What's Microsoft Up To?

So, today's one of those days when every bit of news is dominated by Microsoft. To spare you six different stories about the Borg, we'll assimilate them all into this one. You have seen the stupid Passport hole in an earlier story; also the iLoo, although that hasn't stopped you from submitting stories about it, oh no. New news: a report paid for by Microsoft shows that Windows is a better server than Red Hat. A class-action suit has been filed charging that MSN and Best Buy combined to scam customers. The WINHEC conference is ongoing - Steve Ballmer says DRM is an opportunity, not a prison, the Xbox is going to be your home communications center, Wired talks about how hardware will be changed to imprison users, and once you're locked in to Microsoft you get to pay more each year. An article describes why user desktops are locked down. Oh, and here's another on DRM, just because.

Comments

Microsoft Prototype Crawler

[friedegg]

Anyone see this new Microsoft robot crawling their websites? It's apparently legitimate, or at least acknowledged by Microsoft. Competition for Google?

Both Sides of the Fence

[limekiller4]

From another CNN article released yesterday, Gates says this of DRM:
"Consumers shouldn't be worried that Microsoft Corp.'s new security technology will wrest control of their PCs and give it to media companies, Bill Gates said this week. They can always choose not to use it, he said."

Holy poopy-poop, that's misleading. People are going to read this and think "they" means "them." As in "the consumer can always choose not to use it." It, of course, doesn't. It means the creators of the content. And there goes fair use. And while I'm on it, can someone who is a lawyer tell me if we have a right to fair use or is it merely a thing that we've enjoyed because copyright holders couldn't ever get such a firm grip on it enough to effectively control it?

But anyway, back to the issue. In the same article further down, we see:

"Gates said the format of digital content is up to their creators, and Microsoft is only providing a platform on which record labels and movie studios -- as well as others -- can build."

This is a fairly reasonable argument, not so different from the people who run Kazaa saying "hey, we're just an indexer, blame the end-user." Perhaps Microsoft isn't culpable here, either. What they're creating here is a valid tool, one that can allow people a strong form of encryption. The blame for the abuse of that tool, I think, does not rightfull belong in Microsoft's lap.

You might correctly argue that MS is doing this knowing full well that abuse is going to occur and stands to profit from it. Again, Napster et al. We cannot play both sides of the fence here.

Best Buy's agressive sales staff

[SimplyCosmic]

From the article:

Plaintiff Samuel Kim said he unwittingly became a victim in February after making a purchase at a Best Buy store in Los Angeles with his debit card. At checkout, a store employee scanned Kim's debit card and, without any explanation to him, scanned a trial MSN compact disc and placed it in his shopping bag, the lawsuit said.

Now I'll be the first to note that the man should have paid closer attention to his receipt, but this is definitely not uncommon at many Best Buys.

The Best Buy corporation likes to make a marketting bullet point about how their salespeople are not paid commissions and therefore aren't going to pressure you into sales you don't need. However, they conveniently forget to mention that the sales records of these employees are carefully tracked and while they don't get the positive re-enforcement of a commission income, they get plenty of negative re-enforcement for failing to push MSN, Netflix, service plans or anything else the corporate HQ wants customers to buy into.

Besides seeing such happen as a customer, I worked myself at a Best Buy for an entire eight hours in their computer department a year back and watched one the saleskids first try to push the MSN subscription on a customer who refused it the eight times it was asked, and then had it put on his credit card by the worker anyways.

When I asked the sales manager about the legality of this he merely muttered something about it being the customer's responsibility to keep track of their receipt and that he rewarded such agressive tactics.

I quit that job right then and there.

More horror stories for those look for an entertaining, though depressing read.

Microsoft afraid to be benchmarked on AMD chip?

[Ra5pu7in]

Okay, so it is rather redundant to say, but any benchmarking / testing paid for by a party is pretty much guaranteed to be biased in favor of that party.

Anyway, what is up with all the (ONLY 3?) testing systems being PIII Xeons? Where are the AMD chips for comparison? Sounds like Microsoft made sure the systems and benchmarks were very thoroughly optimized in their favor.

Re:sing with me

[4of12]

Yes, we all know that it's true.

And they're certain to want to rope off pieces of pie for themselves.

Despite all this, though, I think the general idea of a PC with the functionality of "Athena" is a good idea. If MS uses it's big cudgel to bring down the PC decibel level (you can hear `em whining already - "but we gotta cool our 4 GHz chips!"), increase the reliability (go ahead and use cheap capacitors - we won't let you put a quad-color sticker on the outside), and standardize hardware interfaces for telephony, then that would be a largely positive move.

Of course, as Linux user, I'd like to see all these new standards published openly and available for free to anyone who thinks they could implement them.

Re:I'm always skeptical when someone tries to sell

[julesh]

They disabled last access time updating under windows. They didn't under Linux. This is enough to account for these differences, I suspect.

File server shoot-out? You're kidding, right?

[mj01nir]

That's so... 1996. This is one of the tactics Novell tried to use to keep corporations from replacing NetWare with NT. What Novell found out is that no one cared about file server performance. As long as the performance was "good enough" and Windows had more gizmos, they were screwed.

Of course, this is just one part of Microsoft's strategy against Linux and OSS. But I'm pretty sure that this salvo will fall on deaf ears.

Re:Next we tested IIS on both Linux and Windows

[mykepredko]

Actually, I would have liked to see a comparison on different hardware. I have a few questions regarding the hardware:

1. Why was HP servers only used in the comparison?
   
2. I'm not sure of the chipset, but I believe that these servers use HP proprietary Northbridge/Southbridges which could affect performance, I would have preferred to see a Dell with true Intel and/or RCI chipsets included in the test.
   
3. Along these lines, I'm suspicious as to why the DL380 servers were configured with 1.4 GHz PIIIs and not 2.8 GHz Xeons (and the DL760s had 900 MHz Xeons and not 2 GHz Xeons)
   
4. I would have also liked to see different size SDRAM configurations for the test.
   
5. As you said, a comparison of different network file systems would be nice as well.
   
6. Finally, an interesting measure would have been how often each OS crashed and had to be rebooted.
   

Now having said all this, I'm not surprised, I've been reading performance comparisons for 25 years and strangely enough, the sponsoring company's hardware/software/operating systems always seem to come out on top. This started with comparing the 8086 to the 68000 and has continued on to the present day.

The important/best thing about the review is that it states very clearly at the top that the test was sponsored by Microsoft.

myke

Re:What Happened to the tabletPC?

[easyfrag]

OK, I keep hearing about how all hospitals are going to roll Tablet PCs out. I work in a 1000 bed hospital and we are preparing a test rollout of Tablets because on the surface they look like they may fit in a hospital enviornment. My own personal experience with both tablets and the hospital staff who will use them leads me to predict the following:

The nurses will lose the damn pens, and I'm not sure but I don't think that replacing them will be on the scale of replacing a bic, the pen on a Compaq tablet has a battery.

The nurses will lose, drop, or spill something over the devices. When we first rolled out pagers to nurses many came back broken and still do, a fairly large number ended up in toilets (poorly designed clips were the problem there). The point is that most health care workers have physically demanding, mobile jobs.

Most importantly the battery life of this generation of tablets is nowhere near the length neccessary. Most of our nurses work 12 hour shifts, they are not going to want to have to charge or swap batteries every day.

If anyone out there works in a hospital and have tested or rolled out these devices I would love to hear about your experiences.