A company I previously worked for treated me like absolute crap. Eventually they threw me out and I before they threw me out they let me go clean up my desktop. I copied a "logic bomb" that I had studied out of interests sake onto the firewall and then left. This one required a specific IP/request to set it off, but I never did it, because after I had calmed down it was just too childish and irresponsible. They had been scared however, that I would do something like that and deleted all my accounts, thereby shooting themselves in the foot when they needed to work on the webserver sometime later, I heard from a former coworker. For all I know that bomb is still there today.
I think the single most important reason why console game do well is exactly the single most important reason why cellphones do well: They are easy to use. Switch it on, press a couple of buttons and off you go. No matter how much easier computers have become they are still very difficult to use when compared to gadgets.
I think both microsoft and sony will attempt to make their consoles more and more capable in that they will go online, do surfing, mail, messaging etc without the user having to wait eons for the programme to load. They might even start integrating stuff like office (XBOX version) eventually. If it still works like a gadget people will use it and like it.
Another factor in gaming is that there are extremely few really innovative games. Most follow well known genres because the publishers are afraid of taking risks.
I know that I would never even consider buying an ebook for the simple reason that I can't print it out if I want to. I have never even seen ebooks on sale in any large numbers and the famed electronic book craze of a few years back (Microsoft, Adobe and another company all making proprietry standards) has completely dried up. I cannot find electronic book readers in most stores anymore and adobe's ebook reader has got to be one of the less popular downloads around today.
Being a normal human being I believe that I own something when I buy it. Everything else I consider as rent. Strange laws might call it DMCA or licence but I consider it rent. Since a real book doesn't cost all that much more than most of these books, I reckon most people would go for the real paper version.
Not only that but I fear that Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are becoming more and more real all the time. When will the thought police come to my house to burn my books? Is there a difference between that and the taleban?
I've done professional (if one can call it that) video editing for corporate presentation CD's on Mac and on Windows using premier and after effects and I've done editing for DVD's using FCP on Macs.
While all of this is pretty low end stuff, I have a couple of friends in their own business still using AVID on 9500 Macs.
Why? Because it works. People who tell you that you must have the fastest setup are lying. It's a very similar to the idea that you need a 2.4GHz machine in the office to type fucking letters. People were typing very similar letters on 486 machines not so long ago and the work got done. Similarly, if you are a professional in ANY computing field you'll go usually with a system that works, irrespective of whether it's a Mac or a PC. If your system is stable it means that you can tell your client exactly when he can have his video. If your system is unstable (like that POS Miro DC30 on NT that was my first system) then you run the risk of having to pay contract penalties and losing customers who think you are unreliable. Not only this but the quality of one's work seldom depends on how modern the equipment is. If a good professional was getting praise for his work on a 9500Mac or 266NT machine, I very much doubt that he needs a 3GHz machine to suddenly become better. What he probably will appreciate though, is a machine/OS/Software combination that is very stable.
In my experience the Mac, especially with OSX and FCP gives me this stability. I haven't done this recently under XP but my experiences on NT were that the hardware and OS and software seldom worked smoothly without some show stopping problems.
Apart from the other arguments, this suddenly reminded me of something I read when I was a kid. Apparently, according to the article, a lot of japanese have more sensitive eyes than most europeans (caucasian, white etc, this is not meant as a racist comment) and can detect subtle differences in hues of a colour that others don't. The article talked about japanese pearl divers being able to see subtle off-whites in the pearls and seperate them according to quality.
The point is: Are Disney's people in Japan mostly beefy white Americans? Is it possible that they literaly can't see the red tint in the DVD?
I've had a similar experience once when designing a website, and a guy from marketing kept wanting fucking wierd oranges and other strange hues until we discovered that he was colourblind.
I think I am going to start a movement to go on strike against the big record labels. This has got to stop somewhere and where best by starting a music-hunger strike against them.
Think about it. A week in the western world where no music is played in bars,restaurants,businesses (even Finish taxis) or on the streets. A movement like this would bring the record labels to their knees, although you can bet that they would try a Microsoft type of action of trying to legally enforce you to pay for and listen to their music.
