Designing from scratch is probably one of the worst things you could do. Users are complaining there isn't any software out there for Mac all the time. An OS that's only for the deaf and blind would have even less market share and would be the last (if at all) OS to get software ported to it.
Your best bet would be to use the power of Linux and OSS to create some form of a tablet that will raise little nubs for the borders and text on screen. Anything else would be....time consuming, and wouldn't have enough of a market to actually sell the product at a decent price. High prices mean the blind/deaf will just continue doing what they are already doing.
So, yeah, get the source for KDE and start modifying it or atleast using it to make your own proprietary overlay to it. No licensing costs to jack up your bottom line, and it helps grow OSS.
Quite frankly, I could care less if someone has an MCSE. I find them hugely overrated. Not to say there aren't some great MCSE techs out there, but I'll be willing to bet that less than half of them are truly educated and knowledgable. That stems from so many bootcamps that even my cousin went to.
Personally when I'm hiring, I'll take verifiable experience over certifications any day. I've had both certified and non-certified employees and several times the non-certified employees got the job done better, faster, and more stable than the certified did.
Put bluntly, some kid walks in with an MCSE, A+ hardware, and A+ networking cert and only 2 years on the job. Beside him stands a guy with 15 years verifiable experience in network and server administration, I'll take the guy without the certs any day. I can't necessarily say that's how other companies look at it, but that's my take on it.
I thought I made it somewhat clear, but reading it again, I can see it's not. By financial gain...I mean ANY financial gain. ie increased revenue from taxes, jobs, or contracts.
Since hotels don't employ all THAT many people (maybe a 100 for a decent sized hotel) the long term gains from it aren't really that much. Sure there will be contract labor there working on it for a year or 2, but that's it for the major labor. And in many cases those are developers from out of the area so the money is still leaving the area anyway.
Not saying I disagree with you on that. I believe there SHOULD be laws against population growth. And I'm not saying I like what "they" did. I think it wrong and shouldn't be allowed. HOWEVER, it does happen from time to time.
And in ways, you're sounding quite selfish. If you owned a nice little cottage just off a 2 lane interstate that was congested so badly that it was backed up for atleast 5 miles 5 hours out of the day and the ONLY thing stopped them from making it big enough was to take your property. Making hundreds of thousands of people suffer in traffic because you just want to sit on your porch is extremely selfish. Not only does that ruin the air around your house from all the cars nearly idling, but it also puts a considerable strain on natural resources from those people sitting in traffic.... Not to mention the time out of THEIR lives that they sit and wait.
There's a line that was crossed with this mess that should never have been. And that's government taking property for nothing more than financial gain. THAT is wrong. Taking it for the good of the public is quite a different matter.
It says shall not be taken for PUBLIC use. They took it for PRIVATE use. And of course from the article, do you SEE anything about the compensation? How do we know they weren't paid fair market value for their homes?
Sure it's a pain in the ass, but the key points here are:
1) It was taken for PRIVATE use and the constitution doesn't give any statements concerning that.
2) The constitution says without just compensation. If they were paid them fair market value for their homes under any circumstance, that's just tough
I've seen many homes gobbled up for road construction, road widening, whatever kind of public works for decades. That's just the way it goes.
I refuse to "jump on the bandwagon". It's not a BAD idea, but it's riddled with flaws. Microsoft can muscle all they want. When their email users go elsewhere, that's pretty much going to be the end of that.
I may be small, but I know I won't be the only company refusing to setup Sender ID on their mail servers. MS will bow with yet another failed approach...you know, kind of like passport.
Avertising has several modes. Doubleclick's method of advertising is the one that's the problem. Popups, popunders, and the appearance in many spyware "issues" is what has caused all this. It's just like spam, when you let it go unchecked...well everyone here knows how that's turning out right now.
The banner advertising will never go away and it's NOT a good idea to block those. They tend to get placed on a site that's not obtrusive enough to pull away from the content and usually they don't affect anything. I don't mind see banner ads on a site and sometimes I click through to them.
On the other hand, any site that advertises in popups immediately gets closed (if it even managed to get past the popup blocker) and remembered as a company I will not purchase from in the future. I also tend to steer away from sites that USE popups simply because it's annoying. I could give a rats arse about the content. If the site annoys me, I quit going.
