We'll see when the press starts doing major reviews of Win7. At the moment, I'm just kind of peeved that Microsoft once again changed the way things are displayed so as to make me have to learn a whole new bunch of things. Again.
I think Win7 is ok, but really Microsoft (and the over sensitive little boys who get all defensive about a goddamn OS for crying out loud), is deluding itself if they think that the general public will see much positive difference between it and Vista.
Why Microsoft had to copy Apple and introduce an Apple-like Dock (yes, I know, you clever boys invented it all yourselves), dropping the paradigm that has worked pretty well since Win 95 I do not know. I'm pretty sure people will eventually learn how it works and cope with it, but I'm just as sure that they aren't going to be thanking Microsoft for the need to have done so.
Although many Apple fans will most assuredly come up with innovative excuses for their favourite company, the truth is that Apple, given the chance, is no different than Microsoft. Without any real competition they will simply milk their customers for as much as they can possibly get away with.
Combine this with an organisation known for its intensive abuse of the financial and legal systems, like the RIAA, then you get a result that will charge you a fortune to lie to you.
I'm not sure if you were flaming OSS there, but you do realise that Apple owes a great deal to OSS and that much of what is OSX would be next to impossible without it, given that the BSD part of OSX is, in fact, OSS.
The names of these people are known and should be published at every mentioning of this incident. From this article, we know the school administrator's name is Kerry Wilson. I think that the names of the "female administrative assistant" and the "school nurse" should be published as well, in every mentioning of this incident.
Since it doesn't seem like the courts are going to give any justice to this matter, then perhaps making sure that people know who they're dealing with when they think of sending their kids to schools where these people work might help make things clearer to the so-called school district when the school empties of children because parents want nothing to do with these people.
Really, when Microsoft PR gets posted on slashdot as blatantly as this, I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to offer Microsoft an editor position/seat at slashdot?
That way we'd know which articles to lend credibility to and which to add to adblocker.
I was just thinking that the current round of very fast Javascript machines might have one side effect that will have far reaching consequences: Effects like you posted might make Flash (since a good deal of Flash on the web is used for video) and Sliverlight irrelevant ina couple of years, and when that happens, Microsoft and Adobe are going to have to find other things to do.
..... and that by loving browns and mud people they'll somehow get in the pants of "hip stylish urban women" who love to agonize over the supposed crimes of whites against "oppressed minorities."......
Sounds very much like you're agonising over the fact that those "hip stylish urban women" won't let you into their pants and you're blaming everyone else for it. Sad, man.
The iPhone software market, like it or hate it, is like any other market. There is competition and only a few are successful. It's no different to the Windows software market or the Mac software market in this this.
Wish I could mod you up. This desire to just write in any language, be it javascript, php or C++ and then mix it all togther in one project is not a good thing, imho. It's brought forward a generation of "coders" who never learned the basics of software engineering and write software that reflects that lack.
Speak for yourself. Here in Switzerland, and I know this to be a fact in Scandinavia as well, the rate of Mac adoption was higher than it is in the US for a long and was only overtaken in the US in the las year or so. I am a sysadmin for a design company here in Switzerland supporting some 45 Macs and 10 PCs all on Apple OSX Servers.
A third of our company employees are German. Like you many of them have little or no idea about using Macs and usually bitch and complain about it until I, the Mac sysadmin, has to delice their (very often equally expensive Thinkpad) PC from the usual assortment of Trojans, Spyware and general windows cruft. Then, after half a year on the Mac having had none of the crap that they had on their PCs,they often start thinking about buying their own Macs.
I bought one of their Thinkpads off them and now run Ubuntu 8.10 off it as my private machine at work.
Some of those Gung-Ho outsourcing fanatics should ask themselves why Daimler and BMW were able to sell cars in the US even though GM was selling cars at a lower price than the two mentioned above were making them at.
...Stupid package management with insane dependencies....
And you say this as a Mac user, using an OS that doesn't even have a unified package management system (And no,.pkg files don't count, since they aren't unified and there's no built-in update of uninstall mechanism)?
Your post should have been marked troll, flamebait or Macfanboi, and I say that as a Mac user myself who owns three Macs.