In Afghanistan, disallowing all music as they did, this would make them happy. A drab, grey city like Helsinki, with not even music in the taxis is like some Stalinesque vision of the future.
I can see the RIAA and the MIAA going bankrupt in the next 10 years with their continual pushing of court cases against people who play music. People in the future will simply not economically be able to afford to play music as it seems that the fucking greedy bastards of the big music companies are stupid enough to push it far enough that you will have to pay a licence to even play your own instrument, because "you could possibly play a copyright protected song, and we wouldn't want that, now would we?"
Fuck them and may they burn in hell for their greed.
I admin Novell 5.1, Debian 3.0 and WinNT servers and a host of Win Versions from 95 through to XP on the desktop. Novell is by far the most thought out and easiest to administer (NDS and NDPS) and Linux the most stable and flexible. The NT server is stable but only because it runs exactly one application as a service (Navision) and still has to be rebooted once a month to clear memory leaks. The desktop is a nightmare and I wish we had the money and a PHB who would let us move to Mac OSX there.
I used to admin a Win2k advanced server and AD was a pain and Win2k would often lose network sync.
I am a sys admin for a small company where I have to administer a couple of Novell servers, a Debian webserver, a Debian mail server, an NT Navision (POS but stable as hell) box and a bunch of non computer savy users. In order to make my job easier I got myself a Dell Inspiron laptop with XP Pro and it has worked just fine, supports all the proprietry apps and hasn't crashed once and is pretty fast. But windows, even XP, is just plainly so incredibly badly designed. I posted this before, but I'll say it again: Why oh why does Microsoft have to make network setup such a confusing mess? Why does Microsoft have to make the ability to look at mail headers hidden in view->options in a little hard to view box? There are many, many things like this that I am confronted with every day. So often in fact that I would get used to it if it wasn't for that I still have my old 333MHz G3 Powerbook chugging away with OSX on it at home.
The system preferences, all of them, are in one single place, in a thing on the dock called... system preferences. The buttons, window titles bars and other widgets are clear, big and don't fuck with millions of non consistent rollovers that work in some software in one way and in another in another way. One click of the terminal icon and I've got got a true shell at my fingertips, just like the two debian boxes at work. This is why people love it. Lots of people have their problems with the UI but very few of those claim that Windows is more consistent or easier to use.
I'm saving up now and will be getting my new G4Powerbook in January.
I have a dream application athat I've wanted to try writing for about two years now, and the tools, Project and Interface Builder, are there and don't cost any more. If the application is ever made it will probably only find a small audience, and only in the Mac world, since it's being written in ObjC, but I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it because I want to be able to make a useful tool and have fun doing it. On Windows, I can't do this.
I got into the PC business when Windows was at Version 2.11 and DTP and WYSIWYG were the buzzwords and Macs were running rings around PC's both in terms of the OS and software (Win2.11 was such a POS that I am amazed anyone ever used it) I moved into Pre-Press when the business was still new just before the recession in the early 90's. The DTP market blew up and mostly died in everyone's faces very much the same way the dotcom boom did. Years later I got into the internet by way of multimedia.
What had changed? I was now older than most of my superiors and got treated like crap by most of them. I had one boss in my last internet agency that I caught twice sniffing coke in the toilets.
I have since moved into sys admin/jack of all trades for small companies where there is a demand for people like me who experience in lots of different IT fields.
The article is very descriptive of my life, in that with the incredible mental stresses of the past two years I have gained almost 40Kilogrammes, am lonely as hell, often very tired and often end up working 15 hour days. Recently I decided that this BS has to stop and I want my fitness and my life back again (used to swim 8 kilometers a week and had a girlfriend as well). I was fuck scared of being laid off yet once again, but I pulled whatever courage I still had together(yes, I think most geeks are the frightened sort) and told my boss that I simply cannot go on like this anymore. It turns out that he was more frightened of losing me than I was of losing my job. As of this week I only work four days in the week and on saturdays so that I can do project related work where I need to think.
