IE owned 95% of the browser market when he left. True IE 1 and 2 were not part of Windows 95 initially but that changed within a year by 1996. After that and spending a whole night on the internet his opinion quickly changed and he was successful in crushing Netscape, killing Java applets, and tying the internet to Windows for nearly a decade before Firefox came out.
Firefox almost didn't succeed as he reinvented HTML to fit his own standards. The security holes and worms is the only reason people even bothered changing as most sites worked best with IE until about 3 or 4 years ago.
I totally disagree with all the anti-Bill Gates rants here.
Let me see where MS was when Gates left? Oh yeah...
1. IE owned 90% of the browser market 2. SQL Server was rapidly gaining marketshare over Oracle and DB2 3. WindowsCE aka Windows Mobile owned 90% of the smart phone market 4. Windows owned 95% of the desktop operating system market 5. Customers upgrading Windows/Office every 2-3 years during life cycling desktops. 6. MS was first with the MS tablet
Cons 1. XBOX lost 1 billion a quarter. Thats the only negative cost center under his leadership Things were very good under Bill Gates
Today under Balmer 1. IE owns less than 50% of the browser market in North America 2. SQL Server is rapidly being replaced by MySQL for many internet/intranet sites 3. Windows Mobile owns only 6% of the market 4. Windows only owns 85% of the US market thanks to Apple. 10 years ago they had something like 3% market share rather than the 12 - 15%! 5. Customers are keeping and still buying WindowsXP and Office 2003 and refusing to upgrade if they life cycle to new desktops or not. 6. Ipads and now Andriod tablets are eating XP tablets for breakfast and took over the whole market Pro 1.I think XBOX is now breaking even
So, in other words Microsoft is losing their existing monopoly slowly and every new market they are trying to get into is just a money losing division. Notice I did not even mention Linux up there. Apple and google, combined with MS incompentence for their existing monopolies are doing the work for us. The fact is MS already won the war over Apple and the Palm Pilot in the mobile wars. Now they are losing BAD and this is inexcusable if I were a shareholder. You can hate Bill Gates all you want for his business tactics, hence I chose his name back in 1999 as he was perceived as unstoppable then. Something needs to change
It seems this story there is a debate here among those who think certifications might help if you have experience vs certifications mean you are incompetent and it will hurt your job chances.
My brother is a director at FedEX and he looks down on PMP certifications as the employees he wants to fire typically take the exams and study for them. They know they are in trouble and it is a way to cover something up. To me I would love to take the Project Management Certification so I can learn but I guess too many frown upon that as well.
I am confused as I wonder myself whether to even mention my certifications on my resume. I have them but I wonder if it makes me look bad?
So can we discount college degrees too? Sure you do not learn real world experience, but you do learn the theory and basics about a profession and it shows dedication to the employer.
MCSE' tests are hard and those who say they are easy never took them. They are adaptive, which means as soon as you make a wrong answer it keeps asking you things related to the last question. I am not saying you can walk right in and work. But, if you passed all the MCSE and CISCO exams you can tell the new employee you need x.y, and z done and they will probably know what you are talking about and can use some tools to do the job. Maybe not perfect, but enough to start an entry level career.
The question is where do you start? YOu need experience somewhere and volunteering at GeekSquad looks pretty embarasing on a resume.
I put them on my resume. Mainly because it wont hurt and it keeps HR and the headhunters happy. Does that mean I am a jackass that doesn't know anything because I got them, regardless if I owned my own I.T. business as a contractor? That is like saying you do not need a computer science degree to write simple scripting code, therefore every Unix admin who has a CS degree must somehow be incompetent.
Most competent I.T. folks put them on their resume. If they do not then I assume they do not love their job or their previously employer did not give them the tools they needed to succeed. I view it as incompetence. Not because they need that MCSE or CISCO cert but because they agreed that it was not needed and ok to be under certified or the candidate refuses to better themselves.
You can learn a lot with certain certifications that you never know about. Windows 2008 for example has many new features that I had no clue about, explained by a MCSE trainer. It can help if you are already competent.
