Let's face it, Microsoft has recently seen a huge amount of innovation.
- a completely new UI for Windows
- gambling a couple billion dollars on Windows RT
- locking down the XBox with draconian DRM
These were HUGE gambles, Ballmer had HUGE stones. They were really betting the company on this dynamic new strategic path.
It just so happens that this is innovation that really fscking sucked. They need a CEO who recognizes that Microsoft cannot innovate. It is not something that the company does well.
It could have something to do with the fact that I care so little about random posts on tech news sites that I type as fast as I can and don't bother to proofread.
This post is a public plea for someone within Microsoft to come forward with documentation on the rationale behind the recent apparent loss of all reason and common sense by the company.
Please, please come forward now!
The actions of this company make no sense to us. We are bewildered by the illogically behavior of Microsoft's direction.
Everyone knows that to ruin the useability of Windows by the utter donkey skit that is the Metro Interface makes no sense. There must be some greater reason behind these mysterious decisions that Microsoft has recently under taken.
So give us an internal memo or two! There must have been voices of intelligence within Microsoft who argued against the self-destructive path that it has recently undertaken.
Let us know why Microsoft is committing public suicide.
Sorry, I got the email monitoring covered elsewhere. I got a web browser open, I got Outlook alerts in the lower right of the screen.
When I open the open the start menu to run some old program (the name of which I have probably forgotten because I installed in 2 year ago), I don't want to learn about my inbox, my facebook, the price of MSFT.
To all the Microsoft Shills who insist on listing 100 different windows key combinations to replicate what was available from the old start menu, or if you are going to advise me to start typing in program names to launch programs on my mouse operated graphical user interface:
No, the 'minimum effort' way to access programs is to put a Quick Launch Bar into the Windows task bar. One mouse flick, one click. I have 20 programs with icons there that I launch without the back-assward, 20th century methodology of typing in program names.
The old menu allows quick access to the majority of system functions. It did this with a minimum of clicks, mouse movement and extraneous information.
If I am working, I don't want to see weather information, stock quotes and baseball scores. Sure, you can remove those tiles from the start screen, but then that defeats the purpose of having that information available when I am not working.
I actually might enjoy the start screen when I am not working, but that goes back to the core malfunction of the start screen: it is mixing core functional areas:
(1) Program/System/Settings Launcher (2) Information Provider
Why is so freaking difficult for the so-called User Interface experts at Microsoft to understand that this is a colossal fuck up to jam these two key functional areas onto the Start Screen?
Web apps have not destroyed the need for a Windows operating system. Smart phones and tablets are not winning/selling because they have web apps. They are winning because they have a innovative touch interface designed for the hardware, and a huge amount of non-web app software. The browser is just another application which is installed on the phone/tablet, an application which usually takes back seat to a custom app.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail were going to succeed if accessed via Internet Explorer or via Netscape.
In the battle to place the box under the desk, Microsoft still reigns supreme. And web apps have nothing to do with that market. The battle to place the phone in the pocket isn't being decided by which web browser is on the phone.
Microsoft gained nothing by destroying Netscape and limiting adoption of Java. They lost hundreds of millions in legal fees, and then billions went out door to the EU. Microsoft was going to make their money. They had the desktop monopoly. Apple will never gain much desktop market share with their pricing structure. Java was a joke, a complete user interface travesty. They could have fired everyone on the IE team, and licensed Netscape, and it wouldn't have affected one bit the Office and Windows money train that was coming down the tracks.
It doesn't matter one iota which web browser a windows machine is using. Microsoft already got paid. Browsers are commodities. Ballmer and Gates were such paranoid dicks, and non-technologists, that they couldn't see that.
Purely as an exercise in alternate reality, it is interesting to wonder how the computing landscape would have been different, most certainly superior to state of affairs now, if Ballmer and Gates had not been such conniving, backstabbing dicks.
The company would almost certainly be an order of magnitude wealthier, more respected and better positioned in the marketplace, if those two guys hadn't felt it necessary to throw the company's weight around by executing the many well known monopolistic and consumer-unfriendly practices that they are so well known for.
