Users, being stuck in the office on nice days, having to schlep to the office on nasty ones, occasionally confronting the BSoD, having to put up with their idiot colleagues, Hell, having to work at all, have no love for M$ or much of anything else work related.
M$ may not be kidding itself about that but I suspect that the reality distortion field around Bill Gates these days makes the one around Steve Jobs look like clear-eyed, realistic pragmatism.
Users don't like M$. The great majority of them hate it. Its work.
Customers, the OEM who just want to shove boxes out the door and make enough dough to pay the rent and DP/MIS/IT deparments, on the other hand are applying the same rules that gave rise to M$ in the first place: 1) nobody ever got fired for buying IBM quickly followed by 2) nobody ever got fired for saving money which created the clones, and M$.
Usability was a secondary concern at the time. Remember all those books about DOS and the command line?
Visicalc opened the office door, Lotus 123 swept in followed by WordPerfect and M$ became an expert at ripping off other people's IP.
And nothing much has happened since except in niches like desktop publishing, graphics, (now Apple is doing it again with video editing,) email and the web which didn't depend on M$ in the first place.
Given the downward direction of the ROI and upward direction of the acquisition and support costs of an M$ box, M$ will disappear when Linux becomes just "good enough." Not even, uh, "Insanely Great," but just good enough.
OpenOffice, a free OS that any MSCE can install on existing boxes to extend their usable life (even by a single year,) and cheap site-wide licences will destroy M$ on the desktop almost as quickly as the switch to the x86 destroyed Digital Research, who never made it off the -80 architecture.
The switch to a new architecture on the server side is starting to worry M$ too since they have nothing real ported to it anyway. (NT in x86 emulation on the Itanium architecture? Naw, I think, we'll go Unix or Linux.)
I should be smelling fear from Redmond but since M$ has billions in the bank and can survive a change in course, in direction and in what sea they swim in, they won't disappear.
The livelier Linux gets, the more vociferous and ridiculous the denials from Redmond.
Eventually, the man will hold up his hand and ask us like he did to Winston Smith: "How many fingers am I holding up?"
And we'll chop it off and say "None..."
M$ will never necome Big Brother (Bug Brother?:-) or the Borg. Its too inefficient, insecure and vulnerable.
Would a MSCE or B.Comp Sci grad know
on
Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 2
enough to understand the dangers of the connection and of the mode of connection?
Gimme a break? The bell curve shows that most of them will be mediocre. That's sad but statistically true.
But we've got some hope. Our infestation of script kiddies and the puerile juvenile delight our youth takes in engaging in high-tech sacred-cow-tipping.
Somebody somewhere is getting hammered at by the bazillion script kiddies and his/her systems are behaving like women of negotiable affection when the fleet's in town. But its not somewhere important. An individual firm may go under but it most probably wasn't important either.
The web of commerce is far broader, loser and more resilient than it is vulnerable.
But watch the transportation industries and highway system that are the filaments that hold it all together...
Remember the Golden Gate bridge and the disruption expense and systemic inefficiency caused by the Loma Prieta 'quake...
For attackers who's aim is the stone age,
on
Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
and the destruction of the morally bankrupt, corrupt western civilization, we sure are giving Al Qeda and the Q'Ran-and-ravers kudos for a lot more hightech savvy than they need to infect themselves with to accomplish their goals.
Have you read about how Islam is treating anybody with enough education to frame a question to ask the immams? After they've shot them?
Have you read the clap-trap that their schools, in those countries where they still pretend to have some, are spewing in an effort to reconcile the Western scientific viewpoint, based on letting things describe themselves so that we can understand them, and Islam's mystical religious authoritarian fervor, which is based on Allah this, Allah that and nothing happens without the will of Allah and the Q'Ran is the only book you need and the immams will guide you in its interpretation so you don't need to know how to read. (Very Catholic of them. Watch your sons around that bunch of androsterone loving creeps.)
Given the patterns shown to date and the historic emnity betwen the Q'Ran-and-ravers and our transportation infrastructure, (you don't need to leave your village and the influence of your immam,) we'd probably do better to watch who the country's transportation workers are.
What do they do to spread terror and interfers with our lives? Mall bombers are a very ineffective way to spread terror. They have noticed that our conveyances offer the opportunity to murder and do a lot of harm to many people in a tight space. Now they set bombs off next to busses, hijack planes, crash them into buildings.
River bridges and tunnels are far more vulnerable than airports right now. Truckers and their rigs are the vulnerable underbelly of America.
