that's only people with the slightest clue. Business execs are mostly just computer stupid, ignorant, or call it naive. Microsoft did a great job at eliminating the corporate Systems Engineer position and now management is deciding that they know computer technology enough to make the choice of what gets purchased. Visual Basic and MS Access turned management into full blown computer programmers and database developers and gave them the balls to become the IT decider. Funny how it always comes down to education of some sort IMO.
The Windows 'one size fits all' system doesn't work.
they got ya. It doesn't even exist. How about: Windows Mobile Windows XP Home Windows XP Professional Windows XP Ultimate Windows XP Starter Edition( for netbooks ) Windows Vista Home Windows Vista Pro Windos Vista Ultimate Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2008 Windows XP embedded and soon Windows 7 in all it's flavors.
There is no one Windows, it's just a bunch of marketing lies and people keep falling for it.
I know a "Windows guy" who refuses to try Linux because he doesn't have the time to spend on it. But, late last year, he told me he spent an entire weekend recovering from a Windows registry messup and recently, he spent an entire work day dealing with a driver error which occurred "automatically" when an RS232 dev kit was considered a mouse. He laughs at these things but doesn't have the time to learn Linux.
THAT is the most difficult part of it IMO. Human nature is to live in the comfort zone and even though we thrive with adversity and change, heuristics drives most to not want change.
Another example. I've been telling many that they can run Windows in a virtual machine for the few apps they can't yet replace on Linux and they don't want to hear any of that. Now, Microsoft is talking about that same solution for Windows 7 and now they're thinking about upgrading. WTF and HTF do you reason with these kinds of people?
I loved the part where it said OSS was only being used for single task or simple desktop systems but then listed UNIX workstation replacements too. IIRC, UNIX workstations did and do more than single tasking and were known for processing capabilities, reliability, and security. And wasn't UNIX the standard server platform for most businesses in the 80s and most of the 90s? Microsoft came in and told everyone Windows could replace UNIX. Little did they know that Windows was like the Tribbles or better yet the Gremlins. They did little to help productivity and reproduction was their favorite feature. One UNIX server box running 3 business packages = 6 Windows servers( 1 for each business package and another for redundancy to get over 80% uptime ). Virtual machine software now lets them move these back into one box but you still pay all the software licensing fees for so many copies of the same software. Tibbles.
Gartner is the former DataQuest company, the came company people used to call DataGuess. They're just a place for companies to purchase "Gartner Research" papers using the following form: 1) What is it you want research on? 2) How many pages do you require? 3) What is the target result you're looking for? 4) How quickly do you need the research paper? 5) Price is based on the following formula: cost= number of pages * $1,000 * needFactor needFactor = 10 * inverse of #weeks needed
If you want to stop them, advocate for better technology education in K1-K12 and I'm not talking about using particular software. Advocate education on how to use the computer as a general purpose tool. It doesn't take much to see through companies like Gartner but it takes SOME education.
and it's not like NASA and other Fed agencies haven't been working on fuel cells for like 50 years or so.
Talk about a clue, all the hydrogen hype that started in early 2000 was designed to stop the US auto industry from bringing out any fuel efficient hybrids. You know, like the ones they'd been working on through the 90s. And there was probably nothing behind how the hydrogen hype was used to get the CARB board to eliminate high fuel efficiency requirements for California and eliminate the zero emission requirements which caused GM to product the EV1.
This is all just shortsighted politics taking money away from the industry Bush created to chase after unicorns instead of fuel efficiency. Bush is a visionary isn't he? Gheesh, some peoples kids.
When Bush/Cheney took office in Feb 2001, it was only a month or so before they created the hydrogen program and then axed the hybrid vehicle program.
I guess since both Obama and McCain were involved in all the hydrogen hype there wasn't anyone cracking jokes about hydrogen like there was Bush putting down hybrids in the campaigning upto the 2000 election*.
