I've heard a few local highschool kids say that they were taught "The Excel" and "The Powerpoint" in school. But when asked simple questions about a filesystem( where to find and store the school work ), they didn't understand. Asked about printing and what to do when a printer isn't connected, they didn't know and didn't know what a print spool was.
They don't teach basic computer skills first so all they are doing is programming them to be afraid of the computer and to know only Microsoft Office products. I doubt they would even understand it if they were asked to put a spreadsheet together.
It's really sad how computer illiterate students are even in 2008. I doubt many other countries have so many teachers who are so computer illiterate as here in the US.
for one thing, the teachers are not computer literate. Fresh new teachers out of the local university only know how to use Microsoft Office and have no other skills. So no wonder when some city counsel or school district does a pilot of laptops for every kid and finds out they didn't do any better than without the laptops.
I don't think it'll catch on with proprietary software but there's hope that some open source stuff can build to the point of usefulness. There really needs to be some open curriculum web sites where not only is the software freely downloadable, the curriculum and notes from others who've implemented it should be downloadable and/or readable with it. Then those teachers with even a little computer skill can pull in computer based coursework which adds to what they are already doing.
Even the OLPC needs some education on what the apps do and what can be done with them in a learning environment. Dropping truckload of computers on a school is not going to do anything helpful without alot of upfront work on what to do with them. IMO.
That just shows an example of what can be done in Java and labeling it awkward. You made no sale for what would make functional programming better. Are you saying that because you can not, in functional programming, do what you showed in the string reverse that it is therefore better?
And just because Windows developers have a difficult time with multi threading programming, is it better to create a whole new programming paradigm? OS/2 programmers were not some special breed or anything and they seemed to handle this issue very well over 10 years ago.
It seems very strange to me that without promoting multi-threading, someone or group found that it's better to spin developers in a different direction. There just seems to be way too much of a marketing swing to this. IMO.
one of the things I head added massive amounts of friction between the Microsoft software people and the IBM software people regarding OS/2 was that Microsoft wanted to OS to be designed specifically to make the foreground application more responsive at the kernel level while the IBM guys wanted a small fast OS kernel and a scheduler which was fair across the board.
We saw what that did to multi-process applications and loading the Microsoft OS up with a few processes. System crashes and very poor multi-tasking. OS/2 rocked even where there were dozens of server and background processes pulling at the CPU and the only big pain was that single input queue issue the GUI had and even that was mitigated by 1994/Warp 3 IIRC.
Microsoft just has a tough time letting the designers make the kernel a kernel and therefore making the OS more stable and efficient. They are marketing top heavy and tons of junk keeps getting mangled into the bowels of the OS. Keeping thing mostly separated is what now make Linux so stable and much easier to patch and fix as needed.
But still, those large apps doing alot of image manipulations need threads to keep the UI useful while things are going on in the background. When you know somethings going to take a few minutes to compute, it really makes it nice when the user can work on the next task.
that's right, BeOS was also very much a heavy user of multi-threaded applications. IIRC, the multi-threading was throughout the kernel too and what made it so responsive.
I was quite upset when Palm purchased the company and did nothing with the OS. Not to mention completely failing to make a decent OS for the Palm devices.
BeOS was cool and I just loved that video cube demo and the simulated paper book page turning demo. An awesome OS but it too was blocked by PC OEMs who signed contracts restricting them from being able to install any other OS but Microsoft's.
developers need to find some of the old OS/2 books and start multi-threading their applications. When I see the hourglass on a 4GH dual core I think to myself WTF was the developer of this app thinking. For some reason, multi-threading died when OS/2 was knocked out in the mid 90s. From then on, application developers had very little to work with as far as multi-threading goes or nobody made that an issue. Most all OS/2 apps were very nicely multi-threaded and usage on even old hardware showed smooth operation under load because of it.
