Because its easier to take a tank of those chemical weapons, sneak them across the border and then set them off in our subways like what happened in Japan with the Sarin gas?
Lets cut through the bull folks, while I'm sure there are still a few neocons that dream of empire most seem to have decided that the clusterfuck that is Iraq (that frankly should have been broken up, it was the creation of the brits by taking three small countries that hated each other and sticking them together under a brit puppet that created the thing) should NOT be repeated. But the problem with NBC weapons is that our border, which nobody in congress or even the POTUS have the balls to do anything about as it would piss off the Latin vote, is a leaking sieve that makes it just too damned easy to get a canister of some nasty agent across the border. With bullets you can only fire so many rounds before SWAT guns you down, with a gas if you let it loose at the right time you could have 10 times the body count of a crazed gunman because in the panic most wouldn't know WTF is going on and wouldn't know what they needed to do, it would be a slaughter.
So as much as I didn't believe in Iraq (oil grab and payback for Desert Storm) and Afghanistan (mineral rights and a pipeline for big oil) the one place where I can say "Yeah we need to make sure that shit ends quickly" is when it comes to NBC weapons. When you have a dictator like Assad fall it quickly becomes a free for all and shit ends up on the black market and if he is sitting on a couple of warehouses full of NBC weapons its a recipe for a nightmare as every nutball with dreams of jihad will be snatching that shit as fast as they can.
Nope its causing something even worse for MSFT, they are sticking with Win 7 thus creating another XP for them that just won't go away and instead of buying new systems they have the ones they have fixed and use the money they save for new Google and Apple gear.
This not only fucks MSFT by giving them another XP headache but its causing all their OEMs to get on the phone to Google because people go into a store and 3 minutes of fighting that damned "LOL Hai I'm a smartphone, did you see our appstorez? LOL" Windows 8 is all they need to know and they just walk away, NO SALE. And corporate has said Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT so they can't even hope for the old "folks will get used to it at the office" trick and for the final insult Lenovo and Acer are shipping their systems with a third party shell and hacks to make Win 8 look and act like Win 7 which will fragment the audience even more.
Linux isn't what MSFT should fear, its flatline on the desktop and will stay that way, no what MSFT should fear is all these triple and quad desktops sold these past 6 years and all these dual core laptops that is more than "good enough". Nobody is switching away but they sure as fuck isn't buying anything new from MSFT either and that is a slow death for a software house.
Bullshit because all that would do is make one company with bad management into a bunch of companies with bad management, it wouldn't solve a damned thing. Frankly the whole TFA is full of shit, if it were true why not break up Apple? Why not Google? After all they too have products that don't really go together as far as an overarching strategy yet they are doing just fine aren't they?
No what has caused MSFT to go off the rails and what any CEO with a brain, hell what ANY person with a brain should do in that situation is simple....LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! How so many large companies can totally screw up in something so damned simple is beyond me, but that is exactly what happened with MSFT. Ballmer had his head so far up Wall Street and Cupertino's collective asses all he could do was go "ZOMFG apps apps apps MOBILE!" while he not ONCE, not a single time, actually bothered to sit down with the grunts in the field and go "What does the folks want to buy?"
You look at the moves MSFT has made in the past few years and one thing becomes crystal clear...every new feature, and starting with Win 8 every new OS, its all been designed to give MICROSOFT more advantages, not a damned thing for the user. Its like the entire system is designed by Dilbert's PHB! I mean how hard is it to picture Ballmer and his lackeys sitting at the big table going "Well what do we need...well selling a new OS every 5 years is great for the user and the ecosystem but we have to make those quarterly earnings projections, so we'll just ship them out the door ASAP. What do you mean they'll be half baked? That's good, that means it'll screw up quicker and they'll have to buy new hardware which means new license sales! Okay wall street is jerking off to ARM so we'll make WOA, of course i know all the software won't run, that's the point dumbass, we'll have the appstore market all to ourselves! Oh yeah they say tablets and smartphones are hot so we'll make Windows not run worth a shit without touch, that will make people shell out Apple prices for these tablets, oh who gives a fuck if most PCs won't run it, did you see the Financial Times? Its all about corporate control and apps so the fact that most PCs and software won't run well just means we corner the market again!"
So it does NOT need breaking up, what it needs is NOT a CEO but instead a LEADER, one that will get his head out of the Financial Times and stop coming up with more ideas to make the products better for MSFT and instead be making damned sure they know what the CUSTOMERS want, because all they did under Ballmer was toss away good will and burn bridges to try to out Apple Apple while ignoring that if their customers would have wanted an Apple they'd have bought one!
Except they don't work as all you do is breed MORE racism with the quotas! You look at a black person in any kind of upper class job, know what folks here say? "Must be a token" because of the quotas. I have NEVER seen quotas help, only hurt.
Uhhh...that has nothing to do with being a female as much as it has to do with classism and the "good old boy" network which frankly I've been railing against for years. Try being a long haired guy in the deep south and you'd find the same thing, worse pay and shittier treatment because "you're not one of us". It all comes down to classism really and the fact that many people don't really want to be around those that are not "like" them, with like being anything from gender to color to something as arbitrary as hair length or even style of music. I have always thought that shit was insanity and if a company treats you less than someone else strictly because you are "X" with X being any of the above? Then I agree they should be called to the carpet and you should be redressed.
That said frankly most women I've met have taken one look at my job and said "Are you freaking kidding me?" and wouldn't take it on a bet, and I'm just a PC shop guy, talking to programmer friends frankly they have it even worse most of the time. I mean who wants to spend their days trapped in a cubical barely bigger than a urinal staring at a screen all damned day? I know I sure as hell don't which is why I quit working corporate, I don't make as much working shop but I have my own music, nobody says squat if my GF shows up with a little basket and we have our lunch together, hell I've never even had anybody say boo about my smoking, all they care about is that I can do the job in the time allotted, that's it.
So it really doesn't surprise me that there isn't very many female programmers because the whole corporate programmer thing really does kinda suck. As long as little Sally can choose to become a programmer if she WANTS to become one, and get equal pay for equal work? That is as far as I think it should go, quotas are a cancer that not only breeds racist attitudes but frankly demeans even those that weren't hired because of a quota. I see this a LOT in the south because government jobs will often require a contractor to have a "diversity" of X of whatever so even if that person is frankly qualified for the job there is always this lingering resentment and the thought that they didn't REALLY earn that job, they are just a token.
As long as you can be a programmer if you choose to that should be the end of it and to say there has to be "X" number of women in a field I truly believe is demeaning to women and treat them as just a man without a penis. Frankly the whole thing is completely insane to me, it would be like saying you have to have "X" number of black hockey players while ignoring that most black folks find winter sports in general to be boring. what's next, saying its racist that other countries like soccer instead of American Football? That Football is sexist because most women have no desire to be linebackers? The whole thing is just batshit to me, we are all different, different races, different genders, different cultures, why do we all have to be identical? Can't we just accept that we are different and that is fine and move on?
Yes I do find it easier because my mouse is always in easy reach of my right hand and the few milliseconds you save is probably blown by the 4 or 5 seconds to remember which of the bazillion combos you need for a particular task. It has been tested and documented that keyboard commanders are actually SLOWER than mouse users in pretty much any environment where a mouse is usable at all, a primitive CLI like DOS or Bash is the ONLY place where a keyboard commander gains ANY advantage and frankly if your PC is so shit that the only way it will run worth a piss is to not have any shells at all? Frankly you have bigger problems than remembering keyboard shortcuts as an 8 year old dumpster dived PC has more than enough power to run a modern shell.
If remembering a few keyboard shortcuts, even though the figures show you are being slowed down makes you happy? Then please use them, I'm all for personal choice. Where I have to throw the "bullshit on the field" flag is when keyboard commanders act like they are somehow faster or better because they know some arcane rarely used throwback to DOS when in reality the data shows all they are doing is slowing themselves down. Anybody who thinks about it for even a second will see why, we humans are VERY eye hand dominant and can pop GUI icons without even actual thought required whereas the simple act of recalling a keyboard shortcut adds seconds that simply aren't required to just pop an icon with a mouse.
Here is what I don't get and why these "why are there not enough women in X" articles piss me off....why do we have to treat women like a man with an inverted penis, instead of what they are, a completely different creature that SOMETIMES have interests that overlap ours, sometimes not?
Does a woman's brain look the same as ours on a CAT scan? Nope, different areas are used more and different areas used less, in fact any scan tech worth his salt can spot a female vs male scan in seconds. There are plenty of fields where a woman will just slaughter a man, for example a female pilot will whup the dog shit out of a male pilot because she can take more Gs and in a fight the one that can push the plane the hardest without having a black or red out wins. Women are better at language, women are better at diffusing tense situations which is why they make better cops and hostage negotiators...the list goes on and on.