The pledge of allegiance should be more of a decleration to human rights (the right of self-determination.)
The concept of the nation, any nation, which always seems to bind mind and body into some concept alleging to be larger than the individual but always sems to do it at the expense of the individual, should be eliminated.
How did we get here?
In the beginning was the nation state. But they kept warring with each other over land, the politics of control (surely nobody remembers "The Politics Of Dancing,") and marketing rights.
Then we continued with religion. Millions died, slaughtered for something which the best religion could never substantiate. (Pantheism pits the gods against each other. Monotheism pits men against each other. The latter is proving to be even more destructive than the former. Do away with both and you'll be happier. They ALL suck. Doesn't matter which. They start with a suspension of disbelief and slide down from there.)
Then we went on to nationhood. Millions more died over the course of the last hundred years and we close the millenium with unprecedented slaughter. (but its was back to the nation states again. (The first world war, the war that was supposed to end all war, was faught over the Prussians pig marketing rights into Silesia, Serbia and the Meditteranean nations. Look at what Churchill wrote on the cuses of the conflict.)
How about we get our heads out of somebody else's ass-hole and breathe free for a change.
How about pledging to not knowingly hurt, main and deceive other people. That's all.
Hey it could work. The Catholics have lapsed into poedophilia and benign indifference on ten lousy commandements and seven deadly sins.
If you're locky, it'll boil over and fry the chip, the box and any pet nearby. (Think: "Hmm... Fluffy Dead... Bad burnt fur [lawsuit] smell. I'm getting a new Lexus. Yay!")
Hey Gates' is richer that the countries he trying to sell the X-Box crap in.
He'll keep in floggin it just like he did with: - M$ Word (knock-off of AES Word Processing system,) - M$ Multiplan (acquisitions morphed it into) Excell, - M$ IE (we know where he got that idea from,) - M$ VisualStudio (bad copy of the Smalltalk-80/VisualWorks IDE,), - M$ Windows (Puh-leez "Make More Mac Like Make More Mac Like").
He's hoping that M$ can get it right by version 3 and that he still has a big enough choke hold on the PC market to coerce all the manufacturers to shill it for him (consumers don't buy an OS. They buy a box. He just ILLEGALLY arm-twists the OEM into selling HIS OS. [Tony Soprano would be so proud.])
WHAT'T THAT YOU SAY? THERE AIN'T GOING TO BE A XXX-BOX? (Check it out at the video store. The girls there will gladly rent you the video/CD-ROM for $3.95 a day. If you go downtown, you can get the real thing @ $100 for an hour-of-power.:-)
You're right though. There ain't gonna be any XXX-Box. X-Box was a stupid idea. This ain't the PC market. M$ doesn't have a lock on this market.
M$s reputation on the PC side is that his software is buggy, virus prone and eats upgrades for breakfast. People (MIS people,) are sick of it. Consumers DON'T upgrade if they can help it. Upgrades just break the stuff you curently have running.
People don't want the same crap on their own boxes.
M$ has competition and they're not standing still.
Sony can eat M$ raw on vinegared rice and some soy sauce and not even burp. They actually make products and sell them, lots of them, to consumers. Not strong arm them to OEMs. Sell them.
Nintendo ain't a whole lot smaller.
M$ ISN'T GONNA WIN THIS ONE! Its a matter of national Japanese pride.
I like the Linux-en making mod chips to convert X-Boxen into cheap Linux PCs. Must give "Big Bully" Gates and "Monkey Boy Ballmer" heartburn.
I'll be happy when he pulls the plug on this just like he did with "Bob" and that awful "Paper Clip"
Lets hope he wastes some more money before the CPA in his heart yanks out the catheter.
They make the Java and php VMs look like the Johnny-come-lately's that they are. (Sorry Squeak! Wa-ay too slow.)
Blazing fast object allocation (both) interning & loading (VA by a nose,) and both have a full IDE that the others have been trying to achieve since Smalltalk'80 came out.
But remember thei're IDEs not production/delivery. For that you want internationalizable, database drivable GUIs, dialog managers, state machine and transition engines.
All in all. Look at VW & VA and weep. (Or better yet learn.) They've been at it since the days of UCSD Pascal. They've forgot more than you'll ever know.
And do you know why they don't? Because ego gets mixed up in it.
NO mangager will ever admit that he doesn't know everything. They too scared.
NO PHB will ever admit that either. They too stupid.