Dell and Asus once sold Linux briefly at BestBuy before they pulled it. Walmart did too. Why?
Because Joe Six Pack became furious as to why MS Office wouldn't work or why his resume created with OpenOffice looked like crap when a potential employer opend it with Word. OR why little Timmy's pc games with DirectX couldn't run on them? ETC.
Not to mention BestBuy realized that consumers buying these cheap linux books would not provide any profit margins by buying anti virus software and printers. They lose money on every machine sold and only make it by spammer you with accessories and software. Bad for retail...
This is why Windows is here to stay. If you hate it, save up for a Mac. That is a consumer OS as well yet expensive that is higher quality than Linux or Windows. Or get one of those tablets running Andriod. There are options.
That was an accurate, yet ballsy post to mention in slashdot of all places. I got flamed and modded down when stating the obvious with Linux myself, yet I still like it as a Server OS. Linux usage has gone down according to statcounter from nearly 1% to.7%. A very big drop thanks to Windows 7. I used to use Linux but finally gave up on it for the reasons you described. I am contemplating installing it today in a VM so I can run a LAMP stack with PostgresSQL as well as Joomla. But I am in the small small minority of users.
Windows has it's weaknesses but being a consumer OS for business and home users is certainly not one fo them. Compiling a kernel is rediculous. I did PC support as a contractor on teh side and only mentioned Linux to a tech shop because the user needed a server for 10 users and didn't want to pay for Windows 2003 Server Small Business Edition and only needed a file server, domain controller, and a simple email and internet site. Linux fit the bill and hosted all 4 nicely, but that was supported server hardware and not for John in the Office to play his games or run Office on his Toshiba laptop with strange/cheap hardware. Dells do not even make good drivers for Windows in my experience and I hate them with a passion. However, since Michael Dell returned the quality has improved tremendously.
I read your posts and you know your stuff. I used to charge $75/hr when I lived in Alaska for the rates and it sounds like the $35/hr might be a little low for your expertise. I never heard of that app you mentioned that kills adware infected with Flash. I will give it a try since I use music on youtube and prefer not to live without it.
I want a new cell phone interface. One where key functionalty is removed and only one app can be shown at a time with strange mouse gestures that take up the whole screen to shuffle between apps with no buttons focused on single tasking.
"I haven't tried to uninstall them, but they don't run in the background automatically unless the Running Apps utility is lying to me...
My Samsung Galaxy S was lying to me. Without that Advanced Task Killer App I had no idea these apps were even running in the background. Do not trust the task killer that came with your phone. I use AT&T and not Sprint, but still these apps like their news and map programs puts battery life 5 hours which is is unacceptable to me. I took the grandparents advice and will see how long my battery lasts.
It bugs me as it makes clueless users think more highly of the DRM walled garden of Iphone which does not have such garbage. But still
I was wondering why my Samsung Galaxy only had 5 hours of battery life. It was terrible. I used the built in task program and could extend the battery life to 6 hours as long as I didn't use it.
I used Advanced Task Killer and was shocked my phone had 12 apps like youtube, messenger, news, and even Google Maps all sucking data. I find it rotten like a rootkit almost (not quite) that the task ender that came with my phone was intentionally crippled. That is slimy to say the least. Now I know why my phone's battery life is so mediocre compared to an I-phone. Still why should I of had to do download and do that?
Maybe an Iphone is not so bad after all even with the DRM craziness in it (why I use Andriod).
If you have an Andriod phone you can't even use Google???
It makes no sense and the phones are lucked because Microsoft gave them a contract dictating that they must be locked so they can get ad revenue and hurt Google. I find this unacceptable, which is why I choose AT&T (yes I know) as my Andriod platform of choice. At least I am root on my own phone
The problem is moving optimizations to sofware which is the most retarded thing I ever heard. Most problems are not parrallizeable (if such a word exists) and is not needed if Intel made decent processors rather than the Itanium disaster. VLIW is heavily dependable on this. Parallel Programming as Intel wants it is to have the developers make up for the shortcummings by having programmers invent tricks while they put more cache and other things on their chips. We have the corei series of processors now at least but still. Why should we learn how to do parallel programming because they lost billions in R&D and have these silly api's and a market to sell these tools.
