it shows that nothing has changed at Microsoft in the past 20 years. There is no "new Microsoft", there is no "kinder, gentler Microsoft", and there is no "Microsoft is a friend to open source".
It's all a lie for the purpose of furthering their goal of making sure Windows is the only OS for the vast majority of the populations.
it's a tough battle for them when people use will use this know how good the competition is. It's not like their Windows monopoly where most users are not even aware of any of the other computer systems except maybe some know _of_ the Mac. Most people use Google for search on other devices so changing the name and paying Verison twice what the deal Google had is only going to continue the financial losses at Microsoft in every division outside of MS Windows and MS Office. IMO.
wow, can I take it outside in the sun and still read it? Does it have a ruggedized design and built for being out in the dirty/dusty outside world? And will it run for hours on very little power?:-+
Hey, the $200 netbook running on ARM and Ubuntu is really cool but it is not an XO by any stretch of the imagination.
he/she is probably tired if constantly hearing this bull about other devices being comparable. They are not and there are no other laptop-like devices on the market today at $200, $300, $400, or even $500.
And I think he/she was right about a lot of western/US business methods.
those EEE PC's would not last a month in the places the OLPC XO already runs. You can't even use it outside in bright sunlight.
People just don't get that so much engineering that went into the XO was to make it capable for rough environments and especially outdoor use. There is not one other laptop which can do this anywhere near the $200 price. None, zip, nada.
The only thing the EEE PC did was take away sales from the G1G1 program and cause this kind of explanation to be made over and over again to the misinformed.
and ofcourse it helped alot to have Intel chasing behind OLPC with promises of a far far better laptop without actually doing it. FYI, the Classmate is not even a close comparison to the XO.
It also was a big help when Microsoft went around to the governments of many of the countries the OLPC had publicly listed as giving MoU's and was kind enough to find millions of dollars to invest in these governments to 'help them' with their computer technologies. You know, like how Egypt signed on with Microsoft for around $25 million and then when OLPC went back to them, all they would ask is "does it run Windows".
Naw, it was all the OLPC peoples fault 100%. Chalk up another one for big business stomping on innovation and progress. IMO.
All the more reason the system should be teaching students to use the easy tools available to them when something like this is going to effect their lives. Research is not as difficult as it was a couple of decades ago.
I can understand the older generations but I've seen 30-something year old news casters getting this wrong. Even the person who posted this to/. simplified it and incorrectly stated "Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
Are we really just being taught enough to get a job at the local factory or fast food joint?
FYI, I searched around for an emoticon for sarcasm and it seems there is none other than:-> and it doesn't do it for me. I saw this and think it applies,:-+ or maybe:+ although it's close to a kiss(:-x ). ~ is too simple to catch on IMO.
Gawd, I can't believe people still get this wrong after all the publicity on this. No wonder they are running out of money, they are probably sending coupons and rebates to people not using antenna reception when they don't need to.
FYI, if you subscribe to a cable service, they are not going to stop sending you the RF-over-cable/analog signal. They may try to nudge you to move to a digital converter box but even then, they will provide the digital conversion and you don't need to pay $40+ for one the government is rebating.
Is our education system that screwed up people don't understand this? FYI, that's a rhetorical question, I know the answer.
cutting in the XBox business was be a sign of the end of that product IMO. As was stated, that is a huge money pit for them considering they are used to productlines with 1 or 2 billion in losses annually but $8 billion from just one product takes its toll.
If they cut back on the XBox now, it'll never grow enough to be anything more than an also-ran product in the console market. The last I saw, PS2's are outselling XBox still and the Wii is killing it with the PS3 just passing it. Now, the PS3, with the BluRay player, with network movie downloads, with cost reductions, is starting to pick up further. So if Microsoft but back on financing the XBox division it can only make this worst and that, IMO, means just holding on to a small marketshare. Unlike the Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile which cost them about $1 billion annually, XBox is a much larger and more expensive project. IMO.
We'll have to wait to see what really transpires or if this is all just rumor.