So why in the hell do we have to treat little Sally like she is just Jimmy without a penis? Why? ALL we should do is make sure that if little Sally WANTS to try out for a job she can without discrimination that is it, THAT IS ALL we should do. Instead we try to set quotas and if there isn't "X" number of this or that gender (this only seems to apply to women and certain minorities, nobody complains there is not enough white people playing basketball or males becoming nurses) everyone acts shocked! Shocked I tell you! That little Sally doesn't want to do the same shit little Jimmy does...did you ever stop to think maybe little Sally finds computers boring as hell? Did you think about that? Because I fix the computers that women use every day and I have found the VAST majority, I'd say at least a good 7 if not 8 out of 10 just want to do their job and get as far from the PC as they can when the work day is done. You see many females actually LIKE face to face interaction, I know, its weird, and they find just staring at a screen for hours dull and repetitive. Ironic considering the one time they like spending hours on the thing is FB and those damned FB games, or as I call them "hamster pushes the button and gets a treat" but hey I'm not a woman and if it makes 'em happy? More power to 'em.
So as long as we make sure little Sally can do the job if she wants, which with the rise of startups and appstores frankly I don't see as much of a problem since anybody can start their own software house now, then we should just stay the hell out of it. I think if we did so you'd find that certain jobs women are drawn to, certain jobs men are drawn to because surprise! They truly are different creatures with different wants, needs, and goals.
Sure it can, don't like my ideas? there is your pink slip, don't let the door hit ya on the way out. First thing you'd have to do is clear out all of Ballmer's little yes men and lickspittles, wouldn't be hard to do, not with the board scared pissless of Apple and me telling them we are gonna be the big dog again.
The problem with MSFT is Ballmer has been laser locked on Cupertino and Wall Street instead of putting boots on the ground to make damned sure he knew the pulse of his customers, any retailer can tell you that when you don't know WTF your customers want you are dead meat. Instead he just tried to "me too" his way out of the problem and wasted nearly a decade being the half ass ersatz instead of making good products, again a killer.
The ONE thing they should have taken from Jobs is "you don't have to beat the other guy to win". Jobs knew this, he didn't try to beat MSFT at their own game, instead he made up a new game and MSFT ended up (foolishly) playing their game by their rules and got bitchslapped for it. Instead of killing themselves to make a shitty ARM device nobody wants they SHOULD have been on the horn with Intel and AMD and doing everything they could to integrate as tight as they could with the latest chips so that MSFT software would be beyond reproach when it came to X86, what did they do instead? They were so focused on ARM that AMD had to actually DROP an innovative feature, the "per core PowerNow" that would drop ONLY cores that weren't in use thus minimizing power usage because Vista would just ignore what the chip was telling it and pile on work on the sleeping core, slowing down the system and causing it to waste instead of save power, inexcusable.
Now you have both Intel and AMD coming out with ULV chips and who are they talking up? Android. MSFT should have had their products running so fucking good on X86 that even thinking of running anything else would have gotten you laughed at, but they let PHBs and marketing drones run the company and all you got was bling and bloat. First thing I would do is clear house and then lay out EXACTLY what needed to be done and then get to it, too much time wasted to be wasting more on red tape, cut the bull and get back to making MSFT the best products you can buy for computers and go from there.
I think they are talking about using a fucking up 3 finger keyboard shortcut to do what any Gecko or Chromium based browser does with a right click. Why on earth you'd want to go through a 3 finger keyboard shortcut when its just right click>reopen closed tab and unlike the 3 finger bullshit you can undo as many levels as you want, all the way back to when you opened the browser.
I'll probably get hate for saying this but "keyboard commanders" seem to think its some great accomplishment when they trip over some funky fucked up keyboard shortcut and when they point it out a good 90% of the time I have to reply with "Uhhh...you know there is a button that will do that, right? See just click here, no need to twist your fingers into pretzels when there is a GUI button right there" but then they get all pissy, like we should all be amazed at the fact they can twist their fingers into pretzels to do what the rest of us can do with a single click of the mouse in the right place.;
See my post above AC, after using every hack and trick on the net Vista STILL thrashed a new HDD to death, and its "senior moments" caused countless failed burns and network transfer failures. Honestly I hadn't seen THAT much bullshit with a MSFT OS since WinME and when you compared it to the rock solid stable XP X64? No comparison, Vista was a flaming pile of shit. It got to the point when somebody with Vista walked into my shop I automatically said "my condolences" because I KNEW that their problems were all traced back to Vista and sure enough, put on XP and tada! The system ran fine.
As for how to fix Win 8? Use Start8 and combine it with "disable charms registry" and if its a laptop grab the generic synaptics touchpad driver (any other touchpad and you are fucked, just disable it and use a wireless mouse) because the generic driver has an option to disable ALL swipe gestures, otherwise even after start8 and the reg hack if you move your touchpad too quickly you'll have your work interrupted by that damned "charms" bar. Yeah about as charming as a punch to the scrotum.
I didn't touch on enterprise because frankly that one is beyond simple to fix. First we could through the maze of bullshit that is Windows licenses, we make that shit simple with language a third grader could read. Second all the extra tier shit is gone, you got SMB, corporate, and datacenter, that's it. And the differences will be spelled out simply so anybody can take 2 minutes and decide what is right for your business. Your business grows and need to go up a tier? We'll take your old keys for 100% credit on the next tier, so ALL you pay is the difference.
That is just the start, MSFT has fucked up so much I could go on all damned day but just those changes would have IT guys across the country cheering my name at the top of their lungs and would go a long way towards fixing the mess.
Sorry but you are wrong, you just got lucky on the hardware is all. I HAD to deal with it on dozens of systems and I can tell you that unless you got REAL lucky on the hardware (like WinME on that fact) you were in for a WORLD OF PAIN from Vista.
I mean here is the specs for my own personal PC at that time which in 2007 wasn't bleeding edge but sure as hell wasn't a slouch, 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 4Gb of RAM, dual 400GB HDDs, one of which Vista killed by thrashing BTW, and first a GeForce 7600GS and then when everyone blamed the shitty performance on Nvidia drivers I switched to an X1650 PRO and it was STILL deep fried ass. It would have "senior moments" where it would just hang for several seconds, sometimes when it wasn't even running anything, and no it was NOT the hardware as I had an XP X64 set up in dual boot and it ran great. It would lose network shares and refuse to see them without a reboot, the network would slow to a crawl during file transfers for no damned reason i could ever find, it was just a hot mess.
And I'm sorry but you are wrong, not only does Windows 7 use a NEW CORE that has had serious tweaking but unlike Vista its memory management wasn't broken, it didn't have senior moments, its just a great OS. win 8 sadly is Vista to the bone, you wouldn't believe how many times I've been paid to do a refresh my PC because Win 8 shits itself over time. Oh and as for Win2K? You must have not known where to look as I had 2K from RTM until the release of XP X64 (skipped XP, never cared for it) and I didn't have a bit of trouble with drivers. I'd say it would be in the top 3 best OSes by MSFT, right up there with Win 7 and XP X64.
Oh bullshit, put somebody with a brain in the big chair and they could slaughter, all the tools are there, its just Ballmer has his one track mind locked so hard on Cupertino it was a miracle he could walk in a straight line!
Hell put ME in the big chair and i could double the stock price just using good old fashioned common sense. First people hate metro or are afraid to buy a new unit because what if they hate Metro too? I'd tell them "Not a problem, anybody that buys ANY copy of Win 8, OEM, upgrade, whatever, if you try it and don't like it? We'll trade your key for the equivalent Windows 7 key so you have nothing to lose"...BAM! You just fixed the windows 8 problem right there. Fuck win 8.1, roll it into a service pack and call it a day, this ain't 93 and.1s look douchey, instead OS releases will be once every 3 for consumer (and they have the option of going back up to 2 releases, just swap the key) and 6 for business who will have the option of going back one release. Metro will NOT be default, it will be OPTIONAL and we'll buy out ModernMix and integrate it so if you want to use metro apps on the desktop? then do so, its YOUR PC and YOU get to choose what and how it runs.
Next we need more income coming in and to fix the mobile problem, okay not a big deal. For the income we start rolling out services Joe and Jane can actually use and give a fuck about, leave the appstore crapstore junk for mobile. Instead imagine getting a CC sized key, pops into any USB, and lets you have a secure remote session with your home PC from work or vice versa? Not a problem when using MSFT servers for the middle man and we'd make that shit more simple to use than your average ATM. For the home users we peer with groups like Akamai (cut down on latency and the risk you'll hit your cap) and we start cutting deals with networks and movie houses, you'll be able to buy bundles or ala cart Internet entertainment with the goal to be to get everything anybody could possibly want available as a stream and if you want to buy it? Just click the button and its yours, and it'll all integrate with Windows Media Center so ANY desktop or laptop with an HDMI out is now an instant HTPC, no setting up or hassles, just plug and go.