Advancements have been made to make that argument obsolete as putting more cache while making compilers harder to write is not making huge improvements in performance. It is still old fashioned branch predictions. So yes it is usefull in some circumstances, but in business all I care about is how fast I can get SQL out to a client/server app or to an intranet app
I admit I have not wrote code in 5 years so I am not the best source before the professional programmers nail me here. This is just from what I see
Even those profit centers are not turning like they once did. Let me guess what you run at work? 10 year old Windows XP with an 8 year old version of Office 2003 right? That is not good either and is lost revenue. I understand in a recession you wan to have your pc run 5 to 6 years instead of 2 to 3 to extend life to save money. However, this is rediculious.
After hours trading?! Now call me out of the loop here but I was under the assumption this was illegal? If it turned legal then I am very troubled by this.
His business tactics were deplorable, but Windows Mobile aka Windows CE at the time, owned 90% of the mobile market, people purchased Windows regularly every 3 years, not ever 12 years like with Windows XP, and he won the browser wars with IE all under his healm. Microsoft was in great shape when he left.
When he quit Microsoft it went downhill very very fast. Bill Gates would have fired the manager of longhorn long before Windows Vista and would have darned make sure Windows Mobile would be as competive and cool as the Iphone let alone put major dents into Blackberry before.
Bill Gates is a great businessman whether you like his products or agree with his tactics or not. I think he is probably one of the best that ever lived and even tied with Rockefeller. The fact that Windows monopolized and sucked so bad in the Windows 1.0 - Windows 3.11 days is testament to this.
Lack of vision with Balmer is another one besides letting the cream of the crop rot. Incompetent management needs to be cleared and if you have no vision you tend to get it from the same incompentent managers and directors. Now, competitors are coming in and winning. Apple, IBM, Mozilla, Google, etc. There are smaller players too who no longer feel threatened are entering the market as well and things at Microsoft need to change FAST
As stated before, MS can't move beyond Windows and Office.
Outside of this MS won and then lost the cell phone mobile wars very badly from having a near monopoly. Very embarrasing and bad. They lost on the tablets running WindowsXP to the Ipad. MS had a much better better vision before the Office team crippled it. The other products are too little too late, such as Bing, Zune, MS Social, etc. Now looking at the cream of the crop MS Windows/Office, Windows Vista.... no need to go further and the ribbon in Windows 2007 and Windows 2010. I personally love the ribbon after learning to get used to it in college and then discovering the alt key. Seriously, it is a unix person's dream of just hitting alt and then following the numbers/letters for the shortcuts. You can do whatever you want without the mosue or keyboard!
Windows mobile aka Windows CE had 90% of the smartphone market. Balmer watched Blackberry enter, then Apple, and then still let Andriod enter until they dipped in single digit marketshare. Now Balmer freaks out?? A little late there bud. That could have made billions. He let incompentent managers who hated progress keep their jobs developing Office and Windows bully the company while their breakfast was eaten. I mean Balmer now just fired the manager of Windows Mobile and finally fired teh manager for Windows after Longhorn was in dvelopment for 5 years and billions later with no ROI.
The problem is adoption of Windows/Office. How many here work for an employer that still uses Windows XP and Office 2003? That is lost revenue. Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 & 2010 discourage adoption. Windows 7 is great for me and it may give some consumers to switch who are not cheap but businesses remain on XP. Even if businesses kept upgrading software before 2004 the shareholders need growth. Not selling the same old stuff.
XBOX with Microsoft entertainment was losing a billion dollars a quarter as it just could not compete with the Wii or PS3. They need a new CEO and they need to fire many people to send a message. Microsoft has a supurb R&D that these clowns refuse to utilize so they can have pissing matches. The shareholders need to vote him out as Apple and IBM their 2 past competitors are not eating them for lunch.