I am surprised that Microsoft is needing to reduce its workforce by so much but if WinPC shipments are down then they have to cut or it'll really show up on the books.
As far the statement of surprise at this move goes( "Despite its portfolio diversity" ), that portfolio is weighted heavily with financial losses and has been for over a decade. Something in the range of 80-90% of their profits come from 2 or 3 products( Microsoft Windows desktop and server, Microsoft Office ).
Now if the WinPC shipments numbers don't show a large decline, we can figure that a whole lot of businesses are not signing up for expensive bundled contracts and either are stagnating their IT infrastructure or are going elsewhere.
Then again, when was the last big financial shuffle at Microsoft? They used to do this every three years or so and it was a nice way to hide loss patterns and move some of those billions in profits around. I remember one shuffle left the Windows CE/Mobile division and MSN division with enough to show a onetime profit and was around the time they cut the R&D budget from $6.3 billion to around $3.1 billion. The press was all over the R&D cuts but totally missed how a lot of money got shuffled around.
This would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Re-org and reduce head counts in a slowing economy and pressure from open source around the world. IMO.
to some, security, reliability and performance are requirements for a computer OS. Microsoft has failed year after year at building a solid base OS. And now people are supposed to believe Windows 7/2010 they are finally going to get it right? Talk about being in a hole.
"This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled."
Is this person a politician because that is saying nothing.
Too bad 2009 is going to be another year of hearing Microsoft lies and exaggerations regarding yet another Microsoft OS release. BFD, is what I say after 20 something years of the same junk year after year after year. I gave up when Windows 2000 came out and they started shoveling more user level stuff into the kernel and they never fixed the security system. That was in 1999, over 8 years ago and they still are trying to build an operating system worth a hill of beans. Well, it's all about marketing at MS so what you see in print is not what you get and never has.
in 2009, I'll be wading through the MS marketing drivel for what's going on in the embedded, netbook, and MID areas with regards to the ARM Cortex chips and especially the A9 dual core versions. A8 is amazing on the performance front and power front. This should prove very interesting along with what Android, Ubuntu, and others do on these platforms.
So long MSFT, 2009 is probably going to be another tough year of marketing against real solutions. And though you may have smashed the OLPC and dashed their plans of helping millions of children, they kicked off a resurrection of the light weight small form-factor device you just can't compete on. IMO.
simple editing and note taking tools are a requirement for any PDA IMO. But not full blown desktop applications and all the crud those bring with it. Years ago, I would pull out one of those folding keyboards, plug in a Palm Pilot and do notes and letters on the job at remote sites. Taking them into the word proc at the office or hotel and pulling into status reports and the likes was a simple task. But if those apps were loaded up with billions of features which just bogged down the little CPU and memory footprint it would have made the task painful.
Microsoft has many brainwashed into thinking Microsoft software is the only way to do things and the best way to do it. Keeping that myth going and getting people to think they need this stuff on the PDA/mobile is a great way to impart the impression of failure onto that device.
I saw a Jemacs and thought that it might make for an easy port to the G1/Andriod but it's not written in Java and only compiled to Java bytecode. No doubt it'll get to Android eventually.
it's all a marketing ploy to reduce demand for the product by showing a supposed flaw in the platform. Who do you think benefits from such an idiotic concept as having Windows desktop applications running on the iPhone?
There's more to marketing than just fooling the public into thinking your product it good. Sometimes, you have to swing them over to thinking that the dominant product is failing somewhere or in some way.
And if you look around, you'll probably see what I've seen with hardcore Windows fanboyz buying iPhones. Apple seems to have hit another homerun like they did with the iPod and the iPhone is much more of a threat to Windows. This kind of marketing tactic is SOP for you know who but there are also some press people and users who just don't the PDA. Semi-ludites I suppose and just can't wrap their little minds around computing devices for different things. IMO
I found it interesting that the list author stated that Java was based on C but then says it's so different that it has many of it's own rules. Just how can it be so close to C but then so different and what about the complete lack of OOP in C? Maybe the basic syntax of the language but the core of Java is its OOP mechanisms.
