Bill Gates is no more philantophist than any other greedy bastard out there. Its just about PR and trying to be known as more than the one that made computers suck.
No amount of PR can take away the fact that every single penny that man gives to charity is ill-gotten and smells of ruined companies, lives and technologichal breakthroughs killed in their infancy.
At best its an attempt to upweigh all the bad things he has done with some good things, just like your local drugdealer helps the poor but still is a drug dealer.
I think pricing and OEM tactics are much more important to look at. How is it for example possible for Microsoft do demand premium for XP on workstations while at the same time they sell it for spare change in the netbook market? Last time i checked it wasnt legal to use a monopoly in one area to expand into another.
The "marketing" support OEMs get is also something very fishy. Step in line and do as Microsoft tells you or buy your OEM license for much more than your competitors. This in a very low margin business where every dollar counts.
Democracy per definition demands tolerance to non politically correct views and beliefs. Democracy cant exist without totally free speech since whats forbidden today is totally ok tomorrow. Just step back twenty years and there is plenty of stuff that was forbidden to talk about then thats just plain PC nowadays.
A democracy without free speech is just a scam and not a single bit better than communism, nazism, monarchy or dictatorship. I hate it when people try to redefine free speech to be some quasi-free expression where you can only express politically correct stuff and nothing else. Thats not free speech at all.
This is not Microsoft changing anything, its just their astroturfing campaign taking never before seen proportions. They still want to kill any and all competition, still doesnt care one bit about the customers and still have no interest whatsoever to deliver good products.
This is a dangerous game to play since if it succeds people will have overblown expectations that wont be met, just like with Vista. Have anyone forgotten how god the Vista betas was (according to the astroturfers) and how it would be the best os ever? This is just the same marketing but with even more money spent on astroturfers and paid bloggers. Ive still to come accross a respected blogger that sings the Windows 7 praise. Just your normal netgear kind of bloggers....
Microsoft is very worried about Linux. At this point mostly because its existance alone can take away revenues without people even using it.
Imagine prices of Windows if Linux wasnt around. Do you think the licensing of IIS would be pretty much free hadnt Apache beaten them to the market? Numerous governments gotten Windows almost for free? Netbooks gotten OEM agreements to ship XP on them for next to nothing?
At this point the threat is much more about Linux threating the monopoly prices than Linux getting any marketshare. Loosing the monopoly will lessen Microsofts income much more than even a big competitor could do if Microsoft hadnt enjoyed a monopoly.
Canonical is dangerous because they target the desktop. Once someone is fluent on using Ubuntu on the desktop its much easier for them to want Linux at the server end. There is an enormous amount of free PR to get from the desktop market wich both RedHat and Novell miss.
Im very sure Microsoft worries about Ubuntu and do whatever they can to keep it off OEMs computers.
The cost of supporting a AD enviroment is in no way a small cost even if you only count labour. Its not easy to setup, its easy to install a halfbaked, semi working, startable and not at all ready AD. Getting it to work properly is no walk in the park. Our sister departments AD rollout is way behind shedule and it looks as if its going to be pushed back even further.
The price is insane, yearly its comparable to about 6 very well paid it-workers. Add to that very high labour costs and you can toss pretty much a whole it-department at an OSS alternative and still come out with money to spare. Mind you this price is without SharePoint Portal and Exchange. With those the prices gets really rediculus.
I manage about 50/50 Windows and Linux servers and the linux servers are the ones getting the least attention because once up they just keep on going. The time spent planning a rollout and really learning what i do pays tenfold with the systems lifetimes. At the same time i have managed MS products from NCR-DOS 3.2 and up and i still havent gotten a grip on some of the voodoo.
Group policies is overrated something incredible. The amount of bugs is pretty amazing and sometimes i just wonder if it wasnt easier to just push register changes instead of using policies. What is needed for an AD replacement is really a Windows client for loading policies onto windows, not a service for distributing them. The tricky part is probably all the bugs in the policies and Windows that makes interacting with them a minefield.
