Slashdot Mirror
A Former Microsoftie Forecasts Microsoft Doom
Chris Holland writes "Jeff Reifman, a columnist for Seattle Weekly, has written a toe-curling editorial analysis of Microsoft's past and current missed opportunities, contrasted with its financial success, while covering in fair depth some of the most serious threats to their business model. Beyond the many choice quotes, I've found this article to be a very interesting read from somebody who has not only been on the inside, but also significantly developed his professional career thru Microsoft solutions."
Earlier on in the article he says: Yet near the end he says: By "Income" does he mean "Profit" or is MS actually predicting a 50% revenue drop over the previous year?
Trolling is a art,
John Carmack can't be happy about Microsoft embrace and extend to his video game! It's sounds funny anyway: Microsoft Doom
It's almost like the company had troubles or something.
. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work.
I must be very lucky because I typically go weeks without rebooting.
Absolutely
Microsoft admits that one of its biggest challenges is getting users of its products to upgrade to new releases. Fewer than 3 percent of Microsoft Office users have upgraded to the latest version
I can't use all of the features in Office 200 yet....
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Now wouldn't THAT be nice?
The article is well worth reading. I agree with most of it. I am not exactly a Microsoft fan but I don't have quite the issues with Microsoft that the author does. My biggest gripe is not their products but rather their predatory business practices.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Microsoft is going to die? *BSD has supposedly been on that road for years! Maybe MS could learn a thing or two from the resilience of *BSD.
Is Microsoft bought ID Software and will ship Doom 4 with Longhorn ?
:)
Let's the frag begins
...significantly developed his professional career thru Microsoft solutions
THRU?!? What kind of site are you guys running?
How hard is it to keep these lazy-teenager abbreviations out of the stories?
This space intentionally left blank.
Where exactly does it say it's a "Linux advocacy site"? It's news for nerds. Yes, there are quite knowledgeable Microsoft nerds as well.
To me, the blurb is slightly misleading. Whoever wrote the href tags did it so "editorial" was there, but analysis wasn't. People miss that.
Being a true slashdotter, I daren't RTFA, thus I'm not disputing the truth of what the guy says, but people who do read the article should take everything said with a fairly large grain of sodium.
Editorial means subjective, and a true "analysis" would be objective.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
I know most of us on slashdot will enjoy a bit of MS bashing but this article is interesting in pointing out the apparent weakness of the MS mindset. Well worth RTFA.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
This is just Mac/Anti-MS propaganda. He even starts out with the standard windows is so unstable I have to reboot all the time! Which is not nearly true anymore as XP remains perfectly stable for weeks on end. The last time I've rebooted this machine was when the power went out.
I also love the later part of the article when this "Andrew" person expounds on how wonderful OS X is... compared to Windows98! wtf.
Hating MS is one thing, but at least be fair about it.
The article seems to make the assumption that Microsoft got where it is today by having the best products. That's a big mistake. Even if we go back to it's roots and compare DOS with the other operating systems of the time, we see that MS was selling rubbish compared to what the others were.
MS got where it is today by being extremely agressive in defeating its competitors, mostly through business tactics than superior products.
with microsoft's focus on enterprise applications and with sharepoint and sql analysis and reporting services being probably the most powerful web portal and buisness intelligence solutions to date, the juggernaut will roll on crushing anyone who stands in opposition as they move and change with the environment, focusing on where the money is. not trying to make the same thing they've done for 10 years better.
Since when was slashdot dedicated to Linux?
You must be new here.
Please. Any employee of any company can find the internal flaws and missed oppertunities. I work for a large insurance company and eventhough I'm just a peon, I see several flaws and problems that could easily be avoided. But then again, I see lots of things done very well and successfully.
... if you just look at the points being made. The other problem with a comentary is that the opposite is usually just as correct. A person can make a convincing argument from any view point, but ultimatly it is the actions of the company that say whether it is true or not.
This is just a case of dwelling on the negative. Another employee could write the completely opposite review of MS and it would be every bit as convinsing.
The problem with a comentary is that it is generally correct
In MS case, I'm sure they have done many things wrong and missed many oppertunities...yet they continue to make lots and lots and lots of cash. Therefore, this guy can say anything he wants, but it won't change the fact that MS is *definitely* doing things 'right'.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Did anyone else feel like part of the article was more of a resume than an article about Microsoft?
My biggest reason for saying this involves the fact that Microsoft is also too large to just topple outright, and there is too much of the industry tied up in Windows technology for it to just suddenly become irrelevant, not to mention all the legacy apps and documents that'll require continued support no matter what OS or technology eventually rises to new dominance (.doc, ferinstance.)
I guess that, even as an admitted Linux/Mac partisan, Microsoft isn't just going to die in some Nazi-ish 'Gates-eating-a-bullet-in-a-Redmond-bunker' gotterdammerung, as much as it will just become something else, and still hold sway to some extent after it does.
So yeah - out of the two examples you picked, I'd pick the Roman one as being the one most likely to come true.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Recently purchased an OS X machine (iBook). Had been messing around with the system off and on for a few years on the company's art department computers. It's good, but it isn't the panacea this guy (and others) make it out to be.
Every OS excels at something. Mac (still) excels at useability. UNIX stability. Windows excels at recognizing just about any piece of hardware or software I've thrown at it in the last 15 years.
If you think about it, Windows isn't THAT bad. I can't think of a single OS that runs the breadth of programs Windows does from so many years of computing. Sure, console apps still work the same in Linux as they did in UNIX from decades ago, and you can (sometimes) get Mac to run applications prior to OS 7, but there have been a number of times I've loaded up DOS programs from the 80s in Windows XP and was surprised they run more or less perfectly (even when the original app expected full control over the computer).
I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it. Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)? Probably something to bring up in a psychology class.
M$ has something *BSD doesn't have. 56 billion in the bank. *BSD is amazing at what it does which helps it stay around. M$ Windows isn't. They rely on the cash cow machine they have running. They aren't going to learn.
Evolution or ID?
Not Likely.
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
I hate it when first post invokes Godwin's law... ... or perhaps I should thank you on behalf of my employer.
the Romans were but virtuous men who conqured the world in self defence. ask any Classics professor, and they'll "prove" it to you. and the Nazis were only going to conquor half the world. the other half was for Japan. I guess Italy got Africa (as if NS Germany would want THAT joint... "oi vey!").
Microsoft is more like Japan. Even like current Japan. Monopoly is a way of life. It's expected and encouraged.
Well, we need to wait for the jury but this is perhaps the quickier Goldwin point ever seen on slashdot...
The question is : can we give a goldwin point to this comment or not?
Ploum.net.
Windows 98 was never a stable system (unless the only thing you compare it to is Windows 95).
The guy should at least give XP a shot (hell, even 2000)... infinitely more stable than any of the Windows 9x series.
Because time and time again (and not just in IT), if you have someone with a significant market lead, they have a tendency to procrastinate because of the lack of threatening competition.
Microsoft doesn't need to fix these issues because there is no viable enough competitor which is affecting their market share enough to make them worry.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
slashdot crowd predict BSD, Apple doom.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Yes, Microsoft may be doomed, I thought everybody here has predicted it already. Why do you people care so much?
... pretty well, too.
/., is intended to give us all a picture of what may come to pass ... not what will ...
... heh heh ...
This is a false perception. Not everyone on slashdot wants Microsoft to fail, or is predicting it. Just the most vocal members.
You don't hear from "pro-Microsoft" people, simply because the "anti-MS" people are louder, more 'righteous', and more willing to aubse their essential liberties in order to start a flame war.
I believe that most 'sane' geeks truly understand that Microsoft is a company, like any other, and performs under traditional company rules
But times are changing, and the discourse you may observe on these times, here at
I detest Microsoft. I haven't used their products in years, and I stopped purchasing anything that will in any way give them more control over the computing industry. But, if they were to change their ways, and demonstrate that as a group (rather large), they are capable of cleaning up their act, I would give them a second chance.
But not until "ms_windows.tar.gz" cleanly compiles, straight off the 'net, with my own compiler (not theirs)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
.. and some would say, the americans..
...reasonably new. I wasnt aware of the linux dedication over other topics. There always seems to be quite a mixture of subjects covered. I thought that was the idea.
I began using Microsoft products 23 years ago, at age 11, and I worked for Microsoft from 1991 to 1999 as a technology manager.
So this guy started as a manager at MS at age 21? I think that is impressive.
From the article:
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98...
Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running? I reboot my win2k and XP systems maybe once a month, if that.
How many startup services does he have that his reboot takes 10 minutes? On my 800mhz machine (ancient by todays standards) reboot is 2-3 minutes, tops.
Although I've stopped using outlook and IE, in favor of mozilla and thunderbird, in the few times I have to use the apps for compatibility, I never experience instability.
Yes, MS products aren't perfect, but I hate it when people dishonestly paint Window's systems as if they crashed every 10 minutes just to make their point that XXX alternate system is better. OSX is sweet. Linux rocks. But WinXP is also a great system.
I laughed when I read the first paragraph of his article, because it pretty much totally summarized my morning. I tried to open up explorer to work with some shares, and a dialog would come up saying "Access is denied." and nothing would happen. Okay, great. So I load up task manager, and kill all errant explorer processes. I get to the last one, hit 'end task', and get "Access is denied." Super! Suddenly, all my applications stop responding, so I kill them all in task manager, and they disappear, but still show up in the ALT+TAB list. I threw in the towel, and decided to reboot. Windows hangs at the 'Saving your data' screen...
I'd love to see someone factor that kind of crap in in a Total Cost of Ownership study.
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
Troll, Read the whole thing.
Mod down.
I hate M$ as much as anybody but for a guy who worked there for 9 years that was a pretty meatless article/argument. You would think he would use some of his experience about their processes to describe their doom rather than buggy applications and anecdotal evidence. No doubt, M$ has systemic problems that favor ease of use and result in bloated code, poor architecture, bugs, and shortcuts that all feed into lax security. But he barely touched any of these things
I forcasted their doom yesterday.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
No major computer maker preloads linux on the desktop for more than a tiny niche market. No major computer maker preloads a competing office suite for more than a tiny niche market. Nobody's making money on browsers, directly or indirectly. Etc.
People who keep thinking that the IBM model can occur here are fooling themselves - IBM voluntarily restrained from anticompetitive behavior because they were scared to death of the antitrust proceedings. Microsoft (for good reason) has no fear of the government here, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did.
It's in the dictionary.
Evolution or ID?
Now it's more a browser than an os problem : even if the browser is supposedly embedded in the os.
Sorry but this guy wants Microsoft to produce Macs, it's too obvious, he's not credible.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"My OS hangs and bullets don't work in word and the shutdown hangs so I bought a Mac which is great"
It sounds like the haters are still critisizing win98. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Sometimes I forget with all the paper MCSE's running around. I interviewed one a couple of years ago he had a six week crash course and a high school education. He wanted $70k. After we had a good laugh, we hired a guy with a BS in Information Systems working on his MAsters in Computer Science with experience with UNIX/Linux & Windows. One year later we converted to all linux. Our conversion went smooth as butter.
All the things he listed that Microsoft missed their opportunity to implement were a bit off. Some of them were implmented (Passport, for example, for logging into websites with one login.....but that is another sore subject), and others are part of the direction not only Microsoft, but IBM, HP, Sun, etc are working towards. Many of these companies believe web-services are the future, and this is one step beyond the old band wagon of "hosted applications are the future." The hosted applications are what more companies are moving to, its just that the interfaces are being made a bit differently. The old way was to log into a terminal and run MS-Word (or take your pick of app). The new way is to run whatever app you want, but the logic is hosted somewhere else.
This seems like a similar problem to IBM years ago. IBM was no longer looking to the needs of the customer, missing the good business opportunities and loosing business right and left. They took a better part of the 90s' to turn it around with new management. They had to change the attitude and mindset there. Maybe M$ should take some pointers.
Evolution or ID?
You are looking for OSNews.com where the most unpopular OS in the world for some strange reason also happens to be the most newsworthy.
This should be an editorial, not an "analysis". It's filled with non-factual personal experiences that have obviously given him a bias. I mean, why does this belong in an "analysis"??? (from the article):
My most memorable moment at Microsoft came during a technical review with Bill Gates. I will never forget the moment when I made an apparently obvious point to him. He responded, "What? Do you think I'm stupid?" Everyone was staring at me, and I felt it best not to answer. Like Gates, there were always people at Microsoft who were much smarter than me and more technically skilled. But he's created a corporate culture that sometimes struggles to see the forest for the trees--and I think this is what has led to some of the challenges that it faces today.
So I did a little digging on this guy and found out he really is stupid. And my guess is that he's bitter because he's just smart enough to realize how stupid he is.
According to the July 20, 1999 edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencier,
Jeff Reifman, a 29-year-old former program manager at MSNBC, left behind $700,000 in stock options in April to co-found GiftSpot.com, a 24-person Seattle company that delivers gift certificates over the Internet. If Reifman had stayed at Microsoft just two more months he would have been able to cash in on the stock.
Ahh... now we see why he is so angry about why his Gift Certificate store failed! It wasn't because PassPort didn't take off...
This kind of "article" is exactly why newspapers are going down the toilet today. There's no disclosure.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Did anyone else feel like part of the article was more of a resume than an article about Microsoft?
It was a really long article. I didn't read all the way to the end.
Also, I didn't take the time to write a rebuttal to any of the points.
Just kept going with other things, happier to engage in things that have nothing to do with the nominal subject of the article.
2025, Machines rule the earth.
The human resistance must send a terminator back in time to destroy the open source community, after 'Project LINUX' became self aware. Somehow the OS obtained access to it's own source code, and declared penguins to be the superior lifeform. Finally modifying itself to produce fluffy wuffy penguin war machines from the 'Embedded LINUX' factories.
The terminator was sent back to 1985, to eliminate a Bill Gates and take his place.
Microsoft will die once the open source community admits to itself that in this day & age 80% of PC users are non geeks. M$ built an empire around the term "user friendly", when OSS developers begin to understand this concept, the world will change ;-)
Wow, MS have ties that can predict the future!
"Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers." I'd like to know how to do this on Linux, across multiple browers and machines, let alone Windows.
"One of the most frustrating things about Windows is how it steals time from us," says Andrews, who has followed the company for years. Andrews hasn't upgraded his PC from Windows 98 or Office 2000. "I'd just as soon have a stable operating system--my time is more important."
What the??? No one, I mean NO ONE would stick with Winblows 98 for it's stability. They must have a different standard for that in Seattle.
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
20 years ago, the competition was between Microsoft, Wordperfect, and Lotus for office and e-mail applications. Being the early, carefree days of mass computing, the competitive focus was on offering more and more new features. Microsoft won that battle (unfairly, I think, but it did win). While that war was going on, nobody paid much attention to security and stability. Then for the next 10 years, Microsoft was largely in competition with itself (for desktop personal and business purposes), making money from upgrades and the sale of new computers. Here's where I think Microsoft got soft. They branched out into new and ultimately unproductive product types. They focused exclusively on new features that would give the average user a reason to shell out for an upgrade. They continued to use predatory pricing to insure that computer buyers had to pay for their OS (and maybe even their office software) whether they wanted it or not. Now, even free software can have a very advanced feature set. The competitive factors are security and reliability, not new features. Microsoft is suffering because it did not see this coming in time to really start competing in this arena. Their existing code base is so huge that even though Gates said a couple of years ago they were freezing everything to focus on security, they still haven't managed to track down all possible sources even of "buffer overflow" errors, much less all the other security holes. Linux doesn't have to make a huge hit on the desktop to cost Microsoft a lot of money. All it has to do is get enough users to make it economically worthwhile to the computer vendors to tell Microsoft that they will NOT sign the licensing agreement requiring them to bundle Windows and Office with every single computer they sell. Once that happens, then the competition will really start to open up again.
Am I alone?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Reifman mentions a series of mistakes he thinks hurt Microsoft over a multi-year period. He also interweaves descriptions of mistakes, and why he thinks they are mistakes, with asides about other Microsoft actions, which I gather he means to present as background to the reader. I'm assuming this, because he analyzes some actions as explicit mistakes, and just mentions others uncritically or even in a positive light.
That's not necessarily bad, mind you. If it's not clear whether something is a mistake or not, it's better (IMHO) to stick to the clearcut cases.
Reifman's mention of the MSNBC 'merger' as one of his background bits got me thinking though. What if that's one of Microsoft's bigger mistakes? Was there a way to create a stand alone ISP and content sources, and would it have been bold, inovative, and even profitable? Microsoft is known for an embrace and extend approach to small companies. What if they had built up the Microsoft Network's proprietary content entirely by e&e'ing a bunch of small content owners, and stayed away from 'media giants"?
Dealing with a company as large as NBC means adjusting your views on DRM to better fit with theirs. In Microsoft's case, it moved the company towards the same situation as Sony, in that they have divisions that see DRM mostly as something to be imposed preferrably at the hardware level (i.e. the Windows development team), vrs. divisions that want it in the OS (probably everyone who wouldn't have to code it). The situation also sounds a lot like AOL/Time Warner's, which is also a bit strained.
Who is John Cabal?
I think most Mac users will enjoy the day that the word "beleaguered" prefaces every mention of Microsoft's name in the press. I think most Linux users would enjoy it too, but that word has more special meaning for the Mac users.
I remember when it started showing up in front of Compaq's name before they got assimilated. It was kind of delicious.
Reeses
As mentioned. This is a troll and should be modded down.
The success of Windows has depended on its nature as a bundle: you pay 100$ (or Dell pay ???$ for you) and get the whole shebang. The licenses from this release pay for development of the new items in the next version of the bundle. .Mac) cannot be funded from the Windows license fee, unless Windows costs 300$ a license. People expect not to have to pay extra, so it's hard to convince them to do so.
This means that Windows customers expect everything to be included in the bundle that they need. The kind of services that TFA recommends MS sell (20$ a month for virual hard drive etc. like
This bundling also affects the lifecycle of the product: 5-6 years between XP and Longhorn is required because they need to do a lot of work! (Could their 're-write' do to them what Netscape's did?). There is so much in the bundle, and MS want to add so much more, that it takes a long time.
This has an impact on EOLing too - MS is still supporting (to some extent) Windows 98(!), 2000, XP. The cost of having a rapid release cycle is supporting many different releases (unless you EOL these releases just as rapidly, cf. Redhat Linux).
Overall, the size of Windows counts against MS in several different ways. It will be difficult for them to move away from it. Perhaps all those companies killed by MS integrating their features into the OS will have the last laugh?
Posters recognized by their sig,
I thought it was the managers fault that windows and many products suck, engineers always have great ideas, fix this do that etc...
:) stop telling engineers what they cannot fix, yes outlook sucks, its IMAP code is utter grabage probably so stupid ass managers will say, "gee imap sucks, lets use exchange server"
But they get placed on a list, no one does em, and people get shuffled around or sacked.
I blame this guy
Step 1.
replace IE with mozilla
2. use 2xExplorer instead of WinExploder
3. use firefox/thunderbird also
4. use winamp/mediaplayer classic, not WMP
5. use VNC not MS's desktop sharer
its amazing how well a PC works with less and less MS software.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Buried in the article (which I thought was very well written) was this sentiment (echoed in a few other places as well):
The company is addicted to the revenue from these flagship products and is afraid to go in new directions that might initially hurt the bottom line.
Most healthy companies have diverse product lines and aren't afraid to compete internally. Just look at Sony, a company that sells media that it wants to DRM protect as well as devices for copying said media.
Internal competition usually doesn't hurt. But it does hurt Microsoft, at least in the short term. No matter how much of a spectacular success one of its other products is, if it even lowered Windows or Office revenue by 5% it would be a disaster. That's really kept Microsoft from expanding its dominance into areas it should have been able to because of its market position.
The author writes (and many others have written) that Microsoft is paranoid. There's a good kind of paranoia. I think at Microsoft it's become the bad kind. After all, they have a $280B market cap to maintain.
ps. I thought the anecdote about Gates at the bottom was pretty funny. All the anecdotes of Jobs and Gates seem to paint Jobs as an inspirational, visionary asshole, while Gates is just an asshole. I wonder how true that is?