I think a union would be a good idea as IT moves out of the highlight and into the realworld working mainstream. 70 hour weeks make one anti-social, fat and lonely.
Fuck that.
Uhm Matrix meets Fahrenheit451 meets Brazil meets-
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 2
This looks like it has elements of the Matrix (cinematographic effects: action freeze, duotone colouring, short hair), Fahrenheit451 (let's burn those O'reilly originals), Brazil (Men in black breaking down doors and carting away those Bad Pirates- but the wrong ones of course, total state control a la Microsoft Palladium, DRM and EULAs, Ashcroft, Rumsfield and Cheney) and Alien Resurection (The guns popping snazzily out of the ends of the sleeves).
My critique: It is very relevant in todays world with state organs basically above the law and increasing their control all the time (There is a difference inbetween declaring someone an enemy combatant - even if he's a citizen - and this?) and as usual has to use a science fiction context to put the message across, which will make most people miss the point entirely.
Why do so many people react with such bitterness when an organisation does something that makes financial and practical sense? The bank is large enough to have the resources to develop their own applications and running Linux is probably financially practical for them because they don't have to pay the MS licences or worry about BSA audits.
MS can only blame itself with it's restrictive licencing practices and high prices, not to mention extreme amounts of FUD that are not worthy of serious busineses.
I have a programme on my laptop called Microsoft works, which seems to be a simplified version of what MS is planning. It has the most obnoxious, unintuitive interface that I have ever seen, cannot open MS' own Office files and has an Office 97 kind of toolbar floating across everything else that is so absolutely unuseful that I just wonder how or who managed to design something like that and get it past QA, if there is something like that in the MS sprawl.
Personally I'm not that worried about this whole Palladium thing from MS. Windows XP has chiefly been successful because of MS' hammerlock on OEMs and because it has offered true improvements in stability over previous versions ofthe OS. I use XP every day and administer a number of XP machines and it truly has improved in stability. The flipside of the XP story is that I had to think twice before migrating there because the EULA is such a piece of capitaistic, fascist greed and fear. MS shoots itself in the foot with it's attempts to control your daily life, and in this they are truly a bunch of fucked up bastards.
I think that MS' recent financial statements showing that they are totally useless and in fact worse than many dotbombs in every single division apart from Windows and Office, offer a good insight into the true source of motivation behind MS's efforts to enforce control over hardware and users: They realise full well that no one really likes them (OEM's trying to free themselves, large companies pissed off enough to migrate to Linux) and their response is to try to tighten the screws even more. Longhorn and Palladium might very well bring improved performance and stability, but like all MS products in recent years, these improvements are mainly a sugar coating to the bitter pill of MS Palladium.
It will not work. My company does not have the money to play MS games and I will migrate everything to Linux and Novell (we already use both) beofre we go with bullshit like this. Larger companies are even more conservative than we are.
The joke is that MS could gain so many new customers and much more trust (there are people who trust them?) if they spent more efforts on simply improving their products instead of trying to fuck with everybody.
Privately I use MacOSX to develop with because the core OS is open source and the Dev tools are free and I'm fucked if I'm going to pay MS $1000 here in Switzerland for Visual Studio.
Another alternative to Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX. Good. The Darwin method of kext's for drivers is much more flexible than the one for Linux in my opinion.
I don't download stuff from Kazaa, Gnutella or even Limwire because I don't have them installed on my computer for one, and don't have the time to do this. But I must say that when I read things like some big organisation suiing the hell out of some teen or twenty year old (for whom $14000 is a hell of a lot of money) then I realise why I dislike the internet more and more. I remember working in an internet agency in the napster days where my coworkers downloaded about 200 Gigs of CD's in a couple of months and nobody really cared. Those were young guys who didn't really have the money to spend on dozens of originals, and they were fun, nice people and we had a good time listening to good music while coding websites for our soon-to-be-bankrupt agency. The net was fun and interesting. There were thousands of interesting sites and nobody was all too worried.
