Gee....

I would have thought poor job prospects for young people would be the cause. I am going to guess if a young woman could have a job making $600 per week they would sooner that then prostitution, but who the heck can live working part time making $200 per week. Of course the true $ / week would depend on where they live, because $600 a week in New York city wouldn't cut it.

When politicians talk out their @$$ I cannot help but think:

Ignore the man behind the curtain, I am the great and wonderful politician.

It seems most politicians live in the land of oz where the streets are paved with gold.

Lol, MS is right...

I do recall them and their crappy people centric idea. Too bad they have it wrong and Apple has it right. Facebook should be people centric, but they should have been CONTENT CENTRIC like iTunes. As near as I can tell MS has done very little to beat iTunes (a huge fail, in fact EPIC FAIL would be better to say). Media Center was promising, but they let it fizzle, now it is far too late for Media Center.

Lol, we gotta beat google ads, lol, we gotta beat facebook, lol you suck MS, you should have focused on beating Apple, now Apple is eating your cake and I give them an ingredient every time I buy an iTune card. I have spent hundred of dollars on iTunes cards and not one nickel on a Media Center card, what an epic fail seeing I am and always was a Windows kinda guy.

Distrust or...

brains enough to know that so long as organizations like Sony, banks, US gov, Can. Gov, etc. get hacked and things Iike DDOS, botnets, etc. exist it makes absolutely no sense to put your business in a cloud on the Internet.

I got rid of previous hosting company because email went down and was down for days with no response from their support, I could just imagine having the entire company in a cloud.

It's an f-n alpha OS people....

Windows 8 or should we call it Tiles 0.7, soon to be Tiles 0.8 and maybe 0.9, or who knows maybe Tiles 0.2, but it sure as hell ain't Tiles 1.0

So we can resize tiles now and they are allowing for lower resolution, enough said.

Walk Ballmer, it could only get better!

At LucasNorth...

really, it's a story and you had to s#!+ on the guy. It is not journalism but someone sharing a story, and I for one appreciated it. I also appreciate reading the reader comments, I guess I am a commentard, oh well! It is not like he was informing us on current events, he was sharing a part of his life with us and you get all bent up over it? Maybe you are not as harassed as much as him, and you should show a little compassion as I can relate and swear words are appropriate, as it is how he feels. This is "The Register" where geeks share news and STORIES.

I used to have techies...

that would hit me up as I 'used to be' their mentor when I did MS Canada support. In fact I had one tech that had the nerve to follow me out to parking lot when I got laid off, he wanted to get my number to call me at home? I stopped using messenger and hotmail for this very reason. A neighbour or old person with a simple problem is one thing, but a tech wanting to know how to setup DNS, DHCP, and AD is way way out there. Or help setting up their website, from scratch ain't help. Now I do IT for a construction company and tell people I build scaffold and don't know Windows XP or Server 2003, I lie as I stopped doing MS support after Win2k and ME and make out that is when I stopped keeping up on computers, but i guess my overclocked phenom X6 would beg to differ ;)

I have been blacklisted before....

as I can't be on top of things all the time, and have twice had client PCs with virus/botnet get me blacklisted. Clean the virus/botnet off and submitted to be delisted and within no time back to emailing. The slight headache it caused was nothing compared to the headache of spam and other crap filling up my users' inboxes. Sure it is painful/impossible to create an inhouse outgoing mail server on my ip address because of anti-spam, but once again not painful enough to have no anti-spam at me end. As well, it was nice to have the email blocked at the other end when the PCs were infected, as it would have been more of an embarrassment having our customers getting lots of crap email from our PCs (that and both time it tipped me off that a PC on my network had a virus/botnet running on it).

Thanks spamhaus, spamassassin, and the other anti-spam I have layered on my incoming server to stop the crap coming in.

Can someone let me know when Win8 is out of Alpha and into Beta...

because I got sick of waiting on MS when Media Center did absolutely nothing to push iTunes off MS's desktop.

I had a welder, that right a welder and not even an office worker, tell me the programs on the tile-thingy are weak. His exact words, that is pretty sad. I guess they will walk monkey boy when they are at the penny stock level.

More than Canada...

