What I didn't like about Active Desktop and Netscape's push technology was information was supposed to just "come to you" and you just sit there. Keep in mind this was before RSS.
People have better things to do and have TV for everything else.
I am excited about the new html 5 and applets from phones coming into the desktop and other devices as they are real programs. Many MacOSX users have wanted to run their Iphone apps on the desktop at the same time. However turning your whole desktop into a cell phone interface is stupid and misses the point.
People would love to use their apps in the explorer or finder based desktops. But unless you own a tablet, you do not want what Gnome Shell or what Windows 8 has. I think more R&D is needed to learn how people can have a full browser or word processor up as well as accessing an applet. Too much focus on one app running at a time. At least Windows has a bar at the bottom of the screen where you can browser with Windows 7 and get a preview of all your other apps. I like the idea of running things side by side too. This needs to be worked on rather than a gui where we all just minimize everything and stare at the screen (active desktop). Maybe Windows 9, KDE 5, or Gnome Shell 4 will get this right.
This announcement happens to coincide with the Macworld or whatever they call it now. It couldnt be a method to distract attention and have people think of a cool xbox 360 and not a mac
AMD is on record as saying it wants to be the first pad tablet to run x86 software on Windows 8 betting it can outdo the arm. Asus is rumored to include the cpu/gpu combo which will be out next year.
Business 101, when you have a big customer like Ms or Walmart you make amends as to not loose such a huge opportunity and give a competitor like ATI the deal. Suppliers hate things like bulk discounts too and it hurts mom and pop shops. But a smaller profit margin and annoying clauses are better than nothing. There are laws about insider trading which limit public knowledge about aquisitions. We didnt know about the skype deal until after it was locked by MS.
"I've read elsewhere that it's already below 50% on weekends"
That disparity is because China and Korea heavily use IE 6 and 7 which skew the numbers higher for IE. In North America IE had less than 50% marketshare for awhile. It is even lower in Europe.
Most machines in China are pirated and therefore do not get Windows Updates which mean they use IE. Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption. This is no longer a problem but Ebay and the banks do not care and still require it.
Even if everyone but China dumped IE tomorrow, you can bet a good 25-35% of IE marketshare would still be there thanks to that market. In other words ignore the IE statistics for the world if you develop websites and just focus on North America. If you need to make an Asian site just write it for IE only.
Tell me about it. I am browsing this comment with IE 9. Windows update just installed it last night and I am playing with it. I have to say it is stunning and it feels like IE is back in the league with Firefox and Chrome. I find heavily graphic sites like www.msnbc.com scroll very smoothly with IE 9 vs Chrome and Firefox 4. For slashdotters on Windows I highly recommend to download and play with it.... no you did not misread that last sentance. IE 9 even has a firebug-lite development and script debugger now.
IE 10 from what I read will finally clear most of the annoying bugs that MS has been trying to fix since IE 8, that IE 9 still have. But thank you Mozilla Firefox for making this happen. Without you we would be stuck wiht IE 7 and flash. Shudder.
I doubt Google would dare release Chrome if IE still had 85% marketshare of just 5 years ago.
I find these latest generation browsers exciting compared to the past. HTML 5, hardware acceleration, javascript applets, and cell phone applets are all tying together without flash. Even flash is hardware accelerated on Windows and now the Mac. It makes web development fun again and I love competition. Keep it up.
"with just one feature: render standard compliant HTML7 pages with 100% accuracy"... and it has to work with IE 6 or my client isn't interested.... ducks.
"I've read elsewhere that it's already below 50% on weekends"
That disparity is because China and Korea heavily use IE 6 and 7 which skew the numbers higher for IE. In North America IE had less than 50% marketshare for awhile. It is even lower in Europe.
Most machines in China are pirated and therefore do not get Windows Updates which mean they use IE. Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption. This is no longer a problem but Ebay and the banks do not care and still require it.
Even if everyone but China dumped IE tomorrow, you can bet a good 25-35% of IE marketshare would still be there thanks to that market. In other words ignore the IE statistics for the world if you develop websites and just focus on North America. If you need to make an Asian site just write it for IE only.
Windows update doesn't break everything and apps do not have to be retested and upgraded every patch tuesday right? Same is supposed to be true with web browsers if developers use standard html and follow standards and not Java or ActiveX. Face the facts, Chrome is autoupdated very frequently and Mozilla is now going this route with Firefox 5 soon. IE is going this route too but on an anual basis.