Still good to see this finally happening. I wonder if the Governator is still backing that Hydrogen Super Highway to the tune of $200 million out in California?
so they can finally build that perfect Microsoft Car... As the story goes, it would work like this:
1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
3. Ocasionally, when executing a maneuver such as making a left-turn would cause the car to shut down and refuse to start, and you would have to reinstall the engine....well, you should know the rest of the gig.
it's a programming language which splits up multiple threads of execution into different processes instead of threads. Microsoft OS's have sucked at multi-threading since NT v3.1 and Microsoft's own developers are really bad or totally ignorant of the concept of multi-threading. Anyone remember how bad Windows Explorer worked when they tried to multi-thread it in a Chicago beta? OS/2 ran circles around everything MS tried and most all OS ISV's knew and wrote multi-threaded applications.
Because of these "features" of Microsofts OS's and developer skills, or lack thereof, the crutch is to help Windows own developers and ISV's create applications with many processes instead of threads. If that happens, Windows applications can step into the 1990s and take advantage of hardware having more than one CPU.
Microsofts love affair with "function" based programming and API's dates to the Windows NT 3.1 days up to the Windows 95 era. This was when IBM was doing magic with CORBA on OS/2 and C++/OOP cross platform frameworks were all the buzz. Nothing pissed off Microsoft more then having someone else defining what application framework developers were to use and hiding details of the Windows API's was not going to happen on Bill G's watch. Microsoft then became a fan of Functional Programming. They based their messaging on RPC, and their Object-like COM and MFC didn't let the Windows API's get out of developers sight. One by one Microsoft went after the cross-platform framework vendors until there were none left. The Windows Object-like API's and nonstandard C and C++ compilers also made it very difficult to port to any other OS. Some developers called it Microsoft C-- because of its lack of standards following.
So now it's over 15 years later and multi-core CPUs are the norm but Windows, Windows utilities and Windows applications are still mostly single-threaded. You've to 4 CPUs but click on a Windows app and you still get the hourglass waiting for a page, graphic, etc to finish processing on one CPU while the other 3 mostly idle. So it's time to now patch the damage done in the early 90s and come up with a language built on Windows, for Windows, because of Windows, and....wait for it.... tied to Windows. Yeah, that's a great idea. Not, IMO.
come on now, this was a very intelligent computer owner, he called the computer manufacturer and asked if data could be recovered from a missing drive and they said no.
The "repair man" probably did this to a few hundred other computer users before getting caught.
Let me tell you a story. Some friends had a laptop which the husband said was running slow and that was a problem. I told him it was most like Windows XP and it just needed to be reinstalled because that's pretty common. He did nothing and about 2 weeks later I was back over there and booted the laptop with a Knoppix CD and it was nice a snappy. I even showed him Firefox loading pages. About a month or so later, he tells me his computer guru neighbor fixed his computer because it had a bad hard disk and now everything is nice a fast again. I ask if he reinstalled Windows and he looked at me blank faced. I then asked if the desktop background was different or if the browser bookmarks or homepage was different and he said yes. I told him that Windows was reinstalled and they probably didn't need a new hard disk. Most computer users are bumbling idiots and only know who to do what they do by trial and error without any understanding of the most basic concepts. That is what I see here in the USA.
I doubt they'd give up their weapon fuel for $150 million. I suspect they are hoping for a much better deal to stop building weapons. And even then, they'd just stop for a short period and then start again to get even more $$$$.
the difference was that WinME was DOS/Windows based and Win2K was NT based so there was little in common. Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 so it's the same core. That makes this news even more of a dah moment and a WTF cares kind of news item. They won't continue _forcing_ OEMs to ship Vista but will let them sell to any sucker who bought their snakeoil sales pitches and asks for it.
Actually there was a time when Microsoft was hailed as the white knight in the shiny armor freeing us from the evil IBM empire.
I've heard this said, but somehow I managed to miss it. I started work in the industry in 87, and had first encountered microsoft probably in 84. Outside of ziff-davis style vanity press, everything about MS was about what crap they were technically and ethically. The white knights were DEC, BSD, Borland, Commodore,...