With the crash of the internet boom and the lack of cash, it seems as if all the ugliest bunch of greedy scum has crawled out of the woodwork to try and resttrict peoples lives and freedom so that they can rape them for as much money as possible. Christ it's like big brother in 1984. They watch everything you do, strip you of all your privacy and then have the fucking balls to pretend to be righteous about it as well.
While I think this forebodes evil in the PC market in that, if AMD goes under soon, Intel will be able to fix prices much higher than they recently have. What might very well happen is that the latest Intel CPU's might slowly start selling at prices in the $1000 range. Without much competition Intel can charge what it likes and treat customers the way Microsoft, or even worse, Quark , do. The end result is that PC prices might start going up again and that PC makers will make bigger margins. The end effect is that realistically, standard PC's could be selling in $2000 range again, in the next few years.
Although that is a rather dark scenario that will probably not happen soon, the recent announcements of PPC based motherboards and a revival of the Amiga on PPC using morphOS might very start up that market again. Although I cannot really see the practical advantages of Amiga over Linux, Amiga had it's largest user base in Europe, especially in Germany, where the national need to tinker with things found a partner in the Amiga. Although I seriously doubt that they'll market it well and that it will take off in a large fashion, it might provide that need critical mass to get the PPC into the mainstream, thereby providing a small bit of competition to Intel.
What might also happen though, is that China's x86 efforts finally take off and that China becomes a major deliverer of low cost commodity x86 CPU's. Who knows.
Why not try writing them in Objective C. It's very powerful is flexible enough to have bridges to Perl, Java, TCL, Python and Ruby and allows you direct intergation of plain C as well as close integration of C++. Not only this but if you're into frameworks, you'll find that Cocoa has quite a lot of them.
I think he has a very viable point, but only halfway. MS user interfaces are not easy to use. MS' insistence on using so much screen space for it's branding is what makes it's interface unpopular. Users don't care or perhaps even like the jellybean icons, but most users like Nokia etc because they have features that make them easy to use. Things like word completion in SMS in every language that the Nokia is available for. Things like quick selection of numbers, or voice dialing. Smartphones will have these too soon, but this is where the real competition lies and why Nokia has the market majority at the moment. The ease of use on a limited interface is something that Symbian in general and Nokia in particular excels at. (Software chooses a word you didn't want in word completion, on the Nokia you press the "*" key until the word you wanted appears. Try it. It's cool!). These are things that make Nokia popular amongst other things here in Europe.
The fact that Nokia goes out of it's way to help developers also makes them a lot of fans in the developer community. You just register and they send you a free Symbian Java and C++ SDK on a CD. In addition to this the newest ARM CPU's process Java bytecode natively, meaning that Java has finally found a home and that you can make applets in an easy language that you don't have to pay for.
If Microsoft can improve on features like this is what will make the market, not browsers.
Last year it started with the German Bundestag Linux initiative and the French government's open source requirements, moved on to the Chinese government's Linux move, crossed the Pacific to Peru and that intelligent senator there rebutting MS-Peru's words one by one, actually made it past Heathrow customs in the UK, shot down the Atlantic to Namibia, passing by Spain on the way, going round the Cape of good Hope to nest in Japan and now move back to India.
It truly is amazing just how well Linux is being adopted. Most of this is serverside however, but I give Microsoft's server business another year or two of profitability before no one goes for Ms servers anymore in a big way..NET server and co might be extremely good performers but when you can get three boxes for the price of one server licence, which one would you go for?
In addition I think the rollercoaster will only gather speed from now, where even total MS butt kissers like the good folk here in Switzerland start to realise that MS isn't doing anything for them and start getting a clue on Linux. OpenOffice will most likely also only increase in use and I can veritably see the day when MS actually starts losing money. Given their size, I think they'll burn through the 40 Billion real quick.
Slashdot Mirror
A company I previously worked for treated me like absolute crap. Eventually they threw me out and I before they threw me out they let me go clean up my desktop. I copied a "logic bomb" that I had studied out of interests sake onto the firewall and then left. This one required a specific IP/request to set it off, but I never did it, because after I had calmed down it was just too childish and irresponsible. They had been scared however, that I would do something like that and deleted all my accounts, thereby shooting themselves in the foot when they needed to work on the webserver sometime later, I heard from a former coworker. For all I know that bomb is still there today.
