I'm sorry but what "rich content" does Google provide? Google is the yellow pages so I guess if you consider advertising "rich content" then your statement is accuraet.
If you think that Google isn't motivated by financial interests then you're a very scary type of pollyanna.
Also, if I were the paranoid type (which I'm not) I'd be way more scared of Google than I am of Microsoft. Google knows who you are, what you do on the Internet, who you conduct transactions with, who you send email to (if you use Gmail) etc etc.
But seriously, the 100,000 is a total joke. I challenge Google to actually show how they came up with that number and give the names of the companies. I'm sure they wouldn't, citing "confidentiality"...funny, coming from Goggle.
Really? Seriously...is this stuff really happening or are you making this up? Because I use Windows Vista all day/every day and have been for several months and I don't experience what you're talking about. If I need to install an application or activex control or new driver I get prompted...much like I do on my Mac...I click "continue" and the installation takes place and I move on to my work. If it took you 1/2 hour to "configure (my) personal settings and install a couple of applications" then I suspect user incompetence. Tell you what? If you can repeat what you say happened to you and capture it on video and post it to You Tube (with a time clock) I'll personally pay you $100.
I have found the UAC prompts to be no more (or less) annoying that those that I get on my Mac.
MSFT is screwed if they do or screwed if they don't. One of the reasons windows is so popular is that it's really really easy to use for even the average joe. One of the downsides of that is that it was designed for a world of trust. So now they've done a lot of work to change windows to list in a world of untrustworthiness and they're somehow bad?
"The fact is this, I have wasted months of my life maintaining PCs for stubborn relatives who refused to just buy a Mac. Browser hijacks, viruses, trojans, spyware... I've seen the lot... but in 8 years I have NEVER come across anything on Macs. Nothing! 8 years of browsing the internet with no security software on the Macs I support and the 5 or so belonging to the more forward thinking of my relatives who let me chose them a Mac. More than that, I have never had to reinstall from OS 8 to OS X 10.4 for reasons of malware on a Mac ever. My grandfather's iMac has been running OS 8.5 for 7 years now... no reinstalls and no Norton."
No offense intended but...your relatives must not be very bright.:) I have never once had a virus or trojan in all my years of PC use. I have been using the Web since...let's see...1994 using a "mosaic" browser. I browse widely.
I appreciate your well written response but I disagree with much of it.
1. Low depreciation
Probably true but who really re-sells PC's/Mac's? PC's are democratic. Anybody with $400 can buy a reasonably good PC that does everything they need - surf the web, write letters, listen to music, rip CD's etc. Who cares about depreciation of a $400 machine?
2. Really classy software from small companies like Omni Group and Delicious Monster
True. One of the best Mac apps to me - someone who uses it mostly for "productivity" plus photos/videos is Microsoft Office. Very nice.
3. Consistency between apps
I don't disagree. But I might add that part of the reason there is less consistency in PC apps is that there are so many of them and they're being written by average joe's all over the place. Hey, with VB I could write a decent Windows app and I'm far from a programmer.
4. No exploits
Blatantly not true.
5. OS stability
Seems to be true but I haven't had a crash of my Windows XP machine in a couple of years and not one on my newer Windows Vista machine which was running pre-release versions.
6. Intuitive ease of use (drag in and out of dock; drag text off internet; drag internet page straight into Text Edit)
True.
7. The helpful good manners of other Mac users
Others might say the condescending arrogance of (many) Mac users.
8. Consistent GUI metaphors (no confusing window closing with quitting; different window configurations which actually work as alternative methods [try turning off the browser type back buttons on both OSes and see the results: Mac becomes multiple window while Windows leads you in via a single window down a blind alley with no way back!]; Windows My Computer throws a sense of file system hierarchy out the window; double tab lines jumping position confuse in Windows)
This is all in the eye of the beholder. Ten minutes ago (no kidding) I watched my mother struggle for minutes trying to figure out why she couldn't see the address bar in a browser window or how to "close" the browser and open a new window. I'm sure she's just clueless and ignorant of good software design principles.
