Probably yes, but there are no Atom SoCs right now. When compared to ARM, Atom's sole advantage is x86 compatibility, which, in a non-Windows box (or in one where Windows compatibility is not important) is dead weight.
In every other respect, ARM is much superior to Atom, allowing for far greater battery life, smaller sizes and much lower price.
You don't have to play catch-up when you are the gatekeeper. Every Windows box comes with IE and only a fraction of those IEs ever download another HTML engine.
And, of course, in case they ever feel that strategy is about to fail, they will push Silverlight into every Windows box.
The beauty in this conclusion is that nobody even needs to know what Gazelle is. Whether MS goes for Trident under Gazelle or something completely new is irrelevant. The point is they will never allow whatever HTML engine they put in Windows to be fully interoperable with other platforms.
"So you are suggesting businesses ignored a bunch of standards and picked the solution that delivered the best ROI?"
ROI depends on your time horizon. If all you see is the next quarter, the cheapest solution may be the best. If you intend to give the best ROI over a couple years (or decades) that's a whole different story and you will have to find the good ones, not the cheap ones.
Any idiot can give a decent ROI over the next quarter and aiming your measurements that short guarantees you will select idiots to run your business.
No. but the cheapest labor is also the dumbest and the most shortsighted. It's no surprise all things being equal, monkeys prefer anything Visual Studio does with the fewer clicks.
"where people choose solutions which are the easiest to implement"
Because, of course, they will not need any maintenance.
"out of the 6-odd billion people on this planet some of them actually prefer using Microsoft's tech."
Exactly half the people of a given population has below-100 intelligence. Since IQs below 120 are not exactly bright and these things are really complex, it's no surprise many people chose Microsoft - they do so because they can't grasp the differences with their puny brains and limited intellects.
"come up with new ways to blame MS for everything"
What you see as new and what you perceive as old seems to depend on your limited memory span. Various kinds of lock-in are perhaps their most enduring strategies.
"Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit"
Microsoft will never allow the browser that ships with Windows to become a commodity. They will go with Gazelle or whatever they develop that's as incompatible to official standards as possible while still being called a web browser engine.
Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
I must congratulate the P.R. team behind Icahn. The press keeps calling him "activist investor" when "corporate raider" would be a far more appropriate term...
"There should be absolutely no reason to install anything to get mp3 player working."
Except maybe because MS patented every workaround required to make their crappy old technology work as expected by any modern (as in "post-1990") operating system.
Not exactly. The Samba folks worked with the EC judges on the Microsoft antitrust case. I say they are as familiar to Microsoft's ways as Interpol cops are with organized crime and, mind you, there is not much difference between Microsoft and organized crime when it comes to bullying companies.
You don't need to emulate the FAT long file names in order to do that. Only the long file name hack is covered by their patents. I see no good reason to even use long file names in applications like GPS or cameras, since you don't see the files most of the time.
I too hadn't a BSOD for a couple years - yes: I use Windows daily. In fact, I am writing this on a Windows machine (the last post was on a Linux one) and, while BSODs are a thing of the past, application crashes, random lock-ups and several nuisances like those are not. I have given up on keeping the machine running because of that - after 2 or 3 days, it's unusable. It probably does not reach 3 nines.
And lots of people are fine with Exchange mostly because they _don't_know_ anything better. Most of them think that having to delete old e-mail is a normal fact of life and it's not. It's hard to buy a server with less than enough storage to support 10,000 accounts with my quota limits. Heck - it's hard to buy a storage system that couldn't handle 10 times that.
And the very same happens with Windows - they believe computers are unreliable just because they never saw one that wasn't. Expectations are low now because they have been forced down consistently for the past decades.
Nobody _needs_ Exchange. PHBs are simply too dumb to realize they have a really lousy groupware solution.
I noticed how people perceive computers. When Windows locks up a program because you are pushing your machine too hard, people blame the machine, lack of memory and assorted things instead of blaming that sad excuse for an OS. People _expect_ computers to fail because Windows fails all too often. Computers today are far better than people may think.
Does anyone really believe those virtual Windows thingies will ever approach five 9's stability? If you have, say, 1.000 virtual Windows desktops on one mainframe you will still need to employ all the staff that would be needed to run a 1.000 machine network minus the staff needed for dealing with hardware failure.