I think the single most important reason why console game do well is exactly the single most important reason why cellphones do well: They are easy to use. Switch it on, press a couple of buttons and off you go. No matter how much easier computers have become they are still very difficult to use when compared to gadgets.
I think both microsoft and sony will attempt to make their consoles more and more capable in that they will go online, do surfing, mail, messaging etc without the user having to wait eons for the programme to load. They might even start integrating stuff like office (XBOX version) eventually. If it still works like a gadget people will use it and like it.
Another factor in gaming is that there are extremely few really innovative games. Most follow well known genres because the publishers are afraid of taking risks.
While the icons of an OS say nothing about the quality of the OS, the icons and the widgets of this OS look like they're a labour of love. Beautiful.
If I had the extra money at the moment, I would buy one just for the OS.
I know that I would never even consider buying an ebook for the simple reason that I can't print it out if I want to. I have never even seen ebooks on sale in any large numbers and the famed electronic book craze of a few years back (Microsoft, Adobe and another company all making proprietry standards) has completely dried up. I cannot find electronic book readers in most stores anymore and adobe's ebook reader has got to be one of the less popular downloads around today.
Being a normal human being I believe that I own something when I buy it. Everything else I consider as rent. Strange laws might call it DMCA or licence but I consider it rent. Since a real book doesn't cost all that much more than most of these books, I reckon most people would go for the real paper version.
Not only that but I fear that Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are becoming more and more real all the time. When will the thought police come to my house to burn my books? Is there a difference between that and the taleban?
As I said above it wasn't meant to be racist. It was just a thought that brought up a memory, but if you want to take offence, by all means feel free.
I've done professional (if one can call it that) video editing for corporate presentation CD's on Mac and on Windows using premier and after effects and I've done editing for DVD's using FCP on Macs.
While all of this is pretty low end stuff, I have a couple of friends in their own business still using AVID on 9500 Macs.
Why? Because it works. People who tell you that you must have the fastest setup are lying. It's a very similar to the idea that you need a 2.4GHz machine in the office to type fucking letters. People were typing very similar letters on 486 machines not so long ago and the work got done. Similarly, if you are a professional in ANY computing field you'll go usually with a system that works, irrespective of whether it's a Mac or a PC. If your system is stable it means that you can tell your client exactly when he can have his video. If your system is unstable (like that POS Miro DC30 on NT that was my first system) then you run the risk of having to pay contract penalties and losing customers who think you are unreliable. Not only this but the quality of one's work seldom depends on how modern the equipment is. If a good professional was getting praise for his work on a 9500Mac or 266NT machine, I very much doubt that he needs a 3GHz machine to suddenly become better. What he probably will appreciate though, is a machine/OS/Software combination that is very stable.
In my experience the Mac, especially with OSX and FCP gives me this stability. I haven't done this recently under XP but my experiences on NT were that the hardware and OS and software seldom worked smoothly without some show stopping problems.
Apart from the other arguments, this suddenly reminded me of something I read when I was a kid. Apparently, according to the article, a lot of japanese have more sensitive eyes than most europeans (caucasian, white etc, this is not meant as a racist comment) and can detect subtle differences in hues of a colour that others don't. The article talked about japanese pearl divers being able to see subtle off-whites in the pearls and seperate them according to quality.
The point is: Are Disney's people in Japan mostly beefy white Americans? Is it possible that they literaly can't see the red tint in the DVD?
I've had a similar experience once when designing a website, and a guy from marketing kept wanting fucking wierd oranges and other strange hues until we discovered that he was colourblind.
I think I am going to start a movement to go on strike against the big record labels. This has got to stop somewhere and where best by starting a music-hunger strike against them.
Think about it. A week in the western world where no music is played in bars,restaurants,businesses (even Finish taxis) or on the streets. A movement like this would bring the record labels to their knees, although you can bet that they would try a Microsoft type of action of trying to legally enforce you to pay for and listen to their music.