End result... Surprize. Project X DOESN'T WORK! And its gonna cost three time as much to replace the crap code... And it still won't fuckin' work cause the next guy won't have known something else.
I own http://www.softwareprototypes.com
Mailing campaign. Hand-outs. Post-It pads. And NOT ONE CALL. NOT ONE EMAIL. NOT ONE. Its not like I'd even got a chance to fuck up. They weren't even interested.
I now own a dog grooming salon and the dipshits in the DP/MIS/IT world can all go fuck themselves.
That's another things. How long has the automobile industry called itself automobile industry? Since day dot.
In twenty-five years, my profession hasn't even figured out what the fuck to call itself. Toy makers, tyros and jack-offs.
I don't know wether to be angry or relieved that I've give up on the whole idiotic lot.
I lurk here to see what other loser stupidity they come up with.
The world has become too dangerous to let anyone have privacy.
And it will remain so until we ACT on declarations of war, Jihad and Fatwah and paint a bull's eye on the declarator's forehead and blow it off.
There will be no peace for the US and no return to the less expensive and freer way of life until we have a government hit squad who are mandated openly and supported with funds who'se mission is to terminate with extreme prejudice any individual who overtly declares war, Jihad and Fatwah on us.
Its that simple.
Now it would be CHEAPER to do it that way but Americans will just suck up the cost and kiss their privacy good bye because they're idiots and the terrorists will still be able to organize covertly and then come here and blow up busses and mail boxes.
This loss of privacy will NOT address the covert operations but a publicly supported "Hit Squad" might eliminate the public justification and posturing and fund-rasing efforts. (Box cutters and twenty plane tickets may have been cheap but testing out the strategy and feeding, clothing and housing the animals who destroyed the WTC cost. Without Osama's millions, it wouldn't have happened.)
But until Islam recovers some sense of shame about hom-/suic-icide, your best bet is making wide spread use of electric energy and a nice, brightly painted, thermo-nuclear device on a tall pole planted in Mecca displaying a simple message: "Attack us and we set this off!"
Gates' geeks overhauling the software. Why do that NOT fill me with confidence?
The day marketing takes a back seat to security in M$ is the day that their software will be secure. That'll happen the day after the legal department takes a back seat to the engineering department.
Long live Linux and OS X. Its gotta be better and safer than anything comes out of Redmond.
Once you're no longer employed, they MUST toss it out. It makes no sense otherwise.
And if I was running a bank or other enterprise that needed security, I wouldn't buy somebody else's assurance that the data in the ID file was REALLY the individual's unless I could trust them even more than my own eyes, ears, sense of smell and research.
They have obviously lost touch with reality. Maybe they've been listening to their lawyers.
For all Bill Gate's money, his entire wealth has been based on reducing over-head. Not even production costs. OVER-HEAD. The guy doen't have a clue.
CIO are talking to Linux vendors. HP is advertising Linux machines. IBM is gung-ho on Linux. Governments are refusing to consider closed-source.
M$ now has a competitor. M$ is DOOMED. Its not IF, its now just UNTIL.
Like the insane drift towards higher production costs that can break a studio if the audience using what ever brain cells remain in its media-addled pates decides NOT to make its way to the latest budget-&-ball-busting cinematographic turkey, in lemming-like waves throwing bills from its wallets at the bubble-gum chewing minimum-wage earners at the Odeon as patrons hurtle over the cliff, or simply slip and slide in the darkened meat-locker on the oozed-out-through-the-bottom-of-the-bag pop-corn topping to smash their skulls on the arm-rest mounted "bucket-O-Coke" holders.
Like Josip Brox Tito's insistence to the firing squad that his people loved him and his wife. Followed by eleven shots from the twelve rifles.
If Bill Gates went out holding a lamp and shining it into the faces of every stranger he encountered, he would have a longer road to tread in the search for anyone who has not been burnt in someway or another and still trusted M$, than that walked by Diogenes in his search for an honest man (There is no record that Diogenes ever bothered to even head towards Redmond.)
Vital communication would be jammed exactly when it was most needed by the very people who would need it most. Set off a bomb in a crowded mall NEAR the center of the action and the emergency services might not hear of it until somebody drove over and told them.
All of downtown New York was without land phone service for days, weeks and my old neighborhood (Battery Park City,) was affected for months after the attack on the WTC.
Cell phones were dead too because there was no power available to the repeaters but those were reestablished within hours or days with mobile power units and mobile repeaters driven in on trucks.