If I were the new CEO of Microsoft I would make Azure into the operating system it was supposed to be and make Windows 8 the final version of Windows. Again, the Windows team crippled it so they would appear more important. I would make a tablet edition of WIndows 8 and maybe come out with a few more Windows Mobile Oses to catchup. Microsoft is losing to clouds and these businesses wont upgrade their platforms of Windows/Office so a cloud is where the market needs to go next so I could suck monthly fees out of them. And of course I would fire directors and management of Windows and Office as they are ruining the company to send a powerful message to change or get out.
Gnome-Shell is why I gave up on Linux and switched to Windows 7. I saw the writting on the wall last March, and KDE is not going to go back to 3.5 anytime soon in terms of functionality. Microsoft incorporated many gestures and tablet features in Windows 7, such as dragging the title bar to maximize and unmaximize like Gnome and the dekstop preview by moving the cursor over icons of running apps is very cool. But they kept the original design for screens so I would not worry. Apple and Microsoft have billions in gui R&D and would not be retarded like the Gnome folks who think there degrees in CS make them UI experts.
My guess is Microsoft will have Windows 8 be in a tablet mode that you can enable if you wish. However, Windows 7 has both so you can work on a tiny touch screen and still have it somewhat tablet/cell phone like or use it like a traditional desktop.
Well using Windows sets the bar pretty low. I mean is there an OS worse than DOS/Windows 3.1 and before? It was the worst most primptive OS on the market.
I am not saying this as a anti_MS zealot here, as I think Windows 7 is an excellent client OS. I just remember being in middle school and highschool and being dumbfounded on why Dos can't use more than 640k of ram and how I had to run Memmaker to trick device drivers and programs to use more ram. Then I found out it was so primptive it had to let the bios handle the keyboard. It was a braindead command.com interpretor and yet it stole the market!? Some here on slashdot are a fans of DOS so I dunno. The schools macs people laughed at but at least they could do real multimedia and cooperative multitasking and some basic real memory management.
Anyway Windows 1.0/DOS were pretty horrible and OS/2 may not have been even good but it sure looked great compared to the alternatives.
CentOS uses a circa 2006 kernel which has a fraction of the throughput of a modern Linux Kernel. 5.6 is very old and no longer maintained with security fixes.
If this cluster is utilized for five years then it will still be using a 2006 kernel in 2016! I lost faith in them when they refused to make CentOS 6 as RedHat 6.1 is now out.
Scientific Linux 6.0 is built on Redhat Enterprise Edition 6 which is highly tested and tuned for server throughout put, power management, and stability compared to a stock vinalla kernel. The performance will be much better than a stock debian stable kernel or Ubuntu for example. Redhat has a bunch of hackers. Scientific Linux includes apps used for scientists which maybe your target market if you are a university too. If your old cluster has scripts and tools optimzied for Redhat and RPMs then makes sense to use a Redhat Distribution base.
If the scientific apps with Scientific Linux are not being utilized then just buy a license for RedHat Enterrpise Edition 6.1. The licensing fees are affordable if you have the budget for a large cluster and switches. With Redhat Enterprise edition you have support too if something goes down.
Remember to save a few bucks and go free is silly in an expensive project like this.
Where I worked we had to reboot our Windows 2003 small bussiness edition server boxen once a week to prevent GP faults. The systems turned into glue even though ram was free. Unless the memory routines and algorithms were replaced with Windows 2008 I do not think it is ready as a real server os yet. Thr fact that bussinesses bought $35000 switches just to run Windows was hysterical.
Slashdot Mirror
IE owned 95% of the browser market when he left. True IE 1 and 2 were not part of Windows 95 initially but that changed within a year by 1996. After that and spending a whole night on the internet his opinion quickly changed and he was successful in crushing Netscape, killing Java applets, and tying the internet to Windows for nearly a decade before Firefox came out.
