It's a joke, until you consider the raft of mod chipping cases from the DMCA and similar stupid laws. The AIBO case is most pertinent. Sony gave up because the cease and desist notices were bad for business. The law was and is on their side. I'm too fed up with the mean spirited crackers and gougers portrayed to be more than mildly amused by the joke and think the topic is too important to be made light of like that.
If you can't make a computer do what you want, you don't really own it. As computers become part of everything, it becomes possible for you to not own anyting. There's more to be worried about than appliances and vehicles. Your books, private photographs, recordings, and public records may all one day be owned by others.
Your digital rights to swing your digital arm ends where my digital nose begins!
I'm not sure what you think you own. Good luck having a thought that has not been published in the last 100 years. RMS won't try to stop you from using the above phrase, but others will keep you from using equally common phrases and words. Then again, your view of what such an original thought entitles you to is skewed. Slaves frequently and paradoxicly side with their masters and direct the ire of their condition at their would be benefactors with comments that resemble yours.
Copyright has nothing to do with natural rights and everything to do with artificial restrictions. Copyright, in the US, is supposed to be a temporary exclusive franchise granted to the creator of a work. There is nothing natural about exclusive franchises and the framers of the US constitution hated them. They made a careful balance between such an odious restriction and encouraging publishers back in the very expensive days before machine produced paper and ink. Fourteen years. These restrictions should have gone down with the higher rewards, lower costs and risks of modern publishing.
Digital Restrictions are even more odious restrictions. This is because your DRM'd DVD player never has to give up the things copyright law expects eventually and it can enforce things no lawmaker could ever pass. The only thing worse than DRM is the raft of bad laws that make DRM and whatever a device maker decides into defacto laws.
According to this site there's about 1 primary brain cancer case per 10,000 people in the US. The big four cancers dwarf that by an order of magnitude but it's considerable.
Yes, I'm a physicists and I resemble your comment.
You could do better. You might have something if you point to the known link between cancer and chronic irritation and then prove cellphones irritate nerve tissue. There should also be a rise in auditory canal and skin cancer of the ear at that rate, not to mention head and neck cancers. Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population. But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers. Both of you might ignore everyone's advice and take a smoke break.
What would you like to know about ionizing radiation or radio biology? The general principals are not difficult, but as you noted are not related to microwaves. Everyone wants you to know the causes of cancer but here's the short and sweet:
except for the increase in cancers caused by smoking, and a remarkable decrease in stomach cancer, the incidence of the most common cancers for individuals of a given age has not changed very much during the course of the twentieth century figure
Cell phone, schmell phone. It might be true, but I'm not going to give up my cell phone.
If people quit smoking other relations would be easier to spot, so cut it out already! You are killing me.
Someone reads all of my posts and has put them into his favorites, how flattering. I'm in awe of the time and dedication devoted to little old me. It must be love.
Oh well, then your classes must be very enlightening. Until your "students" get home and try to do something with the application you just "taught" them how to use.
That's why me and the other two teachers provide step by step slides. Even an AC bartender who runs a hate site can get things done that way. See for yourself. Sorry, Ackbar, that we don't have any instructions to help you migrate from your mighty leet G5. F the haters, baby.
I know plenty of people who use iPod/iTunes (and others who use iPod/WinAMP) on Windows with no difficulties. Could you please explain that comment?
Sure, it's not my opinion. Her perception comes from watching other people's computers fry when they play with music. I did not dig into her about it, the way people like you might, but I can imagine those computers fried due to a combination of RIAA vigilanti attacks on P2P networks and WMP performance. Whatever, it's a common view that has nothing to do with iTunes. All she knew about Ipod is that other women at the gym spent lots of time programming playlists on them. I don't know anyone who likes WMP.
Non free programs have a tendency to suck and things on Windoze that Bill Gates wants to own have a tendency to break. You can never tell when Steve is going to take some feature away, or when Bill's "security update" will break it all. For all of that, Ipod is what I recommended to her as long as she's stuck in M$.
This gradual decline in physical sales is about to reach the tipping point where the distribution model crumbles and downloads increase exponentially.... At the store level, there just isn't sustainable profit from physical sales.
I'm not sure the death of physical media is that close and I hope local stores never go away. Pressed CDs are a better backup than the dye based things I can burn. Cheaper physical media might change that opinion, but I will still enjoy the artifact.
