http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/30/2014222.shtml
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Microsoft. Lets hope there’s more where that came from AND that you can find a practical in-home purpose for it.
Well, I bought a black macbook and man is it slick. You talk about a quality piece of hardware. I don’t mind the operating system so much either — it has its quirks and little things I’m not used to (why mix the launch of applications with the list of running tasks? It’s counter intuitive to me, but I suppose it does save screen realestate). I am going to put a Windows VM on it for IE7 testing, but the majority of my work will be in OS X.
I’ll still be using XP/Vista full-time on my PC, however, as I need to be able to game, etc., given that I run a CS:S team (not that I get to play as much any more, but that’s fine). I wasn’t so thrilled at the idea of plopping down so much cash, but I need the machine and I’m sure it’ll be nice to have on trips and such. I bought 2GB of ram from newegg and am waiting on that to get here; until then, it’ll be running a bit slower than I’d like. I would have bought the ram locally, but the cheapest price was through Apple themselves at $175, 2.2 times as much as I paid through newegg. Many of the places wanted 4x what I paid through newegg. Oh well, I’ll just have to wait for it to come in.
Paimon, a friend of mine, and I are going to launch a weekly podcast reviewing/discussing various software and hardware that we get our hands on. Since no one is going to give us anything for free, it’ll cover mainly stuff we buy in our day to day lives. The first podcast covers our thoughs on MS’ latest and greatest (ha!) OS, Windows Vista. The site’s going to be pretty basic until I get around to whipping something up in RoR (and even then, it’ll still be basic – just enough to make things interesting). The first podcast is pretty long — 45 minutes — but we promise to keep them short from here on our. Link
You know what I want to see from Microsoft? Innovation. Microsoft has the resources to do a lot of neat things and while I’m regularly made fun of, by friends, for being a Microsoft fan boy, they’ve really disappointed me this go around.
They should be hammering companies like nVidia to have stable, feature-complete drivers ready for their $600 flag-ship video cards upon release.
They should be the first to release features like desktop composition, 3D accelerated GUIs, etc. They shouldn’t have to play catch-up with Apple or Linux or anyone else. It’s sad, really. The best-funded company in the world has stopped innovating and brining new things to the table before anyone else. Now, they just follow.
Of course, there are exceptions — the xbox brand, anyone? They’ve done an amazing job with it, even if they’re not yet profitable. There’s a lot of “neato” behind it, brand and content integration, etc.
My challenge to MS is to use all of the talent and resources they have — stop following and start leading. Start innovating in the finest sense. I suppose we’ll see what happens in the coming years, I suppose, as the Google-Microsoft-Yahoo hate-love-triangle heats up.