Gateway has been on the verge of bankruptcy for what, the last ten years? Their stuff is overpriced and underpowered and I've never spent more than a minute examining their marketing material before concluding that they are way behind everybody else in the consumer PC sweepstakes.
Desktops are commodities. Buy them that way. Go to a storefront run by some Chinese guys and buy a white box. You'll get a straight up Taiwan clone with standard parts, a nice Windows full install CD (none of that "recovery partition" bullshit) and no crap on your desktop.
Anybody who buys desktops from Dell, HP, Gateway or any of the other losers is one. Oh, yeah, Dell might actually be able to undercut your local store by $50 or so on the price - but you'll spend that much removing the crap from your desktop - and when removing the temporary McAfee AV hoses your Windows, you'll spend a lot more fixing that problem.
Maybe Microsoft would get a CEO who has a fucking clue.
Naaah...what am I thinking? Not while Bill still runs the show. He'd find some other nitwit he can control.
Like McCain has a snowball's chance in hell of being President anyway. First of all, he's lost it and is totally out of touch with reality, as his "Baghdad stroll" comments proved to everyone (of course, Bush is totally lost in a dream world as well and he IS President). Second, he's got all the charisma of a thug (well, actually, so does Bush). Third, George Bush is likely to declare martial law and suspend the elections after the next Mossad-orchestrated "terrorist incident" or after the upcoming Iran war starts widespread terrorism in the US. Fourth, even Hillary Clinton, the most hated woman in America after Paris Hilton (and maybe Rosie), could beat that idiot, even if she campaigned in the nude.
"it allows consumers to circumvent geographical boundaries written in to broadcast deals."
Where the fuck is it written that I have to abide by YOUR contract deals?
Seems to me that's YOUR fucking problem, not mine.
You see, this is why so-called "intellectual property" is bullshit - because for these people, YOUR property is THEIR property - and YOUR behavior is THEIR problem.
In other words, "intellectual property" is nothing but an attempt to extend contract law over property law for the purpose of controlling a second - or even third (indeed, unlimited) - party's behavior to the benefit of the first party by allegedly citing a threat to the existence of the product involved if a third party has access to it.
In other words, it's an extortion racket.
And historically it always was if you look at the English history of who benefited from the first copyright laws.
Bill has investments in those porn companies, you see...
Remember the Claria thing - where Microsoft was going to buy them - and suddenly their spyware was downgraded from remove to ignore - or whatever it was?
Microsoft swore up and down that it wasn't true - but it was just too freakin' obvious.
How many times have I tried to kill a process only to have Windows either utterly refuse to do it - because the process is buried in some buggy driver - have to wait a minute and a half only to have Windows ask "Do you really want to kill this process?" Yes, fucking asshole Bill Gates, that's what I just TOLD YOU TO DO! In Linux, you do a "kill -9 - it's fucking OVER for that process.
And the really fun stuff about supporting Windows PCs is how you go in intending to do one thing - and spend the next THREE HOURS doing all the "back story" stuff just to get to the point where you can do what you intended to do - because the machine has been steadily hosing itself since the last time you did a support call.
Had a client yesterday with Windows 2000 losing its printer drivers because the spool service crashed. (And God knows why your printer drivers have to disappear just because the spool service isn't running - who thought that stupidity up at Microsoft?) So I get there, and of course it's a Lexmark POS with their driver hooked to the spool service - or maybe a security update hosed it, since my Google search shows that happens.
So I try cleaning out the drivers from the Registry and the spool directories. So then the spool service and the spooler program somehow got mismatched, so an error message pops up every few seconds.
So while I'm trying to fix this, I see some Windows updates need to be applied. So I start that going, and that fails. I look at the update history, they're all failing with some stupid error code. So I try to rename the catalog directory as per the usual fix - can't do it even as administrator because somehow the system thinks it's still in use.
So I try to go into Safe Mode - machine won't come up at all in Safe Mode. WTF?
So it's "repair install" time. Then, because it's an old Windows 2000 and the repair install dumped the updates (and why is this - a repair install keeps the buggy end user programs, but dumps all its own updates?), I have to download 53 updates (which is still better than Windows XP current 72 updates).
Finally the machine is functional enough that I can do what I intended - install a newer printer driver.
"deployed in the LAN environments for which it was designed, where all the systems were more or less trusted"
Which was, of course, one of the more stupid design decisions - because there are NO trusted systems other than ones not connected to a network which are locked in a (relatively) physically secure room.
By the way, are you saying that NT did not have Internet access? WTF?
"One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."
