Linux is very good (I have at least 6 devices that use it), and I don't have any fair complaints against it. However the fact remains that there ARE comparable kernels out there that android could make use of that would provide similar levels of performance. FreeBSD, for example. Or if google wanted to license a closed source kernel there would be a variety of options. I don't know why Linux was chosen for Android, but it's likely because it provides the best hardware support and was the easiest to build into such a system. Switching Linux out for FreeBSD wouldn't be like putting a chevette engine in a Ferrari, it would be like replacing a ford V8 with a chevy V8. It would be different underneath, and perhaps a hard swap to do, but not really noticeable if all the hardware works.
What's the mobile track record of the "other" kernels? I am admittedly ignorant of phones running bsd*. It seems there is a long track record of Linux being adapted to mobile devices, so there isn't quite as much re-inventing the wheel. And since most vendors are doing their own builds, they have access to a large developer and engineering community and the collective knowledge of such communities. Over and above that, Google's infrastructure has always been Linux and they probably have a boatload of top notch Linux engineers on board already. So while the changing of the engine makes sense theoretically on one level, its pretty stupid on the practical level.
SkyDrive (formerly Windows Live Folders when it came out in August 2007) predates Google Drive by 5 years, Apples iCloud by 4 years and DropBox by a year. So how exactly is it a "me too" service?
Because it was a totally useless piece of shit that no one used (I generalize), or cared about. Ballmer himself probably has never even heard of it. Fact check... Google Drive was a rebranding, btw.
it's amazing how people forget that the iphone wasn't at all the first smartphone and that it was a relatively small evolutionary step over something like the palm treo and not a revolutionary epiphany that they get credited with. almost everything that the iphone did, the palm treo could do - up to and including an app store. apple just did it slicker.
Yea, whatever. But they had a vision of how to pull all that together and make superior product that started a revolution. And of course caused Balmer to laugh out loud, saying it would never sell. And Where the fuck is palm?
For Microsoft, Surface RT was a huge success. It sold much better than their previous offerings and reviews were great. People have also been quite happy using it. In that regard, Surface RT is a success, even though it didn't pass iPad on sales.
Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:
- Listen to users before releasing Win8, not wait until Win8.1 to start "listening"
- Listen to users when market testing the first run of Surface ads, not wait until reviewers have panned the ads, the product, and the OS, and then start making decent ads
- Listen to users before forcing UEFI Secure Boot (without an unlock), not wait until there is an uproar to say oops, change the Win8 logo requirements (desktop PCs escape armageddon... for now)
- Listen to users before forcing always-on connected DRM with the new Xbox, not wait until there is an uproar then take some more things away from their platform
- News flash! Listen to your shareholders! and get rid of Ballmer (ok, clearly there has not been a full scale shareholder revolt. yet.)
- Listen to users who are jumping ship for Google and Apple, to see if a more humble Microsoft could win some of them back
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone? MS completely lacks anything close to that kind of vision or innovation. They wait for others to innovate, see if its making money, then jump in and try to grab marketshare. That worked in the '90's. It doesn't work now. A moron could see the RT was DOA.
While I applaud the engineer's efforts, I wish his employer (Google), would spend a bit more of resources in making its maps aplication more functional [for me].
Here's my gripe, and I am not alone:
Why is it that there's no way to make routing avoid toll roads by default?
I have got a solution: I use Waze but worried that if Google's ambitions with it (Waze) go through, they may disable this feature.
You sometimes wonder why things so basic, take so long to implement. Why?
Possibly just to annoy jackoffs who don't know their hole from an ass in the ground and post off topic comments.
It failed because Redmond was four years too late, and Android and iOS are so dominant at all price points that there is simply no room for a third competitor. Surface RT offers nothing that mid and upper end iDevices and Androids do not.
So true. To make any impact they have to offer a device that is much better (which I don't even think is possible considering the current state of iOS and Android), or much cheaper (and it's really hard/impossible to beat the low end android tablets).
Yea, and to do that they'd have to actually understand technology and the marketplace. That powers that be there just don't get some really important stuff. The thing is severely overpriced, has no compelling features and lacks applications. Of course no one wants the damn thing. Why would they?