In short, advertising can help keep content free, but when it becomes so intrusive that it takes away from the site it's on, isn't that detrimental to the content owner in the first place? Back before there were any good popup blockers, if I would follow a link and a popup jumped infront of me, I closed the popup and clicked back and moved on. It was that simple. Of course we can't forget about the popup swarms that some people would get either. Particularly if they would up on some porn site.....THERE'S A REASON TO BLOCK THAT CRAP.
Actually the sales of *NIX versions were cut about 5 months ago. How do I know? I called and asked about it, then realized after the fact that it was the company MS was buying out.
I don't care what any one says at this point. I've spent the last 3 weeks doing constant searches on google for various items of interest. What I found is on average out of 5 pages worth of search returns, I got approximately 10 links that were actually pertinent to what I was looking for. The rest were all blackhat tactics with nothing more than google ads on the site to take you to something that someone paid for you to see. How does that help? If someone paid for you to see it, they want SOMETHING in return.
The days of relying on Google for search information is gone. We already know we can't really trust MSN, and Yahoo is....well, ugly, cluttered, and over all bloated. So it looks like internet searches are becoming less reliable all together.
Google could retain it's market mindset IF they get off their bums and solve this blackhat tactic bullshit. Basically, they are becoming a victim of their own success. But if they don't succeed in clearing this mess up, people will get tired of it and move elsewhere. And of course when that happens, advertising dollars will go elsewhere as well. I'm already about ready to pull our advertising from them if they don't do something, and fast.
Well, I'm miffed that good people are getting screwed. My favorite saying is, "I'm in this to make a living, not a killing". I don't like having to add insult to injury, and I don't know if you've ever had to deal with an ignorant (yes, I mean uninformed not necessarily stupid) user that had $10k stolen due to identity theft and then you have to turn around and charge them $250+ just to secure a network back up that they already paid for in the first place.
You get to sit there and listen to them venting, ranting, bitching. Just about everything. Of course you're also met with the barrage of questions about if it really is secure now. And then the 5 days worth of phone calls and emails you have to deal with afterwards to help assure that the job was done correctly this time.
I do love the fact that I get the work from them screwing things up. But I have to deal with the aftermath and let me tell you, sometimes it's not worth it. I have actually contemplated charging MORE if one of those places touched the network first. The amount of time doing afterwork support can actually be twice as much as the actual work.
Let's just say people could save themselves and their tech alot of head and heartache if they just did some checking around before they call someone with a fancy car or uniform.
This is quite annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've had to fix the screw-ups from places like this. They don't hire qualified technicians, nor train them properly. I've had issues where they've left wireless networks wide open and resulted in identity theft, hacked systems, and just about anything else you can think of. Including near completely deleted harddrives due to sharing the C drive or whatnot.
The list can go on and on, but things as blatant as telling a customer "oh yeah, we secured your wireless network" but then not actually doing it....well, that's bad. I've had them replace harddrives that weren't bad, even making the user start from scratch WITHOUT attempting to backup any data.....I better stop now before I start getting angry at this crap....again.
more than just slashdot, you would find that Apple had NO intention of allowing OS X to run on just any intel hardware. Which is a shame as that would have skyrocketed them to no end.
However, allowing this story to be posted on/. only perpetuates the fact that you can't believe half of what you read here simply because of the fact the majority of it comes from blogs.
What a shame. So it appears that Apple still doesn't see the forest for the trees. I guess they just want to stay as a niche market. Too many people have made large investments in their hardware already and I know I sure wouldn't buy new hardware just to run OS X, but I would happily buy OS X to run on my own equipment. Which is more than I can say for Windows. I'm using the last version of Windows I ever will.
With that in mind, I have actually seen our sales of Linux desktops increase lately as well. Not only is the hardware cheaper than Apple's, it doesn't have to be "hacked" to make another OS run on it.
Oh, well, bubble went boom
Mac OS X is BSD based. I don't see how this will be a blow to linux on the desktop to be perfectly honest. OS X and Linux are kin. More developers writting code for *NIX is better. Which means both of them will benefit.