9. CDs and DVDs appear on the desktop needing no auto-run
True
10. No registry hell
I've used PC's for many years and have not experience registry hell. What is it?
11. No inaccurate warnings like the delete warning that doesn't empty the trash/recycle bin or "illegal operation" bad manners
BS. I have a bunch of files in my trash can right now that Mac wont' let me delete. Why not? Why doesn't it tell me what I need to do to delete the files? Do I need to hit some special key combination?
12. Good English unlike the infuriating My Little Pony language of Windows
Whatever.
12. No juvenilia: yellow dogs, telly tubby styling, talking paper clips
Point taken but I don't see that in Windows Vista and the yellow dogs and talking paper clips were Office, not Windows. Telly-tubby design is all in the eye of the beholder. Mac OS looks nice. Nicer than Windows XP in my personal opinion. Vista is much closer but probably still less elegant.
13. Clean minimalist GUI unlike the Windows garrulousness of endless notification, comments down the left side of windows and poorly thought out repetitive layouts (count the duplication in Windows Media Player of 'Artist' & 'Library' - I think it is three each)
Maybe.
14. Easy, consistent working with drag and drop between windows and apps
True.
15. Not just a couple of bundled iApps, the whole integrated iLife suite.
The whole iLife suite is nice but over-rated. Why is so hard to figure out how to simply crop a Photo in iPhoto? I have thousands of photos in iPhoto and neither my wife or I - both experienced computer users - can really figure out how to actually edit photos. It's a nice storage container.
16. It just works
Not really. My Mac drops its network connection much more often than my PC's on my home wireless network. No, the network is not running through a PC - it's direct from the cable to the router. Why is that? My Mac is fairly slow. I only have 512 MB RA
You're either 16 and clueless or..50 and clueless. Either way, you're clueless. Microsoft was among the first companies in the world to recognize the promise of the PC...long before Apple existed and before IBM had any PC business. They built programming languages in their early days that made it possible for the predecessors of open source software to actually write code. They were smart enough to realize that to make computing truly democratic and available to anybody that you needed a "standard" platform that enabled a huge variety of innovation in hardware and software. Microsoft directly and indirectly has created millions of jobs. Have they always had the best ideas? Clearly not. Then again, I don't think anybody has a monopoly on good ideas. Certainly not Apple. Certainly not Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds. What makes the world turn round? Lots of people doing interesting things. Microsoft has done a lot of interesting things.
Your pathetic comment on Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists just cements my low opinion of your opinions. Gates had it right. His point was that it takes more than altruism to drive innovation and - duh - most people actually need and want to make money for the work they do. Calling software pirates to task for stealing was/is a reasonable thing to do. If they don't want to pay that's fine. They should download a free development tool and compiler and write their own software. Stealing the work of others is...well, lame.
IMHO...as a Windows Vista and Mac OSX user...
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Windows Expert Jumps Ship
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· Score: 1, Interesting
He's wrong. The funny thing is...the only real nice things about Mac's are (1) very nice hardware (2) a couple of their bundled apps like iPhoto. The overall user experience is way over rated. I'm not a total Mac newbie. I owned several Mac's "back in the day" including a Mac SE with a whopping 4 MB of RAM, then a FX machine, and a Quadra 650. Then I started using Windows and didn't use Mac's except occasionally for several years and didn't buy any. Last summer I bought a Duo Core Intel iMac b/c I wanted something that would look nice in my kitchen nook. It looks great. But the OS is not what it's cracked up to be. Installing applications is...wierd... Unless you're experienced you end up with all of the foo.dmg files on your desktop... Thinking that you've installed the application you throw them into the trash. Wait a sec! The app doesnt' work anymore. Oh. I guess I should have known to drag that file into my applications folder. What would have thought? Safari is a piece of shit compared to Firefox or IE 7. Spotlight is nice but the new search in Windows Vista works at least as well if not better. The overall "polish" of the Mac UI is nice-ish but not really "better" than the Mac unless you're a designer weenie. The hardware is the only real compelling strength. Were it not for the nice hardware - one wire for power and two wires to connect and power and external hard drive - I'd get rid of it today. If a PC company would finally design a nice form factor Windows machine I'd buy it tomorrow.