IE 6 is almost 10 years old! In web time that is a very long time and HTML 5, hardware accelerated browsing, h.264, and tablet/phone applets are coming with advanced javascript libraries. IE is in the way of progress and even clouds and portals businesses use for real world use. I never had a browser crash recently. I do not run Firefox 7 admittingly, but the stable ones out now should be fine. Also Google will still support IE 8 which came in in 2008 or 2009 which is already over 2 years old.
I no longer run Linux because the distro packages refuse to let you upgrade their apps. Firefox 4 and Chrome can be installed and it wont mess up Firefox 3.5. Must geeks who run Linux should have no problem figuring this out. Businesses and web developers need to get used to more updates. Microsoft is finally fixing IE which I believe MS sabataged on purpose to prevent adoption with IE 9. The bugs need to go away so businesses wont be so freaked out with browser versions. Google is certainly going to lend a hand and I hope encourage other high profie sites to do the same.
I have been hearing that a lot. I find it very stable, fast, and a breathe of fresh air. Infact with sites with lots of images... cough msnbc.com cough... IE 9 can scroll and the pics do not even flicker and are smooth. Chrome is the second fastest but the graphics flicker as it is only partially accelerated.
I have heard similiar IE 9 bashing as unstable. Maybe it is your video card driver? What card is it? I have an ATI 5750 which is last years top of the line card so perhaps this is why I have had no problems. WIth aero turned off IE 9 is much slower but still stable. Do you own an intel video chipset?
To get subtracts to work with IE 6 you need to add them only as negative numbers. However this will break Firefox and Chrome because they use floats. So you need to get it to work with IE you need to add the negative numbers and then do roundings as to not upset IE 9, Firefox, nor Chrome. However, the rounding may not be that accurate for all numbers to make up for this add a javascript to...
Normally, I would agree with you. However, realize the phbs at work keep Ie6 and old intranet apps because they can and do not want to be hassled. They will surely notice when help desk gets calls and the CEO cant connect to websites and why wont the VPs ipad work for that 12 year old app? Chinese cracked and pirated windows xp makes up the vast majority of most ie 6 installations with updates disabled. So keep ie 6 for the asain sites. If major players follow suite it will change as these managers will be pressured to upgrade than stay the course. Grandma is the other market and she will change when she keeps getting notices
Lol. Have you seen gnomeshell? It is 100% cell phone based influenced by WebOS. Hell, even the minimize buttons are gone with the developer grining saying its one way that makes it better if you view the videos at its website. Its all optimized for single tasking and running one app at a time. I switched to Windows 7 as a result. Lets wait and see about Windows 8. The demo is just a concept design. Corporate users that hate change who refuse to leave 10 year old xp are the ones who have a say. The tiles maybe disable-ible or will run inside explorer. There is always a mac.
And do business in a more business friendly state. Texas with its low income taxes and growing hiteck industry sounds pretty good. Politicans need to think more about the consequences of their actions.
"right now over 50% of all US IT jobs should be in India and there was predicted to be massive unemployment in the US IT sectoe"
I do not know what world you are in but it surely is the world I am in. Most IT jobs are help desk today and any fortune 500 worth there salt should not have more than 10 or 15 people here in the US. The 500 plus are all in India. Most IT people I know do house call for grandma getting viruses and not doing their exciting $60,000 programming gig they did in 1999 using Visual Basic.
It doesn't matter if Indians can't do it. The accountants are the ones who run the show and not the project managers. Not the management or the accountants become the new management. Sorry about the rant, but many new fads have come true. The internet was not a fad, neither was object oriented programing, nor was active directory servers, and so were guis before all of this.
Clouds yes and no in my opinion. Portals are where it is at and whether you want to call it a cloud is up to you. Salesforce.com and SAP have become very popular. No one wants servers unless their an I.T. company and regardless of objections cost always talks here in the 21st century as the newest management style is similar to the late 1980s were technology is just commodities and added costs that add no value to the bottom line.
"No company worth their salt will put all the company data "on the cloud" No way in HELL is my customer DB and accounting DB going on the cloud.
I think you underestimate the power of accountants and financial analysts. Look at www.salesforce.com? Talk about success. I raised this question to an HR executive who was talking about it as a way to be trapped. His response was Oracle is no different and their licensing software can shut it off too. At least we do not have to hire anyone if we go all internet.
