Ballmer: "We'll Outsmart Open Source"

An anonymous reader writes "Micorosofts Steve Ballmer is spouting off again in this ZDNet UK article. To an audience of Most Valued Professionals in London, he says 'We'll outsmart open source.' Among other things, he also says 'Linux is a serious competitor.' We've known ever since the Halloween Documents that they have been running scared, but this looks like a prelude to a whole new round of dirty tricks. It also looks like damage control for the statements of Microsoft's Sr. VP Brian Valentines last week."

Comments

Re:They have outsmarted us with palladium

[leviramsey]

Since palladium will be in the cpu and bios itself, I wonder if it will even be possible to turn it off?

Considering that the Palladium standard requires that the BIOS allow Palladium to be deactivated, I would say that it's more than possible.

Visual Studio C++

[GuyMannDude]

The Visual Studio IDE integrates everything wonderfully, integrating a really slick editor, a world-class debugger, and a high-quality compiler.

I'm not sure exactly what compiler you are using but the C++ compiler is truly terrible. Besides that fact that they are using an outdated version of the STL libraries, the compiler will let all sorts of crazy errors through that gcc will catch. For those of you who use VC++, I would encourage you to set aside perhaps 2 weeks where you compile both on VC++ and gcc. You'll be stunned at the number of errors that gcc will catch but VC++ will let slip through. Lord only knows what the VC++ compiled code is actually doing...

GMD

Re:I'm sorry, what?

[(trb001)]

The one thing you're missing is that in 99% of the cases, Linux/Open Source doesn't have a bottom line they have to meet. Since the (vast?) majority of programmers working on OSS projects are donating time, there's no need to pay them. This translates into better project planning because they're not always worried about meeting deadlines that their jobs rest on. Not to say that OSS isn't stressful, just that you don't have bigwigs worried about their jobs because a deliverable wasn't met.

I'll admit, I like VC++ and Office for most tasks. However, after attempting to configure an NT/2000 box as a DNS/Web/FTP server that I can remotely manage, I will take Linux anyday. On my first attempt it took me roughly three days (~12 hours) to install and configure a box with 2 websites both DNS'd through the box with an ftp server and some basic user recognition on the web site. This was without ever having done it before. With NT, it took me weeks to figure out how IIS worked the first time, let alone trying to figure out how to do remote management and multi-user functions. When MS comes up with an easy multi-user OS that has literal plug and play (read: like RedHat's rpm or Debian's apt-get functionality) packages, give me a holler.

--trb