The blow I see coming is one HELL of a blow to Windows. So many of my customers and clients are tired of Windows and the crap involved with it. Apple making this move, if handled correctly, will allow those users to begin moving away from Windows and to a *NIX style OS. To me, it doesn't matter so much if it's Linux or OS X, but that the client has a solid, stable system they can rely on. Granted, watching Microsoft get pommeled doesn't cause any lost sleep either.
I personally have a nice space lined up already to put OS X in our list of available OSes as long as they make OS X available for any Intel based system and don't try to lock people into using just their hardware.
Then they should stop sending all the jobs over seas. Why would anyone want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education only to turn around and find that they can't have a stable job because every time they turn around they're outsourced to India or wherever.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'm doing what I love, I wouldn't be doing it at all. I've done more than enough things in my life that I can find a job in other feilds easily enough. I make less than most IT pros because I'm a small business owner, but to be prefectly honest, I would probably walk away in a heartbeat if it wasn't for the fact that I'm my own boss and don't have to worry about outsourcing.
I'm finding that google's search is getting a bit less than acurate of late. Too many blackhat techniques are being allowed to go through and even when they are reported nothing is done about it.
Plus search results for things such as specific errors, using keywords of the error won't return anything. After broadening the search if you make it to page 10 of the search...I'll be damned, there's the exact quoted error your searched for.
I hate to say it, but there's been MANY times of late I've had to fall back to Yahoo to find solutions and once I even had to use turbo10 to actually find what I was looking for. Google needs to return to their roots and fix their search engine instead of spending time working on desktop search or whatever.
However, MSNs search won't be the replacement for Google when users start realizing that Google's search isn't what it used to be simply because MSN is worthless when it comes to finding anything that's not MS friendly information. Even problems with windows can be difficult to find with their search. Besides, Microsoft has always been known for less than quality software, why would their search be any different?
First off, like several people have already said, they don't buy software from us much anyway, so I don't see it being that much of a problem.
Secondly, We don't use any other country's software for our government purposes (except open source stuff were applicable) so why shouldn't some other government do the same? No problems from me there
Third, I've long since said the U.S. needs to get the HELL out of other people's business and worry about things at home more. We spend far too much time trying to be big daddy to every country in the world, then turn around and forgive their debts or send soldiers over to "clean house". Of course our kind of clean might not be what their kind of clean is. But we force our opinions and beliefs on them anyway.
And last, if it bothers you that much...just don't buy anything made in China. I'm sure you'll see your purchasing options drop considerably, but it's a small price to pay, right?
Dvorak is losing my respect of late. He has said some elightening things in the past, but the past 10 or so articles is showing the fact that he's losing touch with the industry.
People buy from us because they DON'T want to have to deal with companies like Dell, HP, Compaq and the like. They also have a love hate relationship with Microsoft. They hate the company, but they also love having a computer. They already know the shoddy software microsoft puts out.
Personally, this just reinforces my opinions of late of the complete end of sales with Microsoft products. If a "partner" decides to go into direct competition, then they cease to be a valid partner. Linux is gaining mindshare and market share. Windows has become the product every wants to get rid of but is afraid they can't.
Hence forth a new business model for any OEM is to offer Linux training and products. Free of charge or very low cost. Let's show MS that they can't piss on the army of people who help put them where they are by even supporting their crap. If it wasn't for places like mine all over the US, how would MS get their stuff repaired? You know full well they won't work with someone over the phone to resolve issues. That will just take more value away from their products. And of course the huge OEMs answer is always "use the restore CD" and fail to mention that data will be lost.
Traditionally, Microsoft has always offered substandard products. Office wasn't near as good as Word Perfect, Scandisk and Defrag weren't as good as disk doctor and speed disk, and so forth. They have won by cheaper prices, bundling, or flat out black hat tactics like code adjustments in the OS to keep software from working properly. On thinking about it, I have YET to think of something....ANYTHING that Microsoft didn't either buy, steal, or mimic. Doing that, they take the competitions' ideas and crush them.
Several of the posts here are already agreeing with my thinking of "Microsoft, it's your crappy code that's causing the problem. Why should we pay you to fix something you broke but we bought in good faith?" Granted, I'm speaking mostly for my customers here as I am slowly moving completely away from Windows, but the point still remains the same.