Finally as for mobile too long as the mobile division been crippled by Ballmer and Gates, first trying to jam a teeny tiny desktop onto phones and then trying to jam phones onto desktops, that shit WILL end under me. Instead we spin off WinPhone who will now be called ModernOS, it will have the ability to run BOTH Android AND WinPhone apps, and the ONLY connection with the desktop is a "it must work simply" mantra. which means if you choose WinPhone over Android you WILL see the benefits, everything from being able to remote access and even track your phone from your desktop to streaming from your PC to your ModernPhone to even using it as a remote for your desktop or laptop, thus making the HTPC idea even nicer. Your SO wants to watch that twilight crap while the game is on? Slap on some phones connected to your ModernPhone and screen the game from one of our channels to your phone!
See how fricking easy it would be to make money with MSFT if they didn't have a CEO with his head up his ass? And this is just what I could come up with off the top of my head, if I gave it any real thought I could come up with dozens more...ohh, get ready for some gold....how about an innovation bounty? Instead of the employees backstabbing each other with that stack crap instead we offer a bounty on innovation, you come up with a great product YOU get a cut of every sale, be that in software or hardware, give the employees a reason to really bust ass for the company again. i could go on all day as the raw materials ARE there, its the leadership that has been throwing everything away trying to be Cupertino North.
Actually they do have jobs where they are fucking awesome, and that is places like garages, construction huts, all those places where the dirt and grime are constantly a part of the landscape. Now in THOSE places? Your regular tower is gonna be choked and the fan dead inside of 6 months, laptops tend to either end up missing or something spilled on them, in that case and ONLY in that case do i recommend an AIO, usually the AMD Bobcat based as not only are they AIO but completely sealed and fanless which is something you really want on a construction site.
As far as repairing them? You don't, like the laptops usually i just pop out the drive and chunk 'em, cost too much and the parts are hell to find. But when you consider that the last construction hut job I got they had gone through THREE desktops in less than 9 months from all the dust and dirt getting sucked into them before someone recommended me and now? That AMD Bobcat AIO has been running over 3 years now, letting them take care of inventory, payroll, pretty much any basic office job you can think of that little Bobcat does and because its an AIO if someone knocks the coffee onto the keyboard they can just chunk it, slap on a new one, and they are back in business.
That is why i love PCs Billy, never discount ANY design of PC because 5 will get you 10 there is at least one place where they work VERY well. In the case of AIO warehouses, factory floors, construction huts, service stations, anyplace where grime and dirt are part of the job a sealed AIO makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Dude android is to cellphones what Windows was to X86, they have every price point covered and what's more the public knows this. Hell I paid a grand total of $20 for my Android slider prepaid by grabbing it and a card during a promotion and the number of Android phones in the $50-$150 range is simply staggering.
So I'm sorry but price alone simply won't sell the MozPhone, in fact India and Africa are coming out with sub $50 android phones so once those take off you can give it up,price alone just won't cut it. if they haven't gotten sub $50 US smartphones in Bulgaria then nobody has cared about that market, no reason why they couldn't already be using smartphones this very minute.
Too bad just the amount of wasted fuel on his Iraq debacle (which just FYI didn't have a damned thing to do with terrorism but was a payback for quote "wanting to kill my dad" because even the CIA said that terrorists didn't get shit from Saddam) spewed enough crap into the air he'd have to live like Begley Jr for a thousand years just to make up for it, that don't count all the depleted uranium splattered all over the place, the wasted infrastructure that had to be rebuilt, if you look at the numbers war is the biggest pollutant you can possibly have short of just nuking from orbit.
Ugh, why would they want to bolt on one of the buggy Linux shells when they have a damned nice one in Win 7 Aero? Simply bring back Aero instead of that flat tablet looking mess and make it default on desktop and laptops with the OPTION of using Metro, buy out ModernMix so that those that choose the desktop can use Metro apps without being dumped into metro without a warning, and split off the ARM division and change the name to "ModernPhone" or something so there won't be the confusion of the Windows name on something that won't run Windows x86 programs.
See it really wouldn't be hard at all to fix what ails MSFT, but you need a leader that has been in the trenches and knows what folks want, not some bozo whose only contact with the public was back in the 3.x days.
The stupid fucking thing is a leader WITH VISION wouldn't have had to give a rat's ass, because they would have been making money hand over fist by offering extras for sale!
I mean imagine something as simple as a CC sized USB dongle that lets you log into your home PC from work and vice versa, using MSFT's server farm this would have been trivial to set up and would have sold a ton to the SMB crowd. Or how about instead of fucking killing Internet TV they had got in on that boat during the drought and signed deals with the major media companies to offer three tiers of video service as well as ala carte channels? Again with their massive server storage and bandwidth capacity they wouldn't have had a problem and would have had people lining up to hand them money.
This is the difference between a good leader and a bad one, a good leader can spot opportunities and come up with ways to capitalize, a bad leader just looks at what other guys are doing and tries to rip it off. Put me in charge of MSFT and if I haven't doubled the stock price simply by making better fucking products that people want to buy they wouldn't owe me a cent, the opportunities with that company are insanely huge, you just need to focus on the strengths of the company. I'd kill that employee stacks bullshit and replace with a rewards system, you come up with a new product that makes us money? Then YOU get a cut, I'd have the employees killing themselves to make us great products, make metro a strictly OPTIONAL choice and NOT the default on any desktop or laptop, default would be Win 7 Aero, offer a program for those that for whatever reason want to stay on XP, you pay us enough? We'll keep patching it. This will not only make more people happy but we can also sell them service contracts...fuck i could go on all day with ways to make crazy money with that company, Ballmer just lacked vision.
And likewise you too are spreading the bull, you could also find damned nice PC AIOs you just weren't gonna get one for a bottom of the barrel price at the Wally World. If you'd have went to the business section you'd have found nice AIOs with decent mobile GPUs, decently powerful CPUs, and many with touch support.
You just have to remember that unlike Apple and their "one size fits all" you have choices when it comes to PCs and you can choose any price point from "cheap and lousy" like the few Intel Atom based I ran into, "cheap but okay" like the Bobcat APU ones that are frankly great for receptionists and similar low intensity jobs, and then there is "midrange and better" and finally "expensive but teh hotness" like the AIO workstations which are pretty kicking. This is one of the reasons I've always preferred the PC side of the street, it lets me choose the right tool for a particular job while letting me save the customer money by not buying more than they need.
Really? Vista was at least fixable and a LOT of its problems came down to Ballmer kissing Intel's behind and allowing the "Vista capable" bullshit to let Intel unload that warehouse of 9xx garbage chipsets they had piled up.
For me it would have been when Zune shit browned all over the stage and playsforsure was killed for Zune market which promptly puked and died. Playsforsure was frankly growing like fricking mad since it gave users an alternative, instead of having to buy every single song they could have "all you can eat" for a low monthly fee, think about how MSFT could have used that to become Netflix before that company was even a thought, but nope! Ballmer shut down a fricking GROWING market so he could rip off iTunes BADLY. Right then he ass should have been punt kicked like a 30 yard field return.
The truly sad part? We could debate this all damned day as there is so many "WTF is he doing? Is he on crack?" moments under Ballmer that any CEO that wasn't Bill's little buddy would have gotten a pink slip any time between a decade ago and now, letting Vista get shoved out the door so poorly finished, X360 RRoD, the piles of money wasted on Zune,Kin,Sidekick,buying Yahoo Search and that ad company they had to take a multi-billion dollar write off on, BEING TOLD FOR A FUCKING YEAR THAT WIN 8 IS GARBAGE BY EVERYONE THAT TRIED IT yet not only ignoring that and putting out a half assed product he honestly thought would compete with iOS and Android but blowing several billion trying to sell that turd with ads....fuck I could go on all damned day.
It has been obvious since the days of the shit brown squirting Zune if not earlier that he lives in a bubble surrounded by yes men. Frankly the only real hope MSFT has now is that they get an actual engineer with a fucking brain that actually uses the products for other than tweeting twits for shits, because if God help us that Larson girl that was responsible for Win 8 and the charms fuckbar gets the big chair? Might as well close it down and give the money back to the shareholders, its done. I mean when I saw server 2K12 and saw the AOL 96...err I mean Metro UI slapped on A SERVER OS!!?? I knew that the marketing droids were running the shop, any engineer that had actually used a server OS would have said "Wow that is fucking retarded!" and been done with it, the fact that they didn't just shows why Ballmer should have been canned ages ago.
BTW is it just me or am I picking up a the board fired my ass vibe in his letter? The way he talks about when he would have rather stepped down certainly sounds like he isn't stepping down by choice. To me it sounds like the board took a look at the figures, saw Win 8.1 getting roasted over the fire like Win 8, and said "either you retire or we fire your ass, pick one" and he tried to save face while letting the insiders know he isn't happy about it. If that is the case? I'll be happy to buy the board a beer, its about damned time!
