He's just one US citizen. If he wants to have influence on Congress he can vote like the rest of us. The fact that he can't get personal meetings with them should be surprising or distressing, regardless of his net worth, given how difficult it would be for everyone else.
Uhm. He's representing a 8000+ employee company that plays crucial role on the Internet (despite the low lock-in effect, Google is a core part of the Internet as of right now, and has been for the last, like 7-8 years or so).
That's like saying Bush is just one citizen. The little details matter though.
"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version.
If it was that simple, Microsoft wouldn't conflict itself so much. There are many more things going on, not the least of which, is the virtualization on the Mac (not a core Mac user myself).
Mac+OSX has still many disadvantages on its own, the biggest of which is vendor support for software and games. Parallels integrates relatively seamlessly virtualized Windows into a Mac.
Under virtualization, you really don't need more than Vista Home, since you can't run Aero anyway, so people would naturally flock to that. Many PC owners are willing to switch to Mac today, as long as they have a seamless Windows experience, which they still need.
Microsoft isn't just trying to make a buck, they're trying to decrease the rate of Vista/Windows virtualization. The problem here is: they can't change the license of XP which is out there already and people run that on their Macs.
So the conflict (at least part of it) is: forbid virtualization on cheap Vista (and thus stiffle Vista adoption as people run their XP on Macs), or allow virtualization since XP already allows virtualization anyway.
And only after all those strategy issues are resolved, comes the question if Microsoft could make more buck with expensive virtualizable Vista: corporate customers usually need to virtualize Windows for testing. But they don't really need a ton of copies for that purpose. A 1000 employee company may need just 5-6 licenses for the 5-6 developers who specifically need to do testing of their software. Hence the buck making potential isn't really quite there.
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Apple works tightly with Google, so that's given. I want to know: how I set Live.com as the search engine in Safari?
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense.
Ok who the hell modded this "informative"... Of course, you do realize that Apple has a complete monopoly on software, bundling AND hardware in its own niche, never mind of the law is shortsighted enough to miss that.
Apple users use anything Steve feeds them and Apple's solution is far more locked down than Windows ever was.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's not far off from Google's own spectacularly successful unprocess. Not to mention the cat-herding controlled chaos of FOSS development.
Not far off, huh.. In Google you work 80% of the time on your very specific task, and 20% of the time you get to work on your own project you believe is beneficial.
In Microsoft, the poor devs had to deliver something to be approved by their managers, which neither their managers nor the developers knew what it was, and they had a hell of a time even getting their changes integrated in the source code base.
The devil is in the details. And over here, they're some quite huge chunks of details you missed in the picture.
The issue of the start menu has come up previously. The last time it did I remember reading a blog of the MS guy who was working on it (can someone supply the reference).
That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.
Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].
By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.
approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.
Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.
Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:
In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.
Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:
I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:
Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.
teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".
Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:
Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not
Lest you think I am trying to make myself feel better about blowing money on an iPhone, I'll say right now that I'm not getting one because they're too expensive. I just like the philosophy of having a clearly defined set of tasks for a product and sticking to that, making sure that it is best at what it does.:)
I know what you mean and that's cool.
Do you know what I'm thinking about though. Those 19 million that expressed "strong interest" in getting the iPhone. How many of them just expressed strong interest like you, but won't get it, since it's expensive.
How many of them expressed interest but are on contract with another service provider (remember: only AT&T have iPhone).
How many of them expressed interest, but will only be able to get it when their *current* contract expires (even if it's in AT&T).
As I said in an earlier post, many people seem to route for Apple when they're about to release a product, but then come short on the "promises" of purchase.
It's kinda like what's happening *right now* with the Ubuntu machines DELL is selling. Hundreds of people expressed "strong interest in getting them", right? How come almost no one is buying them, although they definitely know where to find them on DELL's site. Mystery.
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
Evidence 1: Their fact-rich sheet for "partners and customers" is in fact locked to only computer making companies who sign an NDA O_o. Yes, their "confident list" of reasons to use Vista is actually a secret. That makes me wanna switch to Vista for sure!
Evidence 2: How Microsoft explained that they changed their mind back on virtualization of Basic/Home? "The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks". Oh... My... God... They aren't even TRYING. What kind of damn security risk are we talking about? That people will buy cheap Windows Basic and run it on Parallels on Mac, isn't that the one. Pathetic.
There are plenty of issues of Vista and Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Now, I like Windows as a product overall, but Vista is just not mature enough to use in a production environment. And I'm fine with this. Vista is a technology release, breaking lots of new ground and hence it's hard to get right the first time.