It's come to the point where you have to question Microsoft at this point. If they start making money from Anti-virus subscriptions, what's their incentive to fix the flaws in the software that are causing the problems in the first place? The consumer already has a false idea that viruses and malware are just a fact of life and they WILL get infected without doing anything so they just live with it. If a peice of code is flawed that will allow introduction of malicious code of any type without user intervention, it falls to the software producer to fix it, not charge to protect against it. If you ask me, this is Anti-trust #3 in the making.
Look at Ford awhile back when all those Firestone tires were causing havoc. Did the customer have to pay to get new tires? No! This is the same thing. I would urge ANYONE that's considering using any MS products like this that they should reconsider. It will only support Microsoft's belief that they can milk money out of their customers for producing a crappy product.
I'll agree with you on all those counts. His comment was taken with a grain of salt. And I do believe MS is improving, but I think the damage is already done in many respects. I know I sure won't be going beyond Windows 2000. The only reason I still even USE windows is because I'm a gamer. Otherwise it would have been gone years ago.
I didn't estimate at all, I used the estimate from the article and said that it would take much more. However, the thinking process seems flawed. Wouldn't it be logical to put the more experienced programmers on fixing the bugs? After all they do have more experience. However, I see the advantage of the grunts doing it to to some degree. It gives them experience to learn what NOT to do. But does that thinking really work either? "I'm not a grunt anymore, I can make all the mistakes I want and the grunts will have to fix it"
Every job I've ever done in the past has been "you broke it, you fix it". You know what that did? It made me stop breaking it.
I still don't understand something here. I worked in a shipyard and welded the keel and the underside of the hold together. More often than not, I worked on petroleum barges. The ecological impact of a mistake on my part (or on the inspector's) could be catastrophic. Computer can (and often do) control EVERYTHING. They are in ships, they are in air traffic control towers, they are even in nuclear powerplants! WHY WHY WHY is there not an oversite over some of this stuff specifically dealing with security?
The Coast Gaurd inspected every single weld in our ships, if they weren't good, we had to airarc them out and do it again. They randomly x-rayed welds and EVERY welder had to go through periodic retesting and that's just for a petroleum barge. It was more intense for passenger craft.
All I'm saying is that computers are relied on so much.....it's a shame that Microsoft, and it's "no warranty" EULA can be in control of so many things (identity theft anyone?) and not have to worry about security other than in the public opinion and hurting their sales.
The end users and companies using MS products are the ones that pay for their mistakes, not Microsoft. That doesn't happen if you buy a car, house, or any other product. Hell, even the computer WITH the operating system on it has a warranty. I can understand some aspect of the software not having a warranty due to user errors. But doesn't "dumbing the user down" lay partly to blame on the OS? And you can't tell me it's a users fault if they got nailed with Blaster. We should be able to seek reperations from MS for SELLING a faulty product. Blaster ate up about $1000 worth of bandwidth the first day in the wild hitting our network. Not to mention clean up and patches on all the users computers I worked on that month.
FASTER! MORE SECURE! BETTER GAMING! MORE PRODUCTIVITY!
Doesn't that sound familiar? And here's the kicker, according to a security expert of mine, XP has more potential security holes in it than win95 to win2k combined. I only have his word on it, but to be honest, it sounds logical to me given Microsoft's track record and the amount of XP machines that I see with malware and root kits on them. You can say something is more secure because you disable the ability to open attachments, but then the user turns the ability back on and....whoops there goes the security of OE. Not that it was all that secure even with attachments disabled.
With the magnitude of the amount of code in Windows these days, including easter eggs and so forth, I would estimate that it would take more than 35% of the R&D budget to find them all. I don't buy it. It's all rhetoric and nothing more. Malware will NEVER go away. Bill Gates even suggesting that a product of his company will do so is irresponsible.
The BBB is probably the most useless organization the US has. I'm still stuck with a $2000 notebook that had bad video memory and the BBB wouldn't do anything about it...literally. They took the business's side.
More often than not the BBB does take the business's side unless it's complete and utter gross negligence that can be proven beyond even a glimmer of doubt and has actually resulted in injury.
What's even more sad about it is I'm a business owner and I'm bashing the BBB. I've had to deal with a few issues with them. Usually it is a lame complaint, but you have a stack of papers you have to fill out and once they receive those, the case is usually closed. It's an utter waste of time for both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
That the /. readers know more about the site's content than the people who work there? Jesus this is annoying. This happens ATLEAST once a week.