Money talks, shit walks, as the saying goes.
I will even go as far as go on a rant about most CEOs preferring a nice new vacation house in Brazil as a bonus for doing such a retarded thing for the company to obtain quarterly increases in their companys' share price. To hell with IT and our customers. But I realize that not all companies do this .
I think clouds are overrated and many do not provide the cost savings initially from what I read. But they are very tempting.
"hey called it something completely different, so customers will never think "Oh, my iPad runs OS X, therefore I can run $RANDOM_MAC_APP on my iPad!""
AMD is betting on an x86 one. Rumor has it Asus will make it and can run those apps. Battery life and cost wont be as great as an arm, but it might be what the scientist in R&D imagined what WindowsXP Tablet edition was supposed to be.
Windows NT 4 had decent x86 emulation for the Alpha version. It had x86 emulation for Windows 2000 Server for the Itanium. My guess it will use something like this for the ARM. I just squirm imaging running Office 2010 on it.
2 to 3 years is the normal life cycle for any platform. It's just got screwed up with WindowsXP and Windows 2003. Microsoft likes to release operating systems every 3 years as they coincide average life cycle upgrades for businesses (3 - 4 years). Odd was this severe recession caused many businesses to hold on to their pc's and servers for 7 or 8 more years which also hurt Windows Vista/7 adoption.
What I wonder is how many businesses that used their pc's until the fans all died noticed the cost savings and liked it. The accountants sure do. If that is the case it maybe difficult for corporate buyers to upgrade. Many consumers are holding off upgrading as well. But that is another discussion entirely.
I think tablets/pads and Windows Mobile integration might be key to giving organizations a reason to upgrade. 7 or 8 might be the new norm which would be a nightmare for Microsoft and OEMs.
Microsoft also mentioned that it wants to release Windows in more increments gradually like MacOSX, and older MS products. It keeps revenue flowing and a major os upgrade wont be so shocking and difficult to implement if changes happen slowly. That is the last hurdle that is keeping many PHB's from leaving XP. Windows Vista was an example of when programmers keep fitzing around and not getting anything done. Gradual releases make upgrading every 3 to 4 years less painful.
Try rebooting into Windows with Firefox 4. Hardware acceleration for non DirectX is an issue. I think OpenGL might work with a Mac. Firefox 5 or 6 will fix this for Ubuntu
"Video card hardly makes any difference, browser does. 35 fps full-screen on Firefox 7.0a1, 34 on Firefox 4.0, slideshow on Firefox 3.5. This is on a cheap-ass 2.8Ghz Phenom II. It uses no OpenGL, about any graphics card can handle shoving such bitmaps around"
The HUGE fps difference is because of accelerated video via DirectX as you must be on Vista or Windows 7 correct? Your cheap-ass card can do wonders with Direct2D which is what Firefox 4 for Windows renders compared to 3.6. This is why it sucks on Linux. Just because it can't run Crysis does not mean it can't render tens of millions of pixels a second.
I got 35 fps on Firefox 4 with Windows 7 with an ATI 5750 which is a high end card. It wont work in Chrome or IE 9 as I tried.
If anyone dual boots you will notice a big difference if you look on a page with graphics. The pics will chop of you move up and down. Under IE 9 (only stable browser with full hardware acceleration for all HTML and CSS) it will be smooth. I think Firefox 5 and later will have this as well.
Windows was more insecure because Microsoft designed it to be be scriptable with com/dcom objects that apps can use to integrate into one another for app embedding. ActiveX are just objects that are designed from the ground up to be mix win32 applets inside IE. The whole object model is based upon using proprietary win32 code and api's so the programmers do not have to code as much. This was designed for lock in and accessibility everywhere with no security in mind.. Unfortunately, this meant I can write some VB 6 app to call win32 functions to wipe your hard drive and I can just copy the dll over as an activeX object in IE. If you have IE 5 or earlier all you would have to do is visit my webpage and it would run automatically on your computer and it would be trash. The iloveyou worm that hit it big in Outlook was a simple VBA script that copied the string and did a simply call to the user's address book. Most of the win32 api was designed for Windows95 built on Dos which had no concept of user rights. Only the security API for Windows NT had that modern concept. These api's were ported over to WindowsXP.