Personally i would much rather see more work made on doing something better than AD instead of playing second fiddle. If you mimic a turd no matter how god you copy it its still a turd.
Ive tested the beta of Windows 7 and im not impressed in any way or form. Its better than Vista but so are about any OS in existance if you just put Windows applications compability aside. Vista isnt a good benchmark as its the worst possible outcome of any development i have ever seen with so much resources behind it. Ill still take XP over Windows 7 until those DRM crap are removed and driver support gets a lot better. Using older hardware wirh Vista *cough* Windows 7 (webcams, mouses, printers etc) is still a lottery.
Windows 7 has shown a astroturfing campaign beyond even my wildest dreams. Paid bloggers and journalists write it up like its gods gift to computers while all it really is is a servicepack ontop of Vista. The underlying stuff still sucks, its just hidden as much as possible from the user. The fun begin when you start to use it hard and knock on it. Then you recognize its just Vista with some lipstick on it. The only real success is the unprecedent level of astroturfing Microsoft has managed to build up. Its pretty risky as it turns peoples expectations up for a product that cant deliver.
I think the problem is more about the american violence culture. Everything is solved by war and blunt force, from economic disputes to drugs and crime. Theese kids are feed 24/7 with neews feeds learning them that killing is the way to go when you want something badly enough.
Its a society so used to violence that people in it doesnt even see the problem. Blame anything as long as you dont blame the perverse affection to killing other people.
Mind you im talking about ordinary people here, not geeks like me who almost gets an orgasm by bootstrapping Gentoo. Try if you have the ability to put yourself in the shoes of a normal parent whos just gotten an hour over to watch a flick. Someone with a life, maybe even kids and that do not have hours upon hours to spend on tinkering, reading and researching something. Anything that demands his or hers attention/time is a problem from their viewpoint.
A Wii rarely demands you to install or configure a video driver to work with your TV. A Wii dont start to studder in the middle of my movie because some antivirus scanning starts or some other task churns away in the background. A Wii isnt susceptible to virii or trojans and i have yet to see one that doesnt work or demands someone coming in and cleaning it of said virii. A Wii doesnt have hundreds of different colliding purpouses, it does a small subset and does them well. A Wii has a simple interface that most people can handle without much troubles. Cant say the same about any computer i have seen at all, ever.
The Wii is perfect for this kind of distribution. Using a PC just plain sucks and rarely works without major hickups. When i want to see a movie it damn sure must work without any major glitches.
Quality wise i dont see any problems. Today i gladly watch content in very low resolution without any hesitation. As long as the stuff is encoded well and dont expose artifacts and bad sound im all good. HDTV isnt something i have ever longed for, not since DVD started handling panning well enough.
Since Windows 7 is mostly changes in the upper layers of the gui in Vista wouldnt bet it wont suck. The crappy drivers for Vista will most certainly crap out just as much on Win 7 as they do on Vista. Last i heard where supposed to use Vista drivers in Win 7.
Also, since the underlying issues arent solved performance gains will be small and the whole DRM crap is still in there slowing everything down. Any fixes arent really fixes but rather all sorts of ways of hiding performance problems from the user.
In short, Windows 7 is very, very close to being Windows Vista SP2.
If i was an American i would be much more concerned with military spending than with NASA. The various spy organizations and domestic surveillance programs alone makes the NASA budget look like weekly allowence. Add the military spending and NASAs budget is just silly in comparison.
If there is one area where money is spent for nothing its in the military.
Hitler wasnt some isolated idiot with opposing views from those of other countries. Most of his views was shared by most european countries aswell as most of the US population and govt.
What angered other countries wasnt the holocaust at all but more the fact that hitler was attacking everyone in sight. The holocaust is something that history has rewritten as something most people opposed while in fact it was rather accepted at the time that whithe race supremacy was true and proved.
I highly doubt the internet wouldve changed anything at all. Mostly because people of the time was just as evil as Hitler.