And the bit in C# about the "one company" is wrong, the problem is not one company but which company it is. Unless you've had your head in the sand for that last 20 years, that one company has done everything, both legal and illegal, to make sure developers can only develop for Windows. Java, until recently was also controlled by one company, Sun Microsystems.
The author is very naive to the history Microsoft has in the software development market over the last 20-something years. He definately left off the fact that the 'religious' leader of the Delphi language was purchased away from Borland along with dozens of other Delphi language engineers and assigned to invent something to thwart the threat of cross platform Java. Microsoft settled out of court on the corporate raiding of Borland. Remember, Delphi was also cross platform so Microsoft got a double win for gutting Borland of their Delphi leadership and starting a Windows-ized alternative to Java.
It is religion and it is a religious war, or atleast that is how it has always been handled inside of Microsoff. IMO.
I always wondered how the President of the USA could end up with his brain missing but mostly why it could be missing. I figured the Sci-Fi stories of brain scanning and the likes probably had someone worried something in JFK's memory should stay hidden unknown to all others.
now it seems that if this was the case, they just might have based their actions on a valid fear.
I was looking at the range of low power CPUs and noticed that Intel's Atom seemed to do ok compared to the other low powered chips but then noticed that all the other chips were being built on a 65nm process while Intel had the Atom on the 45nm process. Looking at Intels standard "Core" processors showed that their newest CPUs were also on the 45nm process but not the majority of them.
This was a few months ago but it made me wonder why all the other low power CPU manufacturers were able to get the power and performance from 65nm while Intel had to jump to the newest and smallest process(45nm) for the Atom to get in the ballpark on power and performance. And they had to be eating into production space for the high profit high performance larger CPUs they'd just released on the 45nm process.
They seem to have a strategy of winning by using their ability to shrink the process instead of optimizing the designs. It's a much much more costly exercise and if anyone else with massive amounts of process experience steps in to manufacturer for those with better chip designers, they'll not be gaining much more than a few months. And this push to low power and high performance is also bringing ARM into play with their Cortex A8 and multi-core Cortex A9 processor. It's amazing what a Cortex A8 can do on 3W.
I started reading the story intro and wondered if it wasn't another ploy to get a discussion going on functional programming since I've seen these quite a number of times in the last month. Sure enough, there was the plug and look at all the functional fan boyz talking it up.
Earlier it was multi-core programming, now this 'best paradigm for a 1st prog course'. What next, best compiler or maybe best OS for running functional programming applications?
There is absolutely no reason why any computer-education program should not be using computer setup with Edubuntu or some other GNU/Linux variant with all the open source education software pre-loaded. It's cheaper and there's massive amounts of free information for learning how to run it, keep it running, and even make it run better. Students who learn this stuff and use the same system to learn more and more and it's all free and fully accessible to them.
Then, there's the various ways the systems can be implemented. There's LTSP for thin clients, there's standalone, networked fat clients, and there are multi-head single Chassis system feeding multiple users on the minimum additional hardware of an LCD, a keyboard, and a mouse.
And learning the basics and not teaching an application means they know what a spreadsheet is, they know what a filesystem is, a wordprocessor, and they can know far far more about the system and software than other systems will let them.
So, where can we kindly suggest to Obama that his people look long and hard at Edubutu and/or GNU/Linux and open source software?
Slashdot Mirror
it shows that nothing has changed at Microsoft in the past 20 years. There is no "new Microsoft", there is no "kinder, gentler Microsoft", and there is no "Microsoft is a friend to open source".
It's all a lie for the purpose of furthering their goal of making sure Windows is the only OS for the vast majority of the populations.
surprise!
LoB
it's a tough battle for them when people use will use this know how good the competition is. It's not like their Windows monopoly where most users are not even aware of any of the other computer systems except maybe some know _of_ the Mac. Most people use Google for search on other devices so changing the name and paying Verison twice what the deal Google had is only going to continue the financial losses at Microsoft in every division outside of MS Windows and MS Office. IMO.