Although I think Apple could actually start charging Microsoft for writing their business plan, as well as the amazing total lack of innovative ability from Microsoft, Microsoft might actually be on its way to stealing another of Apple's business plans that would be far more significant: They might start making computers and mobiles themselves and selling them in their own stores.
If you were running Microsoft and finally got tired of throwing chairs at the wall, what part of Apple's business would upset you most, and no, the fact that Apple actually does do amazing innovation isn't the one you're looking for. Apple owns and sells the whole package.
Microsoft could easily start building their own PCs, notebooks, netbooks and mobiles, integrate Windows so that it works very well with them, and sell the whole package using its new stores to increase awareness of them.
Take note that Linux is starting to eat into Microsoft's low end, and the fact that some OEMs, like HP are making better Linux GUIs for these netbooks than Microsoft does. Also think what could OEMs actually do if Microsoft were to start building and selling its own hardware? Nothing. The OEMs are almost toally dependent on Microsoft for their OS as Linux could not replace Windows quickly or easily in general.
Microsoft would not even have to stop selling Windows to OEMs. Sure the OEMs would scream anti-trust and threaten legal action, but Microsoft could just point to Apple, and say, "at least we'll sell you the OS". And if Microsoft really is in as much trouble as I think they are, they might just be desperate enough to try a stunt like this.
5 to 10 yers down the road and almost no OEMs are left, only Microsoft and Apple computers, notebooks and mobiles. It's just like the American political system: two big parties that swap power every once in a while.
What surprises me is that Microsoft would even do this. I think that the combination of the PR disaster that Vista has become, the recession and the fact that Microsoft has just seen the first decrease in sales of Windows in its history means that Microsoft is starting to get very worried that the lack of Windows growth might go from a trickle into a landslide over the next few years with businesses too busy fighting for survival to be worried about updating software, and then going for Linux when they do.
Free updates to Windows 7 from OEM Vista boxes means very they lose out on all the computers that are sold from now until Win 7 is released, unless they set a cut-off date.
My guess is that this is either vapourware, i.e. designed by MS to just get some attention and then neutered with many clauses as the Windows 7 release date approaches, or else Microsoft knows something about the true sales of Vista and isn't telling and is worried that Windows 7 will end up being as much of a flop as Vista was, which might very well happen given that Win 7 is very much a service pack release of Vista.
I recently cancelled my two accounts for EVE because I was getting disillusioned with the game in general and CCP's motives in particular. Things that struck me as odd in the game:
1. The enormous amounts of time need to train skills in the game to be anywhere near able to play on a level playing field with experienced players. This has nothing to do with true skill at the game. Although CCP claims that this is to make it easier for new players to compete with olde rplayers, I suspected pretty early on that the real motivation behind this was that CCP uses this as a mechanism to get people playing longer, i.e. to make more "guaranteed" money from players as they try to compete with more experienced players.
There is no real rationale in the game for the so-called Tech 2 (and soon Tech 3) skills. They just make things longer to complete.
There is already a term in the EVE universe about this "timesink", an activity designed to make the player spend enormous amounts of time waiting to be able to do something during which CCP makes extra money out of the players.
2. Lack of content. The player versus computer missions are so similar to one another, and so lacking in anything interesting that doing missions is referred to as "grinding", i.e. something unpleasant that takes time, like doing homework, filling out taxes etc. Mining in the game is so boring that many players actually get an extra account simply to do this because it is so boring.
3. Terrible UI. The game's UI is so spectacularly bad that it is a wonder that anyone can achieve anything with it. In effect it usually means having so many windows open that you're left with a tiny portion of the screen in which you can actually play.
4. Player versus player. The one area of the game which really is interesting is almost totally off bounds to new players, who don't have the trained skills to be able to compete. There is also an increasing tendency in Eve for players to congregate in huge gangs, called "blobs" which makes casual play for a solo player extremely difficult, and this trend is only increasing.
5. Technical issues, referred to partially in the parent post, and somewhat alluded to in the topic title. Network disconnects are frequent, overburdened laggy servers are a frequent problem and UI glitches are very common. What often makes things worse is CCP's attitude towards its own failings. CCP trumpeted its development of a unique technology to fix the server lag issues, but they have simply worked around the problem by assigning more resources to areas of the game that are usually more frequented, leaving other areas sometimes even more starved of resources than they previously were.