Who created this functional programming buzz anyways and why hasn't anyone asked why they aren't talking about multi-threading? Something seem fishy or those covering this stuff are just doing PR work for someone.
yup, it became a software problem when moores law required duplicating cores instead of making cores faster. It was pretty obvious that something was up back when Intel couldn't get its CPUs clocking over 1.5GHz and had to resort for splitting up functionality and clocking up some parts while other parts clocked at the 1.5GHz range. They have passed that now with SoI and by die shrinkage but the fact remained, they hit a wall. The only way to keep Moores law from falling was to double the core, then quadruple, etc.
It's now a software problem because multi-threading applications died with OS/2 in the mid 90s. Windows developers don't do it if at all so someone invents a new process based multi-processing scheme and labels it "functional programming". Yet another hassle to deal with the inadequacies of the Microsoft OS design... owwww, let's all rush to learn it. NOT. How about we bring back CORBA, that'll spread the load across CPU cores too.
multi-threading on OS/2 rocked and made many OS/2 applications very responsive to user actions and this was on old Pentium computers. Multi-threading died when Windows 95 shipped and OS/2 was sidelined.
Not to mention that Microsoft has always liked procedural APIs because they get to write the rules and everyone must follow their APIs. Functional programing just sounds like more of the same old procedural stuff like RPC and Microsoft's object-like way of protecting from being abstracted out of existence by OO methodologies.
I wonder if Windows is any better at threading these days? In the late 90s, Warp 4 was 2x faster doing threading than Windows NT was on the same hardware. And I remember how MS tried to build the Windows 95 UI as a heavily threaded application and it brought the system to a crawl. So, maybe the way Microsoft designed the kernel and their compiler, they can't do threading very well and want to do separate process based stuff as in this _functional programming_ scheme. Are there any open source gurus and kernel people pushing for this functional stuff? It does seem like hype when threading takes care of spreading processor usage across cores and has been around for a long long time. OS/2 had it in v2.0 in 1991-ish and might have had it in v1.x code too. Solaris got it in the mid 90s. Other OS's probably had it too, Windows just sucked at it and Microsoft own software hardly used it in the 90s.
I've seen where one option is to have Ubuntu installed on the desktop and IBM apps fed from a server but wondered where the backward compatibility was. In one article, it was said that the Win4Lin people were involved but still nothing about legacy Windows. I figure it is in there somewhere. The world can't live on Ubuntu, Notes, and Lotus Symphony/OOo alone. Yet. 8-}
so let me guess, when you load a Microsoft application like one from their MS Office lineup, you don't get this dumping to the swap file when minimized? Knowing how these guys _compete_, it just seems like this is the perfect thing for them to do no matter how much RAM is available. Swap file access is faster than random HD access but no were near as fast as RAM access and they want their software to be faster than other company's software.
So, is this the way it works or is Microsoft being completely fair in what gets forced out to swap when minimized?
you probably don't require it integrate with Microsoft's products. I often get this when really all they want to do is put an image of part of the schedule into a document they send someone else.
Keeping as many users as possible very dumb is a blessing for Microsoft. "I need Windows to check my email." kinds of things are just due to really ignorant computer users.
did you find any which offer browser based project management? Even if that means running one Windows machine in a virtual machine, it would enable you to continue moving more and more to open source.
There has always been the 'throw more memory at it" mentality but you really have to have something to show for this at this stage of the game. Know that I come from a place where in the mid 90s, the OS/2 operating system was getting faster with each release while at the same time getting better. I think Warp v4.0 was the one where there wasn't much of optimization in footprint and performance but there was OpenDoc, speech recognition, Java, and the cool CORBA based workplace shell dished up to you. And that was running in something like 32MB of memory on really slow processors compared to now. GNU/Linux isn't as good as that was in the memory footprint and performance side of it but the modularity and capabilities are amazing while Microsoft keeps shoveling stuff out the door so poor that the only answer is faster CPUs, more CPUs, and much more memory to get what kind of user improvements?
