To be fair to Microsoft, they don't exactly make troubleshooting Windows easy.
How many times have you seen an obscure error message which ends with "Consult your system administrator" or dug through the event log (through a UI thoroughly unsuited for browsing, I might add) to find that despite a perfectly capable logging system, nothing useful's being logged to it?
It always surprises me how much crying goes on from end users when they are forced to learn something new. Especially as it's their job to learn a new system if/when it is introduced.
Most people absolutely hate change. Change in computer systems doesn't really intimidate the average/.'er but for someone who doesn't really understand anything about their computer and just knows "click the third menu across, fifth item down" or "The document I was working on is stored next to the dog in the background's nose", change is a real pain.
If you want a beautiful example of this, look at how people feel if their Windows profile gets corrupted.
You are, of course, aware that the support available when you license Exchange is very limited indeed and you have to pay a substantial amount of money for further support?
How about: because as far as I know the only companies likely to be pure "not-Windows" shops are Sun and Apple? Even then they'll have Windows systems in their labs for interoperability testing.
On the other hand, there are millions of "pure-Windows or must integrate with so seamlessly it may as well be" companies.
Itches that need scratching are more likely to be related to "how can I get this functionality to work without shelling out for the Microsoft product?" than "what can I do from scratch so much better than any other product?"
It went like this: Launch setup.exe, wait until the install finishes (Intel drivers pretty much install with no intervention), setup a network, done.
And that's how it goes 99% of the time.
Ah, this is the fabulous Microsoft idea "Let's allow hardware providers to provide their own UI for setting up wireless". So nobody can write generic setup instructions.
Earlier Intel UIs (not sure about current ones) didn't support WPA Enterprise mode. The card did, but you had to use the Microsoft UI.
Certain RALink UIs do support WPA enterprise mode in theory but don't work when you try using them in practise.
The Microsoft UI is a living abortion if you're doing anything other than the defaults. Mac, OTOH, can detect what you should be using and configure accordingly.
I have a coworker who just bought his first Mac and was begging me to come setup his wireless router and cable modem. He wouldn't even try, because he was certain he would screw something up because he's been conditioned by Microsoft OSes.
It's not just Microsoft OSes to blame - the media has a lot to answer for.
I remember when the Internet first started to become popular loads of people wanted to get online - so much so that the BBC ran a series about how it "didn't need to be difficult".
All of a sudden, people who otherwise would have been happy to give it a go themselves decided it was "too difficult" and gave up without trying.
Try taking your Linux box down to your local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain that GDM fails to start, leaving you at a console login prompt.
Because I'm quite sure that a Geek Squad kid will happily spend an afternoon on MSDN and booting Windows in console mode if there's an obscure problem with Windows. Rather than just reinstalling it.
The guy's theory is, if he keeps buying the same game in different formats, maybe one of them will actually work and get his money's worth.
Saying that, I wonder if anyone's successfully got their money back from a Steam game they purchased that went tits up? Or how they'd react to a credit card chargeback? At least that way buying the DVD wouldn't sting so much.
Very true, but many companies are starting to take a rather different approach.
The store manager is someone relatively young who's probably either fresh out of college or worked there for a couple of years since leaving school. Their power is very limited - they have it drilled into their head that THIS is company policy, and deviation from it is a sackable offence.
Needless to say, "company policy" conveniently forgets to mention anything about consumer retail law. Unless the consumer is prepared for an absolute battle royale, they won't get a refund and they'll be lucky to get a replacement.
I've heard of this happening in at least two large chains in the UK, and witnessed it first hand once. Until the regulators start to impose swingeing fines on companies doing this, I can't see it changing.
At the risk of being modified flamebait, the DRM has already won.
You've bought the product once on Steam, found it doesn't work and rather than contacting the publisher to say "Either it works or I don't buy any more", you've gone out to buy it on DVD instead.
The free market theory doesn't work very well when the customer's reaction to being screwed over is to go back and ask for more.
This £20/year tax isn't going to suddenly make it legal to engage in filesharing - it'll just pay for a government department (or, more likely, a quango) to prosecute you for doing so.
So not only is it still illegal to share files, you're also paying for the privilege of being prosecuted for it.
Why should it be different for a country? If they can't compete by providing the skilled labour necessary why should a company be forced into 'purchasing' the less skilled labor?
This would in theory work if:
1. Wages for a given job tend to be more-or-less the same worldwide. 2. It is so fantastically difficult to run some or all of your operations in another country that any cost benefit would be quickly wiped out by the loss in communications and management efficiency.
Something like 25 years ago, Margaret Thatcher said that the loss of much of UK industry didn't much matter because the country as a whole could do perfectly well operating on a service-based economy. Today, there are areas which still haven't recovered from this assertion - and offshoring is rapidly killing the service industry.
- Specialist software demanded by the teachers (and make no mistake, there's masses of it and a lot of it will be demanded) won't run because that tends to be Windows only.
Unless you can solve this problem, you can provide the most fantastic system in the world and it'll be relegated to the sidelines.
Legally, the buyer has entered into a contract with the retailer and it's the retailer's problem to ensure the buyer gets what they think they're getting.
