I'm not sure which is more amazing, that they made Hell holy, or that they raised it.
10 GB footprint, "cursing for weeks" comments by it's advocates, broken drivers... but no sales and a plunging stock price. That non free software would bloat that way and make users so happy is not so amazing but they have not managed to raise it by a long shot. The repetition of the M$ "we've already won" argument and missrepresentation of M$'s attitude takes articles by this AT author way down in my estimation.
"M$ is big" does not translate into technical merit. Crappy specs deserve to be shot down.
What the heck kind of open document format requires a rocket scientist to figure out it sucks? Most rocket scientists know more about you know... rockets and stuff.
True, and you could probably earn a PhD in ME from a good university before you could finish reading all 6,000 pages of M$ spec. So there, as the OP stated anyone can tell you which is better. Confronted with a 700 page volume or three feet of shelf space that do exactly the same things, most people would go with ODF. As is the usual case, the only person who will ever read M$'s soon to sink standard are it's authors. Something makes me think a majority of the spec was written by scripts, so that no human being will ever have read it.
All of the human being who have read parts of the M$ "standard" have quickly found out it's not a standard at all. It's incomplete and contradictory. The would be implementor is left to find ancient implementation details from older secret formats. Those details were different from version to version and even on different "platforms" within the same version. "Make it look just like the Apple Version of M$ Word from 1995" is hardly a specification and the M$ proposal says things just like that, though you might think that they could fit exact measurements into 6,000 pages. That kind of bullshit has little to do with a formatting implementation, and properly belongs to the exporter that M$ themselves should author because they are the only party with knowledge of all the previous versions. Mostly, their so called "standard" is an admission of past non portability.
, I'd like to see lots of stories about "M$" suing schools. Something that happened this decade will do nicely.
You seem to have forgoten that this discussion was about a teacher threatened with hard labor for simply buying "pirated" M$ crap. The threat in the US of A is very much alive and costly. School districts of all sizes spend all sorts of money chasing "discounts" and keeping track of licenses. As Bill likes to point out, purchase price is only part of TCO. A large part of M$ TCO is the insane complexity of M$ licensing.
I love how you highlighted the "software that has found its way into classrooms" part.
Me too, so I'll do it again. The reporter in that case noted that the "settlement" was much more expensive than the alleged damage and locked the district into five million dollars worth of M$ spending. For all we know, they forced the school to pay for every version of Paint Shop Pro with a expired trail period. The funniest part of the old age of this story is that it was before the internet was really up to the task of moving M$ CDs around. Almost all of that software came from a physical copy that had actually been paid for, such as a teacher thinking they could use the same copy of Word at work as at home.
Microsoft's stock has been on a record tear -- downward. One more down day and we would have been tied at nine for the longest tumble in the company's 20-year trading history.... investors are increasingly skittish about Microsoft's Vista. Late, horsepower-hungry, missing some promised features and getting indifferent reviews, the product is nowhere near the buzzmaker of its predecessors, Windows 95 and Windows XP. Analysts and investors are worried that the product is too little and too late, so much so that Vista won't fuel the usual earnings-goosing upgrade cycle that such releases have in the past.
... Vista problems are just symptoms of a deeper Microsoft malaise. Monolithic software -- bits in a shrink-wrapped box -- is a dying business. It is being slayed by software sold as a service, by open source, and by ad-centric online software (i.e., Google).
Competitors now see Windows as a heavy weight around Microsoft's neck, one that keeps the company safely occupied on a treadmill far from their own businesses. That is why the best news for them in the last few days came when Microsoft began talking up a new version of Windows set for 2009. Yeah, go for it guys, knock yourselves out.
Powerful stuff from venture capitalist and CNBC analyst Paul Kedrosky.
And sure enough, sales are falling now that the squirt of ultimate fanboy is over.
The non free software development model is over and the businesses that stick with it are too. It's about time.
I love the link to http://www.manhattan.k12.ca.us/legal/latimes/lausd 1.html which now returns a M$ 404, but still can be found at the archive.org wayback machine. Here's some of the really cool stuff M$ did to L.A. through the BSA back in 1998!
For years, Microsoft Corp. and other industry giants have tried to persuade public schools that computers belong in classrooms alongside textbooks and teachers.