There comes a point where if you are going to come out with something that is about 50% slower than what came before it, you had better have something really really interesting going on. So when someone says that Vista runs just fine for them on new hardware with 4gigs of memory, it's not how much that cost but what that means regarding what you are really getting and that is basically 50% slower than WinXP and pretty crappy multi-tasking but a new pretty desktop and a whole lot of DRM and anti-virus crutches under the hood.
You have to laugh how the hardware manufacturers were screaming at Microsoft because they built Vista so poorly, even some of the latest hardware wasn't really capable of running it very well. And that's after how many years in development? People just keep getting less and less for their money when they buy Microsoft and it takes more and more money to stay with them because they don't know how to do better, faster, cheaper after all these years. It's like a big version of Palm. Deep down, they really suck at OS design. IMO.
the OP said the the problem was not the operating system itself( do you get this concept? ) and then says "it is more the system requirements". If system requirements are not tied to the operating system then what kind of magic dust are you snorting? It was also the OP which brought up system memory and the 4 gig number. Again, system memory usage is directly tied to the OS design and efficiency regardless of how inexpensive it is.
Bring up 6 VMware virtual machines on this 4gig Vista machine with 4 VMs allocated 256MB and 2 allocated 512 MB and see how useful the system is. Throw Ubuntu on the same machine and see how much better that runs.
that is why I mentioned LTSP and not DOS. These VM's are not running Windows but any clueful person could figure this out. The host OS sometimes runs X and KDE. Enough said IMO.
they could and did do that when it was controllable because it was hard copy printed press. They know where the control points were and used them but now, they can only attempt to bribe some bloggers to be friendly but not the entire network of bloggers out there. Even some of the mainstream press has areas for their writers to blog about things which don't make it to printed press or even the standard electronic press pages.
Unfortunately, none of this was around to defend the truth when Windows NT and then Chicago projects were marketed. IRC and usenet news were only hangouts for geeks and it was like preaching to the choir there. It's a new world and the only tool Microsoft knows is old-world. But they do have the very short memory of the press and bloggers going for them. It's late 2008, Dos/Windows 3.1 was shipped around 1992. Every Microsoft OS released since then had claimed to only be better than the last and every one gets marketed as some kind of must-have thing. One would think they could figure out how to make a fast, stable, and secure OS and just be adding API's on top of that after more than 16 years of this. Now, this new OS called Windows 7 is going to be better than the problems just released as Windows Vista less than 2 years ago. I guess that is what you get when they are a marketing company and a darn good one at that. IMO
"Vista's failure not the operating system itself but more the system requirements"? hint: these two are joined at the hip, shoulder, and head.
and 4 gigs of ram for Vista to run fine on? I've got a server with 4 GB of ram and it also runs a half dozen virtual machines with one of them ran LTSP vm to drive 4 clients around the office. 4 gigs for Vista to run fine. ha
Microsoft knows this and they know all about Tiger, they copied alot of it. What Microsoft was concerned about was rogue press saying things like Mossberg wrote. Anyone who knows technology over the last 20 years knows that Microsoft is a marketing company before they are a tech company and this email just shows that. 'Don't let the public know there is something better' is all this says and that is SOP for Microsoft. IMO
exactly. I was stunned when Windows Vista was released and it was not modularized like GNU/Linux or even Windows XP embedded. It did not scale down at all and that is enough evidence in my mind to see that they've bloated themselves into a big tumble downward. Pulling 8 year old tech, Windows XP, out of retirement to compete with GNU/Linux on the new-ish Ultra Mobile Devices(UMPs) was the next indicator but unfortunately, the press/media just brushed this off. It should be a big red flag showing how Microsoft does not have new technology to compete with GNU/Linux. More and more are seeing this so eventually they'll get it.