If anything, the strategic failure of Microsoft as a company to set itself against so many others in the industry, is missing from the debate about the good and bad aspects of Steve Ballmer's legacy.
Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it.
It is fairly easy to posit that a good amount of the effort behind the rise of Linux was simply due to a common reaction against the back alley tactics deployed by Microsoft. And if Linux is not as developed as it was in 2008, does Google have something upon which to build Android? Something which can be released and developed under the GNU license? And that is just one potential hypothetical.
So obviously there were numerous plot holes in the movies, but the most egregious was the station's lack of defense systems.
So the super rich, who have enslaved the majority of humanity on hell earth, spend billions on a floating space station and they don't bother to defend the thing?
Except that Russia is not good place to do business (at least for manufacturing):
Endemic levels of corruption (higher than even China), a for sale judiciary, a regime that is intent on scaring away foreign capital, workforce that unsuited for large scale Chinese style factory deployment, oligarchical control of existing infrastructure and government, nontransparent capital markets, the list goes on and on.
"Live tiles turned start screen into “incessantly blinking, unruly environment that feels like dozens of carnival barkers yelling at you simultaneously."
"Give me the zen garden calm of Steve Jobs' "less is more" approach to interface design any day."
These are two best quotes from this article and the comments section.
The game of Risk (also a Hasbro property) has a multitude of imitations around the web, one of which is my web-based version, called Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com). I've heard from the creators of other Risk games that they have been threatened by Hasbro if they have used Risk trademarks. I believe that the precedent is fairly clear: Hasbro and other corporate entities won't touch you if you stay away from trademarks, game rules cannot be copyrighted.
What's amazing is how poorly done Scrabulous is. The site design, flow and presentation are incredibly weak. A fair amount of the site appears to be "under construction". And they're going to pay tens of millions for that?
I have a game that donates to charity, more precisely to Heifer International (www.heifer.org). In fact, as I have tired of programming the thing, the donation aspect is one of the main motivators for actually working on it.
It is a clone of risk called Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com).
Our motto is: Good can come from global domination.
Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com), a web-based Risk clone is without a doubt the game of the year. Never before has playing Risk been so easy and so accessible.
A brief list on why GS is so great:
1. Gone are the hours devoted to setup and dice rolling. 2. Your house mates and relatives will not have to collared and cajoled into sitting down with you, the "strategy game freak", for 5 to 6 hours. 3. Grand Strategy uses Ajax and is fully Web 2.0. VCs love it and can't give stop giving me money. 4. It is guaranteed that while playing Grand Strategy that crazed strangers will not take slight at your mentioning the weakness of the Ukraine and attack you on subway trains!
While developing an Ajax application called Grand Strategy, an implementation of the board game Risk, I have found one of my main gripes with Javascript to be the download times involved with using large amounts of it. There are things that you can do to mitigate: gzip compression, displaying progress bars, use short variable and function names, and then caching. There are ways to do dynamic downloading of portions of a library; you can see these in Dojo. However, these dictate that you radically structure your code to support it.
It would be very nice if the whole browser based development environment had mechanisms to deal with the dynamic loading of javascript.
Next we come to the next major javascript issue: the unreliable browser cache. Users of my game will occasionally not be able to log in, or a portion of the game becomes unusable, even after having played the game for weeks on end. Inevitably, some javascript in their browser's cache will have become corrupted, or seemingly partially downloaded.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it, Microsoft has recently seen a huge amount of innovation.
- a completely new UI for Windows
- gambling a couple billion dollars on Windows RT
- locking down the XBox with draconian DRM
These were HUGE gambles, Ballmer had HUGE stones. They were really betting the company on this dynamic new strategic path.
It just so happens that this is innovation that really fscking sucked. They need a CEO who recognizes that Microsoft cannot innovate. It is not something that the company does well.
It could have something to do with the fact that I care so little about random posts on tech news sites that I type as fast as I can and don't bother to proofread.
But no, such a logical deduction is beyond you.
This post is a public plea for someone within Microsoft to come forward with documentation on the rationale behind the recent apparent loss of all reason and common sense by the company.
Please, please come forward now!