I have to disagree. Had MS been denied access to more sensitive information, any proposal would collapse at once. The damage (disturbing business, casting a shadow on Y!'s future viability, destabilizing the workforce and creating an uprising of shareholders) would have largely been already done.
There is no way Yang could have spun this in a favorable way and there is no way he could have prevented the damage.
And, BTW, I don't get the way the press portrayed Icahn as "activist-investor". The term "corporate raider" would seem far more appropriate.
Actually, I sincerely doubt the MS offer was done in good faith.
Had the MS bid gone forward, MS would have access to a whole lot of Y! internal data, research, plans and so on. If they later retired their offer as they considered the companies were never really a good match, MS would have walked away with a lot of inside knowledge about its biggest competitor in the search market and Yahoo would have gotten nothing but a lot of FUD and a probably mortal wound.
This would be a lot less expensive than buying Yahoo! would be in the first place and Yahoo would be every bit as gone as #2 as if they were bought.
This kind of maneuver is so typical of Microsoft I cannot imagine any other explanation.
IIRC (I once was a MCP), long file names are implemented as a series of consecutive invalid directory entries that make up one long file name, the last one pointing to the real file.
Interesting... I have Win7 installed in the same machine and, while it sucks less than Vista (and looks a whole lot better than XP) its performance is somewhat unimpressive.
Perhaps you use more video or Flash thingies than I do. Performance perxeption is all about your application mix.
There are Apple products that compete directly with Microsoft ones. Both Apple and Microsoft make keyboards and mice. I regard Microsoft keyboards and mice as the nicest products they sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... While I am not familiar with ARM-based Unix-like OSs, most of the time yes, it's just a question of recompiling the program.
And, when you use interpreted languages, you don't even need to go that far.
What meaningful advantages OSX has over Linux for a learning tool?
Probably yes, but there are no Atom SoCs right now. When compared to ARM, Atom's sole advantage is x86 compatibility, which, in a non-Windows box (or in one where Windows compatibility is not important) is dead weight.
In every other respect, ARM is much superior to Atom, allowing for far greater battery life, smaller sizes and much lower price.
You don't have to play catch-up when you are the gatekeeper. Every Windows box comes with IE and only a fraction of those IEs ever download another HTML engine.
And, of course, in case they ever feel that strategy is about to fail, they will push Silverlight into every Windows box.
The beauty in this conclusion is that nobody even needs to know what Gazelle is. Whether MS goes for Trident under Gazelle or something completely new is irrelevant. The point is they will never allow whatever HTML engine they put in Windows to be fully interoperable with other platforms.
"So you are suggesting businesses ignored a bunch of standards and picked the solution that delivered the best ROI?"
ROI depends on your time horizon. If all you see is the next quarter, the cheapest solution may be the best. If you intend to give the best ROI over a couple years (or decades) that's a whole different story and you will have to find the good ones, not the cheap ones.
Any idiot can give a decent ROI over the next quarter and aiming your measurements that short guarantees you will select idiots to run your business.
Unfortunately, there are still lots of public-facing web-sites that are designed specifically for IE and sort of break with anything else.
Many big portals still don't test for Safari.
"Nobody put a gun to their head to use ActiveX"
No. but the cheapest labor is also the dumbest and the most shortsighted. It's no surprise all things being equal, monkeys prefer anything Visual Studio does with the fewer clicks.
"where people choose solutions which are the easiest to implement"
Because, of course, they will not need any maintenance.
"out of the 6-odd billion people on this planet some of them actually prefer using Microsoft's tech."
Exactly half the people of a given population has below-100 intelligence. Since IQs below 120 are not exactly bright and these things are really complex, it's no surprise many people chose Microsoft - they do so because they can't grasp the differences with their puny brains and limited intellects.
"come up with new ways to blame MS for everything"
What you see as new and what you perceive as old seems to depend on your limited memory span. Various kinds of lock-in are perhaps their most enduring strategies.
"remaining on good terms with them is really the best option to get them to do what you want."
Good. You have them right where they want you.
"Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit"
Microsoft will never allow the browser that ships with Windows to become a commodity. They will go with Gazelle or whatever they develop that's as incompatible to official standards as possible while still being called a web browser engine.
Their goal is lock-in. A standards-based engine would negate that.
I must congratulate the P.R. team behind Icahn. The press keeps calling him "activist investor" when "corporate raider" would be a far more appropriate term...
That is probably why iTunes mangles filenames when storing them in a Windows-formatted iPod.
"There should be absolutely no reason to install anything to get mp3 player working."
Except maybe because MS patented every workaround required to make their crappy old technology work as expected by any modern (as in "post-1990") operating system.
Not exactly. The Samba folks worked with the EC judges on the Microsoft antitrust case. I say they are as familiar to Microsoft's ways as Interpol cops are with organized crime and, mind you, there is not much difference between Microsoft and organized crime when it comes to bullying companies.
You don't need to emulate the FAT long file names in order to do that. Only the long file name hack is covered by their patents. I see no good reason to even use long file names in applications like GPS or cameras, since you don't see the files most of the time.
I too hadn't a BSOD for a couple years - yes: I use Windows daily. In fact, I am writing this on a Windows machine (the last post was on a Linux one) and, while BSODs are a thing of the past, application crashes, random lock-ups and several nuisances like those are not. I have given up on keeping the machine running because of that - after 2 or 3 days, it's unusable. It probably does not reach 3 nines.
And lots of people are fine with Exchange mostly because they _don't_know_ anything better. Most of them think that having to delete old e-mail is a normal fact of life and it's not. It's hard to buy a server with less than enough storage to support 10,000 accounts with my quota limits. Heck - it's hard to buy a storage system that couldn't handle 10 times that.
And the very same happens with Windows - they believe computers are unreliable just because they never saw one that wasn't. Expectations are low now because they have been forced down consistently for the past decades.
Nobody _needs_ Exchange. PHBs are simply too dumb to realize they have a really lousy groupware solution.
I noticed how people perceive computers. When Windows locks up a program because you are pushing your machine too hard, people blame the machine, lack of memory and assorted things instead of blaming that sad excuse for an OS. People _expect_ computers to fail because Windows fails all too often. Computers today are far better than people may think.
Does anyone really believe those virtual Windows thingies will ever approach five 9's stability? If you have, say, 1.000 virtual Windows desktops on one mainframe you will still need to employ all the staff that would be needed to run a 1.000 machine network minus the staff needed for dealing with hardware failure.
It's really a stupid, stupid idea.
I have to disagree. Had MS been denied access to more sensitive information, any proposal would collapse at once. The damage (disturbing business, casting a shadow on Y!'s future viability, destabilizing the workforce and creating an uprising of shareholders) would have largely been already done.
There is no way Yang could have spun this in a favorable way and there is no way he could have prevented the damage.
And, BTW, I don't get the way the press portrayed Icahn as "activist-investor". The term "corporate raider" would seem far more appropriate.
Actually, I sincerely doubt the MS offer was done in good faith.
Had the MS bid gone forward, MS would have access to a whole lot of Y! internal data, research, plans and so on. If they later retired their offer as they considered the companies were never really a good match, MS would have walked away with a lot of inside knowledge about its biggest competitor in the search market and Yahoo would have gotten nothing but a lot of FUD and a probably mortal wound.
This would be a lot less expensive than buying Yahoo! would be in the first place and Yahoo would be every bit as gone as #2 as if they were bought.
This kind of maneuver is so typical of Microsoft I cannot imagine any other explanation.
Anyone is a David next to Microsoft. TomTom is not a small company, AFAIK.
IIRC (I once was a MCP), long file names are implemented as a series of consecutive invalid directory entries that make up one long file name, the last one pointing to the real file.
Interesting... I have Win7 installed in the same machine and, while it sucks less than Vista (and looks a whole lot better than XP) its performance is somewhat unimpressive.
Perhaps you use more video or Flash thingies than I do. Performance perxeption is all about your application mix.
SQL Server comes as a distant third, BTW.
There are Apple products that compete directly with Microsoft ones. Both Apple and Microsoft make keyboards and mice. I regard Microsoft keyboards and mice as the nicest products they sell.
Agree, but it's still no Linux.