This is yet another example of bureaucratic thinking at its best: Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I would want the badge number of the fool who thought that one up. And I would hold him/her and the judge who is allowing this stupidity so we can hold them responsible for any deaths due to the inability of the authorities to respond.
Loonies, Twonies & what, "Finnies"
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Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 2, Funny
I'm a Canadian trapped here in the land of dull Greenbacks and I can attest that, while the confusion factor over the domination is not that high, damn, its a dull, ugly currency.
I toiled for a real-estate/snake-oil salesman who had made a killing in the Calofornia land rush and bought a software firm.
His total lack of perceptiveness consisted in
- handing me "The Five Minute Manager," a not-so-fine book that he'd obviously never read, - having erraticly scheduled alleged weekly "rah rah" meeting to inspire the troops (we always met afterwards and griped that he was an idiot and the company was doomed, never mind the project,) - asking for estimates, which I delivered based on the growing amount of work (he kept adding "fee-tchurs") to be done and the wall of the delivery date which my team and I were hurtling towards, - and then he'd cut my small team by putting somebody on another project.
It was acidosis vs. Tums, headaches vs. Aspirins, desperation vs. alcohol medication.
I NEVER want to be a middle manager again. Specially not graftin' for an idiot. I'd rather sell shoes or groom dogs, cats and turtles (they have claws that need trimming.)
Reading these posts make me realize that .
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Version Fatigue
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· Score: 3, Insightful
software developers, people who only ever use vi or Emacs should shut up when the discussion comes 'round to GUI design principles or software usability.
They have no [expletive deleted] idea what the problems are because THEIR software has been stable for decades.
Using "make" or a shell does NOT make a coder into a user. It does not provide the programmer with any perspective into "user-land."
That's why most Linux GUI stuff sucks, can't copy/paste across applications, doesn't follow guidelines and is so ideosyncratic you just want to strangle the coder.
Being a domain expert is fine if you're working in that domain. But coders are supposed to be experts working in their OWN domain: CODING.
I wouldn't want to look at or use code produced by a domain expert (it'll be correct but it'll probably be buggy, unstructured, unmaintainable perform like a resource pig.)
By the same token, I wouldn't trust code that has been produced by a software God but has not been verified for correctness by a domain expert (it may be sweet and run like blazes but I can't trust that it actually solves the problem its supposed to.)
We'll move the steering wheel to the other side
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· Score: 2
Now are YOU going to be a cry baby or are you just going to shut up and drive the car?
Don't like the way we moved the steering wheel around from last year's model? Don't buy the new model.
That's whay your argument sounds like if you get your nose off the screen and take a breath.
Now, do you still think it makes sense?
Partly its because of the patents
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· Score: 1, Interesting
You CAN'T be seen as doing the same thing in the same way as somebody else. That's illegal.
When the menus and options get shifted around from release to release, that's a bit of self-interested protectionism due to people taking out other patents that suddenly make the way you USED to do it illegal.
It comes down to the USPO making money for corporate lawyers who seem to come from Mars or someplace and obviously don't use any of the products. (C'mon they lawyers, they don't need the stinkin' products, unless its a computerized enema bag... Oh, sorry. That's where they get their personalities from.)
The user, the guy that's actually paying for the is the LAST one to get considered.
If GM made tires, the only choice for tires on GM vehicles would very quickly be GM tires.
M$ OfficeSuite being bundled in with the OS murdered the competition in their beds.
If Tony Soprano wanted you to sell his brand of cigars and ONLY his brand of cigars at your store, you would quickly have HIS brand and ONLY his brand of cigars at your store. Furthermore HE doesn't pay and he tell you how much you're going to sell his cigars for.
M$ did not sell to consumers, they twisted the arms of OEMs, blatantly and illegally (there's NO dispute about that. Its already been proved in a prior case,) to get their OS forced onto the machines.
Don't make excuses for M$.
They need to get LOCKED onto the X86 architecture under pain of imprisonment for Gates & Balmer.
ANY M$ product appear for ANY other platform and Gates and Balmer sleep in the Big House and they better NOT DROP THE SOAP. (Jobs will just have to push OpenOffice for OS X.)
Slashdot Mirror
Users, being stuck in the office on nice days, having to schlep to the office on nasty ones, occasionally confronting the BSoD, having to put up with their idiot colleagues, Hell, having to work at all, have no love for M$ or much of anything else work related.