Getting rid of centralized broadcasting and the RIAA means getting more of the above in one form or another. Excellence deserves recognition and reward. Denying those rewards is the RIAA's crime.
I hope that small and regional music stores flourish. Without the RIAA shoveling s^H hits, a local store can still be a good way to match people to good music. Suggestion schemes can only go so far. Sometimes you need to step into something completely different. Regional music stores can also have a web presence, as noted above, and they can be an important part of local club scenes.
I'm more interested in differences in the file open/save dialogs, what program presents to me when I first open it, how the help system is integrated into the system, etc. My reasoning is that if there is only one or two programs that accomplish my needs, it doesn't matter much how it works or what it looks like because I am stuck either using it or writing my own.
So, if how a program works is not what you look for in a review, what are you looking for? Is it still April Fools in here? Now for a straight answer, because the subject is actually worth talking about.
Divide and conquer. Everything has it's place and it's better to reference non core items. Know your focus and stick to it and you won't waste the reader's time.
The submitter throws out a number of examples. Open/save dialogs are unique features of meta projects like Gnome and KDE. I'm very interested in how those work when I'm looking at a new window or file manager. KDE sockets have support for samba, sftp, ftp, http, audiocd and more, how cool is that? Screen shots of those are impressive and can be found at KDE's site. When reviewing a media player, lyric fetching, cover management or list generation are how the program works and what's important. It's nice to know that the media player works with the system's underlying file manager and you can get your files by sftp, but you can just say so and link back to the KDE screenshots. The same can be said about skins, which may add character or distract depending on what program you are talking about.
I teach a Linux Class to newbies, so this is something I have to consider often. I only want to teach the important parts of each program and have to be careful about the screenshots used for step by step instruction. Attention spans are limited, so I have to be picky and well organized while I try to cram as much as I can into each class. When teaching, I have to ask myself how I use the program and what I like about it. I'll often show only a region of a program so that it stands out. The result is a very select series of images which show off the strengths of the program. People are not interested in weaknesses. If a program has a weakness in a peripheral function, no one cares. If the weakness is in core function, I won't be teaching with it.
My mom is a good example of where things are going. I showed her my cheap Ilo player from Walmart ($50 baby) and an Ari Hest Concert from archive.org and suddenly "digital music" made sense to her. If she was not hoplessly hooked on Windoze, I'd set her up with Amarok and the usb-device script and that would be that. That's not the case, so I recommended an Ipod. Even she knows that music+windoze= crashed computer, so the free software may come later to her old laptop which still runs WinME! If she can get it, anyone can.
The RIAA is over. Apple makes it easy for people to spend their money on music but the RIAA way is not the future. Sales are only a small piece of the picture. More and more, reputations are not going to be built on radio play but on web play. Bands that understand this are going to be here tomorrow and the rest are going to look like slaves to greedy pigs. Portable music devices can hold more songs than the average radio station can afford to broadcast. To the user, it's all killer and no annoying adverts. The "Industry" is fighting back with satellite radio and FM crap flooding but it's not good enough. Players like Apple are going to help transition the industry to it's less centralized and less parasitic future. The free market forces and free software will move in and make life better for everyone, especially the artists.
If it's just a heat transfer, don't forget that the rate of energy dissipation is dependent on temperature difference. All the power in the world won't do a thing unless it can be transfered.
M$ has always thought of their users that way. That's part of their poor reputation.
Don't worry, people with money and education have a tendency to lead and those without follow eventually. The tipping point has passed, it's all downhill from here.
As it is now, Linux/BSD and Macs lag behind on games, and Linux on desktop speed. Both have some form of compatibility problems, and Macs are expensive. As it is, Windows is the only choice a lot of people have.
Some of that might have been true in 1998. Linux today offers speed, games, compatibility and system stability Bill Gates can only envy.
Linux desktops have always been faster on the same hardware than Microsoft but this is much more true today. Shared code really does make a difference in memory usage. This is impossible in the non free world and every program has to do almost everything for itself or risk breakage.