Firefox almost didn't succeed as he reinvented HTML to fit his own standards. The security holes and worms is the only reason people even bothered changing as most sites worked best with IE until about 3 or 4 years ago.
I totally disagree with all the anti-Bill Gates rants here.
Let me see where MS was when Gates left? Oh yeah ...
1. IE owned 90% of the browser market
2. SQL Server was rapidly gaining marketshare over Oracle and DB2
3. WindowsCE aka Windows Mobile owned 90% of the smart phone market
4. Windows owned 95% of the desktop operating system market
5. Customers upgrading Windows/Office every 2-3 years during life cycling desktops.
6. MS was first with the MS tablet
Cons
1. XBOX lost 1 billion a quarter. Thats the only negative cost center under his leadership
Things were very good under Bill Gates
Today under Balmer
1. IE owns less than 50% of the browser market in North America
2. SQL Server is rapidly being replaced by MySQL for many internet/intranet sites
3. Windows Mobile owns only 6% of the market
4. Windows only owns 85% of the US market thanks to Apple. 10 years ago they had something like 3% market share rather than the 12 - 15%!
5. Customers are keeping and still buying WindowsXP and Office 2003 and refusing to upgrade if they life cycle to new desktops or not.
6. Ipads and now Andriod tablets are eating XP tablets for breakfast and took over the whole market
Pro
1.I think XBOX is now breaking even
So, in other words Microsoft is losing their existing monopoly slowly and every new market they are trying to get into is just a money losing division. Notice I did not even mention Linux up there. Apple and google, combined with MS incompentence for their existing monopolies are doing the work for us. The fact is MS already won the war over Apple and the Palm Pilot in the mobile wars. Now they are losing BAD and this is inexcusable if I were a shareholder. You can hate Bill Gates all you want for his business tactics, hence I chose his name back in 1999 as he was perceived as unstoppable then. Something needs to change
It seems this story there is a debate here among those who think certifications might help if you have experience vs certifications mean you are incompetent and it will hurt your job chances.
My brother is a director at FedEX and he looks down on PMP certifications as the employees he wants to fire typically take the exams and study for them. They know they are in trouble and it is a way to cover something up. To me I would love to take the Project Management Certification so I can learn but I guess too many frown upon that as well.
I am confused as I wonder myself whether to even mention my certifications on my resume. I have them but I wonder if it makes me look bad?
So can we discount college degrees too? Sure you do not learn real world experience, but you do learn the theory and basics about a profession and it shows dedication to the employer.
MCSE' tests are hard and those who say they are easy never took them. They are adaptive, which means as soon as you make a wrong answer it keeps asking you things related to the last question. I am not saying you can walk right in and work. But, if you passed all the MCSE and CISCO exams you can tell the new employee you need x.y, and z done and they will probably know what you are talking about and can use some tools to do the job. Maybe not perfect, but enough to start an entry level career.
The question is where do you start? YOu need experience somewhere and volunteering at GeekSquad looks pretty embarasing on a resume.
You are filtering out good people.
I put them on my resume. Mainly because it wont hurt and it keeps HR and the headhunters happy. Does that mean I am a jackass that doesn't know anything because I got them, regardless if I owned my own I.T. business as a contractor? That is like saying you do not need a computer science degree to write simple scripting code, therefore every Unix admin who has a CS degree must somehow be incompetent.
Most competent I.T. folks put them on their resume. If they do not then I assume they do not love their job or their previously employer did not give them the tools they needed to succeed. I view it as incompetence. Not because they need that MCSE or CISCO cert but because they agreed that it was not needed and ok to be under certified or the candidate refuses to better themselves.
You can learn a lot with certain certifications that you never know about. Windows 2008 for example has many new features that I had no clue about, explained by a MCSE trainer. It can help if you are already competent.
I was more thinking of Duke Nukem Vista
Dell and Asus once sold Linux briefly at BestBuy before they pulled it. Walmart did too. Why?