It was pretty obvious to many techies by the early 90s that Microsoft software was crap. The printed press was one of its tools and perpetuated the myth that companies would be better off with Microsoft. By 1995 it was getting out to a more general crowd how bad Microsoft was but these people still required having their eyes and minds open. Considering where they are today, it's obvious many are still pretty ignorant to their business practices and technology in general. By 1995, even the author, Douglas Adams saw this:
Here's a quote from the end of that short article: "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place."
Over $200 million in marketing spent on Window 95 and about the same amount the following year pushing NT as _the_ server OS suckered in enough to seal their position in the market. That seal is leaking now but unfortunately, the general population of computer users and IT execs are mostly just as naive as they were in the early 1990s. It's the OEM's who are driving the market now because of very low margins and the high relative cost of Microsoft software.
I might be confusing Microsoft with a wife beater, but the mentality is roughly the same it seems.
What do you tell a user with two black eyes?
The same thing they've been told for the past 10-15 years, "format your hard disk, reinstall Windows, and reinstall all your software.". You can add, "DIY or pay to have it done for about $300.", and " Or you can buy a new computer with a _better_ version of Windows and hope they get it right the Nth time around.( Nth = 8 in 2009)"
I'm thinking users just like getting "black eyes" because they see everyone else with them. But it is getting more and more popular to not be walking around with two "black eyes" with more and more BSD/Macs and Linux showing up.
Wanna keep making money? Put Linux on all your computers and migrate the currently installed Windows XP into virtual machines. You've not instantly moved into the 21st century with a far more secure and stable platform to build on and have backwards compatibility.
This pretty much what Microsoft is saying you should do with Windows 7/Vista SP3 except they seem to think the bloated mess called Vista is a solid base. In reality, it's not a solid base, it's a new treadmill and has the same old billing meter tied to it and feeding your profits back to One Microsoft Way.
If someone is throwing chairs around his/her office when they get upset, what do they do at home?
And besides, making a good ODF converter requires technical skills and Microsoft is a marketing company. They are far better skilled at getting you to think they have a good product than actually making a good product.
let's see, Windows on hospital equipment recently got Conficker because Microsoft no longer provided security patches for Windows 2000 and NT. I'm now wondering how long the British Navy thinks these subs will last and how they'll deal with unpatched Microsoft operating systems running the show when Microsoft stops feeding them patches?
Hey USAF! If you can't see the source code and see the patches for later versions, you can't have any hope of securing the system in the long run. You're only hope for security dooms you to tearing it all out and replacing it. And you know that is not going to happen and doesn't happen. Good luck with that "Super-Secure XP".
back in the old days( ~1994 ), IBM was fortunate enough to find one or two top OEMs in Germany who couldn't be paid off by Microsoft and accepted the technically superior IBM OS/2 as their primary preloaded OS. In one short year, OS/2 had 25% marketshare in Germany.
Preloading is the game and Microsoft knows this and is willing to pay out millions in marketing kickbacks to make sure a Microsoft OS is what is preloaded instead of a Linux distro. Remember the ClassmatePC deal in Nigeria? Microsoft got caught purchasing the favor of replacing the preloaded Mandriva with Windows XP once they were delivered. Egypt took tens of millions and became a Windows-only government at the expense of the OLPC MOU for a million units. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft just redirected billions of "R&D" funds and you know where those will likely end up? Most likely place is in the pockets of companies looking to preload Android, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, or other Linux products. IMO.
It's the preloads. So when you hear the press complaining about Linux as it came from the OEM and not about installation problems, it's game-on and most likely game-over for MSFT.
Let me get this straight, we know Microsoft drops support for its OSes and that includes security patches, yet hospital equipment manufacturers are loading Windows on equipment costing millions? Come on folks, what's wrong with this picture.
Atleast with open source, the equipment manufacturer can backlevel a patch or hire someone to do this. They can't do this with Windows or it costs too much for them to do it. I can't imagine getting source access to an unsupported OS is something Microsoft wants. If they don't want it, they price it off the market.