Games are now about as easy on Linux as they are on Microsoft. Free audio and video subsystems have gotten much better and now rival their non free counterparts. Free audio subsystems, indeed, are better at sharing devices than Microsoft's. If the free video subsystems just don't do it for you, Nvidia and ATI have non free ones that will. Don't take my word for it, go install Xandros and play Unreal Tournament. ID games has ported plenty of great titles to Linux and made many of them free, so that you can apt-get them. I can also mention Dosbox, Mame and other software, that run better on Linux than they do on Windoze. The serious gamer is no longer at a loss with free software.
Hardware compatibility? That's some kind of joke, right? The only problem a Linux user has with hardware is with brand new devices. The issues get taken care of and the device then works pretty much forever. In the Windoze world, the user is stuck looking for the "latest" drivers off the internet and might just be out of luck if a few years. Microsoft systems are notoriously brittle. Changing so much as a stick of ram forces you to beg M$ for permission to use their software again. Even when things do work, they are often odd and inconsistent.
HP has had this for years. This is like saying "Microsoft just released a new operating system called Windows XP".
No, it's more like calling Vista "new".
Just the same, the review is worth reading if you are not familiar with the program or have any interest in free software use. This fact jumped out at me:
That said, of the 300,000 unique TestDrive users, almost 60% have chosen Linux as their operating system for evaluating their business on Itanium hardware.
I'll bet you didn't know that.
This shows the program is popular and working. If it did not work, people might avoid Linux. 300,000 users is more than I'd have expected.
Recommending bad treatment of relatives, something sure to bring love to the world. This is really more M$ love in the face of a pan of Vista by Forbes as "not people ready".
things like Flash ads and streaming video will still run automatically -- a user would need to click on them to be able to interact with them, i.e. find the tiny little "mute" or "close" button to make them go away.
So the ads come blaring with no way to turn them off. What else is new on IE and the "dominant" platform? Let's read the article.
Michael Wallent, general manager of the Microsoft Windows Client Platform, confirmed that the changes will be included in a cumulative IE security update that's on tap to ship on April 11...
A "security update" that enforces a patent decision by removing functionality. Priceless wording!
... the 60-day extension would apply only to a "small set of customers.
So, they can give you more time if they wanted to but don't. Typical.
I'm wondering too how IE will handle clicking on "APPLET, EMBED or OBJECT" Will the control open in a new window? Will it open in the window clicked. Does this leave a movie viewer looking at a button instead of their content if they want to change the volume. How will they know which broken object to press?
On April 12, the internet will suck for many people, but especially all those poor suckers who trusted M$ to serve their content. Next time, use a real standard. Microsoft is reaping what it deserves.
... now we get to see what fraction of Slashdotters actually read the linked articles. Hint: the article makes no reference to the performance of Windows compared Mac OS X
Funny how I don't see anything like that outside your post.
The article does, however, mention the inferior performance of Windows:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Ouch!
Speed is one of many ways to measure that inferiority. It takes Windows longer to accomplish a given task on a given system than free software does. Other measures are stability, features and ease of use. With Windows, you have to be careful about the number of tasks you try to accomplish at once and the software suffers "bit rot" over time as the system is ruined by mal/spy ware. There are many things you can't do at all with Windows, such as the virtual desktop and pager manipulation found in Enlightenment and KDE.
Vista will do little to make up for any of these performance issues and will make most worse. The speed difference is a already huge. With Vista, it might reach a whole order of magnitude.
Only a Business School drone could think there's any hope for Microsoft to "pick up the pace" and compete. They've had five years to come up with something, anything, better than XP and failed. As people have proved by running alternate systems on Xbox have proved, DRM and Palladium are boodogles that won't work and no one wants.
Let's get back on topic then. NYT says Windoze Sux
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
However as far as I am concerned this article is a dupe of previous MS article about bloggers who call for firing the top management and fixing the problem by changing the development/testing/business analysis and definition and code check in processes.
The blogger was softballing but the the NYT article is harsh. The slow development pace is tied directly to M$'s anti-competitive practices:
The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation.... it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation - at Microsoft.
That's a quick way of stating that they made a monster they can't keep up. The article then goes on to say that the result is an OS that's not as good as others:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Yoffie must not be aware of how easy it is to replace Windoze.
Article is indeed all about performance.
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
It's got nothing to do with the performance of Windows itself.
From the fine article:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Speed is just one metric of the inferior performance people can expect from Microsoft. The other measures are features and stability.
One Great Big Gem, Windoze Inferiority Noted.