Now the same firms are targeting the Los Angeles Unified School District in a different way, seeking $300,000 over allegations that teachers and other employees have illegally copied software programs.... The real cost of the proposal--which is still subject to school board approval--is the fact that the Los Angeles school district would be forced to spend nearly $5 million over the next three years to replace the unlicensed software that has found its way into classrooms....the settlement is one of about a dozen agreements negotiated over the past 10 years with school districts nationwide.
Great stuff! I just love the way you defend M$'s extortion of public schools. Want to tell me they deserved it? Got any more? How about some links to them suing Churches, Lighthouse for the Blind or Girl Scouts?
Gorbachev's appeal directly to Gates made sense, in part because Microsoft owns the software and only licenses it to customers.
In the CNews interview Dergunova affirmed that "Microsoft is the plaintiff in this case; its intellectual property rights have been violated."
Oh yeah, I wonder where the prosecution got the outrageous value of that coppied software at $10,000 instead of the $100 the judge eventually decided it was worth?
You can keep your M$ spin to yourself, Bungi, M$ created, prosecuted and is ultimately responsible for it. If you consider M$'s anti-competitive practices, it's even worse. M$ does everything in their power to make it hard to run anything but M$ so they can take your money, even if you happen to be a no budget teacher in the backwoods of the Ural mountains. Cases like this are the cost of non free software.
Sure, M$ has nothing to do with the global advance of draconian "intellectual property" law. Nobody has been threatening other contries with trade embargo of the sort usually reserved for wars. No, nothing to do with Bill Gates and M$, they are the good guys trying to eduspam your children about how to buy fine Office software and what a dirty bad pirate you are if you don't buy a M$ OS with each and every computer sold. Oh noes, M$ would never launch any action against a school.
Their solution, to never buy another piece of commercial software, is fitting punishment for those who demanded the laws Russia now has. They will soon learn that the it was stupid to mess around with it to begin with.
If you have a tendency to trust things just because they seem genuine you are in deep, deep trouble.... A month of almost any sort of social activity (or twenty minutes in a few bars I know of) should fix it.... debugging other people's code, working in retail, or even watching nature shows on TV... just open an e-mail account.
There is a difference between scepticism and cynicism. The cynic never expects to find someone who's honest and helpful, and that's sad. They have given up being that way themselves. The problem raised by flogs and their promotion is that exposure to manipulation tends to make cynics. Lying is wrong and fraud is violence.
Companies that do this kind of thing should know that distrust will stick to them, not others.
"If one is always skeptical, then goes to cynicism, you end up feeling pretty negative about the world," Mr. Federman says. "You end up with a very sour disposition. You tend to look at people and interactions as everyone trying to manipulate you, and tend to have a miserable existence, quite frankly. It's not pleasant. You can't enjoy yourself. You always have to be on your guard."
It is a case of the bad tarring the good and it's intentional. If the people making these things tell you up front, "brought to you by Sony," no one would care. The problem is that people in marketing don't want us to trust each other. This goes double for companies like M$, whose primary competition is free software. They understand the value of honest endorsement by disinterested third parties and seek to both use and destroy it.
by "not children" I didn't mean legally, I meant physically and emotionally and all that.... there should be a third legal status in between "child" and "adult" for teens so shit like this doesn't explode.
The ambiguity is precisely why there is a problem. You can not hold someone beneath the age of consent AND responsible for the abuse of their body the same time. Creating a nebulous third class would only make the problem worse. A person is either capable of making these decisions or is not.
These stats [w3schools.com] seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.
That still shows a loss of power by M$. By any reasonable standard 75% penetration after six years is excellent. Compared to the much more rapid adoption of the past, it's not. Compared to what they need to claim "defacto standard" it's not good enough either. By M$ standards, XP was a failure. Vista will be worse.
That doesn't really apply to Windows, for two reasons [listed 3]:
Those methods around the "Osborn Effect" never applied to anything outside the Windoze world. They don't work there now, if they ever did, and the "Osborn Effect" itself did not even apply to Osborn. Really, what you are looking at is advanced vaporware and sales damage control techniques M$ pioneered in the 90's. Those techniques ran out of steam about seven years ago because it's hard to cheat people more than once. M$ credibility is about as low as it gets.
