wdolson
Posts: 10398
Joined: 6/28/2006
From: Near Portland, OR
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Ian R
I'm sorry but this really annoys me. The US Justice department in my (not really) humble opinion should have at he same time as the litigation wrt Sun Microsystems/bundling, also investigated whether or not both M$ and Intel were using their market dominance to max profits by incremental releases of stuff already in the box.
Surely the dissappointment of TOAW I, II etc blinking out on XP is not about to be repeated for WitP (and for the new MTOAW, by the way).
I run Windows 2000 on all my computers (I'm a software engineer). I think Windows XP is a waste of money, plus I hate Microsoft's new licensing scheme. With the XP/Vista licensing scheme, they can shut off your OS and force you to upgrade down the road. They have already forced some people to cough up another $80 for a new XP license with the "Genuine Advantage" BS they brought out last year. Infoworld magazine estimated, based on complaints, that about 10% of all legitimate installs of XP were flagged as pirated and disabled by Microsoft.
Philosophically, I like Linux better, but unfortunately Linux doesn't have a version of many of the tools I use, plus it's kind of impossible to develop software for Windows on Linux. The range of games is limited on Linux too. For example, there is no Linux version of WitP.
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New OS and new chips have devolved from technical advances to marketing tools. Solution: Get a laptop for work, or study, or something tax deductible. Get WAP connected. Insure it in case you leave it in a cab after lunch. Buy a 1 Gig USB plug drive for transfers. Or a blue tooth to WAP from laptop to desktop. Keep your old desktop computer at home for your games.
Microsoft will have to start selling cell phones soon, or at least WAP palmtops that also function as digital TV receivers and cell phones on the side. At least Sun Micro has managed to jump them on that one.
Microsoft already tried going into the phone biz. I worked on the project. I spent almost a year there wondering what Microsoft was thinking. Our product was going to be more expensive than the competition and only offer some PC connectivity which I didn't see as that big a deal.
With technology like the Blackberry coming along, Microsoft might want to get back into the phone business, but they are going to be faced with the same problem they had back in the 90s when I worked there. There are already many very well known names in the phone device business. More than the market can support over the long haul.
Microsoft has seen the potential in this market and came up with Windows CE. Despite a heavy advertising campaign, CE had never gotten very far off the ground. My niche for many years was embedded systems (programming the CPUs on things like phones).
The whole approach to an operating system in that environment has to be different than a general purpose computer. You will always have less memory and less permenent storage than with a general purpose computer. Memory density has increased quite a bit, but you still don't have as much to work with in a Blackberry as you do in a Windows XP box. Additionally, you have limitations in the user interface you don't have with a regular computer.
Microsoft Windows has some very old code in it. Internally, it's a Frankenstein's monster. That's a major reason that they have such long delays getting the next version out. They change one thing and something else collapses. Because Windows is so old, it's also very inefficient in it's use of memory and other system resources. It's the Winchester House of programs.
Operating systems like Palm OS and other OSs written specifically for hand held devices are much more efficient than Windows. CE has too much Windows baggage and it never caught on. The hand held OSs have been growing with the technology and are better suited for it.
If Microsoft wanted to bite the bullet and hire a bunch of embedded programmers to completely rewrite Windows, it would probably be as efficient with memory and resources and as stable as Linux. The problem is that all of the hardware companys that depend on Microsoft bloat ware to push people into buying faster and higher capacity computers would go broke because people could pull out and dust off their old computers that have been sitting in the corner. Why buy a new PC for the new version of Windows when your old Pentium III will run it better than the last version of Windows ran on a new zippy 64 bit machine?
I deliberately live behind the technology curve. It's a lot cheaper and I can do everything I want to do.
Bill
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Microsoft Vista - 
] programmes to choose. You may check that myriad of Debian packages. Maybe they already have what you need. 
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