So is anyone in the press bringing up the issue of companies embedding Windows in products which are expected to last more then 10 years like MRI machines and other hospital equipment? This isn't your standard corporate IT department that keeps throwing away good hardware every three to five years.
It's plain and simple, Windows is unsafe and unsupportable in any long life application.
I don't see what's new here. So the latest version will self destruct in one year, then what? Or maybe they are releasing it to the public instead of leaking it like they normally do?
All I can say is WTF, they are just now realizing it's a security risk and instead of disabling it in existing OS's, they're doing it in a beta of the next OS?
Sounds like they're not too sure about it being a risk or not. It's like having 3 sons ages 18, 16, and 14 and realizing condoms might be valuable but then only giving them to the 14 year old.
Security is probably job #10 at Microsoft as marketing rules the day on One Microsoft Way.
Dell did it one step better and put the ARM chip in the laptop along side the x86 CPU. I forget what version of laptop does this but it's currently used for instant-On but has full network access and I guess it shares it with Windows since they said Windows can boot while using the ARM stuff.
But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.
In NY,NY there are young models all over the city looking to be "discovered" so it stands to reason enough of them are looking up, see a plane, and they think it's going to fall on them so they start running. Others follow the pretty bimbo's running and screaming.
you know it's true, the same thing happened when a car on the street overheated and the radiator started venting.
The funny thing is, where were they running to and why did they think the plane was going to hit them if they didn't move?
Unless it's got a perpetual display or something visible on the stone, technology is going to leave the dead behind in just a few short years. Maybe an ethernet jack on the casket pumping out basic/standard HTML over HTTP might remain viable for a few decades but even then, you'd better set it up on IPv6.
Slashdot Mirror
that's only people with the slightest clue. Business execs are mostly just computer stupid, ignorant, or call it naive. Microsoft did a great job at eliminating the corporate Systems Engineer position and now management is deciding that they know computer technology enough to make the choice of what gets purchased. Visual Basic and MS Access turned management into full blown computer programmers and database developers and gave them the balls to become the IT decider. Funny how it always comes down to education of some sort IMO.
LoB
The Windows 'one size fits all' system doesn't work.
they got ya. It doesn't even exist. How about:
Windows Mobile
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Ultimate
Windows XP Starter Edition( for netbooks )
Windows Vista Home
Windows Vista Pro
Windos Vista Ultimate
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008
Windows XP embedded
and soon Windows 7 in all it's flavors.
There is no one Windows, it's just a bunch of marketing lies and people keep falling for it.
LoB
I know a "Windows guy" who refuses to try Linux because he doesn't have the time to spend on it. But, late last year, he told me he spent an entire weekend recovering from a Windows registry messup and recently, he spent an entire work day dealing with a driver error which occurred "automatically" when an RS232 dev kit was considered a mouse. He laughs at these things but doesn't have the time to learn Linux.
THAT is the most difficult part of it IMO. Human nature is to live in the comfort zone and even though we thrive with adversity and change, heuristics drives most to not want change.
Another example. I've been telling many that they can run Windows in a virtual machine for the few apps they can't yet replace on Linux and they don't want to hear any of that. Now, Microsoft is talking about that same solution for Windows 7 and now they're thinking about upgrading. WTF and HTF do you reason with these kinds of people?
LoB
I loved the part where it said OSS was only being used for single task or simple desktop systems but then listed UNIX workstation replacements too. IIRC, UNIX workstations did and do more than single tasking and were known for processing capabilities, reliability, and security. And wasn't UNIX the standard server platform for most businesses in the 80s and most of the 90s? Microsoft came in and told everyone Windows could replace UNIX. Little did they know that Windows was like the Tribbles or better yet the Gremlins. They did little to help productivity and reproduction was their favorite feature. One UNIX server box running 3 business packages = 6 Windows servers( 1 for each business package and another for redundancy to get over 80% uptime ).
Virtual machine software now lets them move these back into one box but you still pay all the software licensing fees for so many copies of the same software. Tibbles.