M$ pre-announces the next generation every time it launches a new version. If sales tank, they rush out another version on schedule. Windoze 98 was the last lockstep upsell they managed. XP was a money maker for them, but it and everything in between shows how much power they have actually lost. ME, W2K and even XP failed to grab market share like 3.1, 95 and 98 did. It took four years for them to get more than half of their users on XP. Both business and home users have indeed put of the upgrade for more than six months. There are still plenty of users on 98 and W2K because ME and XP were not good enough for them. Vista looks to be even worse, and it's easy to predict M$ will treat it like ME.
None of it really matters at this point. Vista is the last M$ OS anyone will seriously consider but it sucks. People are going to jump to other platforms rather than wait for M$ to get it's act together. There they will discover the truth, the competition is so far ahead, M$ is a hopeless loser.
I am not too impressed by the name of "Vienna", especially since I happen to like the place.
Don't be so cosmo and it's a great name.
Most Americans will think of "Vienna Sausages" that also have nothing to do with Vienna. These are little canned wienies often forced on Boy Scouts as a food substitute. They are packed in meat jelly that smells horrible and contaminates everything. One of the primary makers of Vienna Sausages is Hormel, the Spam maker. Fewer names could be more appropriate.
What're these "must-have" features in KDE? Any time I've used it, I've found a bunch of stupidly-named applications, and a big, bulky UI filled with toolbars. I'd rather use GNOME. Hell, I'd rather use Windows.
There are a lot of excellent KDE applications, none of which require you to use their window manager:
The kicker - yes, it can be big but you can place and size it or hide it to fit your preferences. If you don't want it floating around, un-tack it so that it only lives on one virtual desktop. It's a good menu system.
Konqueror - The file manager. No other comes close in terms of network integration and flexibility. Try using sftp in Safari on a Mac and you get a screen that asks you for $25 to continue! Konqueror has panes that split both horizontally and vertically for easy drag and drop. The mime list and sub menus based on file type are also excellent. It knows what you can do with a given file and makes it easy to do it. It does tabs, of course and makes a good browser with built in spell check, form completion and all that kind of thing.
K3B - the CD/DVD burner.
Kontact - showing you how network transparency makes distributed PIM easy. Kmail on it's own is awesome. This is a best of class application.
Amarok - Better than iTunes.
Konsole is nice for bookmarks, and I like the speed of gnome terminal better, but what is there like it on Windoze or Mac?
Kword is a good and light application that works with ODF.
kate - an excellent text editor with session management, syntax highlighting for about any file type and other goodies.
Kformula is a nice formula editor, which also works with ODF. The list of science applications, like the periodic table Kalzium, Kstars and on and on is first rate.
There's more that I missed, I'm sure. Everytime I turn around there seems to be some nice new application from them.
Like I said, you don't have to use the window manager to use these applications. They work just as well or better under the window manager of your choice.
Best of all, it's all free! That's why there's so much of it and why it all works together.
xbox360 has been a HUGE success partly due to Sony shooting themselves in the foot by trying to push a $600 console and having production issues with the PS3 but still calling xbox360 a failure is really pushing it.
PS2 sales still dwarf the others, but yes you have to judge "success" by M$ terms to consider it an abssolute failure. It has taken them years just to break even and they are not #1 by a long shot and M$ considers the existence of others to be a failure on their part. On a Macro scale, Games are what used to drive enthusiasts to their platform and keep them there. Consoles that cost much less than tricked out PC's and perform as well are a real threat to M$, especially when the technically superior hardware is running Linux. The new Xbox is going to look increasingly stale over the year, while Sony works out production problems and PS3 adds titles that take advantage of the hardware. Sales of Xbox are going to tank.
"We need a simple fast storage system" in this context means "We need to ditch WinFS".
Now that Vista is out, you can see he was talking about much more than that. Had the company quit focusing on trying to become a publishing, music and games monopoly as well as a computing monopoly, Vista would not weigh in at 10GB of trip bits, encrypted binary paths and other in the customer face insult and instability. WinFS was just one of the things that make Vista less than fast, stable, secure or anything else the customer might want. He thought that M$ should spend developer time on making things work for the user, not building better cages.
they have focused on marketing, "power" and other crap that's ended in DRM and botnet hell.
