More Microsoft Bashing....
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Yes, but it takes a lot more energy to get a larger mass moving from a standstill..... onwards and upwards...
Yeah, but it also takes a lot of energy to slow down or stop a behemoth. Even all the heat on slashdot doesn't dissipate enough energy to stop Microsoft. :) Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power Eric Hoffer The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. Eric Hoffer
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Michael A. Barnhart wrote: or even the 25mhz 386 I had 10 years ago (or was that still the 286?) Ten years ago we already had P-133, time really flies, doesn't it? http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/80586/Intel-Pentium%20133%20-%20A80502133%20or%20A80502-133.html[^]
I remember my and my brother had a 486 going as our first computer for ourselves (parents had some older 286 machines, I think). It was decent, no video card, but it could play all of our DOS games, I believe. Man, when my dad brought home a P-133 from work, whew! that thing was blazing! I kept that thing running until games started requiring more than a P133. I ended up buying an AMD 800mhz, which worked well until my new machine, a P4 2.8 w/hyper threading, put all my previous machines to shame. :-) Judging by my machines' incremental improvements, I'd say my next machine will be a P7 10Ghz with Super-Dee-Duper Threadleconundrum, Octal Core Processor. ;)
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Conversation With a Muslim Judah Himango
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Wow, great, another "Microsoft is dead/dying/will-die article. For all Longhorn's delays, you'd think Apple could take some market share, or Linux pound them in the server arena. And wasn't this year supposed to be "the year of the Linux desktop"? Yeah, come to think of it, last year was too. And the year before. Yet this is the first year the Linux server share has actually declined in growth. And while Apple has released some great operating system service packs and charged money for them, I still see everyone running Windows. The whole "mind share" idea is right, you get people hooked on Windows and they'll never leave. There's no way I could ever pull, say, my parents for instance, from an operating system that doesn't have a start button, internet explorer, outlook, & office. Sure there are alternatives in all areas, but that requires learning something new, and when combined with multiple new software packages, the average Joe will be dying to run the familiar old XP, with IE and Office. Frankly, most of all this, I just don't like the zealotry, you know, the kind you find on Slashdot. These people[^] whose moral compass defines commercial software as evil, and Richard M. Stallman as a kind of messiah, the GPL as Scripture, and anything in dissent of the Linux-Stallman-GPL trinity gets flamed to high heaven and moderated out of the discussion, akin to medieval heresy. Take Sun, for example. They've opened Java, open-sourced Solaris and put it under an OSI-approved software license. Yet just the other day, I (a C#/.NET guy) was defending Java from an onslaught of "Not free enough! Not GPL compatible! Stallman warned us of the Java trap!" slew of nonsense. Even today, go look at Slashdot's frontpage story, where Linux frontman Eric S. Raymond gets slammed for disagreeing with the GPL part of the trinity. It is lunacy that morality be measured against a software license! How pathetic the zealotry really is; it's a total turnoff for someone who's interested in technology rather than idealogies based on software licenses.
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Judah Himango wrote: Yet this is the first year the Linux server share has actually declined. Sorry to be difficult but it was a decline in rate of growth, not of level. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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Must have been the 386...the max MHz that 286's went up to was 20, if I recall correctly. I remember when I upgraded my 20Mhz 286 ALR FlexNode to a Northgate 25Mhz 386. Man, did it fly! onwards and upwards...
I remember the salesman trying to talk me out of buying a 486 50Mhz because he didn't think I needed anything so powerful.