I can't get over the feeling that CCP are a bunch of technically gifted con artists, given to the same PR misleading statements and untruths that other companies are. I think the main reason they stay in business is because they appeal to the geekiest of gamer who appreciate the game's complexity and are willing to turn a blind eye towards all the inconsistencies in it.
...Sure, MS has gotten some bad press lately but they still enjoy the overwhelming share of the OS market, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
...
I think that Microsoft might face some significant challenges with the recession. The daily news reports of enormous amounts of people being laid off at very large companies, traditionally Microsoft's major source of income, indicate to me that almost all comanies expect to lose large amounts of money in the next few years before, and if, the economy starts to pick up again.
I think that the way these companies operate in such times is that IT dpartments will be under great pressure to economise as much as they possibly can. If that using Linux and Open Office means they can save 5% a year, after retraining and reequipping, I'm pretty sure they will do it.
What I'm almost sure practically no big company in their right mind would do right now, in these times, is upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7. Those OSes require greater hardware resources than WinXP does and more than Linux does. I am sure that companies will try to use the very cheapest lowest cost hardware they can find to run their businesses.
I am aware that many companies will not find it cheaper to migrate to Linux in these times, but sooner or later, as support for XP starts to die out, they will be forced to move one way or the other. I think very few will be willing to spend big on new expensive hardware and software in the next few years.
Arguing that the difference between server and client operating systems is the same as the difference between Microsoft's various marketing attempts to make higher margins in different segments of the client operating system is a strawman argument.
The various flavours of desktop Windows are PURELY a marketing concept and have no basis in customer needs. You charge more for a so-called Ultimate version which has some extra doo-dahs, a little more for Business so you can do a Citigroup on businesses and a basic price for low margin OEM marketing speak Home Premium, and finally, you attempt to make a buck off OEM makers in areas where everyone pirates Windows in any case with Home Starter, Home basic etc.
This marketing differentiation is one of the reasons why Microsoft is perceived, even if incorrectly, as becoming increasingly irrelevant in todays market. Paying more than a $100 extra for some doodah that you can replace with some freeware doesn't make you any friends.
Customers don't care. No one gives a shit why MS does this. All it does is enforce people's opinion that Windows is confusing, and above all "" doesn't just work.
People like you make me lose hope in the capability of America to drag itself up out of the shit bath it is currently in. The level of pure dumbass stupidity in your post would be one thing, except that there seems to be a whole load of your "OMG SOCIALIST!!!!!!1111(one)" loony friends here on slashdot.
Did you lot ever stop to think that although some small things might get better or worse under Obama (or under McCain) that the general state of your nation or your way of life is not going to change much.
If you earn over $250000 and now have to pay an extra percent tax, will that really be the nation destroying thing you make it out to be?
If free health care or obligatory health insurance (or, for fuck's sake, even just fucking medical insurance reform in the way of regulating payouts and rates) would it be the soul destroying rape of the nation that you make it out to be?
If you had a president who actually talked to his enemies BEFORE sending in the bombers and troops, would that be the selling out of a proud military tradition, or would it be (finally) putting some sanity back into American foreign policy that almost no one internationally trusts any more?
Stop acting like Nov 5 will be the end of the earth if your favourite nutjob doesn't make it into the white house.
You know what really cracks me up with you Americans? It's your steadfast belief in black and white with very little room for a grey area in between. Clamouring about how terrible socialism is is just as bad as people screaming how bad capitalism is.
I'll give you a good example. Many Americans think Europe is some sort of vague socialist superstate, where the reality is that Europe is a mixed free-market economy with state institutions and laws preventing the excesses of either uncontrolled capilatism or socialism. Europe went through enough disaster in its many thousand years history to finally learn that extremes of either stripe are the worst possible ways to go.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll see when the press starts doing major reviews of Win7. At the moment, I'm just kind of peeved that Microsoft once again changed the way things are displayed so as to make me have to learn a whole new bunch of things. Again.