Because Joe Six Pack became furious as to why MS Office wouldn't work or why his resume created with OpenOffice looked like crap when a potential employer opend it with Word. OR why little Timmy's pc games with DirectX couldn't run on them? ETC.
Not to mention BestBuy realized that consumers buying these cheap linux books would not provide any profit margins by buying anti virus software and printers. They lose money on every machine sold and only make it by spammer you with accessories and software. Bad for retail ...
This is why Windows is here to stay. If you hate it, save up for a Mac. That is a consumer OS as well yet expensive that is higher quality than Linux or Windows. Or get one of those tablets running Andriod. There are options.
Haha
That was an accurate, yet ballsy post to mention in slashdot of all places. I got flamed and modded down when stating the obvious with Linux myself, yet I still like it as a Server OS. Linux usage has gone down according to statcounter from nearly 1% to .7%. A very big drop thanks to Windows 7. I used to use Linux but finally gave up on it for the reasons you described. I am contemplating installing it today in a VM so I can run a LAMP stack with PostgresSQL as well as Joomla. But I am in the small small minority of users.
Windows has it's weaknesses but being a consumer OS for business and home users is certainly not one fo them. Compiling a kernel is rediculous. I did PC support as a contractor on teh side and only mentioned Linux to a tech shop because the user needed a server for 10 users and didn't want to pay for Windows 2003 Server Small Business Edition and only needed a file server, domain controller, and a simple email and internet site. Linux fit the bill and hosted all 4 nicely, but that was supported server hardware and not for John in the Office to play his games or run Office on his Toshiba laptop with strange/cheap hardware. Dells do not even make good drivers for Windows in my experience and I hate them with a passion. However, since Michael Dell returned the quality has improved tremendously.
I read your posts and you know your stuff. I used to charge $75/hr when I lived in Alaska for the rates and it sounds like the $35/hr might be a little low for your expertise. I never heard of that app you mentioned that kills adware infected with Flash. I will give it a try since I use music on youtube and prefer not to live without it.
I want a new cell phone interface. One where key functionalty is removed and only one app can be shown at a time with strange mouse gestures that take up the whole screen to shuffle between apps with no buttons focused on single tasking.
Worse, Microsoft lets you uninstall apps and does not like your pc down so you can run apps like pc-decrapifier.
"I haven't tried to uninstall them, but they don't run in the background automatically unless the Running Apps utility is lying to me...
My Samsung Galaxy S was lying to me. Without that Advanced Task Killer App I had no idea these apps were even running in the background. Do not trust the task killer that came with your phone. I use AT&T and not Sprint, but still these apps like their news and map programs puts battery life 5 hours which is is unacceptable to me. I took the grandparents advice and will see how long my battery lasts.
It bugs me as it makes clueless users think more highly of the DRM walled garden of Iphone which does not have such garbage. But still
You saved my opinion of Andriod with your post.
I was wondering why my Samsung Galaxy only had 5 hours of battery life. It was terrible. I used the built in task program and could extend the battery life to 6 hours as long as I didn't use it.
I used Advanced Task Killer and was shocked my phone had 12 apps like youtube, messenger, news, and even Google Maps all sucking data. I find it rotten like a rootkit almost (not quite) that the task ender that came with my phone was intentionally crippled. That is slimy to say the least. Now I know why my phone's battery life is so mediocre compared to an I-phone. Still why should I of had to do download and do that?
Maybe an Iphone is not so bad after all even with the DRM craziness in it (why I use Andriod).
If you have an Andriod phone you can't even use Google???
It makes no sense and the phones are lucked because Microsoft gave them a contract dictating that they must be locked so they can get ad revenue and hurt Google. I find this unacceptable, which is why I choose AT&T (yes I know) as my Andriod platform of choice. At least I am root on my own phone
The problem is moving optimizations to sofware which is the most retarded thing I ever heard. Most problems are not parrallizeable (if such a word exists) and is not needed if Intel made decent processors rather than the Itanium disaster. VLIW is heavily dependable on this. Parallel Programming as Intel wants it is to have the developers make up for the shortcummings by having programmers invent tricks while they put more cache and other things on their chips. We have the corei series of processors now at least but still. Why should we learn how to do parallel programming because they lost billions in R&D and have these silly api's and a market to sell these tools.