M$ may not be kidding itself about that but I suspect that the reality distortion field around Bill Gates these days makes the one around Steve Jobs look like clear-eyed, realistic pragmatism.
Users don't like M$. The great majority of them hate it. Its work.
Customers, the OEM who just want to shove boxes out the door and make enough dough to pay the rent and DP/MIS/IT deparments, on the other hand are applying the same rules that gave rise to M$ in the first place:
1) nobody ever got fired for buying IBM quickly followed by
2) nobody ever got fired for saving money which created the clones, and M$.
Usability was a secondary concern at the time. Remember all those books about DOS and the command line?
Visicalc opened the office door, Lotus 123 swept in followed by WordPerfect and M$ became an expert at ripping off other people's IP.
And nothing much has happened since except in niches like desktop publishing, graphics, (now Apple is doing it again with video editing,) email and the web which didn't depend on M$ in the first place.
Given the downward direction of the ROI and upward direction of the acquisition and support costs of an M$ box, M$ will disappear when Linux becomes just "good enough." Not even, uh, "Insanely Great," but just good enough.
OpenOffice, a free OS that any MSCE can install on existing boxes to extend their usable life (even by a single year,) and cheap site-wide licences will destroy M$ on the desktop almost as quickly as the switch to the x86 destroyed Digital Research, who never made it off the -80 architecture.
The switch to a new architecture on the server side is starting to worry M$ too since they have nothing real ported to it anyway. (NT in x86 emulation on the Itanium architecture? Naw, I think, we'll go Unix or Linux.)
I should be smelling fear from Redmond but since M$ has billions in the bank and can survive a change in course, in direction and in what sea they swim in, they won't disappear.
Could they have misspoken?
:-) or the Borg. Its too inefficient, insecure and vulnerable.
The livelier Linux gets, the more vociferous and ridiculous the denials from Redmond.
Eventually, the man will hold up his hand and ask us like he did to Winston Smith: "How many fingers am I holding up?"
And we'll chop it off and say "None..."
M$ will never necome Big Brother (Bug Brother?
enough to understand the dangers of the connection and of the mode of connection?
Gimme a break? The bell curve shows that most of them will be mediocre. That's sad but statistically true.
But we've got some hope. Our infestation of script kiddies and the puerile juvenile delight our youth takes in engaging in high-tech sacred-cow-tipping.
Somebody somewhere is getting hammered at by the bazillion script kiddies and his/her systems are behaving like women of negotiable affection when the fleet's in town. But its not somewhere important. An individual firm may go under but it most probably wasn't important either.
The web of commerce is far broader, loser and more resilient than it is vulnerable.
But watch the transportation industries and highway system that are the filaments that hold it all together...
Remember the Golden Gate bridge and the disruption expense and systemic inefficiency caused by the Loma Prieta 'quake...
and the destruction of the morally bankrupt, corrupt western civilization, we sure are giving Al Qeda and the Q'Ran-and-ravers kudos for a lot more hightech savvy than they need to infect themselves with to accomplish their goals.
Have you read about how Islam is treating anybody with enough education to frame a question to ask the immams? After they've shot them?
Have you read the clap-trap that their schools, in those countries where they still pretend to have some, are spewing in an effort to reconcile the Western scientific viewpoint, based on letting things describe themselves so that we can understand them, and Islam's mystical religious authoritarian fervor, which is based on Allah this, Allah that and nothing happens without the will of Allah and the Q'Ran is the only book you need and the immams will guide you in its interpretation so you don't need to know how to read. (Very Catholic of them. Watch your sons around that bunch of androsterone loving creeps.)
Given the patterns shown to date and the historic emnity betwen the Q'Ran-and-ravers and our transportation infrastructure, (you don't need to leave your village and the influence of your immam,) we'd probably do better to watch who the country's transportation workers are.
What do they do to spread terror and interfers with our lives? Mall bombers are a very ineffective way to spread terror. They have noticed that our conveyances offer the opportunity to murder and do a lot of harm to many people in a tight space. Now they set bombs off next to busses, hijack planes, crash them into buildings.
River bridges and tunnels are far more vulnerable than airports right now. Truckers and their rigs are the vulnerable underbelly of America.
only applied to America.
The pledge of allegiance should be more of a decleration to human rights (the right of self-determination.)
The concept of the nation, any nation, which always seems to bind mind and body into some concept alleging to be larger than the individual but always sems to do it at the expense of the individual, should be eliminated.
How did we get here?