I think Win7 is ok, but really Microsoft (and the over sensitive little boys who get all defensive about a goddamn OS for crying out loud), is deluding itself if they think that the general public will see much positive difference between it and Vista.
Why Microsoft had to copy Apple and introduce an Apple-like Dock (yes, I know, you clever boys invented it all yourselves), dropping the paradigm that has worked pretty well since Win 95 I do not know. I'm pretty sure people will eventually learn how it works and cope with it, but I'm just as sure that they aren't going to be thanking Microsoft for the need to have done so.
It does. Just installed the beta on my Thinkpad running Ubuntu and then ad to use the live CD to get Grub back and working again.
Although many Apple fans will most assuredly come up with innovative excuses for their favourite company, the truth is that Apple, given the chance, is no different than Microsoft. Without any real competition they will simply milk their customers for as much as they can possibly get away with.
Combine this with an organisation known for its intensive abuse of the financial and legal systems, like the RIAA, then you get a result that will charge you a fortune to lie to you.
I'm not sure if you were flaming OSS there, but you do realise that Apple owes a great deal to OSS and that much of what is OSX would be next to impossible without it, given that the BSD part of OSX is, in fact, OSS.
In all seriousness, Ruby is probably used less than Python and PHP.
no tiene cojones
The names of these people are known and should be published at every mentioning of this incident. From this article, we know the school administrator's name is Kerry Wilson. I think that the names of the "female administrative assistant" and the "school nurse" should be published as well, in every mentioning of this incident.
Since it doesn't seem like the courts are going to give any justice to this matter, then perhaps making sure that people know who they're dealing with when they think of sending their kids to schools where these people work might help make things clearer to the so-called school district when the school empties of children because parents want nothing to do with these people.
Really, when Microsoft PR gets posted on slashdot as blatantly as this, I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to offer Microsoft an editor position/seat at slashdot?
That way we'd know which articles to lend credibility to and which to add to adblocker.
I was just thinking that the current round of very fast Javascript machines might have one side effect that will have far reaching consequences: Effects like you posted might make Flash (since a good deal of Flash on the web is used for video) and Sliverlight irrelevant ina couple of years, and when that happens, Microsoft and Adobe are going to have to find other things to do.
..... and that by loving browns and mud people they'll somehow get in the pants of "hip stylish urban women" who love to agonize over the supposed crimes of whites against "oppressed minorities."......
Sounds very much like you're agonising over the fact that those "hip stylish urban women" won't let you into their pants and you're blaming everyone else for it. Sad, man.
At least there I know I'm being censored and for what.
The iPhone software market, like it or hate it, is like any other market. There is competition and only a few are successful. It's no different to the Windows software market or the Mac software market in this this.
... And even OSX was buggy as hell until recently...
This shows that you have never used OSX or at least very seldom. OSX has never been very buggy. That is plain bullshit.
Which leaves me thinking that you're perhaps the fanboi, and that your post should be marked flamebait.
Wish I could mod you up. This desire to just write in any language, be it javascript, php or C++ and then mix it all togther in one project is not a good thing, imho. It's brought forward a generation of "coders" who never learned the basics of software engineering and write software that reflects that lack.
Speak for yourself. Here in Switzerland, and I know this to be a fact in Scandinavia as well, the rate of Mac adoption was higher than it is in the US for a long and was only overtaken in the US in the las year or so. I am a sysadmin for a design company here in Switzerland supporting some 45 Macs and 10 PCs all on Apple OSX Servers.
A third of our company employees are German. Like you many of them have little or no idea about using Macs and usually bitch and complain about it until I, the Mac sysadmin, has to delice their (very often equally expensive Thinkpad) PC from the usual assortment of Trojans, Spyware and general windows cruft. Then, after half a year on the Mac having had none of the crap that they had on their PCs,they often start thinking about buying their own Macs.
I bought one of their Thinkpads off them and now run Ubuntu 8.10 off it as my private machine at work.
Some of those Gung-Ho outsourcing fanatics should ask themselves why Daimler and BMW were able to sell cars in the US even though GM was selling cars at a lower price than the two mentioned above were making them at.
...Stupid package management with insane dependencies. ...