This is probably what Jim was talking about in 2004. I've posted this twice now, but it deserves every inch of space.
I'm not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way.... our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are and really understanding what the most important probems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
...
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows applications software... If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to start taking the lessons of "scenario, simple, fast" to heart.
All the FUD in the world won't save them from what Vista has become. The DRM alone could waste the resources of a multi-core super computer but that seems to be what they spent their development time doing. What a quagmire.
It's interesting for Jim Allchin to state this, because in terms of performance, security and understanding what the most important problems a customer face, I didn't know Microsoft had a "way" they're somehow losing now. To say that Microsoft has always been lazy in these areas is an understatement.
Their strategy had been lazy - buy into established markets and crush all others. It required little programming effort and made fat returns. This anti-social model was only indirectly anti-user. File format tricks and the destruction of simple protocols was more directly insulting but none of that compares to the present disaster Vista is.
The vast amount of DRM madness in Vista is probably what Allchin was talking about in 2004. M$ did put vast effort into that, but it's all directly against the best interests of the user. They put "trip bits" into it for crying out loud! As if their cobbled together crap was not bad enough already, they added instability. Exactly what he said is worth reading again and again:
I'm not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way.... our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are and really understanding what the most important probems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
...
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows applications software... If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to start taking the lessons of "scenario, simple, fast" to heart.
He saw that XP was already bad and that others were eating their lunch. His little rant, supposedly got WinFS out of the picture, but the message obviously did not hit home.
Nothing could be more clear than the intention of the rant, so I'll type it here for those too lazy to click the link. It deserves the space.
I'm not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way.... our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are and really understanding what the most important probems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
...
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows applications software... If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to start taking the lessons of "scenario, simple, fast" to heart.
-Jim Allchin, January 07 2004
It's obvious they did not listen to him and that's good for everyone. Vista is 10 GB in size and wastes all sorts of processing power for it's DRM insanity, after they dropped their silly new file system and many other vaporware improvements. While it will be difficult if not impossible to make Vista work under Linux or Mac, it's not going to matter because Vista is going to kill the platform. The failure of Vista, more than the failure of Zune and Xbox shows that M$ is going to have to compete on something other than, "It's M$ and you are going to need them tomorrow no matter how crappy their stuff is."
While the TSA is a government agency - last I checked Delta, Continental, AirTran, et al were private companies.
It's not their rule. Even if it was, it's a violation because they run public places and have government granted franchises that limit competition. Government protection comes with obligations that most private businesses don't have.
that a link to the goat man was appropriate. Some people might not mind the "standard" search, but that's not a good reason to force it on everyone.
It reminds me of the disturbingly common bank advert. Imagine the greasy barbarian sitting at the airport rudely asking, "What's in your ass?"
I fully realize some people will still think that's unacceptable, but the point is that you can fly without ID with the standard "intensive" search.
Fab man, just fab. Surrender your right to be secure in your private papers and person or take the bus. Fine, they get better fuel economy than planes, though not as good as four people in my car.
Several people have already posted in this thread saying that their release version of Vista works fine with the same router.
Others claim the problem never existed and still others have posted an insane "fix" that turns off the supposed "feature incompatible with your router". So what? Vista is buggy and has network level changes that don't work with many routers. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. Spending money won't change that.
Buying Vista will not make your computing life easier. It will make you someone who paid to be a beta tester, like every release from M$.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure which is more amazing, that they made Hell holy, or that they raised it.
10 GB footprint, "cursing for weeks" comments by it's advocates, broken drivers ... but no sales and a plunging stock price. That non free software would bloat that way and make users so happy is not so amazing but they have not managed to raise it by a long shot. The repetition of the M$ "we've already won" argument and missrepresentation of M$'s attitude takes articles by this AT author way down in my estimation.
"M$ is big" does not translate into technical merit. Crappy specs deserve to be shot down.
What the heck kind of open document format requires a rocket scientist to figure out it sucks? Most rocket scientists know more about you know... rockets and stuff.