The reason people stay away from Vista is because they experienced actual issues with either compatibility, performance or reliability. Or they know someone who did. It's not just a bunch of myths.
One would expect Microsoft would make some marking noise on Vista's consumer release in January (as any company would) and then quietly back down and start working on fixing Vista so at SP1/2 it becomes a decent replacement for XP. But naaah, "proceed with confidence". Shame on Microsoft, are they really so disconnected from their customers.
If they keep this style, no wonder more companies completely switch away from Windows for their desktop clients, be it on Mac (most of them), BSD or Linux.
It seems obvious to me that the point was that the iPhone's appeal lies in its style, UI, etc., rather than in a laundry list of features.
Yup, Apple has redefined how you make a product. It's not about the features it has, but rather those it doesn't have.
What makes the iPod attractive is that it's not durable, doesn't have replaceable batteries, FM tuner, and for a long tmie couldn't play videos (everybody swore it won't play video since that's kinda the benefit of using an Apple product). The shuffle doesn't have screen and doesn't have sequential playback ability.
iPhone is great since it doesn't have SDK, keyboard, 3G camera and mobile internet, doesn't have Java, and again doesn't have replaceable battery, doesn't have GPS. Safari doesn't have Flash, unlike many other phones, which is a great thing.
And of course, all Apple products are expensive, since it's really hard to not have so many things in a product. The other companies just resist to the pressure and put all kinds of stuff in their products, that's why they're so cheap.
Employees eager to use the cool new gadget, however, may pressure IT departments to support iPhones even if it means incurring more costs and changing policies.
So the iPhone is out, many "employees" bought it, they plan to use a phone with camera and keyboard for business purposes (I mean honestly WTF?), and they plan to whine to their bosses to support it in their corporate network, despite higher costs and changing policies! Apparently those employees want to use this iPhone for their jobs SO much, they'd rather lose their jobs.
Oh wait, the iPhone isn't out.
There aren't mythical employees nagging their bosses, there aren't changing policies, nothing.
YouTube accounts for 10% of Internet traffic. Imagine that. That's more than milions of other site do, combined.
And they built that entirely on venture capital (until they got bought by google).
I read all the time about competing video sites bragging about their high def videos - could they possibly sustain the video playback count of YouTube with such high bandwidth videos? I really doubt that. And no wonder YouTube stays low quality as well.
So are content providers starting to care less about DRM now? Or since most of them are putting teaser promotional videos up, not full-length content, they don't worry so much if the short snippets are copied elsewhere?
Both, but mostly the latter. As for their DRM concerns: YouTube is just more convenient than bothering to download the videoa nd use a special FLV player to play it. Why do that when you're a click away. It's what RIAA doesn't understand about making business on the Internet, but I bet they will, in maybe 50-60 years.
So I'd say that it is likely that China will democratise, and there are certainly signs that it is happening. But it's also likely that reactionary politicians will attempt to roll back the process and it's in everyone's interests that the US tries to stop them
You know, it's nice that the process is not sudden, but slow and careful. Democracy can bring lots of good for Chinese people, but it is because of that flexibility it could also bring a lot worse.
Imagine if a sudden change to democracy brings some crazy nationalistic nuthead as a president of China. I mean: look at USA right now.
Technically true, but show me an example of a communist government that doesn't have serious issues with censorship. The idea of Communist government doesn't require censorship, but the reality is that sustaining a communist government generally does.
Show me a government that doesn't (at least heavily try to) apply censorship on anything offensive.
Of course, democratic governments have much higher tolerance to making jokes with the president or critique. The reason being: they know that doesn't cause such adverse effects, and it's so full of critics about everything, that the separate instance get drowned in a sea of noise.
They still will censor and mess with anything that could relate to "national security". Not to mention the off-the-bat false detection of terrorism and pedophilia related content where there isn't any.
Flickr itself is censoring images for users in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany.
I guess I won't renew my pro account in August...
Said countries blocked Flickr completely at one point or another, because of said images. If they wouldn't do what they did, you wouldn't be using your pro account in August again (you won't be able to access it).
If all big sites would just post the famous picture of that tiananmen massacre on their website (just a microscopic link to the full picture), pretty soon China will have the option of either blocking internet altogether or loosening restrictions.
Consider the possibility if all big sites suddenly decided to do the same with goatse. I don't to even think about it, the consequences would be devastating.