As I recall our "so called" privacy commissioner did nothing and let them walk. What a sell out, I guess we could call her the privacy de-missioner!!! I have to wonder if Google isn't feeding CSIS or CSEC, or likely both, data and have our government look the other way. I say this because when I worked MS Canada phone support we were not allowed to use the remote tools to connect and fix people's pc, and I was told it was because of privacy laws here.

This makes absolutely no sense to me because Canada has more stringent privacy laws which is why we are not allowed to bring spy equipment back from Florida. Maybe next time I go to Florida I could bring some back and say it is all good with our privacy de-missioner, maybe if I start my own corporation it would be OK then?

aggressive series of product launches...

Ya, waiting in the long line at the Microsoft Store in Ottawa, Canada, wait, there is no MS store in Ottawa! Lol, we have multiple Apple stores. Or was I at Future Shop in line waiting to get a Surface, oh wait they didn't have them in store for launch. Exactly what aggressive product launches are they talking about??? If that is aggressive then an Apple launch must be hyper-super-duper-over-the-top-aggressive.

I would like to know the stats, iTunes versus (lol) Media Center. What percentage of users for both on Windows? I feel that single statistic is why Balmer should have been pushed off the top of MS a long, long, long time ago. Allowing Apple to scoop up users on their own platform, so different then the MS of yesteryear.

baked in facebook and crappy maps...

iOS 6 feels desperate to me. Screwing up maps on a smart-phone seems suicidal, as it is one of the best features of a smart-phone. They gotta correct this asap, as I do not see how any decent techie could recommend a smart-phone with crappy maps.

"I don't think we kept up with the innovation"...

unless innovation is: buying up companies, raping the profits, offshoring the work to create even more profit, and leaving behind a dead carcass. At which point they were extremely innovative!

Land of the Free...

now I know what they mean by "you owe me a keyboard".

If DotCOM wins does he get put on the list with Canada? If so, I feel bad for him, because I haven't slept since they put us on that list ;)

Most of what the world uses is tech developed in the USA and much of it sold by US companies. Maybe they shouldn't have put CD and DVD players in every PC making it so easy that even grandma can copy/rip a CD/DVD? Oh ya, and after all that they put Blueray players in PCs??? The way I see it is that some US companies screwed over some other US companies to make a buck, and that is who should be on a list.

I like the Apple buy MS...

Buy MS, bury Windows, close Microsft Way, absorb the IP, sell off X-Box / Games to Sony for a sweet content deal that keeps filling iTunes for years to come. Oh ya, and the Office profits are all theirs:)

This says to me...

that MS is not willing to stand behind their products. Instead of building something rock solid to withstand lawsuits, they have just given up and dismissed lawsuits.

Aren't they late to the party...

What will run under it? All the IP (Nortel, Motorolla, etc.) all bought up? FB pays for all the smartphone IP how could they do it affordably compared to a Google, MS or iPhone? Android based, with Google wanting all the Mobile Ad Money to go with all their Desktop Ad Money. They would be crazy to go Android as they would be at mercy of competitor, much like Novel Office on MS and MS screwing them every chance they had. They fork Android and risk it not running apps designed for Android, and I am sure that would piss a lot of people off.

This sounds desperate, same as their wanting to buy Opera!

God forbid...

anyone take that bubble money out of the US of A, that's not how the scam works! I bet he ain't leaving to dodge taxes, he is leaving because he is done blowing the bubble and the whole thing sickens him.

from Fred Flinstones link...

“Goldman Sachs will sell as much as 50%, up from 23% previously. Tiger Global will sell up to 50% of its stake. Previously it planned to sell 7%.”

Some sheppards looking for sheeple to fleece?

Wow, is wild how they just never stop screwing people, and how the US system is so obviously corrupt to let this happen over and over and over and over again. I guess we will have to all wait and see, seems like a bubble to me, and Mark and his pals will likely walk off with a lot of people's hard earned money.

Oh No! We're on a list...

Oh wait, it is a US Gov. list, influenced by US Corps.

Lol, we don't care, Canadians truly don't care!

Now don't get me wrong, we care about our neighours to the south, just not their Gov. and Corps.

What, are they going to take Google and Facebook from us, lol, go ahead please do.