The actions of this company make no sense to us. We are bewildered by the illogically behavior of Microsoft's direction.
Everyone knows that to ruin the useability of Windows by the utter donkey skit that is the Metro Interface makes no sense. There must be some greater reason behind these mysterious decisions that Microsoft has recently under taken.
So give us an internal memo or two! There must have been voices of intelligence within Microsoft who argued against the self-destructive path that it has recently undertaken.
Let us know why Microsoft is committing public suicide.
Sorry, I got the email monitoring covered elsewhere. I got a web browser open, I got Outlook alerts in the lower right of the screen.
When I open the open the start menu to run some old program (the name of which I have probably forgotten because I installed in 2 year ago), I don't want to learn about my inbox, my facebook, the price of MSFT.
Combining these functional areas is brain damage.
No, no and no.
To all the Microsoft Shills who insist on listing 100 different windows key combinations to replicate what was available from the old start menu, or if you are going to advise me to start typing in program names to launch programs on my mouse operated graphical user interface:
YOU ARE FUCKING WRONG, AND STUPID IN THE HEAD.
No, the 'minimum effort' way to access programs is to put a Quick Launch Bar into the Windows task bar. One mouse flick, one click. I have 20 programs with icons there that I launch without the back-assward, 20th century methodology of typing in program names.
The old menu allows quick access to the majority of system functions. It did this with a minimum of clicks, mouse movement and extraneous information.
If I am working, I don't want to see weather information, stock quotes and baseball scores. Sure, you can remove those tiles from the start screen, but then that defeats the purpose of having that information available when I am not working.
I actually might enjoy the start screen when I am not working, but that goes back to the core malfunction of the start screen: it is mixing core functional areas:
(1) Program/System/Settings Launcher
(2) Information Provider
Why is so freaking difficult for the so-called User Interface experts at Microsoft to understand that this is a colossal fuck up to jam these two key functional areas onto the Start Screen?
Web apps have not destroyed the need for a Windows operating system. Smart phones and tablets are not winning/selling because they have web apps. They are winning because they have a innovative touch interface designed for the hardware, and a huge amount of non-web app software. The browser is just another application which is installed on the phone/tablet, an application which usually takes back seat to a custom app.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail were going to succeed if accessed via Internet Explorer or via Netscape.
In the battle to place the box under the desk, Microsoft still reigns supreme. And web apps have nothing to do with that market. The battle to place the phone in the pocket isn't being decided by which web browser is on the phone.
Microsoft gained nothing by destroying Netscape and limiting adoption of Java. They lost hundreds of millions in legal fees, and then billions went out door to the EU. Microsoft was going to make their money. They had the desktop monopoly. Apple will never gain much desktop market share with their pricing structure. Java was a joke, a complete user interface travesty. They could have fired everyone on the IE team, and licensed Netscape, and it wouldn't have affected one bit the Office and Windows money train that was coming down the tracks.
It doesn't matter one iota which web browser a windows machine is using. Microsoft already got paid. Browsers are commodities. Ballmer and Gates were such paranoid dicks, and non-technologists, that they couldn't see that.
Purely as an exercise in alternate reality, it is interesting to wonder how the computing landscape would have been different, most certainly superior to state of affairs now, if Ballmer and Gates had not been such conniving, backstabbing dicks.
The company would almost certainly be an order of magnitude wealthier, more respected and better positioned in the marketplace, if those two guys hadn't felt it necessary to throw the company's weight around by executing the many well known monopolistic and consumer-unfriendly practices that they are so well known for.
If anything, the strategic failure of Microsoft as a company to set itself against so many others in the industry, is missing from the debate about the good and bad aspects of Steve Ballmer's legacy.
Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it.
It is fairly easy to posit that a good amount of the effort behind the rise of Linux was simply due to a common reaction against the back alley tactics deployed by Microsoft. And if Linux is not as developed as it was in 2008, does Google have something upon which to build Android? Something which can be released and developed under the GNU license? And that is just one potential hypothetical.
You have a folder named Music, you have subfolders named A, B, C, D, ...
How exactly does that not scale?
I have many, many gigabytes of songs.