Designing from scratch is probably one of the worst things you could do. Users are complaining there isn't any software out there for Mac all the time. An OS that's only for the deaf and blind would have even less market share and would be the last (if at all) OS to get software ported to it.
Your best bet would be to use the power of Linux and OSS to create some form of a tablet that will raise little nubs for the borders and text on screen. Anything else would be....time consuming, and wouldn't have enough of a market to actually sell the product at a decent price. High prices mean the blind/deaf will just continue doing what they are already doing.
So, yeah, get the source for KDE and start modifying it or atleast using it to make your own proprietary overlay to it. No licensing costs to jack up your bottom line, and it helps grow OSS.
Quite frankly, I could care less if someone has an MCSE. I find them hugely overrated. Not to say there aren't some great MCSE techs out there, but I'll be willing to bet that less than half of them are truly educated and knowledgable. That stems from so many bootcamps that even my cousin went to.
Personally when I'm hiring, I'll take verifiable experience over certifications any day. I've had both certified and non-certified employees and several times the non-certified employees got the job done better, faster, and more stable than the certified did.
Put bluntly, some kid walks in with an MCSE, A+ hardware, and A+ networking cert and only 2 years on the job. Beside him stands a guy with 15 years verifiable experience in network and server administration, I'll take the guy without the certs any day. I can't necessarily say that's how other companies look at it, but that's my take on it.
I thought I made it somewhat clear, but reading it again, I can see it's not. By financial gain...I mean ANY financial gain. ie increased revenue from taxes, jobs, or contracts. Since hotels don't employ all THAT many people (maybe a 100 for a decent sized hotel) the long term gains from it aren't really that much. Sure there will be contract labor there working on it for a year or 2, but that's it for the major labor. And in many cases those are developers from out of the area so the money is still leaving the area anyway.
Not saying I disagree with you on that. I believe there SHOULD be laws against population growth. And I'm not saying I like what "they" did. I think it wrong and shouldn't be allowed. HOWEVER, it does happen from time to time. And in ways, you're sounding quite selfish. If you owned a nice little cottage just off a 2 lane interstate that was congested so badly that it was backed up for atleast 5 miles 5 hours out of the day and the ONLY thing stopped them from making it big enough was to take your property. Making hundreds of thousands of people suffer in traffic because you just want to sit on your porch is extremely selfish. Not only does that ruin the air around your house from all the cars nearly idling, but it also puts a considerable strain on natural resources from those people sitting in traffic.... Not to mention the time out of THEIR lives that they sit and wait. There's a line that was crossed with this mess that should never have been. And that's government taking property for nothing more than financial gain. THAT is wrong. Taking it for the good of the public is quite a different matter.
It says shall not be taken for PUBLIC use. They took it for PRIVATE use. And of course from the article, do you SEE anything about the compensation? How do we know they weren't paid fair market value for their homes? Sure it's a pain in the ass, but the key points here are: 1) It was taken for PRIVATE use and the constitution doesn't give any statements concerning that. 2) The constitution says without just compensation. If they were paid them fair market value for their homes under any circumstance, that's just tough I've seen many homes gobbled up for road construction, road widening, whatever kind of public works for decades. That's just the way it goes.
I refuse to "jump on the bandwagon". It's not a BAD idea, but it's riddled with flaws. Microsoft can muscle all they want. When their email users go elsewhere, that's pretty much going to be the end of that.
I may be small, but I know I won't be the only company refusing to setup Sender ID on their mail servers. MS will bow with yet another failed approach...you know, kind of like passport.
Avertising has several modes. Doubleclick's method of advertising is the one that's the problem. Popups, popunders, and the appearance in many spyware "issues" is what has caused all this. It's just like spam, when you let it go unchecked...well everyone here knows how that's turning out right now.
The banner advertising will never go away and it's NOT a good idea to block those. They tend to get placed on a site that's not obtrusive enough to pull away from the content and usually they don't affect anything. I don't mind see banner ads on a site and sometimes I click through to them.
On the other hand, any site that advertises in popups immediately gets closed (if it even managed to get past the popup blocker) and remembered as a company I will not purchase from in the future. I also tend to steer away from sites that USE popups simply because it's annoying. I could give a rats arse about the content. If the site annoys me, I quit going.