I'm using Mozilla v1.4 (specifically, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624) and it can't render the page correctly. I'm going to submit a bug report, but I wanted to warn all you /. people to not open the page... it's not readable.
?The ability to log in to all our favorite Web sites with one password.
Security/privacy risk
?Spam blocking for our e-mail accounts.
?Calendar sharing with colleagues and friends to schedule meetings.
Privacy risk
?Automatic address book updates for all our contacts.
Privacy/virus risk
?A virtual hard drive on the Internet for sharing files, photos, and music with our friends and access to these files via the Internet while traveling anywhere in the world.
Privacy risk (if you're dumb enough to use it)
?Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers.
Privacy risk
?Online profiles of personal information that we could choose to share with Web sites and social networks.
Privacy risk
?Regular backup of files to a storage site on the Internet.
Privacy risk
?Regular application and system- security updates.
Security risk
?One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
Security/privacy risk
Sorry dude, but you're still living in MS World.
IF Microsoft succeeds, we're all DoooooooooMED DoooooooooooooooooooMED DoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooMED
I am Jobs.
No, I am Jobs.
I am Jobs!
I am Jobs!
I am Jobs!
And just for a bit of levity....I'm Brian Blessed!
Microsoft is a company, like any other
No, Microsoft is a monopoly, which is by definition not like any other because there is no other...
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Oh no. Because surely if someone who spent 10 friggin' years at Microsoft has problems with the software he must be at fault.
Cause clearly in that many years he never would have had occasion to actually put in bullet text into a document before. And surely he'd never have occasion to double click on the IE icon and have it launch.
I cry horse-shit!! As much as the Microsoft fans and apologists would have us believe that Windows never apparently does something with no understandable reason, I would argue that for the vast majority of the rest of us random flaky behaviour is exactly what we've come to expect.
Over the years I've seen dozens of examples where all of the Kings Techo-Geeks and all the Kings Men standing around a windows box with bad behaviour finally decide to backup what they can and re-install the damned thing because *nobody* can come up with a plausible explaination for what the heck is happening.
Saying in sneering tones that he couldn't possibly be a techno-geek doesn't support your argument in any way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If I had a nickel for every article I've read bashing windows and office, we'll, I'd be as rich as microsoft. I was hoping for a little more inside dirt on the company. The part whe he said Bill Gates actually talked to him was totally lacking in details. Damnit, what a waste of a read. I've read people complaining about reboots and crashes for years. Just a little bit of dirt on the company would have made it worth the read. Something like how he saw Gates slip on a banana peel or was walking around with his fly down would have been wonderful.
That said, anyone got any dirt on these guys?
I see a slight flaw in the logic of Microsoft's downfall any time soon: For now most PC games are made exclusively for Windows, which means though many people will be converting to an open source environment, there will still be a large dependancy on windows. IMO until game developers start to make games multi-OS, microsoft will be here for a long time to come...
Though, granted, most gamers just pirate Windows anyway, so there wouldn't be TOO much revenue from it >)
Transferring your files from an old computer to a new computer on any sort of migration is a pain. I do not see how Mr. Reifman found that task any easier going from Windows [98?] to Mac OS X. And he sure does not say in the article how it was accomplished. When he says "one step migration" does he mean that simply the Windows "Documents and Settings" folders get copied? Or does "one step migration" mean that Windows finds my copy of Eudora and moves the mailboxes and address books?
Mr Reifman's curriculum vitae and cover letter were much too long-winded. Next candidate...
Have you Meta Moderated t
Does a far better job than windows if your a bit of a retro gamer.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'd love to see this guy run a side-by-side comparison of modern software running on six-year-old versions of Mac OS and Linux, and see if he has any stability issues.
I suspect, though, that this guy is just some geek with an axe to grind with Microsoft, who needed to use outdated cliches to prove his 'point'.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
it was quite an interesting piece. (I can see why that put you off though. That was when I nearly gave up.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
And they were regarding Microsoft's virtues, I gather?
"Toe Curling"
So this essay will kill the evil witch of the west, huh?
Sounds 'bout right.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The company must protect these core products. "The prime directive at Microsoft is to protect Windows and get customers to buy Windows and upgrades to Windows," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based newsletter.
If this is really the mindset at MS, it is one of the continuing problems with a lot of big businesses, which is based on their "theory of business". The problem that Peter Drucker lays out is that a company continues to use a theory of business that may have been VERY successful at one time in their earlier years, but because the environment changes, it is no longer successful. But the company isn't able to review their theory of business and create a new one that takes advantage of their current environment.
A typical symptom that Drucker points out is sacrificing new business oportunities for old ones. This was a problem IBM had when creating the PC market, it frequently sacrificed PC sales to it's mainframe line, and stunted itself for some time.
One aspect that seems to particularly apply here is Drucker's story about GM. GM apparently was very good at improving the performance of existing businesses (I don't recall exactly how it did this though). Over a period of years, it bought a number of other well established businesses (in a variety of fields and for seemingly too much money) and dramatically improved their performance. The idea is that GM had a great theory of business, which no longer applied to it's own field, but still worked in other areas.
It seems like MS is trying to do this, expanding into MSN, the Xbox and other areas, but that still there is something in it's theory of business that is holding it back from dominating those areas. Perhaps they haven't gone far enough afield from their core business... (or perhaps their ToB is too Windows centric)...
Interesting food for thought.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Results 1 - 10 of about 6,510 for microsoft antitrust "found guilty". (0.32 seconds) ... how well do they perform under traditional company rules?
You can't become a 'monopoly' over a 'market' unless you are a 'company' first, so yeah ... pedantry ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The nicest way that I can think of immediately is to have your bookmarks online, stored on some service or other. I don't know how it's done these days, but old netscape used to store bookmarks as an HTML file anyway, so you could possibly even, say, visit your bookmarks from another person's browser to show them something (assuming you don't mind making them public).
A friend was recently trying to get his several firefoxes to read and edit the same bookmarks file by symlinking/shortcutting the standard location to a single place on a network share, but he ended up giving up (something about the windows side, iirc).
Windows is Dying!
make room BSD and Apple, we need space for its death bed!
I dismissed those who did as impractical, elitist hipsters, and I mocked the Mac ?switch? ads on TV. But in the first five minutes on my new Mac, I was surfing the Internet, sending e-mail, and ripping a CD. OS X has been a breath of badly needed fresh air after Windows.
Someone send this man Knoppix!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The Nazis were trying to eradicate ideas they did not agree with, by killing people.
Microsoft is trying to eradicate ideas it does not agree with, by misusing its position of power. Different means, same end.
Some might say that forcing me to use a particular brand of software is a lesser abuse of my human rights than killing me. My point, and the parent's point, is that closed-source software may look trivial -- especially when millions of people have far, far worse things to worry about than choosing their own software -- but an abuse of human rights is still an abuse of human rights.
There is actually a school of thought that says we should fight just as hard, if not harder, against "small" human rights abuses {e.g. dress codes} as "big" human rights abuses {e.g. racism, sexism}. As long as the lesser abuses are accepted without question, that acceptance can be cited in an attempt to justify greater ones. And, of course, the great abuses are used to justify the small ones; giving every would-be abuser of human rights a circular argument. {"Right to wear trousers? Pah! You should count yourself lucky -- thirty years ago a woman wouldn't have been allowed in this job at all!"}
An abuse of human rights is stil an abuse of human rights. And the fact that a few hundred thousand people died in the Nazi concentration camps does not make it any less wrong for Microsoft to deny me the right to choose what software I use.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Yes.. just read the article and it does make a lot of good points. My favourite is the fact that Google is positioning itself as THE service provider... giving you access to you information anywhere.. anytime.. ability to store lots and potentially share it. Very cool.. not fraught without security/privacy concerns though.. but if they want to see their model work.. they have to address it. Any thoughts that they may start offering a secure token service??
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
With the statements he makes, how can anyone take the article seriously? I stayed with Windows 98 for its stability? I have to reboot every morning and it takes 10 minutes? Duh. You're using 98. Or how about Wal-mart putting out a PC with Sun Linux? I knew they did a desktop but don't those machines use Suse or Redhat? I could go on. He does make very good points but he is supposed to be a Tech guy not just some journalist. Let's see some factual statements. His quote's are lifted from other stories. His one interview is with some guy who is a Seattle Weekly reporter. Great topic. Some great points but supported by a bunch of B.S.
MickeySoft to it's doom? Not likely. Unless the people there are _extremely_ stupid. They've done some stupid stuff in recent years, but as I see it M$ still has a chance to learn and cope with the changes brewing.
They have definitely missed their chance to maintain their monopoly in ranting about OSS instead of joining the fray and taking the lead - which they could''ve easyly done.
MS will become less important as a player in the software field. If they manage they may become a top notch overall service provider, but they've definitely lost their monopol.
Yet I doubt they'll go away as in 'doom'. MS has some businessmodels in their genes that comes with some serious moneymaking and surviving instincts.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
YHBT
But of course when you get to XYZ, they tell you, "well, our configuration isn't stable, but over at Acme....".
sPh
It will ship along with Duke Nukem Forever, and in an effort to have it released on the same day, Microsoft will rush Longhorn development and release an inferior OS.
:(
Oh how times have changed.
% mkdir
% ls -dF
20 percent of 36 Billion is still 7.2 billion a year in revenue.
So even if MS lost ALL of their Windows and Office revenue they would still be doing better than most companies.
And they have 50+ billion in CASH.
How long could they continue full operations with NO revenue at all? A decade atleast - assuming Bill doesn't personally pick up the tab himself then we are looking at atleast 15 years. Don't expect to see MS going away anytime soon - if ever.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Of course this question is highly subjective, but with Windows 2.0 and eventually Windows 3.1, Microsoft became the name of desktop operating systems. This wasn't through "extremely aggressive" business tactics as it was truly a superior system.
This success for Microsoft led to them developing more software to compliment their operating system... Microsoft was a name everyone recognized and "loved" because of it's windowing platform... so it's an easy leap for people to say "hey if Windows is good, why wouldn't office be?"
It wasn't until much later (late 90s) than MS started playing games with aggressive marketing tactics and forcing competition out of business. But then again, it wouldn't have had the money to do that without the huge number of sales that came with the release of Windows 95.
The ability to log in to all our favorite Web sites with one password.
bad idea, then there is one point of security failure for all of your passwords
Spam blocking for our e-mail accounts.
Has anyone done this well yet? I get plenty of spam on my mac.
Calendar sharing with colleagues and friends to schedule meetings.
I was under the impression that Outlook did this.
Automatic address book updates for all our contacts.
Huh? Is this a big deal?
A virtual hard drive on the Internet for sharing files, photos, and music with our friends and access to these files via the Internet while traveling anywhere in the world.
Most ISP's you sign up with give you webspace.
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers.
Again, not a big deal.
Online profiles of personal information that we could choose to share with Web sites and social networks.
That is more up to ISP's than microsoft. There is this AWESOME TOOL call finger though.
Regular backup of files to a storage site on the Internet.
That is great, then what happens if you want to restore and your internet connection is down?
Regular application and system- security updates.
Microsoft does this. Get off the Mac cockboat. Not only does microsoft do this, but they don't charge for service packs, while Apple charges every time they add a new feature (OS X, Jaguar, Pather, fagcat, etc)
One-step migration of files and programs to a new computer.
Total mac cockboat propaganda. this guy got rich off microsoft and now he doesn't have to work. Mac is great if you don't have any work to do. If you actually have to work with the piece of shit everday you will realize it's no better than XP.
Excuse me, but where does it say Apple Macintrash in the text?
In my humble opinion, you sir, are the troll.
* - These features have already been implemented, partially or fully, by other companies, including Apple, specifically .Mac, Keychain, and (can't find it right now) a software package that made switching from PC to Mac easier.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
and the pro mac open source parts and this artical has some very interesting meat and potatoes.
Office and Windows can not provide the revenue stream that they once did. Cheap computers are here to stay and free software that is good enough for the average everyday Joe rocks the world.
So what is going to happen in a couple of years when the Microsoft tax is repealed? What will the company do to replace that revenue stream? I see some serious questions here.
Just consider the Walmart example (which used to run on Lindows). If the average Joe can get by on a (pretty nice) $300 machine that comes chocked full of software, why would he buy one for a great deal more, and get a barebones OS with a couple of little apps? Seriously there is a big difference in what you get with Lindows and Windows. When people start selling that notion watch out. Microsoft should do a full port Gnome and KDE if they had any sence.
I think that the big crush is going to come when the average everyday business wakes up and says no to the Microsoft tax.
"Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers." I'd like to know how to do this on Linux
You just need one magic word: NFS.
I synchronize each user's particular browser bookmarkarks across different machines by have the users' home directories centralized and using NFS (this is actually a by-product of solving a different problem). It can also be done by using thin clients or by running the browsers on a centralised server and exporting the display.
He compares MickeySoft with a Mac. That's that computer with the Unix (the stable one) underneath and that superneat GUI (the easiest one) on top.
Usabilitywise and in terms of getting the job done Macs kick every other desktop up and down the street. OSS and especially MicroSuck.
I a Linux guy for quite some time now and just got myself an iBook (for some Flash programming). Panther is a breeze even compared to a custom Fluxbox setup. It hasn't got all the tweeks but it's got Expose (think "deep and wide workspace management orgasm") and you can get working in something like 40 to 60 seconds.
Now imagine a Windows person used to a crappy dell with MS on it trying a custom fit Mac. No wonder he thinks he's in heaven.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I guess some day it'll have to be payback time for every time when grandma, grandad, mom, dad, uncle{1,2,3} and auntie{1-9} called any respectably computer-educated relative with a question like: "something is wrong with my computer. Can you come and fix it?"
Microsoft tried to spread the delusion that no computer knowledge and background is neccessary to maintain a computer system while making it more and more complex.
Things have reached saturation point these days: every at-least-half computer-literate spends a significant amount of his business and spare time rescuing some system gone bananas.
The fact is that no open source, free as in beer or even proprietary software is much better than any M$ products. The only difference is that these (non-M$) product do not assume self-sufficiency, or praise themselves as the best thing delivered to mankind. Instead of planting the evil seeds of false expectations, it comes natural to people using these product that they need to master a certain level of skill or consult an expert. One knows what one pays for and one knows what one gets!
Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply not transparent. It takes hours of investigation by a computer professional to discover what combination of -khm-features- caused grandma's computer to "start acting funny".
I stopped doing unpaid PC-M$-Win support for my friends and relatives a few years ago, because it was driving me nuts. So, I prepared a one liner fend-off checklist instead:
1. Don't tell me - you are using Windows, right?
2. Who made you think upgrading your system is a good idea?
3. Everything worked fine until recently and gone bizzare for no apparent reason?
4. I have no idea how to fix or even use M$ Outlook. Simply make a choice between using email or running outlook!
5. Other browsers are just fine. When you run onto a site that only opens up in M$ explorer, guess again, who's to blame!
6. Face it - there is no help or anything either you or even a PHD in computer engineering/science can do.
7. Well, that's why Bill Gates is rich and we are poor.
I mean, how deep the world dropped - people started perceiving computers as problems that can only be miracleously solved by throwing money away every few months!
Hopefully, the demise of m$ happens before any kind of world disaster; otherwise, future archeologists from this or another planet will think the dominant planetary religion was playing some solitary card game...
Or perhaps you could bow down to your masters and shut your sniveling mouth, dog.
Only kidding...
It seems like both you and the author need to get the facts straight.
Former Microsoft Employee predicts doom for m$
Slashdot Cheers
Then everyone realizes that he just wanted his 15 minutes:-(
ummmm... profit!
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98. Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running?
The author implies that he's been running XP as well as those other latest and greatest programs that are causing him no end of grief:
While aware of Microsoft?s shortcomings, I always believed that the Soft did its best to improve products over time, as it did with Windows XP.
While there's no excuse for 98 to act that way either, I've found it to be more stable than newer M$ junk. Sitting behind a nice Debian firewall and blinded to my network, my wife's Windoze 98 partition has been working as good as it ever did for the last three years. We use it to operate a scanner and a few USB devices. Most of the time it's booted to Debian testing because my wife mostly web surfs and emails. My little brother's XP box lasted about six months on the same network in part because he unwisely used it for internet stuff but mostly because of the many compounding Microsoft design flaws. It crashed and burned on him one day and he had lost his XP CD and put Fedora on it. Now it works great. Anyone working the PC industry knows that my little brother's case is typical and that Microsoft computing has become more not less frustrating.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think the problem is deeper than he realizes. Even if you don't buy a new machine you can run into this issue: Upgrading.
I recently attempted to upgrade my 2k pro machine to XP pro. I wanted to get slightly better (newer) driver support and play with the newer OS. However, you cannot upgrade from 2k pro to XP pro but have to do a clean install. WTF!? It's the same base NT kernel with some slight tweaks and services and a new front-end. Why exactly am I required to do a clean install? I could understand possible issues if it was from 2k pro to XP advanced server but from pro->pro?
Don't get me wrong, I possess Clue having been a system admin and network architect for many years so my reticence to doing a clean install isn't from a lack of technical ability. But I'll be damned if I can figure out why I have to re-install all of my applications again. Having a easier way to updgrade products and OS versions would go a long way towards Microsoft accomplishing their goal of putting users on the upgrade treadmill. Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down...
Amoeba
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
There were some interesting and insightful items in the article. There were also some strange statments and assumptions (like his thing about how OpenOffice doesn't have an email client built in... sigh).
People need to stop thinking that there is one blueprint for how all computers should function.
I for one welcome the gradual demise of our monopolistic overlords
Windows 2000 can suffer from the same problems.
OK, not as often as Win98, but it can still happen more often than people would think. Windows (2000) still seems to have problems with releasing resources and shutting down services and background processes cleanly.
That said, I've not had any of those problems under Windows XP. But in XP it's Microsoft's politics which mean I wouldn't chose it for my home PC.
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
As a reseller of Microsoft product, I've got to say there is no real incentive on this end. There's no money in it and the reseller market is so competitive it has become cutthroat. There are so many products and so many different levels at which they are sold it is ridiculous--Open License, Open License Value 6.0, Select License 6.0, Enterprise Agreement 6.0 , Software Assurance, Software Assurance Exceptions, Support Tools, Up-Sell hype. It's a disaster and if you make 2-3 points profit be amazed!
the most cogent review of where MS is now in regards to the industry and customer focus that I've seen.
.ini files over to the new machine under new suffixes, as well as their data and program trees. you then edit the new-machine .ini files, putting in the program references and printer references, etc. from the old files, and reboot. voila, it's YOUR machine on steroids with nuclear power.
I've said for years that MS screwed windows 95 by going to the registry. used to be in 3.x that when somebody important upgraded their computer, you could copy their old
because you can't do that with the registry, when I roached a disk trying to RAID my windows machine last fall on an unfamiliar controller, I couldn't get my machine back. ended up chucking it as parts on eBay, and run an eMac now (had to get glass video instead of a cinema display because I am marrying into a family with another hacker cat; all that cat's energy goes into growing claws.)
so another "softie" who goes back to MS-DOS 2.11 has switched. and MS keeps screwing up in delivering the customer experience as CONTROLLED by the customer.
MSFT: hold to sell if you've got the stock IMHO.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What happens to me is at least once a day, I turn my computer off when I am no longer using it. Turning the machine back on (and Rebooting) takes a stupidly long amount of time. Maybe you don't pay for power, so you are willing to leave your computer running.
It is nice that just copying your home directory worked; I usually find that you need to set up the registry too before programs will run again. I guess you are lucky enough that all the apps you use are preinstalled on your computer; that certainly isn't the case for me.
Also, I often try to transfer peripherals (like keyboards, mice, printers and monitors) to my new computer, only to find myself in driver hell hoping to find new drivers that will work with the new version of Windows. I had to toss a printer because the manufacturer wouldn't write an XP driver for it (and wouldn't give me the information so that I could write it myself).
