Posts by Ron Christian 214 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2007
OK, so a dying company buys a nearly dead company, inheriting as CEO the very person responsible for "nearly dead", and this is a bold move?
Microsoft seems to be between a rock and a hard place -- everyone else is selling hardware with free software, and that's the opposite of Microsoft's model. So getting into hardware might seem a good move, except this strands all the hardware manufacturers with whom they currently have deals. I wonder how that's going to work out.
"Nope, quite the contrary, they know the corporate market has no option but to swallow whatever comes of microsoft 's ass,"
I have to disagree. Many corporations gave Vista a pass, for instance. Machines that were delivered with Vista were re-imaged with the corporate copy of Windows XP. It was one of the reasons XP has been in the field so long.
"If the product was designed for purpose a utility - designed and available from a non-trusted, non-secure third party, no less - should not be needed. It should have been built-in. A settings choice. An optional manufacturer-supplied component install. A user profile switch."
Moreover, once that mistake was apparent, they had a SECOND OPPORTUNITY to fix it with Windows 8.1.... and chose not to. Were this a boxing match, I'd begin to suspect that Ballmer was throwing the fight.
(A side issue is that no corporation is going to plan to deploy a product that relies on a third-party free (and thus untrusted) utility.)
" I hated the Windows XP start menu, but I didn't go around claiming it was made for touch, or Windows was therefore a flop."
Really REALLY bad example. One setting change would turn off the garish XP look and give you the classic Windows look and feel. Same is true with Windows 7. (All my XP and Win7 machines are running the classic look.) If Win8 had this feature, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Sorry, we have a convertible running Win8, and it doesn't work *well* in either mode. There are things that need touch and things that can't be done via touch, and basic phone-isms (like all metro apps being full screen) that don't make sense on a larger than 5 inch screen. It's clumsy enough to make it a chore even for standard Windows apps, resulting in going back to the Windows XP laptop it was supposed to replace. I don't recall ever being so profoundly disappointed in a computer purchase. Current plan is to upgrade to 8.1 when the update is finally released to mere mortals, and then find a new home for it.
I know, I know, we're all whiners who should just buck up and take whatever Microsoft gives us and LIKE it.
And there was a time when you just had to grit your teeth and work through it. Not true anymore.
"That being said, how many companies would have migrated to Windows 8 anyway? Many are still trying to get to 7, so in Ballmer's defence, going after the consumer space was not a a bad idea."
A reasonable point. The problem is, it appears consumers hated it too. It's not just a business/consumer issue. It's a touch vs traditional PC issue. Come out with a touch-friendly OS, fine. Microsoft REALLY needed to do that. But force non-touch, traditional laptops and desktop PCs to use an inappropriate touch paradigm, only for the sake of forcing an ecosystem? Screw that. If I'm a non-geek and I just bought a conventional laptop, what is this crap?? Double screw that. If I'm the geek that has to help the non-geek try to live with his Windows 8 non-touch laptop? Triple screw that.
Windows 8 is a superb example of a company thinking they can dictate the marketplace, because they always had been able to do it in the past, and finding out it didn't work anymore. Coming out with a touch-oriented interface wasn't the mistake. Again, that was something Microsoft needed to do. Insisting that it be used on a non-touch device, when Microsoft mostly sells software that runs on non-touch devices, was a HUGE mistake.
In one place I worked, our machines would have most of their problems on Thursdays. Different machines, different architectures, different models of storage devices... we couldn't figure it out. This was a raised floor, halon protected computer room with a combination lock on the door.
So, with nothing else to try, one Wednesday I prepared to spend the night in the computer room. Sure enough, about 2:00 AM the cleaning crew came in with a big buffer machine, preparing to run it over the raised tiles.
I chased them out and next day confronted the facilities manager about (a) giving the cleaning crew the combination to a secure room, and (b) letting them bang a floor buffing machine against our disk arrays.
He looked at me like a guy who'd seen his first kangaroo. He couldn't fathom why I wouldn't want the floors polished in the computer room. I finally gave up, got some tools, took the lock apart, and changed the combination.
As I write this, I now realize that I did not pass on the combination when I left the company. Oops.
Yeah, the problem is, the OS is just there to load my applications. I don't need a new OS, and I don't need a new computer just to be able to run a new OS in order to run my existing application. So, no. Sorry. Don't care how long it's been. Mere age is not in and of itself a reason to replace a computer that is still doing the job.
Is it just me, or does this entire argument predicate that the bad guys were *not* aware of these vulnerabilities for YEARS before Microsoft decided to patch them?
Seems to me that the issue also being present in XP means by definition that the issue has existed since 2001. Are we to believe that Microsoft is so much better at finding security defects than the average criminal programmer that exploits found 12 years after release had not yet been found by said criminal? In substantial numbers?