Steve Ballmer's got balls because he's got monopoly money to spend and he knows exactly what Ubuntu is and where it came from. He also knows that when that monopoly money runs out, they are in deep Elephant dung because their products have always stood on emaciated legs.
He also knows he's got more money than Mark Shuttleworth.
but they are now willing to pay millions going after a market so poor they have little to no computer infrastructure. THAT is somewhat new to them. Typically, the left these markets alone and dumped billions into marketing to markets where there was a support system and more of a chance of an ROI out 5 years but probably under 10 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa? They're probably looking out 20+ years if even that. But mostly, I think what they are doing is blocking as many public successes of GNU/Linux in these areas. Did you notice how quick they got on the anti-OLPC marketing campaign? They dumped $25 million into Egypt alone so that they'd be a Windows-only government and there are dozens more around the world.
So this is somewhat new for them and it's probably costing them something close to $1 billion annually in these marketing/services/training/etc "partnerships". All to keep GNU/Linux from finding a home in a hut or two in areas like sub-Saharan Africa. IMO
wow, isn't it great that a company who's poured billions into developing a product and spends millions monthly marketing it has to 'ramp up' marketing against the free product in order to get people and businesses to use it?
Way to go Microsoft. But after MS Vista and considering your handheld OS( Windows Mobile ) still crashes regularly on phones, do you really think you can keep this up forever? Smart move going after those very poor and mostly unconnected to the outside world. They'll have little to compare your product to until they eventually get online and see/read how good GNU/Linux is, how cheap it is, and how easy it is to use. Because as soon as they find out and unless their incomes have increased dramatically, they'll switch or have to revert to piracy to stay with your Windows products. Products that are probably already close to 10 years old. Hello Windows XP, I'm talking about you and your new life on computers not capable of running your new brother, Windows Vista.
Ya gotta love it when a company must keep paying people to use their products. Especially when the alternative is something originally put together by a whole bunch of people in their spare time. Ouch, that's still gotta be pissing olde Steve Ballmer off. But then again, he's used to paying people to use their products since they've had to do this for like 20 years. IMO
The hanging chad thing was not due to "stupid people", it had to do with the card perforating machine not producing perforations with equal break-points on each side of the chad. Sometimes one side didn't break and the chad was left hanging. When you combine that with hardly anyone being told to remove all hanging chads before placing the ballot in the box, you end up with those hanging chads sometimes getting pushed back into the hole as the ballots stacked up on top of each other in the ballot box and before counting.
Another problem that occurred which looked like "stupid people" was those butterfly ballots where there were votable items on both left and right sides of the perf area. This set people up for misaligning the vote because instead of having choices from top-to-bottom on one side, they were interlaced top-to-bottom on left-and-right sides. I've seen 30-something adults have problems with more then 2 dimension eye-hand coordination so this also became a very real problem in the over 70 areas where the butterfly ballot was used.
So if anything, the "stupid people" label should go on the people running the elections where chads were part of the process. Not telling everyone to verify and clean their ballot before surrendering was _stupid_. Creating the butterfly ballot where voting alternated from left to right _and_ top to bottom was _stupid_.
I do think that having a touchscreen which also allowed for special touch-pens would help millions vote more easily and accurately. Too many people misalign their finger with the button, roll their finger down so it ends up covering a long 1-2" range, and even push so hard the tablet and table move from the force as if pushing harder will make it work better. I've also seen touchscreen tilted back so far that when you stand in front of it, it's angled away from you and that too makes touch accuracy worst for anyone without very good hand-eye coordination.
There still many who just won't get it right no matter what and for them, maybe it's a good thing that their votes end up randomly distributed.;-) Just kidding, there are ways to make the process far more accurate for far more voters but accuracy isn't always what some desire. IMO.
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I've heard a few local highschool kids say that they were taught "The Excel" and "The Powerpoint" in school. But when asked simple questions about a filesystem( where to find and store the school work ), they didn't understand. Asked about printing and what to do when a printer isn't connected, they didn't know and didn't know what a print spool was.