Now I'll admit that I don't always know when problems in Windows are fixed in later releases, but I find the worst part of setting up a new computer is reinstalling and reconfiguring all the programs so they work the same again. Maybe things work differently now.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
Microsoft has something like $55 billion in cash and short-term investments, and another $15 of equities in other companies. They could weather a decade with that.
"'Through' is just trying to cheat at scrabble."
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And not bought a mac if all he's happy about is that his system doesn't fail any more.
Reinstall Windows. Poof, problem solved, and you don't have to spend $2,000 to do it.
Or be a smart cookie and image you system off after you've got it set up so when you open that stupid email attachement your friend sent you that trashes your system, you can be back to a known good in an hour or so.
Sure, if by "traditional" you mean anti competitive and most of the time downright dirty tactics.
I'll take MS's RDP implementation over VNC any day. It's way more smooth (speed of screen draws, yes I know they integrate code at a much lower level than VNC to get this performance and I don't care*). Even for windows to linux connections, I'd rather just install cygwin, start X on the windows box, and ssh over to the linux box. If I absolutely need real remote desktop from windows to linux, then I'll use VNC.
I do have one machine (RHEL 2.1, with garnome 0.27.1 and the MS fonts from corefonts.sf.net) where the fonts are all jacked up when I connect to a Windows 2003 server using RDP. But VNC is even worse on that machine.
* It would certainly be nice if VNC had free code access to get the same performance boosting integration. Maybe then I would go back to using that by default.
About two years ago I got sick of missing a bookmark at work that I had at home, or the reverse. I sat down and made a simple database with a web frontend and stuck it on my website. Then I set all my default pages to that page.
When I open a brower, I see my bookmarks regardless of where that browser happens to be. Very handy!
We could take on the whole world, subjugate you all to Empire withing 6 months.
Come on, you can't even deal with a desert shithole like Iraq. Bombing it is one thing, controlling it is another.
I've never met a project manager that didn't think they were a lot smarter than he really were, because they get to ride along with the engineers and take credit for their work.
This guy isn't saying anything that an impartial industry analyst (granted, there may not be such a thing) couldn't figure out in a couple of months. The throwing away stock options for a dot com thing kills me, too. What a dumbass. $700,000 in MS stock is still $700,000.
>>In XP applications generally can't and don't (crash the system).
//fix me later //Profit!
>>You may be having driver issues
Dear fellow slashdotter:
#define application = program
#define driver = other program
#define BSOD = 5ux0r
main ()
int fault = on.catch(_ERR);
if (fault) then printf("app barf")
else printf("driver barf");
hose[current_user];
do_reboot("hope you saved your work");
}
Turn down that reality distortion field!
This sentence struck me as weird:
/. stories, search is hard. With file sharing and e-mail, it seems to me that those would be easier to scale.
Admittedly, though, creating search engines to serve millions of users is an easier task than offering other remote services, such as e-mail and file sharing.
As has been pointed out by various
There were several dot coms that were to provide this function, bundled with a buddies list and that sort of thing. I don't recall the name of the company, but one of the coders was www.benbrown.com
How odd... I run Windows 2000 at work and Windows XP at home, and never have to reboot just so I can get working. Outlook's never hung on me. Windows always shuts down, altho on the 2000 box is can take a while. And IE not opening sounds like he's got a virus.
My question for him is this: what all kinds of junk do you have installed on your computer? If a lawyer here at the firm came to me with those complaints, the first thing I'd do is go through add/remove programs, then run a spy-sweeper like program. This doesn't sound like a Windows problem, but a user prolem.
-jls
Techno-pagan
Some of them have begun to understand it--Mandrake, for instance. (Proof: I'm typing this on my mom's Mandrake box--she got sick of Win98.)
The problem is that Linux is such a flexible system, there is no one way to put all the pieces together to get a working system. So, you can either have each distro write extensive documentation separately (which is duplication of effort), or you can disperse the documentation like the OSS community has dispersed the development.
The problem with this approach is that, in its current form, nontechnical users have trouble putting together the pieces of the different bits of documentation. What we need (would help geekly-but-not-wizardly users as well) is a Linux documentation wiki, which provides all the documentation in one place even though it's written by different factions.
Microsoft seems to think that non-power-users should never have to refer to the documentation: most things in Windows are automated as hell. Rather than making the man pages easy to read (Windows online documentation sucks, especially for non-obvious things), they're trying to eliminate the need for it altogether. Stick in a thumbdrive, and in WinXP a box pops up asking me if I want to look at the files in Explorer, or look at the pictures in Windows Pixture and Fax Viewer. I know I can get at them through I:\, but to the general populace this is a very nice feature.
Linux, to be widely accepted, probably could use more stuff like this. Granny isn't going to know to run k3b every time she wants to burn a CD; she wants it to run every time she sticks in a blank disk.
You don't hear from "pro-Microsoft" people, simply because the "anti-MS" people are louder, more 'righteous', and more willing to aubse their essential liberties in order to start a flame war.
This is true. Another important factor the Karma Police (Tux mafia?) can use their mod points for their own agenda. Pro-Microsoft arguments can be modded up if they are well-written and correct, but the bar is set a lot higher than it is for Pro-Linux stuff.
I love Linux as much as the next guy and haven't used Windows in years, but sometimes the dittohead factor makes it feel like Free Republic around here
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Am I alone?
You are not alone. You are a just fool who has parted with his money. I only reboot my *nix boxes for two reasons: scheduled power outages and kernel updates. The first happens rarely, the second when necessary for security reasons. All for free.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
``I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it.''
/.), but works a lot better for me.
I can confirm that. Coming from a GNU/Linux background:
1. First thing I noticed that, contrary to what it says on several website, the system ships without a C compiler. To get one, I had to download > 600 MB (big big gasp! that's more than my entire Debian installation was) from Apple.
2. Many applications written for the GNU system won't compile on it. This is because glibc is bloated with all kinds of functions that do get used by developers who target GNU/Linux.
3. Some software just doesn't run correctly. I wrote a webserver that I started developing on OS X, then further developed on Linux. It compiles without warnings, but goes completely insane when run on OS X. Several Java applications fail when trying to use Swing.
4. The OS (including the GUI) eats a *lot* of memory. The iLife apps are also huge.
5. Safari does too many things in one thread; when it's rendering a page in one tab, I can't switch to another tab: the Spinning Beachball of Death appears and the switch happens only *after* the page has rendered. I use Camino now; it has bugs (especially rendering
6. iChat A/V doesn't work behind my NAT box - after a request for audio chat (no connection can be established), messages I send do not get delivered, and eventually iChat loses its connection altogether.
7. The Terminal is sloooow to start, and annoyingly eats the PgUp and PgDn keypresses, sending them to the scroll bar instead of the program that's running. I know, I can use Shift+PgUp, but that's annoying, especially since that's actually Shift+fn+up on my iBook.
8. Quicktime - nah, let's not even go there. It sucks in every way. VLC is the way to go, even though it plays Ogg media at the wrong speed (really hurts the ears) on OS X.
Although all this may sound like I regret buying my iBook, the opposite is true. OS X is still the system that combines compatibility with usability and polish, and the machine is just *great*. It gets over 5 and a half hours of battery life on one charge while programming, which is a great boon to me. As soon as MOL runs under OS X, I will run Linux on it, though - for the games, and for developing kernel modules.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Stupidly long amount of time? RH9 takes longer to boot than XP Pro on the same PC. I agree with most of the article, except with the bug problems and having to reboot. I find XP fairly stable.
perception is reality
I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular.
But the author has told you. He thinks Winblows is getting worse, not better, and has a detailed shit list that got to him:
Over the past year, my frustration with Windows grew ...
I?m tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company?s e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command?it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
... I regularly ponder why software giant Microsoft Corp., which has more than $56 billion in cash, hasn?t solved more of these problems.
I have to agree with him and see the decline as a trend as old as the Soft. Like the author, I've used Microsoft for 20 years or so, since DOS 3.2 on an XT. Every release they have made became more complicated and more buggy, despite "Best Ever!" hype. I decommissioned that first XT in 1997. It still worked as good as it ever had with University and AOL dial up service, a hand scanner, a logitec bus mouse, Word Perfect and a fortran compiler, it was an adequate machine that never hung. It's replacement, a 486 with windoze 3.1 lasted about half as long and every M$ OS I've had in my house followed this trend. 95 did not last as long as 3.1 and 98 was buggier than 95. The record goes to my little brother's XP box that lasted only six months.
Linux distributions, on the other hand have grown in quality and polish every year. I've used Red Hat since 1998 but have moved to Debian and Mepis. Newer distributions, such as Mepis, are now easier to set up and run, have more features and are far more stable than Microsoft ever dreamed of being.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular.
But the author has told you. He thinks Winblows is getting worse, not better and that this is inexcusable. He has a detailed shit list of bugs that got to him, which I've not seen because I got out own the Winblows suck years ago. I'll just quote him:
... I always believed that the Soft did its best to improve products over time, as it did with Windows XP. But recently, I've had a crisis of faith. Perhaps I've rebooted Windows one too many times.
Over the past year, my frustration with Windows grew ...
I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company' e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
I regularly ponder why software giant Microsoft Corp., which has more than $56 billion in cash, hasn't solved more of these problems.
I have to agree with him and see the decline as a trend as old as the Soft. Like the author, I've used Microsoft for 20 years or so, since DOS 3.2 on an XT. Every release they have made became more complicated and more buggy, despite "Best Ever!" hype. I decommissioned that first XT in 1997. It still worked as good as it ever had with University and AOL dial up service, a hand scanner, a logitec bus mouse, Word Perfect and a fortran compiler, it was an adequate machine that never hung. It's replacement, a 486 with windoze 3.1 lasted about half as long and every M$ OS I've had in my house followed this trend. 95 did not last as long as 3.1 and 98 was buggier than 95. The record goes to my little brother's XP box that lasted only six months.
Linux distributions, on the other hand have grown in quality and polish every year. I've used Red Hat since 1998 but have moved to Debian and Mepis. Newer distributions, such as Mepis, are now easier to set up and run, have more features and are far more stable than Microsoft ever dreamed of being.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've done a VERY SIMPLE Word 2000 document containing one (1) text box and one (1) resized monochrome bitmap from Paint. Nothing else at all. Looks OK, prints well, but save it and try to reopen it later? BANG, the bitmap goes away with a bull**** message about something scaled too large or too small. It doesn't seem to take much to reach the performance limits of Office if you try something the least bit unusual. I look forward to the day when Corporate Policy no longer requires me to use that steaming pile of poo.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Wow, that was scary. I had visions of Microsoft Doom 3.1 coming out, where you go around shooting penguins.
"'Here may be found the last words of kpansky. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find a crash-free browsing experience in the Microsoft Internet Expl-aaaaaagggh'"
"What?"
"Internet Expl-aaaaagggh"
"What is that?"
"His browser must have died while typing it."
"Oh, come on!"
"Well, that's what it says."
"Look, if his browser was dying, it wouldn't bother to transmit 'aaaaaggh'. It'd just pop up one of those ridiculous 'Do you want to report this to Microsoft' dialogs."
" Well, that's what's typed in the Slashdot posting!"
"Perhaps he was dictating to someone using Mozilla."
I've heard Cockney rhyming slang --- you guys are no better.
And repeat after me --- A-LOO-MIH-NUM not AL-YOO-MIN-YUM.
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
perfectly stable for weeks on end
That's like saying "the operation was a perfect success, the patient lived for a whole week afterward".
My Powerbook goes months at a time. I only need to reboot when an update requires it (rarely) to a server I am running. Otherwise most updates can wait or require no reboot.
I'll bet $100 that even a clean install of XP with updates can not live on a laptop for a month, with a dozen or so lid-closings and openings a day (in and out of hibernation, that is). Never. Mac laptops do it all the time. There is a HUGE difference in stability.
That said, XP is a good OS for it's own reasons (build your own box, XP with Moz ok for Mom, some apps Windoze only) but people must be on Crack Rock(TM) if they think Windoze is nearly as stable as Mac OS, or Solaris, or most Linux kernels.
This ugly piece of data structure - without a decent failover strategy is the root cause of most windows problems.
/etc structure should be emulated and config info should be left to flat file structures.
/etc/config folder.
Even the current XP based restore point creation does nothing better.
The
IIS 6.0 did that by abandoning all registry settings and moved to an XML file structure - Everything actually. DotNet has moved in that direction too.
Hopefully Longhorn will have a
>Over the years I've seen dozens of examples where all of the Kings Techo-Geeks and all the Kings Men standing around a windows box with bad behaviour finally decide to backup what they can and re-install the damned thing because *nobody* can come up with a plausible explaination for what the heck is happening.
Worse, I've had to reinstall Windows simply because I installed one program out of sequence!
Just installing the programs resulted in a system that worked for normal (for Windows) periods of time, where installing the SAME applications in a different order caused Windows to bluescreen or reboot itself every 3-5 minutes!
And this has happened on systems belonging to others I know.
If it wasn't for the "compatibility" issues, most people would drop Windows in a heartbeat like the bloated crapware it is.
Of course, many will argue that users should have computer-science degrees to simply run their applications, but most of them are MS shills.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Oh, you actually meant all of that? Oh dear....
You are a self-absorbed maniac...
HOW, exactly, is Microsoft denying you your right to choose what software you want to use?!
No, he just wants the feature set and a computer that works. A PC with XP can't do those things without lots and lots of effort. The same PC with an Linux distro can easily do those things. Most of them are built into KDE. The fact that I can run the same software on a Mac and that Mac's native software does all of the same things too does not excuse M$ from all of the above shortfalls. Indeed, Microsoft's position to demand hardware drivers and software contributions from everyone in the industry makes the sad state of their software hard to believe. It's pure mismanagement.
As for credibility, I give high marks to a man who's used M$ for 23 years, worked for the company for 8 years and is still not able to get satisfactory results from the junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Name a single OS that DOESN'T have random flakiness and bullshit associated with it?
even ATM machines need a reboot sometimes
not that things couldnt' be better but things have dramatically improved in windows stability since '98, i'm down to maybe 2 reboots a week with XP, sure its no 300+ day uptime like my obsd server, but then my obsd server doesn't play games
I am no friend of Microsoft, but... You are saying a 100% mark-up for software is bad. Just because a company's numbers are in the billions does not nessesarily mean they no longer have a right to make money on their profit? And considering that the basic materials for a software product are cheap, and that the basic technology for Windows and Office has already been developed, I'm surprised the ratio isn't higher. We live in a capitalist world where you are allowed to squeeze as much as the market will bare. And, there is a realistic alternative, it's called Linux. And the desktop is just fine.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
that is because Liberals and Moderates are pussies. Mecca should have been NUKED on 12 September, 2001. Iraq war should have consisted of B52 strikes on the all the cities, followed by armor and infantry moving to mop up, killing everything from camels to Ayatollahs.
Colonization could then begin. Faluja Delenda Est!
dress codes are not an abuse of human rights.
fanboyz, he worked for M$ for 10 years! all you've done is sniff their crotch with your MSCA or whatever piece of paper they gave you...
your reaction is like the Bush administrations about Iraq--bbbbbut, why don't they tell us the good news? wahhhhh!!!!!!
backup all data (skip if freshly done)
save customizations (/home separate, /usr/local->/home/local, cp -a /etc /home/etc)
run CD install to upgrade
build fresh kernel (optional, you _do_ save /usr/src/linux/.config?)
restore customizations (14 files from /home/etc to /etc, rebuild sensors & NVidia)
No silly Registry, no Apps customizations lost, just go!
He was there at Microsoft for 8 years.... when you start, you usually get options that vest over 4 years, so that means the options he got for the first 4 years all vested and the last 4 years partially vested...
If his remaining options were $700,000, imagine how much in options he actually did cashed in!!!!! He's probably a multi-millionaire already, and $700k probably didn't mean so much to him as the opportunity at the time.
"I stayed with Windows 98 for its stability?
"Andrews hasn't upgraded his PC from Windows 98 or Office 2000. 'I'd just as soon have a stable operating system--my time is more important.'"
It's an interview with another individual, illustrating the unwillingness to go through the hassle of upgrading when the current system is adequate.
"I have to reboot every morning and it takes 10 minutes? Duh. You're using 98."
10 minutes is an exaggeration used to make a point, and is perfectly acceptable. The time to save work, close applications, reboot, and get back to where you were before could well take several minutes. Oh, and he's using Office 2003, which doesn't run on Windows 98.
"Or how about Wal-mart putting out a PC with Sun Linux?"
Sun Java Desktop Systems
Any more examples of points "supported by... B.S."?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Ok both windows and macs are OS's but that is the only thing they have in comin. Mac has one big advantage/disadvantage in my mind. Mac only runs on mac hardware. I am sure if microsoft sold windows on there own hardware, windows would be a more stable platform.
I have owned a Mac, I have used and still do use linux, but for my home use and for work I use windows. I think there is way to much anti microsoft hate in the world, and it just slows down progress.
If you don't like microsoft, don't use it.
If you don't like linux, don't use it.
If you don't like Macs, don't use it.
I have used windows since dos days. I bought a Mac G4 when they first came out, loved it for awhile but lack of software got old quick. I even got tired of windows in 2001 and switched to linux (mandrake) for 3 months, but I switched back. Why, even if windows crashes 3 times a day, gets stupid errors, or is slow sometimes it was not as hard as getting linux to work on my pc and keep it work. While on linux I had alot of problem with the gui crashing. Sure it would crash to a prompt, meaning I lost no data but its still a crash. For my life I choose Window for home, windows for work, linux for my server, and macs are pretty to look at in the apple store.
Rob
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
"Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I?m tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company?s e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command?it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me. "
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Hey, Windows trolls, HERE IS THE TRUTH! Read it and weep, suckers!
Mod this flamebait, mod this troll!
Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I write Google daily and ask them to put this in their Google Tool bar.
I'm really surprised one of the big toolbar add-on's hasn't done this already.
I use about 3 computer regularly and can never keep my porn straight!
Microsoft's $50 billion in the bank (or whatever it is) is a market inefficiency.
Everything that costs in this world is someone's labour or work, whether they work in a mineshaft or as a software developer. Hours are costly. Now, how is it possible to develop Open Source apps? Surely it must cost. And yes, it does cost, and I can only assume that people working on OSS have an income elsewhere.
Anyway, since it is, obviously, possible to offer one's hours for free in producing one thing, why not the other?
The car companies would manufacture cars for free, you could build a house for free... Hungry? Just eat, anywhere you want and how much you want. It's free.
Why can't some hours be free while other's can?
If you use a browser that an import and export Netscape-style bookmarks, you can use Yahoo! Bookmarks to sync.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
The original post is clueless with a capital C.
Dude. I have not reset my Windows desktop machine in weeks. Maybe months. I have all these programs. I have no problems. This guy has gotten himself infected with virii of some sort from being stupid. He is a total moron and there is nothing wrong with the software. Even the things he talks about happening within programs are easy to fix with the buttons readily available.
That was not apparent, sorry to call you a dummy over it. It seemed so obvious that the author was a died in the wool softie who used the latest and greatest M$ everything and would never hesitate to follow any M$ instructions to the letter. More importantly, his eXPerience, despite his great knowledge, is the norm rather than the exception.
What particular XP design flaws are you talking about? I'm not doubting you, just would like to get a better idea of what is tripping people up.
My XP knowledge comes from a recent six month stint of PC service work. It was impossible for home and business users to keep it clean of spyware, malware and it was a nightmare compared to my last work back in 1998-99. Things have become less stable and more difficult to fix. The author lists a pile of feature problems that make it look like the applications are no longer even worth the security problems and I blame them all on poor design features: a kernel that does not really know all processes, a filesystem that does not have real user based permissions, internet connected services that run as root and accept run code sent by email from anywhere and the list goes on. Even Windows 2000, the last M$ OS I was forced to work with at a job, was unstable. Like you, I used Mozilla for browsing and mail, but it did not really help and the last Microsoft system I used this way started flaking after less than four months.