Cry. In my beer. We are fucked. Might as well find a way to relax and enjoy those deep, rhythmic thrusts. Its military industrial complex on steroids. As long as there is big money involved, and all 3 branches of govt are complicit, and the govt is run by big money, there is no hope. The chance of a sea change in the US electorate that gives a shit and might effect some meaningful change, is slim to none.
To be fair, those TV's are probably all running Webkit.
I still prefer Chrome over Internet Explorer, but IE 10 (the "Metro" version anyway) isn't a mind-numbingly terrible piece of software in comparison to the competition. It's good to know that, however ironic it may be, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera are all working opposite Google to keep the web away from just a different monoculture.
I've not had the personal "pleasure" of using IE10, since my long experience with previous MS products led me down a different path. But it is kinda of good to see MS is not shitting all over their own customers any more, just because they can and their customers don't know any better.
The power of Google is its ability to provide higher quality results for rarer and non-trivial searches. Bing has made no attempt to compete here
Wouldn't that be mainly due to Google's incumbancy?
As someone who rarely goes to Bing, and just took a peak, I am always amazed at how much of Google MS has mimicked. Layouts, menus, color schemes. There appears to be very little that is really original or obvious improvements. Not talking even about quality of results. Which would seem to indicate, if you want the latest / greatest features in search, you will see them first at Google. Bing is just an imitation. Its like they are providing a branded version of Google.
Which isn't news. MS has a long history of taking things other people have developed, putting their spin on it, finding a way to shove it into the market using their OS dominance and name, and then either grabbing market share, and with a little luck maybe make some money. But rarely do they have an original idea, or improve on someone else's ideas. Apple, OTOH, takes other people's ideas, and tends to improve them, and usually make some money. Google just has ideas, some good, some not so good.
Where's the money for Google? Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool. Google can only sell ads, and I don't see them reacting to this until it's proven to have made an impact worth countering.
You can say that without it even crossing your mind that maybe they know something you don't?
Besides how to create monopolies and not pay a real price for it? They were really good at the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing when they needed to, and they got away with it. Impressively so. But now that they've lost that tool, they seem to spend most their time shitting in their own nest. High quality shit, but shit nonetheless.
No iPad support, which is arguably the largest use case scenario.
You have to subscribe to Office 365.
You can't just buy it in the app store.
I honestly can't come up with a way they could have fucked this up any more. Once again MS snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Its kind of good sport to watch them shoot themselves in the foot over and over again. One of the wonders of the known universe is they still manage to turn a profit. Its a strange world sometimes.
I've been using Bing Reader (BReader) for awhile now, absolutely love it! Everything that Google Reader should have been !
iBing isn't too shabby either!
Yes, only if all of them are just browsing the internet all the time.
But if they are making real work, maybe the results would not be that good.
You have to consider the source here too... its Microsoft. It was "sponsored" research, which translates to "rigged" test with rigged results. So it is indeed done for marketing purposes, or why else do it. Probably a simple web page with little css or js. You can't take anything they say at face value.
The MS business model is to a) buy / copy someone else's business plan / idea b) provide just enough quality and value to get a big audience and c) start taking where you really don't want to go but now they've set the hook and you are in their playground d) start fucking you and hope you like it enough to come back for more.
The only thing that is keeping Ballmer is Windows and Office and still keeping the company afloat financially. However, Vista and Win 8 are huge black marks for Windows which happened under Ballmer's watch. Zune and Kin happened under his watch. Xbox (still not broken even yet) happened under his watch.
When will Microsoft wake up the fact they release crap, users are getting fed up with it.
People have been putting up with it for over 20 years; why would MS change their strategy now?
Its finally catching up with them now. They got away with it because they were pretty much the only viable game in town. They fucked up the tablet market, and their phone market, and people have real choices in those areas. But people think of MS as the crap company that pushes crap. And who wants a phone or a tablet from a company that is a known, certified crap dealer. Its quite fun to watch all this though, I gotta say.
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Linux is very good (I have at least 6 devices that use it), and I don't have any fair complaints against it. However the fact remains that there ARE comparable kernels out there that android could make use of that would provide similar levels of performance. FreeBSD, for example. Or if google wanted to license a closed source kernel there would be a variety of options. I don't know why Linux was chosen for Android, but it's likely because it provides the best hardware support and was the easiest to build into such a system. Switching Linux out for FreeBSD wouldn't be like putting a chevette engine in a Ferrari, it would be like replacing a ford V8 with a chevy V8. It would be different underneath, and perhaps a hard swap to do, but not really noticeable if all the hardware works.