I don't trust the banks, or the credit card companies, so I am one of the few people who do EVERYTHING in cash. [..] I fear out of technicality I am going to loose my housing since I cannot get them their money on time because they do not take cash.
Do you know few of the things you CAN do with cash?
Get a cashiers check.
Open a checking account.
Just go and do it, don't just put your entire savings in there if you're so paranoid, put the amount that the university will charge you.
Do you honestly are telling us that you'd rather *lose* your housing than open a checking account and put $100 in it?
Geeee, that's all a fabrication. It's not like Dell or Microsoft have ever acted antagonistically towards Apple, or "declared war" on them. Oh wait, they have.
Apparently you're in the first group GP is posting about, "devoted fans of Apple". You're buying their bubble and not even knowing about it, aren't ya.
DELL and Microsoft are eating, breathing, sleeping, walking: just with one mission, to destroy the hated Apple! It's a war! Buy more Apple gear to help Apple win the war!
but this might actually be a "good thing." It may not be the best move for AMD, but for the buying public it should encourage innovation and competition. Which ultimately benefits everyone.
Don't even kid about it. It's a path that once taken will be very hard to revert for AMD. Before you know it they'll outsource the rest of their fab, then sell their design to someone, and all that will be left, is a patent troll.
Last time when we discussed AMD's poor financial performance, I critized a guy who said we should buy AMD to support them, or the future may be quite grim, with Intel (being de facto complete monopolist on the x86 market) raising prices and stagnating.
When I read THIS article, I gotta say, that fear makes me think more like this guy and I'm suddenly feeling the need to buy AMD chips for the hell of it. I know it's wrong.
I always suspected that if they continue performing badly, IBM could consider purchasing them and entering the market of x86 chips. Both companies have worked together for a long time and share lots of technologies, some fab and many processes and design decisions.
Thing is, I didn't expect AMD to begin falling apart by itself, by selling some of its fab business. If they continue trying to minimize their losses by destroying themselves in this way, soon no one will want to have anything with them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought the software (note - this is a lie; there's no way I'm going to buy Vista any time soon).
Nice... thanks for letting us know.. a lie. I guess.
Microsoft has made their money.
That's a lie, deducing from your first lie...
They should stop telling me how I can use it.
That's a lie, they can since you purchased a license, and you agree with it to use the software.
This is why I like free software. I'm treated as the owner.
And that's a lie too. You're not the owner. You agree with the license again and need to follow it to use free software.
You liar, liar.
He's just one US citizen. If he wants to have influence on Congress he can vote like the rest of us. The fact that he can't get personal meetings with them should be surprising or distressing, regardless of his net worth, given how difficult it would be for everyone else.
Uhm. He's representing a 8000+ employee company that plays crucial role on the Internet (despite the low lock-in effect, Google is a core part of the Internet as of right now, and has been for the last, like 7-8 years or so).
That's like saying Bush is just one citizen. The little details matter though.
"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version.
If it was that simple, Microsoft wouldn't conflict itself so much. There are many more things going on, not the least of which, is the virtualization on the Mac (not a core Mac user myself).
Mac+OSX has still many disadvantages on its own, the biggest of which is vendor support for software and games. Parallels integrates relatively seamlessly virtualized Windows into a Mac.
Under virtualization, you really don't need more than Vista Home, since you can't run Aero anyway, so people would naturally flock to that. Many PC owners are willing to switch to Mac today, as long as they have a seamless Windows experience, which they still need.
Microsoft isn't just trying to make a buck, they're trying to decrease the rate of Vista/Windows virtualization. The problem here is: they can't change the license of XP which is out there already and people run that on their Macs.
So the conflict (at least part of it) is: forbid virtualization on cheap Vista (and thus stiffle Vista adoption as people run their XP on Macs), or allow virtualization since XP already allows virtualization anyway.
And only after all those strategy issues are resolved, comes the question if Microsoft could make more buck with expensive virtualizable Vista: corporate customers usually need to virtualize Windows for testing. But they don't really need a ton of copies for that purpose. A 1000 employee company may need just 5-6 licenses for the 5-6 developers who specifically need to do testing of their software. Hence the buck making potential isn't really quite there.
Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.
Apple works tightly with Google, so that's given. I want to know: how I set Live.com as the search engine in Safari?
Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense.
Ok who the hell modded this "informative"... Of course, you do realize that Apple has a complete monopoly on software, bundling AND hardware in its own niche, never mind of the law is shortsighted enough to miss that.