In the beginning was the nation state. But they kept warring with each other over land, the politics of control (surely nobody remembers "The Politics Of Dancing,") and marketing rights.
Then we continued with religion. Millions died, slaughtered for something which the best religion could never substantiate. (Pantheism pits the gods against each other. Monotheism pits men against each other. The latter is proving to be even more destructive than the former. Do away with both and you'll be happier. They ALL suck. Doesn't matter which. They start with a suspension of disbelief and slide down from there.)
Then we went on to nationhood. Millions more died over the course of the last hundred years and we close the millenium with unprecedented slaughter. (but its was back to the nation states again. (The first world war, the war that was supposed to end all war, was faught over the Prussians pig marketing rights into Silesia, Serbia and the Meditteranean nations. Look at what Churchill wrote on the cuses of the conflict.)
How about we get our heads out of somebody else's ass-hole and breathe free for a change.
How about pledging to not knowingly hurt, main and deceive other people. That's all.
Hey it could work. The Catholics have lapsed into poedophilia and benign indifference on ten lousy commandements and seven deadly sins.
You'll be able to heat your coffee on it.
If you're locky, it'll boil over and fry the chip, the box and any pet nearby. (Think: "Hmm... Fluffy Dead... Bad burnt fur [lawsuit] smell. I'm getting a new Lexus. Yay!")
Hey Gates' is richer that the countries he trying to sell the X-Box crap in.
:-)
He'll keep in floggin it just like he did with:
- M$ Word (knock-off of AES Word Processing system,)
- M$ Multiplan (acquisitions morphed it into) Excell,
- M$ IE (we know where he got that idea from,)
- M$ VisualStudio (bad copy of the Smalltalk-80/VisualWorks IDE,),
- M$ Windows (Puh-leez "Make More Mac Like Make More Mac Like").
He's hoping that M$ can get it right by version 3 and that he still has a big enough choke hold on the PC market to coerce all the manufacturers to shill it for him (consumers don't buy an OS. They buy a box. He just ILLEGALLY arm-twists the OEM into selling HIS OS. [Tony Soprano would be so proud.])
WHAT'T THAT YOU SAY? THERE AIN'T GOING TO BE A XXX-BOX? (Check it out at the video store. The girls there will gladly rent you the video/CD-ROM for $3.95 a day. If you go downtown, you can get the real thing @ $100 for an hour-of-power.
You're right though. There ain't gonna be any XXX-Box. X-Box was a stupid idea. This ain't the PC market. M$ doesn't have a lock on this market.
M$s reputation on the PC side is that his software is buggy, virus prone and eats upgrades for breakfast. People (MIS people,) are sick of it. Consumers DON'T upgrade if they can help it. Upgrades just break the stuff you curently have running.
People don't want the same crap on their own boxes.
M$ has competition and they're not standing still.
Sony can eat M$ raw on vinegared rice and some soy sauce and not even burp. They actually make products and sell them, lots of them, to consumers. Not strong arm them to OEMs. Sell them.
Nintendo ain't a whole lot smaller.
M$ ISN'T GONNA WIN THIS ONE! Its a matter of national Japanese pride.
I like the Linux-en making mod chips to convert X-Boxen into cheap Linux PCs. Must give "Big Bully" Gates and "Monkey Boy Ballmer" heartburn.
I'll be happy when he pulls the plug on this just like he did with "Bob" and that awful "Paper Clip"
Lets hope he wastes some more money before the CPA in his heart yanks out the catheter.
They make the Java and php VMs look like the Johnny-come-lately's that they are. (Sorry Squeak! Wa-ay too slow.)
Blazing fast object allocation (both) interning & loading (VA by a nose,) and both have a full IDE that the others have been trying to achieve since Smalltalk'80 came out.
But remember thei're IDEs not production/delivery. For that you want internationalizable, database drivable GUIs, dialog managers, state machine and transition engines.
All in all. Look at VW & VA and weep. (Or better yet learn.) They've been at it since the days of UCSD Pascal. They've forgot more than you'll ever know.
billions every year.
... Surprize. Project X DOESN'T WORK! And its gonna cost three time as much to replace the crap code... And it still won't fuckin' work cause the next guy won't have known something else.
And do you know why they don't? Because ego gets mixed up in it.
NO mangager will ever admit that he doesn't know everything. They too scared.
NO PHB will ever admit that either. They too stupid.