If you believe that, I have a version of Windows 8 that doesn't suck to sell you.
Seriously, the ONLY motivation for this announcement is to scare you into buying another copy of Windows.
Although most of me thinks they're firing the wrong people, a reorg isn't necessarily a bad thing. When you have a problem and you don't know the cause, changing something (anything) and see if the problem changes is a reasonable strategy.
Of course, if you don't know the cause and everyone else in the world does and you refuse to listen to them, whatever you change probably won't end happily, but it'll probably be entertaining for the rest of us.
I can't imagine HP not going with Windows Phone 8. Their biggest partner is Microsoft, which isn't above using its stranglehold to "guide" hardware manufacturers in the right direction. It'll be Win8. And it will fail, of course. But HP will be "in the game", after a fashion.
I bought Win8 when they were offering that special deal at a very low price. Loaded it on a Win7 laptop with a touch screen (since Win7 doesn't really know what to do with a touch interface). It sucked. From what I'm reading 8.1 does not fix the basic issues with the UI. So I'm thinking I'll restore Win7 from the recovery partition and then give the laptop away. I've got other laptops, and it'd bug me that this one has a useless touch screen.
We switched from an overloaded Exchange server to Office 365 and immediately noticed a pronounced delay in mail delivery, up to minutes, accompanied by occasional refusal to recognize user credentials, causing temporary email outages on a random, individual basis. The portion of the company still on Exchange are not seeing these symptoms. Comments?
>> Part of the reason why Win 8 was a initially a damp squib was the lack of touch tablets or PCs on the market which could take advantage of the Metro interface TIFKAM.
Hmm. Well. Perhaps. But speaking as someone who has only ever used it on a hybrid with a touchscreen, I have to say that *most* of the reason why Win 8 was and continues to be a damp squib is that it SUCKS. Even on a touch screen device. I can sorta see how this might be useful on a phone, but laptop or larger it's pants.
But that does not gives you a start menu. It gives you an ugly collection of square blotches of color, which appear to represent applications, with no hierarchical grouping visual clues, that takes up the entire 22 inch screen while showing only a fraction of the choices, having to be scraped back and forth to expose the rest of the blotches. It's a mess.
I'm writing this on Windows 7. When I hit the Windows key, I get a real menu, and I can choose to bring up a new application while leaving my current open windows in place. I have a Windows 8 machine, but haven't touched it in weeks, because a real user workflow does not work on the device. It's probably fine for casual browsing (which I do on my phone anyway, but never mind) but is a definite step backwards for real work.
There's so much that failed here, I don't know where to begin. The start button -- I had a feeling they would just change the graphic rather than change the behavior. As if the graphic was the issue. How condescending.
As I write this, I have nine apps appearing on my 1920 X 1200 screen. If I upgrade this box, I will only be able to effectively display two apps. That's such a total wet-fart fail that I am at a loss for words.
An effective company would fire the person responsible for these decisions. It appears that Microsoft is no longer an effective company.
At this point, it looks like I'll be using Windows 7 until I just can't use it anymore, and then switch to something else. Maybe Chrome or OSX. What a total incredible botch.
We actually have a laptop with a touchscreen that's running Windows 8.0. (Because Windows 7 doesn't do anything reasonable with a touch screen.) Nobody uses it because it's very frustrating and time consuming to use, and some things (like comparing data from multiple apps displayed simultaneously) can't be done at all.
We'll upgrade this appliance to Windows 8.1 because it's free, and then I'll try to find a home for it.
> They forced desktop user to use metro so those same desktop users would know how to use their tablets when they came out.
Exactly. And that didn't even take a great deal of thought. Windows Mobile 6 and earlier was the Desktop (including start button and walking menus) pushed to mobile devices, on the theory that people would gravitate to something they were already used to. The only difference here is that someone said "We tried pushing desktop onto mobile devices; it didn't sell. Let's push the mobile interface onto the desktop that's surely a winner." And of course, all it did was suppress desktop sales.
The Q10 is really tempting. I've been carrying an Android phone for three years. I switched to Android during an extended BES outage. But after three years I still can't type as quickly or as comfortably as I could on my old Tour. And what Blackberry excelled at, better than any iOS, Android or (shudder) Windows phone, is that it is a PHONE first. The Tour excelled as a phone, over and above any Android or iOS based smartphone.
I'm really tempted to switch back to Blackberry. Will have to think about this.
ESPECIALLY since it's an inescapable part of the i-culture that users must swap phones every time an incremental improvement is shat out, or run the risk of not being hip. So what do users do the first time an i-phone comes out that won't fit in their i-car? Replace the car? Wow, if VW can get away with that, they'd be set for life.