True, and you could probably earn a PhD in ME from a good university before you could finish reading all 6,000 pages of M$ spec. So there, as the OP stated anyone can tell you which is better. Confronted with a 700 page volume or three feet of shelf space that do exactly the same things, most people would go with ODF. As is the usual case, the only person who will ever read M$'s soon to sink standard are it's authors. Something makes me think a majority of the spec was written by scripts, so that no human being will ever have read it.
All of the human being who have read parts of the M$ "standard" have quickly found out it's not a standard at all. It's incomplete and contradictory. The would be implementor is left to find ancient implementation details from older secret formats. Those details were different from version to version and even on different "platforms" within the same version. "Make it look just like the Apple Version of M$ Word from 1995" is hardly a specification and the M$ proposal says things just like that, though you might think that they could fit exact measurements into 6,000 pages. That kind of bullshit has little to do with a formatting implementation, and properly belongs to the exporter that M$ themselves should author because they are the only party with knowledge of all the previous versions. Mostly, their so called "standard" is an admission of past non portability.
, I'd like to see lots of stories about "M$" suing schools. Something that happened this decade will do nicely.
You seem to have forgoten that this discussion was about a teacher threatened with hard labor for simply buying "pirated" M$ crap. The threat in the US of A is very much alive and costly. School districts of all sizes spend all sorts of money chasing "discounts" and keeping track of licenses. As Bill likes to point out, purchase price is only part of TCO. A large part of M$ TCO is the insane complexity of M$ licensing.
I love how you highlighted the "software that has found its way into classrooms" part.
Me too, so I'll do it again. The reporter in that case noted that the "settlement" was much more expensive than the alleged damage and locked the district into five million dollars worth of M$ spending. For all we know, they forced the school to pay for every version of Paint Shop Pro with a expired trail period. The funniest part of the old age of this story is that it was before the internet was really up to the task of moving M$ CDs around. Almost all of that software came from a physical copy that had actually been paid for, such as a teacher thinking they could use the same copy of Word at work as at home.
Wall Street thinks the failure is due to crappy software. In part, the author asserts:
Powerful stuff from venture capitalist and CNBC analyst Paul Kedrosky.
And sure enough, sales are falling now that the squirt of ultimate fanboy is over.
The non free software development model is over and the businesses that stick with it are too. It's about time.
That's a great conversation you pointed to.
I love the link to http://www.manhattan.k12.ca.us/legal/latimes/lausd 1.html which now returns a M$ 404, but still can be found at the archive.org wayback machine. Here's some of the really cool stuff M$ did to L.A. through the BSA back in 1998!
Great stuff! I just love the way you defend M$'s extortion of public schools. Want to tell me they deserved it? Got any more? How about some links to them suing Churches, Lighthouse for the Blind or Girl Scouts?
I should read more carefully. Not only is M$ responsible for crappy IP laws elsewhere, they actually helped to prosecute this one.
Last week, Microsoft executive Olga Dergunova defended the reseller that provided the computers.
Then you follow that link and find:
Oh yeah, I wonder where the prosecution got the outrageous value of that coppied software at $10,000 instead of the $100 the judge eventually decided it was worth?
You can keep your M$ spin to yourself, Bungi, M$ created, prosecuted and is ultimately responsible for it. If you consider M$'s anti-competitive practices, it's even worse. M$ does everything in their power to make it hard to run anything but M$ so they can take your money, even if you happen to be a no budget teacher in the backwoods of the Ural mountains. Cases like this are the cost of non free software.
Sure, M$ has nothing to do with the global advance of draconian "intellectual property" law. Nobody has been threatening other contries with trade embargo of the sort usually reserved for wars. No, nothing to do with Bill Gates and M$, they are the good guys trying to eduspam your children about how to buy fine Office software and what a dirty bad pirate you are if you don't buy a M$ OS with each and every computer sold. Oh noes, M$ would never launch any action against a school.
Their solution, to never buy another piece of commercial software, is fitting punishment for those who demanded the laws Russia now has. They will soon learn that the it was stupid to mess around with it to begin with.
If you have a tendency to trust things just because they seem genuine you are in deep, deep trouble. ... A month of almost any sort of social activity (or twenty minutes in a few bars I know of) should fix it. ... debugging other people's code, working in retail, or even watching nature shows on TV... just open an e-mail account.