I can contrast poor performance like that to Linux systems that I have no problems with. I almost never have to reboot them and I use hardware literally from the garbage. Newer distributions offer me features that cost thousands of dollars in the Microsoft world. I've got stable systems from a 486 gateway and a 75MHz PI laptop that surfs wireless to Athlon systems with all the bells and whistles that have grown by leaps and bounds each year. The only reason I turn any of them off is to add hardware or on power failure.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Bullshit.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors. Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for it's crap. If you are stupid enough to pay for it, that's your problem.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Only in America would someone say that a company making $32 billion a year with $56 billion in the bank is guilty of "missteps".
Microsoft is hugely successful, and extremely profitable. They are a software company, not a services or internet company, which is why all those things that he mentioned as examples of what they "could" have done was never done. IBM, AOL, and Oracle didn't do it either!!!!
Imagine if Microsoft *were* as successful as the author wants them to be in those areas that he mentions??? Imagine how utterly dominating in the world they would be right now? They would own the internet by having the best web sites, and then even more people would just be complaining about Microsoft even more.
Count your fucking blessings that Microsoft can't be as agile as smaller companies like Google, so that the innovation can be spread amongst other people. Sooner or later, all you slashdotters will turn against Google, once they are in the dominating position.
One other annoying point: At the end of the article, the author says, "Why doesn't Microsoft release patches more quickly!" Well, guess what, they did and they were called hotfixes, but people complained because they came out so frequently that admins couldn't keep track. So they moved over to monthly releases, and now people are complaining about that, too.
There are always going to be people that complain, no matter what you do. As a company, you have to choose which direction is best for the you and what is best overall for your customers. I'm no Microsoft-lover but for fuck's sake, lay off all the bitchy little whining. They have millions of customers, every little step they make will piss someone off.
Other companies have no doubt had the same problem, but my experience was in the world of DEC. Back in the 1990's, their highly profitable VAX/VMS line was getting undercut on the low end by Windows desktop PCs and NT servers, which were low-cost replacements for ASCII terminals and VAX/VMS workstations connected to a forklift-class server. They KNEW the future was commoditized hardware and software, but too much of their revenue stream was based on products that were doomed. Everything they tried to do to remain competitive was cannibalizing the legacy product line. The moral of the story is that most tech companies do not survive the loss of long-term revenue products. It's the corporate equivalent of getting your head attached to a different body. The process is complicated, painful, and the survival rate is damn low.
MS competitors have the luxury of offering MS replacement software without the burden of maintaining a multi-billion dollar revenue stream while doing it.
That sounds about right. They do what they can get away with. It's the American way!
Windows 2000 is the OS I currently run, and I love it to no end. I've seen a few blue screens, but that was also before I started using a router and installing software countermeasures (Ad Aware, Spybot Search & Destroy, Spy Sweeper, Pop-Up Stopper, Macafee ViruScan, SpamNet). After those different layers of security were installed on top of a clean Windows 2000 install, I haven't encountered any major problems.
Before Windows 2000 came along, Windows 95 was the last incarnation of Windows I believed to be relatively stable. While Windows 98 offers excellent hardware and driver detection, it seems that within 12 months of serious use it always needs to be reformatted to get it back into working order. I'm not tech-savvy enough to know exactly why this is, but it's held true on a lot of machines I've come across -- boxes I haven't ever touched, but that have been in use for ~1 year and seem to be lagging.
Windows XP might be an improvement on an already good thing. That being said, my current Windows 2000-sized shoes fit, so I'm gonna continue wearing them.
that is because Liberals and Moderates are pussies. Mecca should have been NUKED on 12 September, 2001.
Agreed
(The) Iraq war should have consisted of B52 strikes on the all the cities, followed by armor and infantry moving to mop up, killing everything from camels to Ayatollahs.
We need to get out of the habit of nation building. It doesn't work. Instead of dropping peanut butter to enemy combatants and citizens, why not give it to the homeless in California and New York?
Colonization could then begin. Faluja Delenda Est!
I for one can't wait for my vacation to New Texas.
First of all, I have to point out that his suggestion that OS X is in general superior to windows is patently ridiculous. He should check out some of the *ridiculous* problems that are going on with Adobe products and that OS right now. Add to that the classic Mac problem of "it can enver have enough RAM" seems to be an ongoing thing. I have a friend who works as a designer and his productivity is seriously and significantly impacted by the fact that OS X just doesn't work all that well when you're doing more than running Office and surfing the web. You can say what you want about Windows security, you can highlight stability problems (although most of my boxes stay up for days with no errors or crashes), you can critisize all the many, many, many other flaws in Windows, but at the end of the day I can STILL fire up more applications than I could ever want to run at once on a computer with 256mb of RAM and switch between them with impressive speed and reliability. Windows works extremely well for running multiple heavy duty desktop applications at once. No other operating system with the level of ease of use that Windows provides does this. With OS X you open a couple apps and the thing is running out of memory and crashing before Windows even breaks a sweat.
He brings up a lot of good points in the article and I am not trying to say that his overall point is wrong, however I think there is another seious error in what he says. He talks about Mac and Open Source OSes ability to update quickly as a positive thing. This is probably one of the most negative aspects of open source and Mac for certain types of environments...
I work for a *LARGE* nonprofit company involved in the medical industry and more than a significant portion of my job is devoted to maintaining stability and continuity at the desktop level. When you're talking about centrally managing tens of thousands of nodes, nodes that may interact with medical devices or other critical processes, you are not looking for weekly updates or the ability to add new features on a daily basis. Now, there are serious issues with dealing with the way Microsoft updates their software too, but deploying weekly updates to 25 thousand computers or so, some of which are hooked up to medical equipment, without proper QA testing is not realistic or safe. QA testing fixes on a weekly basis is not realistic either.
I think there is an opportunity to improve upon the way that Microsoft releases patches, but to cite weekly updates as a reason why open source is better, especially when some of it's largest customers are concerned with stability and continuity, is missing the point. It's the classic IT fallacy of "newer is better", "more features are better". Remember also that I am only talking about problems with the machine itself and applications from weekly or monthly updates, I am not even going to mention the impact on non-technical users that adding new features willy-nilly would have.
Finally, I just need to tack on one more thing that is not covered in the article, but is still relevant. Microsoft provides features for centrally managing large networks that other vendors and open source are not even in the neighborhood of competing with. At work we do a fair amount to add on our own features to ease centralized management, but to take away some of the tools that Microsoft provides out of the box would simply be a disaster and make certain large networks completely unmanageable. Dealing with a few tens of thousands of Linux boxes used mostly by novice users would be a *frigging nightmare* right now and would require an obscene amount of resources....Mac is just a cruel joke in this arena....not even worth mentioning.
Again, I am not a Microsoft apologist. I run OpenBSD on my gateway at home...I love open source and I think that it does certain things 1000x better than Windows. However, I do not think that the article takes all the relevant factors and business driven situations into acccount. All these anti-
I would strongly disagree that Xbox won't bring in billion $ revenues. Whilst it may not be doing that now, MS are looking at the large amount of money made by Sony, Nintendo, and big hitter publishers like EA, who do have billions in revenue from games products.
MS seem pretty committed to the games market, so don't write this off just yet. Look at Sony, whose primary revenue is now derived from the SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) groups, powered by the PlayStation phenomenon.
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
It's weird. THis guy waits 10 minutes for a boot? It might take 1 minute here, and that's once a day. Reboot? Forced? Never happens here except those stupid app installs. Why does an app need to reboot the machine? Anyway, using w2000 I've never bluescreened, and before that, in NT4, only occasionally due to the same adobe driver fault.
I'll take that bet. Multiple laptops, all running XP pro. Only problem I've had is a bad fan. The OS works perfectly, but then again, I'm picky about what I run on them. Here's a list:
1 - office 2k pro (patched)
2 - visio (2k and 2k3)
3 - securecrt
4 - solarwinds tools
5 - cisco vpn
6 - at&t globalnet dialer
7 - at&t gprs/edge card software
8 - WinDVD
Note that none of these are shareware/freeware apps, and there is a very limited set. Add to this years of experience running large to very large networks and even more years of building and running pc's, and you end up with laptops that only shut down when the battery dies or when I tell them to. Also note that there are no "servers" running. These are laptops. Servers are big bulletproof boxes that get mounted in racks. And they don't crash either (that's what happens when you have knowledgable people building and maintaining them).
Oh, and if you want to know how old the OS installs are, one is 14 months, one is 16 months.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors. Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for it's crap. If you are stupid enough to pay for it, that's your problem.
Perhaps you overlooked the fact that MS is a monopoly.
Microsoft is a monopoly?
What OS are YOU running?
(hint: if you are running something other than windows, then it is not "A company or group having exclusive control over a commercial activity.")
Not a right to "profit", but a right to "recieve compensation."
It's a fine line, but an important one.
For you, a free clue.
Just 'cause everyone doesn't think like you doesn't make 'em a leftest stooge.
And, yes, the grand-parent was a bit fast-n-loose with facts....
All of the software I use at home is listed here. Most of it was not already installed on my computer when I decided I wanted it. It took a while to set up. If I'm moving to a new computer, I'll TAR up the software as well as my data. No point in installing/compiling twice.
Having to mess with drivers and registries sounds rather unpleasant. IMO, well written programs will re-create their default settings if the program starts and things appear to be missing. With the list of software in the above link, I just plug in my hardware and it works, although getting my PDA to sync required an extra driver I think.
Follow me
I think it would be fruitful for technology for MS to fade away. MS is slowing the rate of change and innovation.
I think it would be bad for businesses if MS faded away BEFORE an equivelent end-to-end environment were available for business processing be it linux or something else.
What was obvious to open source zealots years ago is becoming obvious to a wider audience. Free software has commoditized a number of software niches. And all of the other companies who don't want to play on Microsoft's playing field are contributing to that commodity. Linux, FreeBSD, GNU Hurd and Mac OS X are not totally separate systems. Yes, there are core components that are unique to each of them. The same is true for AIX and Solaris. But there is an enormous quantity of software that is easily portable between them.
Microsoft's business strategy is built on differentiating their product lines in ways that make switching extremely difficult. That plays very poorly in a commodity market. The network effect has a downside too. If customers start leaving Windows and Office in large enough numbers, Microsoft will have to make them compatible with the rest of the world. That will remove their single greatest marketting advantage, which is to force upgrades by the network effect. Microsoft has long relied on driving upgrades because their customers want to be able to exchange documents and run new apps. When the tide turns, it is going to turn very hard and very fast.
Is a few billion dollars really that much of a miss for Microsoft? Especially if that money is spread out over several years?
For you, a free clue.
For you, an english lesson
Just 'cause everyone doesn't think like you doesn't make 'em a leftest stooge.
My exact words were:
I'm so sick of hearing it, especially from the "liberal left".
which means I'm sick of hearing it from people other than the liberal left also. Learn how to read and understand the english language.
Windows 2000 works for you. Windows XP works for Microsoft. "Updates are ready for download" (which can appear on machines with no network connection), tightly integrated IE, and more restrictive licensing terms, all make it clear that XP is optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours.
There's a good reason that most of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. It's one of Microsoft's most solid versions, probably the most stable one since NT 3.51.
If you're still running anything Microsoft prior to Win2K, upgrade to Win2K. If you're running Win2K, the next available upgrade is to Linux.
I find the use of the word 'liberal' hurtful and hate-inciting, please stop. Also, I find 'and', 'the', 'it' and 'of' derogatory. It isn't my fault i'm dyslexic.
But for Reifman, who owns two non-profit coffeehouses on Capitol Hill, it has never been about the money. It is more about creating a company that makes a difference. "A lot of what I am doing is motivated by philanthropic causes," said Reifman, who is setting up a program at GiftSpot.com so his online customers can donate their spare change to charity. ...
But Reifman also said Microsoft, which has grown to 30,200 employees, is a more bureaucratic company than the one he joined eight years ago. That was part of his reason for leaving.
"Bureaucratic" is a nice way of saying "stupid".
I don't see where you get off calling the man bitter. He is currently gainfully employed and his gushing praise of Macs and Linux is anything but bitter. Indeed, the whole article is carefully considered and constructive criticism. M$ regularly pays for astroturf and smear, but, jmulvey, you really have set a new low standard by accusing a man driven by philanthropy of bitterness about money.
Fanboys never cease to amaze me with their vehemence, twitsted logic and bile. Reifman has argued persuasively that the Microsoft experience is not all it's cracked up to be and that alternatives require far less effort to work and are earning loyalty. Deal with it, if you can, without slandering the speaker. It's a turn off and always has been.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
they used ascii text
think about it...
if gates would have designed a competitor to ascii text, he would have indeed captured the market
back in the day we didnt have no old school
I'll give you a clue how many people were killed in Nazi concentration camps: it was significantly fewer than the entire population of Europe at the time. Revising the estimates upward is just as bad as downward. We probably will never know the exact figure, and so many lies have been told now that nobody would believe the truth if you told them.
Have you ever tried buying an 80x86-type laptop without Windows installed? Desktops I can, and do, build up from parts; but not laptops. Microsoft is limiting my choice there. I am not making a trivial matter look serious; you just can't see how serious it really is.
Look beyond the means {yes, there are some people who really do see killing people as no more than a means to an end} and see the end. If the Nazis could have found a way to destroy the ideas they did not agree with, without killing anyone, then they probably would have done that instead. And they would, in all likelihood, have succeeded in their aims. As things worked out, the killing was what got their efforts nipped in the bud.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This article just lowers the signal to noise ratio and frustrates people looking for real news.
*Sigh*
The greatest hindrance to success is a well-rationalized excuse
I guess I'm asking why do windows users hate MACs? How many Windows users have used a MAC, and I mean used a MAC.
We all use MACs, they're on our network cards, and you need it if you want to have any sort of TCP/IP-based LAN happening...
Not everyone uses Macs, on the other hand.
Still in high school?
That would not be easy for someone who's been using and working on PCs for more than 20 years.
Ask me something useful or shut up. Stupid and loud is such a nasty combination.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think it is pretty remarkable that the English the yanks, canucks, or aussies speak are as close to real thing as they are. I understand people from GBR well enough when I meet them. An interesting question is whether world English will converge in the future or continue to diverge. I think they will converge, but heaven forbid if "thru","nite", "cuz", "u", or even "hoser" become commonly accepted.
an ill wind that blows no good
Posted AC for obvious reasons.
Oh yes they are. Discrimination is discrimination, never mind what it's about. The fact that I can change my clothing more easily than I can change the colour of my skin does not mean it is generally OK to say "No Jeans", even though you are generally not allowed to say "No N***ers". If someone invented a device or substance which would allow someone to change reversibly the colour of their skin as easily as changing their clothing, would that then make it generally OK to discriminate on skin colour? Of course not, and it follows that it is cannot generally OK to discriminate on clothing either.
This is part of my point about the minor abuses making it easier to justify the major ones.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Are you actually suggesting that private schools having uniforms, for example, is comparable to the Nazis killing millions of people? Are you insane, joking, or trolling?
I'm not sure if I should even bother arguing, because if you're insane, joking, or trolling, there's no point in arguing, and I'm not sure there are other possibilities. Unless you're twelve. I could imagine you being a twelve year old who's upset about having to obey a dress-code, and over-stating your case.
In case you're twelve, it's important to keep some perspective- meaning, people should rember how lucky they are to have the rights that they have, since, in most cases, every right you have would have been denied you if you lived in a different time, place, and social role. That doesn't mean you can't fight against current injustices, but I do think civil-rights activists in America, for example, would do well to remember how far we've already come, and how close we are on many issues. Failure to do so just makes them look like creepy phychos.
And, finally, a dress code is not really a himan rights abuse. Maybe, if you call making Jews wear yellow stars at all times a dress code- but "little girls can't wear belly shirts", or "it's not appropriate to wear T-shirts and jeans to work, wear a nice shirt and tie" isn't a human rights violation. As far as any "All Jews must wear yellow stars" types of dress-codes, I'm not aware of any place currently getting away with this, but if you live in the sort of society where you can get away with speaking up against it, you should count yourself lucky-- most places in most periods of history haven't allowed you to speak up.
Mine was a display unit though (bought from an apple store near where I live). I saved 100 bucks getting the display but I too had to download the developer tools. But hey... isn't wasnt all too bad (they don't make them too hard to find) with cable.
Maybe the above poster was like me and got a demo unit? Or we were just both unlucky.
Oh yes this was purchased only about 4 months ago now too.
The two-volume Shorter Edition is a necessity of life.
And no, it's not just so that I can understand me mates across the pond when the blokes are on the telly whinging about the decimalisation of a zebra crossing, or whatever.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
If you aren't a monopoly, you have a right to charge whatever you want. That's not the same as a right to profit, because if you aren't a monopoly and demand too much money, your customers go elsewhere.
Just try to open a grocery store and swing an 80% profit margin like MS does on their office and OS divisions. Try to run a car company or run a restauraunt that way, I dare you.
If individuals or other companies had life as easy as Microsoft, our economy wouldn't function at all.
Gosh, I guess the corporations out there that hate making money are passing up a golden opportunity here. There are possibly hundreds of people who want a Windows-less laptop! Better dump $100s of millions (or using your several orders of magnitude dumb fuck number manipulation, that would be $5.25) to please these few people. We are being oppressed and fed to the ovens of M$!!!!!
n az i+camps
As far as the numbers being manipulated, I can assure you the number killed in the death camps alone is far closer to 13 million than "a few hundred thousand" you stupid revisionist fuck. An exact number may never be had, but you are still a liar. I have yet to see an estimate below 6 million people that isn't offered by some racist brainwashed asswipe who wants to chalk everything up to a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+killed+
Many estimates focus exclusively on the Jewish deaths, but it looks like the total number (gypsies, gays, and Russians are humans too, right?) is closer to 10 million. That's just a bit closer to 13 million than "a few hundred thousand."
Might the Nazis have used peaceful means to achieve their goals of killing off all of the Jews, gypsies, gays, mentally retarded people, and subjugating the entire world? WHO CARES? Might you be less of a revisionist idiot if you were using MS products?
MS != Nazis. You = dumb fuck.
Surely 'burglarize' isn't listed?
Next thing they'll be calling burglars 'bulgarizers'...
I mean, if you're going to have 'burglarized', why not start doing the same to other words?
"Someone help me! I've been shooterized!"
"Yeah, I went into town the other day to do some shopperizing"
"We're not breaking even. We need some way to encourage more shopperizers into the store..."
Madness!
"It's very interesting that many of the complaints people have about Microsoft Products are actually addressed in later releases, but if the customer never upgrades to that new release they'll never see the changes."
Which, in essence, means that you have to PAY for bug fixes.
This has been a very profitable practice for Microsoft. That way they can keep selling you the same product(Win95) over(Win98) and over(Win2000) and over(WinXP).
I wouldn't have that big of a problem with the practice except for one major "bug". As was mentioned in the article, moving your apps from one version to another is damn painful.
So, people don't pay for the bug fixes (or feature packs) because applying them is too painful.
That's why I like Debian so much. I don't have that problem with Debian (and it is very stable and reliable).
That's one of the complaints about Microsoftie's I have. Experience with only one OS. No wonder he's gushing.
--
"Sorry, but according to [the] tests [we keep turning off and on], you are trying to post from an open HTTP proxy. "
The OEM disk that he obviously used does NOT upgrade.
The retail version DOES upgrade.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Yeah, what was up with the guy who wasn't upgrading from Win98? "I've got the worst release of Windows EVER, and I ain't gonna change!"
In my opinion, WinME is far worse than Win98.
*sigh* back to work...