Bottom line: Mac's are over rated and mostly the fetish's of fanboys/fangirls who walk around wearing nothing but black, Doc Martins and...never mind. Time to shut up. If you're all about image, get a Mac.
While MSFT's XNA initiative is still in early stages they're starting to deliver stuff that could help address the high cost of video game development. Right now the platforms and tools for game development are complex and immature. The goal of XNA is to provide a framework and toolset that will greatly speed development and...ultimately...provide a common framework for video games across both XBOX and Playstation. They have a tool available now for hobbyhists but I think they're eventually planning on releasing a toolset for professional developers. Some details are at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx.
The headline of this posting is just about as intelligent and insightful as the following:
1. New York Times uses "newsprint" which would allow someone to "print" something evil.
2. Books can be used to distribute evil content.
3. TV includes content that you might not like
Suggesting that MSFT (or any other softare company) is somehow doing something bad because they make it possible for their customers to include non Microsoft softare in thier OS images is dumb.
deserves whatever they get. What is MSFT or any other softare company to do? Make it impossible for their customers to add other software to images of their OS because scum bags might do something sleazy to dumbasses? Not my concern.
I'm far from a conspiracy theorist but the more I read the more convinced I am that there is something rotten in Denmark...or at least the RNC and their cronies. Check out http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002027.php for the scary details on the FL-13 race. More than 18,000 voters in primarly Democratic leaning areas showed NO vote for the Congressional candidate. An excerpt from the Orlando Sentinal:
The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.
Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat -- agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland -- outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes....
Put it this way. I believe that most estimates are that Windows Vista will sell in the neighborhood of 150-200 million copies in the first year compared to about 75 million for the first year of Windows 95. That doesn't sound too bad. Even with all the "excitement" for Windows 95, corporate customers were slow to upgrade - and that was with huge amounts of press and a big improvement in hardware (Pentiums arriving on the scene). I'd bet that Vista will do well from the get-go with consumers. I personally know of several people who haven't seen a need to upgrade thier old PC's who are waiting until Vista is available to buy a new machine. That's a sample size of...maybe 10 which isn't projectable but I'd bet a few bucks that it'll prove accurate.
Dvorak is kind of an idiot anyway.
You're partly right. The "Longhorn reset" - when they decided to largely throw out more than years worth of work - came about because they were overly ambitious. They were trying to re-write major portions of the platform. They realized that doing so was not only going to be too difficult/take too much time but that customers didn't really want that. So they did a reset...significantly reduced the origional ambitions of the project so they could get it done. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is in the eye of the beholder. In my mind it was probably good because, despite the rantings of some on/. and elsewhere, Windows actually works pretty well for most people and organizations. Re-writing the whole thing would have probably cause more harm than good. Just my personal two cents.
I have a new iMac. I like the hardware b/c it lacks the wires of my PC's and looks good in my kitchen. I run Windows XP on it most of the time. MacOS is over rated. Safari truly sucks...vastly inferior to Firefox and not even as good as IE7. I know of many other people who are also using their Mac's as PC's.
Re:Integration has always been Apple's differentia
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Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure what Apple's business would look like if they didn't offer Mac OS but I suspect they'd still have a business. I'm one of the many (hundreds of thousands? more than a million?) people who bought a Mac and use it to run Windows XP most of the time. The hardware is nice. The OS is over-rated and lacks a lot of the appliations I need/want. I know this is probably an unpopular point to make on/. but I know many people who are using their Mac's as...PCs.
Hey, half right is better than all wrong Khasim..