And the Canadian Privacy Commissioner will likely.....

let them walk as she did with street view. I sure would like to know her credentials? Mine are, Shane Kent, Lead Mentor MS's largest Canadian call center group 1996-2001. Did support for Windows and the addons, most notably Internet Explorer. I supported the General Public on a grand scale, what did she do? And I never bought a software engineer screwed up from a company that specializes in data analysis, as how did they not see the extra data? Google "is evil" and should be blocked from doing business in Canada for violating privacy. This is not to say MS is a shining star that never does wrong, but Google is evil that claims do no evil.

If the Canadian Privacy Commisioner does nothing, I would have to say it is time for a new privacy commisioner.

I thought sopa was....

watch this hand (sopa) while the other (acta) robs you.

WTF...

F-n US gov, it is plenty fine that for decades Canadians go to Vegas to gamble?

Notice I said US Gov, and not USA as that would imply I hate the country. Love the country and the people, just can't stand their government.

This goes with the soft wood lumber dispute, and scream protectionism. Well, our soft wood lumber is now going east, and it would appear that more and more of our trade will go east. Canada will continue to benefit more and more going to China, will the USA?

Checklist...

MS, US gov, Nortel, Canadian gov, etc, etc, etc. hacked.

Anonomous, Lolzsec, Eastern Europe, China, etc, etc, etc. hacking.

The Internet right now is a whitewash!

The words private and cloud should not be put together.

So #1 on the checklist should be, do you care if other people get your info/data, and if the answer is yes then skip the cloud.

You know it seems to me....

our governments and ISPs should be more concerned with being hacked and less concerned with protecting the USA's media (or Canadian media for what it is worth). It wasn't that long ago the Canadian Finance department was hacked, and then I read of the 10 year Nortel hack. Last year I had crap hitting my ports from China, and Bell Canada did nothing to stop it, not even hey we notice weird activity in an email notification.

How about the government and ISPs do a better job of protecting us before they worry about protecting Corps.

MS better hope...

the sales people sell it properly, as I can see it now, "but the guy in the store told me it would run all my old stuff." People are going to be really pissed off they get a WOA, screw around with it for a week only to have a real tech tell them it will never work. This could be a Vista repeat with lots of FUD tossed around. I pulled my nVidia card switched to ATI and had little difficulty with Vista after that, where I seen lots of people abandon Vista completely.

Push email...

one more patent that should have never seen the light of day! Did Motorola PAY to invent email? These s#!+ patents based around a tech not belonging to the patent holder should all be thrown away. Did Motorola, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, etc. PAY to invent the Internet? NO, it was for the most part on tax payer dollars. So all Internet related patents (IP, TCP, UDP, HTTP, SMTP, POP, etc.) and services relying on internet tech, should all be thrown out, otherwise these tech companies can reimberse us tax payers for the development of internet technologies. And reimberse us on todays value and not the $ from back then.

This sounds very dangerous...

Most end users don't RTFM, and so if they try to repair themselves and select Reset instead of Refresh all is lost. Personal data gone! And they can prompt people all they want, they will click Next, Next, Yes, Finish without even reading. Not all, but a lot of end users.

I used to nail some end users with this when I mentored in call center:

You want to format. Yes.

Do you have any data on your computer. No.

Do you know what data is. No

Then I would point out that they told me they have no data but don't know what data is. More often then not they had data and did not realize formatting was deleting everything and thought it was just Windows. Because some person at their work place told them, your PC is slow just format and reinstall Windows, bad advice! What if the PC is faulting and you run even a repair setup on a hardware faulting PC? Bye bye file system maybe? Final nail in coffin of a dying hard drive?

End users should be encouraged to call a real tech, get their stuff backed up off PC using bootable DVD and thumb drive. Then have the tech diagnose their PC and perform the appropriate operations. One of those, if the video card, cpu, or power suppy fan isn't spinning, then a reinstall is not going to fix it!

maybe his first order of business could be...

to let Windows die, he let DOS die and now it is time for Windows. Not to say they stop making OSs, just no more Windows and make something new. Looking at Windows 8, maybe they could

call it Tiles instead of Windows. Drop everything that was Windows, that being USER, GDI, Explorer, CMD Console, Iexplore, Kernel, etc. and start fresh. And ship it with VM'd Windows XP tweaked for VM. Much the same as they VM'd DOS on Win9x.

