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Microsoft Decides To Take On Linux On Low-Cost PCs
e5rebel writes "Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs. It is an effort to stop Linux dominating this market but Microsoft is insisting on limiting the hardware specs of these devices."
So if you're looking for thin & light notebooks to join your AD domain, you still need the Linux ones.
They've just defined the features for the next big Linux boom: 12" touch screen, 100GB HDD, dual core. That was clever. Differentiate your product as the less capable one. Genius!
These machines will never run Vista well. Let's keep that important knowledge in front of people. Intel expects to move 10 million Atom platforms in the first wave, and none will have Vista.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Because Joe wants to run Calendar Creator or some such nonsense. He doesn't want to type "sudo apt-get install $whatever". He doesn't even want to use Synaptics Package manager. He wants the damn CD he bought in the bargain bin at WalMart to load and install.
He wants IE and all the stupid toolbars.
He doesn't want to think about this appliance he bought.
And he especially doesn't want to go online and post a question to a forum. Even the warm and inviting Ubuntu forums. He just wants it to work. (Irony noted).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't know about ultra low cost pc's but I've held on to an old laptop that's falling apart, had a failing drive and the replacement never quite fit so I just pulled it out and have been using a Damn Small Linux CD to boot so I can browse the web and even VNC into my main desktop.
I also found this today. MilaX which claims to be like DSL but is based on OpenSolaris. But it doesn't look like that POS laptop will be able to run this.
MS is planning on charging betweek $26-$32 bucks for Windows XP Home Edition for these machines. That's still a significant cost compared to the price of these machines. Especially the One Laptop Per Child based on reports of what they're planning on charging. But then again it seems their prototypes wound up being 2x as much as planned.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
The point isn't really to replace the notebook. They'll do that too, though. A modern laptop is ridiculously overpowered for the purpose of running a well designed OS and office application. The idea is to make it cheap enough to not freak out about breaking it, to provide enough power to do your stuff but not so much that you have to be chained to a wall wart to accomplish anything that takes more than two hours.
Yes. And it runs just fine. And with Compiz the visual effects are flashier than Aero if you want them to be. And it will play HD video just fine. And it's got all the wireless features you would expect. And on and on. The screen and keyboard are a little small. The next generation may be better in this regard.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
- Predatory pricing to prevent a new entrant into a market by a company with market dominance
- Limitations on what resellers can do with the product purchased (only on low-end PCs)
- Arbitrary discounts to some distributors over others
- Agreements between different members of the supply chain to limit customer choice
If the EU is at all consistent with the policies explained in my training today, MS should be forced to either sell low-cost XP to everyone, regardless of the hardware, or not sell XP at all. Who do I write in the EU to get an injunction?TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Ok, I guess I'll bite. I'm not a Linux guy - I've messed around with it as a hobby (I've actually been hankering to install Linux on one of my old dev machines and do a bit of freeware game development), but I develop computer games for a living. That means, like most of the industry, I'm using Microsoft platforms and (among some other vendors), their development tools. In general, I've always found Microsoft development tools to be best in class, at least lately. A number of years ago, Borland made the best game dev tools, and then Watcom had its day in the sun.
.NET platform, C#, and WPF are three examples of pretty innovative and solid technologies that I've seen them come out with. We're building some pretty amazing content creation tools for our designers and artists to use, and we're doing things with them that would be extremely difficult to do using most traditional UI APIs.
.NET in a very short time. When I'm working on a run-time component for our engine, I'm using C++ and optimize for performance. If a "point-and-click" tool is going to improve my productivity and is appropriate for the job I'm doing, then I have no problems with using it.
At work today, we're using XAML / WPF for some of our newest content creation tools, so I've gotten a chance to play with some of Microsft's cutting edge development APIs. Say what you like, but the
I'm not going to dismiss Linux as a solid development platform. It's got an solid work history, and it, of course, has the obvious benefits of being free and open source. What a lot of people don't seem to understand, though, is that many people really don't care all that much about those last two points. Software development is big business, and developing on Windows is simply the most practical option right now (again, in my industry: game development. I can't speak for yours). Reasons:
1) Windows is the OS of choice for large-scale game development efforts (both for Windows and console development). Some developers, such as Blizzard, admirably support a variety of platforms. I wish our company did, but there's no real economic incentive to do so. If anyone can successfully make the case, let me know. I'd love to present arguments to our company higher-ups.
2) It's hard to find developers with the expertise to port to Mac and Linux. The current talent pool of game developers is nearly universally trained with Microsoft tools and platforms. While on-the-job training is nearly always required to some degree, any more required training is a disincentive. Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's a problem nonetheless.
3) The development tools from Microsoft are excellent. I've seen some cool open-source stuff, and in fact, we do use those tools as well. What's important to us as a development house is productivity, because our real costs are in labor, not software. If buying a few hundred dollars worth of software will save all our developers a few hours (for instance, the company pays for Visual Assist X plugins for developers), it's worth it.
Say what you like about "point-and-click" developers, but I work on both low-level game engine code all the way up to tools and utilities. The farther down I go in the code, the lower level my style becomes. In my opinion, it's simply smart to use the most appropriate development tools available for the job at hand. When I need to bang out a quick utility to help artists generate a simple XML configuration file, I can create a nice little easy-to-use utility using C# / WPF /
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.