Thanks but this is something that has bothered me for years, Al Gore is the biggest fatass hypocrite on the planet and is about as useful for the cause of AGW as sending the head of the black panthers every time there is a racial incident so he can grab the mike and say "kill them honky bitches".
The man lives in a Mc Mansion capable of housing a half a dozen families without even coming into contact with each other, takes an entire fleet of SUVs wherever he goes like some third world dictator, farts around in a personal Lear Jet that often carries only him and a few aides, while having the big brass balls to say while he stuffs his face that YOU should do without or pay higher taxes that will go to him and his pals to "save" the environment he obviously cares soooo much about...the man is a pig, there is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. he is the classic "do as i say not as I do" hypocrite standing on high and stuffing his pockets while telling you to do without and even Ray Charles could see through his bullshit.
Contrast this to Begley who even though he has enough money he likewise could live like a pig lives in a VERY modest 3 bedroom like the majority of Americans live in, drives a little electric car with a bike rack so he can just pop off his bike and ride it for short hops and who does everything in his power to minimize his footprint and recycle, THAT is the kind of guy we should be hearing from, not some fat pig living like a king with his AC blasting while telling us we should just take the heat. another GREAT example is Dennis Weaver, he lives in a solar powered house made from cans and tires and other refuse, he like wise walks the walk.
Re:In the next 12 months...
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I would say they have spent the past few years burning their bridges more than the one giant fail that is a shark jump. it would be like you heard the next town over has incredible mansions and great jobs that pay a fortune...so you take a torch to your home and place of business without even bothering to see if the next town over will have you because "hey how could anybody resist me, didn't you hear I was a star 10 years ago?".
MSFT had 3 golden geese that consistently brought in good money, they may not have set the world on fire but they still brought in piles of cash, and that was Windows desktop, server, and MS Office...so what has Ballmer crapped all over these past few years because the press is going "Mobile mobile mobile ZOMFG CELLPHONES!"? Why Windows desktop, server, and MS Office of course! It takes a special kind of hubris and arrogance to ignore every single bit of data and metric you are shown yet that is EXACTLY what Ballmer has done over and over AND OVER. From everybody pointing out the Zune was big, bulky, and offered nothing over the iPod to Win 8 not working worth a shit except on the teeny tiny niche that is Windows tablets and touchscreen laptops, it didn't matter how many screamed "THIS FUCKING SUCKS!" Ballmer just gave them the finger while sticking out his tongue, thinking that just sticking a WinFlag on something was enough to make it a hit.
If there is anything we should take away from the Ballmer years it is this, focusing only on what Wall Street cares about while ignoring your customers is a recipe for massive failure, that all the advertising in the world isn't gonna make people buy something they can't fucking stand, all you are doing is pissing money down the drain. By remaining myopic in his focus on making MSFT into Apple Steve Ballmer threw out every strength they had and thought that advertising and name recognition alone could push through changes that benefited ONLY MSFT while giving the person buying the product the finger. The lesson the next CEO should take from this is that you can put sprinkles and glitter and make videos of people dancing with a pile of fresh poo but that ain't gonna make people suddenly want to go out and buy poo, you have to offer them something they actually want to buy.
Funny my ass, that is 100% insightful! Look at his record folks...Vista, Zune, pushing out the X360 with a 2 billion plus flaw, killing the profitable playsforesure for the DOA Apple ripoff Zune market, Sidekick, Kin, ignoring a year's worth of beta testers and reviewers pointing out it sucks to shit out the "Oh Hai I'm a cellphone LULZ" Win 8, spending way too damned much money buying an ad company because...well Google is an ad company, right? Doing the same for yahoo search and damned near buying the whole company, I could go on and on and on with the only positive being Win 7/2K8 which if rumors are true he was too busy squirting with his poo brown Zune to care.
Look at the growth of Apple and Google in just the last 5 years and then look at MSFT with Ballmer shitting billions away with zero ROI and its not hard to see he was MSFT's version of the Pepsi guy at Apple, he was a PHB middle manager that just happened to be Gates little buddy and thus ended up WAY over his head and thrust into a job he simply wasn't capable of doing. You could have made a better ROI at MSFT by hiring a chimp to throw poo at the financial section and buying stocks based on where the poo stuck.
And the worst part? You KNOW why he is waiting 12 months, its so he can get the last laugh and ram through "Windows Goatse" AKA Windows 8.1 because he is so damned deluded he thinks that it will vindicate his "vision" instead of going over as well as a loud pants ripper in a crowded elevator. When folks go "They brought back the start button!" only to click on it and find out its a Goatse that takes them straight to the Metro they are trying to get the fuck away from its gonna bomb HARD and will be the first MSFT double flop, mark my words. I have found out first hand all the band aids like ClassicShell and Start8 won't fix the bullet wounds that are swipe gestures and "Charms Bar" pop up garbage (yeah about as charming as a punch in the scrotum) and from what I've seen Win 8.1 is even worse, not fixing a single problem Joe User had but instead adding even more? Well I don't know a more perfect end to a pathetic career, Ballmer will go out on a billion dollar failure just as he came in on the failure of WinME.
Sorry about the length but I feel like singing "ding dong the bitch is dead" because I have been waiting years for this to happen, now let us hope to FSM they get a CEO with a functional brain as it really wouldn't be hard to fix what ails MSFT. Return Windows to the Win 7 desktop model with Metro a strictly OPTIONAL shell for tablets, spin off mobile so they can sink or swim without dragging the name Windows into it, and focus instead of on "one device to poorly rule them all" and appstore crapstores on a mantra of "its just HAS to work and be easy" so that every product in their line is beyond simple to use with the others and then they'll be back on the right track. If they replace Ballmer with another bozo they might as well close their doors and give the money back to the shareholders, the death of Win 7 in 2020 will also be the EOL of MSFT.
I'm sure those that are skeptics (or like me think the "solutions" that they are attempting to ram down our throats are just a giant reverse robin hood cash grab by Gore and pals) love the hell out of the Al Gore, after all the more times he's caught just outright pulling the "facts" from his rectum the easier it is to get more folks to be skeptical.
In a way he makes me think of another Al, Al Sharpton, in that even if he has some facts on his side he has to go so far out with his rhetoric that even if he originally had a point he quickly becomes a recruitment tool for the other side. With both Als the facts are never enough, they ALWAYS have to go overboard with the bullshit and spin until it gets to the point if they said it was raining you'd want a second opinion.
Those that believe in AGW frankly ought to do everything they can to distance themselves from al Gore and his hypocritical bullshit, his farting around in a Lear jet or a fleet of limos while claiming he is carbon neutral because he gets credits from HIS OWN COMPANY (this would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and getting cheers and a tax credit for "wealth redistribution") just makes the entire platform look like a giant scam cooked up by a bunch of greedy spoiled pigs that want to stuff their pockets selling snake oil. If there HAS to be a public face to AGW I have the perfect candidate...Ed Begley Jr. That man not only talks the talk he walks the walk, living in a modest house and driving a small electric vehicle and living as lightly as he can to minimize his footprint, makes a hell of a lot better example than the Rev Al Gore and his McMansion with indoor basketball court and AC blasting.
Actually as I understand it just like on X86 the phone vendors write the drivers for whatever OS they intend to support and that is that. They also can NOT be made FOSS in most cases because the chips used in mobile are some of the most cross licensed and proprietary chips ever made, especially anything to do with video as texture compression on up is patented up the ying yang.
As for how its an issue unlike X86 where other than graphics most of the chips are highly standardized and constantly reused, for example you only really need to support a handful of chips from companies like Realtek and Sigmatel to cover pretty much all sound hardware, with the phones and tablets a LOT of the chips are highly specialized SoC and each manufacturer changes just enough to make reverse engineering pretty much a nonstarter. This is why I can't say download drivers and use WinPhone or WinCE (shudder) on my Android whereas if I wanted to i could put BSD or Linux on my netbook with little effort.
But that is all ignoring the point of my post which is when I gave what frankly should be a trivial scenario, I'm in your phone shop and you need to sell me on MozPhone because you believe in the platform that despite the fact this is an insanely "Moz yay!" site that nobody here could do it, not a single one could even come up with a half ass reason why MozPhone would be better for me than my Android slider, not one. In fact if you'll look below this post one guy even outright ignored both my post and reply and instead built a strawman around IE and Mozilla which not only doesn't answer the question but isn't even applicable to his own statement that "once upon a time nobody had a reason to choose Moz over IE" when in fact it was the exact opposite, IE was a creaking virus infected mess so the users had VERY good reasons for switching.
Hell even TFA pointed out that if you don't have a compelling problem that your product is solving or a reason why the customer should choose you over the other guy you are doomed, and I think I pointed out pretty well that there simply is no reason for MozPhone to exist.