End result
I own http://www.softwareprototypes.com
Mailing campaign. Hand-outs. Post-It pads. And NOT ONE CALL. NOT ONE EMAIL. NOT ONE. Its not like I'd even got a chance to fuck up. They weren't even interested.
I now own a dog grooming salon and the dipshits in the DP/MIS/IT world can all go fuck themselves.
That's another things. How long has the automobile industry called itself automobile industry? Since day dot.
In twenty-five years, my profession hasn't even figured out what the fuck to call itself. Toy makers, tyros and jack-offs.
I don't know wether to be angry or relieved that I've give up on the whole idiotic lot.
I lurk here to see what other loser stupidity they come up with.
Somebody better hurry up and kill the lawyers while there's still an ounce of creativity left in this industry.
In America, maybe in your home.
In other countries, maybe in between your ears.
The world has become too dangerous to let anyone have privacy.
And it will remain so until we ACT on declarations of war, Jihad and Fatwah and paint a bull's eye on the declarator's forehead and blow it off.
There will be no peace for the US and no return to the less expensive and freer way of life until we have a government hit squad who are mandated openly and supported with funds who'se mission is to terminate with extreme prejudice any individual who overtly declares war, Jihad and Fatwah on us.
Its that simple.
Now it would be CHEAPER to do it that way but Americans will just suck up the cost and kiss their privacy good bye because they're idiots and the terrorists will still be able to organize covertly and then come here and blow up busses and mail boxes.
This loss of privacy will NOT address the covert operations but a publicly supported "Hit Squad" might eliminate the public justification and posturing and fund-rasing efforts. (Box cutters and twenty plane tickets may have been cheap but testing out the strategy and feeding, clothing and housing the animals who destroyed the WTC cost. Without Osama's millions, it wouldn't have happened.)
But until Islam recovers some sense of shame about hom-/suic-icide, your best bet is making wide spread use of electric energy and a nice, brightly painted, thermo-nuclear device on a tall pole planted in Mecca displaying a simple message: "Attack us and we set this off!"
Gates' geeks overhauling the software. Why do that NOT fill me with confidence?
The day marketing takes a back seat to security in M$ is the day that their software will be secure. That'll happen the day after the legal department takes a back seat to the engineering department.
Long live Linux and OS X. Its gotta be better and safer than anything comes out of Redmond.
Once you're no longer employed, they MUST toss it out. It makes no sense otherwise.
And if I was running a bank or other enterprise that needed security, I wouldn't buy somebody else's assurance that the data in the ID file was REALLY the individual's unless I could trust them even more than my own eyes, ears, sense of smell and research.
Okay, maybe AFIS system
Maybe his time has come and gone. (I must be honest I don't know if I've ever heard any of his stuff.)
This may be M$ last hurrah.
They have obviously lost touch with reality. Maybe they've been listening to their lawyers.
For all Bill Gate's money, his entire wealth has been based on reducing over-head. Not even production costs. OVER-HEAD. The guy doen't have a clue.
CIO are talking to Linux vendors. HP is advertising Linux machines. IBM is gung-ho on Linux. Governments are refusing to consider closed-source.
M$ now has a competitor. M$ is DOOMED. Its not IF, its now just UNTIL.
Like the insane drift towards higher production costs that can break a studio if the audience using what ever brain cells remain in its media-addled pates decides NOT to make its way to the latest budget-&-ball-busting cinematographic turkey, in lemming-like waves throwing bills from its wallets at the bubble-gum chewing minimum-wage earners at the Odeon as patrons hurtle over the cliff, or simply slip and slide in the darkened meat-locker on the oozed-out-through-the-bottom-of-the-bag pop-corn topping to smash their skulls on the arm-rest mounted "bucket-O-Coke" holders.
Like Josip Brox Tito's insistence to the firing squad that his people loved him and his wife. Followed by eleven shots from the twelve rifles.
If Bill Gates went out holding a lamp and shining it into the faces of every stranger he encountered, he would have a longer road to tread in the search for anyone who has not been burnt in someway or another and still trusted M$, than that walked by Diogenes in his search for an honest man (There is no record that Diogenes ever bothered to even head towards Redmond.)
I'm ambivalent about buying an XBox. I have a life, a wife and a very private walled-in garden. What do I need a computer to play games for?
But as long as each sale (now don't go and buy their games too,) loses money for M$, its got to be a good thing, right?
Why should M$ change its pattern now?
in a disaster? The phone service.