Apple users use anything Steve feeds them and Apple's solution is far more locked down than Windows ever was.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but that's not far off from Google's own spectacularly successful unprocess. Not to mention the cat-herding controlled chaos of FOSS development.
Not far off, huh.. In Google you work 80% of the time on your very specific task, and 20% of the time you get to work on your own project you believe is beneficial.
In Microsoft, the poor devs had to deliver something to be approved by their managers, which neither their managers nor the developers knew what it was, and they had a hell of a time even getting their changes integrated in the source code base.
The devil is in the details. And over here, they're some quite huge chunks of details you missed in the picture.
The issue of the start menu has come up previously. The last time it did I remember reading a blog of the MS guy who was working on it (can someone supply the reference).
I found it, and the related posts to the menu by Joel.
That' far worse than Channel 9 hinted at and apparently a big problem that grew with XP and exploded during Vista. Some comments I selected.
Moishe, the dev who worked on the menu:
The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature [: the shutdown menu].
By the time I left the team the total code that I'd written for this "feature" [in a year] was a couple hundred lines, tops.
approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" [...] Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, [...] and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something... just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.
Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. [...] the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. [...] it [took] between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes.
Stanely Krute, ex-Microsoft developer:
In 1989 I worked on Windows UI for a brief period. [..] Even then one could see that what MS did to IBM would eventually happen to MS [..] Vista is a bloated baroque thing that adds some kernel security and eye candy at the cost of doubling a machine's RAM and adding a high-end graphics chip.
Anonymous ex-Microsoft manager:
I was a manager at Microsoft during some of this period [..] [There is] promiscuous dependency [, including circular dependencies, ] taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences. [...] There was much work done analyzing the internal structure of Windows [suv4x4: note they're not familiar with the structure of their *own* OS]
As others have mentioned, the real surprise here is that they managed to ship anything.
Anonymous developer working at Microsoft:
Slavish adherence to the "rules" as a means of CYA, a desire to build kingdoms (people/hardware/process), an inability to adjust as circumstances changed, and an irrational fear of breaking "something" were the real problems with many branches in Vista.
teams constantly harped on BS "rules" as the reason why they couldn't move or make progress. "My PM tells me what bugs I can/can't work on". "I can only check into branch vvv_www_xxx_yyy_zzz - I have no idea if/when my changes will migrate up". "We need a N-week test pass before we're allowed to make a change - there's no way we could do that in any other branch".
Anonymous developer who worked in Vista UI in a small company hired by MS 2002-2004:
Microsoft wanted to avoid some of the problems that cropped up with XP and told us they were going to do Longhorn "right" this time. After years of slaving away to supposed exacting standards of UI elements, the project was pulled from us and (I assume) taken in-house. [..] Now we see the result and I can tell you it is not
Lest you think I am trying to make myself feel better about blowing money on an iPhone, I'll say right now that I'm not getting one because they're too expensive. I just like the philosophy of having a clearly defined set of tasks for a product and sticking to that, making sure that it is best at what it does. :)
I know what you mean and that's cool.
Do you know what I'm thinking about though. Those 19 million that expressed "strong interest" in getting the iPhone. How many of them just expressed strong interest like you, but won't get it, since it's expensive.
How many of them expressed interest but are on contract with another service provider (remember: only AT&T have iPhone).
How many of them expressed interest, but will only be able to get it when their *current* contract expires (even if it's in AT&T).
As I said in an earlier post, many people seem to route for Apple when they're about to release a product, but then come short on the "promises" of purchase.
It's kinda like what's happening *right now* with the Ubuntu machines DELL is selling. Hundreds of people expressed "strong interest in getting them", right? How come almost no one is buying them, although they definitely know where to find them on DELL's site. Mystery.
Your complaint presumes that Microsoft is capable of just giving customers what they want. With their current state of management dysfunction, Vista is in all likelihood the very best product they could make. Sad, but true.
I like Channel 9 a lot. It's video interviews with Microsoft employees about the work they're doing in the company. Some of the guys are truly smart, even genius, and have great insight into the way technology works, and will develop in the future.
But some of the videos, on Vista, were very odd.
In one interview, a team of few guys spent working almost 3 years on just the sound volume dialog in Vista. They also said they're just "experimenting with some things" and very far from done.
The WPF/DCE (i.e. the new GUI) team has produced an incredible amount of demos of 3D spinning and "raining" windows, none of which had any practical purpose and none of it ended up in the final Vista builds.