Or going back to my day, Vietnam.
There is no shortage of human stupidity.
Adobe software has all this "license management" crap built in that screws everything up - and one day I put the word Adobe into a Google search box - and the top site on the results page was a crack site...which pretty much tells you all you need to know about copy protection.
over their own lines. How are they going to deliver interactive TV?
They were promising they were going to deliver 20Mbps DSL in a year about two years ago when I tried to upgrade my DSL from 1.5 to 3Mbps. Then they had to reneg on the 3Mbps because I was over 10,000 feet from the CO (without bothering to tell me they had reneged, either, until I asked them about the slow bandwidth I was paying for.)
Anybody who believes AT&T about anything probably believes Microsoft, too.
I gotta admit, the other day I burned a later build of Matrox X-Tools onto a CD. Had an autorun in it, etc.
Stuck the CD in the drive, the autoran ran their installer.
Held the mouse of the Install Matrox X-Tools - got "Matrox X-Tools can not be found"...
Apparently their stupid ass installer is so hardcoded the CD has to be named something specific - but even burning another CD with the right volume name didn't help. Even moving the installer into the directory WITH the Matrox X-Tools, it couldn't find its own directory.
In other words, if you don't have one of their CD's, you can't install it.
So why do they let you download it?
Utterly stupid shit.
And don't get me started on how we have installed and uninstalled Adobe Premiere 1.5 and the Matrox X-Tools a dozen times now and STILL can't this utter crap to work properly. After a fresh install of Windows and the downloading of the necessary critical security updates, Adobe Premiere will not load. If you manage to achieve that (we did on one machine), Matrox will tell you Adobe Premiere is not installed - even when it is. If you manage to get Matrox installed, Adobe hangs loading the Matrox drivers. If you manage to get past that, so that both Adobe and Matrox runs, Matrox can't find its own goddamn card...
I mean, if it wasn't for the alleged "features" this crap has, both companies would have been out of business years ago. They're both ridiculously poor software companies.
The software industry is TRULY a pathetically badly run industry. You can't even call it an "industry" - it's a joke shop.
The usual reference is to Lloyds of London. Your beer example is interesting, but not particularly relevant.
It really is irrelevant to the point that a local brewery has been around for a while in Saltzburg, Austria...One could easily find companies dealing in basic commodities like beer that have been around for a long time. We are hardly talking about some small company with X employees with a local - or even small national - market.
And neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor any other tech company today, is all that "well-managed".
The point stands. No company lasts forever - if for no other reason than by the end of this century, with the coming tsunami in technological development, people might not even be drinking beer anymore - or that any particular kind of beer will be produced by anybody with a little nanotech.
And certainly the notion of search - or anything else Google invests in - will have undergone enough changes over the next fifty years that it will require an exceptional series of management to weather the changes.
I believed back in the early 1980's that IBM was doomed and that the mainframe was doomed. But I was surprised to see that IBM was able to reinvent itself into a services company, and modify the uses of the mainframe enough to make it still a viable product today - if not a particularly smart product, in my opinion, outside of certain niche uses.
So it's not impossible for a company to keep plugging ahead and manage to survive drastic changes in the environment.
But it's not the usual situation. Only very small companies with niche markets or very large companies with massive resources usually make it through such changes - and not forever.
I just read the ten pages of comments and added my own. The guy gets slagged totally and deservedly so.
I'm not a big fan of MySQL. I tend to think that it might be okay for serving up dynamic Web sites, but for serious DB work outside of Web page serving where you are manipulating corporate INFORMATION in various domains by dynamic queries that may be complex, it's not that great - in fact, it's pretty weak. PostgreSQL has much better features for use in that scenario.
But the reasons cited not to use MySQL are simply pathetic. I mean, you've got an Oracle DBA, so go Oracle so he's "comfortable"? Supposedly this saves you money over time? WTF?
Also, his counts on the number of possible projects Google could pursue under their employee development plan was dismissed immediately by people who know how large corporations pursue ideas.
However, I'd like to see him apply the same logic to Microsoft, since obviously the same thing applies - except of course that Microsoft hires "brilliant morons" who can't code, can't design, can't do usability or security, and are willing slaves to making Bill richer - but who really know Visual C++ and.Net.
So maybe the logic doesn't apply. If it weren't for myopia and incompetence on the part of most of the corporate world, and also for Bill's heavy-handed marketing and distribution tactics amounting to near monopoly, - and to some degree, the incompetence of its competitors, such as Sun, HP and IBM, who insisted on fragmenting the UNIX market with proprietary versions - Microsoft would have been out of business a decade ago.