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Judah Himango wrote: Yet this is the first year the Linux server share has actually declined. Sorry to be difficult but it was a decline in rate of growth, not of level. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
Hah, my mistake then, I'll modify my post.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Conversation With a Muslim Judah Himango
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Momentum. It all boils down to momentum. Google has it. Sony has it. Apple has it pouring out of its orifices, Microsoft though. . .not so much Momentum = mass x velocity. While Microsoft may not be pumping out service releases as fast as Apple, it's way, way bigger. cheers, Chris Maunder
Your definition of momentum is right. However momentum is being used wrongly in the statement. Microsoft's momentum means that it is not flexible to change direction. Due to beauracracy etc any large company becomes less flexible. Imagine if at CP to create a new emoticon it had to be approved by various sub-committees and took a few months. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
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I don't think all is well within Microsoft. I sense a lot of internal struggle going on, as Microsoft tries to restructure itself to meet the challenges of Linux, Google, Yahoo and the rest. The company has got a little stodgy as most large corporate institutions tend to do. However there are a lot of smart people still working there and I'd expect Microsoft to pull themselves out of the mire. If I was Bill Gates, I'd break the company up into seperate self-controlling entities. Windows, Office, MSN, Developer Tools, Gaming etc. That would give each team a chance to break free of the corporate structure and show us what they can really do. The divisions would then have to survive on their own merit and not be propped up by each other. Cutting a lot of corporate fat would help speed up product development and release. Michael CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
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I agree that, with all of those people out there, they are moving like their feet are in the mud. A bigger issue, in my mind, is that Win2003 is very good, and very stable, and very mature. What new features are people waiting on so badly? Searchable file system? Got it already (MSIndexServer, Google Desktop Search, MSN Desktop Search). Call a web service? What percentage of users need to do this? Software developers already have toolboxes bursting with code to call web services. A new UI? How many people struggled with the change from W2K/98 to XP? The PlaySchool look. Now we need to retrain again for yet another UI. So, to summarize, I think that OS that people are using TODAY (W2K,W2K3,XP) has been more than adequate for the last couple of years and there is not going to be a rush to upgrade, nor will there be compelling reasons to do so until the OS's currently in use reach their end of life. This means that the only revenue MS will get on Longhorn is from factory pre-installs. My $.02, FWIW. onwards and upwards...
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Momentum. It all boils down to momentum. Google has it. Sony has it. Apple has it pouring out of its orifices, Microsoft though. . .not so much Momentum = mass x velocity. While Microsoft may not be pumping out service releases as fast as Apple, it's way, way bigger. cheers, Chris Maunder
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:laugh: Probably by some Linux zealot who felt his views threatened by reality. Hopefully it wasn't our friendly outlaw programmer. :-)
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. I'm currently blogging about: Conversation With a Muslim Judah Himango
friendly? :)
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Momentum. It all boils down to momentum. Google has it. Sony has it. Apple has it pouring out of its orifices, Microsoft though. . .not so much Momentum = mass x velocity. While Microsoft may not be pumping out service releases as fast as Apple, it's way, way bigger. cheers, Chris Maunder
Show-off physics major. :-D
Software Zen:
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Your definition of momentum is right. However momentum is being used wrongly in the statement. Microsoft's momentum means that it is not flexible to change direction. Due to beauracracy etc any large company becomes less flexible. Imagine if at CP to create a new emoticon it had to be approved by various sub-committees and took a few months. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
Ooh! Ooh! Dueling physicists! ColinDavies wrote: Microsoft's momentum inertia means that it is not flexible to change direction Mr. Newton, anyone? :laugh:
Software Zen:
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Ooh! Ooh! Dueling physicists! ColinDavies wrote: Microsoft's momentum inertia means that it is not flexible to change direction Mr. Newton, anyone? :laugh:
Software Zen:
delete this;Since momentum is a conservative property, Colin has the right of it. It's also a vector quantity, so not only is it difficult to slow or accelerate, but equally difficult to change its direction. Look for more of the same from our favorite behemoth.:-D "...putting all your eggs in one basket along with your bowling ball and gym clothes only gets you scrambled eggs and an extra laundry day... " - Jeffry J. Brickley
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I find this kind of funny. A friend of mine who hates "M$" sent this to me. I find it funny how all these companies and people are so focused on taking down Microsoft. I like Mac's, UNIX and Windows. I also get a kick out of people who love to bash "M$". I find it amusing. :laugh: http://applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/dont_look_now_but_the_coroner_is_measuring_microsoft_for_a_black_suit/
There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. We shouldn't assume something's debugged just because everyone in the whole world has access to the source code.