It may look like a very minor one, but it's a human rights violation all the same. I am no less able to do my job in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt than I would be in a shirt and tie, nor does my wearing a T-shirt and jeans endanger others; therefore it is not necessary that I should wear a shirt and tie to do my job. "What other people might think" is a red herring, since it is a matter of opinion and therefore beyond my control. What if some of those "other people" have an irrational distrust of people with dark hair and blue eyes? Should I dye my hair or wear tinted contact lenses just to please them? Small abuses make it easier to perpetuate large ones -- that was one of my points, remember. Yes, I am bloody lucky to have what I've got -- but I'm still entitled to more, and I'm damned if I'm not going to fight for it with everything I've got, because if I give in now then somebody else is only going to have a harder time in future. The idea that there is such a thing as "just free enough" is what keeps the whole rotten system going -- the truth is, either you are free, or you aren't. And I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.
BTW, I haven't worn a tie for ten years, and you would have an easier job getting a hangman's noose around my neck.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"I sure wish Apple would finally allow licensed machines."
They did, back in 1994 - 1997. It just about sunk the company, because Apple is a hardware company that also makes software.
The "cloners" were eating away at Apple's share of the hardware market, and Apple still had to develop the software to run all of it. Less revenue + same expenses = death.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Every office product on the Mac has the same or similar problems.. many of the same bugs. I fail to see the corrlation here between Office Products and OSes. I use Macs and PCs. Windows, Mac OS 9 and 10, and Linux. They all have problems. I have had just as many Macs having crash problems as the PCs. If you want stability get a damn Commodore 64. These operating systems with a million lines of code are no more stable than any other. What a bunch of bull shit. I use linux for day to day crap myself because I have some control over what software I am using (Still has problems); I am a tech of course -- but where I work they have lots of Macs and Lots of PCS. My biggest complaint against Apple is the substandard, crappy emachine like hardware. Cdrom drives on macs are so crappy that it is hit or miss if they are going to work. Don't even get me started on the monitors that they use inside the machines. Many can do high refresh rates, etc... but when it comes to lasting they are just pure crap. Hard disk failure is quite common with Apple, much more percentage wide then the PCs that we have here. I won't totally fault apple computer because they use very good Keyboards, better than 90% of the PC makers. BTW, I love how an application in Mac OS X can cause the computer to freeze with the spinning cursor thing -- oh yeah, I did not get a blue screen, but I still can't do anything. I don't have core dumps often in Mac OS X, but an application sucking up all the resources is not uncommon (you can't kill the application, because often you can't do anything). I would call that a crash, because the user is still unable to do anything. I fail to see how MAC OS is so "different". I use Linux every day, and it is ugly as well (X Windows is a bloaty app), but I have had less crashes with linux, and less problems overall. I think the biggest problems I have had were with sound anyhow, and with the 2.6 kernel most of those are a thing of the past. How is Apple and Microsoft going to compete with "hey, I can buy one copy and install it on all of my machines, and it works just as good!" Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X have all the problems of feature bloat, include all the problems and "features". Of course the flipside to minimalistic OSes was you could not do as much as you can on modern Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. I would like to see a scientific approach given by a large organization that tracks actual user problems for each platform. My experience is that Mac OS X is not squeeky clean, I use Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux for my job everyday. I know. I use everything from a XServe to an Imac, and 20 different PC models inbetween. -Ron -Ron -Ron
Sun is not losing money. Their net profit is down, but they are not in the red and continue to return profit to their stockholders. Sorry, next troll?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't cite this article as some kind of evidence of newspapers' decline. The Seattle Weekly is a free alternative paper that plays faster and looser than Seattle's more conservative (in the sense of maintaining the journalism tradition of focusing on objective reporting) papers like the Times and the PI.
Besides, I don't think newspapers are going down the toilet. Some newspapers report minor circulation decline, but I think that's more of an indication that they are slowly changing from an analog to digital distribution systems. Fundamentally I still think newspapers serve vital and important functions.
The author of the article is the classic success story at Microsoft. Straight out of school at 21 and into Microsoft. Bounces around between various half completed projects inside Microsoft and is then a leader and decision maker.
Employees who are hired with experience from outside Microsoft are not usually successful. Their ideas are rejected due to "lack of relevant experience." This occurs even when the new employee was a senior level person at the company that Microsoft is now reacting to.
In other words. Microsoft will hire key people out of google into their search group. But any ideas those people have will be rejected by the decision makers.
Why?
Because the decision makers have never worked anywhere besides Microsoft - and obviously the most sucessful company in the world must have all the best ideas. So they won't listen to new ideas until the senior management forces them to acknowledge an outside threat.
This is what will eventually kill Microsoft. You constantly hear "we have the best technical people in the industry - by a huge margin..." But the people who are saying that have never been anywhere else. And trust me, the technical people at Microsoft are only slightly better than typical for a large tech company. And slightly worse than typical for a small tech company.
On the other hand: senior management, marketing and sales are the best I have ever seen. And you can make up for a lot of poor engineering with a world class marketting organization.
So it's not *as* bad when a non-lefty makes the Nazi analogy? Somehow the fact a non-leftist says it somehow doesn't diminish as much the plight of the victims of the Nazi regime?
> You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors.
... it's an exchange or barter, whether it is good or services of perceived value.
It's *not* "profit"
Who owns your time?
Your experience or skills?
You give UP those two in order to RECEIVE money. That's all money. An extremely convient way of trading those two.
To me, that's not profit, thats a TRADE, specificaly, a contract.
Now whether anyone has the right to be a third party to that contract is an entirely different matter.
--
The fallacy of government is that it assumes everyone needs to be told how to live, but the fact remains it is unconstituational to homogenize community by its own standards. When it passes more laws until it makes everyone a criminal it has made the mistake of placing the intent on the "Letter of the Law" over the "Spirit of the Law."
"The more corrupt the republic, the more numerious the laws" -- Tacitus, A.D. 55
ALL civilizations eventualy collapse. Are you that ignorant and arrogant to assume that yours won't?
Microsoft ought to consider moving from the software industry into something new. They have the capital for anything. They have enough brainpower to do anything. Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth. It's something no individual needs, sure, but there is big money in it just waiting to be tapped. Imagine going on a space vacation and eating at the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe.' So cool. Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock. I bet it would replace football on ESPN. And there's a hundred thousand other things people would pay to do on their vacation. That's only the recreation aspect. Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space. And mining the moon or asteroids. Colonization, because such a base would be an ideal staging platform.
But in the software industry, I think they are just about done. They will not contribute anything else important to mankind there. They can only cause damage to the world by crippling the internet they helped create, or crippling software by continuing their current pattern. Time to bow out gracefully and move on.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
"It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable."
So, anyone who disagrees with that statement is admitting to being less technically proficient than trb001. And there is ALWAYS someone who will post that claim. Regardless of whether the OS is Win95, Win2000 or whatever.
Yet when the NEXT version of Microsoft's OS is released, EVERYONE claims how it is so much more stable and reliable than the last. Even Microsoft got into that with comparing NT and Windows2000 and showing that NT wouldn't stay up for more than a few days of heavy work (sorry, I couldn't find a citation for that yet).
I get dragged in to fix all kinds of Windows problems. From corrupt registries to tons of spyware, I've seen it and fixed it. It is a PAIN keeping Windows stable. Even installing the DCom patch on NT broke apps.
Here's a tip on how much everyone else in the world has to reboot. Call Microsoft tech support with any problem and see what the FIRST thing they tell you to do is.
Ah - no NFS between work and home, sadly. This I didn't make clear, I suppose.
Most all the problems come from poorly written software that people load on their systems, which then goes out and violates all sorts of operating rules that MS tries to lay down.
Bar none, there isn't any other OS out there that can be so maintenance free as XP. OHHH NOOO, I had to reboot my machine.. crap.. I don't ever reboot my XP Pro machine these days. It runs and runs and runs.. no problems.
Linux, been there done that.... it's a waste of my time to try to get some of the older hardware that I have to work on it..
Mac, very pretty, very cool... doesn't run what I want it to, and the hardware is too expensive and limited.
Microsoft is to slashdot, as George W. Bush is to the liberal media....
Here is some true insight for you...
For the IBM PC, DOS was cheap, and all that was needed to get the job done. It was not "Rubbish", it was small, fast and clean (At least at first). It worked and was easy to use.
Microsoft's success is based on two things.
1) Superior software for the job/machine/user combination targeted.
2) "Extremely aggressive" marketing and distrbution.
It is a complete fallacy that if MS produts truly were worthless crap, that they would still be where they are today.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The article will curl my toes? That sounds a little gay. Come on, man. make an effort.
Thanks - I will give this a try.
Isn't it supposed to be "microserf"? I thought all geeks knew that. :)
The simple fact is, people like to complain. How many people write into a fast food company and say "Hey, I really like your burger"? compared to "Hey, I got slow service the other day!"? Maybe 1:1000? If you judged everything by the ratio of complaints to praises, you'd have to ditch everything.
/. will get you modded as TROLL instantly, so here, complaining about OSX or Linux makes you vunerable while praising gets you power.
Complaining gives you power. Praising has two problems, one, it makes you vunerable to attack so most people don't do it, two, why "praise" something that just works and you usually never have to think about it? But when it doesn't work that one time, well, people get irate easily and vent on-line.
As far as "Linux" and "OSX" users go, they are in a different category, it's called "zealotry". Being underdogs or feeling like being attacked, they get defensive and the entire process reverses. Complaining about a Linux problem on
Frankly, I'll take the former rather than the latter. At least with the former, as long as you apply the appropriate weighting, you get more real information about a product than with the latter.
Unfortunately the spellchecker doesn't work that well.
Try to get the SDK's for Nintendo GameCube. (Ha!) Try to get a G5 development system for XBox. (YeeHa!) Bill Gates may be debugging Basic bugs in his sleep, but some of those other Joltheads understand the buzz biz.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors.
No.
Everyone has the right to try to make a profit.
This is a different concept. If you are not having profits from your work, your rights are not being violated.
i just had to email the guy...that was one of the most entertaining and useful articles i've read in a long time. Good writing, *plus* a geek enough to write on level that interests me, *plus* OS-agnostic when deciding what really works for him, *plus* a former insider of his subject company. Very, very refreshing to read, compared to the other non-news tripe the /. ed's link.
i'm really quite intersted to see what Longhorn will bring to the table....i mean, $56 billion in the bank, you *know* some of that is going into an ibm-like, "Bet your Company" push to get Longhorn solid. The next few years as linux matures on the desktop, OSX innovates even more, and a revolutionary (hopefully) OS from Microsoft...damn, fun times ahead people. It's about time too!
Or maybe it's a common /. thing. Any troll or flamebait can be modded insiteful as long as it is bashing M$.
hoo-yah
I didn't like Jeff Reifman shallow article for many reasons, all of which are listed below.
1) The author seems pretty ungrateful to a company that gave him a head start in the technical world. He is where he is today because of Microsoft (and probably very wealthy too). Yet he is so quick to kick dirt on them by making rash generalizations. His attitude is holier-than-thou. Maybe he's still pissed at Bill because he was patronizing him in a meeting and Bill didn't appreciate it?
2) Office and the OS are not the least of MS problems, actually both are their strengths. What has hurt Microsoft lately is their over diversification into the Xbox, WebTV, wireless home networking hardware markets. They should turn their focus back on their core products which made them great. They definitely do not need to diversify anymore. Everybody wants to label Microsoft the greedy monopolist precisely because when they diversify it is perceived as pushing out all their competitors and not innovation. Kind of a catch-22 wouldn't you say?
3) This guy isn't a technical expert if he can't turn-off bulleting in Word. Read the help file.
4) Jeff's list of missed opportunities is chalked full of misstated facts. Outlook already shares calendars, but since he hasn't figured out bulleting in Word I'm not surprised he wasn't aware of this.
5) Apple is a hypocrite. They modify BSD open source code and incorporate it into their OS. Then turn around and make it closed source and sell it for quite a lot more than Microsoft does for its products! To me, this violates the main tenant of the open source heritage. At least Microsoft is honest in designing and keeping their entire code base closed. Jeff trumpets the virtues of open source but still uses closed source at home. OSX is BSD which is a direct descendent from UNIX but made free because the Computer Sciences Research Group of the University of California at Berkeley released the source code in 1990 (which the open source BSD took and home grew into FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc..). At least Apple should give something back anything in return (instead of charging money for open source software.)
6) Many of us forget that we owe Microsoft a debt of gratitude. Part of the reason most people have a PC in their homes today is because of Microsoft made them a lot more affordable in the late 80's-early 90's. They did this by moving computing away from universities and government to a cheaper Intel-based architecture. How come the author doesn't point out this out?
7) The author is incorrect in stating that Linux is Unix based. Linux owes its heritage to Unix lore, but Linux isn't the same under the covers. It is not *completely* Unix based as the author would make it sound. It has BSD in it, yea sure but mostly it has been from the ground up - much like Microsoft Windows, but at a different approach.
8) 5 Years between an upgrade of an OS is not a major lapse. To me, taking the time to secure and stabilize Longhorn is a good thing. How is this a misstep? Don't bash a company for paying attention to detail. Meantime Windows 2000 and Windows XP are perfectly fine and secure O/S's for any technical person. One thing I would like to see Microsoft do is pare down the amount of superfluous features. But XP is an extremely stable O/S. I don't know what kind of applications the author was running on his Windows machines - Bonzai Buddy, Kazaa?
9) Microsoft is for the masses, Apple and Linux are geek/trendy niche systems. You can't expect Jon Q Public to update but once every few years, or 'modularly' as the author puts it.
In the course of using this product, I had little trouble until I created an class that was, shall we say, oversized. It had a need to be big, let that pass. Intellisense stopped working. And on random compiles, the whole thing would lose it's mind ( thankfully not too often ), and start giving out bizzare error messasges ( one of them was "kind" enough to tell me that my class was "too complex", and I should do something about it ( which led me to wonder just *who* was driving... ) ). Reboot the machine, no code or environment changes, worked till next time.
MAybe I should take a course in C# programming. I am *sure* that will help...
emt 377 emt 4
i am not fan of M$, but i feel this man wrote this article in more of a socialistic philosophy than as a technology article.
essentially the article makes no point. he just wanted to rant about his non-profit companies, and how OSS will save the world if we as a society love each other and share. WTF?
You most certainly do not "go months without a reboot". You might get a good month here and there where you don't have to reboot but just applying updates alone requires rebooting every month or so. I run XP Pro on an IBM thinkpad and I wind up rebooting every 2-3 weeks because the thing starts becoming less and less responsive. It's a far cry from Win9x which needed daily reboots but it's most certainly not month*S*.
You are a hippie. There are accepted standards of behaviour in society. Wearing jeans and tshirt and visible tattoos and facial pericings is not acceptable if you are a Fortune 500 CEO, a Prosecutor, or President. It is not acceptable in many other areas in life either. In the REAL WORLD you must do things even if you don't like them. It's just the way it is. You must learn to take orders before you can give orders. Now, finish high school, grow up, and stop listening to punk rock.
Nope, you've got it backwards. Work where you want to, and refuse a job where you disagree with the dress code. A human rights violation is when a business owner decides he wants all of his employees, when representing his company, to wear a shirt and tie, but you tell him "you can't". No one is forced to work for this guy, but he should be able to specify any rules he wants that anyone can comply with. After all, he is paying for it.
AFAIK, there are as yet no government mandates (in the US, anyway) requiring dress codes anywhere (except maybe hair nets for cooks - health issue). You are advocating rules for that tell employers what they can do, which is unreasonable, and is a human rights violation.
Get it straight. Part of the human rights equation is not interfering with anybody else's rights.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Nobody has a "right" to profit.
Okay, consider this. Someone owns a car worth roughly $3,000. He wants to sell it. Someone offers $3.000 for it, and it is sold. Who profits?
The answer is BOTH.
The guy who sold it obviously thought that $3,000 cash was more important to him than his car. So he made out good on the deal. If he didn't want $3,000 more than he wanted the car, he wouldn't have sold it.
The guy who bought it thought that the car was more valuable than his $3,000 cash. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bought it. So he made out good on the deal as well.
When you go to pay whatever you pay for a computer, you are getting something more valuable (the computer) than what you gave (the cash). The guy who sold it to you did the same. When Microsoft sells Windows XP to the retailer, they are giving away something less vauable to them than the cash they receive, and the retailer is getting something more valuable to them than the cash they gave out.
So in the end, everyone profits in free trade.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
Is this guy still running windows 98?
I mean, I don't use word 2k3, but I seriously doubt they'd ship the product with a bug like that, unless it was extreemly rare. I mean, can you imagine if word shipped with bullet points not working!? What would all those poor bullet-mad power-pointers do?
And yeah, outlook is bugy still. But microsoft really improved their stability over the past few years.
Too bad you can't say the same of their security.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you're an incompetent moron whose labor causes negative productivity, you have a right to profit?
No, the original statement is correct. No one has a right to profit. Everyone should have the right to pursue profit. This is a wholly different thing.
Dress codes are up to the company. If a company feels that people will be more productive or more professional-looking wearing a suit and tie, it is their decision to enforce it. Some companies reason that you not only have to be able to do the job but you have to look the part too. The reason for this is so other people will also have confidence in you. A dress code is a trade-off you make for having a job. If you don't like a company's dress code then you don't have to work for them. Keep working for companies that don't require a suit and tie. It's that simple.
Personally, I don't want to work for a company that requires a suit either. Atmosphere is one of the things that I consider when interviewing for a job. I'm more than willing to take less money from a company with casual policies than from a rigid company.
What if some of those "other people" have an irrational distrust of people with dark hair and blue eyes?
That truly is an evil combination!
Small abuses may very well make it easier to perpetuate large ones. I haven't done enough research to form any conclusion on it and I don't plan to. I just don't want you to confuse things you don't like with human rights abuses. I hate peas but I don't think making your children eat peas is a violation of their basic human rights.
Life is full of shitty compromises.
One of the few /. articles I can honestly say that I gave up on reading.
By the time the 5th or 6th "socially responsible" was dropped, I bailed. Was there a point in there?
I hope they recycled those electrons.
Software is becoming a "mature" market. In the developed countries, most of the people want/need a computer already have one. Chances are, it runs OK and will continue to do so for at least a few years. MS has had a big problem with "declining upgrade rates", meaning each new release of software is leaving behind more and more people who pass up the chance to buy the new version. The "Microsoft tax" brings in vast amounts of revenue when new PCs are sold, but PC manufacturing is not the growth industry that it used to be.
Unless they can find a vast new source of customers, how are they supposed to grow the company?
How emerging markets such as India or China? Unfortunately, the same currency exchange that makes offshoring so attractive is what makes MS products unattractive for export. Selling MS products in those markets will be very tough. Customers will be hard-pressed to pay the price, and open source will look more attractive than ever. In many parts of the world, MS competes with pirate copies of its own products -- priced at less than $5 per CD. MS considered piracy to be a bad thing until they learned that open source would absorb most of the market if piracy were eliminated. Now they look for ways to give away the product to people who have demonstrated their resistance to pay.
If MS can't grow earnings by 15% per year, investors will take their money and look for companies that can. No matter how much money MS makes today, any CHANGE in their stock price is determined by the expectation of increased future earnings. If the earnings picture is "fat yet flat", the price per share goes nowhere, and they have unhappy investors. If MS faces a stagnant market, combined with erosion from open source and possibly other competitors, they will be in big trouble just trying to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the "other guys" can make plenty of money just by eroding Microsoft's market share. A stagnant market can still be a growth market if you can take business away from the top player in that market.
Everyone has a "right to profit".
However, a "perfect market" limits profits to near zero. With no barriers to entry in a business, which is a lot like "neglecting friction", competition will force prices down toward costs.
A 100% markup is only possible if the barriers to entry in the field are high, which they are in this case.
However, the barriers to entry are falling also. Once the OS or Office suite, or whatever are "good enough", the impetus for upgrades evaporate. At that point, competing products have a chance to catch up to the target of "good enough".
Microsoft is suffering from "good enough" now. As are hardware makers. Most people don't use much, if any, more capabiity than was available in computers/software in 2000. Microsoft is dependent on people buying a new computer (and, implied, a new OS and Office suite) every couple of years. This was a workable model until the computers got "good enough", and has been suffering since then.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Nobody as a "right" to profit
Totally wrong. Completely and utterly false statemenent.
