Isn’t it funny that Microsoft is nowadays widely praised for hardware, but widely derided for software? This fact won’t stop them from pushing off more inferior and annoying software on people, but at least now they’re not regarded as the only game in town.

Taking an approximately $100 charge for each unit to repair millions of Xbox 360s is nothing to warrant praise about

Peace,
Gene

Isn’t it funny that Microsoft is nowadays widely praised for hardware, but widely derided for software? This fact won’t stop them from pushing off more inferior and annoying software on people, but at least now they’re not regarded as the only game in town.

Maaate … come on … Microsoft do great mouses!!

The one I have is pretty darn good, true, but it’s rather annoying how it stops working every few days, and the only fix is to remove and reinsert the batteries. After three units (run on two different computers with different versions of Microsoft’s Mac drivers) exhibited the same symptoms, you have to blame the product for the failure.

Peace,
Gene

Maaate … come on … Microsoft do great mouses!!

Microsoft’s slogan: We’re number one; why try harder?

“Microsoft’s eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user’s medical records or their banking PIN.”

“Microsoft Security” Oxymoron of the day.

Dell’s not the only one. Lenovo says it will make SuSe Linux available on selected laptops in the fourth quarter of this year.

The other issue rumbling away in the background – coming up again recently at USENIX – that Microsoft would surely like to go away is Windows Vista Content Protection. There’s no way of measuring how much damage people’s awareness of just what they’ve done has affected Vista sales – no way of knowing if it, indeed, has. But it’s back in discussion. See, for example:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/aacs-tentacles.ars

Anyone who’s actually looked through some of the material in the past must have seen Microsoft revealed pretty starkly to them:

“On-board graphics create an additional problem because blocks of precious content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged out to disk. In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and decrypted again after being paged in. Vista doesn’t provide any other pagefile encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card details, private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in plaintext. The content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in Microsoft’s eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user’s medical records or their banking PIN.”

Yeah, those are people I’d really like to buy an OS from.