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Leopard Vs. Vista
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Nice twisting of logic and language. The author of the article made the explicit point that OEM's had to pay a higher license for Windows if they advertise non-Windows operating systems which is blatantly false. You sort of admit that but then go on to say, somewhat disparagingly, that it's still "legal" to pay Dell to be part of Microsoft's "advertising campaign."
Who the hell cares and why shouldn't that be "legal?"
Dell is still free to do similar deals with other OS makers if there were any who wanted to do that and there would be no penalty from Microsoft. Why don't they? Because the vast majority of consumers could care less about whether they can get a Dell with Redhat and Redhat either doesn't have the money or the sense to try to make a deal with Dell. Don't blame Microsoft for that.
The author of this series has a major axe to grind
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Leopard Vs. Vista
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· Score: 1
The whole article series is full of "interesting" interpretation which many could find fault with. I'll stick to a key factual error that is highlighted in the original slashdot post. The quote:
" Leading PC hardware makers can't freely advertise PCs sold without Windows, or with an alternative OS such as Linux, without having to pay Microsoft significantly more for every other OEM license they ship."
That would have been an accurate statement in, oh, say 1989 or 1990. Then Microsoft was sued by the Federal Trade Commission (well before the DOJ days) and had to make a variety of changes in the way they license MS-DOS and Windows. Since then there have been no OEM license provisions that punish OEM's that ship PC'w without DOS or Windows and no provisions that prevent OEM's from promoting other operating systems. The big news: consumers don't want other operating systems on their PC's so why would OEM's advertise them? Whether or not MSFT has co-marketing deals with OEM's like Intel does with OEM's that promote "Intel Inside" is a totally separate issue. But to say that OEM's have to pay more for an OEM license to Windows if they advertise Linux is ignorant, wrong, stupid and, dare I say, suggests that the author has an axe to grind.
I'm using Live.com about 1/2 the time and increasing daily. I started trying it just to check relevance (based on my own highly scientific algorithms;)and have found the results to be almost always as good or better than Google. I'm still having a little trouble getting used to the Live.com UI after using Google for so long but it grows on you.
Interesting article but I think the author misses a couple of important points. Microsoft's entire strategy is to find a way offer a best of both worlds approach where their platforms offers the "richness" (hate that word but not sure of a better one...) of great client (e.g. Windows) apps and the ease of development/updating and deployment of Web apps. Easier said than done. The irony is that...Microsoft actually might have the right strategy.
Microsoft has been saying for years that it would be bad for users and dumb to move too far toward a Web-based application-only world b/c Web apps don't (and will never?) offer the high quality user experience that good client apps offer and b/c turning the hundreds of millions of PC's into, essentially, dumb terminals is a huge waste of processing power. MSFT's problem is that writing/updating and deploying old style Windows apps is such a pain in the ass that users and businesses have been willing to live with the lower quality experience they get from Web apps they're such much easier to deal with. If they (or Adobe?) can ever get it right then Microsoft will be as successful in the future as they have in the past. Things that Microsoft is working on like WPF/e, while still mostly vaporware, have the potential to give developers the best of both worlds - a cross platform,"managed" runtime with high quality vector graphics/video/audio that,when running in Windows takes advantage of Windows API's/hardware acceleration etc and, when running on other platforms offers an almost as good experience.
As a corporate worker bee with a reasonably techy company I can tell you that taking two years to migrate 15K desktops either suggest an inept IT organization or poor migration/management tools for their Linux distribution. The company I work for five years ago migrated more than 20K desktops running Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to Windows XP in about three months including internal trials to test applications etc.
I certainly wasn't trying to argue the point that someone who steals $1 deserves to be punished as harshly as someone who steals $1 million. My point is that both people are equally guilty of stealing. Similarly, stealing software for your own use is fundamentally no different than stealing software to sell it to someone else. In either case the thief benefits personally - either from using the software for his own use or by receiving money for selling it.