Correct that the huge profits represents a vaccuum in the market place, and also correct that a market works because of competition.
The whole point of selling products or services for a profit is to increase the financial health of a company. This means people get paid, they can retire, they can invest and create more jobs, etc.
In America, we have a right to profit from our labors. This is because we have the right to pursue happiness, and we're capitalists.
Perhaps you live in a socialist nation?
It's an effort / reward system here. If I put in the effort to find a cure for cancer and actually do it, there are great rewards for accomplishing this feat.
Some may argue that the cure should be given away for the betterment of mankind. Although noble in thought, that type of thinking would probably discourage someone from working on a cure in the fist place.
This is a macro statement, and doesn't account for many who make humanitarian efforts their life's work, but it holds true for most scenarios.
In America, at least, each individual has certain rights. Personal ownership of land and assets is one of those. In order to acquire those, you must have money. To have money, you have to earn it somehow. Lets say you put a $10 valuation on every hour of your time. If you earned a 1:1 valuation for each hour you spent at work, you'd have to work 24 hours a day to make rent and pay for food, etc. But most people don't.
They make a determination of this is how much they have to have each month for shelter, food, savings, and luxuries (car, tv, etc.). Assuming you want to work a 40 hour work week, you need to make a 3.x:1 ratio for each hour at work. So you're making a little profit there, eh?
Some people are exceptional at doing this and earn ratios in excess of 100:1.
Why?
Because they perform a service or have the knowledge to maximize the investment by someone else.
In the above example, you want to save some money. But assume you only acheive a maximum 4:1 ratio in your lifetime. You therefore need to take the savings portion of your income and put it somewhere where it too can earn an income. So you invest it. If you don't, you're going to be living of government sponsored retirement and when you die they're going to bill your children and family members (this really happens).
So you give Joe your money because he has the capability to make your savings earn a ratio of 2:1. You pay him x dollars. But if Mary can make your savings earn at 5:1, she's more valuable, eh?
She could do this for herself, but you would like her to do it for you. How can you make it worth her time?
By increasing her personal income ratio. I.E. You pay her.
The cycle goes on and on. This is why Tax Cuts are proven to spur the American economy. When people have money they buy things and pay people for services. If the Government was in 100% control of everything and you were alloted your 800 sq foot apartment, your 386 computer running windows 98, and your dial up internet connection and thats all you could ever have in life, you'd be ok with this?!?!
I would encourage you to value your own time and your own efforts more.
There's a joke about a girl who was going to college and told her Republican father that she was a democrat and believe in the redistribution of wealth. He asked how school was going and she bemoaned how hard she worked but had a 4.0 GPA. He asked how her friend was doing Mary and she said Mary was barely making it with a 2.0 but was popular and had lots of friends.
The father asked the girl why she didn't go to the dean and have 1.0 taken from her 4.0 and given to Mary. The girl cried out about how that would be unfair because she sacrificed and worked hard for that 4.0!
The father said "Welcome to the republican party."
Although silly and politically slanted, this speaks to the point.
If you want more, earn it. If you don't, don't. But one must earn enough not to have to depend on others for their very existence.
If you put yourself in this situation, you might as well be a slave or an endentured servant.
Hope this helps!
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
IN another section of the article, he states, "There's no e-mail program, and it definitely lacks the sophisticated features of Office 2003, but it's free."
Based on what you quoted, this (other) point of his is entirely irrelevant. He also neglects to mention exactly which sophisticated features are missing, why they're such a godsend, and the throngs of people clamoring for an upgrade in order to gain access to them.
I've used OpenOffice at work (on a linux box), and I have to say that there is nothing I haven't been able to do yet that would make me wish I had MS Office installed. The more I use it, the more I like it. Recently, I had to re-create some business forms. Not a problem - OpenOffice handled this with ease, and they printed exactly as they were on the screen - no surprises. Although I did encounter a few annoyances, none of them were show-stoppers.
I make quite a bit of money doing contract work on MS products.. because some of them are too hard to use! Personally, I have literally ZERO problems with Windows XP or Server 2K/2K3.. but I've been around... I've been a Microsoft man for many, many years (hey, I like Linux too, OK?). They DO make some really great products and I'll argue that to my grave with anyone. Unfortunately, they make a lot of crappy products too. They also have a lot of "Upgrades" that really aren't much of an Upgrade, or are really UN NEEDED. I think people focus on the bad too much. People love to hate Microsoft. You ALWAYS root for the little guy (Mac and Linux). Microsoft does a lot of GOOD things for communities and businesses, regardless of if you want to admit it or not. They provide the Non-Profit I work for with a nice chunk of grant money and give us a great break on licenses.
I think what he's getting at is that while you have a right to charge as much as you want for your product/labor, you do not have a 'right' per say to receive profit from your labor/product.
Hear me out. When I say 'right' I do not mean natural rights/common law (as Locke would put it), but a 'right' as in a constitutional right.
I.e. If you run a company, and it is running at a loss, you do not have the 'right' to file a lawsuit against your competitors, alleging that they are infringing on your 'right' to profit.
Your labor is your own, and you have the right to its use. Whether the product of your labor produces a profit is entirely up to the free market and your skills {negotiation, advertising, volume/quality of product}.
I am John Hurt.
Well, the new releases come with their own problems. Also, they are often resource-hogs requiring hardware upgrades. This is because of new "features" which bring new vulnerabilities and bugs. And further, useful features disappear or mutate into something different.
For instance, Windows 2000 is much more stable than 98. But it's half as fast. And if you manipulate files, Windows 2000 is a pain in the ass because Microsoft decided to eliminate direct access to the desktop in the Save As dialog. Now you have to drill upward thru folders to put it up there. Then they came up with XP, which is even slower due to all the niceties. They eliminated the Desktop icon from the taskbar (it can be restored, but why the hell do they want it gone). And why does it take 2-3 minutes to delete files off a CF card. (as if I didnt know). XP actually deletes each image one at a time, and whatever you do, including emptying the Recycle Bin, they are not gone because unless you format the card in the camera you do not get all the space back. This did not happen in 2000 or 98.
This feature creep is not confined to Microsoft. I used Paint Shop Pro 3 for years as a lightweight image browser and editor. Finally upgraded to Paint Shop Pro 5 because it handles more file types (and is 32-bit). That one launches in 10 seconds, but I kept PSP3 because of its almost instant-on screencap ability and takes up almost no disk space.
But the thumbnail browser in 5 is limited to a microscopic 80x80 pixels. As screens grew that started to suck. Worse, editing in 5 destroys embedded EXIF and IPTC data, and a lot of editors want that intact. So, after sitting out PSPs 6 and 7 I bought 8, which has thumbnails up to 250x250 and correctly handles embedded image data.
But PSP8 is bloatware, requires a ghz processor and takes almost a minute to start even on a better machine. I don't use Photoshop because I don't need all those features, but yet the makers of PSP have seen fit to try to combine Photoshop and Illustrator and incorporate vector graphic support in an attempt to cater to both crowds. I didn't want all that and have to suffer thru slow load times. Now trying to draw a simple straight line now requires a course in Bezier graphics. The interface is both simpler and harder to use as they try to idiot-proof it.
So PSP 5 stays to have instant-on image editing and old-skool line-drawing. So now I have three versions of the same software installed on the same machine.
...once upon a time, long long ago, ok not that long ago, late 70's early 80's PC's where FUN!
Not just fun, I said FUN!
There where many architectures, many ways to enjoy the whole personal computer experiance.
Then IBM set the standard for hardware. That took out some fun, but the clone wars began. That was fun.
Then MS took over the OS and desktops and all the fun got squeezed out, until Linux. Now there is fun again.
It isn't a requirement that personal computers be fun, they can be boring business based comp-u-drones. It's just that if its fun, not Frustrating, if the pc does what YOU want, not what THEY want, people will spend more time not less using them.
Once upon a time MS invoked passion, now "... Microsoft doesn't evoke passion in me anymore...". Me either - I'll think I'll get a Mac!
Or accept the brain damage of transferring all my bookmarks, files, etc etc to a Linux box.
MS just can't understand the concept of FUN anymore.
rebooting
not really necessary with any BSD or Linux unless there is a new kernel, so save for power outages, uptime can be weeks, months, or even years.
moving data and applications
It's fun to use different package management systems that different operating systems have - it's interesting to install the same application several different ways on several different computers. It's also fun to see which distribution has more current applications (out of curiousity). Another thing that I have never understood, for instance, is the relative obscurity of routers that have a serial port for an external dial-up modem. How cool is that? You don't even need broadband to hook up all of your machines to a 100Mbit Lan! Why didn't people think of home networking, ssh, and ftp (sftp) before broadband became so popular? If you don't want to "run" a traditional ftp server, there is this Net-FTPServer which is written entirely in Perl, you can just start it up whenever you need to transfer files; just in case you don't want an ftp server starting up every time you boot up... Between ftp servers that are easy as a couple of clicks to install in many distributions, and the Perl ftp server that can be started up whenever you like, and tar/gzip/bzip2 utilities to help store away those pesky collections of files that you won't be using anymore, not to mention having a backup copy of your home directory on another computer (who doesn't have at least two computers by now?). Why throw them out?
upgrading to the latest version
FreeBSD has a nice utility called portupgrade - I just used it to bring an OS that I installed well over two years ago (Oct 2001) up to date with all of the latest, greatest software. Of course there is the buildworld utility for the base system itself, but the two put together bring your system up to date, current, as if you had just installed everything (provided you use the ports system, which is one of the coolest things about FreeBSD). Apt for Debian, portage for Gentoo, these I have also worked with and they are also excellent ways to stay current. You do kind of need broadband though. At least, it helps. Gentoo can be upgraded piecemeal, and the last thing I want to do is compile for 7-8 hours Open Office every time there is an incremental upgrade, so with dial-up, you can just skip the big apps and only do those once in a while. It's not like you constantly need to upgrade OpenOffice anyway. But with Debian's apt, for instance, using a pre-compiled binary of Ooo, and a broadband connection, you can literally do this several times a month. Silly, but it is pretty cool to have all the latest software, and it's really not that difficult to stay current. What makes it hard to stay current is when you install a bunch of stuff that you don't need and don't use because you "might want to try it out someday", or because you feel like your computer is going to be better in some way if you have some ungodly number of applications on it. Pick a distribution, realize that that distribution has a method for automating the installation of new software and the upgrading of existing software on your hard drive, realize that the software that you need is more than likely there, available, when you need it - just a hop, skip, and jump away - so don't install anything that you don't need now, and aren't using today. If you discover that you need something a week from now, you can download it then. Don't download stuff you don't need, it just means that you have that much more stuff to keep upgrading all the time. Only install what you absolutely need. Don't install web servers, ftp servers, etc... if you aren't going to be using them - it's so easy to install them, it's too tempting; but if you don't need them, why bother?
synchronizing internet bookmarks
I don't know if it's really the best idea to have all of the bookmarks in the browser all the time - there can be so many - I have been telling myself that I am going to write a perl script to strip them out of my bookmarks
There is actually a school of thought that says we should fight just as hard, if not harder, against "small" human rights abuses {e.g. dress codes} as "big" human rights abuses {e.g. racism, sexism}. As long as the lesser abuses are accepted without question, that acceptance can be cited in an attempt to justify greater ones
The effect you are refering to is called 'cumulative radicalisation', and is currently in vogue with historians trying to explain how the progressive German societies of the 18th and 19th centuries could take such a right-handed turn to Fascism in the early 20th.
I still think you've Godwin'ed yourself here, but the premise is valuable to investigate regarding computer technologies. Cumulative radicalisation in this case is an effective method of reducing the 'barrier to entry' into other markets, once you're operating from a position of strength in one area. In Microsoft's case, its many areas.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
You don't have a right to profit. You only have a right to try to profit. If everyone had a right to profit, then there would be no unsuccessful business endeavors. If everyone has a right to profit, then what is the minimum profit that I have a right to? Everyone else has a right to this same minimum profit. Where does the money come from to guarantee everyone their God-given right to the sacred holy profit?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I always have at least two systems. One I use regularly and the other is generally used as a server when things are working.
At work, recently one of my systems crapped out. Most likely due to the POS harddrive that's in it. So I'm working on one system while I rebuild the other.
Employers would be smart to Ghost systems every once in awhile (whenever major changes are made to the system) so if something does go wrong they can slap the HD in a second system not on a network, clean and pull off the user's files, blast the image back onto the drive, put the files back and give it back to the user.
It'd also be a good idea to have extra systems ready to go in case of major failures. You don't need to have an extra system for every employee. Just enough to cover when X of their systems go out.
And why would you only have one essenstial server? If it's so expensive when it goes down you should build a twin for emergency use. Take that $300 per week per employee and apply it to purchasing some redundancy.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
You are missing my point. My point is: Profit is na "bad". Profit is not "evil".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Enough said!!!
Ah.. good point. I see what he or she was saying.
:)
Perhaps a proper statement would be you are not guranteed a profit for your products or services...
However, if you run a company in America and it's running at a loss, you get tax breaks for a limited time. Reimbursements?
I guess a Tax Break can't be considered a profit.. <wink>.. Sorry Mr. IRS.. I won't do that again.. LOL!!!
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
I suppose that, if the surgeon had perfect usage of the King's English (circa, 1900), but didn't know which end of the scalple to hold, you'd be just fine with that, right?
Personally, if my surgeon was talking as you described, I'd take some time to check his qulaifications, but if they were in order, I wouldn't give a sh-- about whether or not he had a funny accent...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
If you're including security with stability, then Win2k is more secure than WinXP (pre-SP2). After all, it can be connected to the internet and not get exploited while booting...
Oh? What changed?
I installed a Win2k box for a friend but couldn't find my firewall software. Was surprised it wasn't hit by Sasser (or Blaster) when I finally got back to it... considering it was connected 8+ hours a day.
Wow, you're really into personal attacks.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
The parent attempted to make Reifman look like an idiot with a gurdge and so deflect Reifman's careful criticism of M$ junk. He pointed to an article that called Reifman a "Baby Bill", a Microsoft made millionair with philanthropic goals. He used this and Reifman's refusal to stay at M$ for 2 months to gain another $200,000 of stock options as evidence of Reifman's stupidity and bitterness. It's unconvincing at best and the parents omission of Reifman's lack of concern about money amounts to dishonesty. This was done instead of addressing the very real shortcomings of Microsoft's latest and greatest software.
There's a whole pack of apologists here doing more of the same, but jmulvey has really gone off the deep end.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
At the time of Windows 3.1, you could basicly keep all of your DOS programs and have OS driver support for True Type or maybe Adobe fonts in programs that were Windows 3.1 native. This is one reason Excel surpassed Lotus 123, Word surpassed WordPerfedt, etc. The Apple soulution would have required you to get rid of all your old DOS hardware and software.
--I disagree that Microsoft got where they are because people loved their products. It has far more to do with simple inertia, followed by aggressive marketing tactics that date back to the days of Windows versus OS/2.--
I agree with this statement mostly, but there are some businees reasons as well.
FYI, you can use rdsesk (uses RDP and the code is GPLed) as the remote desktop client for *NIX systems. I tried it with Slackware 9.1 and it plain works.
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No, it means they aren't fully exercising their rights. Just because everyone has a right to make a profit off their work doesn't mean that they are guaranteed a profit.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Wow, you have a machine from before Windows 98 that's capable of running XP Pro? What on earth is it?
As for your problem, it's strange. You certainly should have been able to do it... I've upgraded many PCs and laptops from 2000 Pro to XP Pro, with very few issues. I think, though, that all the 2000 Pro machines had started that way and not been upgraded to it.
In fact the only problems that spring to mind are old/obscure hardware which XP doesn't know how to deal with at the upgrade stage. This is usually solved by reinstalling the 2000 drivers once XP has settled down and the chipset has been found.
Wow.
My web server (runs only 4 web sites, but doubles as the firewall for my LAN) has been running continuously without a reboot since sometime in 2002 (yes 2002, that's not a type for 2003). Natch, I've upgraded Apache, sshd, etc a couple of times without a reboot.
One's expectations tend to be higher when one does not run Mickeysoft's crap.
no, no, you have a right to profit, but an obligation to civilization not to overdo it.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
... I can assure you that, whilst the British were once "subjects" of His/Her/Its (delete as applicable) Majesty, we now enjoy the status of citizens, both of the United Kingdom (since the British Nationality Act of 1981) and of the European Union.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Not at all. If you had a "right" to profit, you could go to court to break a contract solely on you losing money over it.
Nope. If someone's too stupid to set their price high enough, or can't make a product worthy of selling at higher than what it took to make, then their rights have not been violated when they don't make a profit.
Profit is what you get over and above what you spent to get it. Getting profit is part science, part art, and part dumb luck. You have a right to try to profit. You don't have a right to make profits for no good reason.
It's the same as with getting a job. You have the right to apply for work and to be hired if you're the right candidate. You are not guaranteed to be the best candidate for a particular job.
"I run 2000 at work.... It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable."
You might want to take those guys over in the Network Department out to lunch. Sounds like the've been working their tail off to keep your computer from the dozens of viruses and worms that are loose on the internet.
It only takes one laptop, or email to fry all but the best of the best networks.
It's work keeping Anti-Virus up to date, the Firewall setup with the correct inbound and outbound rules, the IDS alerts along could make one bonkers. Oh yea, and let's not forget about the patching....
My only experience with M$ came several years ago when they tried to hire me. Here I was, all pumped up, and they came back with a low ball offer that bore no relation to my current market value and salary history.
I think most people would agree that a company is defined by its employees. It appeared to me that they're just not prepared to pay to have people in who could make a difference to their organization. They hire mediocrity because they think that people will bend over backwards to join them just because they are M$. But it ain't so, Jo.
Or, to put it another way: you have a right to hope for a profit, but only the federal government can make sure you get one, no matter how badly you screw things up.
I agree profit is good. I'm just pointing out that a huge profit by one company year after year is not a sign of a healty competitive market. I would hold up Wal-Mart as a more positive example - they fend off competition from Target, Kmart, Sears, etc. Their profit is pretty huge in absolute dollars, but it's only about a 3% profit margin. That means that while they're turning a profit, the market is forcing them to give customers good deals.
So should colleges ban exams because they "force" students to do stressful exams even though just attending classes is enough for me to get an education?
And why should your "right" to dress however you want override the employer's right to set a dresscode? Is your right worth more than other people's rights?
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NT5 took a long time to make. A LONG time. Do you think that they'll throw away every line of code and just make something new ?
You mentioned the R word.
Longhorn is by no means being built from scratch. Lots of layers are being refactored, reworked, replaced, and so on. New things are being introduced into the platform stack side by side with current and legacy components.
Nobody does back compat better than MS - what other platform lets you generally get away with running 20+ year old binaries ?
Make no mistake, Longhorn introduces a LOT of new cool stuff. But it does so without throwing away everything. I mean, WinFS is coming, right ? Do you think that means NTFS is going away ? Of course not. THere's an entire new programming model coming in longhorn.. do you think Win32 is going away ? Of course not...
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
One thing I find interesting is the idea of an online harddrive offered by MS or Google as a pay service.
It can be done, and pretty cheaply for most users I think, anyone who doesn't use streamload for storage should really look into it. It's got a pretty novel payment method where you mostly pay for downloads unless your data is very unique. Even considering an encrypted HD Image, for 4.95/month you get 3000MB unique storage and 1000MB downloads. The service scales at very reasonable prices to the truly awesome. If monthly prices are too much (which for backup, it probably is) you can get nice yearly subscriptions starting at $45 I believe for the same 3000MB storage, and a total of 12000MB downloaded over the course of the year.
Now that I am done sounding like an advertisement, I just am saying that online HardDrive space has already been done, and done well. And I wouldn't want a totally one company solution anyway, just my fear of monopolies.
