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Cringley on Microsoft and Linux
brentlaminack writes "Time for this week's dose of I, Cringely. This week the Cringe talks about Ballmer's Orlando comments from this week. He compares Ballmer's comments with Linus's. Nothing new here for the /. group, but a good read for the non-technical."
So in UPNP the people that worked there were C-Class players... ok, but then, where are the A-Class players for Microsoft? In the NBA? Because they don't seems to be working on Windows neither.
Yeah, I hate still having to deal with horrible projects like Bob.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
That's the sound that Open Source makes as it screams at high speed over your head...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Yeah, I hate still having to deal with horrible projects like Bob.
You misspelled 'Clippy.'
UPNP is a decent example of Microsoft failure. But nothing is more fun to pick on than...
Microsoft Bob!!
And I liked the part where he compared Microsoft Support to the Psychic Friends Network.. Hey, maybe he's on to something here... They can have the solution to my problem ready before I even call, and give me lotto number to boot.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
You can use statistics to prove anything. 37% of all people know that.
No, they were both invented by SCO.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Microsoft is producing the software to make money; that's a given. And it's often stated that Bill is driven by a Borg mentality to beat the other players in the industry and to own everything. Which makes a lot of sense; a lot of the evil illegal things they do can not be explained just by a motivation to get money, they already have the money.
And it stated in this article again that open source software development is based on a desire to make this software free. And personal reputation of the developer. And other motivations. But here's the one major driving motivation to Open Source Software that no one else seems to be willing to state:
Open Source software is largely driven, and will continue to succeeded, because of a hatred of Bill Gates. It's as simple as that. People hate Bill Gates so much that they are not just willing but glad to donate tens or hundreds of hours of their time to anything that would make projects that Microsoft competes with better. And the more illegal things he does to try to destroy other software and to take over the software world, the more this will continue to be true.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They should have adoption ads like the animal shelter has for pets.
The compairison has been done! Really!
PSN did pretty well compaired to MS.
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried: Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a resultof this research, we have come to the following conclusions: 1 ) that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone ; 2 ) that the Psychic Friends Net work has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but 3) that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem.
In the paragraphs that follow, we will detail the support calls we made and the responses we received from each pport provider. We will follow this with a discussion of the features provided by each support provider so that readers can do their own rankings of the two services.
Our research began when we called Microsoft regarding a bug that we had detected when executing queries which pulled data from a Sybase Server into Microsoft Access. If we used the same Access database to query two databases on the same server, we found that all of the queries aimed at the second database that we queried were sent to the first database that we had queried. This problem existed no matter which database we queried first. Dan called Microsoft's Technical Solutions Line, gave them $55, and was connected with an official Microsoft Access technical support person. As Dan began to explain the problem, the support person interrupted him, and told him that since it was clear that it was not just a problem with Access but with the two programs together, Microsoft would not try to help us. They did,however, have a consultant referral service with which he would be glad to connect us. Dan then asked if we could have our $55 refunded, since Microsoft was not going to try to answer to our question. The tech support person responded by forwarding Dan to the person in charge of giving refunds. The person officially in charge of giving refunds took Dan's credit card info again, after which Dan asked about the referral service. It was too late, however - the refund folks could not reconnect Dan with the tech support guy he'd been talking with, nor could he put Dan in touch with the referral service hotline. End of Call One.
Our second call came when Dan was creating some line graphs in Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access actually uses a program called Microsoft Graph to create its graphs, and this program has a "feature" that makes the automatic axis scale always start the scale at zero. If all of your data are between 9,800 and 10,000 and you get a scale of 0 to 10,000, your data will appear as a flat line at the top of your graph-not a very interesting chart. Since Dan was writing Visual Basic code to create the graphs, he wanted to be able to use Visual Basic code to change the graph scaling, but he could not find anything in the help files that would tell him how to do this. After working with Microsoft Graph for a while, Dan concluded that it probably didn't have the capability that he needed, but he decided to call Microsoft just to make sure. Dan described his problem to the technical support person, whom we'll call Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob said he'd never gotten a call about Microsoft Graph before. He then left Dan on hold while he went to ask another support person how to use Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Bob came back with the suggestion that Dan use the online help. Dan, however, had already used the online help, and didn't feel that this was an appro
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Ballmer didn't write glib and that's a fact.
Meow. Now!
Come out with your hands up, Archangeli!
( Just kidding! )
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
If Feynman was slow, the rest of us are moving backwards.
but anyhow, the largest reason open source [projects are] better ... is because you have millions of people around the world looking at it, testing it, not just coders, but everyone.
Unless that project is XFree86... because looking at it just paralyzes you with FEAR.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Anecdote time.
Windows NT4 had no utility to show the uptime of a running server. It was stored in the kernel, but there was no tool that came with the operating system that would display that information.
But, Microsoft DID release a unsupported set of tools called the Resource Kit. The Resource Kit was, as you would expect, all the tools that would be of USE to a system administrator, like a remote shutdown tool, a remote command tool, just to name a couple.
In there, there was a utility you could use to display the uptime of the server.
The format that the server displayed was:
HH:MM:SS.s
So, much like the 'no one would EVER need more than 640KB of memory', whoever wrote that tool couldn't even comprehend a system that was up for more than 99 hours, and 59 seconds.
My server at home has been up for 68 days, 11 hours, 26 minutes.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Bill usually knows how to pick a winner, it just takes it a while to cross the line.
I agree. Bill chose Unix way back in the 80's and it looks like Unix will win.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
No, he is not. He realizes that he dosn't have this skillful fork force to make software that is up to standard, but he can make software for the noobs. Do you thik a noob cares that his computer crashed when all he is running is MSN on a nice and sleek desktop. They don't care if their computer looses most of it's data due to a cyber attack as long as they can look at the silver start bar mooving up and down. How many real programers use MS for work? CHEERS --RoadkillBunny
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny