I can remember (just off the top of my head) 4…

lol

Are the downvotes because #win32 is comparable to #django, #python, etc? Or what exactly? No one bothered blessing me with a explanation for why I've been crucified here. What ever, this is sad.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#78

Post by drivebyacct2 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #31
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #3

Revolutionary! Despite competing open source projects that have been around for years with more features and no arbitrary limitations of four computers.

I've been accused of writing a troll-bait post, so I thought I'd elaborate on my thoughts. There seems to be this cheering of the notion of "Microsoft Garage" despite the fact that Microsoft still gets to say if it's released at all, and how. I'm more sad to see that this was it's own project instead of a modification/fork/extension of Synergy. If the focus and energy used to develop this were instead spent on cleani…

Thanks for the downvote and no reply! It's totally awesome that Microsoft is taking control of their developer's community projects and totally awesome that they incorporate these projects and relegate them to internal use only instead of encouraging the betterment of existing tools.

How dare I suggest otherwise. I totally deserve to be downvoted. THANKS.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#79

Post by awa »

PyErr_SetString wrote: post #58
lurker19 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft develops operating systems.

I am aware of that :) When developing OS it might make sense to have two machines. (unless you can run in a VM, which I think many could) But, not everyone at MS works with windows, which is why I was a little surprised about the statement that everyone had more than one machine.

Afaik 2 machines are almost mandatory 1. Dev machine 2. Email machine

The 2 biggest orgs inside MS are Office and Windows, devs in both of them can't have a single machine doing both the above tasks. (And VMs suck for disk based I/O, and that becomes a factor when you have multi-hour build time)

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#80

Post by [deleted] »

snow_mac wrote: post #75
snow_mac wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But Garage probably stole the idea. http://synergy-foss.org/pm/issues/47 Synergy isn't very developed but they do have an extensive roadmap, which Microsoft seems to have copied and implemented. This doesn't make them innovative, just coping a good idea. Maybe if this run on OS X I'd use it, but I'll stick to my separate Mouse/Keyboards for now. Btw, back in the day, I did love Synergy.

Why a down vote on this? It's not spammy!

[deleted]
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