In short, advertising can help keep content free, but when it becomes so intrusive that it takes away from the site it's on, isn't that detrimental to the content owner in the first place? Back before there were any good popup blockers, if I would follow a link and a popup jumped infront of me, I closed the popup and clicked back and moved on. It was that simple. Of course we can't forget about the popup swarms that some people would get either. Particularly if they would up on some porn site.....THERE'S A REASON TO BLOCK THAT CRAP.
Actually the sales of *NIX versions were cut about 5 months ago. How do I know? I called and asked about it, then realized after the fact that it was the company MS was buying out.
So, erm, bit late.
I don't care what any one says at this point. I've spent the last 3 weeks doing constant searches on google for various items of interest. What I found is on average out of 5 pages worth of search returns, I got approximately 10 links that were actually pertinent to what I was looking for. The rest were all blackhat tactics with nothing more than google ads on the site to take you to something that someone paid for you to see. How does that help? If someone paid for you to see it, they want SOMETHING in return.
The days of relying on Google for search information is gone. We already know we can't really trust MSN, and Yahoo is....well, ugly, cluttered, and over all bloated. So it looks like internet searches are becoming less reliable all together.
Google could retain it's market mindset IF they get off their bums and solve this blackhat tactic bullshit. Basically, they are becoming a victim of their own success. But if they don't succeed in clearing this mess up, people will get tired of it and move elsewhere. And of course when that happens, advertising dollars will go elsewhere as well. I'm already about ready to pull our advertising from them if they don't do something, and fast.
Well, I'm miffed that good people are getting screwed. My favorite saying is, "I'm in this to make a living, not a killing". I don't like having to add insult to injury, and I don't know if you've ever had to deal with an ignorant (yes, I mean uninformed not necessarily stupid) user that had $10k stolen due to identity theft and then you have to turn around and charge them $250+ just to secure a network back up that they already paid for in the first place.
You get to sit there and listen to them venting, ranting, bitching. Just about everything. Of course you're also met with the barrage of questions about if it really is secure now. And then the 5 days worth of phone calls and emails you have to deal with afterwards to help assure that the job was done correctly this time.
I do love the fact that I get the work from them screwing things up. But I have to deal with the aftermath and let me tell you, sometimes it's not worth it. I have actually contemplated charging MORE if one of those places touched the network first. The amount of time doing afterwork support can actually be twice as much as the actual work.
Let's just say people could save themselves and their tech alot of head and heartache if they just did some checking around before they call someone with a fancy car or uniform.
This is quite annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've had to fix the screw-ups from places like this. They don't hire qualified technicians, nor train them properly. I've had issues where they've left wireless networks wide open and resulted in identity theft, hacked systems, and just about anything else you can think of. Including near completely deleted harddrives due to sharing the C drive or whatnot.
The list can go on and on, but things as blatant as telling a customer "oh yeah, we secured your wireless network" but then not actually doing it....well, that's bad. I've had them replace harddrives that weren't bad, even making the user start from scratch WITHOUT attempting to backup any data.....I better stop now before I start getting angry at this crap....again.
more than just slashdot, you would find that Apple had NO intention of allowing OS X to run on just any intel hardware. Which is a shame as that would have skyrocketed them to no end.
/. only perpetuates the fact that you can't believe half of what you read here simply because of the fact the majority of it comes from blogs.
However, allowing this story to be posted on
What a shame. So it appears that Apple still doesn't see the forest for the trees. I guess they just want to stay as a niche market. Too many people have made large investments in their hardware already and I know I sure wouldn't buy new hardware just to run OS X, but I would happily buy OS X to run on my own equipment. Which is more than I can say for Windows. I'm using the last version of Windows I ever will. With that in mind, I have actually seen our sales of Linux desktops increase lately as well. Not only is the hardware cheaper than Apple's, it doesn't have to be "hacked" to make another OS run on it. Oh, well, bubble went boom
Mac OS X is BSD based. I don't see how this will be a blow to linux on the desktop to be perfectly honest. OS X and Linux are kin. More developers writting code for *NIX is better. Which means both of them will benefit.