IANAL, but AFAIK if the retailer bought a bunch of products in good faith, sold them on and then found a massive return rate, it would be down to the retailer to chase their supplier. As a rule of thumb, however, the more money there is involved the harder it is to get a refund or replacement - so I can't imagine a retailer could simply call up their supplier and demand a credit note for £thousands.
MS clearly spelled out what "Vista Capable" and "Premium Ready" meant. If customers chose not to read this information, it is nobody's fault but their own.
I think part of the problem is that Vista was an attempt at market segmentation taken to extreme ends - certainly to an extent that hasn't really been seen in consumer operating systems in the past.
That might not have been so much of a problem had Microsoft not made "how it looks" one of the features that divides Vista Basic from the others in the range. After all, "how it looks" is probably all that most people will ever notice.
They lied to shift hardware. To avoid pissing off Intel. They therefore need to give you WHAT YOU PAID FOR - you paid for a machine that was stated it could run Aero capably, so you should get that. No more No less.
Here in the UK, that'd be the retailer's problem. After all, it was they who sold you the product (complete with Vista capable sticker), it's their problem if it later transpires it isn't Vista capable. (In the real world, you'd almost certainly have no end of trouble getting a refund or a free upgrade in a case like this, but that's not really the point)
I'm surprised that this isn't the case in the US, frankly. What's the point in retailers if they're not responsible for the products they retail?
The UK didn't have a problem with "special renditions" (oh what a nasty euphemism - why can't we call it what it really is, "government sponsored kidnapping"?) taking place on our own damn soil.
Frankly, if Teflon Tony and his Team of Toadying Something Nasty That Begins with a "T" were still Prime Minister I have no doubt that McKinnon would be in the US right now.
He obviously got the first bit of the PR training - where they say "Never give a direct answer that makes us look bad, even if you're asked a direct question which can only be answered in a negative fashion".
Maybe he was in the bathroom when they said "Oh, and for goodness' sake people - if there really is no way you can make the product sound good, don't agree to the interview."
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind that if the music industry actually managed to make this happen, they could essentially STOP making music
There are some that say this has already happened.
To be fair to Microsoft, they don't exactly make troubleshooting Windows easy.
How many times have you seen an obscure error message which ends with "Consult your system administrator" or dug through the event log (through a UI thoroughly unsuited for browsing, I might add) to find that despite a perfectly capable logging system, nothing useful's being logged to it?
It's the 6th match now.
It always surprises me how much crying goes on from end users when they are forced to learn something new. Especially as it's their job to learn a new system if/when it is introduced.
Most people absolutely hate change. Change in computer systems doesn't really intimidate the average /.'er but for someone who doesn't really understand anything about their computer and just knows "click the third menu across, fifth item down" or "The document I was working on is stored next to the dog in the background's nose", change is a real pain.
If you want a beautiful example of this, look at how people feel if their Windows profile gets corrupted.
You are, of course, aware that the support available when you license Exchange is very limited indeed and you have to pay a substantial amount of money for further support?
How about: because as far as I know the only companies likely to be pure "not-Windows" shops are Sun and Apple? Even then they'll have Windows systems in their labs for interoperability testing.
On the other hand, there are millions of "pure-Windows or must integrate with so seamlessly it may as well be" companies.
Itches that need scratching are more likely to be related to "how can I get this functionality to work without shelling out for the Microsoft product?" than "what can I do from scratch so much better than any other product?"
Yes, I did.
It went like this: Launch setup.exe, wait until the install finishes (Intel drivers pretty much install with no intervention), setup a network, done.
And that's how it goes 99% of the time.
Ah, this is the fabulous Microsoft idea "Let's allow hardware providers to provide their own UI for setting up wireless". So nobody can write generic setup instructions.
Earlier Intel UIs (not sure about current ones) didn't support WPA Enterprise mode. The card did, but you had to use the Microsoft UI.
Certain RALink UIs do support WPA enterprise mode in theory but don't work when you try using them in practise.
The Microsoft UI is a living abortion if you're doing anything other than the defaults. Mac, OTOH, can detect what you should be using and configure accordingly.
I have a coworker who just bought his first Mac and was begging me to come setup his wireless router and cable modem. He wouldn't even try, because he was certain he would screw something up because he's been conditioned by Microsoft OSes.
It's not just Microsoft OSes to blame - the media has a lot to answer for.
I remember when the Internet first started to become popular loads of people wanted to get online - so much so that the BBC ran a series about how it "didn't need to be difficult".
All of a sudden, people who otherwise would have been happy to give it a go themselves decided it was "too difficult" and gave up without trying.
That's nice, your microvax probably cost as much as all of my Citrix servers to support 1,000 users and mine are infinitely more useful.
His microvax probably did the job.
That's what the system's there for, after all. Anything beyond that is fluff.
Tried setting up wireless on OS X and compared it with Windows lately? Particularly if it's not a straightforward open or shared-secret configuration?
It really should be an embarrassment to Microsoft how much easier it is under OS X.
Try taking your Linux box down to your local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain that GDM fails to start, leaving you at a console login prompt.