As to the bookmark sharing, there are many programs that provide that kind of feature, or how about just using something like TightVNC?
One Login for all sites? Has he ever tried Opera's Wand feature? Or Roboform(I think - kind of like OSS gator, no spyware?) Or even Keywallet?
Regardless that sounds like a major security flaw anyway, especially if it is network based, and not based on the local machine.
My point here is that many of these things he wants already exist. It may be nice to see them unified, but I really have no need of them shoved down my throat in an integrated manner. I much prefer modular anyway.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
You are misinterpreting Locke. It's a philosophical argument that doesn't exactly fit into the real world. He's arguing that individuals can create property ownership over collective property (i.e. the whole "state of nature" thing) by "mixing his labor" with it, i.e. you can take common land that isn't being used by other people and make it yours if you plant crops there, or graze your sheep there, or whatever. Locke certainly believed in and argued for property rights, but what you quote is more about justifying the assertion of property rights over common property than about property rights in general.
I would also add that a right to property is something completely different from a right to profit from property.
wtf are you talking about?? there is no right to recieve compensation, you recieve compensation for work done with a pre-existing agreement that you receive compensation for the work, If i go mow my neighbors lawn, i don't have a "right" to be paid, either for my time or the gasoline used to mow. Now if my Neighbor hires me to mow, I have the right to be paid whatever was agreed upon.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You can buy x86 laptops without Windows installed. You are just limiting your choices by not researching.
And did you notice that you are making up rather impossible or improbable senerios to support your arguements? Just as Nazis finding a way to destory ideas without killing anyone, someone inventing a skin color changing machine, or a code against someone with dark hair and blue eyes. Maybe they should teach Klingon at schools just in case Klingons really do exist. Or restrict the sales of sugar to minors just incase they start to snort it.
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Office 2003 will only install on Windows 2000 and above. You know, the purportedly modern, stable versions?
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
IBM wasn't too much different than MS in the past. IBM used to be as much a monopoly as MS in the PC market. IBM has changed its tunes and there always is a sliver of chance that MS may end up changing as well.
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sorry, perhaps I should have been more clear.
as you say, You have the right to TRY and make a profit. you also have the right to gouge for whatever you can get from whatever poor suckers will give you. (unless you control the market in a monopoly, of course. then there are rules;)
the difficulty is that you have a social obligation as a member of a society not to screw over everyone on your way to wealth and fortune. this is the bit that most people forget or don't realize. so here you have a company that has managed to charge enough extra for their product that they now have, what was it, $56 billion?
that means that if they applied that amount of money evenly over every product they ever sold, the software might have been half the price and they still would be a profitable company
did they have a right to do this? most of the time certainly.
did we (as the buying public) have a right to fall for this? also, certainly.
"everyone has the right to make an ass of themself."
maude
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Windows versions prior to 3.1 were useless, except for Reversi.
Windows 2 also had a cool scrolling starield desktop option, which was kind of trippy for the late 1980s.
Da Blog
"Anyone sufficiently proficient with (name your OS) and knowledgable about what they're running should."
:)
:)
And how is "sufficiently proficient" defined?
"I know what software is running on my computer, I know what bugs my OS has (and how to workaround/deal with them), I know what issues may come up because of my hardware configuration."
Strange. Very strange. Because, what if a known bug (say a memory leak) causes you to have to reboot your machine?
Is this because Windows needs rebooting? (As many claim.)
-or-
Is it you working around a known bug? (Because you're so much more proficient than those others.)
Now, given that Microsoft has released more than a few service packs for their software, and that many bugs relating to memory leaks have been fixed in those service packs......
How is it that you managed that "reliability" prior to those service packs being released?
Not that such is not possible. But it is less a matter of "sufficient proficiency" than a matter of redefining what "stable" and "reboot" means.
I have, in the past, "discussed" this same issue with people who swore that they had not rebooted their Win95 machine for months. Win95 was just so stable that they never had to.
Of course, then Microsoft confirms that there was a bug that caused problems with Win95 after 49.5days of uptime.
At which point those same people who had said that they did not need to reboot their machines for months now said that of course they restarted their computers every day.
The difference is how someone looks at the situation. A Windows fan will see "reboot" in one fashion while a Debian fan (your's truly) will see reboot in a different fashion (type "uptime" and see when the last reboot was).
If your Windows boxes run for months at a time without rebooting, then you're not applying the critical patches and such that Microsoft releases. Which gets back to the service packs that fix memory leaks.
Get to it, bitch, that post of yours is way out of date.
racist, ignorant bastards. Nation building isn't what the US is doing, it's replacing nations with ones that fit in with their self-interest, foreign interests. Problem, reaction, solution. It's what's been going on, and will do for years to come.
We keep hearing how we should let these countries just fight it out, but it's the new empire that the West is hinging on, and that involves by its very nature, interfering with these nations.
how about we just say that we let other countries bomb the shit out ofothers in their own national interest? Happened in Iraq/Kuwaiti war. Oh wait, that happened, then the propoganda machine of the US kicked in.
How many people did Saddam kill? Less than half a million. How many have the US killed since the first Gulf War? over 1.5 million, including 750,000 childrem due to sanctions.
Now who's the tyrant?
grow up.
Actually, Rome fell with barbarians at the gate, and it was a slow ugly political decay till then. I think M$ will fall more like the plantation system. Linux is going to come up on them like a sunami that will bust their butts harder than they busted IBM's butt. Once linux takes over they'll realise it's too late - and freak. It will make SCO look like a tea party. Sure M$ will likely still be arround, but so are cotton farms.
In the 80's it was the PC boom, in the 90's it was the internet boom, now it's the GNU/Linux boom and at current growth rates it's shaping up to be bigger than the other two combined. Even with a market cap of half a trillion, M$ doesn't have a snowballs chance - the US economy alone puts out well over 20 times that in a single year. When puch comes to shove, they will get their ass kicked!
Without that, OpenOffice has a real "missing capabilities" problem.
Users aren't going to cripple their way into MySQL or PostgreSQL as a hacked-up or half-baked solution to what Access can do. Access has lots of limitations (smallish databases, some field length issues), but your average business user isn't going to hit them.
OpenOffice's dependence upon even the hugely powerful underlying database engines without a happy GUI comparable to Access' GUI was a huge error. IMHO, of course.
What's worse, unlike the email situation, there is no application comparable to Access in the Linux space. Solve that one, and the business people (including me) will beat a path straight to your door.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...why doesn't Apple release an OS X that runs on x86 hardware?
blow your mind already
Don't you worry! As soon as M$ perfects DRM BIOS (probably by moving the registry and Windoze update there) they will be able to adopt a rational configuration system once again. Of course, you won't be able to edit those files with anything but a signed copy of DRM enabled M$ Notepad (C ATT) or some other M$ controled tool. You won't be able to boot if you manage to modify, I mean tamper, you BIOS or config files in an unauthorized manner. Nor will you be able to boot alternate OS and all the stability Windows is famous for will be be exhibited by the hardware itself.
The configuration files, however, will look pretty at first. Because Microsoft has said that they will use XML as a binary container, they end up looking just like the mixed binary/text unspecified registry. I'll bet they even modify regedit to give you a graphical view of your new config files so that you won't be able to tell the difference.
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Microsoft is moving towards more control over your computer, not less. The form that control takes does not matter because what you see is unreal. Any segregation of system information will be superficial at best.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1) Everyone has a right to be paid for their labour. In the case of a company that would be revenue. Profit is what you make after you've received your payment.
2) Microsoft is a (near) monopoly.... blabla....., you need it to communicated with other companies/make sure your employees can use your computers etc. etc. .... see the other 6 billion MS discussions on Slashdot.
You're Satan, aren't you.
Satan! Satan! Introibo ad altare dei nostri Satani!!
Ahem. Anyway....
I never said "good" products, I said "usable"-- try a dictionary. That Microsoft has made it's money essentially by selling a gold plated turd at gunpoint is (oddly) irrelevant to the article's discussion of an even more basic problem looming at Microsoft, to wit:
"The company is addicted to the revenue from these flagship products and is afraid to go in new directions that might initially hurt the bottom line."
They can't get bigger in the markets they're in, they're facing growing competition in those markets, and they're either unwilling or too incompetent to go after new markets. Oh, and now everyone hates their guts. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
This decade is for Microsoft what the 1980s were for IBM.
Look at the parallels.
New technology (PC/Internet) rapidly embraced but not quite understood, instead used to burgeon old business (Mainframes/OS & Office software), while failing to understand the new, true standard (Intel & ISA/TCP & HTTP) that they don't control. Meanwhile, fighting off anti-trust suits, agreement among techies that they are basically evil.
IBM didn't die; they eventually reinvented themselves to take advantage of the new world. They no longer even bother with PCs much any more, other than Thinkpads; the PC is a commodity now, anyway! Soon, so will be the OS, the browser, and the "office" application.
Microsoft won't die, but they'll be has-beens by 2010 or 2015, much like IBM was in the early 90's, until they face the reality of their situation and change. By 1990, IBM was already on the path to change, but it took them a while. Microsoft isn't.
This is one of the most succint expressions of the philosophy that makes American culture distasteful to many I have seen for some time.
And they have proved their morals will keep them from nothing! Making up Apple switchers, writing letters to congressmen from dead people, extorting money from public school systems, astroturfing educational meetings, bbs, weblogs, and google bombing, calling free software an "unAmerican" "cancer" that will doom the US economy, hiring others to say the same and, of course, the SCO extortion.
Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth.
Ahhhhhh! I can only imagine M$ $pace $uits, rockets, power systems and life support. They already did a bang up job for the Navy.
Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock.
The Microsoft space suit will need no lasers to lock up. Imagine Embrace, Extend and Extinguish applied to oxygen lines, HVAC and propulsion. "Where do you want to go today?" travelers will scream as they beat their did navigation computers. You just knew you should have paid extra for the "pro" version. In space, more than your screen will turn blue! What do you think the average spacer wrestling with a drill in hard vacuum would think of a little yellow light telling them their suit has "upgrades" that will be installed before they can finish their job?
Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space.
If it's anything like the Microsoft Bob, XBox, and other M$ Research efforts, I expect more from NASA. A company that publically proclaims it will not enter anything but "mature" markets is not really an innovator.
Still, your wish is noble. It would be nice if tomorrow Microsoft were struck by a wave of ethics and became a completely different company. It would be nice if they quit sucking money from government, utilities, public schools and other places where cluelessness is legally mandated. I'd love to see Bill Gates tear up his open letter and declare that he was wrong about free software and world domination.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well at least we are making up for it by finally invading and occupying Iraq and doing the job right. If you accept the fact that 1.5 million Iraqis have been killed by the sanctions, then the new Iraqi war is a godsend, because even the most liberal estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties due to the occupation are MUCH less than the amount that would have died due to continued sanctions.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors
Bullshit yourself. M$ only makes a profit because we, the citizens, give them some rights to control copying i.e. copyright law. We do this because we, the citizens, think we will get a fair return in terms of price competition and product improvement. The M$ monopoly is currently taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for ten pieces of software it largely wrote more than a decade ago. That is an atrocious tradeoff.
Intellectual property law is completely broken at the moment. M$ gets maybe 10,000 times the reward for writing the same software that another company might write. I don't mind 10-100 times the reward to encourage true competition and inovation but law which allows more than that is wrong and unfair. Yes, the world is unfair but that doesn't mean that in a democracy we the people should deliberately make it more unfair.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I did this over last weekend.
1 - Take hard drive with Fedora Core 1 out of 400MHz Compaq Presario computer.
2 - Install as boot drive in new computer with 2GHz CPU motherboard with all different peripherals (NIC, video, sound, etc.).
3 - Boot new computer with "old" hard drive and watch it find all the new hardware and all the right drivers and install them without requiring a reboot.
4 - Run Fedora Core 2 CD upgrade.
Done. No problems. No errors.
I know of no version of MS operating system that could do step 3. With MS it would have involved loading drivers of several CDs, reboots after each driver installs, downloading fixes and updates and possibly adjusting application settings to match the new system. All of that IF it did not require a completely new install from scratch.
I spell relief L-I-N-U-X!
I applaud you, sir or madam, on the insightfulness of your post. However, the last paragraph concerning Apple is arguably invalid.
Apple is a hardware company. It makes the OS because it has to in order to maintain its market differentiation. Apple generates revenue of between one and two billion dollars per quarter. At most, it sells two million boxed copies of Mac OS X per year (I don't have figures, but Steve Jobs was triumphant when OS 8 sold 1.2 million copies), the rest are given away with the purchase of a new Mac. At $99 per, minus correction for Family Packs, that brings in approximately $150 million per year, or less than 3% of the gross revenues of the company.
Apple may not be as big as Microsoft, but I don't believe it to be hooked on the software upgrade cycle like Microsoft.
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Quarterly operating expenses were in the range of 5 to 8 billion dollars, two of which are advertising. Revenues for the same period were 7 to 9 billion. Research is down, advertising is up and administrative costs have increased sixfold! While they trumpet increased revenue, their net is down by almost half over a year ago from 2.1 to 1.3 billion. If tomorrow everyone switched to free software, Microsoft would be out of business in less than two years.
It won't happen like that, but that's more realistic than expecting them to coast for a decade. The migration to free software is already on and mainstream. It won't take long for the Microsoft PR machine to self destruct. With enough free software deployment, the inferiority of Microsoft's line will be apparent to everyone regardless of all the feel good "potential" adverts and the gravy train will derail. You don't have to have worked for the Soft for 8 years to see the problems Word, Lookout, XP and all have. The tipping point is close.
I wonder if SCO "investments" are marketing or administrative costs. Soon it will go into their investment losses.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Check your Applications directory. I downloaded Xcode as well, thinking that I hadn't received the developers tools. Turns out there's a 600 MB installer for them sitting in the Applications directory, along with the installer for AOL.
Of course, that installer would be moot now, since Xcode has been revved to 1.2, but I wish I'd known it at the time.
iBook G4 12" 800MHz, bought December 2003.
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
Actually, you did. You accused Reifman of being stupid and bitter because he dared point out software and cultural problems Microsoft. I've simply called you on it and you have yet to respond with anything but further insult and bile. It's nothing really personal, I've just noticed you are a Microsoft suck.
Instead, I'll give you some free advice: Instead of acting like a Nazi, you ought to consider that people should be able to make their OWN CHOICE about what software they run.
Yes, idiots like you are free to use whatever they feel like paying for. You deserve it.
The rest of us, however, are free to read the information you pointed us to and see that you are full of shit.
Failing that, the only other way I see for you to achieve happiness in your life is to recruit your own luftwaffe and lock up anyone who even considered a Microsoft product.
Now that is wack. I'm laughing at you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
go back to econ, equilibrium means 0 economic profits in the long run in perfect competition, not 0 accounting profits.
This is one of the most succint expressions of the philosophy that makes American culture distasteful to many I have seen for some time.
Yes, it is a succinct illustration of what is bad not just of American culture, but of the (IMHO) the healthcare industry as a whole. I understand what you're saying is this is why American culture is found distasteful by many, and you didn't say necessarily by you. So when I say you, I really mean the reader in general... cool?
Deadly, widespread diseases like cancer and AIDS are extremely difficult to cure and require huge amounts of money and manpower. Who's money and who's manpower? Yours and mine? What if you where conscripted by your government to work on it?
If I could choose to allocate my taxes, I would allocate money (in no particular order) to space, medical research, public works, military, and civil services.
Americans, as a nation, tend to require some type of motivation to institute dramatic change. (Pearl Harbor for example)
But more to the point, Americans enjoy liberty and freedom of choice. I believe that most of the people in the world want the same things. A peaceful, happy existence. A bright future for their children. And happiness and blessings for their fellow man. I'm sure this isn't everything, but I'll use these three for now. I also believe this is why Americans are considered uncaring and unknowledgable when it comes to world affairs.
The reason being, from their micro perspective, these three issues are mostly fulfilled. Americans are an extremely generous people as a whole.
But to your statement that the philosophy that someone would expect some type of reward for their effort as being distateful seems somewhat narrow minded in to me.
Is it because a cure for cancer was used as a dramatic illustration? Do you not expect something for the efforts you put forth in everyday life?
Hypothetically, let's say that a cure for cancer is found. This cure requires a manufacturing process that costs $50 a dose, and they produce 100,000,000 doses. However, let's say that 40,000,000,000 dollars is spent finding this cure. That makes the actual cost per dose $450. Then you have an additional $25 in labor, shipping, etc.
Our hypothetical cure would cost $475 a dose. What if all these numbers are multiplied by 10 or 100?
The point of all this is this: To get the right person to find a cure, that person has to have a high moral calling to motivate themselves to dedicate their life to the effort. If you have a brilliant, gifted person who, for example, believe more strongly in solving hunger through genetic manipulation of plants; what is it that will sway them to focus on our Cancer cure?
It's all about motivation.
That's why many to say they find American culture distateful simply don't understand Americans. If their perception of Americans comes from what our leaders do or what they see on television and in the news, then their woefully ignorant of who Americans really are as a people.
I agree with you that this occurs, but it saddens me that it happens both ways. But it's not just Americans, it's human nature. It's a firm believe by anyone that their way of life is the right way of life, and anyone elses is wrong.
Sometimes I wonder why nations who's people are starving in droves let this happen. Many point outward or fight amongst themselves.
Why don't they focus themselves, as a people, to the betterment of their nation and everyone within it. Build irrigation systems, grow grain, feed each other, hold elections, and encourage liberty to their population?
Is it because the neighboring country won't allow access to water? Is it because the family that's been in control for 5 generations doesn't want to relenquish power? Is it because they believe that a different race of people amongst their population should be slaughtered wholesale?
Ultimately, it's horrible and ugly across the globe. But I would rather live in a co
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
Quoth the Kool-Aid addled poster:
The whole point of selling products or services for a profit is to increase the financial health of a company. This means people get paid, they can retire, they can invest and create more jobs, etc.
You're partly correct. It's more like this:
The whole point of selling products or services for a profit is to increase the financial health of a company. This means people (read: executives) get paid, (executives) can retire (on their big fat golden parachutes while everybody else gets Enroned), (executives) can invest (and add more zeroes to their already obscene bottom lines) and create more jobs (in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Budapest, Ankara etc.), etc.
In America, we have a right to profit from our labors.
So I have an inalienable right to profit from my, say, buggy-whip making labors? In a free society, who is going to enforce that right?
This is because we have the right to pursue happiness, and we're capitalists. (Emphasis added)
If you succeed at starting your own business, great. The odds are at least four to one against you. You have a right to try and achieve wealth, but when you fail, get a job at Wal-Mart like everybody else.
It's an effort / reward system here. If I put in the effort to find a cure for cancer and actually do it, there are great rewards for accomplishing this feat.
Yeah, Pfizer or Eli Lilly comes along and says, "we patented that ten years ago. Hand it over." Since you trying to fight them is like trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper . . .
Who made you the fuhrer?
I'm really _REALLY_ sick of all those MS Fanboy these day.. why even come to debate here if you can't even stand anything which is not pro-MS ??! Those stupid "/. is anti-MS" really drives me nut, ever since it's so obvious that any MS-praising post is moderated up..
Because as we all know, Saddam was such a nice guy. he would have given all kinds of food and medicine to his poor, starving citizens who democratically elected him, had the big bad US not imposed those sanctions on those little doe-eyed children.
Fuck you you commie pussy licker. Someone ought to crush your head into the curb with the heal of his Doc Martins.
One thing I get SO sick of hearing.
Outlook express constently crashes!
IE wouldn't load/run
Office won't do this or that, without screwing up, or crashing
I have to constently reboot windows cause of crashes, or it refuses to shut down etc.
Folks, if you want to wine, don't ask for cheese with it. Don't use something that obviously is broken. Your not forced to use IE, OE, or office. There's far superior products on the market.
Only MS thing I use, and I'm forced because of my vertical apps, AND linuxs's continuing problems of installing programs easly (and not taking a week to POSSIBLY getting a program to work.)