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Because its easier to take a tank of those chemical weapons, sneak them across the border and then set them off in our subways like what happened in Japan with the Sarin gas?
Lets cut through the bull folks, while I'm sure there are still a few neocons that dream of empire most seem to have decided that the clusterfuck that is Iraq (that frankly should have been broken up, it was the creation of the brits by taking three small countries that hated each other and sticking them together under a brit puppet that created the thing) should NOT be repeated. But the problem with NBC weapons is that our border, which nobody in congress or even the POTUS have the balls to do anything about as it would piss off the Latin vote, is a leaking sieve that makes it just too damned easy to get a canister of some nasty agent across the border. With bullets you can only fire so many rounds before SWAT guns you down, with a gas if you let it loose at the right time you could have 10 times the body count of a crazed gunman because in the panic most wouldn't know WTF is going on and wouldn't know what they needed to do, it would be a slaughter.
So as much as I didn't believe in Iraq (oil grab and payback for Desert Storm) and Afghanistan (mineral rights and a pipeline for big oil) the one place where I can say "Yeah we need to make sure that shit ends quickly" is when it comes to NBC weapons. When you have a dictator like Assad fall it quickly becomes a free for all and shit ends up on the black market and if he is sitting on a couple of warehouses full of NBC weapons its a recipe for a nightmare as every nutball with dreams of jihad will be snatching that shit as fast as they can.
Nope its causing something even worse for MSFT, they are sticking with Win 7 thus creating another XP for them that just won't go away and instead of buying new systems they have the ones they have fixed and use the money they save for new Google and Apple gear.
This not only fucks MSFT by giving them another XP headache but its causing all their OEMs to get on the phone to Google because people go into a store and 3 minutes of fighting that damned "LOL Hai I'm a smartphone, did you see our appstorez? LOL" Windows 8 is all they need to know and they just walk away, NO SALE. And corporate has said Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT so they can't even hope for the old "folks will get used to it at the office" trick and for the final insult Lenovo and Acer are shipping their systems with a third party shell and hacks to make Win 8 look and act like Win 7 which will fragment the audience even more.
Linux isn't what MSFT should fear, its flatline on the desktop and will stay that way, no what MSFT should fear is all these triple and quad desktops sold these past 6 years and all these dual core laptops that is more than "good enough". Nobody is switching away but they sure as fuck isn't buying anything new from MSFT either and that is a slow death for a software house.
Bullshit because all that would do is make one company with bad management into a bunch of companies with bad management, it wouldn't solve a damned thing. Frankly the whole TFA is full of shit, if it were true why not break up Apple? Why not Google? After all they too have products that don't really go together as far as an overarching strategy yet they are doing just fine aren't they?
No what has caused MSFT to go off the rails and what any CEO with a brain, hell what ANY person with a brain should do in that situation is simple....LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! How so many large companies can totally screw up in something so damned simple is beyond me, but that is exactly what happened with MSFT. Ballmer had his head so far up Wall Street and Cupertino's collective asses all he could do was go "ZOMFG apps apps apps MOBILE!" while he not ONCE, not a single time, actually bothered to sit down with the grunts in the field and go "What does the folks want to buy?"
You look at the moves MSFT has made in the past few years and one thing becomes crystal clear...every new feature, and starting with Win 8 every new OS, its all been designed to give MICROSOFT more advantages, not a damned thing for the user. Its like the entire system is designed by Dilbert's PHB! I mean how hard is it to picture Ballmer and his lackeys sitting at the big table going "Well what do we need...well selling a new OS every 5 years is great for the user and the ecosystem but we have to make those quarterly earnings projections, so we'll just ship them out the door ASAP. What do you mean they'll be half baked? That's good, that means it'll screw up quicker and they'll have to buy new hardware which means new license sales! Okay wall street is jerking off to ARM so we'll make WOA, of course i know all the software won't run, that's the point dumbass, we'll have the appstore market all to ourselves! Oh yeah they say tablets and smartphones are hot so we'll make Windows not run worth a shit without touch, that will make people shell out Apple prices for these tablets, oh who gives a fuck if most PCs won't run it, did you see the Financial Times? Its all about corporate control and apps so the fact that most PCs and software won't run well just means we corner the market again!"
So it does NOT need breaking up, what it needs is NOT a CEO but instead a LEADER, one that will get his head out of the Financial Times and stop coming up with more ideas to make the products better for MSFT and instead be making damned sure they know what the CUSTOMERS want, because all they did under Ballmer was toss away good will and burn bridges to try to out Apple Apple while ignoring that if their customers would have wanted an Apple they'd have bought one!
Except they don't work as all you do is breed MORE racism with the quotas! You look at a black person in any kind of upper class job, know what folks here say? "Must be a token" because of the quotas. I have NEVER seen quotas help, only hurt.
Uhhh...that has nothing to do with being a female as much as it has to do with classism and the "good old boy" network which frankly I've been railing against for years. Try being a long haired guy in the deep south and you'd find the same thing, worse pay and shittier treatment because "you're not one of us". It all comes down to classism really and the fact that many people don't really want to be around those that are not "like" them, with like being anything from gender to color to something as arbitrary as hair length or even style of music. I have always thought that shit was insanity and if a company treats you less than someone else strictly because you are "X" with X being any of the above? Then I agree they should be called to the carpet and you should be redressed.
That said frankly most women I've met have taken one look at my job and said "Are you freaking kidding me?" and wouldn't take it on a bet, and I'm just a PC shop guy, talking to programmer friends frankly they have it even worse most of the time. I mean who wants to spend their days trapped in a cubical barely bigger than a urinal staring at a screen all damned day? I know I sure as hell don't which is why I quit working corporate, I don't make as much working shop but I have my own music, nobody says squat if my GF shows up with a little basket and we have our lunch together, hell I've never even had anybody say boo about my smoking, all they care about is that I can do the job in the time allotted, that's it.
So it really doesn't surprise me that there isn't very many female programmers because the whole corporate programmer thing really does kinda suck. As long as little Sally can choose to become a programmer if she WANTS to become one, and get equal pay for equal work? That is as far as I think it should go, quotas are a cancer that not only breeds racist attitudes but frankly demeans even those that weren't hired because of a quota. I see this a LOT in the south because government jobs will often require a contractor to have a "diversity" of X of whatever so even if that person is frankly qualified for the job there is always this lingering resentment and the thought that they didn't REALLY earn that job, they are just a token.
As long as you can be a programmer if you choose to that should be the end of it and to say there has to be "X" number of women in a field I truly believe is demeaning to women and treat them as just a man without a penis. Frankly the whole thing is completely insane to me, it would be like saying you have to have "X" number of black hockey players while ignoring that most black folks find winter sports in general to be boring. what's next, saying its racist that other countries like soccer instead of American Football? That Football is sexist because most women have no desire to be linebackers? The whole thing is just batshit to me, we are all different, different races, different genders, different cultures, why do we all have to be identical? Can't we just accept that we are different and that is fine and move on?
Yes I do find it easier because my mouse is always in easy reach of my right hand and the few milliseconds you save is probably blown by the 4 or 5 seconds to remember which of the bazillion combos you need for a particular task. It has been tested and documented that keyboard commanders are actually SLOWER than mouse users in pretty much any environment where a mouse is usable at all, a primitive CLI like DOS or Bash is the ONLY place where a keyboard commander gains ANY advantage and frankly if your PC is so shit that the only way it will run worth a piss is to not have any shells at all? Frankly you have bigger problems than remembering keyboard shortcuts as an 8 year old dumpster dived PC has more than enough power to run a modern shell.
If remembering a few keyboard shortcuts, even though the figures show you are being slowed down makes you happy? Then please use them, I'm all for personal choice. Where I have to throw the "bullshit on the field" flag is when keyboard commanders act like they are somehow faster or better because they know some arcane rarely used throwback to DOS when in reality the data shows all they are doing is slowing themselves down. Anybody who thinks about it for even a second will see why, we humans are VERY eye hand dominant and can pop GUI icons without even actual thought required whereas the simple act of recalling a keyboard shortcut adds seconds that simply aren't required to just pop an icon with a mouse.
Here is what I don't get and why these "why are there not enough women in X" articles piss me off....why do we have to treat women like a man with an inverted penis, instead of what they are, a completely different creature that SOMETIMES have interests that overlap ours, sometimes not?
Does a woman's brain look the same as ours on a CAT scan? Nope, different areas are used more and different areas used less, in fact any scan tech worth his salt can spot a female vs male scan in seconds. There are plenty of fields where a woman will just slaughter a man, for example a female pilot will whup the dog shit out of a male pilot because she can take more Gs and in a fight the one that can push the plane the hardest without having a black or red out wins. Women are better at language, women are better at diffusing tense situations which is why they make better cops and hostage negotiators...the list goes on and on.