There is a difference between scepticism and cynicism. The cynic never expects to find someone who's honest and helpful, and that's sad. They have given up being that way themselves. The problem raised by flogs and their promotion is that exposure to manipulation tends to make cynics. Lying is wrong and fraud is violence.
Companies that do this kind of thing should know that distrust will stick to them, not others.
It is a case of the bad tarring the good and it's intentional. If the people making these things tell you up front, "brought to you by Sony," no one would care. The problem is that people in marketing don't want us to trust each other. This goes double for companies like M$, whose primary competition is free software. They understand the value of honest endorsement by disinterested third parties and seek to both use and destroy it.
by "not children" I didn't mean legally, I meant physically and emotionally and all that. ... there should be a third legal status in between "child" and "adult" for teens so shit like this doesn't explode.
The ambiguity is precisely why there is a problem. You can not hold someone beneath the age of consent AND responsible for the abuse of their body the same time. Creating a nebulous third class would only make the problem worse. A person is either capable of making these decisions or is not.
A rude little AC points to one of many articles showing a spurt of Vista sales and adds his opinion,
Suck it up, floss boy.
My opinion, it's a blip that will go away. You won't be able to convince people to buy and use software that does not work and Vista does not work.
These stats [w3schools.com] seem to show that Windows XP is at 75% usage and thus did, in fact, manage to 'grab marketshare' in a way that any OS manufacturer would intend it to. Apparently for you 'plenty of users' is 9% of the market share, which I will concede to you with as much grace as you have ever shown.
That still shows a loss of power by M$. By any reasonable standard 75% penetration after six years is excellent. Compared to the much more rapid adoption of the past, it's not. Compared to what they need to claim "defacto standard" it's not good enough either. By M$ standards, XP was a failure. Vista will be worse.
Vista doesn't suck. I should know - I'm using it.
You deserve it.
That doesn't really apply to Windows, for two reasons [listed 3]:
Those methods around the "Osborn Effect" never applied to anything outside the Windoze world. They don't work there now, if they ever did, and the "Osborn Effect" itself did not even apply to Osborn. Really, what you are looking at is advanced vaporware and sales damage control techniques M$ pioneered in the 90's. Those techniques ran out of steam about seven years ago because it's hard to cheat people more than once. M$ credibility is about as low as it gets.
M$ pre-announces the next generation every time it launches a new version. If sales tank, they rush out another version on schedule. Windoze 98 was the last lockstep upsell they managed. XP was a money maker for them, but it and everything in between shows how much power they have actually lost. ME, W2K and even XP failed to grab market share like 3.1, 95 and 98 did. It took four years for them to get more than half of their users on XP. Both business and home users have indeed put of the upgrade for more than six months. There are still plenty of users on 98 and W2K because ME and XP were not good enough for them. Vista looks to be even worse, and it's easy to predict M$ will treat it like ME.
None of it really matters at this point. Vista is the last M$ OS anyone will seriously consider but it sucks. People are going to jump to other platforms rather than wait for M$ to get it's act together. There they will discover the truth, the competition is so far ahead, M$ is a hopeless loser.
I am not too impressed by the name of "Vienna", especially since I happen to like the place.
Don't be so cosmo and it's a great name.
Most Americans will think of "Vienna Sausages" that also have nothing to do with Vienna. These are little canned wienies often forced on Boy Scouts as a food substitute. They are packed in meat jelly that smells horrible and contaminates everything. One of the primary makers of Vienna Sausages is Hormel, the Spam maker. Fewer names could be more appropriate.
What does iTunes do for you that Amarok does not?
What're these "must-have" features in KDE? Any time I've used it, I've found a bunch of stupidly-named applications, and a big, bulky UI filled with toolbars. I'd rather use GNOME. Hell, I'd rather use Windows.
There are a lot of excellent KDE applications, none of which require you to use their window manager:
There's more that I missed, I'm sure. Everytime I turn around there seems to be some nice new application from them.
Like I said, you don't have to use the window manager to use these applications. They work just as well or better under the window manager of your choice.
Best of all, it's all free! That's why there's so much of it and why it all works together.
xbox360 has been a HUGE success partly due to Sony shooting themselves in the foot by trying to push a $600 console and having production issues with the PS3 but still calling xbox360 a failure is really pushing it.