Advancements have been made to make that argument obsolete as putting more cache while making compilers harder to write is not making huge improvements in performance. It is still old fashioned branch predictions. So yes it is usefull in some circumstances, but in business all I care about is how fast I can get SQL out to a client/server app or to an intranet app
I admit I have not wrote code in 5 years so I am not the best source before the professional programmers nail me here. This is just from what I see
Bill Gates has been known to fire people and encourage others to leave when MS is threatened. Look up Paull Allen?
If he is smart he would fire him as his funds for his charity are tied to Microsoft's share prices.
Even those profit centers are not turning like they once did. Let me guess what you run at work? 10 year old Windows XP with an 8 year old version of Office 2003 right? That is not good either and is lost revenue. I understand in a recession you wan to have your pc run 5 to 6 years instead of 2 to 3 to extend life to save money. However, this is rediculious.
After hours trading?! Now call me out of the loop here but I was under the assumption this was illegal? If it turned legal then I am very troubled by this.
"He wasn't much better.
His business tactics were deplorable, but Windows Mobile aka Windows CE at the time, owned 90% of the mobile market, people purchased Windows regularly every 3 years, not ever 12 years like with Windows XP, and he won the browser wars with IE all under his healm. Microsoft was in great shape when he left.
When he quit Microsoft it went downhill very very fast. Bill Gates would have fired the manager of longhorn long before Windows Vista and would have darned make sure Windows Mobile would be as competive and cool as the Iphone let alone put major dents into Blackberry before.
Bill Gates is a great businessman whether you like his products or agree with his tactics or not. I think he is probably one of the best that ever lived and even tied with Rockefeller. The fact that Windows monopolized and sucked so bad in the Windows 1.0 - Windows 3.11 days is testament to this.
Lack of vision with Balmer is another one besides letting the cream of the crop rot. Incompetent management needs to be cleared and if you have no vision you tend to get it from the same incompentent managers and directors. Now, competitors are coming in and winning. Apple, IBM, Mozilla, Google, etc. There are smaller players too who no longer feel threatened are entering the market as well and things at Microsoft need to change FAST
As stated before, MS can't move beyond Windows and Office.
Outside of this MS won and then lost the cell phone mobile wars very badly from having a near monopoly. Very embarrasing and bad. They lost on the tablets running WindowsXP to the Ipad. MS had a much better better vision before the Office team crippled it. The other products are too little too late, such as Bing, Zune, MS Social, etc. Now looking at the cream of the crop MS Windows/Office, Windows Vista.... no need to go further and the ribbon in Windows 2007 and Windows 2010. I personally love the ribbon after learning to get used to it in college and then discovering the alt key. Seriously, it is a unix person's dream of just hitting alt and then following the numbers/letters for the shortcuts. You can do whatever you want without the mosue or keyboard!
Windows mobile aka Windows CE had 90% of the smartphone market. Balmer watched Blackberry enter, then Apple, and then still let Andriod enter until they dipped in single digit marketshare. Now Balmer freaks out?? A little late there bud. That could have made billions. He let incompentent managers who hated progress keep their jobs developing Office and Windows bully the company while their breakfast was eaten. I mean Balmer now just fired the manager of Windows Mobile and finally fired teh manager for Windows after Longhorn was in dvelopment for 5 years and billions later with no ROI.
The problem is adoption of Windows/Office. How many here work for an employer that still uses Windows XP and Office 2003? That is lost revenue. Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 & 2010 discourage adoption. Windows 7 is great for me and it may give some consumers to switch who are not cheap but businesses remain on XP. Even if businesses kept upgrading software before 2004 the shareholders need growth. Not selling the same old stuff.