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 0, Troll
For all it's technical flaws and lack of understanding, that article is really a bombshell. Framed within the anti-trust case, it notes that M$ has fallen behind and won't catch up. They fail to understand free software and how it has aided Apple and why the non free way is killing M$, but the feeling of inferiority is overwhelming. My favorite quote is from the end:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Someone needs to send that man a copy of Mepis or Xandros right away. They should load it up with Cross Over Office and Parallels, so he can have all of his precious Windoze programs confined to a nice little X window where they can't rob his system of too much performance. With a few moments reflection, he will realize that free software is not hard to use, that legacy support of hardware and software is possible and that something radical has happened to the world of software development. In a month or two, he may realize that "consumer" is an insulting term.
Windows is no longer second rate, it's third rate and that's death for Microsoft. "Good enough" is not good enough when superior free alternatives are more than good enough.
Vista won't change anything. It's going to be XP times ten in terms of underwhelming customers.
Slashdot Mirror
If AAC has an owner that charges a license fee for use, as MP3 does, then it is proprietary. AAC deployed with "Fairplay" is a DRM'd thing to avoid.
Algorithms should not be ownable like that.
If you can't make a computer do what you want, you don't really own it. As computers become part of everything, it becomes possible for you to not own anyting. There's more to be worried about than appliances and vehicles. Your books, private photographs, recordings, and public records may all one day be owned by others.
I'm not sure what you think you own. Good luck having a thought that has not been published in the last 100 years. RMS won't try to stop you from using the above phrase, but others will keep you from using equally common phrases and words. Then again, your view of what such an original thought entitles you to is skewed. Slaves frequently and paradoxicly side with their masters and direct the ire of their condition at their would be benefactors with comments that resemble yours.
Copyright has nothing to do with natural rights and everything to do with artificial restrictions. Copyright, in the US, is supposed to be a temporary exclusive franchise granted to the creator of a work. There is nothing natural about exclusive franchises and the framers of the US constitution hated them. They made a careful balance between such an odious restriction and encouraging publishers back in the very expensive days before machine produced paper and ink. Fourteen years. These restrictions should have gone down with the higher rewards, lower costs and risks of modern publishing.
Digital Restrictions are even more odious restrictions. This is because your DRM'd DVD player never has to give up the things copyright law expects eventually and it can enforce things no lawmaker could ever pass. The only thing worse than DRM is the raft of bad laws that make DRM and whatever a device maker decides into defacto laws.
Yes, I'm a physicists and I resemble your comment.
You could do better. You might have something if you point to the known link between cancer and chronic irritation and then prove cellphones irritate nerve tissue. There should also be a rise in auditory canal and skin cancer of the ear at that rate, not to mention head and neck cancers. Hell, you might even score some points if you cited the 85 heavy cell phone users of 905 brain case numbers and told us, which the article fails to explain, how that's 240% higher than the general population. But some other smart ass would tell you you could prove anything with such tiny numbers. Both of you might ignore everyone's advice and take a smoke break.
What would you like to know about ionizing radiation or radio biology? The general principals are not difficult, but as you noted are not related to microwaves. Everyone wants you to know the causes of cancer but here's the short and sweet:
except for the increase in cancers caused by smoking, and a remarkable decrease in stomach cancer, the incidence of the most common cancers for individuals of a given age has not changed very much during the course of the twentieth century figure
Cell phone, schmell phone. It might be true, but I'm not going to give up my cell phone.
If people quit smoking other relations would be easier to spot, so cut it out already! You are killing me.
Now we need a study on testicular cancer. They are sensitive, you know. Handedness might not matter as much there, but it can make you blind.
Oh well, then your classes must be very enlightening. Until your "students" get home and try to do something with the application you just "taught" them how to use.
That's why me and the other two teachers provide step by step slides. Even an AC bartender who runs a hate site can get things done that way. See for yourself. Sorry, Ackbar, that we don't have any instructions to help you migrate from your mighty leet G5. F the haters, baby.
Sure, it's not my opinion. Her perception comes from watching other people's computers fry when they play with music. I did not dig into her about it, the way people like you might, but I can imagine those computers fried due to a combination of RIAA vigilanti attacks on P2P networks and WMP performance. Whatever, it's a common view that has nothing to do with iTunes. All she knew about Ipod is that other women at the gym spent lots of time programming playlists on them. I don't know anyone who likes WMP.
