You think Apple is bad... try HP. My wife has the low-end business laser jet and needed to upgrade memory. HP sold the 128MB memory module for approximately 40 times the price of was a regular memory module would cost (this was several years ago and it went for something like $800), and as it turned out, 10 - 15 times the price of what you could get it for from a third party. It was just regular old DRAM but in a non-standard package, and I found replacement memory on-line for about $50 each.
I remember many years ago, being in Microcenter and seeing a product for the PC, and occasionally wandering into the Mac department and seeing the exact same product, same brand and everything being sold for 50% more for the Mac. It's always been true. Apple provides products that are superior in many ways, but they have a monopoly of sorts as well, and exploit every drop of profit from it.
Network file transfer was a huge thing for me. My "main" machine is a laptop and I spend a fair amount of time organizing my music archives (legal stuff... I have about 1000 ripped CDs and several thousand tracks from eMusic and Mindawn), photos (I've scanned several thousand slides and photos, plus the output from the family's digital cameras), the "wallpaper" I collect from Flickr, NASA, Webshots, etc, and my subscription to Digital Blasphemy and plenty of other things as well. Since finances restrict me to using a large number of relatively small harddrives I've bought over the years, I move stuff around a lot in an attempt to keep it well-organized and backed up. In the short time I used Vista, I found the network file transfer performance to be ghastly. There's no excuse for screwing up such a fundamental part of the OS.
You're preaching to the choir. I had an Amiga, and almost wet myself laughing when Gates made the claim you couldn't multitask with less than a megabyte of memory, although maybe that was another of those "apocryphal" quotes, even though Gates never made a non-trivial prediction about technology that was anything near reality.
Well, Captain, remember it was the same mentality that the robber barons of the 19th century used to justify themselves.
Defending Microsoft on its financial success is to take a totally objectivist, cutthroat mentality of unfettered capitalism, or to be woefully ignorant.
Windows 95 was 13 years ago. Sure they did lots of usability studies. They still do, but the vast majority of the effort that goes into Microsoft products these days seems to serve Microsoft and its media buddies, not customers. Oh, well, there's that butt-ugly Aero stuff, which doesn't look at as good as KDE did years ago, or OSX when it first came out.
Or are they retiring XP because the user base has clearly abandoned it in favor of the new replacement, to which they are upgrading in droves, and there's no more reason to keep it around. I mean, sure, businesses exist to make money, but _idea_ is to make money by making happy customers and selling a superior product.
Meanwhile, if Vista still weren't out it _would_ be vapor, because it was promised in 2003. QED.
I mean, buy Office 2011 and get Windows 7 for free, Would you buy it and use it?
No. Do you know how much Office costs? I could buy a laptop for that much.
Windows 7 is going to have to be a radical transformation (you know, like Vista only in the direction of "better") for me to even consider using it. By then (then being 2012 or whenever it will actually ship), I doubt there will be anything that you could do with Windows that couldn't be done as well or better on Linux. Heck, right now that list only includes games and very little else.
Besides if Microsoft totally turns it around and produces a lean, mean, sleek OS... and it could happen... Windows 7 will still be shackled with tremendous amounts of rights-infringing, temper-shortening, interoperability-breaking, freedom-restricting functionality.
I mean, if Vista worked perfectly today, i.e., no bugs, including being as fast or faster than XP in all it does, I still wouldn't have a reason use it. Would you?
I would love to see MS programmers working on Linux, they would be freed of the crippling bureaucratic management that has done nothing but reduce their efforts to a thick, oily, billowing cloud of pure FAIL rolling across the fields of technology.
I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who'd been part of the NT kernel and SQL Server teams and he was incredibly knowledgeable and really sharp. I'm sure Microsoft has its share of loser programmers, but they are far outweighed by its loser management which is drenched with the stink of FAIL all the way to its chair-throwing. triple-Y chromosomed, chrome-domed top.