Talk about moral relativism! So a guy who steals $1000 is a better man than someone who steals $10,000? What next. Someone who mugs someone by beating them is morally superior to someone who stabs their victim? Or someone who murders one person is somehow less morally reprehensible than someone who kills two? Theft is theft.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but what "rich content" does Google provide? Google is the yellow pages so I guess if you consider advertising "rich content" then your statement is accuraet. If you think that Google isn't motivated by financial interests then you're a very scary type of pollyanna. Also, if I were the paranoid type (which I'm not) I'd be way more scared of Google than I am of Microsoft. Google knows who you are, what you do on the Internet, who you conduct transactions with, who you send email to (if you use Gmail) etc etc.
But seriously, the 100,000 is a total joke. I challenge Google to actually show how they came up with that number and give the names of the companies. I'm sure they wouldn't, citing "confidentiality"...funny, coming from Goggle.
Really? Seriously...is this stuff really happening or are you making this up? Because I use Windows Vista all day/every day and have been for several months and I don't experience what you're talking about. If I need to install an application or activex control or new driver I get prompted...much like I do on my Mac...I click "continue" and the installation takes place and I move on to my work. If it took you 1/2 hour to "configure (my) personal settings and install a couple of applications" then I suspect user incompetence. Tell you what? If you can repeat what you say happened to you and capture it on video and post it to You Tube (with a time clock) I'll personally pay you $100. I have found the UAC prompts to be no more (or less) annoying that those that I get on my Mac. MSFT is screwed if they do or screwed if they don't. One of the reasons windows is so popular is that it's really really easy to use for even the average joe. One of the downsides of that is that it was designed for a world of trust. So now they've done a lot of work to change windows to list in a world of untrustworthiness and they're somehow bad?
"The fact is this, I have wasted months of my life maintaining PCs for stubborn relatives who refused to just buy a Mac. Browser hijacks, viruses, trojans, spyware... I've seen the lot... but in 8 years I have NEVER come across anything on Macs. Nothing! 8 years of browsing the internet with no security software on the Macs I support and the 5 or so belonging to the more forward thinking of my relatives who let me chose them a Mac. More than that, I have never had to reinstall from OS 8 to OS X 10.4 for reasons of malware on a Mac ever. My grandfather's iMac has been running OS 8.5 for 7 years now... no reinstalls and no Norton." No offense intended but...your relatives must not be very bright. :) I have never once had a virus or trojan in all my years of PC use. I have been using the Web since...let's see...1994 using a "mosaic" browser. I browse widely.
Oops. My bad. I was...13 in 1976 so I guess I didn't follow it closely. ;)
I appreciate your well written response but I disagree with much of it. 1. Low depreciation Probably true but who really re-sells PC's/Mac's? PC's are democratic. Anybody with $400 can buy a reasonably good PC that does everything they need - surf the web, write letters, listen to music, rip CD's etc. Who cares about depreciation of a $400 machine? 2. Really classy software from small companies like Omni Group and Delicious Monster True. One of the best Mac apps to me - someone who uses it mostly for "productivity" plus photos/videos is Microsoft Office. Very nice. 3. Consistency between apps I don't disagree. But I might add that part of the reason there is less consistency in PC apps is that there are so many of them and they're being written by average joe's all over the place. Hey, with VB I could write a decent Windows app and I'm far from a programmer. 4. No exploits Blatantly not true. 5. OS stability Seems to be true but I haven't had a crash of my Windows XP machine in a couple of years and not one on my newer Windows Vista machine which was running pre-release versions. 6. Intuitive ease of use (drag in and out of dock; drag text off internet; drag internet page straight into Text Edit) True. 7. The helpful good manners of other Mac users Others might say the condescending arrogance of (many) Mac users. 8. Consistent GUI metaphors (no confusing window closing with quitting; different window configurations which actually work as alternative methods [try turning off the browser type back buttons on both OSes and see the results: Mac becomes multiple window while Windows leads you in via a single window down a blind alley with no way back!]; Windows My Computer throws a sense of file system hierarchy out the window; double tab lines jumping position confuse in Windows) This is all in the eye of the beholder. Ten minutes ago (no kidding) I watched my mother struggle for minutes trying to figure out why she couldn't see the address bar in a browser window or how to "close" the browser and open a new window. I'm sure she's just clueless and ignorant of good software design principles. 