They don't teach basic computer skills first so all they are doing is programming them to be afraid of the computer and to know only Microsoft Office products. I doubt they would even understand it if they were asked to put a spreadsheet together.
It's really sad how computer illiterate students are even in 2008. I doubt many other countries have so many teachers who are so computer illiterate as here in the US.
LoB
for one thing, the teachers are not computer literate. Fresh new teachers out of the local university only know how to use Microsoft Office and have no other skills. So no wonder when some city counsel or school district does a pilot of laptops for every kid and finds out they didn't do any better than without the laptops.
I don't think it'll catch on with proprietary software but there's hope that some open source stuff can build to the point of usefulness. There really needs to be some open curriculum web sites where not only is the software freely downloadable, the curriculum and notes from others who've implemented it should be downloadable and/or readable with it. Then those teachers with even a little computer skill can pull in computer based coursework which adds to what they are already doing.
Even the OLPC needs some education on what the apps do and what can be done with them in a learning environment. Dropping truckload of computers on a school is not going to do anything helpful without alot of upfront work on what to do with them. IMO.
LoB
That just shows an example of what can be done in Java and labeling it awkward. You made no sale for what would make functional programming better. Are you saying that because you can not, in functional programming, do what you showed in the string reverse that it is therefore better?
And just because Windows developers have a difficult time with multi threading programming, is it better to create a whole new programming paradigm? OS/2 programmers were not some special breed or anything and they seemed to handle this issue very well over 10 years ago.
It seems very strange to me that without promoting multi-threading, someone or group found that it's better to spin developers in a different direction. There just seems to be way too much of a marketing swing to this. IMO.
LoB
one of the things I head added massive amounts of friction between the Microsoft software people and the IBM software people regarding OS/2 was that Microsoft wanted to OS to be designed specifically to make the foreground application more responsive at the kernel level while the IBM guys wanted a small fast OS kernel and a scheduler which was fair across the board.
We saw what that did to multi-process applications and loading the Microsoft OS up with a few processes. System crashes and very poor multi-tasking. OS/2 rocked even where there were dozens of server and background processes pulling at the CPU and the only big pain was that single input queue issue the GUI had and even that was mitigated by 1994/Warp 3 IIRC.
Microsoft just has a tough time letting the designers make the kernel a kernel and therefore making the OS more stable and efficient. They are marketing top heavy and tons of junk keeps getting mangled into the bowels of the OS. Keeping thing mostly separated is what now make Linux so stable and much easier to patch and fix as needed.
But still, those large apps doing alot of image manipulations need threads to keep the UI useful while things are going on in the background. When you know somethings going to take a few minutes to compute, it really makes it nice when the user can work on the next task.
LoB
that's right, BeOS was also very much a heavy user of multi-threaded applications. IIRC, the multi-threading was throughout the kernel too and what made it so responsive.
I was quite upset when Palm purchased the company and did nothing with the OS. Not to mention completely failing to make a decent OS for the Palm devices.
BeOS was cool and I just loved that video cube demo and the simulated paper book page turning demo. An awesome OS but it too was blocked by PC OEMs who signed contracts restricting them from being able to install any other OS but Microsoft's.
LoB
developers need to find some of the old OS/2 books and start multi-threading their applications. When I see the hourglass on a 4GH dual core I think to myself WTF was the developer of this app thinking. For some reason, multi-threading died when OS/2 was knocked out in the mid 90s. From then on, application developers had very little to work with as far as multi-threading goes or nobody made that an issue. Most all OS/2 apps were very nicely multi-threaded and usage on even old hardware showed smooth operation under load because of it.
Who created this functional programming buzz anyways and why hasn't anyone asked why they aren't talking about multi-threading? Something seem fishy or those covering this stuff are just doing PR work for someone.
