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Judge Clears the Way for Google's Microsoft Hire
MarkEst1973 was one of the first to write to tell us MSNBC is reporting that a Judge has cleared the way for Google to hire former Microsoft employee Kai-Fu Lee. The hire does come with several limitations and Lee was also found to have 'misled his former employer and taken advantage of confidential Microsoft information'. This comes as a follow up to the original story in which Microsoft sued Google in order to prevent the hire. Tom Burt was quoted as saying that "Dr. Lee is going to be the highest-paid HR manager ever."
I'm running Suse 9.3 and have experienced so many bugs and problems. Flash doesn't work at all within Konqueror. Sound doesn't work with Flash within Firefox or Mozilla. Things crash. Even Vim crashes when I try to use it with SVN. There are performance problems. It ships with a beta version of OpenOffice.org which is not stable. This is all with a stock installation of 9.3. I've been using Suse since version 9.0 and 9.3 is the least stable I have ever used. Anyone who tries this out is going to be disappointed.
I have just now downloaded OpenSuse 10. I'll install it and hope to see some improvements.
If Novell / Suse wants to get real desktop adoption, these are the things they need to do:
1. The system needs to be more stable. Take a deep breath, slow down on the new features, and make it stable.
2. THERE SHOULD BE ONLY ONE APPLICATION FOR EVERY TASK! This is so obvious and people have been saying it for years. On my Suse 9.3, if I want to control the volume, I go to Multimedia -> Volume control and I see NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS, all of which work or don't work to varying degrees, and none of which are simple and easy to use and understand. That's crazy. That's on drugs. That's lame. Say whatever you want about how great Linux is but if my desktop has NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS that is horrific. I bring up volume control, but the same problem exists in all the other application categories, but volume control is by far the worst offender. If users want to go crazy and install a dozen different word processors, fine, let them do it, but the default installation should have ONE and exactly ONE application in every category.
3. There needs to be a good media player that is well-integrated and WORKS. I should be able to pop in a DVD which I got from Blockbuster and play it, with GUI controls, subtitles, everything, with no messing around. I should be able to go to CNN.com and look at video, with no messing around.
The first two items are not rocket science. They're not technology problems. They are management problems. Someone who is a technical manager high up in Novell should lay down the law on these two issues and make them happen. Say to the dev team, "If you think that such-and-such should be the ONE application for such-and-such task, make your case, and we'll have a decision process and at the end we'll pick one, and go with it."
The media player part is more difficult because it's wrapped up in all kinds of legal licensing problems. They need to solve these problems. They are solvable with money, lawyers and time. Guess what, time to do it Novell!
It is true. I would sacrifice my wang to the penisbird for TripMaster Monkey. I would let the penisbird perch on my manhood. I would let that penisbird peck at my knob. I would let that penisbird tear open my nutsack. I would let the penisbird do all that, just for TripMaster Monkey!