Posts by Goat Jam

Credible competitors

Once again thanks to apple we are finally seeing some actual innovation and improvements where before we only had market dominance by an oligarchy of incumbents whose only motivation was to maximize the profits pouring in from their legacy product lines.

We saw the iphone totally shake up the festering smart phone mobile to the point that people now want to, SHOCK, HORROR, actually use the internet on their phones, which was something that manufacturers pushing for years before hand.

Before the iphone came along manufacturers and carriers alike were totally without clue as to why Joe Public had unanimously awarded their efforts with the Epic Fail award and actively avoided their products.

Thank god that BB came along and fixed email on the smartphone and the iphone fixed everything else. Now all the other manufacturers are still trying to catch up but at least they are fucking doing something instead of doing their normal thing of producing any old crap they like and relying on the fact that there is nothing better around for people to buy.

Hopefully the same will happen for tablets. WinTablets have been around for almost as long as mob phones and have been treated with similar disdain by the buying public. Undaunted WinTel just kept on putting out the same old products apparently using the theory that if they keep building it then eventually they will come, right?

It didn't work and now they too are having their arses handed to them by apple.

Whether you use apple products or not, you at least have to give them credit for shaking up the market and putting an end to the endless of flow of uninspired dreck that it has been producing for at least a decade.

I am so sick of the automatic assumption that Windows is always required.

Security: "Many older PCs are running much the same software that they were initially configured with, Windows XP"

Performance: "Employees often try to “work” around performance difficulties"

Cost: "Much of the cost of replacement is in the provisioning and roll-out, application licences and end-user training for new applications"

Every one of these "issues" so helpfully provided by the author can be solved once and for all by removing Windows and going to a FOSS solution.

This never happens though.

Instead, we have legions of MCSE's whose primary career goal is to protect the value of their precious certs and will therefore not even consider that other options are available.

They are like a shuffling zombie army moaning "Windoze . . . . Windoze . . . . must have Windoze . . ." over and over.

I get so sick of it sometimes.

What is it worth?

"It's as good a method as any other"

Surely it is the *only* method.

I once had a GF who was into buying antique cups and saucers (go figure) and she would drag me around the antique shops pointing at items with about half an inch layer of dust on them exclaiming "Wow, look how much that is worth!". I must have explained to her a hundred times that if it was actually worth whatever was written on the price tag then somebody surely would have bought it in the 30 years or so it had apparently been sitting there in the shop.

The same goes for my old man, who is in Real Estate. He sees no end of punters trying to sell their houses for ludicrously inflated prices based on the fact that it is worth an extra 20 grand because they spent 15K putting in new carpet in their favourite shade of purple and they are wondering why it hasn't sold yet. He has to explain to these poor deluded fools that "no, it is not worth what you say, it is worth what somebody else is prepared to pay for it and they don't want to pay $20K extra for that revolting purple carpet"

Paris, because I'd definitely pay for that.

Wouldn't it be nice

Was on Redhat up until Redhat 9 but made the move to Ubuntu when Fedora and RHEL parted ways.

Since then I have come to love deb/apt and hate rpm/yum with a passion. I still have to use it on Centos at work and it blows compared to apt. I can't even set up a simple yum cache FFS.

So, as much as I dislike the direction that ubuntu is moving in these days and I can sense the time to move is approaching, I cannot bring myself to consider moving back to RPM based Fedora under any circumstances.

So, at the moment I am still in wait-and-see mode but if push comes to shove I will be going to vanilla Debian or perhaps Linux Mint.

Sigh

I really want to get something that checks just a few key points

1) It is inexpensive (which rules out apple products)

2) It is open (which rules out apple products)

3) It does not come pre-infected by Microsoft products (which rules out everything else)

4) Has battery life that can't be counted in a single digit (which rules out intel processors)

Why is it so fricking hard for manufacturers to provide such a product? Why does it seem that (apart from apple) not a single company in the world performs any real world usae testing before releasing stuff for sale? There seems to be a rule that says every thing you purchase must include at least one design flaw that makes you ask "WTF drugs were these guys on?"

A case in point, I just purchased a Sony car radio that has a ipod/usb drive "cavity" inside it. It gave me the opportunity to use my old 120Gb ipod that had fallen by the wayside as a storage device for music in my car. I normally don't buy Sony and I sure as hell didn't like the ADD inspired screen and control layout but it was cheapish so I thought WTH and bought it on impulse.

Now, what sort of unimaginative moron would simply rehash a UI that was cumbersome even in the bad old days of CD changers for use in a device that "allows" the user to select from hundreds of thousands of songs? Navigating to a specific Artist/Album can take minutes and there is no way you can do it while driving and even the worst traffic light intersection on my daily commute seems like a blink of an eye whilst I am trying to find Led Zeppelin IV on my head unit.

Honestly , sometimes I think that if apple would announce a car head unit I would buy it on pre-order. At least I'd know it would include a UI designed by a squad of retarded monkeys.

Ummmm, OK

What sort of treatment exactly did the "fans" expect to get from Microsoft?

It's not like they don't have lots of prior form in this regard.

Numpties

"the people who feed the school"

You have to wonder how much money Microsoft provides in the form of "incentives" to the individuals who run the "Moscow Institute Of Open Education" eh?

It seems that the tactic of "If you can't win on your merits then bribe the decision makers" is still very much alive and well in Redmond.

Molyneux needs to give up

He hasn't done anything worthwhile since Populous.

Everything he has done since then has been preceded by monumental amounts of hype and magnificent claims about all manner of ground breaking innovation.

The end result is always completely underwhelming pap.

Black and White anyone?