Because I'm quite sure that a Geek Squad kid will happily spend an afternoon on MSDN and booting Windows in console mode if there's an obscure problem with Windows. Rather than just reinstalling it.
The guy's theory is, if he keeps buying the same game in different formats, maybe one of them will actually work and get his money's worth.
Saying that, I wonder if anyone's successfully got their money back from a Steam game they purchased that went tits up? Or how they'd react to a credit card chargeback? At least that way buying the DVD wouldn't sting so much.
Here in the UK, I don't even think class-action suits exist sadly.
They do but they're very rare.
Very true, but many companies are starting to take a rather different approach.
The store manager is someone relatively young who's probably either fresh out of college or worked there for a couple of years since leaving school. Their power is very limited - they have it drilled into their head that THIS is company policy, and deviation from it is a sackable offence.
Needless to say, "company policy" conveniently forgets to mention anything about consumer retail law. Unless the consumer is prepared for an absolute battle royale, they won't get a refund and they'll be lucky to get a replacement.
I've heard of this happening in at least two large chains in the UK, and witnessed it first hand once. Until the regulators start to impose swingeing fines on companies doing this, I can't see it changing.
At the risk of being modified flamebait, the DRM has already won.
You've bought the product once on Steam, found it doesn't work and rather than contacting the publisher to say "Either it works or I don't buy any more", you've gone out to buy it on DVD instead.
The free market theory doesn't work very well when the customer's reaction to being screwed over is to go back and ask for more.
This £20/year tax isn't going to suddenly make it legal to engage in filesharing - it'll just pay for a government department (or, more likely, a quango) to prosecute you for doing so.
So not only is it still illegal to share files, you're also paying for the privilege of being prosecuted for it.
Yes. That's why it's a $1550 option.
In order to exercise the option on the regular macbook, you pay the $1550 difference and get the 17" pro.
Why should it be different for a country? If they can't compete by providing the skilled labour necessary why should a company be forced into 'purchasing' the less skilled labor?
This would in theory work if:
1. Wages for a given job tend to be more-or-less the same worldwide.
2. It is so fantastically difficult to run some or all of your operations in another country that any cost benefit would be quickly wiped out by the loss in communications and management efficiency.
Something like 25 years ago, Margaret Thatcher said that the loss of much of UK industry didn't much matter because the country as a whole could do perfectly well operating on a service-based economy. Today, there are areas which still haven't recovered from this assertion - and offshoring is rapidly killing the service industry.
- Specialist software demanded by the teachers (and make no mistake, there's masses of it and a lot of it will be demanded) won't run because that tends to be Windows only.
Unless you can solve this problem, you can provide the most fantastic system in the world and it'll be relegated to the sidelines.
That's a very good question.
Legally, the buyer has entered into a contract with the retailer and it's the retailer's problem to ensure the buyer gets what they think they're getting.
IANAL, but AFAIK if the retailer bought a bunch of products in good faith, sold them on and then found a massive return rate, it would be down to the retailer to chase their supplier. As a rule of thumb, however, the more money there is involved the harder it is to get a refund or replacement - so I can't imagine a retailer could simply call up their supplier and demand a credit note for £thousands.
And you think a single product release increased the sales of a well established and household brand by 23,000%?
23,000% is a hell of a jump.
If they were already selling by the boatload, that's incredible.
But what if they weren't? What if they'd published 250,000 copies and sold 200 prior to this?
MS clearly spelled out what "Vista Capable" and "Premium Ready" meant. If customers chose not to read this information, it is nobody's fault but their own.
I think part of the problem is that Vista was an attempt at market segmentation taken to extreme ends - certainly to an extent that hasn't really been seen in consumer operating systems in the past.
That might not have been so much of a problem had Microsoft not made "how it looks" one of the features that divides Vista Basic from the others in the range. After all, "how it looks" is probably all that most people will ever notice.
They lied to shift hardware. To avoid pissing off Intel. They therefore need to give you WHAT YOU PAID FOR - you paid for a machine that was stated it could run Aero capably, so you should get that. No more No less.
Here in the UK, that'd be the retailer's problem. After all, it was they who sold you the product (complete with Vista capable sticker), it's their problem if it later transpires it isn't Vista capable. (In the real world, you'd almost certainly have no end of trouble getting a refund or a free upgrade in a case like this, but that's not really the point)
I'm surprised that this isn't the case in the US, frankly. What's the point in retailers if they're not responsible for the products they retail?
The UK didn't have a problem with "special renditions" (oh what a nasty euphemism - why can't we call it what it really is, "government sponsored kidnapping"?) taking place on our own damn soil.
Frankly, if Teflon Tony and his Team of Toadying Something Nasty That Begins with a "T" were still Prime Minister I have no doubt that McKinnon would be in the US right now.
He obviously got the first bit of the PR training - where they say "Never give a direct answer that makes us look bad, even if you're asked a direct question which can only be answered in a negative fashion".
Maybe he was in the bathroom when they said "Oh, and for goodness' sake people - if there really is no way you can make the product sound good, don't agree to the interview."