May they burn in hell for their greed
In Afghanistan, disallowing all music as they did, this would make them happy. A drab, grey city like Helsinki, with not even music in the taxis is like some Stalinesque vision of the future.
I can see the RIAA and the MIAA going bankrupt in the next 10 years with their continual pushing of court cases against people who play music. People in the future will simply not economically be able to afford to play music as it seems that the fucking greedy bastards of the big music companies are stupid enough to push it far enough that you will have to pay a licence to even play your own instrument, because "you could possibly play a copyright protected song, and we wouldn't want that, now would we?"
Fuck them and may they burn in hell for their greed.
I admin Novell 5.1, Debian 3.0 and WinNT servers and a host of Win Versions from 95 through to XP on the desktop. Novell is by far the most thought out and easiest to administer (NDS and NDPS) and Linux the most stable and flexible. The NT server is stable but only because it runs exactly one application as a service (Navision) and still has to be rebooted once a month to clear memory leaks. The desktop is a nightmare and I wish we had the money and a PHB who would let us move to Mac OSX there.
I used to admin a Win2k advanced server and AD was a pain and Win2k would often lose network sync.
No way. I don't have the time for those problems.
Another plus is that Palladium would not available for this platform and MS would have no handle on them either.
I am a sys admin for a small company where I have to administer a couple of Novell servers, a Debian webserver, a Debian mail server, an NT Navision (POS but stable as hell) box and a bunch of non computer savy users. In order to make my job easier I got myself a Dell Inspiron laptop with XP Pro and it has worked just fine, supports all the proprietry apps and hasn't crashed once and is pretty fast. But windows, even XP, is just plainly so incredibly badly designed. I posted this before, but I'll say it again: Why oh why does Microsoft have to make network setup such a confusing mess? Why does Microsoft have to make the ability to look at mail headers hidden in view->options in a little hard to view box? There are many, many things like this that I am confronted with every day. So often in fact that I would get used to it if it wasn't for that I still have my old 333MHz G3 Powerbook chugging away with OSX on it at home.
The system preferences, all of them, are in one single place, in a thing on the dock called... system preferences. The buttons, window titles bars and other widgets are clear, big and don't fuck with millions of non consistent rollovers that work in some software in one way and in another in another way. One click of the terminal icon and I've got got a true shell at my fingertips, just like the two debian boxes at work. This is why people love it. Lots of people have their problems with the UI but very few of those claim that Windows is more consistent or easier to use.
I'm saving up now and will be getting my new G4Powerbook in January.
I have a dream application athat I've wanted to try writing for about two years now, and the tools, Project and Interface Builder, are there and don't cost any more. If the application is ever made it will probably only find a small audience, and only in the Mac world, since it's being written in ObjC, but I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it because I want to be able to make a useful tool and have fun doing it. On Windows, I can't do this.
I got into the PC business when Windows was at Version 2.11 and DTP and WYSIWYG were the buzzwords and Macs were running rings around PC's both in terms of the OS and software (Win2.11 was such a POS that I am amazed anyone ever used it) I moved into Pre-Press when the business was still new just before the recession in the early 90's. The DTP market blew up and mostly died in everyone's faces very much the same way the dotcom boom did. Years later I got into the internet by way of multimedia.
What had changed? I was now older than most of my superiors and got treated like crap by most of them. I had one boss in my last internet agency that I caught twice sniffing coke in the toilets.
I have since moved into sys admin/jack of all trades for small companies where there is a demand for people like me who experience in lots of different IT fields.
The article is very descriptive of my life, in that with the incredible mental stresses of the past two years I have gained almost 40Kilogrammes, am lonely as hell, often very tired and often end up working 15 hour days. Recently I decided that this BS has to stop and I want my fitness and my life back again (used to swim 8 kilometers a week and had a girlfriend as well). I was fuck scared of being laid off yet once again, but I pulled whatever courage I still had together(yes, I think most geeks are the frightened sort) and told my boss that I simply cannot go on like this anymore. It turns out that he was more frightened of losing me than I was of losing my job. As of this week I only work four days in the week and on saturdays so that I can do project related work where I need to think.