9. CDs and DVDs appear on the desktop needing no auto-run True 10. No registry hell I've used PC's for many years and have not experience registry hell. What is it? 11. No inaccurate warnings like the delete warning that doesn't empty the trash/recycle bin or "illegal operation" bad manners BS. I have a bunch of files in my trash can right now that Mac wont' let me delete. Why not? Why doesn't it tell me what I need to do to delete the files? Do I need to hit some special key combination? 12. Good English unlike the infuriating My Little Pony language of Windows Whatever. 12. No juvenilia: yellow dogs, telly tubby styling, talking paper clips Point taken but I don't see that in Windows Vista and the yellow dogs and talking paper clips were Office, not Windows. Telly-tubby design is all in the eye of the beholder. Mac OS looks nice. Nicer than Windows XP in my personal opinion. Vista is much closer but probably still less elegant. 13. Clean minimalist GUI unlike the Windows garrulousness of endless notification, comments down the left side of windows and poorly thought out repetitive layouts (count the duplication in Windows Media Player of 'Artist' & 'Library' - I think it is three each) Maybe. 14. Easy, consistent working with drag and drop between windows and apps True. 15. Not just a couple of bundled iApps, the whole integrated iLife suite. The whole iLife suite is nice but over-rated. Why is so hard to figure out how to simply crop a Photo in iPhoto? I have thousands of photos in iPhoto and neither my wife or I - both experienced computer users - can really figure out how to actually edit photos. It's a nice storage container. 16. It just works Not really. My Mac drops its network connection much more often than my PC's on my home wireless network. No, the network is not running through a PC - it's direct from the cable to the router. Why is that? My Mac is fairly slow. I only have 512 MB RA
You're either 16 and clueless or..50 and clueless. Either way, you're clueless. Microsoft was among the first companies in the world to recognize the promise of the PC...long before Apple existed and before IBM had any PC business. They built programming languages in their early days that made it possible for the predecessors of open source software to actually write code. They were smart enough to realize that to make computing truly democratic and available to anybody that you needed a "standard" platform that enabled a huge variety of innovation in hardware and software. Microsoft directly and indirectly has created millions of jobs. Have they always had the best ideas? Clearly not. Then again, I don't think anybody has a monopoly on good ideas. Certainly not Apple. Certainly not Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds. What makes the world turn round? Lots of people doing interesting things. Microsoft has done a lot of interesting things. Your pathetic comment on Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists just cements my low opinion of your opinions. Gates had it right. His point was that it takes more than altruism to drive innovation and - duh - most people actually need and want to make money for the work they do. Calling software pirates to task for stealing was/is a reasonable thing to do. If they don't want to pay that's fine. They should download a free development tool and compiler and write their own software. Stealing the work of others is...well, lame.
He's wrong. The funny thing is...the only real nice things about Mac's are (1) very nice hardware (2) a couple of their bundled apps like iPhoto. The overall user experience is way over rated. I'm not a total Mac newbie. I owned several Mac's "back in the day" including a Mac SE with a whopping 4 MB of RAM, then a FX machine, and a Quadra 650. Then I started using Windows and didn't use Mac's except occasionally for several years and didn't buy any. Last summer I bought a Duo Core Intel iMac b/c I wanted something that would look nice in my kitchen nook. It looks great. But the OS is not what it's cracked up to be. Installing applications is...wierd... Unless you're experienced you end up with all of the foo.dmg files on your desktop... Thinking that you've installed the application you throw them into the trash. Wait a sec! The app doesnt' work anymore. Oh. I guess I should have known to drag that file into my applications folder. What would have thought? Safari is a piece of shit compared to Firefox or IE 7. Spotlight is nice but the new search in Windows Vista works at least as well if not better. The overall "polish" of the Mac UI is nice-ish but not really "better" than the Mac unless you're a designer weenie. The hardware is the only real compelling strength. Were it not for the nice hardware - one wire for power and two wires to connect and power and external hard drive - I'd get rid of it today. If a PC company would finally design a nice form factor Windows machine I'd buy it tomorrow. Bottom line: Mac's are over rated and mostly the fetish's of fanboys/fangirls who walk around wearing nothing but black, Doc Martins and...never mind. Time to shut up. If you're all about image, get a Mac.
