The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
So, just as soon as I spread my wings on Ubuntu one more time, it smacks me down like the bitch I am. For some odd reason, directories just began to disappear from the disks. Disappear! Can you believe that? I first noticed it when network mounts weren’t coming back and there were long, odd pauses on the desktop when it loaded.
Back to Windows again. Sigh.
I had a problem in Windows over the past two months – it was a problem so annoying that it drove me to try Ubuntu again. I had a problem where everytime the computer toked on the hard disks or the network, it would pause. The mouse would stop moving – just enough to annoy. On first glance, it’s easy to think… okie… my hard drives are messed up (especially after what Ubuntu did!) – but then, I rolled back to some ancient revisions of the SATA driver and the problem went away. We’re talking… ancient as in 2005.
Okie, I took the plunge and threw Beryl onto Ubuntu… along with all the other goodies.
Now that is some bad-ass 3D desktop goodness. Well worth the effort.
Okie, well, Kubuntu won’t load on my system. It seems to load successfully, but then won’t reboot. Going back to what I know – regular old Ubuntu.
Okie, I’m going to drop an F-bomb here. It’s fucking cold outside. Fucking. Cold.
I have also realized that among my many skills as a server engineer/architect/administrator/whatever you call it in your company, I am NOT a very good cabler. I suck at it.
It’s stupid when it’s warmer in your data center than outside.
Did I mention it’s fucking cold?
I ramble because I have tired. I am in burnout mode. I turned off the work phone. Mail system could go down and I won’t care. Unplugging from work for the weekend.
So the negative spin last night and this morning on Vista is Microsoft’s decision to enforce the notion of the “upgrade version.” You cannot install Windows Vista without Windows 2000 or XP already installed on the system. This bucks the previous process of installing Windows from scratch, but proving you own the prior version by inserting the disc for verification.
I’m going to go on record as saying I don’t like this – not one damn bit, but I saw it coming. Given the “smackdown” mentality Microsoft has gotten themselves into, this was just a natural evolution. They’re merely enforcing what the license terms say should happen. One item you might want to be aware of though – when reading the Vista EULA… once you install the Vista upgrade, the Vista rights/EULA completely supersedes all licensing agreements for the previous version. This means you essentially lose your rights to even install the prior version of Windows ever again.
  don’t let kde scare you
   until aRTS gets involved
   once that package happens, it’s over
   seems like it has few dependencies
   good
   yeah, arts is scary
   arts isn’t just scary – it’s a deprecated pile of garbage
In other news, this is just what the doctor ordered to give Linux a swift kick in the arse.
Had a further little email chat with Jennifer about Vista’s licensing. She pointed out this article on ZDNet, so I wanted to make sure I bring it to everyone’s attention.
It’s clear to both of us in our discussion, however… that these modifications just aren’t good enough. It doesn’t solve the “ick” factor of knowing that Microsoft is watching how you compute – every day, every night, every boot. To me, that makes it the ultimate deal killer. The general distrust is the nail in the coffin.