LoB
yup, it became a software problem when moores law required duplicating cores instead of making cores faster. It was pretty obvious that something was up back when Intel couldn't get its CPUs clocking over 1.5GHz and had to resort for splitting up functionality and clocking up some parts while other parts clocked at the 1.5GHz range. They have passed that now with SoI and by die shrinkage but the fact remained, they hit a wall. The only way to keep Moores law from falling was to double the core, then quadruple, etc.
It's now a software problem because multi-threading applications died with OS/2 in the mid 90s. Windows developers don't do it if at all so someone invents a new process based multi-processing scheme and labels it "functional programming". Yet another hassle to deal with the inadequacies of the Microsoft OS design... owwww, let's all rush to learn it. NOT. How about we bring back CORBA, that'll spread the load across CPU cores too.
LoB
multi-threading on OS/2 rocked and made many OS/2 applications very responsive to user actions and this was on old Pentium computers. Multi-threading died when Windows 95 shipped and OS/2 was sidelined.
Not to mention that Microsoft has always liked procedural APIs because they get to write the rules and everyone must follow their APIs. Functional programing just sounds like more of the same old procedural stuff like RPC and Microsoft's object-like way of protecting from being abstracted out of existence by OO methodologies.
I wonder if Windows is any better at threading these days? In the late 90s, Warp 4 was 2x faster doing threading than Windows NT was on the same hardware. And I remember how MS tried to build the Windows 95 UI as a heavily threaded application and it brought the system to a crawl. So, maybe the way Microsoft designed the kernel and their compiler, they can't do threading very well and want to do separate process based stuff as in this _functional programming_ scheme. Are there any open source gurus and kernel people pushing for this functional stuff? It does seem like hype when threading takes care of spreading processor usage across cores and has been around for a long long time. OS/2 had it in v2.0 in 1991-ish and might have had it in v1.x code too. Solaris got it in the mid 90s. Other OS's probably had it too, Windows just sucked at it and Microsoft own software hardly used it in the 90s.
LoB
I've seen where one option is to have Ubuntu installed on the desktop and IBM apps fed from a server but wondered where the backward compatibility was. In one article, it was said that the Win4Lin people were involved but still nothing about legacy Windows. I figure it is in there somewhere. The world can't live on Ubuntu, Notes, and Lotus Symphony/OOo alone. Yet. 8-}
LoB
so let me guess, when you load a Microsoft application like one from their MS Office lineup, you don't get this dumping to the swap file when minimized? Knowing how these guys _compete_, it just seems like this is the perfect thing for them to do no matter how much RAM is available. Swap file access is faster than random HD access but no were near as fast as RAM access and they want their software to be faster than other company's software.
So, is this the way it works or is Microsoft being completely fair in what gets forced out to swap when minimized?
LoB
you probably don't require it integrate with Microsoft's products. I often get this when really all they want to do is put an image of part of the schedule into a document they send someone else.
Keeping as many users as possible very dumb is a blessing for Microsoft. "I need Windows to check my email." kinds of things are just due to really ignorant computer users.
LoB
did you find any which offer browser based project management? Even if that means running one Windows machine in a virtual machine, it would enable you to continue moving more and more to open source.
it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
LoB
Just as I suspected and probably used for email and web browsing. Runs fine with 4gig. LoL
LoB
There has always been the 'throw more memory at it" mentality but you really have to have something to show for this at this stage of the game. Know that I come from a place where in the mid 90s, the OS/2 operating system was getting faster with each release while at the same time getting better. I think Warp v4.0 was the one where there wasn't much of optimization in footprint and performance but there was OpenDoc, speech recognition, Java, and the cool CORBA based workplace shell dished up to you. And that was running in something like 32MB of memory on really slow processors compared to now. GNU/Linux isn't as good as that was in the memory footprint and performance side of it but the modularity and capabilities are amazing while Microsoft keeps shoveling stuff out the door so poor that the only answer is faster CPUs, more CPUs, and much more memory to get what kind of user improvements?