LoB
hey Ballmer, chill out and grow up.
LoB
wow, can I take it outside in the sun and still read it? Does it have a ruggedized design and built for being out in the dirty/dusty outside world? And will it run for hours on very little power? :-+
Hey, the $200 netbook running on ARM and Ubuntu is really cool but it is not an XO by any stretch of the imagination.
LoB
he/she is probably tired if constantly hearing this bull about other devices being comparable. They are not and there are no other laptop-like devices on the market today at $200, $300, $400, or even $500.
And I think he/she was right about a lot of western/US business methods.
LoB
those EEE PC's would not last a month in the places the OLPC XO already runs. You can't even use it outside in bright sunlight.
People just don't get that so much engineering that went into the XO was to make it capable for rough environments and especially outdoor use. There is not one other laptop which can do this anywhere near the $200 price. None, zip, nada.
The only thing the EEE PC did was take away sales from the G1G1 program and cause this kind of explanation to be made over and over again to the misinformed.
LoB
and ofcourse it helped alot to have Intel chasing behind OLPC with promises of a far far better laptop without actually doing it. FYI, the Classmate is not even a close comparison to the XO.
It also was a big help when Microsoft went around to the governments of many of the countries the OLPC had publicly listed as giving MoU's and was kind enough to find millions of dollars to invest in these governments to 'help them' with their computer technologies. You know, like how Egypt signed on with Microsoft for around $25 million and then when OLPC went back to them, all they would ask is "does it run Windows".
Naw, it was all the OLPC peoples fault 100%. Chalk up another one for big business stomping on innovation and progress. IMO.
LoB
All the more reason the system should be teaching students to use the easy tools available to them when something like this is going to effect their lives. Research is not as difficult as it was a couple of decades ago.
I can understand the older generations but I've seen 30-something year old news casters getting this wrong. Even the person who posted this to /. simplified it and incorrectly stated "Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
Are we really just being taught enough to get a job at the local factory or fast food joint?
FYI, I searched around for an emoticon for sarcasm and it seems there is none other than :-> and it doesn't do it for me. I saw this and think it applies, :-+ or maybe :+ although it's close to a kiss( :-x ). ~ is too simple to catch on IMO.
LoB
Gawd, I can't believe people still get this wrong after all the publicity on this. No wonder they are running out of money, they are probably sending coupons and rebates to people not using antenna reception when they don't need to.
FYI, if you subscribe to a cable service, they are not going to stop sending you the RF-over-cable/analog signal. They may try to nudge you to move to a digital converter box but even then, they will provide the digital conversion and you don't need to pay $40+ for one the government is rebating.
Is our education system that screwed up people don't understand this? FYI, that's a rhetorical question, I know the answer.
LoB
cutting in the XBox business was be a sign of the end of that product IMO. As was stated, that is a huge money pit for them considering they are used to productlines with 1 or 2 billion in losses annually but $8 billion from just one product takes its toll.
If they cut back on the XBox now, it'll never grow enough to be anything more than an also-ran product in the console market. The last I saw, PS2's are outselling XBox still and the Wii is killing it with the PS3 just passing it. Now, the PS3, with the BluRay player, with network movie downloads, with cost reductions, is starting to pick up further. So if Microsoft but back on financing the XBox division it can only make this worst and that, IMO, means just holding on to a small marketshare. Unlike the Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile which cost them about $1 billion annually, XBox is a much larger and more expensive project. IMO.
We'll have to wait to see what really transpires or if this is all just rumor.
LoB
Nintendo and Sony have a history of actually doing this, Microsoft has a history of not being able to pull profits from their other business units.
2009 could be a first for Microsoft in this regard but after 20 something years, I wouldn't put a nickel bet on it.
LoB
true, it should have included numbers showing slowing in WinPC sales or something other than just, 'rumors have it they are reducing their workforce'.
More numbers will tell the whole story and don't expect the press to put the puzzle pieces together.