Vital communication would be jammed exactly when it was most needed by the very people who would need it most. Set off a bomb in a crowded mall NEAR the center of the action and the emergency services might not hear of it until somebody drove over and told them.
All of downtown New York was without land phone service for days, weeks and my old neighborhood (Battery Park City,) was affected for months after the attack on the WTC.
Cell phones were dead too because there was no power available to the repeaters but those were reestablished within hours or days with mobile power units and mobile repeaters driven in on trucks.
This is yet another example of bureaucratic thinking at its best: Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I would want the badge number of the fool who thought that one up. And I would hold him/her and the judge who is allowing this stupidity so we can hold them responsible for any deaths due to the inability of the authorities to respond.
I'm a Canadian trapped here in the land of dull Greenbacks and I can attest that, while the confusion factor over the domination is not that high, damn, its a dull, ugly currency.
If only I had a lot more of it.
I toiled for a real-estate/snake-oil salesman who had made a killing in the Calofornia land rush and bought a software firm.
His total lack of perceptiveness consisted in
- handing me "The Five Minute Manager," a not-so-fine book that he'd obviously never read,
- having erraticly scheduled alleged weekly "rah rah" meeting to inspire the troops (we always met afterwards and griped that he was an idiot and the company was doomed, never mind the project,)
- asking for estimates, which I delivered based on the growing amount of work (he kept adding "fee-tchurs") to be done and the wall of the delivery date which my team and I were hurtling towards,
- and then he'd cut my small team by putting somebody on another project.
It was acidosis vs. Tums, headaches vs. Aspirins, desperation vs. alcohol medication.
I NEVER want to be a middle manager again. Specially not graftin' for an idiot. I'd rather sell shoes or groom dogs, cats and turtles (they have claws that need trimming.)
software developers, people who only ever use vi or Emacs should shut up when the discussion comes 'round to GUI design principles or software usability.
They have no [expletive deleted] idea what the problems are because THEIR software has been stable for decades.
Using "make" or a shell does NOT make a coder into a user. It does not provide the programmer with any perspective into "user-land."
That's why most Linux GUI stuff sucks, can't copy/paste across applications, doesn't follow guidelines and is so ideosyncratic you just want to strangle the coder.
Being a domain expert is fine if you're working in that domain. But coders are supposed to be experts working in their OWN domain: CODING.
I wouldn't want to look at or use code produced by a domain expert (it'll be correct but it'll probably be buggy, unstructured, unmaintainable perform like a resource pig.)
By the same token, I wouldn't trust code that has been produced by a software God but has not been verified for correctness by a domain expert (it may be sweet and run like blazes but I can't trust that it actually solves the problem its supposed to.)
Now are YOU going to be a cry baby or are you just going to shut up and drive the car?
Don't like the way we moved the steering wheel around from last year's model? Don't buy the new model.
That's whay your argument sounds like if you get your nose off the screen and take a breath.
Now, do you still think it makes sense?
You CAN'T be seen as doing the same thing in the same way as somebody else. That's illegal.
When the menus and options get shifted around from release to release, that's a bit of self-interested protectionism due to people taking out other patents that suddenly make the way you USED to do it illegal.
It comes down to the USPO making money for corporate lawyers who seem to come from Mars or someplace and obviously don't use any of the products. (C'mon they lawyers, they don't need the stinkin' products, unless its a computerized enema bag... Oh, sorry. That's where they get their personalities from.)
The user, the guy that's actually paying for the is the LAST one to get considered.
If GM made tires, the only choice for tires on GM vehicles would very quickly be GM tires.
M$ OfficeSuite being bundled in with the OS murdered the competition in their beds.
If Tony Soprano wanted you to sell his brand of cigars and ONLY his brand of cigars at your store, you would quickly have HIS brand and ONLY his brand of cigars at your store. Furthermore HE doesn't pay and he tell you how much you're going to sell his cigars for.
M$ did not sell to consumers, they twisted the arms of OEMs, blatantly and illegally (there's NO dispute about that. Its already been proved in a prior case,) to get their OS forced onto the machines.
Don't make excuses for M$.
They need to get LOCKED onto the X86 architecture under pain of imprisonment for Gates & Balmer.
And then we let history resume its proper course.
When it dies, they do. Simple, clean and neat.
Verification?
ANY M$ product appear for ANY other platform and Gates and Balmer sleep in the Big House and they better NOT DROP THE SOAP. (Jobs will just have to push OpenOffice for OS X.)
Total cost of verification and enforcement $0.00
That's IT. That's ALL.