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Ballmer - Trusting Vista and Battling Google
Carnivore24 wrote to mention a C|Net article discussing Steve Ballmer's morning keynote at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo. From the article: "'I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life,' Microsoft's CEO said ... Ballmer also touched on a variety of areas related to Microsoft's competition with Google. The software maker will compete 'the good old-fashioned way, with innovation,' he said. 'There are many things--who knows?--Google may or may not do. If you read the papers today, other than curing cancer, Google will do everything.'"
Yet another story to fuel the anger of Slashdotters towards Microsoft and to hail Google as abosolutely good.
The sound you hear the is the hundred Slashdotters typing anti-Microsoft and pro-Google remarks at lightning speed.
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of this and want some actual NEWS?
"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."
Sure Steve, and I'm not the guy who hacked the announcements system when I was in high school. Face it. It's what you're famous for. Make use of it.
Hey, google could be working on that, too...
Let me extrapolate on Balmer's Microsoft competes the "Good old-fashioned way":
We will own more congressman and senators than Google, and then we will make Google against the law, and then make it illegal for them to index any Class-C address web-site, and then we will buy all Class-B addresses and then patent them, and make it so only Windows machines can reach a Class-B address. After than we will have our congressmen and Senators pass a law making IP-v6 illegal, thereby protecting our hold on addresses. Then we will go to Europe and outlaw X.25.
That's just a good old-fashioned microsoft technology battle.
Microsoft claims Linux is Cancer
Google uses Linux
Microsoft repeats claims that Google cures Cancer
To cure cancer, you make cancer go away.
Therefore Microsoft claims Google will make Linux go away.
Since I like Linux, should I be using MSN search then?
I've never tried Microsoft's search engine. This article made me pause a bit and ask why.
The reason may not be entirely rational, but I just don't feel like I can trust MSN. It isn't just a blanket mistrust of Microsoft; writing a memo on Word doesnt' make me uneasy. I think the issue is that Microsoft has such an obvious lust to control the economic and technological ground on which information is created, processed, stored and distributed, my subconscious impression is that I couldn't rely on their search results as not having some kind of strategic agenda embedded in it.
Of course, may not be wise not to trust Google either, but they are in the informaiton as information business, not in the business yet of setting themselves as the ground on which all transactions have to occur. The most important asset they have is user trust. In many ways, Google is the closest thing we have to the old newspaper business model: we give you information, and support that service by advertising around the information. Newspapers these days tend to be part of media empires with financial interests that go beyond the old fashioned cussede political biases.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
OK, I'll bite. :)
The massive clustering infrastructure google has developed sure could help with protein analysis. I would bet that their idle cycles could easily match or exceed what is being done today with United Devices or Folding at home.
They may not cure cancer, but I could see them partnering to help those that will.
XML is the best data format; unless your data needs to be read or written by a human or a computer.
I'm sorry ... but MS has burned us all so many times that no matter what they say, I will never trust them again. I also don't like their attitude and the attitude of their staff (one of their reps described a tech support policy I find abominable, I said I'd never do business with their employer, the rep snottily said 'okay, remove all MS software from your computer', I responded that I long since quit using their crap and that I'm a Mac user... never got a reply. How predictable).
They ignore antitrust rules (most recently, Microsoft Pulls Its Head Out), they make software that ignores standards (IE), they assume their customers are thieves and demand all kinds of crap from us to prove we aren't when no other major OS vendor does that, and they are a convicted abusive monopolist and should have been broken up but are still operating.
Sorry, Ballmer. Sorry, Bill. You lost me a long time ago. You had lots of chances, and that time is way past over. You dug your own hole. Rot in it.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Contract out your use of evil. Use dogpile
:P
That way your hands remain clean
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Consequently, I don't think it will be a question of whether or not we will be using Vista but merely how Microsoft will have managed to improve upon the mostly unimproveable experience of Windows XP. If they compete with anything, it will be their own success.
... works?
Uh, you're kidding, right?
Right?
I spent 4 hours yesterday helping a techno-neophyte (but good friend from high school) get his wireless card to work with my wifi hotspot. A frustrating afternoon, where we discovered that
1) Windows Update, run manually, didn't work because of some ActiveX error that repeated attempts to fix did nothing and never could be made to work.
2) Windows Update, run "automatically" in the background, resulted in updates that wouldn't install, and there was no indication as to why.
3) The wireless card, when connected, with all the settings for DHCP and so on set correctly, still wouldn't update the routing table when "connected".
4) Windows Antispyware, AdAware, and McAffee Virus scanner all came up clean.
5) He'd used the system very little, and spent $1,500 on it about a year ago, and was pretty upset when *nothing* seemed to work. (as I would be, if we were talking about a TV, stereo system, or similar appliance in the same price range)
There were many more - this is just what I remember.
1) How about making sure that Windows Vista
2) How about making the "Administrator" account - an actual administrator account? I've *never* gotten a "permission denied" error, when doing something as root on a Linux system. WTF??!?
3) How about making Windows Update work without stupid, insecure, bug-prone ActiveX hacks (which you are supposed to disable?!?) ???
4) How about (re?)designing Windows so that the entire "Documents and Settings" folder can be copied, thus retaining all Outlook/Outlook express settings and data without having to do stupid import stuff? It's way retarded that you can't just copy over the "Documents and Settings" folder and have *any* confidence of having effectively grabbed all the users' data..
I'm sure you'll see plenty more in the replies to this post...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Hate to break it to ya Steve old boy, but Google is curing cancer. The Google Toolbar includes Google Compute, which contributes unused CPU cycles to Folding@home, the Stanford research project on protein folding. Potential payoffs of the research include curing some types of cancer.
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