I must have been unclear. Im talking about computers in the lower grades, not high school and up.
Computers do have its place but before the student can write, read and do simple tasks manually they just make things harder than nessecary. Added complexity at no apparent benefit to the student.
My own not so educated observations is that the younger students of today that has very good access to computers are also terribly bad at using them for anything advanced. If its short attention span or something else i dont know but it sure looks like unlimited access to computers dont by itself give students better knowledge in computers. For that you need targeted lessons by proffesional teachers.
Having a computer in the classroom adds nothing and makes things much more labour intensive than it simplifies. The only real task its suited for in lower classes is repetetive practice like geography, simple math and learning words for some languages. For languages with many different ways of bending words its utter useless. Its also a pretty expensive library if you add add up the cost of the computers for the whole school.
In sweden many computers is nothing more than very expensive typewriters and libraries. Some old worn out applications for tutoring exists but they are very old and written mainly for win 3.11 and such fancy modern systems.
The problem as i see it is that nobody has written anything even remotely able to substitute a good teacher in any field. As of today a computer can only be a tool for students once they already master pen and paper and other basic skills.
The sad part is that nobody has done any extensive study in a computer aided classrooms and really found out if there infact are any benefits. Its a huge gamble with generations of kids without anyone knowing what they are doing.
My view is that computers should come last on every list. In no way should computers be more important than good teachers, good study materials and a nice calm enviroment for the kids.
Free Software is not a great money printer for business in the traditional sense. Instead of earning money they save loads of money and thats something many PHBs have problems wrapping their head around. The software cashcow where you could write an application and then sit back and reap the rewards are dead.
I think the focus in mainstream media is very wrong since they only look at the earning bit and not at how much money can be saved. In their mind Linux isnt successfull if it dont bring in lots of money even if it saves boatloads of money for the people using it.
While i think it would be nice with preloaded linux i dont think preloaded Winlux is the answer. I have used SUSE extensively on servers, desktops and it does really suck lama compared to most other distributions out there. Its package management system (the depenancy resolution, not RPM) have bitten me badly over and over again. My HP 2133's broke down totally when i tried to upgrade them for example.
I would much rather see Ubuntu being offered on the machine or really just about any distribution BUT SUSE.
I cant really understand why anyone in open source would like to be locked in and giving the key to Apple. If Appe had won the battle against Microsoft im pretty sure we would have some variant of MacOS9 by now, being as or more locked in than we are to Microsoft. If there is a company more anal retentive than Apple when it comes to total control over everything than Apple id like to see it.
I really hope they wont take over from Microsoft anyday soon. Id rather has my hopes Linux will take enough marketshare to enable better players on the OS market through proxy of the wast catalogue of open source apps. Lord knows our modern operating systems are stoneage and an abdomination. MacOSX is just an extremely polished old turd. Go beneeth the surface and the smell reeks.
From what i can understand what you really want to do is compare the differences between the installations of different apps? If thats the case any old MSI packaging solution will do the trick much better and with much greater detail. They almost all have a very handy function for tracking every single thing an application does on your computer. Some, like Emcos, are very easy to use and have a very clear and consistend interface for displaying the changes made. I assume youre not after what Windows XP does but rather what installations does.
For example, buy Emco Package Manager, install it on your pristine XP install. Start Emco and put it in recording mode. Do an installation / alteration / run your evil application of choice and stop the recording. Then you have all the alterations on screen easily readable.
Well, Microsoft has hit a brick wall when it comes to development of their OS. They seem stuck where everything new breaks half of the old code. Windows is long overdue for a total rewrite just like Apple had to do. Vista shows with painful clarity how hard the current code is to manage.
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Bill Gates is no more philantophist than any other greedy bastard out there. Its just about PR and trying to be known as more than the one that made computers suck.
No amount of PR can take away the fact that every single penny that man gives to charity is ill-gotten and smells of ruined companies, lives and technologichal breakthroughs killed in their infancy.