Buffer overflows are something else and poor memory management of Windows causes GP faults which everyone and their brother received back in the Win 9x days. Microsoft had trouble enforcing this because Dos and Windows 3.1 apps just took random memory addresses mostly and one would just take an address of something else and bluescreen and take down your system. So if you are a hacker and know when a ram address ends with a certain DLL (thanks to a debugger) you can put some code in that adress and WHAM instant execution. Windows also has no concept of data for execution vs data for storage. This is a flaw of x86 actually but you could put executable code in just a cookie or a temp file and it would not be hard to trick Windows when it is done executing a DLL to go to your program and it will totally bypass security. You can do this in Unix as well but this is very uncommon today as you need to be root and was a hack of the early 80s when coders wrote in assembly to gain performance tricks. This is frowned upon in the Unix world as there are excellent libraries that can obtain speeds close to assembly. Not to mention users do not want to log in as root. This same assembly calls stayed in Windows due to backwards compatibility as WindowsXP has the default user as an administrator. Doh
Anyway, this was why Windows was less secure and why MS wants you to switch to.NET. Less to do with marketshare but more to do with poor design decisions and the requirements to be backwards compatible. I am so sick of those saying Windows is great and it is marketshare or something else stupid.
I agree 100% of what your post. Illegal or not it worked and created the monopoly. I do not agree with all of his tactics or like all of his products when he was CEO of Microsoft, but he knows how to make sure people use them and pay Microsoft large sums of money for them. This is something shareholders drool on.
Yes the Windows powered phones had a terrible interface, and yes the MS Office teams crippled the tablet on purpose. However, this is something that Balmer should have improved upon. Microsoft won these products and the idea of a smartphone was there thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft did make great profits when these 2 products for came out. MS typically likes to put their toes in the water and gradually improve their product quality after it starts generating revenue under Gates. Windows NT and Word were horrible at first. MS cornered these markets and left them right open for Apple after Balmer let them die out. Gates himself said that Ipod is obsolete as users will switch to cell phones right before he left. What did Balmer do? Let Apple take over that market with the Iphone 2 years later. lol
My point is he had a vision and if he stayed on Microsoft would be making a lot more money. Just as he bashed employees for leaving IE and Office behind compared to their competitors, he would make sure Windows Mobile would look pretty and so would the tablet edition of XP and Windows 7. Hate him all you want but Gates knows how to make money very well. After all, Dos/Windows 3.11 were the biggest pieces of dodo on the face of the earth yet they took over. That says a lot about him as a business man to pull that one off.
As a user I do not want him back strong arming everyone again, but if I were a shareholder or bank you bet I would be begging him. In all fairness it maybe too little too late now as once you lose the standards bar it is near impossible to gain it back to use twisted standards for your gain. MS no longer sets the standard in phones or html/css anymore.
That is rapidly changing. IE 9, Firefox, and Chrome have GPU accelerated graphics with 3D support. Office 2010 is sluggish on my 6 cpu system due to its virtualization technology in it. If people are running doom in their browsers you know where the market is heading. More visual effects and hi res videos on netbooks too with the gpu on low end devices is what this is for. My fedora based 4 year old laptop can barely keep up in msnbc.com with firefox 3.6 m but is tolerable in Chrome due to gpu spport.
Under Gates, IE had 90% of the browser market, 95% of the desktop market, 90% of the mobile smart phone market, and existing users upgrading their software every 2 - 3 years when it was time to life cycle their hardware. That made them a fortune.
Gates would be better because he is ruthless and is successful in tying proprietary technology to other MS products to encourage users away from non MS technology. After he left Balmer embraced more open standards and let the competition figure out how Outlook and.doc formats works. Because of that we have the Blackberry, Apple, and Firefox.
Once that is out then there is no reason to stick to a MS ecosystem.
The whole point of picking a Windows Mobile device was to show people your word docs and website pics to clients that would work best with other MS products. Now, every phone maker has that ability. Under Balmer, MS did not update its bugs or its horrible interface for Windows Mobile when the eye candy and pretty i-phone came out. Office 2007/2010 is hated by business and they still use Office 2003 etc.
Under Gates, he would make technology work with other MS products, he would bully other OEMs and handset makers to use his products, he would make sure there are reasons for corporate users to upgrade their products. Right now it makes sense to keep what is very old for cost savings. I would think he would not be afraid to fire people either. Also, he has a vision, where as Balmer gets his from listening to poor management. He cares more about his salary than the company.