If you want to get away from the headaches, upgrade to XP, don't use the most state-of-the-art computer systems, put in lots of memory and that'll solve many windows crashes. (I have XP pro for 2 years, it's never crashed like 98 did, and when a program crashes, 99% of the time I can get rid of it, and restart it.) My system is a 1.5 ghz duel processor, with 512 megs memory. It's plenty fast, and with that much memory, it's got plenty to spare.
I use Open Office, works good. I use Pegasus mail (excellent), and Mozilla, which is fine. I prefer the features on Opera but the possiblity of Opera having spyware in it, doesn't set well with me.
I get a LOT more done now that I'm on XP Pro over 98, nad like many here I rarely have to reboot. Sometimes 2 or 3 weeks go by. 98 couldn't go 2 or 3 HOURS without a reboot.
So the moral is, whine if you wish, but don't expect anyone to give a toot. It's liek the old saying, 'The gods help those, who help themselves."
And guess what? I didn't need to shell out a lot of money for a MacOS machine.
Now if only linux would fix that one remaining problem of installing, I'd start putting our vertical apps on linux/wine in a heartbeat.
Then MS could kiss my...AAAAAA! (thank you Timon)
Kevin C. Redden
kcredden@kevinredden.name
You might want to take those guys over in the Network Department out to lunch. Sounds like the've been working their tail off to keep your computer from the dozens of viruses and worms that are loose on the internet
Yeah, no kidding! Somehow, my home XP box never crashed when those hit because I had already installed the MS secutiry patches for them weeks before the exploits were taken advantage of. Yet at work, they sat on their hands and someone brought one in on their notebook and we were doomed! They just never installed the patches.
Now, is that hard? I don't think so. I let Windows Update download them in the background, notify me of them, and I decide if I want to install them (and I usually do some moderate investigation to make sure its not MS's latest DRM advancement).
How hard is it to get the latest patches for Linux? Seriously, I'm not a Linux user (as soona s I can scrouneg up another box, I'm gonna start toying with it), so I really do want to know if its as easy to keep "up to date".
And yes, most people view Office 97/2K as good enough. The danger with OSS to Microsoft is that people may upgrade off these to the next version of Open Office rather than paying a huge upgrade fee for the next MS Office.
And you are right about Hardware. I'm typing this on an 1800 Athlon, which is now coming up to 3 years old, and I have no plans to upgrade whatsoever.
Maybe start raiding the reserves, do you think?
Source: Automatic Updates
Category: Installation
Event ID: 21
Restart Required: To complete the installation of the following updates, the computer must be restarted. Until this computer has been restarted, Windows cannot search for or download new updates.
- Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 5.5 Service Pack 2 (KB832894)
- Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 (KB824145)
- Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB828741)
- Security Update for Windows 2000 (KB835732)
- Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB828749)
Yep 2000 doesn't need a reboot after patching...
PWNED
Now sir, you know what they include the anonymouse filter. When you are posting stupid shit (like this post) you should do it under the cover on anonymity, so you don't look like a fucktard.
Have a nice day.
Haha oh man. So uptight...and image obsessed! Wooot accepted standards! Yeah I know those ones, they're written in that big book over...there...
Warhol listened to punk rock, and, call me crazy, but I think he was a tad more refined, intellectually and socially, than you.
This link crashes IE6
And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
Me too.
Solution 1: Spybot
Solution 2 (when I got sick of repeating solution 1): Mozilla.
Incidentally, that article page sure looks wacked in Mozilla 1.6.
Sometimes I feel sorry for M$. Sure, I like to bash them, but it must be hard having a user base who's average IQ is in the low 50s. Windows can be made stable, and then it is a fine operating system. But people just connect raw to the internet, don't download patches, and then they wonder why their computers stop working.
First Apple going out of business, now Microsoft!
There are no rights. You have the right to do something if you have the power to do something. Society is a struggle for power: all evocations of the concept of "rights" are just exercises in this play of power. The world is anarchy: instiutions, governments, these are subsets of the massive geometry of power. If one of these subsets enchains you, rendering you powerless, and forces you to labour under threat of death, you have to right to work, or the right to die, nothing else. The Enlightenment evocations of "rights" are naive, and were quickly recuperated by those who hold power. Their persisting state is on the level of simulation now, with power been acted out most diabolically: completely transparently in relation.
From the article:
.NET. Even some Java developers are now excited about developing on Windows.
Everyone I spoke to had positive things to say about
You must be new here!
For the same reason that my "right" not to be around guns overrides your "right" to carry a gun. Or, sometimes, for the same reason that my "right" to carry a gun overrides your "right" not to be around guns. Pick whichever you prefer. In making your decision, be sure to seek the advice of someone who is too young to buy a packet of fags according to the shopkeeper, but too old to travel on the bus for half fare according to the bus driver.
It is the language's fault for making it difficult to track memory, and it is Windows' fault for making things difficult enough for the user to make a mistake.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I remember the day, too. I call it The Day.
I'd just had a long, intimate session with Microsoft Office XP, and we lay side by side on the bed. Office was smoking contentedly. I stared out the window, trying to ignore the mouldy scents of our tryst and the way the suite pressed against me, the reptilian sensation of shrinkwrap urgent on my thigh. It was rubbing its Certificate of Authenticity hologram against me! I shuddered.
"What is it, Zhe? You're. . .distant."
"I..." Could I tell Office the truth? What choice did I have?
"This is going to sound harsh. But I'm just not turned on any more by Clippy. Or the other Office Assistants. I thought having a harem's worth would fulfill me. But there is no emotional or intellectual connection. There just isn't."
Office froze. In another minute the cig burned up to its fingers. It winced. "It's that fucking Apple slut, isn't it," hissed Office.
"Look, I should go."
"Take one step, and you'll never get metadata from me again."
"You're. . .threatening me? Don't you see it's over?"
But the suite was clutching at my neck. "No! I didn't mean it! Oh, don't leave me! Without you, I'm nothing. With you, I'm. . .EULA-ted!"
"Goodbye."
"Why? Why?"
"I can't take the angst, baby."
"You've just been using me!"
"Well, I am the user, aren't I."
"Leave and I'll kill myself!"
At the door I paused, racking my brain for what I'd learned from TV to do at these moments. Firm, but tender? Tender, but firm? If only I'd paid more attention, any attention, to the plot lines in Baywatch. And so all I could manage was: "There are better ways to innovate."
On the way downstairs it was clear, anyway, that Office was bluffing. It was already on the phone with the BSA, arranging to sue a small business. Poor guy had indulged in a three-way at his place of business with a single license. Idiot. Ass, grass, gas, or bloatware: nobody rides for free.
Well, I actively avoided MS software and IBM PC-compatible hardware from 1981 until 1997, using RISC OS on Acorn Archimedes among others. I even wrote my own small multitasking OS in 8-bit assembly (which fitted in 1 kilobyte after some trickery). In 1997, I bought an IBM-compatible PC with MS Windows NT4 because I had to professionally: that's the result of a monopoly!
OK, I also use Linux on my PCs, but Linux (as oposed to _Linux distributions_ like Red Hat or Mandrake) is not a commercial product, and that's exactly why it (or other open/free software) has a chance to break the MS monopoly. I once even bought a boxed version of BeOS, but we know what happened to BeOS.
Microsoft is a monopolist, they did abuse their monopoly (the list is endless, but the bogus "error messages" that early Windows generated when it was running on DR/DOS is a good example) and almost everybody uses their software.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Pedantry? Perhaps...
I did not claim that Microsoft was a monopolist since the homo erectus or since the beginning of time; of course they are a company first. But they a not a company like any other: they do have a monopoly and therefore they are legally not entitled to do the same things other companies can do (at least in the EU and USA).
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had a business class in university. The teacher asked everybody who had a computer to raise their right hand. Next, he asked everybody who was running MS Windows on it to raise their left hand. Everybody who had raised their right hand also raised their left hand. "Well, that's what we call a monopoly" the teacher said. (Yes, I was a bit amazed that really *nobody* in that class was using an Apple Mac...)
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
first it's the beginning, which talks about problems with Win95 and Win98 ... i find it amazing that people still listen to that bullshit ... what if i write an article about Linux now and start bullshiting about problems in the "Linux95" and 98 versions?!?! ... that's pure garbage .. and even more, that garbage was out a long time ago, i don't see any reason to go through it again
and then comes the "bullshit climax": ... does the author have no shame in coming out with this after tens of years in the technology field?
"But in the first five minutes on my new Mac, I was surfing the Internet, sending e-mail, and ripping a CD. OS X has been a breath of badly needed fresh air after Windows."
this is exactly the kind of "review" a 14years Mac-switcher stoned girlie will write
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I think it would be good if Microsoft stayed, but changed its ways.
...
Imagine them opening the source code to their earlier operating systems, such as Win98?
I know its far-fetched and sounds surreal, but give the Linux/FOSS camp another years worth of onslaught and pillage, and I think a few kneecaps might hit the floor in the "Big Boys" department
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Actually, it's not hard. What gets in the way is two things:
:)
:).
1) Vendors that refuse to certify patches. I have one that for a long time wouldn't support Windows 2000 SP4, and we could only install *certain* hotfixes. (Yes, it broke thier app)
2) Culture. Many companies install Firewalls, and AV but patching doesn't hit the radar, even after they've been hit with viruses that used a vector that could have been patched. They just use the "party line" of Microsoft and blame the virus author, missing the fact that they could have patched and never had a problem. This is a *real problem* that even GLB and HIPPA havn't solved
Have to admit that I have more problems patching my Linux boxes (2) than my Windows boxes. Even with apt-get under Debian I've had problems, and since my RH is out of "support" I have to manually download patches and install them. Ever tried to talk a newbie into installing a kernel patch
Which was my point.
/. about worms and such. Look at how many of the Windows fans claim that it isn't Windows' fault that those machines were exploited, but that it is the admins' fault for not installing the patches that had been available for months prior. :) :D :)
In order for him to have achieved his claimed "stability", he would have had to skip the service packs and hot fixes that Microsoft issues.
So it isn't a matter of "sufficient proficiency" on his part. It seems to be a matter of finding a stable configuration, at that time, and then skipping further patching.
Now, look at the other stories on
In order for him to have achieved his claimed "stability", he would have had to skip the service packs and hot fixes that Microsoft issues.
/. about worms and such. Look at how many of the Windows fans claim that it isn't Windows' fault that those machines were exploited, but that it is the admins' fault for not installing the patches that had been available for months prior. :D
So it isn't a matter of "sufficient proficiency" on his part. It seems to be a matter of finding a stable configuration, at that time, and then skipping further patching.
Now, look at the other stories on
"almost" does not equal "monopoly".
Case closed! Thanks for proving my point.
(like almost pregnant, almost dead etc etc...)
racist, ignorant bastards.
Commie loonball!
Nation building isn't what the US is doing, it's replacing nations with ones that fit in with their self-interest, foreign interests.
Then why haven't we invaded Iran, Pakistan, etc. Give me a fucking break.
Problem, reaction, solution. It's what's been going on, and will do for years to come. We keep hearing how we should let these countries just fight it out, but it's the new empire that the West is hinging on, and that involves by its very nature, interfering with these nations. how about we just say that we let other countries bomb the shit out ofothers in their own national interest? Happened in Iraq/Kuwaiti war. Oh wait, that happened, then the propoganda machine of the US kicked in.
Uhh, the whole world was up in arms over Sadaam invading Kuwait.
How many people did Saddam kill? Less than half a million.
Uhh no, check out the stories on the mass graves that have been found in Iraq.
How many have the US killed since the first Gulf War? over 1.5 million, including 750,000 childrem due to sanctions.
overestimated liberal fuckwad numbers. The "sanctions" weren't killing children, sadaam was by improperly distributing and corrupting the oil-for-food program.
Now who's the tyrant?
Sadaam, you and the the other commies that have the nerve to call themselves American citizens. Go fucking move to China.
While I might agree that this is a missing feature, I'd be interested in knowing if this is one of the specific features he's referring to, or if it's just something that isn't there. Further, I'd be interested in knowing the percentage of users that actually incorporate this feature into their general office productivity.
Access makes accessible just about every ability you can have with a database, many of them so smoothly and flexibly implemented that custom applications can emerge from the program full blown in a matter of hours. For instance, my own company not only manages our customer base and inventory with it (a pretty vanilla thing to do with a database), we also use it for a style-based, recursive documentation generation system and a web site generation tool.
I personally use it to generate a large genealogical website with all manner of amenities, all provided by the database at one level or another.
Access continuously pops up in my mind as the obvious solution to a very wide range of problems.
The thing is, I'm a programmer and somewhat of a database freak. I like databases. At one of my jobs, I do PostgreSQL a good portion of the day - this is for one of the largest R/c car and truck companies in the world. Big, big data, huge web activity, etc. I wrote their entire e-commerce system under Linux, using PostgreSQL for the database, and perl, python and straight c code for the e-commerce system. So I'm reasonably capable, and reasonably flexible, when it comes to which database solution I pick, and why. Access is flat-out no good for these people because the database size is too limited - which is unfortunate, because development of the entire system would have taken a fraction of the time. Linux itself is a great fit because it is so reliable - stuff runs and runs and runs without the crashing that is so prevalant under Windows (and Windows zealots, don't even give my any crap about how reliable windows is... my company uses Windows a lot, and it's a big headache for me. If it weren't for Access, we wouldn't have to use Windows!)
That particular pushup - we're talking about literally years of effort here, this is not a small system - sensitized me to the need for an "Access-like" system under Linux. I know I'm not the only guy working to put Linux into businesses, and I know I'm not the only guy who wishes he had more powerful tools to do it with.
Finally, as a consultant, I wouldn't have any problem suggesting to a mom and pop business that they use a somewhat recent Linux distribution (such as RH9, which is what I'm messing with now) instead of a Windows based soluntion, if and when a relible and relatively complete Access clone arrives for Linux. Until then, I can't in good conscience do it except for light office work, or if they have a serious and very capable development staff.
The neat thing is, if a capable Linux based Access clone shows up (and yes, I know about the "PG Access" project - and what an awful, unsupported, stagnant, broken mess that is - I refuse to count it as a serious effort) that Linux based clone will almost certainly use a powerful underlying engine such as PostgreSQL, and it should be able to kick the "real" Access's butt right off the planet without any further effort.
I tend to think of it this way: The front office light data processing work - the things that get done in word processors, presentation managers and so forth - depend on data crunchers in the back offices, and they need two tools: spreadsheets and databases. So Linux is halfway there. We have great spreadsheets. We have great, but almost completely inaccessible databases.
Be nice to see a poll of the audience here as far as who would like to be able to "GUI-up" a usable database application in a few hours under Linux, instead of many times that amount of effort. I bet the only people who wouldn't want such a thing just don't understand what Access can do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you are not having profits from your work, your rights are not being violated.
I'd say it that way:
If you are not having profits from your work, your rights may not have been violated.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I call BS on this fool. Warhol was nothing more than an artist, a cultural icon for a short amount of time. Parent poster might be a little uptight, but what they say is true. Unless you have some billion dollar idea or are born into money, you have to look and act like an executive in order to be one. Oh well, ignore me... You'll find out when you grow up.
If Microsoft is a monopoly then please explain this whole Linux and OpenOffice.org thing to me. I was under the impression that they were an open source alternative to Microsoft Windows and an open source alternative to Microsoft Office respectively.
Firstly, I'm glad you didn't say anything about a "right to $X"... ;)
Second, I wanted to just note that in Wal-Mart's case, I'm most impressed with the fact that they intentionally "undercutt" market prices in order to grow. The market isn't forcing them to give good deals. Wal-Mart structured themselves in such a way that they could price under competitors like Target and K-mart, and by drawing customers with those deals, they have knocked the market-competitors on their asses. Wal-Mart competes with almost every retail store on the face of the earth. Not just the "sell everything" types, but they do clothes, toys, sporting goods, movies, foodstuffs, electronics. And not only do they sell them, they sell them for cheaper than competitors!
I may not particularly agree with a lot of their practices, but it's almost awe-inspiring to look at Wal-Mart's approach to a competitive marketplace, and see how they dominate it. They come up with a way to take profit from competitors, and then they just blaze on and do it again and again!
Of course, it all sadly begs the question: how will Wal-Mart react once they have 90% control of retail sales?
- DaftShadow
Well, that second 'i' isn't put there at all in the U.S. Not that I'm taking sides on this...
It is a commonly-held misconception that the Declaration of Independence's inalienable right to "the pursuit of happiness" refers in some way to chasing, or trying to get, happiness. It doesn't. Jefferson used the word "pursuit" in a sense of "experience". What the first few lines of the Declaration say is that people have the right to be alive, to be free, and to be happy -- not the right to be alive, to be free, and to do whatever they want while they try achieve something that will make them happy.
It's not a sense of the word "pursuit" that one comes across very often these days. The boardgame Trivial Pursuit is the only one that comes to my mind quickly, anyway.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
That's enough of a reason to stop using a programming language for me.
Hmm, i don't code VB, but what about OOP/OOD? (Object oriented stuff). Is it at least half as good as in Java?
Ah, if only this were true. If you look at Wal-mart's practices with their suppliers, you would see abuses that are anything but free market.
Wal-mart bullies suppliers into selling to them at a price much less than the market would allow, threatening to go with the large orders to an alternate supplier. If wal-mart changes to supplier B, then supplier A goes out of business. But if Wal-mart stays with supplier A, then supplier A only loses money and can hopefully make it up with sales to other retail outlets.
Don't be naive. Wal-mart is one of the worst companies out there. In addition to how they treat the suppliers, Wal-mart takes huge advantages of tax breaks by small localities to move in, then if the tax breaks go away, they'll move to a new location, which offers them the same breaks.
You can like Wal-mart for the prices (hell, it's a free country, you can like them for whatever reason you want). But to say they are a positive example of a competitive market is a stretch.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Also little knows is, I believe, that it originially read the persuit of wealth, but they changed that to happiness.
I'm not sure who would think that right gave endowes a citizen with the right to "do whatever they want" in pursuit of their happiness.
In my eyes, there's no difference, if any, between the two.
If I have a right to experience happiness, then I have a right to find it.
To find it, I have the right to do different things such as be a farmer, be a programmer, be a dentist, or be a lawyer.
I would say that finding those things in life that bring you personal satisfaction and happiness must be found.
Here's an interesting article you might enjoy. It's here
Here's a great quote: Those who would supplant the pursuit of such a democracy for a "free market" philosophy of greed, which, like a cancer, would kill the host body that gives it life, have "no business here at all."
In other words, I agree with what your saying, but I don't agree with going the to the other extreme.
Freedom of choice and the ability to earn a fair wage (determined by competition in the marketplace) in any field of profession I choose (which I need to put thought into, eh? There may be too many lawyers to earn a living...) is extremely important to me, and I believe all people deserve the same.
To pay for a home, to worship where and how I please, a decent education for myself and my family, to provide a bright future for my children, and to; in general; realize the harmonious balance whose end result is hapiness is, ultimately, what Jefferson meant.
I do not, however, think it meant to step on the backs of the downtrodden in order to gain wealth that'd make Soloman blush. If great wealth can be earned by providing a good product or service; and can be created and sold with ethics and morals; more power to that person.
Great point, though.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
That means that while they're turning a profit, the market is forcing them to give customers good deals.
Walmart is no longer a good example of a competitive player.
They have become so large that they can dictate special terms to their suppliers and obtain special prices from them that smaller buyers cannot hope to obtain.
Likewise, they can squash smaller retailers by offering low prices and economies of scale on selected items while keeping prices higher on other items that consumers will still buy from time to time.
A 3% profit margin is higher than what many grocery stores enjoy. Not as large a profits on revenue as what MS gets for its products or what big pharmaceutical companies get, but respectable for what is typically considered a very competitive marketplace.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I don't know why states don't make those tax breaks illegal. If WalMart can't get a tax break anywhere, they'll still go somewhere, and some community will actually get the taxes.