Another conspiracy theory he can use to attack Novell since the "Novell is trying to be bought out by Microsoft" one was so ridiculous it just made him look like an idiot.
Naturally in any legal document you can spin the thing any way you want - despite or perhaps because of the supposedly rigorous legal language - so I'm sure he'll come up with something to let him get more play in/. and Linux Today.
By the same stupid Microsoft shill - even if his name is different than the last one.
Every one of the five points is wrong.
It's the same old, same old: "command line", "too geeky", "no drivers", blah, blah, blah.
This crap isn't news any more, guys. And it's becoming less relevant with every new distro release.
Linux has its problems, sure. ALL software has problems. Windows has as many or more than Linux. Windows may have been significantly easier to use back in 2000, but it's 2007 now and things have changed.
How do they handle the body overheating problem? Yes, you can buy ribbed, ventilating T-shirts for wearing under vests, but heat buildup is WHY vests get sweated on and then lose protection ability from moisture.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire first page of posts is one repetitive list:
Moron 1: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 2: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 3: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 4: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 5: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 6: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 7: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 8: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 9: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 10: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 11: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 12: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 12: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 14: You CAN turn it off.
Moron 15: Google didn't say that - they said allow it to be turned off.
Moron 16: You CAN turn it off.
There's your whole first page...
Morons...
It never was about "justice". Just look at it's behavior concerning US torture, its behavior about the firing of US attorneys, etc., ad nauseum.
You might as well hand it over to the Mafia and let them run it. At least they'd be efficient about it.
That's it! It's strange attraction! Or is that entanglement?
One story attracts another story - and since Zonk is entangled he lets them through.
Do the quantum encryption guys know about this breakthrough?
Just send Zonk your message and it gets through no matter how much duplication it entails!
"Dude, you bought a Gateway!"
Gateway has been on the verge of bankruptcy for what, the last ten years? Their stuff is overpriced and underpowered and I've never spent more than a minute examining their marketing material before concluding that they are way behind everybody else in the consumer PC sweepstakes.
Desktops are commodities. Buy them that way. Go to a storefront run by some Chinese guys and buy a white box. You'll get a straight up Taiwan clone with standard parts, a nice Windows full install CD (none of that "recovery partition" bullshit) and no crap on your desktop.
Anybody who buys desktops from Dell, HP, Gateway or any of the other losers is one. Oh, yeah, Dell might actually be able to undercut your local store by $50 or so on the price - but you'll spend that much removing the crap from your desktop - and when removing the temporary McAfee AV hoses your Windows, you'll spend a lot more fixing that problem.
The Afghanistan arms manufacturers are going to pay royalties to the Russians they kicked out of their country.
Right.
Email me when this happens.
Maybe Microsoft would get a CEO who has a fucking clue.
Naaah...what am I thinking? Not while Bill still runs the show. He'd find some other nitwit he can control.
Like McCain has a snowball's chance in hell of being President anyway. First of all, he's lost it and is totally out of touch with reality, as his "Baghdad stroll" comments proved to everyone (of course, Bush is totally lost in a dream world as well and he IS President). Second, he's got all the charisma of a thug (well, actually, so does Bush). Third, George Bush is likely to declare martial law and suspend the elections after the next Mossad-orchestrated "terrorist incident" or after the upcoming Iran war starts widespread terrorism in the US. Fourth, even Hillary Clinton, the most hated woman in America after Paris Hilton (and maybe Rosie), could beat that idiot, even if she campaigned in the nude.
Browsers facilitate "Google hacking"!
In fact, so does TCP/IP!
So do Cisco routers!
No more Internet!
We KNOW Microsoft never utters a word without LYING!
This is a truth on a par with "the Earth revolves around the sun."
Nothing to see here, move along.
"it allows consumers to circumvent geographical boundaries written in to broadcast deals."
Where the fuck is it written that I have to abide by YOUR contract deals?
Seems to me that's YOUR fucking problem, not mine.
You see, this is why so-called "intellectual property" is bullshit - because for these people, YOUR property is THEIR property - and YOUR behavior is THEIR problem.
In other words, "intellectual property" is nothing but an attempt to extend contract law over property law for the purpose of controlling a second - or even third (indeed, unlimited) - party's behavior to the benefit of the first party by allegedly citing a threat to the existence of the product involved if a third party has access to it.
In other words, it's an extortion racket.
And historically it always was if you look at the English history of who benefited from the first copyright laws.
Bill has investments in those porn companies, you see...