PS2 sales still dwarf the others, but yes you have to judge "success" by M$ terms to consider it an abssolute failure. It has taken them years just to break even and they are not #1 by a long shot and M$ considers the existence of others to be a failure on their part. On a Macro scale, Games are what used to drive enthusiasts to their platform and keep them there. Consoles that cost much less than tricked out PC's and perform as well are a real threat to M$, especially when the technically superior hardware is running Linux. The new Xbox is going to look increasingly stale over the year, while Sony works out production problems and PS3 adds titles that take advantage of the hardware. Sales of Xbox are going to tank.
"We need a simple fast storage system" in this context means "We need to ditch WinFS".
Now that Vista is out, you can see he was talking about much more than that. Had the company quit focusing on trying to become a publishing, music and games monopoly as well as a computing monopoly, Vista would not weigh in at 10GB of trip bits, encrypted binary paths and other in the customer face insult and instability. WinFS was just one of the things that make Vista less than fast, stable, secure or anything else the customer might want. He thought that M$ should spend developer time on making things work for the user, not building better cages.
they have focused on marketing, "power" and other crap that's ended in DRM and botnet hell.
This is probably what Jim was talking about in 2004. I've posted this twice now, but it deserves every inch of space.
All the FUD in the world won't save them from what Vista has become. The DRM alone could waste the resources of a multi-core super computer but that seems to be what they spent their development time doing. What a quagmire.
It's interesting for Jim Allchin to state this, because in terms of performance, security and understanding what the most important problems a customer face, I didn't know Microsoft had a "way" they're somehow losing now. To say that Microsoft has always been lazy in these areas is an understatement.
Their strategy had been lazy - buy into established markets and crush all others. It required little programming effort and made fat returns. This anti-social model was only indirectly anti-user. File format tricks and the destruction of simple protocols was more directly insulting but none of that compares to the present disaster Vista is.
The vast amount of DRM madness in Vista is probably what Allchin was talking about in 2004. M$ did put vast effort into that, but it's all directly against the best interests of the user. They put "trip bits" into it for crying out loud! As if their cobbled together crap was not bad enough already, they added instability. Exactly what he said is worth reading again and again:
He saw that XP was already bad and that others were eating their lunch. His little rant, supposedly got WinFS out of the picture, but the message obviously did not hit home.
Nothing could be more clear than the intention of the rant, so I'll type it here for those too lazy to click the link. It deserves the space.
-Jim Allchin, January 07 2004
It's obvious they did not listen to him and that's good for everyone. Vista is 10 GB in size and wastes all sorts of processing power for it's DRM insanity, after they dropped their silly new file system and many other vaporware improvements. While it will be difficult if not impossible to make Vista work under Linux or Mac, it's not going to matter because Vista is going to kill the platform. The failure of Vista, more than the failure of Zune and Xbox shows that M$ is going to have to compete on something other than, "It's M$ and you are going to need them tomorrow no matter how crappy their stuff is."
While the TSA is a government agency - last I checked Delta, Continental, AirTran, et al were private companies.
It's not their rule. Even if it was, it's a violation because they run public places and have government granted franchises that limit competition. Government protection comes with obligations that most private businesses don't have.
that a link to the goat man was appropriate. Some people might not mind the "standard" search, but that's not a good reason to force it on everyone.
It reminds me of the disturbingly common bank advert. Imagine the greasy barbarian sitting at the airport rudely asking, "What's in your ass?"
Fab man, just fab. Surrender your right to be secure in your private papers and person or take the bus. Fine, they get better fuel economy than planes, though not as good as four people in my car.
Yeah, except your point has been contradicted multiple times in this discussion.
Contradicted and confirmed, that's how it is with buggy shit.
If you're going to stick your fingers in your ears and yell "La la la! I can't hear you!", could you do it in private from now on, please?
Few people seek me out like you and your sock puppets. I'd be much happier if you would put me on your freaks list and go away.
Several people have already posted in this thread saying that their release version of Vista works fine with the same router.
Others claim the problem never existed and still others have posted an insane "fix" that turns off the supposed "feature incompatible with your router". So what? Vista is buggy and has network level changes that don't work with many routers. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. Spending money won't change that.
Buying Vista will not make your computing life easier. It will make you someone who paid to be a beta tester, like every release from M$.