And you say this as a Mac user, using an OS that doesn't even have a unified package management system (And no, .pkg files don't count, since they aren't unified and there's no built-in update of uninstall mechanism)?
Your post should have been marked troll, flamebait or Macfanboi, and I say that as a Mac user myself who owns three Macs.
Although I think Apple could actually start charging Microsoft for writing their business plan, as well as the amazing total lack of innovative ability from Microsoft, Microsoft might actually be on its way to stealing another of Apple's business plans that would be far more significant: They might start making computers and mobiles themselves and selling them in their own stores.
If you were running Microsoft and finally got tired of throwing chairs at the wall, what part of Apple's business would upset you most, and no, the fact that Apple actually does do amazing innovation isn't the one you're looking for. Apple owns and sells the whole package.
Microsoft could easily start building their own PCs, notebooks, netbooks and mobiles, integrate Windows so that it works very well with them, and sell the whole package using its new stores to increase awareness of them.
Take note that Linux is starting to eat into Microsoft's low end, and the fact that some OEMs, like HP are making better Linux GUIs for these netbooks than Microsoft does. Also think what could OEMs actually do if Microsoft were to start building and selling its own hardware? Nothing. The OEMs are almost toally dependent on Microsoft for their OS as Linux could not replace Windows quickly or easily in general.
Microsoft would not even have to stop selling Windows to OEMs. Sure the OEMs would scream anti-trust and threaten legal action, but Microsoft could just point to Apple, and say, "at least we'll sell you the OS". And if Microsoft really is in as much trouble as I think they are, they might just be desperate enough to try a stunt like this.
5 to 10 yers down the road and almost no OEMs are left, only Microsoft and Apple computers, notebooks and mobiles. It's just like the American political system: two big parties that swap power every once in a while.
What surprises me is that Microsoft would even do this. I think that the combination of the PR disaster that Vista has become, the recession and the fact that Microsoft has just seen the first decrease in sales of Windows in its history means that Microsoft is starting to get very worried that the lack of Windows growth might go from a trickle into a landslide over the next few years with businesses too busy fighting for survival to be worried about updating software, and then going for Linux when they do.
Free updates to Windows 7 from OEM Vista boxes means very they lose out on all the computers that are sold from now until Win 7 is released, unless they set a cut-off date.
My guess is that this is either vapourware, i.e. designed by MS to just get some attention and then neutered with many clauses as the Windows 7 release date approaches, or else Microsoft knows something about the true sales of Vista and isn't telling and is worried that Windows 7 will end up being as much of a flop as Vista was, which might very well happen given that Win 7 is very much a service pack release of Vista.
I recently cancelled my two accounts for EVE because I was getting disillusioned with the game in general and CCP's motives in particular. Things that struck me as odd in the game:
1. The enormous amounts of time need to train skills in the game to be anywhere near able to play on a level playing field with experienced players. This has nothing to do with true skill at the game. Although CCP claims that this is to make it easier for new players to compete with olde rplayers, I suspected pretty early on that the real motivation behind this was that CCP uses this as a mechanism to get people playing longer, i.e. to make more "guaranteed" money from players as they try to compete with more experienced players.
There is no real rationale in the game for the so-called Tech 2 (and soon Tech 3) skills. They just make things longer to complete.
There is already a term in the EVE universe about this "timesink", an activity designed to make the player spend enormous amounts of time waiting to be able to do something during which CCP makes extra money out of the players.
2. Lack of content. The player versus computer missions are so similar to one another, and so lacking in anything interesting that doing missions is referred to as "grinding", i.e. something unpleasant that takes time, like doing homework, filling out taxes etc. Mining in the game is so boring that many players actually get an extra account simply to do this because it is so boring.
3. Terrible UI. The game's UI is so spectacularly bad that it is a wonder that anyone can achieve anything with it. In effect it usually means having so many windows open that you're left with a tiny portion of the screen in which you can actually play.
4. Player versus player. The one area of the game which really is interesting is almost totally off bounds to new players, who don't have the trained skills to be able to compete. There is also an increasing tendency in Eve for players to congregate in huge gangs, called "blobs" which makes casual play for a solo player extremely difficult, and this trend is only increasing.