LoB
I am surprised that Microsoft is needing to reduce its workforce by so much but if WinPC shipments are down then they have to cut or it'll really show up on the books.
As far the statement of surprise at this move goes( "Despite its portfolio diversity" ), that portfolio is weighted heavily with financial losses and has been for over a decade. Something in the range of 80-90% of their profits come from 2 or 3 products( Microsoft Windows desktop and server, Microsoft Office ).
Now if the WinPC shipments numbers don't show a large decline, we can figure that a whole lot of businesses are not signing up for expensive bundled contracts and either are stagnating their IT infrastructure or are going elsewhere.
Then again, when was the last big financial shuffle at Microsoft? They used to do this every three years or so and it was a nice way to hide loss patterns and move some of those billions in profits around. I remember one shuffle left the Windows CE/Mobile division and MSN division with enough to show a onetime profit and was around the time they cut the R&D budget from $6.3 billion to around $3.1 billion. The press was all over the R&D cuts but totally missed how a lot of money got shuffled around.
This would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Re-org and reduce head counts in a slowing economy and pressure from open source around the world. IMO.
LoB
Hey Microserf moron, how does embedded, netbooks, and MIDs turn into desktops? Typical AC moronic drivel.
LoB
to some, security, reliability and performance are requirements for a computer OS. Microsoft has failed year after year at building a solid base OS. And now people are supposed to believe Windows 7/2010 they are finally going to get it right? Talk about being in a hole.
LoB
"This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled."
Is this person a politician because that is saying nothing.
Too bad 2009 is going to be another year of hearing Microsoft lies and exaggerations regarding yet another Microsoft OS release. BFD, is what I say after 20 something years of the same junk year after year after year. I gave up when Windows 2000 came out and they started shoveling more user level stuff into the kernel and they never fixed the security system. That was in 1999, over 8 years ago and they still are trying to build an operating system worth a hill of beans. Well, it's all about marketing at MS so what you see in print is not what you get and never has.
in 2009, I'll be wading through the MS marketing drivel for what's going on in the embedded, netbook, and MID areas with regards to the ARM Cortex chips and especially the A9 dual core versions. A8 is amazing on the performance front and power front. This should prove very interesting along with what Android, Ubuntu, and others do on these platforms.
So long MSFT, 2009 is probably going to be another tough year of marketing against real solutions. And though you may have smashed the OLPC and dashed their plans of helping millions of children, they kicked off a resurrection of the light weight small form-factor device you just can't compete on. IMO.
LoB
simple editing and note taking tools are a requirement for any PDA IMO. But not full blown desktop applications and all the crud those bring with it. Years ago, I would pull out one of those folding keyboards, plug in a Palm Pilot and do notes and letters on the job at remote sites. Taking them into the word proc at the office or hotel and pulling into status reports and the likes was a simple task. But if those apps were loaded up with billions of features which just bogged down the little CPU and memory footprint it would have made the task painful.
Microsoft has many brainwashed into thinking Microsoft software is the only way to do things and the best way to do it. Keeping that myth going and getting people to think they need this stuff on the PDA/mobile is a great way to impart the impression of failure onto that device.
I saw a Jemacs and thought that it might make for an easy port to the G1/Andriod but it's not written in Java and only compiled to Java bytecode. No doubt it'll get to Android eventually.
LoB
it's all a marketing ploy to reduce demand for the product by showing a supposed flaw in the platform. Who do you think benefits from such an idiotic concept as having Windows desktop applications running on the iPhone?
There's more to marketing than just fooling the public into thinking your product it good. Sometimes, you have to swing them over to thinking that the dominant product is failing somewhere or in some way.
And if you look around, you'll probably see what I've seen with hardcore Windows fanboyz buying iPhones. Apple seems to have hit another homerun like they did with the iPod and the iPhone is much more of a threat to Windows. This kind of marketing tactic is SOP for you know who but there are also some press people and users who just don't the PDA. Semi-ludites I suppose and just can't wrap their little minds around computing devices for different things. IMO
LoB
make the public need desktop applications on the PDA and the PDA fails. Wow, where have I seen and heard that one before.