Remember the Claria thing - where Microsoft was going to buy them - and suddenly their spyware was downgraded from remove to ignore - or whatever it was?
Microsoft swore up and down that it wasn't true - but it was just too freakin' obvious.
This is totally true.
How many times have I tried to kill a process only to have Windows either utterly refuse to do it - because the process is buried in some buggy driver - have to wait a minute and a half only to have Windows ask "Do you really want to kill this process?" Yes, fucking asshole Bill Gates, that's what I just TOLD YOU TO DO! In Linux, you do a "kill -9 - it's fucking OVER for that process.
And the really fun stuff about supporting Windows PCs is how you go in intending to do one thing - and spend the next THREE HOURS doing all the "back story" stuff just to get to the point where you can do what you intended to do - because the machine has been steadily hosing itself since the last time you did a support call.
Had a client yesterday with Windows 2000 losing its printer drivers because the spool service crashed. (And God knows why your printer drivers have to disappear just because the spool service isn't running - who thought that stupidity up at Microsoft?) So I get there, and of course it's a Lexmark POS with their driver hooked to the spool service - or maybe a security update hosed it, since my Google search shows that happens.
So I try cleaning out the drivers from the Registry and the spool directories. So then the spool service and the spooler program somehow got mismatched, so an error message pops up every few seconds.
So while I'm trying to fix this, I see some Windows updates need to be applied. So I start that going, and that fails. I look at the update history, they're all failing with some stupid error code. So I try to rename the catalog directory as per the usual fix - can't do it even as administrator because somehow the system thinks it's still in use.
So I try to go into Safe Mode - machine won't come up at all in Safe Mode. WTF?
So it's "repair install" time. Then, because it's an old Windows 2000 and the repair install dumped the updates (and why is this - a repair install keeps the buggy end user programs, but dumps all its own updates?), I have to download 53 updates (which is still better than Windows XP current 72 updates).
Finally the machine is functional enough that I can do what I intended - install a newer printer driver.
Windows is utter shit.
"Expect more pro-microsoft and microsoft PR posts"
Is that even possible? As far as I can tell, the MS shills here outnumber the Ubuntu fanboys two to one.
Or maybe just because they're being paid to run their mouths, they just post more?
"deployed in the LAN environments for which it was designed, where all the systems were more or less trusted"
Which was, of course, one of the more stupid design decisions - because there are NO trusted systems other than ones not connected to a network which are locked in a (relatively) physically secure room.
By the way, are you saying that NT did not have Internet access? WTF?
"One could also argue whether all that money spent by the industry in this race will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."
Or going back to my day, Vietnam.
There is no shortage of human stupidity.
Adobe software has all this "license management" crap built in that screws everything up - and one day I put the word Adobe into a Google search box - and the top site on the results page was a crack site...which pretty much tells you all you need to know about copy protection.
over their own lines. How are they going to deliver interactive TV?
They were promising they were going to deliver 20Mbps DSL in a year about two years ago when I tried to upgrade my DSL from 1.5 to 3Mbps. Then they had to reneg on the 3Mbps because I was over 10,000 feet from the CO (without bothering to tell me they had reneged, either, until I asked them about the slow bandwidth I was paying for.)
Anybody who believes AT&T about anything probably believes Microsoft, too.
When's the last time you heard or read of the Zune as opposed to the iPod?
'Nuff said.
Well, maybe not. Just read this in Wikipedia:
"On Monday, April 9, 2007, Apple announced that over 100 million iPods had been sold worldwide"
That puts Microsoft at LESS than one percent of the market (since there are plenty of other makes on the market, as well.)
Another loser product from Microsoft.
How does it feel to have a tiny share of the market, Bill?
Go back to sueing OSS.
I gotta admit, the other day I burned a later build of Matrox X-Tools onto a CD. Had an autorun in it, etc.
Stuck the CD in the drive, the autoran ran their installer.
Held the mouse of the Install Matrox X-Tools - got "Matrox X-Tools can not be found"...
Apparently their stupid ass installer is so hardcoded the CD has to be named something specific - but even burning another CD with the right volume name didn't help. Even moving the installer into the directory WITH the Matrox X-Tools, it couldn't find its own directory.
In other words, if you don't have one of their CD's, you can't install it.
So why do they let you download it?
Utterly stupid shit.