So obviously there were numerous plot holes in the movies, but the most egregious was the station's lack of defense systems.
So the super rich, who have enslaved the majority of humanity on hell earth, spend billions on a floating space station and they don't bother to defend the thing?
This is probably a stupid question, is the list of applications on the tile screen and desktop screen inclusive of both tablet apps and desktop apps?
There is probably just one list of programs.
How does one know if a program is a tablet app or a desktop app?
So they took away the start menu: the simple list of programs you have installed.
So in Windows 8, how do you find the program you installed 6 months ago, but you forgot the program's name?
This use case, finding an old forgotten program, is the only thing I use the Start Menu for.
Except that Russia is not good place to do business (at least for manufacturing):
Endemic levels of corruption (higher than even China), a for sale judiciary, a regime that is intent on scaring away foreign capital, workforce that unsuited for large scale Chinese style factory deployment, oligarchical control of existing infrastructure and government, nontransparent capital markets, the list goes on and on.
"Live tiles turned start screen into “incessantly blinking, unruly environment that feels like dozens of carnival barkers yelling at you simultaneously."
"Give me the zen garden calm of Steve Jobs' "less is more" approach to interface design any day."
These are two best quotes from this article and the comments section.
There will be no next Obama administration. Didn't you see that last presidential debate?
Obama is too stupid and lazy to be president.
Mitt knows that it isn't possible to "heal the planet", (insert Romney smirk here), or begin to slow the rise of the oceans.
So when Mittens is elected all of these silly MPG ratings will be rolled back once we achieve North American energy independence.
Naturally, the robots would produce human colonists as sex slaves to serve their craven robotic needs.
All that needs to be said about this story:
Mandatory ethical birth control, which makes people numb from the waist down and takes every pleasure out of sex.
And he hasn't made any great music in a very long time.
What about his new tune "Purple and Gold"?
Purple and Gold
You see "Purple Rain" was simply an earlier, less mature Vikings tribute.
The game of Risk (also a Hasbro property) has a multitude of imitations around the web, one of which is my web-based version, called Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com). I've heard from the creators of other Risk games that they have been threatened by Hasbro if they have used Risk trademarks. I believe that the precedent is fairly clear: Hasbro and other corporate entities won't touch you if you stay away from trademarks, game rules cannot be copyrighted.
What's amazing is how poorly done Scrabulous is. The site design, flow and presentation are incredibly weak. A fair amount of the site appears to be "under construction". And they're going to pay tens of millions for that?
I have a game that donates to charity, more precisely to Heifer International (www.heifer.org). In fact, as I have tired of programming the thing, the donation aspect is one of the main motivators for actually working on it.
It is a clone of risk called Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com).
Our motto is: Good can come from global domination.
No, I was justing do a code update. No slashdotting involved.
Grand Strategy (www.denizengames.com), a web-based Risk clone is without a doubt the game of the year. Never before has playing Risk been so easy and so accessible.
A brief list on why GS is so great:
1. Gone are the hours devoted to setup and dice rolling.
2. Your house mates and relatives will not have to collared and cajoled into sitting down with you, the "strategy game freak", for 5 to 6 hours.
3. Grand Strategy uses Ajax and is fully Web 2.0. VCs love it and can't give stop giving me money.
4. It is guaranteed that while playing Grand Strategy that crazed strangers will not take slight at your mentioning the weakness of the Ukraine and attack you on subway trains!
While developing an Ajax application called Grand Strategy, an implementation of the board game Risk, I have found one of my main gripes with Javascript to be the download times involved with using large amounts of it. There are things that you can do to mitigate: gzip compression, displaying progress bars, use short variable and function names, and then caching. There are ways to do dynamic downloading of portions of a library; you can see these in Dojo. However, these dictate that you radically structure your code to support it.
It would be very nice if the whole browser based development environment had mechanisms to deal with the dynamic loading of javascript.
Next we come to the next major javascript issue: the unreliable browser cache. Users of my game will occasionally not be able to log in, or a portion of the game becomes unusable, even after having played the game for weeks on end. Inevitably, some javascript in their browser's cache will have become corrupted, or seemingly partially downloaded.