LoB
Gartner is the former DataQuest company, the came company people used to call DataGuess. They're just a place for companies to purchase "Gartner Research" papers using the following form:
1) What is it you want research on?
2) How many pages do you require?
3) What is the target result you're looking for?
4) How quickly do you need the research paper?
5) Price is based on the following formula:
cost= number of pages * $1,000 * needFactor
needFactor = 10 * inverse of #weeks needed
If you want to stop them, advocate for better technology education in K1-K12 and I'm not talking about using particular software. Advocate education on how to use the computer as a general purpose tool. It doesn't take much to see through companies like Gartner but it takes SOME education.
LoB
and it's not like NASA and other Fed agencies haven't been working on fuel cells for like 50 years or so.
Talk about a clue, all the hydrogen hype that started in early 2000 was designed to stop the US auto industry from bringing out any fuel efficient hybrids. You know, like the ones they'd been working on through the 90s. And there was probably nothing behind how the hydrogen hype was used to get the CARB board to eliminate high fuel efficiency requirements for California and eliminate the zero emission requirements which caused GM to product the EV1.
This is all just shortsighted politics taking money away from the industry Bush created to chase after unicorns instead of fuel efficiency. Bush is a visionary isn't he? Gheesh, some peoples kids.
LoB
When Bush/Cheney took office in Feb 2001, it was only a month or so before they created the hydrogen program and then axed the hybrid vehicle program.
I guess since both Obama and McCain were involved in all the hydrogen hype there wasn't anyone cracking jokes about hydrogen like there was Bush putting down hybrids in the campaigning upto the 2000 election*.
Still good to see this finally happening. I wonder if the Governator is still backing that Hydrogen Super Highway to the tune of $200 million out in California?
LoB
so they can finally build that perfect Microsoft Car... As the story goes, it would work like this:
1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
3. Ocasionally, when executing a maneuver such as making a left-turn would cause the car to shut down and refuse to start, and you would have to reinstall the engine. ...well, you should know the rest of the gig.
LoB
it's a programming language which splits up multiple threads of execution into different processes instead of threads. Microsoft OS's have sucked at multi-threading since NT v3.1 and Microsoft's own developers are really bad or totally ignorant of the concept of multi-threading. Anyone remember how bad Windows Explorer worked when they tried to multi-thread it in a Chicago beta? OS/2 ran circles around everything MS tried and most all OS ISV's knew and wrote multi-threaded applications.
Because of these "features" of Microsofts OS's and developer skills, or lack thereof, the crutch is to help Windows own developers and ISV's create applications with many processes instead of threads. If that happens, Windows applications can step into the 1990s and take advantage of hardware having more than one CPU.
Microsofts love affair with "function" based programming and API's dates to the Windows NT 3.1 days up to the Windows 95 era. This was when IBM was doing magic with CORBA on OS/2 and C++/OOP cross platform frameworks were all the buzz. Nothing pissed off Microsoft more then having someone else defining what application framework developers were to use and hiding details of the Windows API's was not going to happen on Bill G's watch. Microsoft then became a fan of Functional Programming. They based their messaging on RPC, and their Object-like COM and MFC didn't let the Windows API's get out of developers sight. One by one Microsoft went after the cross-platform framework vendors until there were none left. The Windows Object-like API's and nonstandard C and C++ compilers also made it very difficult to port to any other OS. Some developers called it Microsoft C-- because of its lack of standards following.
So now it's over 15 years later and multi-core CPUs are the norm but Windows, Windows utilities and Windows applications are still mostly single-threaded. You've to 4 CPUs but click on a Windows app and you still get the hourglass waiting for a page, graphic, etc to finish processing on one CPU while the other 3 mostly idle. So it's time to now patch the damage done in the early 90s and come up with a language built on Windows, for Windows, because of Windows, and....wait for it.... tied to Windows. Yeah, that's a great idea. Not, IMO.
LoB
come on now, this was a very intelligent computer owner, he called the computer manufacturer and asked if data could be recovered from a missing drive and they said no.
