Apple plans to crank up the anti-Vista rhetoric at its international chain of retail stores later this week, the latest move in a broader bid by the Mac maker to undermine the new operating system release from rival Microsoft. The campaign, set to get underway this Saturday, will include new store displays and employee t-shirts gently mocking Vista as little more than a washed-up attempt at a modern operating system, those familiar with the matter say. In a multi-page training manual made available through the company's internal retail system this week, Apple challenged its employees to learn and tout the Mac's many existing advantages over Vista-equipped Windows PCs.
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Member since:2005-07-02
Member since:2005-11-10
If Windows was secure, it would still have the registry, stil require re-installing every six-months/year, still cost too much, still have too many popup-bubbles and prompts, still have abusive, intrusive, unwanted third party software and still be hell bent on not being interoperable with anything else. If Windows was secure, I might not have moved to a Mac so quickly, but Leopard compared to Vista would have sold me straight away.
Member since:2005-08-11
"stil require re-installing every six-months/year"
Man, must be a long time since you used Windows, you haven't had to do that since Win2k.
"still be hell bent on not being interoperable with anything else"
Are you still living in 1992? Come on, interoperability between platforms have never been higher. You have Services for Unix (Free) which give NFS and standard unix tools, you have Active Directory (LDAP, and comes free with Win2k server and up) MSDSS allows Netware and Windows boxes to synchronise user info and accounts, and supports 2-way synchronization. Samba and CIFS allows other OS's to use Windows file and printer sharing, and even be a NT domain controller. C# is an ECMA standard. Web services on windows can be used by any language, any platform. NetBIOS is dead, long live TCP/IP
Even if MS is not the most well-behaved companies, Windows interoperates with all sorts of different products, on all sorts of hardware, At home, my linux box mounts fileshares from my win2k3 domain controller at bootup, no problems, and didn't take any effort really on either OS. I think anybody beating the interoperbility horse right now had better find another horse
Member since:2005-07-06
Even if Windows became as secure and stable as Linux, and got rid of the UI brain-damage that is Vista, and got rid of the corporate culture of embracing massive complexity in their APIs, they still could not wash off the fact that they systematically and anti-competitively leveraged their monopoly to drive their competitors out of business in the 1990s.
There used to be a time when you had three major word processors to choose from, and MS Word wasn't the de-facto one. If Microsoft hadn't anti-competitively leveraged their Windows monopoly to gain ground in the productivity software market, you'd still have these choices. And of course, we can't forget all the markets Microsoft demolished as they were emerging, just by subsidizing their entry with profits from their Windows and Office businesses.
One has to keep in mind that most of Microsoft's divisions lose money. Indeed, for a long time, Windows and Office were the only divisions that made a profit. In a competitive market, those poorly-performing divisions would've been excised. But because Microsoft has a strangle-hold on Windows, they can afford to take losses almost indefinitely if it means muscling a smaller competitor out of the market.
But yeah, if they somehow manage to rewrite history, there would be no reason not to change one's mind about MS...
Member since:2006-02-06
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Google added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow."During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function - you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced - namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too." I hold on to my hat every time Google changes Search. It's such a vital product in my daily life.
Member since:
2006-06-08
MS got as secure as Linux or even more secure? Would all the MS people who do not like MS change their minds?