> Its all violently annoying to setup but once you are there it is really useful
This is part of the problem I have with the entire concept. It appears to be made for people who don't want to have to fiddle with a complicated A/V setup, but on the other hand, the device itself takes a fair amount of fiddling over a significant amount of time by a knowledgeable individual in order to do its job. It seems to be more for bragging rights than for actual use.
I paid $250 (US) for an early Harmony, and after five weeks it became shelfware. It my communicate with a gazillion devices, but my receiver was not one of them. It was verrrryryyyyyyy slloooowww to do anything, and often did the wrong thing.
I think these remotes work best in households with one alpha geek and one luddite. The alpha geek is necessary to debug and program the durn thing. The luddite must have an unreasoning fear of A/V systems with more than one component. The geek is forever tweaking the Harmony to find some combination of settings that will make the luddite comfortable with turning the TV on and finding something to watch.
Finally, the geek gives up, the Harmony collects dust, and the family goes back to the original remotes. (Try an armchair remote cozy. It at least keeps them all together.)
As many have pointed out, Windows phone users have already been orphaned twice -- Mobile 6 -> Phone 7 -> Phone 8. Phone 9 (or whatever) will most likely need new hardware to run, but will they even retain the API and GUI from Phone 8, or will this be yet another complete departure? As I see it, MSFT is between rock and hard place. If they merely do an incremental upgrade on WP8, they risk furthering the mistake of going to it in the first place. But if they radically depart yet again, they risk losing whatever customer and developer base they still have.
I'm basing this on absolutely nothing, but I envision MSFT engineers coming out with something extremely usable, which management will reject in favor of doubling down on some new funky interface for the sake of differentiation in the marketplace, requiring people to buy yet another device for the questionable experience. And few will.
...Well, except that corporations tended to skip right over Vista, hanging on grimly to XP until Windows 7 was viable. Yes, companies tend to be very conservative in what OS they adopt, to the point where they're routinely a couple of major revisions behind. But in the case of Vista, corporations didn't adopt it because of the perception (largely true) that Vista was pants.
I think what the article is implying is that Win8 is going to be a similar situation -- that it's not a matter of being conservative, it's a matter of Win8 being considered broken.
Sorry, our expectations have been set -- watch what we want, when we want it. Gone are the days where we all huddled around the TV eating our dinner on TV trays and watched whatever is on, holding our bladders for the next commercial break. That is so generation-before-last. It's way too late to train users to go back to that paradigm.
It should have been apparent that video on demand would increase network usage, but the attempts to build out for that have been inadequate. A possible compromise might be to spool selected content to the device to be viewed later, if the DRM details could be worked out. But broadcast TV? The time has passed.
There was an incident like that written up in Slashdot awhile back. The guy took his PC to a PC shop (admittedly not a cop shop) and complained that all this porn had been loaded on it. Was promptly arrested on child porn charges. It probably depends on the local laws and specific circumstances, but generally, bringing in the police may not solve your problem.
I'd be tempted to wave goodby to all my stuff and completely scrub the disk. Or maybe microwave it for a few minutes and buy a new one.
> The ransomware sports logos of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the German Society for the Prosecution of Copyright Infringement (GVU) to lend an air of authenticity to proceedings.
So... there's kiddie porn on your computer, and you're supposed to believe that the government is concerned about copyright infringement?
I loved my Blackberry, and I'd love to go back to it. But it's not the platform that I abandoned when I went to Android -- it was the BES server, administration of which was outsourced a few years ago, resulting in a service that had been dead nuts reliable becoming ... less so. A lot less. Now, I have the opportunity to go back to Blackberry, and the phones are very attractive, but I no longer trust the service or the people managing it. So I wish RIM the best, but I'll stick to Android, thanks.
> Unlike computer games, you don't stay standing up and go 'ouch' if you get hit by 9mm even with body armour.
Um, no, not really. Contrary to what is commonly seen in movies, the impact of a pistol round doesn't really throw people back onto the ground. The force absorbed by the target is identical to the force absorbed by the shooter as recoil, according to this guy named Newton. So if you're not knocked on your ass, the person you're shooting at is unlikely to be, either.
>> "(I don't know if its particularly common but the Five-seveN uses the same round as the P90 which is in use already with the US military at least)."
> Where and by whom? [citation needed!]
From the wiki:
The P90 is currently in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations, such as Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Malaysia, Poland, and the United States. In the United States, the P90 is in use with over 200 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service. The standard selective fire P90 is restricted to military and law enforcement customers, but since 2005, a semi-automatic carbine version has been offered to civilian shooters as the PS90.