There were a ton of skins produced, just fiddling with the design part, not the technology part, including a "Pro skin", a simpler skin for professionals, before they settled on Aero as the idea and improving that one (for another 1-2 years). They dropped the "Pro skin".
Funny thing is, during XP betas, another "Pro skin" was developed (dubbed Watercolor), and subsequently dropped again. Maybe in Vienna they'll finally ship the mythical "Pro skin", who knows.
The start menu was apparently being in "heavy development" for the entire 5 years of Vista's development, and they had some very hard time deciding how to make the shutdown buttons work. In the end they opted just putting all options in a menu next to the sleep function.
--
Basically, this all started to look like a bunch of (otherwise very smart) developers having no direction whatsoever. The blame for this can only be in the management. I mean: these guys CAN deliver, if given a specific set of tasks to produce, and monitored on their progress in case they stumble in the process. But looks like none of them really had any idea what Vista will end up like and they spent their days playing with the technologies and fiddling and redoing the same things for years.
Truly weird.
And now Microsoft comes and says "proceed with confidence". Microsoft: if we have the confidence to proceed of your developers, we'd be stuck on XP for life.
I've some evidence.
Evidence 1: Their fact-rich sheet for "partners and customers" is in fact locked to only computer making companies who sign an NDA O_o. Yes, their "confident list" of reasons to use Vista is actually a secret. That makes me wanna switch to Vista for sure!
Evidence 2: How Microsoft explained that they changed their mind back on virtualization of Basic/Home? "The company said virtualization presents inherent security risks". Oh... My... God... They aren't even TRYING. What kind of damn security risk are we talking about? That people will buy cheap Windows Basic and run it on Parallels on Mac, isn't that the one. Pathetic.
There are plenty of issues of Vista and Microsoft is painfully aware of this. Now, I like Windows as a product overall, but Vista is just not mature enough to use in a production environment. And I'm fine with this. Vista is a technology release, breaking lots of new ground and hence it's hard to get right the first time.
The reason people stay away from Vista is because they experienced actual issues with either compatibility, performance or reliability. Or they know someone who did. It's not just a bunch of myths.
One would expect Microsoft would make some marking noise on Vista's consumer release in January (as any company would) and then quietly back down and start working on fixing Vista so at SP1/2 it becomes a decent replacement for XP. But naaah, "proceed with confidence". Shame on Microsoft, are they really so disconnected from their customers.
If they keep this style, no wonder more companies completely switch away from Windows for their desktop clients, be it on Mac (most of them), BSD or Linux.
It seems obvious to me that the point was that the iPhone's appeal lies in its style, UI, etc., rather than in a laundry list of features.
Yup, Apple has redefined how you make a product. It's not about the features it has, but rather those it doesn't have.
What makes the iPod attractive is that it's not durable, doesn't have replaceable batteries, FM tuner, and for a long tmie couldn't play videos (everybody swore it won't play video since that's kinda the benefit of using an Apple product). The shuffle doesn't have screen and doesn't have sequential playback ability.
iPhone is great since it doesn't have SDK, keyboard, 3G camera and mobile internet, doesn't have Java, and again doesn't have replaceable battery, doesn't have GPS. Safari doesn't have Flash, unlike many other phones, which is a great thing.
And of course, all Apple products are expensive, since it's really hard to not have so many things in a product. The other companies just resist to the pressure and put all kinds of stuff in their products, that's why they're so cheap.
Confused?
Only communists use POP and IMAP, you know.
BS. Everyone knows communists run on Macs.
Employees eager to use the cool new gadget, however, may pressure IT departments to support iPhones even if it means incurring more costs and changing policies.
So the iPhone is out, many "employees" bought it, they plan to use a phone with camera and keyboard for business purposes (I mean honestly WTF?), and they plan to whine to their bosses to support it in their corporate network, despite higher costs and changing policies! Apparently those employees want to use this iPhone for their jobs SO much, they'd rather lose their jobs.
Oh wait, the iPhone isn't out.
There aren't mythical employees nagging their bosses, there aren't changing policies, nothing.
Just speculation.
YouTube accounts for 10% of Internet traffic. Imagine that. That's more than milions of other site do, combined.
And they built that entirely on venture capital (until they got bought by google).
I read all the time about competing video sites bragging about their high def videos - could they possibly sustain the video playback count of YouTube with such high bandwidth videos? I really doubt that. And no wonder YouTube stays low quality as well.