At best its an attempt to upweigh all the bad things he has done with some good things, just like your local drugdealer helps the poor but still is a drug dealer.
I think pricing and OEM tactics are much more important to look at. How is it for example possible for Microsoft do demand premium for XP on workstations while at the same time they sell it for spare change in the netbook market? Last time i checked it wasnt legal to use a monopoly in one area to expand into another.
The "marketing" support OEMs get is also something very fishy. Step in line and do as Microsoft tells you or buy your OEM license for much more than your competitors. This in a very low margin business where every dollar counts.
Democracy per definition demands tolerance to non politically correct views and beliefs. Democracy cant exist without totally free speech since whats forbidden today is totally ok tomorrow. Just step back twenty years and there is plenty of stuff that was forbidden to talk about then thats just plain PC nowadays.
A democracy without free speech is just a scam and not a single bit better than communism, nazism, monarchy or dictatorship. I hate it when people try to redefine free speech to be some quasi-free expression where you can only express politically correct stuff and nothing else. Thats not free speech at all.
This is not Microsoft changing anything, its just their astroturfing campaign taking never before seen proportions. They still want to kill any and all competition, still doesnt care one bit about the customers and still have no interest whatsoever to deliver good products.
This is a dangerous game to play since if it succeds people will have overblown expectations that wont be met, just like with Vista. Have anyone forgotten how god the Vista betas was (according to the astroturfers) and how it would be the best os ever? This is just the same marketing but with even more money spent on astroturfers and paid bloggers. Ive still to come accross a respected blogger that sings the Windows 7 praise. Just your normal netgear kind of bloggers....
Microsoft is very worried about Linux. At this point mostly because its existance alone can take away revenues without people even using it.
Imagine prices of Windows if Linux wasnt around. Do you think the licensing of IIS would be pretty much free hadnt Apache beaten them to the market? Numerous governments gotten Windows almost for free? Netbooks gotten OEM agreements to ship XP on them for next to nothing?
At this point the threat is much more about Linux threating the monopoly prices than Linux getting any marketshare. Loosing the monopoly will lessen Microsofts income much more than even a big competitor could do if Microsoft hadnt enjoyed a monopoly.
Canonical is dangerous because they target the desktop. Once someone is fluent on using Ubuntu on the desktop its much easier for them to want Linux at the server end. There is an enormous amount of free PR to get from the desktop market wich both RedHat and Novell miss.
Im very sure Microsoft worries about Ubuntu and do whatever they can to keep it off OEMs computers.
The cost of supporting a AD enviroment is in no way a small cost even if you only count labour. Its not easy to setup, its easy to install a halfbaked, semi working, startable and not at all ready AD. Getting it to work properly is no walk in the park. Our sister departments AD rollout is way behind shedule and it looks as if its going to be pushed back even further.
The price is insane, yearly its comparable to about 6 very well paid it-workers. Add to that very high labour costs and you can toss pretty much a whole it-department at an OSS alternative and still come out with money to spare. Mind you this price is without SharePoint Portal and Exchange. With those the prices gets really rediculus.
I manage about 50/50 Windows and Linux servers and the linux servers are the ones getting the least attention because once up they just keep on going. The time spent planning a rollout and really learning what i do pays tenfold with the systems lifetimes. At the same time i have managed MS products from NCR-DOS 3.2 and up and i still havent gotten a grip on some of the voodoo.
Group policies is overrated something incredible. The amount of bugs is pretty amazing and sometimes i just wonder if it wasnt easier to just push register changes instead of using policies. What is needed for an AD replacement is really a Windows client for loading policies onto windows, not a service for distributing them. The tricky part is probably all the bugs in the policies and Windows that makes interacting with them a minefield.
Personally i would much rather see more work made on doing something better than AD instead of playing second fiddle. If you mimic a turd no matter how god you copy it its still a turd.
