Posts Tagged “Microsoft”
After reading some quotes from Linus about the recent code submission from Microsoft it got me thinking about my feeling towards Microsoft. In the past when I was in University I really did have some strong negative feeling towards Microsoft. I had to use their software, and it did not always do what I wanted how I wanted it done.
However now that I am older and… well just older I find myself caring much less about who makes the software, and more about whether it works or not. In the end that is what’s important.
For example, I wanted to build a home server and I automatically went for Ubuntu server. I fought to get the printer working, then fought to get CUPS working, then Samba etc. I know that Linux could do everything I wanted, but every feature I wanted require setup and time on my part. In the end I only had a Print server and a very simple Samba share.
In the end I bought Windows Home Server for $99.00 with the hardware I used for the server. So far it is doing everything I want, plus with add-ins seems to offer many options for expansion. I will go into Windows Home Server a little more in a later post.
I think the point I am trying to make is that I am trying not to judge products on who makes it. Just because Microsoft makes something does not make it bad, and just because something is Apple or Linux does not make it the best solution. With information reviews, and other peoples experiences so readily available we can make informed choices about products and rely less on brands.
After the complete disappointment I felt after buying Windows Vista a while back, and then again after installing SP1 I was a little skeptical about all the good first impressions I have been reading of Windows 7 Beta. So this weekend I decided to dust off an old 120GB hard drive and take the Windows 7 Beta for a spin.
After using Windows 7 for just a few hours I am starting to feel that Microsoft has finally started to do something right. I say “something” because I can not quite put my finger on what it is, it’s many little things that make up an intangible feeling of “rightness.”
After watching a short video about how Windows 7 is copying Apple I got a little mad. It seems that when ever Apple does something people think that they just came up with it all by themselves, and its never been done before.
Multitouch has been worked on for many years by several different companies. Microsoft has had the Microsoft Surface prototype in development for years, and showed mature demos in early 2007.
I am not saying that Microsoft is innocent, just that neither is Apple or Linux. The point is that software only improves by taking things that work and improving on them. If no one was allowed to copy anything we would never make any progress in any field.
Can you imagine if you could patent an equation in Mathmatics? Then no one could use your equation to solve more complex problems in the future. Where would we be today? Probably still working with basic algebra.
*End Rant*
When Vista first came out I jumped on-board and decided to give it a try. I bought the Ultimate edition just because it sounded the best, and installed it. After fighting the OS to make it do what it is meant to do out of the box, I decided to go back to XP. I put the problems down to early bugs.
Six month later Vista SP1 is released and I decided to really give vista a try a second time. The install went a bit easier because I remembered most of the tricks I had used before. This time however I was in for the long haul and was determined to make things work the best I could. This decision ended up causing me a lot of headaches.
I am going to go over some of the issues I encountered when getting this to work, some are small and others are show stoppers.
*UPDATE 9/10/2006: After reading some more “editorials from an analytical perspective” on the Popular Tecnology I now see that they are a Microsoft advocate blog pretending to be a impartial source. I think that sites like OSNews should be a little more careful when picking thier sources.
While browsing OS News I found a link to an article claiming that IE is more secure in 2006 than Firefox. They base this statement on the fact that Firefox had more vulnerabilities found this year. This is an extremely naive way to measure the security of a certain browser to another. There are several reasons why the metric they used to measure security is useless which I will briefly go over now.