So why in the hell do we have to treat little Sally like she is just Jimmy without a penis? Why? ALL we should do is make sure that if little Sally WANTS to try out for a job she can without discrimination that is it, THAT IS ALL we should do. Instead we try to set quotas and if there isn't "X" number of this or that gender (this only seems to apply to women and certain minorities, nobody complains there is not enough white people playing basketball or males becoming nurses) everyone acts shocked! Shocked I tell you! That little Sally doesn't want to do the same shit little Jimmy does...did you ever stop to think maybe little Sally finds computers boring as hell? Did you think about that? Because I fix the computers that women use every day and I have found the VAST majority, I'd say at least a good 7 if not 8 out of 10 just want to do their job and get as far from the PC as they can when the work day is done. You see many females actually LIKE face to face interaction, I know, its weird, and they find just staring at a screen for hours dull and repetitive. Ironic considering the one time they like spending hours on the thing is FB and those damned FB games, or as I call them "hamster pushes the button and gets a treat" but hey I'm not a woman and if it makes 'em happy? More power to 'em.
So as long as we make sure little Sally can do the job if she wants, which with the rise of startups and appstores frankly I don't see as much of a problem since anybody can start their own software house now, then we should just stay the hell out of it. I think if we did so you'd find that certain jobs women are drawn to, certain jobs men are drawn to because surprise! They truly are different creatures with different wants, needs, and goals.
Sure it can, don't like my ideas? there is your pink slip, don't let the door hit ya on the way out. First thing you'd have to do is clear out all of Ballmer's little yes men and lickspittles, wouldn't be hard to do, not with the board scared pissless of Apple and me telling them we are gonna be the big dog again.
The problem with MSFT is Ballmer has been laser locked on Cupertino and Wall Street instead of putting boots on the ground to make damned sure he knew the pulse of his customers, any retailer can tell you that when you don't know WTF your customers want you are dead meat. Instead he just tried to "me too" his way out of the problem and wasted nearly a decade being the half ass ersatz instead of making good products, again a killer.
The ONE thing they should have taken from Jobs is "you don't have to beat the other guy to win". Jobs knew this, he didn't try to beat MSFT at their own game, instead he made up a new game and MSFT ended up (foolishly) playing their game by their rules and got bitchslapped for it. Instead of killing themselves to make a shitty ARM device nobody wants they SHOULD have been on the horn with Intel and AMD and doing everything they could to integrate as tight as they could with the latest chips so that MSFT software would be beyond reproach when it came to X86, what did they do instead? They were so focused on ARM that AMD had to actually DROP an innovative feature, the "per core PowerNow" that would drop ONLY cores that weren't in use thus minimizing power usage because Vista would just ignore what the chip was telling it and pile on work on the sleeping core, slowing down the system and causing it to waste instead of save power, inexcusable.
Now you have both Intel and AMD coming out with ULV chips and who are they talking up? Android. MSFT should have had their products running so fucking good on X86 that even thinking of running anything else would have gotten you laughed at, but they let PHBs and marketing drones run the company and all you got was bling and bloat. First thing I would do is clear house and then lay out EXACTLY what needed to be done and then get to it, too much time wasted to be wasting more on red tape, cut the bull and get back to making MSFT the best products you can buy for computers and go from there.
I think they are talking about using a fucking up 3 finger keyboard shortcut to do what any Gecko or Chromium based browser does with a right click. Why on earth you'd want to go through a 3 finger keyboard shortcut when its just right click>reopen closed tab and unlike the 3 finger bullshit you can undo as many levels as you want, all the way back to when you opened the browser.
I'll probably get hate for saying this but "keyboard commanders" seem to think its some great accomplishment when they trip over some funky fucked up keyboard shortcut and when they point it out a good 90% of the time I have to reply with "Uhhh...you know there is a button that will do that, right? See just click here, no need to twist your fingers into pretzels when there is a GUI button right there" but then they get all pissy, like we should all be amazed at the fact they can twist their fingers into pretzels to do what the rest of us can do with a single click of the mouse in the right place.;
See my post above AC, after using every hack and trick on the net Vista STILL thrashed a new HDD to death, and its "senior moments" caused countless failed burns and network transfer failures. Honestly I hadn't seen THAT much bullshit with a MSFT OS since WinME and when you compared it to the rock solid stable XP X64? No comparison, Vista was a flaming pile of shit. It got to the point when somebody with Vista walked into my shop I automatically said "my condolences" because I KNEW that their problems were all traced back to Vista and sure enough, put on XP and tada! The system ran fine.
As for how to fix Win 8? Use Start8 and combine it with "disable charms registry" and if its a laptop grab the generic synaptics touchpad driver (any other touchpad and you are fucked, just disable it and use a wireless mouse) because the generic driver has an option to disable ALL swipe gestures, otherwise even after start8 and the reg hack if you move your touchpad too quickly you'll have your work interrupted by that damned "charms" bar. Yeah about as charming as a punch to the scrotum.
I didn't touch on enterprise because frankly that one is beyond simple to fix. First we could through the maze of bullshit that is Windows licenses, we make that shit simple with language a third grader could read. Second all the extra tier shit is gone, you got SMB, corporate, and datacenter, that's it. And the differences will be spelled out simply so anybody can take 2 minutes and decide what is right for your business. Your business grows and need to go up a tier? We'll take your old keys for 100% credit on the next tier, so ALL you pay is the difference.
That is just the start, MSFT has fucked up so much I could go on all damned day but just those changes would have IT guys across the country cheering my name at the top of their lungs and would go a long way towards fixing the mess.
Sorry but you are wrong, you just got lucky on the hardware is all. I HAD to deal with it on dozens of systems and I can tell you that unless you got REAL lucky on the hardware (like WinME on that fact) you were in for a WORLD OF PAIN from Vista.
I mean here is the specs for my own personal PC at that time which in 2007 wasn't bleeding edge but sure as hell wasn't a slouch, 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 4Gb of RAM, dual 400GB HDDs, one of which Vista killed by thrashing BTW, and first a GeForce 7600GS and then when everyone blamed the shitty performance on Nvidia drivers I switched to an X1650 PRO and it was STILL deep fried ass. It would have "senior moments" where it would just hang for several seconds, sometimes when it wasn't even running anything, and no it was NOT the hardware as I had an XP X64 set up in dual boot and it ran great. It would lose network shares and refuse to see them without a reboot, the network would slow to a crawl during file transfers for no damned reason i could ever find, it was just a hot mess.
And I'm sorry but you are wrong, not only does Windows 7 use a NEW CORE that has had serious tweaking but unlike Vista its memory management wasn't broken, it didn't have senior moments, its just a great OS. win 8 sadly is Vista to the bone, you wouldn't believe how many times I've been paid to do a refresh my PC because Win 8 shits itself over time. Oh and as for Win2K? You must have not known where to look as I had 2K from RTM until the release of XP X64 (skipped XP, never cared for it) and I didn't have a bit of trouble with drivers. I'd say it would be in the top 3 best OSes by MSFT, right up there with Win 7 and XP X64.
Oh bullshit, put somebody with a brain in the big chair and they could slaughter, all the tools are there, its just Ballmer has his one track mind locked so hard on Cupertino it was a miracle he could walk in a straight line!
Hell put ME in the big chair and i could double the stock price just using good old fashioned common sense. First people hate metro or are afraid to buy a new unit because what if they hate Metro too? I'd tell them "Not a problem, anybody that buys ANY copy of Win 8, OEM, upgrade, whatever, if you try it and don't like it? We'll trade your key for the equivalent Windows 7 key so you have nothing to lose"...BAM! You just fixed the windows 8 problem right there. Fuck win 8.1, roll it into a service pack and call it a day, this ain't 93 and .1s look douchey, instead OS releases will be once every 3 for consumer (and they have the option of going back up to 2 releases, just swap the key) and 6 for business who will have the option of going back one release. Metro will NOT be default, it will be OPTIONAL and we'll buy out ModernMix and integrate it so if you want to use metro apps on the desktop? then do so, its YOUR PC and YOU get to choose what and how it runs.
Next we need more income coming in and to fix the mobile problem, okay not a big deal. For the income we start rolling out services Joe and Jane can actually use and give a fuck about, leave the appstore crapstore junk for mobile. Instead imagine getting a CC sized key, pops into any USB, and lets you have a secure remote session with your home PC from work or vice versa? Not a problem when using MSFT servers for the middle man and we'd make that shit more simple to use than your average ATM. For the home users we peer with groups like Akamai (cut down on latency and the risk you'll hit your cap) and we start cutting deals with networks and movie houses, you'll be able to buy bundles or ala cart Internet entertainment with the goal to be to get everything anybody could possibly want available as a stream and if you want to buy it? Just click the button and its yours, and it'll all integrate with Windows Media Center so ANY desktop or laptop with an HDMI out is now an instant HTPC, no setting up or hassles, just plug and go.