XBOX with Microsoft entertainment was losing a billion dollars a quarter as it just could not compete with the Wii or PS3. They need a new CEO and they need to fire many people to send a message. Microsoft has a supurb R&D that these clowns refuse to utilize so they can have pissing matches. The shareholders need to vote him out as Apple and IBM their 2 past competitors are not eating them for lunch.
If I were the new CEO of Microsoft I would make Azure into the operating system it was supposed to be and make Windows 8 the final version of Windows. Again, the Windows team crippled it so they would appear more important. I would make a tablet edition of WIndows 8 and maybe come out with a few more Windows Mobile Oses to catchup. Microsoft is losing to clouds and these businesses wont upgrade their platforms of Windows/Office so a cloud is where the market needs to go next so I could suck monthly fees out of them. And of course I would fire directors and management of Windows and Office as they are ruining the company to send a powerful message to change or get out.
Ya no shit.
Gnome-Shell is why I gave up on Linux and switched to Windows 7. I saw the writting on the wall last March, and KDE is not going to go back to 3.5 anytime soon in terms of functionality. Microsoft incorporated many gestures and tablet features in Windows 7, such as dragging the title bar to maximize and unmaximize like Gnome and the dekstop preview by moving the cursor over icons of running apps is very cool. But they kept the original design for screens so I would not worry. Apple and Microsoft have billions in gui R&D and would not be retarded like the Gnome folks who think there degrees in CS make them UI experts.
My guess is Microsoft will have Windows 8 be in a tablet mode that you can enable if you wish. However, Windows 7 has both so you can work on a tiny touch screen and still have it somewhat tablet/cell phone like or use it like a traditional desktop.
Wow!
Thanks a lot. I may use scientific linux 6.x for awhile now until Gnome-Shell 3.1 and some extensions come out to fix it.
Well using Windows sets the bar pretty low. I mean is there an OS worse than DOS/Windows 3.1 and before? It was the worst most primptive OS on the market.
I am not saying this as a anti_MS zealot here, as I think Windows 7 is an excellent client OS. I just remember being in middle school and highschool and being dumbfounded on why Dos can't use more than 640k of ram and how I had to run Memmaker to trick device drivers and programs to use more ram. Then I found out it was so primptive it had to let the bios handle the keyboard. It was a braindead command.com interpretor and yet it stole the market!? Some here on slashdot are a fans of DOS so I dunno. The schools macs people laughed at but at least they could do real multimedia and cooperative multitasking and some basic real memory management.
Anyway Windows 1.0/DOS were pretty horrible and OS/2 may not have been even good but it sure looked great compared to the alternatives.
CentOS uses a circa 2006 kernel which has a fraction of the throughput of a modern Linux Kernel. 5.6 is very old and no longer maintained with security fixes.
If this cluster is utilized for five years then it will still be using a 2006 kernel in 2016! I lost faith in them when they refused to make CentOS 6 as RedHat 6.1 is now out.
Scientific Linux 6.0 is built on Redhat Enterprise Edition 6 which is highly tested and tuned for server throughout put, power management, and stability compared to a stock vinalla kernel. The performance will be much better than a stock debian stable kernel or Ubuntu for example. Redhat has a bunch of hackers. Scientific Linux includes apps used for scientists which maybe your target market if you are a university too. If your old cluster has scripts and tools optimzied for Redhat and RPMs then makes sense to use a Redhat Distribution base.
If the scientific apps with Scientific Linux are not being utilized then just buy a license for RedHat Enterrpise Edition 6.1. The licensing fees are affordable if you have the budget for a large cluster and switches. With Redhat Enterprise edition you have support too if something goes down.
Remember to save a few bucks and go free is silly in an expensive project like this.
Where I worked we had to reboot our Windows 2003 small bussiness edition server boxen once a week to prevent GP faults. The systems turned into glue even though ram was free. Unless the memory routines and algorithms were replaced with Windows 2008 I do not think it is ready as a real server os yet. Thr fact that bussinesses bought $35000 switches just to run Windows was hysterical.