So are content providers starting to care less about DRM now? Or since most of them are putting teaser promotional videos up, not full-length content, they don't worry so much if the short snippets are copied elsewhere?
Both, but mostly the latter. As for their DRM concerns: YouTube is just more convenient than bothering to download the videoa nd use a special FLV player to play it. Why do that when you're a click away. It's what RIAA doesn't understand about making business on the Internet, but I bet they will, in maybe 50-60 years.
So I'd say that it is likely that China will democratise, and there are certainly signs that it is happening. But it's also likely that reactionary politicians will attempt to roll back the process and it's in everyone's interests that the US tries to stop them
You know, it's nice that the process is not sudden, but slow and careful. Democracy can bring lots of good for Chinese people, but it is because of that flexibility it could also bring a lot worse.
Imagine if a sudden change to democracy brings some crazy nationalistic nuthead as a president of China. I mean: look at USA right now.
Technically true, but show me an example of a communist government that doesn't have serious issues with censorship. The idea of Communist government doesn't require censorship, but the reality is that sustaining a communist government generally does.
Show me a government that doesn't (at least heavily try to) apply censorship on anything offensive.
Of course, democratic governments have much higher tolerance to making jokes with the president or critique. The reason being: they know that doesn't cause such adverse effects, and it's so full of critics about everything, that the separate instance get drowned in a sea of noise.
They still will censor and mess with anything that could relate to "national security". Not to mention the off-the-bat false detection of terrorism and pedophilia related content where there isn't any.
Flickr itself is censoring images for users in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany.
I guess I won't renew my pro account in August...
Said countries blocked Flickr completely at one point or another, because of said images. If they wouldn't do what they did, you wouldn't be using your pro account in August again (you won't be able to access it).
If all big sites would just post the famous picture of that tiananmen massacre on their website (just a microscopic link to the full picture), pretty soon China will have the option of either blocking internet altogether or loosening restrictions.
Consider the possibility if all big sites suddenly decided to do the same with goatse. I don't to even think about it, the consequences would be devastating.
Jesus, you're stubborn:
I don't trust the banks, or the credit card companies, so I am one of the few people who do EVERYTHING in cash. [..] I fear out of technicality I am going to loose my housing since I cannot get them their money on time because they do not take cash.
Do you know few of the things you CAN do with cash?
Get a cashiers check.
Open a checking account.
Just go and do it, don't just put your entire savings in there if you're so paranoid, put the amount that the university will charge you.
Do you honestly are telling us that you'd rather *lose* your housing than open a checking account and put $100 in it?
Water's wet, the skies blue, and the Chinamen are rotten Commi's.
And you're a nerd teen living in his mom's basement, can't talk to girls, and run Linux on his MacBook!
At least that's what it says here in my "Absurd Stereotypes" guide book.
Geeee, that's all a fabrication. It's not like Dell or Microsoft have ever acted antagonistically towards Apple, or "declared war" on them. Oh wait, they have.
Apparently you're in the first group GP is posting about, "devoted fans of Apple". You're buying their bubble and not even knowing about it, aren't ya.
DELL and Microsoft are eating, breathing, sleeping, walking: just with one mission, to destroy the hated Apple! It's a war! Buy more Apple gear to help Apple win the war!
Pathetic.
All of those examples seem much more extreme that the comparatively quiet and friendly Apple advertising.
Honestly, which planet are you coming from.
but this might actually be a "good thing."
It may not be the best move for AMD, but for the buying public it should encourage innovation and competition. Which ultimately benefits everyone.
Don't even kid about it. It's a path that once taken will be very hard to revert for AMD. Before you know it they'll outsource the rest of their fab, then sell their design to someone, and all that will be left, is a patent troll.
Last time when we discussed AMD's poor financial performance, I critized a guy who said we should buy AMD to support them, or the future may be quite grim, with Intel (being de facto complete monopolist on the x86 market) raising prices and stagnating.
When I read THIS article, I gotta say, that fear makes me think more like this guy and I'm suddenly feeling the need to buy AMD chips for the hell of it. I know it's wrong.
I always suspected that if they continue performing badly, IBM could consider purchasing them and entering the market of x86 chips. Both companies have worked together for a long time and share lots of technologies, some fab and many processes and design decisions.
Thing is, I didn't expect AMD to begin falling apart by itself, by selling some of its fab business. If they continue trying to minimize their losses by destroying themselves in this way, soon no one will want to have anything with them at all.
What a sad fate.