And when making this OS, I would like one that doesn't have a stupid number of files. DIR /S from within my WINDOWS 7 directory and I get over 91 thousand files and 62 thousand directories. 62 thousand directories for 91 thousand files, who makes this crap? I remember Win95 early days, a handful of directories and could do a DIR on DLLs in SYSTEM folder and manage down a list of files looking for older dated files (fixing DLL hell). Modular is great, but this is ridiculous, we got gigabytes of RAM, why do we need a bunch of killobyte and megabyte files?

I seen this and envisioned...

two people jump from a plane and only one chute with them. Then they fall through the air in a death spiral fighting over the chute. Shouldn't they part ways and each partner with a company smart enough to bring an extra chute?

and I guess we are left to believe...

that US companies and government don't hack anyone? The country where bankers/investors/etc blow their customer's savings, draw large salaries/bonuses, and then get the government to screws over the general public to clean up their mess. I would not be the least bit surprised if more hacking comes out of the US than China and Russia combined.

I got one...

for $270 Canadian and got free $30 sheild. For the price it is great. I am happy with the functionality, and I can wait for updates. Not a BB user so could care less about messenger. I got PC for email, so could care less about that as well. It is my first QNX device and I guess more of a toy than anything. But I would assume there are a lot of users who don't feel the same, as the 2.0 was supposed to be out shortly (according to crackberry forums) and I would say next year is not shortly.

Why not...

offshore the position. HP is good at that. Off shore the manufacturing, support, programming, design, etc, so why not the CEO as well. Could hire a thousand CEOs for the cost of one in the US.

I think this should be all about Java...

and nothing about Google or Oracle or Patents. What was the main idea behind Java, platform independence... And to me that would make Oracle bad for trying to tie Java down, and Google should be allowed to walk. As much as I am not a big fan of Google, they should be allowed to walk away with Java in their pocket, as should anyone or anything.

Java is a great tech, set it free Oracle, and let it fly.

Robble, robble...

She can say iGotHad

At A.C.

ETs were here, but they converted themselves to light to travel at the speed of light and got absorbed by the blackness around us. No proof to be had, RIP ET.

Someone should patent...

make computing device run faster and/or easier to use. One patent to rule them all, lol.

Config and autoexec...

A little late to the party weren't they. The patent should have been filed obsolete. And what if msdos.sys had changed, after all it is the only configuration file required for Win9x to boot?

P.S. to my comment

MSDOS.SYS is the only one of the "DOS files" required for Win9x to boot. Binary in old DOS and configuration file in Win95 and higher.

Or is it...

Their logo and name are overvalued?

so she is...

not a bad person, just an incompetent boss? Nice defense, fits in with Google's it was one rogue engineer and we didn't realize we were collecting excess data ALL OVER THE WORLD. She should go down regardless of her BS defense. Utter slime, she should do time in a sewer not a prison.

I would think...

a reboot option stating no modular nightmare piece of s#!t Internet would be better. Just think, you could iWork without crap hitting ports in the background.

Seeing it is an ass, why not...

Booty, as in show me your booty.

Phase 3...

is MS plugging the security leaks caused by all the rushed programming in Phase 1 and 2. Then Phase 4 will be to restore the performance stripped away in Phase 3.

RE: Embarrasing

Embarassing was the Ultimate Extras for Computer "Enthusiast". Don't know about the rest of you, but moving wallpaper and the tinker game? That one thing alone goes to show how far off base MS really is!

"nuclear power is far and away the safest form of energy generation.."

I grew up between Pickering and Darlington (Ontario, Canada) and I was taught this (safe, etc.) growing up. And I was very pro Nuclear Power. But then I watched a documentary that points out what is driving the power plants (other side of the coin). The mining is nasty nasty nasty. Watch "Uranium" at www.nfb.ca it is an eye opener, the videos are free to watch.

RE: Windows 3, 3.11, 95, 98 and ME were just GUI front-ends to DOS

Win 3X in standard mode is a GUI for DOS. Standard mode is a VCPI client, otherwise it runs as a DPMI server. Non standard mode have 32 disk access, and later vfat 32 bit file access. Windows 95 could use dos mode disk access, but for the most part it used DOS as a spring board and not just a pretty face for DOS. Each version of Windows trapped more of DOS and emulated LPT, COM, etc. through Windows drivers.

Much more than a GUI. Non-DOS drivers, file and memory management, and virtualized/emulated DOS environment.