While MSFT's XNA initiative is still in early stages they're starting to deliver stuff that could help address the high cost of video game development. Right now the platforms and tools for game development are complex and immature. The goal of XNA is to provide a framework and toolset that will greatly speed development and...ultimately...provide a common framework for video games across both XBOX and Playstation. They have a tool available now for hobbyhists but I think they're eventually planning on releasing a toolset for professional developers. Some details are at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx .
The headline of this posting is just about as intelligent and insightful as the following: 1. New York Times uses "newsprint" which would allow someone to "print" something evil. 2. Books can be used to distribute evil content. 3. TV includes content that you might not like Suggesting that MSFT (or any other softare company) is somehow doing something bad because they make it possible for their customers to include non Microsoft softare in thier OS images is dumb.
deserves whatever they get. What is MSFT or any other softare company to do? Make it impossible for their customers to add other software to images of their OS because scum bags might do something sleazy to dumbasses? Not my concern.
Let's see...your inane post was modded +2...so you have good karma and you're a subscriber...and anonymous coward? Lame.
FWIW, I've been running Vista for six months and have had a grand total of ZERO (0) 'blue screens." Your paranoia strikes deep.
Put it this way. I believe that most estimates are that Windows Vista will sell in the neighborhood of 150-200 million copies in the first year compared to about 75 million for the first year of Windows 95. That doesn't sound too bad. Even with all the "excitement" for Windows 95, corporate customers were slow to upgrade - and that was with huge amounts of press and a big improvement in hardware (Pentiums arriving on the scene). I'd bet that Vista will do well from the get-go with consumers. I personally know of several people who haven't seen a need to upgrade thier old PC's who are waiting until Vista is available to buy a new machine. That's a sample size of...maybe 10 which isn't projectable but I'd bet a few bucks that it'll prove accurate. Dvorak is kind of an idiot anyway.
You're partly right. The "Longhorn reset" - when they decided to largely throw out more than years worth of work - came about because they were overly ambitious. They were trying to re-write major portions of the platform. They realized that doing so was not only going to be too difficult/take too much time but that customers didn't really want that. So they did a reset...significantly reduced the origional ambitions of the project so they could get it done. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is in the eye of the beholder. In my mind it was probably good because, despite the rantings of some on /. and elsewhere, Windows actually works pretty well for most people and organizations. Re-writing the whole thing would have probably cause more harm than good. Just my personal two cents.
I have a new iMac. I like the hardware b/c it lacks the wires of my PC's and looks good in my kitchen. I run Windows XP on it most of the time. MacOS is over rated. Safari truly sucks...vastly inferior to Firefox and not even as good as IE7. I know of many other people who are also using their Mac's as PC's.
I'm not sure what Apple's business would look like if they didn't offer Mac OS but I suspect they'd still have a business. I'm one of the many (hundreds of thousands? more than a million?) people who bought a Mac and use it to run Windows XP most of the time. The hardware is nice. The OS is over-rated and lacks a lot of the appliations I need/want. I know this is probably an unpopular point to make on /. but I know many people who are using their Mac's as...PCs.
Nice twisting of logic and language. The author of the article made the explicit point that OEM's had to pay a higher license for Windows if they advertise non-Windows operating systems which is blatantly false. You sort of admit that but then go on to say, somewhat disparagingly, that it's still "legal" to pay Dell to be part of Microsoft's "advertising campaign."