The blow I see coming is one HELL of a blow to Windows. So many of my customers and clients are tired of Windows and the crap involved with it. Apple making this move, if handled correctly, will allow those users to begin moving away from Windows and to a *NIX style OS. To me, it doesn't matter so much if it's Linux or OS X, but that the client has a solid, stable system they can rely on. Granted, watching Microsoft get pommeled doesn't cause any lost sleep either.
I personally have a nice space lined up already to put OS X in our list of available OSes as long as they make OS X available for any Intel based system and don't try to lock people into using just their hardware.
Then they should stop sending all the jobs over seas. Why would anyone want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education only to turn around and find that they can't have a stable job because every time they turn around they're outsourced to India or wherever.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'm doing what I love, I wouldn't be doing it at all. I've done more than enough things in my life that I can find a job in other feilds easily enough. I make less than most IT pros because I'm a small business owner, but to be prefectly honest, I would probably walk away in a heartbeat if it wasn't for the fact that I'm my own boss and don't have to worry about outsourcing.
I'm finding that google's search is getting a bit less than acurate of late. Too many blackhat techniques are being allowed to go through and even when they are reported nothing is done about it.
Plus search results for things such as specific errors, using keywords of the error won't return anything. After broadening the search if you make it to page 10 of the search...I'll be damned, there's the exact quoted error your searched for.
I hate to say it, but there's been MANY times of late I've had to fall back to Yahoo to find solutions and once I even had to use turbo10 to actually find what I was looking for. Google needs to return to their roots and fix their search engine instead of spending time working on desktop search or whatever.
However, MSNs search won't be the replacement for Google when users start realizing that Google's search isn't what it used to be simply because MSN is worthless when it comes to finding anything that's not MS friendly information. Even problems with windows can be difficult to find with their search. Besides, Microsoft has always been known for less than quality software, why would their search be any different?
First off, like several people have already said, they don't buy software from us much anyway, so I don't see it being that much of a problem.
Secondly, We don't use any other country's software for our government purposes (except open source stuff were applicable) so why shouldn't some other government do the same? No problems from me there
Third, I've long since said the U.S. needs to get the HELL out of other people's business and worry about things at home more. We spend far too much time trying to be big daddy to every country in the world, then turn around and forgive their debts or send soldiers over to "clean house". Of course our kind of clean might not be what their kind of clean is. But we force our opinions and beliefs on them anyway.
And last, if it bothers you that much...just don't buy anything made in China. I'm sure you'll see your purchasing options drop considerably, but it's a small price to pay, right?
Dvorak is losing my respect of late. He has said some elightening things in the past, but the past 10 or so articles is showing the fact that he's losing touch with the industry.
People buy from us because they DON'T want to have to deal with companies like Dell, HP, Compaq and the like. They also have a love hate relationship with Microsoft. They hate the company, but they also love having a computer. They already know the shoddy software microsoft puts out.
Personally, this just reinforces my opinions of late of the complete end of sales with Microsoft products. If a "partner" decides to go into direct competition, then they cease to be a valid partner. Linux is gaining mindshare and market share. Windows has become the product every wants to get rid of but is afraid they can't.
Hence forth a new business model for any OEM is to offer Linux training and products. Free of charge or very low cost. Let's show MS that they can't piss on the army of people who help put them where they are by even supporting their crap. If it wasn't for places like mine all over the US, how would MS get their stuff repaired? You know full well they won't work with someone over the phone to resolve issues. That will just take more value away from their products. And of course the huge OEMs answer is always "use the restore CD" and fail to mention that data will be lost.
Traditionally, Microsoft has always offered substandard products. Office wasn't near as good as Word Perfect, Scandisk and Defrag weren't as good as disk doctor and speed disk, and so forth. They have won by cheaper prices, bundling, or flat out black hat tactics like code adjustments in the OS to keep software from working properly. On thinking about it, I have YET to think of something....ANYTHING that Microsoft didn't either buy, steal, or mimic. Doing that, they take the competitions' ideas and crush them.
Several of the posts here are already agreeing with my thinking of "Microsoft, it's your crappy code that's causing the problem. Why should we pay you to fix something you broke but we bought in good faith?" Granted, I'm speaking mostly for my customers here as I am slowly moving completely away from Windows, but the point still remains the same.