There comes a point where if you are going to come out with something that is about 50% slower than what came before it, you had better have something really really interesting going on. So when someone says that Vista runs just fine for them on new hardware with 4gigs of memory, it's not how much that cost but what that means regarding what you are really getting and that is basically 50% slower than WinXP and pretty crappy multi-tasking but a new pretty desktop and a whole lot of DRM and anti-virus crutches under the hood.
You have to laugh how the hardware manufacturers were screaming at Microsoft because they built Vista so poorly, even some of the latest hardware wasn't really capable of running it very well. And that's after how many years in development? People just keep getting less and less for their money when they buy Microsoft and it takes more and more money to stay with them because they don't know how to do better, faster, cheaper after all these years. It's like a big version of Palm. Deep down, they really suck at OS design. IMO.
LoB
the OP said the the problem was not the operating system itself( do you get this concept? ) and then says "it is more the system requirements". If system requirements are not tied to the operating system then what kind of magic dust are you snorting? It was also the OP which brought up system memory and the 4 gig number. Again, system memory usage is directly tied to the OS design and efficiency regardless of how inexpensive it is.
Bring up 6 VMware virtual machines on this 4gig Vista machine with 4 VMs allocated 256MB and 2 allocated 512 MB and see how useful the system is. Throw Ubuntu on the same machine and see how much better that runs.
LoB
that is why I mentioned LTSP and not DOS. These VM's are not running Windows but any clueful person could figure this out. The host OS sometimes runs X and KDE. Enough said IMO.
LoB
they could and did do that when it was controllable because it was hard copy printed press. They know where the control points were and used them but now, they can only attempt to bribe some bloggers to be friendly but not the entire network of bloggers out there. Even some of the mainstream press has areas for their writers to blog about things which don't make it to printed press or even the standard electronic press pages.
Unfortunately, none of this was around to defend the truth when Windows NT and then Chicago projects were marketed. IRC and usenet news were only hangouts for geeks and it was like preaching to the choir there. It's a new world and the only tool Microsoft knows is old-world. But they do have the very short memory of the press and bloggers going for them. It's late 2008, Dos/Windows 3.1 was shipped around 1992. Every Microsoft OS released since then had claimed to only be better than the last and every one gets marketed as some kind of must-have thing. One would think they could figure out how to make a fast, stable, and secure OS and just be adding API's on top of that after more than 16 years of this. Now, this new OS called Windows 7 is going to be better than the problems just released as Windows Vista less than 2 years ago. I guess that is what you get when they are a marketing company and a darn good one at that. IMO
LoB
"Vista's failure not the operating system itself but more the system requirements"? hint: these two are joined at the hip, shoulder, and head.
and 4 gigs of ram for Vista to run fine on? I've got a server with 4 GB of ram and it also runs a half dozen virtual machines with one of them ran LTSP vm to drive 4 clients around the office. 4 gigs for Vista to run fine. ha
LoB
Microsoft knows this and they know all about Tiger, they copied alot of it. What Microsoft was concerned about was rogue press saying things like Mossberg wrote. Anyone who knows technology over the last 20 years knows that Microsoft is a marketing company before they are a tech company and this email just shows that. 'Don't let the public know there is something better' is all this says and that is SOP for Microsoft. IMO
LoB
ah yes, the 20 year plan. Good one. LOL
LoB
exactly. I was stunned when Windows Vista was released and it was not modularized like GNU/Linux or even Windows XP embedded. It did not scale down at all and that is enough evidence in my mind to see that they've bloated themselves into a big tumble downward. Pulling 8 year old tech, Windows XP, out of retirement to compete with GNU/Linux on the new-ish Ultra Mobile Devices(UMPs) was the next indicator but unfortunately, the press/media just brushed this off. It should be a big red flag showing how Microsoft does not have new technology to compete with GNU/Linux. More and more are seeing this so eventually they'll get it.