Finally as for mobile too long as the mobile division been crippled by Ballmer and Gates, first trying to jam a teeny tiny desktop onto phones and then trying to jam phones onto desktops, that shit WILL end under me. Instead we spin off WinPhone who will now be called ModernOS, it will have the ability to run BOTH Android AND WinPhone apps, and the ONLY connection with the desktop is a "it must work simply" mantra. which means if you choose WinPhone over Android you WILL see the benefits, everything from being able to remote access and even track your phone from your desktop to streaming from your PC to your ModernPhone to even using it as a remote for your desktop or laptop, thus making the HTPC idea even nicer. Your SO wants to watch that twilight crap while the game is on? Slap on some phones connected to your ModernPhone and screen the game from one of our channels to your phone!
See how fricking easy it would be to make money with MSFT if they didn't have a CEO with his head up his ass? And this is just what I could come up with off the top of my head, if I gave it any real thought I could come up with dozens more...ohh, get ready for some gold....how about an innovation bounty? Instead of the employees backstabbing each other with that stack crap instead we offer a bounty on innovation, you come up with a great product YOU get a cut of every sale, be that in software or hardware, give the employees a reason to really bust ass for the company again. i could go on all day as the raw materials ARE there, its the leadership that has been throwing everything away trying to be Cupertino North.
Actually they do have jobs where they are fucking awesome, and that is places like garages, construction huts, all those places where the dirt and grime are constantly a part of the landscape. Now in THOSE places? Your regular tower is gonna be choked and the fan dead inside of 6 months, laptops tend to either end up missing or something spilled on them, in that case and ONLY in that case do i recommend an AIO, usually the AMD Bobcat based as not only are they AIO but completely sealed and fanless which is something you really want on a construction site.
As far as repairing them? You don't, like the laptops usually i just pop out the drive and chunk 'em, cost too much and the parts are hell to find. But when you consider that the last construction hut job I got they had gone through THREE desktops in less than 9 months from all the dust and dirt getting sucked into them before someone recommended me and now? That AMD Bobcat AIO has been running over 3 years now, letting them take care of inventory, payroll, pretty much any basic office job you can think of that little Bobcat does and because its an AIO if someone knocks the coffee onto the keyboard they can just chunk it, slap on a new one, and they are back in business.
That is why i love PCs Billy, never discount ANY design of PC because 5 will get you 10 there is at least one place where they work VERY well. In the case of AIO warehouses, factory floors, construction huts, service stations, anyplace where grime and dirt are part of the job a sealed AIO makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Dude android is to cellphones what Windows was to X86, they have every price point covered and what's more the public knows this. Hell I paid a grand total of $20 for my Android slider prepaid by grabbing it and a card during a promotion and the number of Android phones in the $50-$150 range is simply staggering.
So I'm sorry but price alone simply won't sell the MozPhone, in fact India and Africa are coming out with sub $50 android phones so once those take off you can give it up,price alone just won't cut it. if they haven't gotten sub $50 US smartphones in Bulgaria then nobody has cared about that market, no reason why they couldn't already be using smartphones this very minute.
Too bad just the amount of wasted fuel on his Iraq debacle (which just FYI didn't have a damned thing to do with terrorism but was a payback for quote "wanting to kill my dad" because even the CIA said that terrorists didn't get shit from Saddam) spewed enough crap into the air he'd have to live like Begley Jr for a thousand years just to make up for it, that don't count all the depleted uranium splattered all over the place, the wasted infrastructure that had to be rebuilt, if you look at the numbers war is the biggest pollutant you can possibly have short of just nuking from orbit.
Ugh, why would they want to bolt on one of the buggy Linux shells when they have a damned nice one in Win 7 Aero? Simply bring back Aero instead of that flat tablet looking mess and make it default on desktop and laptops with the OPTION of using Metro, buy out ModernMix so that those that choose the desktop can use Metro apps without being dumped into metro without a warning, and split off the ARM division and change the name to "ModernPhone" or something so there won't be the confusion of the Windows name on something that won't run Windows x86 programs.
See it really wouldn't be hard at all to fix what ails MSFT, but you need a leader that has been in the trenches and knows what folks want, not some bozo whose only contact with the public was back in the 3.x days.
The stupid fucking thing is a leader WITH VISION wouldn't have had to give a rat's ass, because they would have been making money hand over fist by offering extras for sale!
I mean imagine something as simple as a CC sized USB dongle that lets you log into your home PC from work and vice versa, using MSFT's server farm this would have been trivial to set up and would have sold a ton to the SMB crowd. Or how about instead of fucking killing Internet TV they had got in on that boat during the drought and signed deals with the major media companies to offer three tiers of video service as well as ala carte channels? Again with their massive server storage and bandwidth capacity they wouldn't have had a problem and would have had people lining up to hand them money.
This is the difference between a good leader and a bad one, a good leader can spot opportunities and come up with ways to capitalize, a bad leader just looks at what other guys are doing and tries to rip it off. Put me in charge of MSFT and if I haven't doubled the stock price simply by making better fucking products that people want to buy they wouldn't owe me a cent, the opportunities with that company are insanely huge, you just need to focus on the strengths of the company. I'd kill that employee stacks bullshit and replace with a rewards system, you come up with a new product that makes us money? Then YOU get a cut, I'd have the employees killing themselves to make us great products, make metro a strictly OPTIONAL choice and NOT the default on any desktop or laptop, default would be Win 7 Aero, offer a program for those that for whatever reason want to stay on XP, you pay us enough? We'll keep patching it. This will not only make more people happy but we can also sell them service contracts...fuck i could go on all day with ways to make crazy money with that company, Ballmer just lacked vision.
And likewise you too are spreading the bull, you could also find damned nice PC AIOs you just weren't gonna get one for a bottom of the barrel price at the Wally World. If you'd have went to the business section you'd have found nice AIOs with decent mobile GPUs, decently powerful CPUs, and many with touch support.
You just have to remember that unlike Apple and their "one size fits all" you have choices when it comes to PCs and you can choose any price point from "cheap and lousy" like the few Intel Atom based I ran into, "cheap but okay" like the Bobcat APU ones that are frankly great for receptionists and similar low intensity jobs, and then there is "midrange and better" and finally "expensive but teh hotness" like the AIO workstations which are pretty kicking. This is one of the reasons I've always preferred the PC side of the street, it lets me choose the right tool for a particular job while letting me save the customer money by not buying more than they need.
Really? Vista was at least fixable and a LOT of its problems came down to Ballmer kissing Intel's behind and allowing the "Vista capable" bullshit to let Intel unload that warehouse of 9xx garbage chipsets they had piled up.
For me it would have been when Zune shit browned all over the stage and playsforsure was killed for Zune market which promptly puked and died. Playsforsure was frankly growing like fricking mad since it gave users an alternative, instead of having to buy every single song they could have "all you can eat" for a low monthly fee, think about how MSFT could have used that to become Netflix before that company was even a thought, but nope! Ballmer shut down a fricking GROWING market so he could rip off iTunes BADLY. Right then he ass should have been punt kicked like a 30 yard field return.
The truly sad part? We could debate this all damned day as there is so many "WTF is he doing? Is he on crack?" moments under Ballmer that any CEO that wasn't Bill's little buddy would have gotten a pink slip any time between a decade ago and now, letting Vista get shoved out the door so poorly finished, X360 RRoD, the piles of money wasted on Zune,Kin,Sidekick,buying Yahoo Search and that ad company they had to take a multi-billion dollar write off on, BEING TOLD FOR A FUCKING YEAR THAT WIN 8 IS GARBAGE BY EVERYONE THAT TRIED IT yet not only ignoring that and putting out a half assed product he honestly thought would compete with iOS and Android but blowing several billion trying to sell that turd with ads....fuck I could go on all damned day.
It has been obvious since the days of the shit brown squirting Zune if not earlier that he lives in a bubble surrounded by yes men. Frankly the only real hope MSFT has now is that they get an actual engineer with a fucking brain that actually uses the products for other than tweeting twits for shits, because if God help us that Larson girl that was responsible for Win 8 and the charms fuckbar gets the big chair? Might as well close it down and give the money back to the shareholders, its done. I mean when I saw server 2K12 and saw the AOL 96...err I mean Metro UI slapped on A SERVER OS!!?? I knew that the marketing droids were running the shop, any engineer that had actually used a server OS would have said "Wow that is fucking retarded!" and been done with it, the fact that they didn't just shows why Ballmer should have been canned ages ago.
BTW is it just me or am I picking up a the board fired my ass vibe in his letter? The way he talks about when he would have rather stepped down certainly sounds like he isn't stepping down by choice. To me it sounds like the board took a look at the figures, saw Win 8.1 getting roasted over the fire like Win 8, and said "either you retire or we fire your ass, pick one" and he tried to save face while letting the insiders know he isn't happy about it. If that is the case? I'll be happy to buy the board a beer, its about damned time!