It's come to the point where you have to question Microsoft at this point. If they start making money from Anti-virus subscriptions, what's their incentive to fix the flaws in the software that are causing the problems in the first place? The consumer already has a false idea that viruses and malware are just a fact of life and they WILL get infected without doing anything so they just live with it. If a peice of code is flawed that will allow introduction of malicious code of any type without user intervention, it falls to the software producer to fix it, not charge to protect against it. If you ask me, this is Anti-trust #3 in the making.
Look at Ford awhile back when all those Firestone tires were causing havoc. Did the customer have to pay to get new tires? No! This is the same thing. I would urge ANYONE that's considering using any MS products like this that they should reconsider. It will only support Microsoft's belief that they can milk money out of their customers for producing a crappy product.
I'll agree with you on all those counts. His comment was taken with a grain of salt. And I do believe MS is improving, but I think the damage is already done in many respects. I know I sure won't be going beyond Windows 2000. The only reason I still even USE windows is because I'm a gamer. Otherwise it would have been gone years ago.
I didn't estimate at all, I used the estimate from the article and said that it would take much more. However, the thinking process seems flawed. Wouldn't it be logical to put the more experienced programmers on fixing the bugs? After all they do have more experience. However, I see the advantage of the grunts doing it to to some degree. It gives them experience to learn what NOT to do. But does that thinking really work either? "I'm not a grunt anymore, I can make all the mistakes I want and the grunts will have to fix it"
Every job I've ever done in the past has been "you broke it, you fix it". You know what that did? It made me stop breaking it.
I still don't understand something here. I worked in a shipyard and welded the keel and the underside of the hold together. More often than not, I worked on petroleum barges. The ecological impact of a mistake on my part (or on the inspector's) could be catastrophic. Computer can (and often do) control EVERYTHING. They are in ships, they are in air traffic control towers, they are even in nuclear powerplants! WHY WHY WHY is there not an oversite over some of this stuff specifically dealing with security?
The Coast Gaurd inspected every single weld in our ships, if they weren't good, we had to airarc them out and do it again. They randomly x-rayed welds and EVERY welder had to go through periodic retesting and that's just for a petroleum barge. It was more intense for passenger craft.
All I'm saying is that computers are relied on so much.....it's a shame that Microsoft, and it's "no warranty" EULA can be in control of so many things (identity theft anyone?) and not have to worry about security other than in the public opinion and hurting their sales.
The end users and companies using MS products are the ones that pay for their mistakes, not Microsoft. That doesn't happen if you buy a car, house, or any other product. Hell, even the computer WITH the operating system on it has a warranty. I can understand some aspect of the software not having a warranty due to user errors. But doesn't "dumbing the user down" lay partly to blame on the OS? And you can't tell me it's a users fault if they got nailed with Blaster. We should be able to seek reperations from MS for SELLING a faulty product. Blaster ate up about $1000 worth of bandwidth the first day in the wild hitting our network. Not to mention clean up and patches on all the users computers I worked on that month.
FASTER! MORE SECURE! BETTER GAMING! MORE PRODUCTIVITY!
Doesn't that sound familiar? And here's the kicker, according to a security expert of mine, XP has more potential security holes in it than win95 to win2k combined. I only have his word on it, but to be honest, it sounds logical to me given Microsoft's track record and the amount of XP machines that I see with malware and root kits on them. You can say something is more secure because you disable the ability to open attachments, but then the user turns the ability back on and....whoops there goes the security of OE. Not that it was all that secure even with attachments disabled.
With the magnitude of the amount of code in Windows these days, including easter eggs and so forth, I would estimate that it would take more than 35% of the R&D budget to find them all. I don't buy it. It's all rhetoric and nothing more. Malware will NEVER go away. Bill Gates even suggesting that a product of his company will do so is irresponsible.
The BBB is probably the most useless organization the US has. I'm still stuck with a $2000 notebook that had bad video memory and the BBB wouldn't do anything about it...literally. They took the business's side.
More often than not the BBB does take the business's side unless it's complete and utter gross negligence that can be proven beyond even a glimmer of doubt and has actually resulted in injury.
What's even more sad about it is I'm a business owner and I'm bashing the BBB. I've had to deal with a few issues with them. Usually it is a lame complaint, but you have a stack of papers you have to fill out and once they receive those, the case is usually closed. It's an utter waste of time for both sides.