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What I didn't like about Active Desktop and Netscape's push technology was information was supposed to just "come to you" and you just sit there. Keep in mind this was before RSS.
People have better things to do and have TV for everything else.
I am excited about the new html 5 and applets from phones coming into the desktop and other devices as they are real programs. Many MacOSX users have wanted to run their Iphone apps on the desktop at the same time. However turning your whole desktop into a cell phone interface is stupid and misses the point.
People would love to use their apps in the explorer or finder based desktops. But unless you own a tablet, you do not want what Gnome Shell or what Windows 8 has. I think more R&D is needed to learn how people can have a full browser or word processor up as well as accessing an applet. Too much focus on one app running at a time. At least Windows has a bar at the bottom of the screen where you can browser with Windows 7 and get a preview of all your other apps. I like the idea of running things side by side too. This needs to be worked on rather than a gui where we all just minimize everything and stare at the screen (active desktop). Maybe Windows 9, KDE 5, or Gnome Shell 4 will get this right.
This announcement happens to coincide with the Macworld or whatever they call it now. It couldnt be a method to distract attention and have people think of a cool xbox 360 and not a mac
AMD is on record as saying it wants to be the first pad tablet to run x86 software on Windows 8 betting it can outdo the arm. Asus is rumored to include the cpu/gpu combo which will be out next year.
Business 101, when you have a big customer like Ms or Walmart you make amends as to not loose such a huge opportunity and give a competitor like ATI the deal. Suppliers hate things like bulk discounts too and it hurts mom and pop shops. But a smaller profit margin and annoying clauses are better than nothing. There are laws about insider trading which limit public knowledge about aquisitions. We didnt know about the skype deal until after it was locked by MS.
"I've read elsewhere that it's already below 50% on weekends"
That disparity is because China and Korea heavily use IE 6 and 7 which skew the numbers higher for IE. In North America IE had less than 50% marketshare for awhile. It is even lower in Europe.
Most machines in China are pirated and therefore do not get Windows Updates which mean they use IE. Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption. This is no longer a problem but Ebay and the banks do not care and still require it.
Even if everyone but China dumped IE tomorrow, you can bet a good 25-35% of IE marketshare would still be there thanks to that market. In other words ignore the IE statistics for the world if you develop websites and just focus on North America. If you need to make an Asian site just write it for IE only.
Tell me about it. I am browsing this comment with IE 9. Windows update just installed it last night and I am playing with it. I have to say it is stunning and it feels like IE is back in the league with Firefox and Chrome. I find heavily graphic sites like www.msnbc.com scroll very smoothly with IE 9 vs Chrome and Firefox 4. For slashdotters on Windows I highly recommend to download and play with it. ... no you did not misread that last sentance. IE 9 even has a firebug-lite development and script debugger now.
IE 10 from what I read will finally clear most of the annoying bugs that MS has been trying to fix since IE 8, that IE 9 still have. But thank you Mozilla Firefox for making this happen. Without you we would be stuck wiht IE 7 and flash. Shudder.
I doubt Google would dare release Chrome if IE still had 85% marketshare of just 5 years ago.
I find these latest generation browsers exciting compared to the past. HTML 5, hardware acceleration, javascript applets, and cell phone applets are all tying together without flash. Even flash is hardware accelerated on Windows and now the Mac. It makes web development fun again and I love competition. Keep it up.
"with just one feature: render standard compliant HTML7 pages with 100% accuracy" ... and it has to work with IE 6 or my client isn't interested. ... ducks.
"I've read elsewhere that it's already below 50% on weekends"
That disparity is because China and Korea heavily use IE 6 and 7 which skew the numbers higher for IE. In North America IE had less than 50% marketshare for awhile. It is even lower in Europe.
Most machines in China are pirated and therefore do not get Windows Updates which mean they use IE. Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption. This is no longer a problem but Ebay and the banks do not care and still require it.
Even if everyone but China dumped IE tomorrow, you can bet a good 25-35% of IE marketshare would still be there thanks to that market. In other words ignore the IE statistics for the world if you develop websites and just focus on North America. If you need to make an Asian site just write it for IE only.
Windows update doesn't break everything and apps do not have to be retested and upgraded every patch tuesday right? Same is supposed to be true with web browsers if developers use standard html and follow standards and not Java or ActiveX. Face the facts, Chrome is autoupdated very frequently and Mozilla is now going this route with Firefox 5 soon. IE is going this route too but on an anual basis.