What's the mobile track record of the "other" kernels? I am admittedly ignorant of phones running bsd*. It seems there is a long track record of Linux being adapted to mobile devices, so there isn't quite as much re-inventing the wheel. And since most vendors are doing their own builds, they have access to a large developer and engineering community and the collective knowledge of such communities. Over and above that, Google's infrastructure has always been Linux and they probably have a boatload of top notch Linux engineers on board already. So while the changing of the engine makes sense theoretically on one level, its pretty stupid on the practical level.
SkyDrive (formerly Windows Live Folders when it came out in August 2007) predates Google Drive by 5 years, Apples iCloud by 4 years and DropBox by a year. So how exactly is it a "me too" service?
Because it was a totally useless piece of shit that no one used (I generalize), or cared about. Ballmer himself probably has never even heard of it. Fact check ... Google Drive was a rebranding, btw.
I fucking hate Microsoft. That said. "SkyDrive" does not, in any sane persons thought processes infringe upon "BSkyB". British courts are insane.
Nah, MS just shit on too many people, and few of them turned out to be UK judges.
it's amazing how people forget that the iphone wasn't at all the first smartphone and that it was a relatively small evolutionary step over something like the palm treo and not a revolutionary epiphany that they get credited with. almost everything that the iphone did, the palm treo could do - up to and including an app store. apple just did it slicker.
Yea, whatever. But they had a vision of how to pull all that together and make superior product that started a revolution. And of course caused Balmer to laugh out loud, saying it would never sell. And Where the fuck is palm?
For Microsoft, Surface RT was a huge success. It sold much better than their previous offerings and reviews were great. People have also been quite happy using it. In that regard, Surface RT is a success, even though it didn't pass iPad on sales.
*wink*
Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone? MS completely lacks anything close to that kind of vision or innovation. They wait for others to innovate, see if its making money, then jump in and try to grab marketshare. That worked in the '90's. It doesn't work now. A moron could see the RT was DOA.
While I applaud the engineer's efforts, I wish his employer (Google), would spend a bit more of resources in making its maps aplication more functional [for me].
Here's my gripe, and I am not alone:
Why is it that there's no way to make routing avoid toll roads by default?
I have got a solution: I use Waze but worried that if Google's ambitions with it (Waze) go through, they may disable this feature.
You sometimes wonder why things so basic, take so long to implement. Why?
Possibly just to annoy jackoffs who don't know their hole from an ass in the ground and post off topic comments.
It failed because Redmond was four years too late, and Android and iOS are so dominant at all price points that there is simply no room for a third competitor. Surface RT offers nothing that mid and upper end iDevices and Androids do not.
So true. To make any impact they have to offer a device that is much better (which I don't even think is possible considering the current state of iOS and Android), or much cheaper (and it's really hard/impossible to beat the low end android tablets).
Yea, and to do that they'd have to actually understand technology and the marketplace. That powers that be there just don't get some really important stuff. The thing is severely overpriced, has no compelling features and lacks applications. Of course no one wants the damn thing. Why would they?
What are you going to do about it?
Cry. In my beer. We are fucked. Might as well find a way to relax and enjoy those deep, rhythmic thrusts. Its military industrial complex on steroids. As long as there is big money involved, and all 3 branches of govt are complicit, and the govt is run by big money, there is no hope. The chance of a sea change in the US electorate that gives a shit and might effect some meaningful change, is slim to none.
But if you're going to pick a single language to be used by everyone for all purposes, then why pick something kludgy like JavaScript?
Because there isn't one? How many languages run in all web browsers, have a native database implementation that scales, and a server side language.
I remember 10 years ago I actually saw a retail boxed package of Red Hat Linux in a store in a small northern Wisconsin town, I thought it was funny.
The software in the box was of course "free". The box itself, the manual, the support, and the media inside the box cost $39.95.
To be fair, those TV's are probably all running Webkit. I still prefer Chrome over Internet Explorer, but IE 10 (the "Metro" version anyway) isn't a mind-numbingly terrible piece of software in comparison to the competition. It's good to know that, however ironic it may be, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera are all working opposite Google to keep the web away from just a different monoculture.