Non free programs have a tendency to suck and things on Windoze that Bill Gates wants to own have a tendency to break. You can never tell when Steve is going to take some feature away, or when Bill's "security update" will break it all. For all of that, Ipod is what I recommended to her as long as she's stuck in M$.
I'm not sure the death of physical media is that close and I hope local stores never go away. Pressed CDs are a better backup than the dye based things I can burn. Cheaper physical media might change that opinion, but I will still enjoy the artifact.
Here's a store to add to your site that I hope people will visit.
Here's something you can visit now.
Getting rid of centralized broadcasting and the RIAA means getting more of the above in one form or another. Excellence deserves recognition and reward. Denying those rewards is the RIAA's crime.
I hope that small and regional music stores flourish. Without the RIAA shoveling s^H hits, a local store can still be a good way to match people to good music. Suggestion schemes can only go so far. Sometimes you need to step into something completely different. Regional music stores can also have a web presence, as noted above, and they can be an important part of local club scenes.
I'm more interested in differences in the file open/save dialogs, what program presents to me when I first open it, how the help system is integrated into the system, etc. My reasoning is that if there is only one or two programs that accomplish my needs, it doesn't matter much how it works or what it looks like because I am stuck either using it or writing my own.
So, if how a program works is not what you look for in a review, what are you looking for? Is it still April Fools in here? Now for a straight answer, because the subject is actually worth talking about.
Divide and conquer. Everything has it's place and it's better to reference non core items. Know your focus and stick to it and you won't waste the reader's time.
The submitter throws out a number of examples. Open/save dialogs are unique features of meta projects like Gnome and KDE. I'm very interested in how those work when I'm looking at a new window or file manager. KDE sockets have support for samba, sftp, ftp, http, audiocd and more, how cool is that? Screen shots of those are impressive and can be found at KDE's site. When reviewing a media player, lyric fetching, cover management or list generation are how the program works and what's important. It's nice to know that the media player works with the system's underlying file manager and you can get your files by sftp, but you can just say so and link back to the KDE screenshots. The same can be said about skins, which may add character or distract depending on what program you are talking about.
I teach a Linux Class to newbies, so this is something I have to consider often. I only want to teach the important parts of each program and have to be careful about the screenshots used for step by step instruction. Attention spans are limited, so I have to be picky and well organized while I try to cram as much as I can into each class. When teaching, I have to ask myself how I use the program and what I like about it. I'll often show only a region of a program so that it stands out. The result is a very select series of images which show off the strengths of the program. People are not interested in weaknesses. If a program has a weakness in a peripheral function, no one cares. If the weakness is in core function, I won't be teaching with it.
The RIAA is over. Apple makes it easy for people to spend their money on music but the RIAA way is not the future. Sales are only a small piece of the picture. More and more, reputations are not going to be built on radio play but on web play. Bands that understand this are going to be here tomorrow and the rest are going to look like slaves to greedy pigs. Portable music devices can hold more songs than the average radio station can afford to broadcast. To the user, it's all killer and no annoying adverts. The "Industry" is fighting back with satellite radio and FM crap flooding but it's not good enough. Players like Apple are going to help transition the industry to it's less centralized and less parasitic future. The free market forces and free software will move in and make life better for everyone, especially the artists.
Nah, works just fine. Use mplayer and download the crappy win32 drivers. Funny thing is that it works better under X than it does under windoze.
If it's just a heat transfer, don't forget that the rate of energy dissipation is dependent on temperature difference. All the power in the world won't do a thing unless it can be transfered.
M$ has always thought of their users that way. That's part of their poor reputation.
Don't worry, people with money and education have a tendency to lead and those without follow eventually. The tipping point has passed, it's all downhill from here.
Some of that might have been true in 1998. Linux today offers speed, games, compatibility and system stability Bill Gates can only envy.
Linux desktops have always been faster on the same hardware than Microsoft but this is much more true today. Shared code really does make a difference in memory usage. This is impossible in the non free world and every program has to do almost everything for itself or risk breakage.