IE 6 is almost 10 years old! In web time that is a very long time and HTML 5, hardware accelerated browsing, h.264, and tablet/phone applets are coming with advanced javascript libraries. IE is in the way of progress and even clouds and portals businesses use for real world use. I never had a browser crash recently. I do not run Firefox 7 admittingly, but the stable ones out now should be fine. Also Google will still support IE 8 which came in in 2008 or 2009 which is already over 2 years old.
I no longer run Linux because the distro packages refuse to let you upgrade their apps. Firefox 4 and Chrome can be installed and it wont mess up Firefox 3.5. Must geeks who run Linux should have no problem figuring this out. Businesses and web developers need to get used to more updates. Microsoft is finally fixing IE which I believe MS sabataged on purpose to prevent adoption with IE 9. The bugs need to go away so businesses wont be so freaked out with browser versions. Google is certainly going to lend a hand and I hope encourage other high profie sites to do the same.
Download Chrome from Google. It will run and update automatically unlike stuff from YUM or Apt-get.
I have been hearing that a lot. I find it very stable, fast, and a breathe of fresh air. Infact with sites with lots of images ... cough msnbc.com cough ... IE 9 can scroll and the pics do not even flicker and are smooth. Chrome is the second fastest but the graphics flicker as it is only partially accelerated.
I have heard similiar IE 9 bashing as unstable. Maybe it is your video card driver? What card is it? I have an ATI 5750 which is last years top of the line card so perhaps this is why I have had no problems. WIth aero turned off IE 9 is much slower but still stable. Do you own an intel video chipset?
To get subtracts to work with IE 6 you need to add them only as negative numbers. However this will break Firefox and Chrome because they use floats. So you need to get it to work with IE you need to add the negative numbers and then do roundings as to not upset IE 9, Firefox, nor Chrome. However, the rounding may not be that accurate for all numbers to make up for this add a javascript to ...
Normally, I would agree with you. However, realize the phbs at work keep Ie6 and old intranet apps because they can and do not want to be hassled. They will surely notice when help desk gets calls and the CEO cant connect to websites and why wont the VPs ipad work for that 12 year old app? Chinese cracked and pirated windows xp makes up the vast majority of most ie 6 installations with updates disabled. So keep ie 6 for the asain sites. If major players follow suite it will change as these managers will be pressured to upgrade than stay the course. Grandma is the other market and she will change when she keeps getting notices
Lol. Have you seen gnomeshell? It is 100% cell phone based influenced by WebOS. Hell, even the minimize buttons are gone with the developer grining saying its one way that makes it better if you view the videos at its website. Its all optimized for single tasking and running one app at a time. I switched to Windows 7 as a result. Lets wait and see about Windows 8. The demo is just a concept design. Corporate users that hate change who refuse to leave 10 year old xp are the ones who have a say. The tiles maybe disable-ible or will run inside explorer. There is always a mac.
And do business in a more business friendly state. Texas with its low income taxes and growing hiteck industry sounds pretty good. Politicans need to think more about the consequences of their actions.
"right now over 50% of all US IT jobs should be in India and there was predicted to be massive unemployment in the US IT sectoe"
I do not know what world you are in but it surely is the world I am in. Most IT jobs are help desk today and any fortune 500 worth there salt should not have more than 10 or 15 people here in the US. The 500 plus are all in India. Most IT people I know do house call for grandma getting viruses and not doing their exciting $60,000 programming gig they did in 1999 using Visual Basic.
It doesn't matter if Indians can't do it. The accountants are the ones who run the show and not the project managers. Not the management or the accountants become the new management. Sorry about the rant, but many new fads have come true. The internet was not a fad, neither was object oriented programing, nor was active directory servers, and so were guis before all of this.
Clouds yes and no in my opinion. Portals are where it is at and whether you want to call it a cloud is up to you. Salesforce.com and SAP have become very popular. No one wants servers unless their an I.T. company and regardless of objections cost always talks here in the 21st century as the newest management style is similar to the late 1980s were technology is just commodities and added costs that add no value to the bottom line.
"No company worth their salt will put all the company data "on the cloud" No way in HELL is my customer DB and accounting DB going on the cloud.
I think you underestimate the power of accountants and financial analysts. Look at www.salesforce.com? Talk about success. I raised this question to an HR executive who was talking about it as a way to be trapped. His response was Oracle is no different and their licensing software can shut it off too. At least we do not have to hire anyone if we go all internet.