The "repair man" probably did this to a few hundred other computer users before getting caught.
Let me tell you a story. Some friends had a laptop which the husband said was running slow and that was a problem. I told him it was most like Windows XP and it just needed to be reinstalled because that's pretty common. He did nothing and about 2 weeks later I was back over there and booted the laptop with a Knoppix CD and it was nice a snappy. I even showed him Firefox loading pages. About a month or so later, he tells me his computer guru neighbor fixed his computer because it had a bad hard disk and now everything is nice a fast again. I ask if he reinstalled Windows and he looked at me blank faced. I then asked if the desktop background was different or if the browser bookmarks or homepage was different and he said yes. I told him that Windows was reinstalled and they probably didn't need a new hard disk. Most computer users are bumbling idiots and only know who to do what they do by trial and error without any understanding of the most basic concepts. That is what I see here in the USA.
LoB
I doubt they'd give up their weapon fuel for $150 million. I suspect they are hoping for a much better deal to stop building weapons. And even then, they'd just stop for a short period and then start again to get even more $$$$.
LoB
No OS/2 shows an obvious lack of knowing the history of computer software and operating systems.
LoB
the difference was that WinME was DOS/Windows based and Win2K was NT based so there was little in common. Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 so it's the same core. That makes this news even more of a dah moment and a WTF cares kind of news item. They won't continue _forcing_ OEMs to ship Vista but will let them sell to any sucker who bought their snakeoil sales pitches and asks for it.
LoB
Actually there was a time when Microsoft was hailed as the white knight in the shiny armor freeing us from the evil IBM empire.
I've heard this said, but somehow I managed to miss it. I started work in the industry in 87, and had first encountered microsoft probably in 84. Outside of ziff-davis style vanity press, everything about MS was about what crap they were technically and ethically. The white knights were DEC, BSD, Borland, Commodore, ...
It was pretty obvious to many techies by the early 90s that Microsoft software was crap. The printed press was one of its tools and perpetuated the myth that companies would be better off with Microsoft. By 1995 it was getting out to a more general crowd how bad Microsoft was but these people still required having their eyes and minds open. Considering where they are today, it's obvious many are still pretty ignorant to their business practices and technology in general. By 1995, even the author, Douglas Adams saw this:
Microsofthttp://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/dna-on-microsoft.html
Here's a quote from the end of that short article:
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place."
Over $200 million in marketing spent on Window 95 and about the same amount the following year pushing NT as _the_ server OS suckered in enough to seal their position in the market. That seal is leaking now but unfortunately, the general population of computer users and IT execs are mostly just as naive as they were in the early 1990s. It's the OEM's who are driving the market now because of very low margins and the high relative cost of Microsoft software.
LoB
I might be confusing Microsoft with a wife beater, but the mentality is roughly the same it seems.
What do you tell a user with two black eyes?
The same thing they've been told for the past 10-15 years, "format your hard disk, reinstall Windows, and reinstall all your software.". You can add, "DIY or pay to have it done for about $300.", and " Or you can buy a new computer with a _better_ version of Windows and hope they get it right the Nth time around.( Nth = 8 in 2009)"
8 because - Win95, NT4.0, Win98, WinME, Win2K, WinXP, WinVista, Win7
I'm thinking users just like getting "black eyes" because they see everyone else with them. But it is getting more and more popular to not be walking around with two "black eyes" with more and more BSD/Macs and Linux showing up.
LoB
Wanna keep making money? Put Linux on all your computers and migrate the currently installed Windows XP into virtual machines. You've not instantly moved into the 21st century with a far more secure and stable platform to build on and have backwards compatibility.
This pretty much what Microsoft is saying you should do with Windows 7/Vista SP3 except they seem to think the bloated mess called Vista is a solid base. In reality, it's not a solid base, it's a new treadmill and has the same old billing meter tied to it and feeding your profits back to One Microsoft Way.
Get the facts straight. IMO.