The Five-seven [pistol] is currently in service with military and police forces in over 40 nations, such as Canada, France, Greece, India, Poland, Spain, and the United States. In the United States, the Five-seven is in use with numerous law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service. In the years since the pistol's introduction to the civilian market in the United States, it has also become increasingly popular with civilian shooters.
> Mainly because Glocks have a hell of a kick and a reputation for the exit chute jamming when least convenient.
So... hang on... There might be a bit more felt recoil, the Glock being a slightly lighter firearm than the Sig, but "hell of a kick" doesn't scan, either for the Glock 17/19 or pretty much any firearm in 9mm. It's not that powerful a round.
Moreover, Glocks have a pretty good reputation for reliability. I have a Glock 21 (.45 ACP) that would not feed reliably when I got it, but eventually found out the previous owner had mucked with it. After fixing what he'd done, it could shoot boxes of ammo without one FTF (failure to feed). I'm not sure I believe the stories that you can kick them around in the dirt and freeze them in a block of ice and they'll still fire, but they're considered reasonably reliable.
> I think the only place I've seen a Desert Eagle is coming out of Robocop's leg- the film's prop department stuck some extra metal on the end and thought it would appeal to teenage lads and Zmodem.
Um, no, it was a Beretta 93R in 9mm, although the part about extra metal on the end is probably correct. As I recall, it fired in 3 round bursts, which is probably not a good idea with any of the calibers for which the DE is chambered.
The Desert Eagle is a more massive handgun. There are versions with a barrel that long, but they don't look the same.
> The film, like the rest of the 1980s Verhoven classics, is being remade this year- wonder what they'll give Cyborg Murphy this time?
I did not recognize the handgun in the remake of Total Recall. (Much better film than the original, BTW.) I suspect it was created for the film. I suspect the same will be true for the new Robocop. (A film I plan to miss.)
> And Arnie's laser sight in The Terminator required a cable from the sight to a battery on his belt; again just a prop.
This is correct. Of course, these days, laser sights are common and relatively cheap.
I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. As previously mentioned, the DE is routinely chambered in .357 mag, .44 Mag, and (rarely) .50 AE. I own a Ruger Super Blackhawk (single action wild west revolver) in .44 Mag, and shoot it regularly (although after 18 rounds or so, I'm done with it for that visit). The gun is uncomfortable to shoot and the noise and kick are prodigious. On the other hand, it'll knock over a rather large steel plate at 25 yards where my 9mm will only go "tink".
Getting to the point: I rented a DE in .44 Mag one time, and was somewhat surprised at how much more comfortable it was to shoot than the Blackhawk, partly because of the increased mass and partly because of the gas operation. I wouldn't consider it to be something someone shoots "just once" and I don't see any real swaggering potential, to be perfectly honest. It's a massive gun, but that's because it shoots a high powered round.
.357 and .44 Mag are fairly common on the range in the US, and .357 Mag in particular is considered the "top stopper" for a defense round. .44 Mag is not generally considered a common defense round, being rather unmanageable in a tactical situation, but .44 Special (same slug, less powder) is.
...so I'm a little puzzled by this "desperately trying to compensate" thing. Unless one's experience with firearms was limited to the world of Ian Fleming, where .25 ACP is considered an effective defense round and .32 a top stopper.
Now, the .50 AE is a bit ridiculous. But the .50 AE is not considered a round for personal defense even in the movies.
No supported version of flash on any model of android or ios tablet. Way too many websites still using flash. Flash works on all netbooks. Therefore, tablets are not a substitute for netbooks even for casual browsing.
Wife recently got a Kindle Fire HD. Found that the browsing capabilities are largely useless, as everything she was trying to do required flash, which the Fire HD does not support. All she can do is read books with it, and she could already to that with her original Kindle. Total fail.
It's not exactly like that. Often it's: CIO of company A outsources to company B, collects bonus based on estimated savings, immediately resigns, new CIO assumes position, realize he's totally screwed. The outsource is a fiasco, customers are complaining, and the cost to get out of the contract and hire and train a new set of workers is prohibitive. In the meantime, investors are asking "where are our savings?" and when the situation is explained to them, they retort "the previous CIO assured us that this would make us loads of cash. You must not be doing it right." New CIO looks like an idiot through no fault of his own.
Although management covered it up, it was already looking like the outsource had destroyed decades of experience and competence at my company and we were starting to fail badly by the time the CIO quit. When the company tried to promote someone into the position, there were no takers. A year later, the position is still not filled.
The point being, this is a situation where one person or a very few people in the company can lead an initiative to do something profoundly stupid that ultimately wrecks the company. And then, get out before the fall. It's not necessarily the company's fault.
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