I've not had the personal "pleasure" of using IE10, since my long experience with previous MS products led me down a different path. But it is kinda of good to see MS is not shitting all over their own customers any more, just because they can and their customers don't know any better.
The power of Google is its ability to provide higher quality results for rarer and non-trivial searches. Bing has made no attempt to compete here
Wouldn't that be mainly due to Google's incumbancy?
As someone who rarely goes to Bing, and just took a peak, I am always amazed at how much of Google MS has mimicked. Layouts, menus, color schemes. There appears to be very little that is really original or obvious improvements. Not talking even about quality of results. Which would seem to indicate, if you want the latest / greatest features in search, you will see them first at Google. Bing is just an imitation. Its like they are providing a branded version of Google. Which isn't news. MS has a long history of taking things other people have developed, putting their spin on it, finding a way to shove it into the market using their OS dominance and name, and then either grabbing market share, and with a little luck maybe make some money. But rarely do they have an original idea, or improve on someone else's ideas. Apple, OTOH, takes other people's ideas, and tends to improve them, and usually make some money. Google just has ideas, some good, some not so good.
Kids in school get used to Google, will use it at home. Potential for money for Google.
Kids in school get used to Bing, will use it at home. No potential money for Google.
Or kids use xyz in school, associate it with unpleasantness, and never use it again.
Where's the money for Google? Microsoft can sell all kinds of stuff after using this as a promotional tool. Google can only sell ads, and I don't see them reacting to this until it's proven to have made an impact worth countering.
Google Apps accounts?
The moment a company decides to use Wordpress as their underlying site "technology", its game over.
Like CNN, NYTimes ... ?
This was supposed to be a product that allowed people at home to set up a content site quickly, not an enterprise level technology.
Actually originally and for a long time, it was a blogging platform ... for people who write blogs. Not really for housewifes and the like.
So if this thing is causing significant security issues, it should be placed at the top of the Internet's most hated and avoided like the plague.
"if" ? If your aunt had a dick she'd be your uncle.
You can say that without it even crossing your mind that maybe they know something you don't?
Besides how to create monopolies and not pay a real price for it? They were really good at the whole "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing when they needed to, and they got away with it. Impressively so. But now that they've lost that tool, they seem to spend most their time shitting in their own nest. High quality shit, but shit nonetheless.
No iPad support, which is arguably the largest use case scenario. You have to subscribe to Office 365. You can't just buy it in the app store.
I honestly can't come up with a way they could have fucked this up any more. Once again MS snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Its kind of good sport to watch them shoot themselves in the foot over and over again. One of the wonders of the known universe is they still manage to turn a profit. Its a strange world sometimes.
Why on earth would you need a website for what ought to be a simple RSS reader?
Its an NSA requirement.
I've been using Bing Reader (BReader) for awhile now, absolutely love it! Everything that Google Reader should have been ! iBing isn't too shabby either!
Good to see MS is supporting RSS now.
Yes, only if all of them are just browsing the internet all the time. But if they are making real work, maybe the results would not be that good.
You have to consider the source here too ... its Microsoft. It was "sponsored" research, which translates to "rigged" test with rigged results. So it is indeed done for marketing purposes, or why else do it. Probably a simple web page with little css or js. You can't take anything they say at face value.
The MS business model is to a) buy / copy someone else's business plan / idea b) provide just enough quality and value to get a big audience and c) start taking where you really don't want to go but now they've set the hook and you are in their playground d) start fucking you and hope you like it enough to come back for more.
The only thing that is keeping Ballmer is Windows and Office and still keeping the company afloat financially. However, Vista and Win 8 are huge black marks for Windows which happened under Ballmer's watch. Zune and Kin happened under his watch. Xbox (still not broken even yet) happened under his watch.
True, just 'bing' it!
MS is also Exchange and SQL.
That's only half true.
When will Microsoft wake up the fact they release crap, users are getting fed up with it.
People have been putting up with it for over 20 years; why would MS change their strategy now?
Its finally catching up with them now. They got away with it because they were pretty much the only viable game in town. They fucked up the tablet market, and their phone market, and people have real choices in those areas. But people think of MS as the crap company that pushes crap. And who wants a phone or a tablet from a company that is a known, certified crap dealer. Its quite fun to watch all this though, I gotta say.