Gavin Clarke is an utter moron...

Frankly, I never heard of a Gavin Clarke before today. He seems to be one of the writers @ that OTHER NEWS SITE.

But after reading THIS and THIS and THIS other story... all on the subject of the Oracle-Sun acquisition, and reading his stupid remarks, I conclude the guy has an agenda against Sun or its products.

Not that there's anything wrong with having a personal agenda. I dislike Microsoft with a passion, for instance, for its monopolistic ways. But at least there's some substance to my claims (DOJ trial, UE ruling against MSFT, South Korea's competition commision, etc).

FC

Microsoft is the Soviet Union

"Microsoft is going the way of the Soviet Union. Their insular management culture simply can't accept that computing is leaving the IBM x86 PC behind, and is moving on to the web, mobile devices, and cloud computing. Apple knows what people want and builds it. Microsoft builds 90s tech and tries to persuade people to want it. Then, on the high end, low cost newcomers are delivering *more* performance and functionality for less money, or even free. I'm thinking of MySQL over MS SQL Server, and Salesforce.com for small to medium businesses. There's just no reason to buy Microsoft anything today." (logic Jul 25, 2008 4:23 PM GMT)

Reader comment at:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc20080724_447840.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

Good Riddance Bill Gates...

I forgot to give my farewell thoughts after Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft. If I wanted to give this a serious tone, I'd perhaps write something along the lines of what Richard Stallman has said to the BBC.

But those who know me know that I'm not very serious or "politically correct". So here's my farewell message to "Bill #2" ... the only moment where I smiled after seeing Gates on TV!:



The pie-in-the-face. An hillarious and well-deserved moment.

The young people nowadays whom watch the clip on YouTube seem confused... and don't understand "why" someoone would even think about throwing a pie to the face of this "hero" of theirs, responsible for their "stable, lovely" Windows OS. This is the generation which has grown on Windows XP and think Windows has been stable all the time and they can't conceive or imagine that the company did something abusive and broke the law in the process to obtain its dominant marketplace position. They should know the truth about BillG's firm and its recurring abusive, restrictive behaviour.

I said Gates was "Bill#2". This isn't my own invention... I took it from a very funny book at the time of the Microsoft-DOJ trial aptly titled "The Secret Diary of Bill Gates". On it, the Bill Gates character calls Bill Clinton "Bill #2" -in his view he was always Bill the Numero Uno. [Well, I think the spots were reversed. I always thought of Clinton as "Bill #1" and Gates as "Bill #2" ;-)].

Let's just remember him with one of his internal e-mails that surfaced to the public as a result of the DOJ-Microsoft trial: "what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there [sic] feature they have that might get in our way?" -Bill Gates, to a number of his employees.

And the memorable response from one of his product managers: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS" -Brad Silverberg



Good riddance, Bill Gates!






FC
PS: For those interested in the facts with regards to the pie-in-the-face greeting to BillG, you should read this very interesting cached interview with Noel Godin, the man behind it, and whom calls himself the leader of "Patissiers sans frontiers" -Pie Bakers Without Borders-

Blu-Ray PS3 wins in dollars/features ratio over HDDVD+Xbox360...

A lot has been written lately about the High-Definition standard wars of Blu-Ray vs HDDVD.

I only have enough money to buy a single console and HD movies player,
so I have done the math using prices from Amazon.com:

Sony PS3 (60 Gb) console: $499
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009VXAM0

Sony PS3 Blu-Ray remote $24
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000M17AVO

Sony PS3 cordless Media Keyboard $65
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000MFLBBK

Total: $ 589

Storage: 60GB
Full-size wireless Keyboard: Yes
Runs Linux without mod: Yes, [4, afaik] Yellowdog for PS3 , Fedora-PPC, Ubuntu-PPC, Gentoo

vs

Xbox 360 - 20Gb: $349
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000B43OY4

Xbox 360 HD-DVD player add-on: $180
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JHO4L0

Xbox 360 Media Remote: $20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000B6MLSM

Tiny clumsy Xbox rubber mini-Keyboard: $30
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UN3UDQ

Total: $579

Storage: 20GB

plays HD movies: YES, but with Bulky add-on

You fund an evil corporation which is also a convicted monopolist: YES
Runs Linux without mod?: NO
Full-size wireless keyboard: NO

Game over, Sony's PS3 wins. :)

Price difference:
Sony's $10 more expensive, big freaking deal. :)

Vista Aero even on old PCs, with Visiontek's 256MB, X1600 PCI graphics card

This card supports dual displays, and HDTV TV-Out!

The nice folks at VisionTek sent me one of the company's X1600 PCI graphics adapters for review.

While I AWAIT (until hell freezes over?) for Microsoft to ship me a sample media evaluation copy of Vista, I want to give you a sneak peek of this impressive graphics card.

Front View. Yes, it' s PCI bus!.

In a nutshell, if you need to use Vista (I prefer Linux, yet I understand that people have no choice for work reasons), and want to experience "Aero" (the 3D interface eye candy), I suggest you get one of these cards. At $210 [Updated June 1st : $154 at TigerDirect, here!], it' s a LOT cheaper than replacing your whole motherboard, graphics card, and probably RAM as well.


I have used it and it works very well. Vista Aero works beatifully, on my 2.4 Ghz P4 (800Mhz FSB) in the Supermicro P4SCA mobo. 3DMark scores and screenshots will be published on my INQ review. I would have published this months ago if it wasn't for the Vole. [Hello? Anyone reading?].

In short, if you have a machine with no AGP or PCI-X, just plain old PCI bus, I suggest you get one of these cards. I had no previous experience with this company, but from the way they communicated with me, the firm looks top notch!.

www.visiontek.com, and also www.froogle.com. Use Google, it is your friend!.