Thanks but this is something that has bothered me for years, Al Gore is the biggest fatass hypocrite on the planet and is about as useful for the cause of AGW as sending the head of the black panthers every time there is a racial incident so he can grab the mike and say "kill them honky bitches".
The man lives in a Mc Mansion capable of housing a half a dozen families without even coming into contact with each other, takes an entire fleet of SUVs wherever he goes like some third world dictator, farts around in a personal Lear Jet that often carries only him and a few aides, while having the big brass balls to say while he stuffs his face that YOU should do without or pay higher taxes that will go to him and his pals to "save" the environment he obviously cares soooo much about...the man is a pig, there is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. he is the classic "do as i say not as I do" hypocrite standing on high and stuffing his pockets while telling you to do without and even Ray Charles could see through his bullshit.
Contrast this to Begley who even though he has enough money he likewise could live like a pig lives in a VERY modest 3 bedroom like the majority of Americans live in, drives a little electric car with a bike rack so he can just pop off his bike and ride it for short hops and who does everything in his power to minimize his footprint and recycle, THAT is the kind of guy we should be hearing from, not some fat pig living like a king with his AC blasting while telling us we should just take the heat. another GREAT example is Dennis Weaver, he lives in a solar powered house made from cans and tires and other refuse, he like wise walks the walk.
I would say they have spent the past few years burning their bridges more than the one giant fail that is a shark jump. it would be like you heard the next town over has incredible mansions and great jobs that pay a fortune...so you take a torch to your home and place of business without even bothering to see if the next town over will have you because "hey how could anybody resist me, didn't you hear I was a star 10 years ago?".
MSFT had 3 golden geese that consistently brought in good money, they may not have set the world on fire but they still brought in piles of cash, and that was Windows desktop, server, and MS Office...so what has Ballmer crapped all over these past few years because the press is going "Mobile mobile mobile ZOMFG CELLPHONES!"? Why Windows desktop, server, and MS Office of course! It takes a special kind of hubris and arrogance to ignore every single bit of data and metric you are shown yet that is EXACTLY what Ballmer has done over and over AND OVER. From everybody pointing out the Zune was big, bulky, and offered nothing over the iPod to Win 8 not working worth a shit except on the teeny tiny niche that is Windows tablets and touchscreen laptops, it didn't matter how many screamed "THIS FUCKING SUCKS!" Ballmer just gave them the finger while sticking out his tongue, thinking that just sticking a WinFlag on something was enough to make it a hit.
If there is anything we should take away from the Ballmer years it is this, focusing only on what Wall Street cares about while ignoring your customers is a recipe for massive failure, that all the advertising in the world isn't gonna make people buy something they can't fucking stand, all you are doing is pissing money down the drain. By remaining myopic in his focus on making MSFT into Apple Steve Ballmer threw out every strength they had and thought that advertising and name recognition alone could push through changes that benefited ONLY MSFT while giving the person buying the product the finger. The lesson the next CEO should take from this is that you can put sprinkles and glitter and make videos of people dancing with a pile of fresh poo but that ain't gonna make people suddenly want to go out and buy poo, you have to offer them something they actually want to buy.
Funny my ass, that is 100% insightful! Look at his record folks...Vista, Zune, pushing out the X360 with a 2 billion plus flaw, killing the profitable playsforesure for the DOA Apple ripoff Zune market, Sidekick, Kin, ignoring a year's worth of beta testers and reviewers pointing out it sucks to shit out the "Oh Hai I'm a cellphone LULZ" Win 8, spending way too damned much money buying an ad company because...well Google is an ad company, right? Doing the same for yahoo search and damned near buying the whole company, I could go on and on and on with the only positive being Win 7/2K8 which if rumors are true he was too busy squirting with his poo brown Zune to care.
Look at the growth of Apple and Google in just the last 5 years and then look at MSFT with Ballmer shitting billions away with zero ROI and its not hard to see he was MSFT's version of the Pepsi guy at Apple, he was a PHB middle manager that just happened to be Gates little buddy and thus ended up WAY over his head and thrust into a job he simply wasn't capable of doing. You could have made a better ROI at MSFT by hiring a chimp to throw poo at the financial section and buying stocks based on where the poo stuck.
And the worst part? You KNOW why he is waiting 12 months, its so he can get the last laugh and ram through "Windows Goatse" AKA Windows 8.1 because he is so damned deluded he thinks that it will vindicate his "vision" instead of going over as well as a loud pants ripper in a crowded elevator. When folks go "They brought back the start button!" only to click on it and find out its a Goatse that takes them straight to the Metro they are trying to get the fuck away from its gonna bomb HARD and will be the first MSFT double flop, mark my words. I have found out first hand all the band aids like ClassicShell and Start8 won't fix the bullet wounds that are swipe gestures and "Charms Bar" pop up garbage (yeah about as charming as a punch in the scrotum) and from what I've seen Win 8.1 is even worse, not fixing a single problem Joe User had but instead adding even more? Well I don't know a more perfect end to a pathetic career, Ballmer will go out on a billion dollar failure just as he came in on the failure of WinME.
Sorry about the length but I feel like singing "ding dong the bitch is dead" because I have been waiting years for this to happen, now let us hope to FSM they get a CEO with a functional brain as it really wouldn't be hard to fix what ails MSFT. Return Windows to the Win 7 desktop model with Metro a strictly OPTIONAL shell for tablets, spin off mobile so they can sink or swim without dragging the name Windows into it, and focus instead of on "one device to poorly rule them all" and appstore crapstores on a mantra of "its just HAS to work and be easy" so that every product in their line is beyond simple to use with the others and then they'll be back on the right track. If they replace Ballmer with another bozo they might as well close their doors and give the money back to the shareholders, the death of Win 7 in 2020 will also be the EOL of MSFT.
I'm sure those that are skeptics (or like me think the "solutions" that they are attempting to ram down our throats are just a giant reverse robin hood cash grab by Gore and pals) love the hell out of the Al Gore, after all the more times he's caught just outright pulling the "facts" from his rectum the easier it is to get more folks to be skeptical.
In a way he makes me think of another Al, Al Sharpton, in that even if he has some facts on his side he has to go so far out with his rhetoric that even if he originally had a point he quickly becomes a recruitment tool for the other side. With both Als the facts are never enough, they ALWAYS have to go overboard with the bullshit and spin until it gets to the point if they said it was raining you'd want a second opinion.
Those that believe in AGW frankly ought to do everything they can to distance themselves from al Gore and his hypocritical bullshit, his farting around in a Lear jet or a fleet of limos while claiming he is carbon neutral because he gets credits from HIS OWN COMPANY (this would be like me moving money from my left to right pocket and getting cheers and a tax credit for "wealth redistribution") just makes the entire platform look like a giant scam cooked up by a bunch of greedy spoiled pigs that want to stuff their pockets selling snake oil. If there HAS to be a public face to AGW I have the perfect candidate...Ed Begley Jr. That man not only talks the talk he walks the walk, living in a modest house and driving a small electric vehicle and living as lightly as he can to minimize his footprint, makes a hell of a lot better example than the Rev Al Gore and his McMansion with indoor basketball court and AC blasting.
Actually as I understand it just like on X86 the phone vendors write the drivers for whatever OS they intend to support and that is that. They also can NOT be made FOSS in most cases because the chips used in mobile are some of the most cross licensed and proprietary chips ever made, especially anything to do with video as texture compression on up is patented up the ying yang.
As for how its an issue unlike X86 where other than graphics most of the chips are highly standardized and constantly reused, for example you only really need to support a handful of chips from companies like Realtek and Sigmatel to cover pretty much all sound hardware, with the phones and tablets a LOT of the chips are highly specialized SoC and each manufacturer changes just enough to make reverse engineering pretty much a nonstarter. This is why I can't say download drivers and use WinPhone or WinCE (shudder) on my Android whereas if I wanted to i could put BSD or Linux on my netbook with little effort.
But that is all ignoring the point of my post which is when I gave what frankly should be a trivial scenario, I'm in your phone shop and you need to sell me on MozPhone because you believe in the platform that despite the fact this is an insanely "Moz yay!" site that nobody here could do it, not a single one could even come up with a half ass reason why MozPhone would be better for me than my Android slider, not one. In fact if you'll look below this post one guy even outright ignored both my post and reply and instead built a strawman around IE and Mozilla which not only doesn't answer the question but isn't even applicable to his own statement that "once upon a time nobody had a reason to choose Moz over IE" when in fact it was the exact opposite, IE was a creaking virus infected mess so the users had VERY good reasons for switching.
Hell even TFA pointed out that if you don't have a compelling problem that your product is solving or a reason why the customer should choose you over the other guy you are doomed, and I think I pointed out pretty well that there simply is no reason for MozPhone to exist.