Who the hell cares and why shouldn't that be "legal?"
Dell is still free to do similar deals with other OS makers if there were any who wanted to do that and there would be no penalty from Microsoft. Why don't they? Because the vast majority of consumers could care less about whether they can get a Dell with Redhat and Redhat either doesn't have the money or the sense to try to make a deal with Dell. Don't blame Microsoft for that.
The whole article series is full of "interesting" interpretation which many could find fault with. I'll stick to a key factual error that is highlighted in the original slashdot post. The quote:
" Leading PC hardware makers can't freely advertise PCs sold without Windows, or with an alternative OS such as Linux, without having to pay Microsoft significantly more for every other OEM license they ship."
That would have been an accurate statement in, oh, say 1989 or 1990. Then Microsoft was sued by the Federal Trade Commission (well before the DOJ days) and had to make a variety of changes in the way they license MS-DOS and Windows. Since then there have been no OEM license provisions that punish OEM's that ship PC'w without DOS or Windows and no provisions that prevent OEM's from promoting other operating systems. The big news: consumers don't want other operating systems on their PC's so why would OEM's advertise them? Whether or not MSFT has co-marketing deals with OEM's like Intel does with OEM's that promote "Intel Inside" is a totally separate issue. But to say that OEM's have to pay more for an OEM license to Windows if they advertise Linux is ignorant, wrong, stupid and, dare I say, suggests that the author has an axe to grind.
I'm using Live.com about 1/2 the time and increasing daily. I started trying it just to check relevance (based on my own highly scientific algorithms ;)and have found the results to be almost always as good or better than Google. I'm still having a little trouble getting used to the Live.com UI after using Google for so long but it grows on you.
Interesting article but I think the author misses a couple of important points. Microsoft's entire strategy is to find a way offer a best of both worlds approach where their platforms offers the "richness" (hate that word but not sure of a better one...) of great client (e.g. Windows) apps and the ease of development/updating and deployment of Web apps. Easier said than done. The irony is that...Microsoft actually might have the right strategy. Microsoft has been saying for years that it would be bad for users and dumb to move too far toward a Web-based application-only world b/c Web apps don't (and will never?) offer the high quality user experience that good client apps offer and b/c turning the hundreds of millions of PC's into, essentially, dumb terminals is a huge waste of processing power. MSFT's problem is that writing/updating and deploying old style Windows apps is such a pain in the ass that users and businesses have been willing to live with the lower quality experience they get from Web apps they're such much easier to deal with. If they (or Adobe?) can ever get it right then Microsoft will be as successful in the future as they have in the past. Things that Microsoft is working on like WPF/e, while still mostly vaporware, have the potential to give developers the best of both worlds - a cross platform ,"managed" runtime with high quality vector graphics/video/audio that,when running in Windows takes advantage of Windows API's/hardware acceleration etc and, when running on other platforms offers an almost as good experience.
As a corporate worker bee with a reasonably techy company I can tell you that taking two years to migrate 15K desktops either suggest an inept IT organization or poor migration/management tools for their Linux distribution. The company I work for five years ago migrated more than 20K desktops running Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to Windows XP in about three months including internal trials to test applications etc.
If they knew about it before the release of IE 7 then they're low-lifes.
I certainly wasn't trying to argue the point that someone who steals $1 deserves to be punished as harshly as someone who steals $1 million. My point is that both people are equally guilty of stealing. Similarly, stealing software for your own use is fundamentally no different than stealing software to sell it to someone else. In either case the thief benefits personally - either from using the software for his own use or by receiving money for selling it.
Talk about moral relativism! So a guy who steals $1000 is a better man than someone who steals $10,000? What next. Someone who mugs someone by beating them is morally superior to someone who stabs their victim? Or someone who murders one person is somehow less morally reprehensible than someone who kills two? Theft is theft.