Windows 9 Rumors
erco
Posts: 20,256
Dr. Acula and I like Windows 8.1, but we're in the minority. So Microsoft wants to punish us. Windows 9 may be a free upgrade for users of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. But maybe not Win 8.
Wait, what?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/windows-9-features-news-changes/#!bDaoYW
Wait, what?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/windows-9-features-news-changes/#!bDaoYW
Comments
If you're "enjoying" (ick) Windows 8, then what's the problem? Why would it be considered punishment?
And as far as price goes, I pay more for RAM or a CPU or HDD/SSD or sometimes even the Motherboard than I do for MS Windows when I build a new computer from parts.
Especially in the case of Vista, they deserve some sort of compensation. Especially that "lowest end" Vista variant where the desktop background couldn't be changed. And that terrible "vista compatible" garbage hardware microsoft greenlighted (toshiba craptop in the corner I'm looking at you, which spends major CPU time adjusting its own CPU fan speed tens of thousands of times a second, heating itself up)
I wonder whats up with the "free upgrade" rumors? That could be good news for a lot of Vista and XP users.
Somehow MS has to prevent them from moving to Linux or the Mac when they finally get around to upgrading their systems.
XP users don't want to pay MS for making their old apps unusable when upgrading from XP.
Seems a "free" upgrade is required my MS as an effort to maintain their control of users.
If a company is clueless enough to try to force feed to the PC makers and general public something as wretched as Windows 8, should anyone be surprised if the next thing they concoct is just as bad... if not worse?
There's something funny here, but I don't know if I should laugh or not.
For what its worth, Linux Mint 17 + MATE works how I always wanted and expected Windows should have worked. When we dig, we find more ways to do stuff better, rather than dig to figure out how to get the beast to do something usable in the first place.
I guess I qualify on all three OSes.
Nonetheless, I will pass.
I am much happier in Linux, even though I keep all these OSes installed on a dual boot of various hardware.
And yes, Vista users deserve something for all the mess MS caused. But I am mostly annoyed with having specifically ordered XP Professional in English and finding that MS decided that English language users in Taiwan were only permitted on-line support in Chinese.
If Bill Gates had decided to build airplanes, we would have had to run for cover.
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
The emphasis there is mine.
OK Bill, we are still waiting....
Hey, I just noticed. In there Bill says "The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."
Notice Bill's cunning use of "The value of" as opposed to "The amount we paid for".
I don't believe he actually ever paid that. It was all done on computer time borrowed from the university he dropped out of. Certainly I could run up such huge amounts of Computer Resource Units (CRU's) as a student at that same time. The University admin guys hated me for it:)
This is becoming my exact experience as well. The interesting part is that two of my commercial clients are seeing the same.
There are still a few things that "suck" in Linux, but Microsoft's current position has allowed the linux community to gain a lot of ground.
Ah, the ol' famous QUIT RIPPING OFF OUR BASIC! rant... Great stuff.
Good artists copy; great artists steal...
I can understand your reluctance to move away from a system that works. "If it ain't broke don't fix it" as they say. I know a number of individuals and companies that have perfectly fine working systems, from manufacturing to book keeping, that will not run on anything above XP for whatever reason. Perhaps that app they need is not available, perhaps the hardware they use is not supported any more. Swapping out their perfectly working XP systems and apps and hardware would be a very expensive operation.
However going into the future this just not tenable. PC's break down. Peripherals break down. Support is unavailable. Eventually it becomes unsustainable. As it did for us old guys hanging on to CP/M and VMS in days of yore. I can see why you say that. But I have read a few stories now where companies and government departments faced with the untenable XP situation and the cost and pain of upgrading to any other operating system (Never mind if it is from MS or not) have basically said "F'it, if we are going to go through this pain we are going to make sure we only have to do it once." And they move to Linux.
And that was my point above. To try and prevent that MS basically has to give away it's OS for free. To late I'm afraid, people have been burned enough times already.
I mean, if I understand correctly we have a few BASICs available for the Propeller. They are no doubt more functional than the original MS 4K BASIC. They have been written by guys for fun and their own personal use and presented here free for use by anyone.
We also have a pile of other useful languages provided by enthusiasts from Forth (many versions) upwards.
This kind of thing has been going on since the first micro-processors or even any other computer was around.
How the hell did Bill found a bazillion dollar empire and gain domination of the worlds computers from such a simple thing that many people have done just for fun many times before and since?
Look at Seattle Computer Products and 86-DOS... It wasn't programming smarts that created this empire...
In all honesty, Apple didn't do much different. all of our PCs should have an Xerox tag.
They were busy building those chips into boards and figuring out how to program them. Even I got involved in one such project.
There is a reason why there was a proliferation of 8 bit computers in the UK shortly after. The Sinclair, the Acorn and a bunch of others I guess nobody has heard of. (They all had their own BASIC and other software by the way)
Not that I knew anyone involved in those famous names but I can see how it came to be.
I also remember the young engineers I worked with opening up the first IBM PC in the company in 1981. How they laughed at how crude the hardware was. And how stupid PC-DOS was...Massively disappointing. These guys were qualified to laugh though, they were on teams that had designed the 16 bit CPU the company was using and written the real-time multi-tasking OS it used.
