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Gates on Spyware and OS Competition
Ant writes "CNET's News.com has an article that says Microsoft plans to offer its own anti-spyware software." prostoalex writes "Both OsNews and InfoWorld talk about Bill Gates' speech at the Computer History Museum in California. Gates is noting that Linux is taking over, and claims that 10 years forward Linux and Windows will be the only OSs left in the market."
People have been predicting the death of MacOS and Apple for almost 2 decades now. That "wizard" over at PCMag, John Dvorak, has been doing so for almost that long, and look at where that prediction has gone.
*tears out another Dvorak article, wipes, and flushes it down the toilet*
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Actually, if you did your research, you'd find out that he never said that. He's not an idiot, and only an idiot would make a definate statement about the evolution of tech.
I'm too tired to find the links right now, but a minute or 5 of google should clear it up for ya.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
To be fair, Tom Watson was born in the 1870's :)
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
As hardware gets cheaper and more powerful and becomes a commodity, Apple is likely to have an increasingly difficult time selling its own line of expensive machines.
Rolls Royce still manages to sell cars.
Plug into a published (long before beta1) API, using WMI/WBEM. Even Symantec still haven't got it fixed for some versions of their pile of poo scanner.
They do have it working. The really scary thing is that they actually explicitly PREVENT it from reporting to Windows the status of the AV software. If you try to change that, it pops up a window which says (something along the lines of) that "Norton AV is monitoring your system", and there's a check box which says "Report status to other systems (recommend that you DO NOT do this)".
Kind of shitty of them really. Especially as you have to go through hoops to get their LiveUpdate system to automatically download AV signature file updates - it's not enabled by default.
Lame lame lame lame lame.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Eeerrrr, if they really wanted to do something about it why not change the way the write software so that it is not so easy for outsiders to hack into their products and dump unwanted code onto their clients machines? This would efectively cut down on virii as well as spyware, trojans etc... Why do they chose to leave so many doors open? I believe it is because they are more concerned with leaving the doors open for themselves than they are worried about the effect of the abuse of those doors. Why does a Windows users email need the power to format their hard disk etc?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Sounds like every other large corporation in the world.
:)
My advice as a veteran is to stick with smaller companies. Not only will you make a bigger impact but you'll also be appreciated. You definately wait till you are married and have kids before you get your soul sucked out by a large company. Of course by then you'll have lost the will to live anyway so it won't matter so much
good luck.
evil is as evil does
From the OSNews article:
This is a real issue. Red Hat and the Linux companies have little incentive to make products which require less support, because this could cut into their support contracts.Microsoft then can show a lower TCO by putting lots of resources into making management easier and do-able by lower level cheaper employees.
They could win (at least temporarily) with this strategy if we aren't careful (and don't get administration on Linux to be as easy and automated as possible).
Linux is, and has been ready for the desktop for at least 5 years or more. I've been using it full-time on my desktops and workstations here for at least 7 years.
Don't blame the kernel for the lack of userland applications. The peripherals, ports, and external devices are all supported (and in fact, more devices and peripherals are supported under the current 2.6.8.1 Linux kernel than on Windows and OSX combined).
Linux was never "meant" for the desktop. That is the job of distribution manufacturers and userland application authors. Talk to them. The rest of us "desktop Linux users" are waiting for them to catch up.
This isn't a race against Microsoft. Linux solves my needs, and gives me much more flexibility and power and choice than the alternative OS that might run on my hardware.
Incidentally, Windows and OSX don't support 90% of the hardware out there that Linux has happily been running on for several years to over a decade. See my previous post for a more-complete list.