Ho Hum

The "Cloud" is fundamentally a software solution. Software has never been one of intels strong points. They have built an empire around the x86 processor but a lot of what they do outside of that comfort zone has been mediocre to say the least. Most of their software products have been less than well received.

What importance the actual processor has in a cloud scenario is highly debatable.

I have no idea what they actually bring to the table. Microsoft would on the face of it be a more suitable choice for "Technical advisor".

Ummm

I installed Maverick netbook remix (or whatever it is called today) with unity on my netbook.

Hated it.

It's a dumbed down interface that is only suited to the most basic of users. Sure, have it as an option, I applaud that there are options for every type of user, but for gods sake don't concentrate your efforts there to the detriment of gnome or you *will* lose users.

Fail-tastic

While a PC is running Windows it will only ever be "just another PC" and therefore will only ever be compared on the basis of the length of its feature checklist vs its price. Apart from those crazed yoofs who self describe as "hardcore gamers" nobody could give a rats arse about anything else when purchasing a PC.

What megahurtz is it? It's got "intel inside right? Can I plug my camera in? What about hard-disk RAM then? It has lots right?

Microsoft has done a *great* job of commoditizing Windows PC hardware* to the point that manufacturers have very little ability to differentiate their products. They are simply widget manufacturers who provide a platform on which MS can sell their OS at exorbitant markups while they scramble around on the ground for any crumbs that they can get to supplement their razor thin margins.

* Yes, I know that macs have essentially the same hardware these days but in an upmarket package but when someone buys a mac they are buying into the whole package. I have never heard of anyone buying a mac just for the hardware and then blowing MacOS away in favour of Windows. Parallels/Vmware for compatibility, sure. Bootcamp, ditto.

A Title

How much money do they give to MS each year? Wouldnt it be neat if there were some alternatives that could be considered?

Its funny how even though they are desperate to cut back there are some things that are considered as sacrosant.

Its almost like they have <ahem> other incentives at play eh?

Letters < > Digits

"Whitehurst didn't mention that this waste provides $500bn worth of jobs, and that these also have a multiplicative effect, so it could be a wash."

That is the IT version of the "Broken window fallacy" and it would have done his credibility no favours whatsoever had he have mentioned it.

"The problem, says Whitehurst, is that IT vendors try to predict the future many years out, and design their products for big-bang upgrades far into the future"

He is dead right there. I have been saying much the same thing for years. IT vendors have yet to step out of their glory days (aka the 80s) where every site was a greenfield site and every customer a locked-in income stream.

The needs of the market have matured since then but the entrenched players haven't kept pace.

Confused Aussie Here

WTF are you guys talkin' 'bout?

Is the football league over there claiming copyright on the season fixture list or something equally retarded?

The mind boggles.

Say what?

"a company struggling to regain the position at the vanguard of innovation."

Did they ever really hold that position? Really? Microsoft have been a huge success it's true, but I am struggling to think of anything that has been a true innovation.

This is a list of their successful products that are just copies of other products;

BASIC

MS-DOS

Windows

Word

Excel

SQL server

Exchange server

Internet explorer

Less successful copies include;

xbox

azure

silverlight

Zune

And finally, their truly Innovative products;

MSBob

With Ballmer, failure is inevitable

"his failure to get a tablet product out the door ahead of Apple’s fondle slab, the iPad:"

What? Hasn't Microsoft had The Dream since the late 1990's and has been pushing tablets out via their OEMs for over a decade? It's not that MS didn't get a tablet out before apple, it's that they didn't get a tablet out that wasn't big, hot, heavy with crappy battery life and a laughable excuse for an interface. Consumers stayed away from it in droves and those who bought into the dream ended up just rotating the screen around and using it like it was just another laptop.

Currently, there are no indications that they have any clue how to do tablets any better. Even if they do a cargo cult like copy of the ipad it will still fail because both Microsoft and intel have put way too much emphasis in "familiarity and compatiblity" up to this point and now they are simply incapable of moving into areas that call for an entirely new interface and architecture.

If I was a shareholder I would be getting out of both companies right away.

I don't expect to get an iPad

but I really hope the Cult of Jobs gives the mainstream PC market a good hard rogering.

Without lube.

Until those craven idiots that operate under the Wintel regime collectively grow a pair the entire industry will continue to produce uninspired dreck that targets the lowest common denominator and has very little of interest to anyone other than spreadsheet wielding corporate drones.

Asus created an interesting market (accidentally it would seem) with the original eeepc but it didn't take long for them to succumb to the pressure coming from their Wintel masters who ran a very successful campaign to kneecap that particular market in its infancy in order to stop it eating into their more profitable markets.

They then aborted the Smartbook market in utero.

For Wintel it is not about providing what the customer wants but providing what is best for Wintels bottom line. It is a sign of their arrogance that they believe that they can dictate to their customers in such a way. They have been doing that since the start of the 90's and by now I doubt that they are even capable of operating in any other way.

This is textbook behaviour from companies that operate entrenched monopolies.

Fortunately, this sort of market arrogance does not last forever because there is always someone else who comes along and offers consumers the products that they want that the prevailing monopolist will not (or cannot) provide.

The various OEM's that the Wintel Empire rides on the back of do have a choice but to this point they have been too afraid to break free of the yoke.

Hopefully apple will show them the way and they will finally come to realise that products can succeed without them having to suck on the sour teat of the Wintel monster.

Oh noes!

This is terrible! Years back I vowed that I would never buy another Lexmark printer but this amazing new feature leaves me having to reconsider my stance.

<0.2 nanoseconds later>

OK, I have reconsidered and I'm still not going to buy one of their craptastic printers.