Ive tested the beta of Windows 7 and im not impressed in any way or form. Its better than Vista but so are about any OS in existance if you just put Windows applications compability aside. Vista isnt a good benchmark as its the worst possible outcome of any development i have ever seen with so much resources behind it. Ill still take XP over Windows 7 until those DRM crap are removed and driver support gets a lot better. Using older hardware wirh Vista *cough* Windows 7 (webcams, mouses, printers etc) is still a lottery.
Windows 7 has shown a astroturfing campaign beyond even my wildest dreams. Paid bloggers and journalists write it up like its gods gift to computers while all it really is is a servicepack ontop of Vista. The underlying stuff still sucks, its just hidden as much as possible from the user. The fun begin when you start to use it hard and knock on it. Then you recognize its just Vista with some lipstick on it. The only real success is the unprecedent level of astroturfing Microsoft has managed to build up. Its pretty risky as it turns peoples expectations up for a product that cant deliver.
I think the problem is more about the american violence culture. Everything is solved by war and blunt force, from economic disputes to drugs and crime. Theese kids are feed 24/7 with neews feeds learning them that killing is the way to go when you want something badly enough.
Its a society so used to violence that people in it doesnt even see the problem. Blame anything as long as you dont blame the perverse affection to killing other people.
"What makes the wii better suited for distribution of video over the Xbox 360 especially since the 360 has netflix already in its camp?"
The Wii is technically not in any way more suited for video distribution, its just much more common than the 360.
"Examples or stfu"
Mind you im talking about ordinary people here, not geeks like me who almost gets an orgasm by bootstrapping Gentoo. Try if you have the ability to put yourself in the shoes of a normal parent whos just gotten an hour over to watch a flick. Someone with a life, maybe even kids and that do not have hours upon hours to spend on tinkering, reading and researching something. Anything that demands his or hers attention/time is a problem from their viewpoint.
A Wii rarely demands you to install or configure a video driver to work with your TV.
A Wii dont start to studder in the middle of my movie because some antivirus scanning starts or some other task churns away in the background.
A Wii isnt susceptible to virii or trojans and i have yet to see one that doesnt work or demands someone coming in and cleaning it of said virii.
A Wii doesnt have hundreds of different colliding purpouses, it does a small subset and does them well.
A Wii has a simple interface that most people can handle without much troubles. Cant say the same about any computer i have seen at all, ever.
The Wii is perfect for this kind of distribution. Using a PC just plain sucks and rarely works without major hickups. When i want to see a movie it damn sure must work without any major glitches.
Quality wise i dont see any problems. Today i gladly watch content in very low resolution without any hesitation. As long as the stuff is encoded well and dont expose artifacts and bad sound im all good. HDTV isnt something i have ever longed for, not since DVD started handling panning well enough.
Since Windows 7 is mostly changes in the upper layers of the gui in Vista wouldnt bet it wont suck. The crappy drivers for Vista will most certainly crap out just as much on Win 7 as they do on Vista. Last i heard where supposed to use Vista drivers in Win 7.
Also, since the underlying issues arent solved performance gains will be small and the whole DRM crap is still in there slowing everything down. Any fixes arent really fixes but rather all sorts of ways of hiding performance problems from the user.
In short, Windows 7 is very, very close to being Windows Vista SP2.
If i was an American i would be much more concerned with military spending than with NASA. The various spy organizations and domestic surveillance programs alone makes the NASA budget look like weekly allowence. Add the military spending and NASAs budget is just silly in comparison.
If there is one area where money is spent for nothing its in the military.
Hitler wasnt some isolated idiot with opposing views from those of other countries. Most of his views was shared by most european countries aswell as most of the US population and govt.
What angered other countries wasnt the holocaust at all but more the fact that hitler was attacking everyone in sight. The holocaust is something that history has rewritten as something most people opposed while in fact it was rather accepted at the time that whithe race supremacy was true and proved.
I highly doubt the internet wouldve changed anything at all. Mostly because people of the time was just as evil as Hitler.