Games are now about as easy on Linux as they are on Microsoft. Free audio and video subsystems have gotten much better and now rival their non free counterparts. Free audio subsystems, indeed, are better at sharing devices than Microsoft's. If the free video subsystems just don't do it for you, Nvidia and ATI have non free ones that will. Don't take my word for it, go install Xandros and play Unreal Tournament. ID games has ported plenty of great titles to Linux and made many of them free, so that you can apt-get them. I can also mention Dosbox, Mame and other software, that run better on Linux than they do on Windoze. The serious gamer is no longer at a loss with free software.
Hardware compatibility? That's some kind of joke, right? The only problem a Linux user has with hardware is with brand new devices. The issues get taken care of and the device then works pretty much forever. In the Windoze world, the user is stuck looking for the "latest" drivers off the internet and might just be out of luck if a few years. Microsoft systems are notoriously brittle. Changing so much as a stick of ram forces you to beg M$ for permission to use their software again. Even when things do work, they are often odd and inconsistent.
300,000 unique TestDrive users, almost 60% have chosen Linux as their operating system for evaluating their business on Itanium hardware.
That's news to me. You might have known that, but I did not. That's a lot of people driving.
No, it's more like calling Vista "new".
Just the same, the review is worth reading if you are not familiar with the program or have any interest in free software use. This fact jumped out at me:
That said, of the 300,000 unique TestDrive users, almost 60% have chosen Linux as their operating system for evaluating their business on Itanium hardware.
I'll bet you didn't know that.
This shows the program is popular and working. If it did not work, people might avoid Linux. 300,000 users is more than I'd have expected.
And the list of uselessness goes on as far as the user cares to browse.
So the ads come blaring with no way to turn them off. What else is new on IE and the "dominant" platform? Let's read the article.
Michael Wallent, general manager of the Microsoft Windows Client Platform, confirmed that the changes will be included in a cumulative IE security update that's on tap to ship on April 11 ...
A "security update" that enforces a patent decision by removing functionality. Priceless wording!
So, they can give you more time if they wanted to but don't. Typical.
I'm wondering too how IE will handle clicking on "APPLET, EMBED or OBJECT" Will the control open in a new window? Will it open in the window clicked. Does this leave a movie viewer looking at a button instead of their content if they want to change the volume. How will they know which broken object to press?
On April 12, the internet will suck for many people, but especially all those poor suckers who trusted M$ to serve their content. Next time, use a real standard. Microsoft is reaping what it deserves.
Funny how I don't see anything like that outside your post.
The article does, however, mention the inferior performance of Windows:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Ouch!
Speed is one of many ways to measure that inferiority. It takes Windows longer to accomplish a given task on a given system than free software does. Other measures are stability, features and ease of use. With Windows, you have to be careful about the number of tasks you try to accomplish at once and the software suffers "bit rot" over time as the system is ruined by mal/spy ware. There are many things you can't do at all with Windows, such as the virtual desktop and pager manipulation found in Enlightenment and KDE.
Vista will do little to make up for any of these performance issues and will make most worse. The speed difference is a already huge. With Vista, it might reach a whole order of magnitude.
Only a Business School drone could think there's any hope for Microsoft to "pick up the pace" and compete. They've had five years to come up with something, anything, better than XP and failed. As people have proved by running alternate systems on Xbox have proved, DRM and Palladium are boodogles that won't work and no one wants.
The blogger was softballing but the the NYT article is harsh. The slow development pace is tied directly to M$'s anti-competitive practices:
The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation. ... it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation - at Microsoft.
That's a quick way of stating that they made a monster they can't keep up. The article then goes on to say that the result is an OS that's not as good as others:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Yoffie must not be aware of how easy it is to replace Windoze.
From the fine article:
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Speed is just one metric of the inferior performance people can expect from Microsoft. The other measures are features and stability.
Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School.
Someone needs to send that man a copy of Mepis or Xandros right away. They should load it up with Cross Over Office and Parallels, so he can have all of his precious Windoze programs confined to a nice little X window where they can't rob his system of too much performance. With a few moments reflection, he will realize that free software is not hard to use, that legacy support of hardware and software is possible and that something radical has happened to the world of software development. In a month or two, he may realize that "consumer" is an insulting term.
Windows is no longer second rate, it's third rate and that's death for Microsoft. "Good enough" is not good enough when superior free alternatives are more than good enough.
Vista won't change anything. It's going to be XP times ten in terms of underwhelming customers.