LoB
If someone is throwing chairs around his/her office when they get upset, what do they do at home?
And besides, making a good ODF converter requires technical skills and Microsoft is a marketing company. They are far better skilled at getting you to think they have a good product than actually making a good product.
A new Microsoft my a55.
LoB
let's see, Windows on hospital equipment recently got Conficker because Microsoft no longer provided security patches for Windows 2000 and NT. I'm now wondering how long the British Navy thinks these subs will last and how they'll deal with unpatched Microsoft operating systems running the show when Microsoft stops feeding them patches?
Hey USAF! If you can't see the source code and see the patches for later versions, you can't have any hope of securing the system in the long run. You're only hope for security dooms you to tearing it all out and replacing it. And you know that is not going to happen and doesn't happen. Good luck with that "Super-Secure XP".
LoB
back in the old days( ~1994 ), IBM was fortunate enough to find one or two top OEMs in Germany who couldn't be paid off by Microsoft and accepted the technically superior IBM OS/2 as their primary preloaded OS. In one short year, OS/2 had 25% marketshare in Germany.
Preloading is the game and Microsoft knows this and is willing to pay out millions in marketing kickbacks to make sure a Microsoft OS is what is preloaded instead of a Linux distro. Remember the ClassmatePC deal in Nigeria? Microsoft got caught purchasing the favor of replacing the preloaded Mandriva with Windows XP once they were delivered. Egypt took tens of millions and became a Windows-only government at the expense of the OLPC MOU for a million units. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft just redirected billions of "R&D" funds and you know where those will likely end up? Most likely place is in the pockets of companies looking to preload Android, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, or other Linux products. IMO.
It's the preloads. So when you hear the press complaining about Linux as it came from the OEM and not about installation problems, it's game-on and most likely game-over for MSFT.
LoB
Let me get this straight, we know Microsoft drops support for its OSes and that includes security patches, yet hospital equipment manufacturers are loading Windows on equipment costing millions? Come on folks, what's wrong with this picture.
Atleast with open source, the equipment manufacturer can backlevel a patch or hire someone to do this. They can't do this with Windows or it costs too much for them to do it. I can't imagine getting source access to an unsupported OS is something Microsoft wants. If they don't want it, they price it off the market.
So is anyone in the press bringing up the issue of companies embedding Windows in products which are expected to last more then 10 years like MRI machines and other hospital equipment? This isn't your standard corporate IT department that keeps throwing away good hardware every three to five years.
It's plain and simple, Windows is unsafe and unsupportable in any long life application.
LoB
I don't see what's new here. So the latest version will self destruct in one year, then what? Or maybe they are releasing it to the public instead of leaking it like they normally do?
Nothing here, move along. Move along. IMO.
LoB
All I can say is WTF, they are just now realizing it's a security risk and instead of disabling it in existing OS's, they're doing it in a beta of the next OS?
Sounds like they're not too sure about it being a risk or not. It's like having 3 sons ages 18, 16, and 14 and realizing condoms might be valuable but then only giving them to the 14 year old.
Security is probably job #10 at Microsoft as marketing rules the day on One Microsoft Way.
LoB
Dell did it one step better and put the ARM chip in the laptop along side the x86 CPU. I forget what version of laptop does this but it's currently used for instant-On but has full network access and I guess it shares it with Windows since they said Windows can boot while using the ARM stuff.
But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.
LoB
In NY,NY there are young models all over the city looking to be "discovered" so it stands to reason enough of them are looking up, see a plane, and they think it's going to fall on them so they start running. Others follow the pretty bimbo's running and screaming.
you know it's true, the same thing happened when a car on the street overheated and the radiator started venting.
The funny thing is, where were they running to and why did they think the plane was going to hit them if they didn't move?
LoB
Unless it's got a perpetual display or something visible on the stone, technology is going to leave the dead behind in just a few short years. Maybe an ethernet jack on the casket pumping out basic/standard HTML over HTTP might remain viable for a few decades but even then, you'd better set it up on IPv6.
LoB