Ever been to MS Research? They are on to some really cool stuff. Too bad all the neat stuff they make never makes it into a shipping product, because it doesn't further upper management's goals of tyranny and world domination. Remember, the user experience is irrelevant to management, it's all about lock-in and unfair competition. If it was about making a better product, Vista would still be in development.
Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses"
You're right, much of it can be attributed to Microsoft's pathetic documentation. Nevertheless, in 1990 you couldn't do many very basic things without reverse engineering. There are multiple books written on the topic that leave it beyond a doubt that only back in those days Microsoft or Microsoft's special "friends" had the information necessary to write software that could compete, performance-wise (as ironic as that is) with Office, or do debugging, or compete with Microsoft fully. they stacked the deck in their own favor from the get-go and have never let up.
While this may no longer be true, especially because Microsoft products these days are almost never the best in their fields, and are often pathetic also-rans, the damage was done long ago. In fact, these days Microsoft has been coasting on inertia for years, all their efforts going into maintaining lock-in and stifling competition because that's all they have left.
Maybe so, but I found OpenOffice Write far easier to use than Word. Using Word should be branded as torture under the Geneva Convention. Frankly the people who would inflict Word on the world would easily be capable of waterboarding and worse.
The idea of Ballmer standing on Gates' concave chest and dangle-spitting on his face until he gives in his bullying, triple-Y chromosome demands is quite amusing, but Microsoft was corrupt and hated long before Ballmer was in charge. Or does nobody remember Andrew Schulman exposing Microsoft's monopolistic abuses with "Undocumented Windows" almost 20 years ago?
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Gates was always a total bastard of a businessman (and only marginally technical at best, just listen to anything he says, he doesn't have a clue) and I don't think you can give credit to the chair-tosser for his long reign of corporate evil.
Meh. Chicken Little types have short attention spans. I'm sure they will be forget about "global warming" in a few years and be wailing about some completely new reason the world will end in the next three months.
No kidding... a "biology major"? All you need to be is someone who speaks English.
Reminds me when I was discussing a CS project in college with someone. It was a memory management simulation and I was comparing a FIFO scheme. Someone present at the conversation who was an accounting major or something said, "FIFO? You must be studying accounting."
Yeah, like a term as generic as FIFO couldn't apply to different fields.
Reminds me of watching a business major using the computer. This was back in the DOS days and he was dutifully typing in a huge list of commands, but apparently had screwed up something early on and was still at the DOS prompt that would launch the program he was supposed to be using, so he would type in a command and it would respond "Bad command or file name" over and over and over, completely oblivious to the obvious error messages.
I would have offered to help, but so often when I tried to help an obviously non-computer-literate person, and politely, not in the usual sarcastic way you often expect of computer geeks, they would get very snarky about it, so I just quietly watching him make an idiot of himself. (If he'd been a she, I probably would have spoken up anyway.) CS students on the other hand were more than happy to be helped, and I developed quite a reputation among classmates as someone who could fix your problems. I was convinced you could get a CS degree without actually being able to know something because there was so much help available.
Fortunately, I was able to make a career out of fixing people's problems.
Well, the developers need better targetting because millions of people and billions of man-hours are wasted by Word. I bet Word causes more pain and wasted time than the U.S. tax code.
so the correct date is Oct 25th 2012 just 2 months before the end of the world as we know it.
And the prophecies of the end of the world will of course be fulfilled by a malfunctioning copy of Windows 7 beta 1, an Internet-enabled refrigerator and a nuclear reactor.
I didn't want to walk down that path, but you've got a point.
Nevertheless, a year with my children will always be more valuable to me that a year working on a project, even if both were to simply disappear. I might have learned something or have the satisfaction of having coded something really cool or clever, but in the big picture it doesn't amount to all the teaching, learning, sharing, laughter, joy (and pain) that parenthood brings.