And thus started the MS/Intel/IBM freeze. A dark age that went on for, well, ages. Killing off a whole ecosystems of development. Stamping out variety and innovation.
As my young Comp Sci friend said at the time "IBM has always held up the progress of computing by at least 10 years. With this PC thing they have just done it again". And so it was.
Luckily the young Linus Torvalds tentatively dropped Linux into the world in 1991 and then somebody remembered those crazy young English guys had a long lost ARM 32 bit CPU design hanging around.
WINDOWS ... NEIN !!
cheers,
Peter (pjv)
If MS would just provide MS Office for other OSes, it might actually revive growth. The majority of the Asian business community are loyal to Windows for only one reason... everyone is using MS Office. They fear going to Libre Office would lose customers and sales. Or they have all their accounting in Excel.
In sum, the majority of Windows users seem locked in to MS Office and dread a change over. In fact, I keep the XP installed just because I occassionally get editting work that requires I use a bonafide MS Office to track editting changes and I only have a licensed copy for XP.
For my own creativity, I have migrated completely to Libre Office.
But the truth is that MS Office will likely remain only available in Linux under Wine as it complies with MS license software and uses a registry.
MS Office is available for the Macintosh. MS could port it to Linux, but I imagine the small size of the desktop Linux market means they wouldn't recoup the cost of the port.
I've been told by finance types at my job that Excel has features that are missing in the Libreoffice equivalent. Specifically in some of the features of the pivot table functionality. The Google docs version of that feature was unusable. So people might have good reasons for sticking with the MS Office suite.
It becomes harder and harder to protest anything as being part of that network becomes unavoidable. Writing an alternative free version becomes pointless as no one will use it anyway.
This pattern of network effects continues with the operating system, the word processor the web browser and on an on. Until MS is a huge monster that dominates the software landscape and most of the worlds computer users are locked into feeding it. You fell for it. The other big lie in that letter from Bill.
Nobody was "stealing" anything. At worst they might have been infringing copyright. I'm surprised none of those hobbyists punched Bill in the face for calling them thieves.
We might accept that Bill was using "stealing" in the colloquial way, meaning "copyright infringement" but the lie is even much bigger than that.
At the time software was not protected under copyright law. Not even source code almost certainly not as represented by the holes on Bill's paper tapes. Copyright protection for software was coming, it's status under the law was not really confirmed until much later with cases like Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin in 1983.
Those hobbyists were not doing anything illegal!
That would have been solved by a compatible free version if anyone had bothered to write one. This is essentially what Linux is. It is a Unix-compatible OS written by people who didn't want to pay for Unix. I guess it's possible that what they were doing was not strictly illegal but I think it was unethical.
C.W.
Most people I work with expect to get paid just for showing up!
I saw this the other day: "You expect me to show up on time AND do work?".
C.W.
I believe Bill did write MS BASIC, with a lot of help from others to do the hard parts. Monte Davidoff had already written the floating point routines that ended up in MS BASIC.
I don't claim MS BASIC was worthless. I do claim there were a lot of people who could write a BASIC like that for those 8 bit machines. Bill knew that. Somewhere he has written that when the BASIC idea came he already knew they had a very short time to get it done. I think he set three months as the target. His feeling was that someone else would do it and if they were not first it was pointless as there would be no profit in it. Bill basically understood those network effects I mentioned.
Certainly others did write such BASICs. Look at Sinclair and Acorn computers for example. There was no motivation to. We are not talking about price here. It was cheap enough to pay for without worrying too much. Mostly MS BASIC was on the machine you bough anyway.
Pretty much no one saw the problems of proprietary lock in that were coming. One who did was Richard Stallman who immediately set about building Free Software to avoid that lock in. He started with an editor and a C compiler. Richard bothered. Thank you Richard for GCC. That shows a serious misunderstanding of why Linux and Free Software exists. You deserve a good spanking for saying such a thing.
It's not about the money. Do have a read about Richard Stallman and the beginnings of the Free Software Foundation.
Copying those tapes may have been unethical. It was certainly stupid. It only helped entrench the seeds of the coming MS disaster.
Besides those original MS BASICS were pretty useless. The best thing you could do with them is use them as loaders for your machine code programs:)
What I meant was that you said: "Don't do it by stealing a commercial product." I presumed you were talking about the hobbyists mentioned in Bill's letter and presumed you had gotten the word "steal" from there. My only point was that copying those tapes was not "stealing" as Bill said. It was not even copyright infringement at the time. He was tarring all those hobbyists as thieves when they were not.
I did not mean you "fell" for some bad deals on buying proprietary software. I'm quite OK with the idea that if you need software to make your life easier, your work more productive, enable you to do things you could not otherwise do or just be plain fun, them paying for a package someone has written can be well worth it. After all I have worked as a software engineer or products like electronics CAD packages that sold for 10,000 GBP a seat at the time.
I guess I did fall into Bill's trap by calling it "stealing". However, I still maintain it is unethical.