5. Technical issues, referred to partially in the parent post, and somewhat alluded to in the topic title. Network disconnects are frequent, overburdened laggy servers are a frequent problem and UI glitches are very common. What often makes things worse is CCP's attitude towards its own failings. CCP trumpeted its development of a unique technology to fix the server lag issues, but they have simply worked around the problem by assigning more resources to areas of the game that are usually more frequented, leaving other areas sometimes even more starved of resources than they previously were.
I can't get over the feeling that CCP are a bunch of technically gifted con artists, given to the same PR misleading statements and untruths that other companies are. I think the main reason they stay in business is because they appeal to the geekiest of gamer who appreciate the game's complexity and are willing to turn a blind eye towards all the inconsistencies in it.
...Sure, MS has gotten some bad press lately but they still enjoy the overwhelming share of the OS market, and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
...
I think that Microsoft might face some significant challenges with the recession. The daily news reports of enormous amounts of people being laid off at very large companies, traditionally Microsoft's major source of income, indicate to me that almost all comanies expect to lose large amounts of money in the next few years before, and if, the economy starts to pick up again.
I think that the way these companies operate in such times is that IT dpartments will be under great pressure to economise as much as they possibly can. If that using Linux and Open Office means they can save 5% a year, after retraining and reequipping, I'm pretty sure they will do it.
What I'm almost sure practically no big company in their right mind would do right now, in these times, is upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7. Those OSes require greater hardware resources than WinXP does and more than Linux does. I am sure that companies will try to use the very cheapest lowest cost hardware they can find to run their businesses.
I am aware that many companies will not find it cheaper to migrate to Linux in these times, but sooner or later, as support for XP starts to die out, they will be forced to move one way or the other. I think very few will be willing to spend big on new expensive hardware and software in the next few years.
Arguing that the difference between server and client operating systems is the same as the difference between Microsoft's various marketing attempts to make higher margins in different segments of the client operating system is a strawman argument.
The various flavours of desktop Windows are PURELY a marketing concept and have no basis in customer needs. You charge more for a so-called Ultimate version which has some extra doo-dahs, a little more for Business so you can do a Citigroup on businesses and a basic price for low margin OEM marketing speak Home Premium, and finally, you attempt to make a buck off OEM makers in areas where everyone pirates Windows in any case with Home Starter, Home basic etc.
This marketing differentiation is one of the reasons why Microsoft is perceived, even if incorrectly, as becoming increasingly irrelevant in todays market. Paying more than a $100 extra for some doodah that you can replace with some freeware doesn't make you any friends.
Customers don't care. No one gives a shit why MS does this. All it does is enforce people's opinion that Windows is confusing, and above all "" doesn't just work.
At least he can spell
People like you make me lose hope in the capability of America to drag itself up out of the shit bath it is currently in. The level of pure dumbass stupidity in your post would be one thing, except that there seems to be a whole load of your "OMG SOCIALIST!!!!!!1111(one)" loony friends here on slashdot.
Did you lot ever stop to think that although some small things might get better or worse under Obama (or under McCain) that the general state of your nation or your way of life is not going to change much.
If you earn over $250000 and now have to pay an extra percent tax, will that really be the nation destroying thing you make it out to be?
If free health care or obligatory health insurance (or, for fuck's sake, even just fucking medical insurance reform in the way of regulating payouts and rates) would it be the soul destroying rape of the nation that you make it out to be?
If you had a president who actually talked to his enemies BEFORE sending in the bombers and troops, would that be the selling out of a proud military tradition, or would it be (finally) putting some sanity back into American foreign policy that almost no one internationally trusts any more?
Stop acting like Nov 5 will be the end of the earth if your favourite nutjob doesn't make it into the white house.
You know what really cracks me up with you Americans? It's your steadfast belief in black and white with very little room for a grey area in between. Clamouring about how terrible socialism is is just as bad as people screaming how bad capitalism is.
I'll give you a good example. Many Americans think Europe is some sort of vague socialist superstate, where the reality is that Europe is a mixed free-market economy with state institutions and laws preventing the excesses of either uncontrolled capilatism or socialism. Europe went through enough disaster in its many thousand years history to finally learn that extremes of either stripe are the worst possible ways to go.