My kids are great if for no other reason (though there are many) than the fact that they have picked up my wicked sense of humor and constantly amuse me.
e.g., A recent quip by my 12-year-old, "Always point your weapon in a safe direction, like at a hippie or politician."
I think there's some kind of rule that Word always has to take at least 30 seconds to start up, whether it was running on a 33MHz 486 with 4MB of RAM under Windows 3.1 or a 3.6GHz P4 with 4GB of RAM running on Vista (or even XP).
Selfish people might feel that way. My kids are total pain in the ass, but I wouldn't trade them for anything (not even a set of mag wheels), because being a father is also the most satisfying job I've ever had. My kids might drive me crazy, but as soon as they're all gone, I miss 'em terribly. Before I had a family, I never laughed so much, or been a real hero to someone or felt really needed and consistently made a positive difference. (Of course, I've also never had someone puke on my head either.)
At a job, you can have a project be cancelled and a year of work is just thrown out, but that can never happen with children, because the work itself is also the meaning, and its effects are immediate as well as long-term. Of course doing good coding is also meaningful regardless of what it's used for, but it's never the same thing. I've had plenty of good jobs, and the one I have now is about the best I've had in 21 years, but the best day at work doesn't match having kids (although a good day at work is a nice break from kids:-).
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You think Apple is bad... try HP. My wife has the low-end business laser jet and needed to upgrade memory. HP sold the 128MB memory module for approximately 40 times the price of was a regular memory module would cost (this was several years ago and it went for something like $800), and as it turned out, 10 - 15 times the price of what you could get it for from a third party. It was just regular old DRAM but in a non-standard package, and I found replacement memory on-line for about $50 each.
I remember many years ago, being in Microcenter and seeing a product for the PC, and occasionally wandering into the Mac department and seeing the exact same product, same brand and everything being sold for 50% more for the Mac. It's always been true. Apple provides products that are superior in many ways, but they have a monopoly of sorts as well, and exploit every drop of profit from it.
There is nothing wrong in Vista. Nothing that I have found.
You talk about people being trolls? This is the biggest troll statement I've seen here in a while.
Network file transfer was a huge thing for me. My "main" machine is a laptop and I spend a fair amount of time organizing my music archives (legal stuff... I have about 1000 ripped CDs and several thousand tracks from eMusic and Mindawn), photos (I've scanned several thousand slides and photos, plus the output from the family's digital cameras), the "wallpaper" I collect from Flickr, NASA, Webshots, etc, and my subscription to Digital Blasphemy and plenty of other things as well. Since finances restrict me to using a large number of relatively small harddrives I've bought over the years, I move stuff around a lot in an attempt to keep it well-organized and backed up. In the short time I used Vista, I found the network file transfer performance to be ghastly. There's no excuse for screwing up such a fundamental part of the OS.
You're preaching to the choir. I had an Amiga, and almost wet myself laughing when Gates made the claim you couldn't multitask with less than a megabyte of memory, although maybe that was another of those "apocryphal" quotes, even though Gates never made a non-trivial prediction about technology that was anything near reality.
Well, Captain, remember it was the same mentality that the robber barons of the 19th century used to justify themselves.
Defending Microsoft on its financial success is to take a totally objectivist, cutthroat mentality of unfettered capitalism, or to be woefully ignorant.
Windows 95 was 13 years ago. Sure they did lots of usability studies. They still do, but the vast majority of the effort that goes into Microsoft products these days seems to serve Microsoft and its media buddies, not customers. Oh, well, there's that butt-ugly Aero stuff, which doesn't look at as good as KDE did years ago, or OSX when it first came out.
Or are they retiring XP because the user base has clearly abandoned it in favor of the new replacement, to which they are upgrading in droves, and there's no more reason to keep it around. I mean, sure, businesses exist to make money, but _idea_ is to make money by making happy customers and selling a superior product.
Meanwhile, if Vista still weren't out it _would_ be vapor, because it was promised in 2003. QED.