Remove the word Microsoft and this article could be about any other company the writer happens to dislike. What's so absurd, and why the author will never run a successful company, is that he's openly advocating "when the going gets tough, give up." (It's actually worse than that since, for Microsoft, "the going" simply hasn't gotten tough by any measure except in the tiny minds of delusional critics.) (The silliest part is that the author is passing judgement on an operating system that hasn't even gone alpha, let alone beta, and is at least a year out. I wouldn't be surprised if he just took an article about XP from late 1999, changed a few words and republished it.) (This is more than a bit like the product manager who finds a bug in a pre-alpha release and proclaims that the engineers are all idiots, the project should be cancelled and a rewrite outsourced. True story. Guess who's no longer involved in the project.) [Edit: For those who are curious, a year or so ago, I read an article identical in tone concerning Boeing. After regrouping, Boeing is now on a serious rebound.] Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke
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Your definition of momentum is right. However momentum is being used wrongly in the statement. Microsoft's momentum means that it is not flexible to change direction. Due to beauracracy etc any large company becomes less flexible. Imagine if at CP to create a new emoticon it had to be approved by various sub-committees and took a few months. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
The argument was that Microsoft has no momentum in growth/new releases/rabid fan base/whatever, and that Apple has tons of it. Angular momentum still depends on mass, but to stretch the analogy Apple is small in mass (and hence momentum) so, as you seemingly imply, is able to change it's direction of motion faster than Microsoft. If forced to change Microsoft, to really push things, will have a bigger moment than Apple. cheers, Chris Maunder
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Your definition of momentum is right. However momentum is being used wrongly in the statement. Microsoft's momentum means that it is not flexible to change direction. Due to beauracracy etc any large company becomes less flexible. Imagine if at CP to create a new emoticon it had to be approved by various sub-committees and took a few months. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
ColinDavies wrote: Microsoft's momentum means that it is not flexible to change direction. Due to beauracracy etc any large company becomes less flexible. Actually, I think Microsoft continues to show extraordinary flexibility. The whole .NET thing has been a gigantic change. If I was to criticise Microsoft, it would be for changing too rapidly to really design things well and work out the bugs. But that is simply my preference as a consumer. I couldn't argue that Microsoft's actual strategy has been less than a stunning success commercially. John Carson "The English language, complete with irony, satire, and sarcasm, has survived for centuries wihout smileys. Only the new crop of modern computer geeks finds it impossible to detect a joke that is not Clearly Labelled as such." Ray Shea
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I find XP's UI repulsive and "The PlaySchool look" is a perfect description of it ! On every XP machine I have dealt with I immediately change to the "classic" theme and add my own color preferences.
So by your own admission you haven't actually worked with it? It takes a day and then you start to notice the improvements: faster identification of items, tasks, commands and purpose throughout the operating system. Did you think they changed the UI on a marketing whim?
Ðavid Wulff Audioscrobbler :: flickr Die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen (QT)
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So by your own admission you haven't actually worked with it? It takes a day and then you start to notice the improvements: faster identification of items, tasks, commands and purpose throughout the operating system. Did you think they changed the UI on a marketing whim?
Ðavid Wulff Audioscrobbler :: flickr Die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen (QT)
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I tried it when I first got a machine with XP on it and even with a color theme change I didn't like it. And yes, I DID think they changed it on a marketing whim.
Well the first part is up to you. I have seen all the die hard XP-theme haters I've worked with convert after giving a real try, you are obviously different. As to the second. it certainly wasn't done on a marketing whim. There is loads of information on the Microsoft Research site about inductive UIs if you want to learn more, and there was a lot of information going about at the time of its release.
Ðavid Wulff Audioscrobbler :: flickr Die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen (QT)