I think a union would be a good idea as IT moves out of the highlight and into the realworld working mainstream. 70 hour weeks make one anti-social, fat and lonely.
Fuck that.
This looks like it has elements of the Matrix (cinematographic effects: action freeze, duotone colouring, short hair), Fahrenheit451 (let's burn those O'reilly originals), Brazil (Men in black breaking down doors and carting away those Bad Pirates- but the wrong ones of course, total state control a la Microsoft Palladium, DRM and EULAs, Ashcroft, Rumsfield and Cheney) and Alien Resurection (The guns popping snazzily out of the ends of the sleeves).
My critique: It is very relevant in todays world with state organs basically above the law and increasing their control all the time (There is a difference inbetween declaring someone an enemy combatant - even if he's a citizen - and this?) and as usual has to use a science fiction context to put the message across, which will make most people miss the point entirely.
Ray Bradbury must be turning over in his grave.
"Did you ever stop to think where you'd be when you finally kill your idols and have noone left to copy? "
Does this apply to Bill Gates and larry Ellison as well?
Why do so many people react with such bitterness when an organisation does something that makes financial and practical sense? The bank is large enough to have the resources to develop their own applications and running Linux is probably financially practical for them because they don't have to pay the MS licences or worry about BSA audits.
MS can only blame itself with it's restrictive licencing practices and high prices, not to mention extreme amounts of FUD that are not worthy of serious busineses.
I give MS 5 years.
I have a programme on my laptop called Microsoft works, which seems to be a simplified version of what MS is planning. It has the most obnoxious, unintuitive interface that I have ever seen, cannot open MS' own Office files and has an Office 97 kind of toolbar floating across everything else that is so absolutely unuseful that I just wonder how or who managed to design something like that and get it past QA, if there is something like that in the MS sprawl.
Personally I'm not that worried about this whole Palladium thing from MS. Windows XP has chiefly been successful because of MS' hammerlock on OEMs and because it has offered true improvements in stability over previous versions ofthe OS. I use XP every day and administer a number of XP machines and it truly has improved in stability. The flipside of the XP story is that I had to think twice before migrating there because the EULA is such a piece of capitaistic, fascist greed and fear. MS shoots itself in the foot with it's attempts to control your daily life, and in this they are truly a bunch of fucked up bastards.
I think that MS' recent financial statements showing that they are totally useless and in fact worse than many dotbombs in every single division apart from Windows and Office, offer a good insight into the true source of motivation behind MS's efforts to enforce control over hardware and users: They realise full well that no one really likes them (OEM's trying to free themselves, large companies pissed off enough to migrate to Linux) and their response is to try to tighten the screws even more. Longhorn and Palladium might very well bring improved performance and stability, but like all MS products in recent years, these improvements are mainly a sugar coating to the bitter pill of MS Palladium.
It will not work. My company does not have the money to play MS games and I will migrate everything to Linux and Novell (we already use both) beofre we go with bullshit like this. Larger companies are even more conservative than we are.
The joke is that MS could gain so many new customers and much more trust (there are people who trust them?) if they spent more efforts on simply improving their products instead of trying to fuck with everybody.
Privately I use MacOSX to develop with because the core OS is open source and the Dev tools are free and I'm fucked if I'm going to pay MS $1000 here in Switzerland for Visual Studio.
Thanks, this one gave me a good laugh today.
It did help :)
Another alternative to Windows, Linux, BSD and OSX. Good. The Darwin method of kext's for drivers is much more flexible than the one for Linux in my opinion.
Wonder how many devices are supported though?
I don't download stuff from Kazaa, Gnutella or even Limwire because I don't have them installed on my computer for one, and don't have the time to do this. But I must say that when I read things like some big organisation suiing the hell out of some teen or twenty year old (for whom $14000 is a hell of a lot of money) then I realise why I dislike the internet more and more. I remember working in an internet agency in the napster days where my coworkers downloaded about 200 Gigs of CD's in a couple of months and nobody really cared. Those were young guys who didn't really have the money to spend on dozens of originals, and they were fun, nice people and we had a good time listening to good music while coding websites for our soon-to-be-bankrupt agency. The net was fun and interesting. There were thousands of interesting sites and nobody was all too worried.