AMD is in a unique position to push a Windows-Free alternative to Wintel's VIIV

David Berlind of ZDNet asks in his blog "If you could ask AMD anything, what would you ask?"

Since my reply requires room for the explanation, here goes my analysis:

Given these facts:

1. AMD is in a UNIQUE position, with its low-power, low-cost CPUs, to challenge the Microsoft-Intel push for Windows Media Center and the insane "VIIV" ""solutions"", that locks consumers into Microsoft's proprietary codecs, and with windows-only DRM-infected "media".

2. AMD is very linux friendly, in fact, MIT's "OLPC" effort is proof that linux+AMD can bring great technological solutions to the marketplace.

3. AMD, along with Sun, could develop an OPEN ALTERNATIVE to challenge VIIV, based on:
a. AMD's low-cost, low-power CPUs
b. Sun's cross-platform java for the media server software on PCs
c. Linux as the OS for the "media players", set top boxes and "entertainment centers".

The only thing missing is the WILL, on AMD's part, to create an open platform, co-develop with taiwanese and chinese hardware makers a "reference platform" and then once the cross-platform, open software side is polished up, sit batck and watch the competition among hardware makers for differentiation and features do the rest.

Prismiq, the company now closing shop after a number of bad strategic decissions, showed the way with its Prismiq Media Player, which 3 years ago won the "best of Comdex" prize. It had great potential and I'm surprised that neither AMD nor Sun saw the potential and acquired the company and its ideas, which would have paved the way for an open alternative to VIIV based on AMD, Linux and Java, which is what I'm proposing today.

Prismiq's mistakes? Let me summarize:.
1. choosing a low-horsepower NEC CPU, and a low-ram configuration on the hardware side
2. choosing to do the back-end software of their media player in cross-platform java, and then attempting to re-code a GUI in C++ for each native platform they wanted to support (Windows, MacOS, Linux).
3. Attempting (and failing) to get a "community" of hobbyst programmers to do #2 above for them, without putting enough resources or paid programmers into the effort.
4. Throwing a lot of money down the drain trying to release a Prismiq video recorder on top of the low-horsepower base hardware configuration (see #1 above).

Despite this, and trying not to lose focus and get back to the subject... THE QUESTION FOR AMD IS:

DEAR AMD...
-AMD is already collaborating with Sun, and have a great relationship with them.
-Sun is promoting an open alternative to windows-only, platform-locked DRM, they call it DReaM, and is based in Java.
-Consumers want CHOICES, and a DRM-FREE (and/or open-DRM, could be up to the hardware makers' choice) solution that is comparable to Intel's VIIV but doesn't lock them to a single vendor or desktop platform would be warmly welcomed into the market.
-There is an open mpeg4 video codec that AMD's alternative to VIIV could use: THEORA
-Your main competitor, Intel, is in cahoots with the Evil Empire of Redmondia to help extend the Windows desktop monopoly to the Home Theather and living room market of consumers....

... SO WHAT IS AMD WAITING FOR TO GIVE INTEL's BRAINDEAD VIIV SOME SERIOUS KICKING and help promote the use of low-power AMD CPUs and OPEN SOFTWARE and CODECS on the consumers' home???

I'd like to hear what AMD execs have to say about this...

FC

NYTimes´ Pogue is right: people do not "choose" IE

Tech columnist at the NY Times David Pogue writes in his review of the Internet Explorer 7 beta:

"ABOUT 85 percent of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to surf the Web, even though it's relatively ancient, crusty with neglect and about as secure as a screen door. In what other industry would 85 percent of consumers choose such a product — when better ones, also free, were also available? Trick question. Those consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers."

It was about time someone told it like it is!!

However, some folks at the Evil Empire of Redmondia need a reality check.... specifically Microsoft India´s guru Rishi K Srivastava who only weeks ago claimed just the opposite, that the "bundling" had nothing to do with IE´s market share (yeah, right!).

“IE’s success cannot be attributed to its access through Windows. The reason why people are not opting for other browsers is because of IE’s superiority. If you have access to a better product why you would not choose it. IE is much secure and only a large corporation like Microsoft can invest so much into security,”
What a good joke.

See Srivastava... you can fool some people a long time, but you cannot fool all the people, all the time.

Microsoft India exec Rishi K Srivastava: joker of the year!

“IE’s success cannot be attributed to its access through Windows. The
reason why people are not opting for other browsers is because of IE’s
superiority. If you have access to a better product why you would not
choose it. IE is much secure and only a large corporation like Microsoft
can invest so much into security,” counters Microsoft India Windows Client director Rishi K Srivastava.
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=120295

This is the same outspoken guy who seems to be BillG's mouthpiece, a caped crusader defending in the media everything the Corporation does. He recently said "Vista is a platform, Google is just search".

Google "not a platform, just search"?. Yeah, right.... then Picasa and all this Google software is a product of my imagination?. Oh, and incidentally:

Microsoft the Vole admits IE mess up
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30432

Microsoft complains UE is undemocratic
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30288

New zero-day bug crashes IE - March 17
http://www.informationweek.com/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=183700672&subSection=Viruses+and+Patches

Big Hole found in MS IE 6 - March 21, 2006
http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?NewsID=5608

Mr. Srivastava... I think the joke's on you.

Microsoft ".NET" so good Microsoft not using it for Longhorn and Windows Vista

Slashdot | Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn and Vista: "Richard Grimes analyses the ratio of native to managed code in Microsoft's upcoming Vista Operating System., and concludes it's a classic example of 'Do as I say, not as I do'

According to the analysis of Microsoft Vista and .NET, 'Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework.'"