I mean, buy Office 2011 and get Windows 7 for free, Would you buy it and use it?
No. Do you know how much Office costs? I could buy a laptop for that much.
Windows 7 is going to have to be a radical transformation (you know, like Vista only in the direction of "better") for me to even consider using it. By then (then being 2012 or whenever it will actually ship), I doubt there will be anything that you could do with Windows that couldn't be done as well or better on Linux. Heck, right now that list only includes games and very little else.
Besides if Microsoft totally turns it around and produces a lean, mean, sleek OS... and it could happen... Windows 7 will still be shackled with tremendous amounts of rights-infringing, temper-shortening, interoperability-breaking, freedom-restricting functionality.
I mean, if Vista worked perfectly today, i.e., no bugs, including being as fast or faster than XP in all it does, I still wouldn't have a reason use it. Would you?
I would love to see MS programmers working on Linux, they would be freed of the crippling bureaucratic management that has done nothing but reduce their efforts to a thick, oily, billowing cloud of pure FAIL rolling across the fields of technology.
I worked with an ex-Microsoftie who'd been part of the NT kernel and SQL Server teams and he was incredibly knowledgeable and really sharp. I'm sure Microsoft has its share of loser programmers, but they are far outweighed by its loser management which is drenched with the stink of FAIL all the way to its chair-throwing. triple-Y chromosomed, chrome-domed top.
Ever been to MS Research? They are on to some really cool stuff. Too bad all the neat stuff they make never makes it into a shipping product, because it doesn't further upper management's goals of tyranny and world domination. Remember, the user experience is irrelevant to management, it's all about lock-in and unfair competition. If it was about making a better product, Vista would still be in development.
Yeah, I'm sure China, Russia and India are lying awake at night worrying about the possible long-term effects of pollution.
Undocumented functionality, in and of itself, is in no way evidence of "monopolistic abuses"
You're right, much of it can be attributed to Microsoft's pathetic documentation. Nevertheless, in 1990 you couldn't do many very basic things without reverse engineering. There are multiple books written on the topic that leave it beyond a doubt that only back in those days Microsoft or Microsoft's special "friends" had the information necessary to write software that could compete, performance-wise (as ironic as that is) with Office, or do debugging, or compete with Microsoft fully. they stacked the deck in their own favor from the get-go and have never let up.
While this may no longer be true, especially because Microsoft products these days are almost never the best in their fields, and are often pathetic also-rans, the damage was done long ago. In fact, these days Microsoft has been coasting on inertia for years, all their efforts going into maintaining lock-in and stifling competition because that's all they have left.
Maybe so, but I found OpenOffice Write far easier to use than Word. Using Word should be branded as torture under the Geneva Convention. Frankly the people who would inflict Word on the world would easily be capable of waterboarding and worse.
The idea of Ballmer standing on Gates' concave chest and dangle-spitting on his face until he gives in his bullying, triple-Y chromosome demands is quite amusing, but Microsoft was corrupt and hated long before Ballmer was in charge. Or does nobody remember Andrew Schulman exposing Microsoft's monopolistic abuses with "Undocumented Windows" almost 20 years ago?
Remember "It ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? That's not apocryphal.
Hell, I ran into undocumented functionality with the first non-trivial Windows program I tried to write. It was a little utility to manage and assign icons in Program Manager, but I could never figure out how to extract the icon resources from executables because... it wasn't documented anywhere. At least in 1990 or so when I was doing this.
Gates was always a total bastard of a businessman (and only marginally technical at best, just listen to anything he says, he doesn't have a clue) and I don't think you can give credit to the chair-tosser for his long reign of corporate evil.
Sometimes the newer games cut out the middle man and come out pre-useless-ized for your convenience. Yes, D&D 4e, I'm talking to you.
Meh. Chicken Little types have short attention spans. I'm sure they will be forget about "global warming" in a few years and be wailing about some completely new reason the world will end in the next three months.