Money talks, shit walks, as the saying goes.
I will even go as far as go on a rant about most CEOs preferring a nice new vacation house in Brazil as a bonus for doing such a retarded thing for the company to obtain quarterly increases in their companys' share price. To hell with IT and our customers. But I realize that not all companies do this .
I think clouds are overrated and many do not provide the cost savings initially from what I read. But they are very tempting.
"hey called it something completely different, so customers will never think "Oh, my iPad runs OS X, therefore I can run $RANDOM_MAC_APP on my iPad!""
AMD is betting on an x86 one. Rumor has it Asus will make it and can run those apps. Battery life and cost wont be as great as an arm, but it might be what the scientist in R&D imagined what WindowsXP Tablet edition was supposed to be.
Windows NT 4 had decent x86 emulation for the Alpha version. It had x86 emulation for Windows 2000 Server for the Itanium. My guess it will use something like this for the ARM. I just squirm imaging running Office 2010 on it.
2 to 3 years is the normal life cycle for any platform. It's just got screwed up with WindowsXP and Windows 2003. Microsoft likes to release operating systems every 3 years as they coincide average life cycle upgrades for businesses (3 - 4 years). Odd was this severe recession caused many businesses to hold on to their pc's and servers for 7 or 8 more years which also hurt Windows Vista/7 adoption.
What I wonder is how many businesses that used their pc's until the fans all died noticed the cost savings and liked it. The accountants sure do. If that is the case it maybe difficult for corporate buyers to upgrade. Many consumers are holding off upgrading as well. But that is another discussion entirely.
I think tablets/pads and Windows Mobile integration might be key to giving organizations a reason to upgrade. 7 or 8 might be the new norm which would be a nightmare for Microsoft and OEMs.
Microsoft also mentioned that it wants to release Windows in more increments gradually like MacOSX, and older MS products. It keeps revenue flowing and a major os upgrade wont be so shocking and difficult to implement if changes happen slowly. That is the last hurdle that is keeping many PHB's from leaving XP. Windows Vista was an example of when programmers keep fitzing around and not getting anything done. Gradual releases make upgrading every 3 to 4 years less painful.
Try rebooting into Windows with Firefox 4. Hardware acceleration for non DirectX is an issue. I think OpenGL might work with a Mac. Firefox 5 or 6 will fix this for Ubuntu
"Video card hardly makes any difference, browser does. 35 fps full-screen on Firefox 7.0a1, 34 on Firefox 4.0, slideshow on Firefox 3.5. This is on a cheap-ass 2.8Ghz Phenom II. It uses no OpenGL, about any graphics card can handle shoving such bitmaps around"
The HUGE fps difference is because of accelerated video via DirectX as you must be on Vista or Windows 7 correct? Your cheap-ass card can do wonders with Direct2D which is what Firefox 4 for Windows renders compared to 3.6. This is why it sucks on Linux. Just because it can't run Crysis does not mean it can't render tens of millions of pixels a second.
I got 35 fps on Firefox 4 with Windows 7 with an ATI 5750 which is a high end card. It wont work in Chrome or IE 9 as I tried.
If anyone dual boots you will notice a big difference if you look on a page with graphics. The pics will chop of you move up and down. Under IE 9 (only stable browser with full hardware acceleration for all HTML and CSS) it will be smooth. I think Firefox 5 and later will have this as well.
Windows was more insecure because Microsoft designed it to be be scriptable with com/dcom objects that apps can use to integrate into one another for app embedding. ActiveX are just objects that are designed from the ground up to be mix win32 applets inside IE. The whole object model is based upon using proprietary win32 code and api's so the programmers do not have to code as much. This was designed for lock in and accessibility everywhere with no security in mind.. Unfortunately, this meant I can write some VB 6 app to call win32 functions to wipe your hard drive and I can just copy the dll over as an activeX object in IE. If you have IE 5 or earlier all you would have to do is visit my webpage and it would run automatically on your computer and it would be trash. The iloveyou worm that hit it big in Outlook was a simple VBA script that copied the string and did a simply call to the user's address book. Most of the win32 api was designed for Windows95 built on Dos which had no concept of user rights. Only the security API for Windows NT had that modern concept. These api's were ported over to WindowsXP.