Seems like yet another sign that some people in management didn't get there because of their mental skills.
And isn't there Google Docs for the iPhone or something like that if the idiots ever actually want to attempt full word processing on a PDA?
LoB
... so Citrix was hired to bring desktop Windows apps to the iPhone. Ho ho ho and a ha ha ah.
LoB
I found it interesting that the list author stated that Java was based on C but then says it's so different that it has many of it's own rules. Just how can it be so close to C but then so different and what about the complete lack of OOP in C? Maybe the basic syntax of the language but the core of Java is its OOP mechanisms.
And the bit in C# about the "one company" is wrong, the problem is not one company but which company it is. Unless you've had your head in the sand for that last 20 years, that one company has done everything, both legal and illegal, to make sure developers can only develop for Windows. Java, until recently was also controlled by one company, Sun Microsystems.
The author is very naive to the history Microsoft has in the software development market over the last 20-something years. He definately left off the fact that the 'religious' leader of the Delphi language was purchased away from Borland along with dozens of other Delphi language engineers and assigned to invent something to thwart the threat of cross platform Java. Microsoft settled out of court on the corporate raiding of Borland. Remember, Delphi was also cross platform so Microsoft got a double win for gutting Borland of their Delphi leadership and starting a Windows-ized alternative to Java.
It is religion and it is a religious war, or atleast that is how it has always been handled inside of Microsoff. IMO.
LoB
I always wondered how the President of the USA could end up with his brain missing but mostly why it could be missing. I figured the Sci-Fi stories of brain scanning and the likes probably had someone worried something in JFK's memory should stay hidden unknown to all others.
now it seems that if this was the case, they just might have based their actions on a valid fear.
LoB
I was looking at the range of low power CPUs and noticed that Intel's Atom seemed to do ok compared to the other low powered chips but then noticed that all the other chips were being built on a 65nm process while Intel had the Atom on the 45nm process. Looking at Intels standard "Core" processors showed that their newest CPUs were also on the 45nm process but not the majority of them.
This was a few months ago but it made me wonder why all the other low power CPU manufacturers were able to get the power and performance from 65nm while Intel had to jump to the newest and smallest process(45nm) for the Atom to get in the ballpark on power and performance. And they had to be eating into production space for the high profit high performance larger CPUs they'd just released on the 45nm process.
They seem to have a strategy of winning by using their ability to shrink the process instead of optimizing the designs. It's a much much more costly exercise and if anyone else with massive amounts of process experience steps in to manufacturer for those with better chip designers, they'll not be gaining much more than a few months. And this push to low power and high performance is also bringing ARM into play with their Cortex A8 and multi-core Cortex A9 processor. It's amazing what a Cortex A8 can do on 3W.
LoB
I started reading the story intro and wondered if it wasn't another ploy to get a discussion going on functional programming since I've seen these quite a number of times in the last month. Sure enough, there was the plug and look at all the functional fan boyz talking it up.
Earlier it was multi-core programming, now this 'best paradigm for a 1st prog course'. What next, best compiler or maybe best OS for running functional programming applications?
FYI, the answer is OOP.
LoB
There is absolutely no reason why any computer-education program should not be using computer setup with Edubuntu or some other GNU/Linux variant with all the open source education software pre-loaded. It's cheaper and there's massive amounts of free information for learning how to run it, keep it running, and even make it run better. Students who learn this stuff and use the same system to learn more and more and it's all free and fully accessible to them.
Then, there's the various ways the systems can be implemented. There's LTSP for thin clients, there's standalone, networked fat clients, and there are multi-head single Chassis system feeding multiple users on the minimum additional hardware of an LCD, a keyboard, and a mouse.
And learning the basics and not teaching an application means they know what a spreadsheet is, they know what a filesystem is, a wordprocessor, and they can know far far more about the system and software than other systems will let them.
So, where can we kindly suggest to Obama that his people look long and hard at Edubutu and/or GNU/Linux and open source software?
LoB