LoB
Steve Ballmer's got balls because he's got monopoly money to spend and he knows exactly what Ubuntu is and where it came from. He also knows that when that monopoly money runs out, they are in deep Elephant dung because their products have always stood on emaciated legs.
He also knows he's got more money than Mark Shuttleworth.
LoB
but they are now willing to pay millions going after a market so poor they have little to no computer infrastructure. THAT is somewhat new to them. Typically, the left these markets alone and dumped billions into marketing to markets where there was a support system and more of a chance of an ROI out 5 years but probably under 10 years.
Sub-Saharan Africa? They're probably looking out 20+ years if even that. But mostly, I think what they are doing is blocking as many public successes of GNU/Linux in these areas. Did you notice how quick they got on the anti-OLPC marketing campaign? They dumped $25 million into Egypt alone so that they'd be a Windows-only government and there are dozens more around the world.
So this is somewhat new for them and it's probably costing them something close to $1 billion annually in these marketing/services/training/etc "partnerships". All to keep GNU/Linux from finding a home in a hut or two in areas like sub-Saharan Africa. IMO
LoB
wow, isn't it great that a company who's poured billions into developing a product and spends millions monthly marketing it has to 'ramp up' marketing against the free product in order to get people and businesses to use it?
Way to go Microsoft. But after MS Vista and considering your handheld OS( Windows Mobile ) still crashes regularly on phones, do you really think you can keep this up forever? Smart move going after those very poor and mostly unconnected to the outside world. They'll have little to compare your product to until they eventually get online and see/read how good GNU/Linux is, how cheap it is, and how easy it is to use. Because as soon as they find out and unless their incomes have increased dramatically, they'll switch or have to revert to piracy to stay with your Windows products. Products that are probably already close to 10 years old. Hello Windows XP, I'm talking about you and your new life on computers not capable of running your new brother, Windows Vista.
Ya gotta love it when a company must keep paying people to use their products. Especially when the alternative is something originally put together by a whole bunch of people in their spare time. Ouch, that's still gotta be pissing olde Steve Ballmer off. But then again, he's used to paying people to use their products since they've had to do this for like 20 years. IMO
LoB
The hanging chad thing was not due to "stupid people", it had to do with the card perforating machine not producing perforations with equal break-points on each side of the chad. Sometimes one side didn't break and the chad was left hanging. When you combine that with hardly anyone being told to remove all hanging chads before placing the ballot in the box, you end up with those hanging chads sometimes getting pushed back into the hole as the ballots stacked up on top of each other in the ballot box and before counting.
Another problem that occurred which looked like "stupid people" was those butterfly ballots where there were votable items on both left and right sides of the perf area. This set people up for misaligning the vote because instead of having choices from top-to-bottom on one side, they were interlaced top-to-bottom on left-and-right sides. I've seen 30-something adults have problems with more then 2 dimension eye-hand coordination so this also became a very real problem in the over 70 areas where the butterfly ballot was used.
So if anything, the "stupid people" label should go on the people running the elections where chads were part of the process. Not telling everyone to verify and clean their ballot before surrendering was _stupid_. Creating the butterfly ballot where voting alternated from left to right _and_ top to bottom was _stupid_.
I do think that having a touchscreen which also allowed for special touch-pens would help millions vote more easily and accurately. Too many people misalign their finger with the button, roll their finger down so it ends up covering a long 1-2" range, and even push so hard the tablet and table move from the force as if pushing harder will make it work better. I've also seen touchscreen tilted back so far that when you stand in front of it, it's angled away from you and that too makes touch accuracy worst for anyone without very good hand-eye coordination.
There still many who just won't get it right no matter what and for them, maybe it's a good thing that their votes end up randomly distributed. ;-) Just kidding, there are ways to make the process far more accurate for far more voters but accuracy isn't always what some desire. IMO.
LoB