Buffer overflows are something else and poor memory management of Windows causes GP faults which everyone and their brother received back in the Win 9x days. Microsoft had trouble enforcing this because Dos and Windows 3.1 apps just took random memory addresses mostly and one would just take an address of something else and bluescreen and take down your system. So if you are a hacker and know when a ram address ends with a certain DLL (thanks to a debugger) you can put some code in that adress and WHAM instant execution. Windows also has no concept of data for execution vs data for storage. This is a flaw of x86 actually but you could put executable code in just a cookie or a temp file and it would not be hard to trick Windows when it is done executing a DLL to go to your program and it will totally bypass security. You can do this in Unix as well but this is very uncommon today as you need to be root and was a hack of the early 80s when coders wrote in assembly to gain performance tricks. This is frowned upon in the Unix world as there are excellent libraries that can obtain speeds close to assembly. Not to mention users do not want to log in as root. This same assembly calls stayed in Windows due to backwards compatibility as WindowsXP has the default user as an administrator. Doh
Anyway, this was why Windows was less secure and why MS wants you to switch to .NET. Less to do with marketshare but more to do with poor design decisions and the requirements to be backwards compatible. I am so sick of those saying Windows is great and it is marketshare or something else stupid.
I agree 100% of what your post. Illegal or not it worked and created the monopoly. I do not agree with all of his tactics or like all of his products when he was CEO of Microsoft, but he knows how to make sure people use them and pay Microsoft large sums of money for them. This is something shareholders drool on.
Yes the Windows powered phones had a terrible interface, and yes the MS Office teams crippled the tablet on purpose. However, this is something that Balmer should have improved upon. Microsoft won these products and the idea of a smartphone was there thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft did make great profits when these 2 products for came out. MS typically likes to put their toes in the water and gradually improve their product quality after it starts generating revenue under Gates. Windows NT and Word were horrible at first. MS cornered these markets and left them right open for Apple after Balmer let them die out. Gates himself said that Ipod is obsolete as users will switch to cell phones right before he left. What did Balmer do? Let Apple take over that market with the Iphone 2 years later. lol
My point is he had a vision and if he stayed on Microsoft would be making a lot more money. Just as he bashed employees for leaving IE and Office behind compared to their competitors, he would make sure Windows Mobile would look pretty and so would the tablet edition of XP and Windows 7. Hate him all you want but Gates knows how to make money very well. After all, Dos/Windows 3.11 were the biggest pieces of dodo on the face of the earth yet they took over. That says a lot about him as a business man to pull that one off.
As a user I do not want him back strong arming everyone again, but if I were a shareholder or bank you bet I would be begging him. In all fairness it maybe too little too late now as once you lose the standards bar it is near impossible to gain it back to use twisted standards for your gain. MS no longer sets the standard in phones or html/css anymore.
That is rapidly changing. IE 9, Firefox, and Chrome have GPU accelerated graphics with 3D support. Office 2010 is sluggish on my 6 cpu system due to its virtualization technology in it. If people are running doom in their browsers you know where the market is heading. More visual effects and hi res videos on netbooks too with the gpu on low end devices is what this is for. My fedora based 4 year old laptop can barely keep up in msnbc.com with firefox 3.6 m but is tolerable in Chrome due to gpu spport.
Under Gates, IE had 90% of the browser market, 95% of the desktop market, 90% of the mobile smart phone market, and existing users upgrading their software every 2 - 3 years when it was time to life cycle their hardware. That made them a fortune.
Gates would be better because he is ruthless and is successful in tying proprietary technology to other MS products to encourage users away from non MS technology. After he left Balmer embraced more open standards and let the competition figure out how Outlook and .doc formats works. Because of that we have the Blackberry, Apple, and Firefox.
Once that is out then there is no reason to stick to a MS ecosystem.
The whole point of picking a Windows Mobile device was to show people your word docs and website pics to clients that would work best with other MS products. Now, every phone maker has that ability. Under Balmer, MS did not update its bugs or its horrible interface for Windows Mobile when the eye candy and pretty i-phone came out. Office 2007/2010 is hated by business and they still use Office 2003 etc.
Under Gates, he would make technology work with other MS products, he would bully other OEMs and handset makers to use his products, he would make sure there are reasons for corporate users to upgrade their products. Right now it makes sense to keep what is very old for cost savings. I would think he would not be afraid to fire people either. Also, he has a vision, where as Balmer gets his from listening to poor management. He cares more about his salary than the company.