With the crash of the internet boom and the lack of cash, it seems as if all the ugliest bunch of greedy scum has crawled out of the woodwork to try and resttrict peoples lives and freedom so that they can rape them for as much money as possible. Christ it's like big brother in 1984. They watch everything you do, strip you of all your privacy and then have the fucking balls to pretend to be righteous about it as well.
Perhaps some time we'll have the last laugh...
While I think this forebodes evil in the PC market in that, if AMD goes under soon, Intel will be able to fix prices much higher than they recently have. What might very well happen is that the latest Intel CPU's might slowly start selling at prices in the $1000 range. Without much competition Intel can charge what it likes and treat customers the way Microsoft, or even worse, Quark , do. The end result is that PC prices might start going up again and that PC makers will make bigger margins. The end effect is that realistically, standard PC's could be selling in $2000 range again, in the next few years.
Although that is a rather dark scenario that will probably not happen soon, the recent announcements of PPC based motherboards and a revival of the Amiga on PPC using morphOS might very start up that market again. Although I cannot really see the practical advantages of Amiga over Linux, Amiga had it's largest user base in Europe, especially in Germany, where the national need to tinker with things found a partner in the Amiga. Although I seriously doubt that they'll market it well and that it will take off in a large fashion, it might provide that need critical mass to get the PPC into the mainstream, thereby providing a small bit of competition to Intel.
What might also happen though, is that China's x86 efforts finally take off and that China becomes a major deliverer of low cost commodity x86 CPU's. Who knows.
Why not try writing them in Objective C. It's very powerful is flexible enough to have bridges to Perl, Java, TCL, Python and Ruby and allows you direct intergation of plain C as well as close integration of C++. Not only this but if you're into frameworks, you'll find that Cocoa has quite a lot of them.
I think he has a very viable point, but only halfway. MS user interfaces are not easy to use. MS' insistence on using so much screen space for it's branding is what makes it's interface unpopular. Users don't care or perhaps even like the jellybean icons, but most users like Nokia etc because they have features that make them easy to use. Things like word completion in SMS in every language that the Nokia is available for. Things like quick selection of numbers, or voice dialing. Smartphones will have these too soon, but this is where the real competition lies and why Nokia has the market majority at the moment. The ease of use on a limited interface is something that Symbian in general and Nokia in particular excels at. (Software chooses a word you didn't want in word completion, on the Nokia you press the "*" key until the word you wanted appears. Try it. It's cool!). These are things that make Nokia popular amongst other things here in Europe.
The fact that Nokia goes out of it's way to help developers also makes them a lot of fans in the developer community. You just register and they send you a free Symbian Java and C++ SDK on a CD. In addition to this the newest ARM CPU's process Java bytecode natively, meaning that Java has finally found a home and that you can make applets in an easy language that you don't have to pay for.
If Microsoft can improve on features like this is what will make the market, not browsers.
Last year it started with the German Bundestag Linux initiative and the French government's open source requirements, moved on to the Chinese government's Linux move, crossed the Pacific to Peru and that intelligent senator there rebutting MS-Peru's words one by one, actually made it past Heathrow customs in the UK, shot down the Atlantic to Namibia, passing by Spain on the way, going round the Cape of good Hope to nest in Japan and now move back to India.
.NET server and co might be extremely good performers but when you can get three boxes for the price of one server licence, which one would you go for?
It truly is amazing just how well Linux is being adopted. Most of this is serverside however, but I give Microsoft's server business another year or two of profitability before no one goes for Ms servers anymore in a big way.
In addition I think the rollercoaster will only gather speed from now, where even total MS butt kissers like the good folk here in Switzerland start to realise that MS isn't doing anything for them and start getting a clue on Linux. OpenOffice will most likely also only increase in use and I can veritably see the day when MS actually starts losing money. Given their size, I think they'll burn through the 40 Billion real quick.