I must have been unclear. Im talking about computers in the lower grades, not high school and up.
Computers do have its place but before the student can write, read and do simple tasks manually they just make things harder than nessecary. Added complexity at no apparent benefit to the student.
My own not so educated observations is that the younger students of today that has very good access to computers are also terribly bad at using them for anything advanced. If its short attention span or something else i dont know but it sure looks like unlimited access to computers dont by itself give students better knowledge in computers. For that you need targeted lessons by proffesional teachers.
Having a computer in the classroom adds nothing and makes things much more labour intensive than it simplifies. The only real task its suited for in lower classes is repetetive practice like geography, simple math and learning words for some languages. For languages with many different ways of bending words its utter useless. Its also a pretty expensive library if you add add up the cost of the computers for the whole school.
In sweden many computers is nothing more than very expensive typewriters and libraries. Some old worn out applications for tutoring exists but they are very old and written mainly for win 3.11 and such fancy modern systems.
The problem as i see it is that nobody has written anything even remotely able to substitute a good teacher in any field. As of today a computer can only be a tool for students once they already master pen and paper and other basic skills.
The sad part is that nobody has done any extensive study in a computer aided classrooms and really found out if there infact are any benefits. Its a huge gamble with generations of kids without anyone knowing what they are doing.
My view is that computers should come last on every list. In no way should computers be more important than good teachers, good study materials and a nice calm enviroment for the kids.
Except if thy name is Microsoft, then its just ok.
Free Software is not a great money printer for business in the traditional sense. Instead of earning money they save loads of money and thats something many PHBs have problems wrapping their head around. The software cashcow where you could write an application and then sit back and reap the rewards are dead.
I think the focus in mainstream media is very wrong since they only look at the earning bit and not at how much money can be saved. In their mind Linux isnt successfull if it dont bring in lots of money even if it saves boatloads of money for the people using it.
"Guess I must be the only one here using Chrome."
Thats because its not released for Linux yet!
I wonder if i can get it working on linux. BB later =)
Silverlight is mostly obsolete before its even got started thanks to html5 and the video tags.
I also wont let mono anywhere near any linux computers i control.
While i think it would be nice with preloaded linux i dont think preloaded Winlux is the answer. I have used SUSE extensively on servers, desktops and it does really suck lama compared to most other distributions out there. Its package management system (the depenancy resolution, not RPM) have bitten me badly over and over again. My HP 2133's broke down totally when i tried to upgrade them for example.
I would much rather see Ubuntu being offered on the machine or really just about any distribution BUT SUSE.
I cant really understand why anyone in open source would like to be locked in and giving the key to Apple. If Appe had won the battle against Microsoft im pretty sure we would have some variant of MacOS9 by now, being as or more locked in than we are to Microsoft. If there is a company more anal retentive than Apple when it comes to total control over everything than Apple id like to see it.
I really hope they wont take over from Microsoft anyday soon. Id rather has my hopes Linux will take enough marketshare to enable better players on the OS market through proxy of the wast catalogue of open source apps. Lord knows our modern operating systems are stoneage and an abdomination. MacOSX is just an extremely polished old turd. Go beneeth the surface and the smell reeks.
From what i can understand what you really want to do is compare the differences between the installations of different apps? If thats the case any old MSI packaging solution will do the trick much better and with much greater detail. They almost all have a very handy function for tracking every single thing an application does on your computer. Some, like Emcos, are very easy to use and have a very clear and consistend interface for displaying the changes made. I assume youre not after what Windows XP does but rather what installations does.
For example, buy Emco Package Manager, install it on your pristine XP install. Start Emco and put it in recording mode. Do an installation / alteration / run your evil application of choice and stop the recording. Then you have all the alterations on screen easily readable.
Well, Microsoft has hit a brick wall when it comes to development of their OS. They seem stuck where everything new breaks half of the old code. Windows is long overdue for a total rewrite just like Apple had to do. Vista shows with painful clarity how hard the current code is to manage.