No kidding... a "biology major"? All you need to be is someone who speaks English.
Reminds me when I was discussing a CS project in college with someone. It was a memory management simulation and I was comparing a FIFO scheme. Someone present at the conversation who was an accounting major or something said, "FIFO? You must be studying accounting."
Yeah, like a term as generic as FIFO couldn't apply to different fields.
Reminds me of watching a business major using the computer. This was back in the DOS days and he was dutifully typing in a huge list of commands, but apparently had screwed up something early on and was still at the DOS prompt that would launch the program he was supposed to be using, so he would type in a command and it would respond "Bad command or file name" over and over and over, completely oblivious to the obvious error messages.
I would have offered to help, but so often when I tried to help an obviously non-computer-literate person, and politely, not in the usual sarcastic way you often expect of computer geeks, they would get very snarky about it, so I just quietly watching him make an idiot of himself. (If he'd been a she, I probably would have spoken up anyway.) CS students on the other hand were more than happy to be helped, and I developed quite a reputation among classmates as someone who could fix your problems. I was convinced you could get a CS degree without actually being able to know something because there was so much help available.
Fortunately, I was able to make a career out of fixing people's problems.
What pain?! He's got enough money to pay someone to use Vista and read e-mails to him.
Well, the developers need better targetting because millions of people and billions of man-hours are wasted by Word. I bet Word causes more pain and wasted time than the U.S. tax code.
From what I've heard you can sometimes get better results opening Word documents with OpenOffice.
Word can only be explained as a plot to sap the productivity of computer users, towards what end I cannot say.
so the correct date is Oct 25th 2012 just 2 months before the end of the world as we know it.
And the prophecies of the end of the world will of course be fulfilled by a malfunctioning copy of Windows 7 beta 1, an Internet-enabled refrigerator and a nuclear reactor.
Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head.
Any investment into my kids, sometimes fun, often tedious, occasionally heart-wrenching has always returned to me tenfold.
I didn't want to walk down that path, but you've got a point.
Nevertheless, a year with my children will always be more valuable to me that a year working on a project, even if both were to simply disappear. I might have learned something or have the satisfaction of having coded something really cool or clever, but in the big picture it doesn't amount to all the teaching, learning, sharing, laughter, joy (and pain) that parenthood brings.
My kids are great if for no other reason (though there are many) than the fact that they have picked up my wicked sense of humor and constantly amuse me.
e.g., A recent quip by my 12-year-old, "Always point your weapon in a safe direction, like at a hippie or politician."
I think there's some kind of rule that Word always has to take at least 30 seconds to start up, whether it was running on a 33MHz 486 with 4MB of RAM under Windows 3.1 or a 3.6GHz P4 with 4GB of RAM running on Vista (or even XP).
Selfish people might feel that way. My kids are total pain in the ass, but I wouldn't trade them for anything (not even a set of mag wheels), because being a father is also the most satisfying job I've ever had. My kids might drive me crazy, but as soon as they're all gone, I miss 'em terribly. Before I had a family, I never laughed so much, or been a real hero to someone or felt really needed and consistently made a positive difference. (Of course, I've also never had someone puke on my head either.)
At a job, you can have a project be cancelled and a year of work is just thrown out, but that can never happen with children, because the work itself is also the meaning, and its effects are immediate as well as long-term. Of course doing good coding is also meaningful regardless of what it's used for, but it's never the same thing. I've had plenty of good jobs, and the one I have now is about the best I've had in 21 years, but the best day at work doesn't match having kids (although a good day at work is a nice break from kids :-).
You know, I am really tired of silly, childish, and unrealistic posts by immature child-like idiots on /.
Fortunately, this isn't one of them. I for one, welcome you, my consumer-rage TLD overlord.
Make sure you give him the little stick with bells and a tiny Ballmer-puppet head.