And don't get me started on how we have installed and uninstalled Adobe Premiere 1.5 and the Matrox X-Tools a dozen times now and STILL can't this utter crap to work properly. After a fresh install of Windows and the downloading of the necessary critical security updates, Adobe Premiere will not load. If you manage to achieve that (we did on one machine), Matrox will tell you Adobe Premiere is not installed - even when it is. If you manage to get Matrox installed, Adobe hangs loading the Matrox drivers. If you manage to get past that, so that both Adobe and Matrox runs, Matrox can't find its own goddamn card...
I mean, if it wasn't for the alleged "features" this crap has, both companies would have been out of business years ago. They're both ridiculously poor software companies.
The software industry is TRULY a pathetically badly run industry. You can't even call it an "industry" - it's a joke shop.
The usual reference is to Lloyds of London. Your beer example is interesting, but not particularly relevant.
It really is irrelevant to the point that a local brewery has been around for a while in Saltzburg, Austria...One could easily find companies dealing in basic commodities like beer that have been around for a long time. We are hardly talking about some small company with X employees with a local - or even small national - market.
And neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor any other tech company today, is all that "well-managed".
The point stands. No company lasts forever - if for no other reason than by the end of this century, with the coming tsunami in technological development, people might not even be drinking beer anymore - or that any particular kind of beer will be produced by anybody with a little nanotech.
And certainly the notion of search - or anything else Google invests in - will have undergone enough changes over the next fifty years that it will require an exceptional series of management to weather the changes.
I believed back in the early 1980's that IBM was doomed and that the mainframe was doomed. But I was surprised to see that IBM was able to reinvent itself into a services company, and modify the uses of the mainframe enough to make it still a viable product today - if not a particularly smart product, in my opinion, outside of certain niche uses.
So it's not impossible for a company to keep plugging ahead and manage to survive drastic changes in the environment.
But it's not the usual situation. Only very small companies with niche markets or very large companies with massive resources usually make it through such changes - and not forever.
I just read the ten pages of comments and added my own. The guy gets slagged totally and deservedly so.
I'm not a big fan of MySQL. I tend to think that it might be okay for serving up dynamic Web sites, but for serious DB work outside of Web page serving where you are manipulating corporate INFORMATION in various domains by dynamic queries that may be complex, it's not that great - in fact, it's pretty weak. PostgreSQL has much better features for use in that scenario.
But the reasons cited not to use MySQL are simply pathetic. I mean, you've got an Oracle DBA, so go Oracle so he's "comfortable"? Supposedly this saves you money over time? WTF?
"Email me when this happens."
Basically he's saying "no company lives forever."
.Net.
In other words: "Duh!"
Also, his counts on the number of possible projects Google could pursue under their employee development plan was dismissed immediately by people who know how large corporations pursue ideas.
However, I'd like to see him apply the same logic to Microsoft, since obviously the same thing applies - except of course that Microsoft hires "brilliant morons" who can't code, can't design, can't do usability or security, and are willing slaves to making Bill richer - but who really know Visual C++ and
So maybe the logic doesn't apply. If it weren't for myopia and incompetence on the part of most of the corporate world, and also for Bill's heavy-handed marketing and distribution tactics amounting to near monopoly, - and to some degree, the incompetence of its competitors, such as Sun, HP and IBM, who insisted on fragmenting the UNIX market with proprietary versions - Microsoft would have been out of business a decade ago.
Another conspiracy theory he can use to attack Novell since the "Novell is trying to be bought out by Microsoft" one was so ridiculous it just made him look like an idiot.
/. and Linux Today.
Naturally in any legal document you can spin the thing any way you want - despite or perhaps because of the supposedly rigorous legal language - so I'm sure he'll come up with something to let him get more play in
"similar problems are being encountered with lessons on the Crusades because these lessons contradict teachings from local mosques."
In other words, since the Muslims aren't listening to the standard Christian belief system that extols the Crusades, there are "problems".
As for the supposed "Holocaust deniers", this is a crap piece. Who put this out? MEMRI? The guys runs by ex-Mossad agents?
By the same stupid Microsoft shill - even if his name is different than the last one.
Every one of the five points is wrong.
It's the same old, same old: "command line", "too geeky", "no drivers", blah, blah, blah.
This crap isn't news any more, guys. And it's becoming less relevant with every new distro release.
Linux has its problems, sure. ALL software has problems. Windows has as many or more than Linux. Windows may have been significantly easier to use back in 2000, but it's 2007 now and things have changed.
I say it once again.
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT Linux is FREE crap.
Wearing pure plastic is likely to be worse.
How do they handle the body overheating problem? Yes, you can buy ribbed, ventilating T-shirts for wearing under vests, but heat buildup is WHY vests get sweated on and then lose protection ability from moisture.