Daily Green Ideas is a decent site for those who are looking for simple ways to cut back. The other day they posted this. The upshot for those that do not wish to follow the link is that instead of buying a new computer upgrade the old. Ah If only I could, You see I love Guild Wars. I have been waiting for Guild Wars 2. I bought it early to get in on the Beta and the head start. Except - I cannot run it.
Overlord is a blast. I loved it. Overlord II came out and guess what? Yep, I can't run it. Same applies to many new firewalls, virus checkers and various other software. I have expanded the RAM as far as it will go. The processor is the best it can be. I have tweaked and prodded and overclocked. Guess what, I have hit the limit. Good thing I have a tower if this were a laptop I would have hit the limit YEARS ago.
So what to do. Well I plan for the fun of it to build my own. I have never built a gaming machine before, or modded a case even. But what about those who are not so adventurous or even 'gasp' dislike the idea? They are most likely stuck buying a new machine. Why? Because the new processors need a new motherboard. The new OS's need new monitors and peripherals and all of the above need more power.
I thought maybe at least ArenaNet had 'gotten' it. They swore if we could run the present Guild Wars we would be able to run the new, probably. Alas it seems even they have bought into the hype that we all need the latest in technology. What for? To play games? to look at Facebook? To build a personal network for all our daily needs so hackers and crackers can pluck our information out of the air - literally in some cases?
Let's get real. Businesses need computers to do work. A handful of people in an enterprise need a higher end machine. According to Wikipedia approximately 38% of users use Windows 7, 22% are still using the now unsupported XP. It seems that 'normal' people and businesses do not NEED the latest and greatest. Why can't companies get this through their heads. People do not need touch screen operating systems and monitors to create a spreadsheet. We still use the keyboard more than the mouse to communicate and most of all we do not need to buy a bigger, faster, more expensive machine to shop at Amazon.
To the writers of Daily Green Ideas, I wish that what you suggest was possible, but the machine makers are not in agreement. Please instead of putting the pressure on your readers to try and upgrade, encourage them to pressure the software and hardware manufacturers to just STOP and look at usability and accessibility to those who do not have beaucoup bucks to spend on a tool. Because when all is said and done that is what a computer is, something to make our lives easier, not a sinkhole for money.
Showing posts with label forced obsolescence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label forced obsolescence. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Monday, June 6, 2011
Microsoft NOT in Gang of Four
Usually I quote Jon Radoff over on the gaming blog because he is mainly a game marketeer. I do not always agree with him, sometimes I think he demonstrates what is wrong in business today, sometimes agree with him he has insight as to the direction technology is taking. This is one of those times and I would like to address one of his points concerning Microsoft from my personal experience in the industry. Microsoft forgot what it was about.
Most IT professionals have stories to tell about the giant. I have more than a few, but let me just select from the best. First you must understand Microsoft was a hero to many of us in the budding IT field in the early 80s. They took on IBM and won. IBM had been the business that bought technologies that showed promise and shut them down. They were THE defining company for computers. Microsoft changed all that. They created DOS and it WORKED! Well at least the odd numbered ones did.
Maybe we were to blame in a way. Until Windows was unveiled, Microsoft could do no wrong. Gates was hero and the company was full of renegades and geeks. They had the best PC O/S, Novell had the the best network, Epson made the best dot matrix printers and Procomm plus was the standard for PC interconnectivity. Most of the world used WordPerfect, Lotus and dBase as PC business applications. Got the computing world in your head?
Changes were coming, Crays were the fastest supercomputers and lived in a fishtank to keep cool, Apples were for artsy types but MACs were actually compared to Crays and other "real business" machines. Chips previously available all over the place from many manufacturers but were starting to standardize. The first rumblings of storms of change started when WINDOWS was released in 1985. A friend of mine called me to brag he had just gotten it on his PC. What did he need that for to code in assembler? It looked like a MacIntosh! It was a RAM hog- it needed 512 KB, great for people who did not do much crunching, but for the numbers and data types it was stupid.
Suddenly though Novell needed 1 MG ram to run. So MUCH! We upgraded our server. I sat with the manuals for a while learning how to compsurf my drive, how to put in a NIC and most of all how to set up the upgraded Novell. it was FAST. We used Paradox from Ansa, a company that had just been acquired by Borland and had one of the best networked databases there was. It all ran on DOS and we were happy - for now. But annoyed that we had upgrade our system to keep it supported because they had to recode a network the bloat from Windows.
By the time I was working for a company that published software training courses we were into Windows 2 and starting on 3. We got lots of betas, beta were free back then. For publishing in the technology field they were crucial. My first experience was with Win 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.0. I had to work with Windows for training purposes, but we still did not NEED it to do our work. Plain old DOS was good enough for most of what we had to do.
Back then Windows was shell that ran on top of DOS. Your machine would start DOS and you could go from there if you wanted either starting Windows or not. You could run other manufacturer's versions of DOS there was PC-DOS and DR-DOS to name 2 I remember. The new Windows was almost out. The new MS-DOS was due months later but DR-DOS was due out earlier. Suddenly the beta Windows would not run well on the beta MS-DOS - it crashed an burned a lot. Why? Because MS-DOS had changed to counter the competition's release and Windows had not. The writer testing DOS sat next to me, we both called our contacts and they pointed fingers at each other. Same company creating software that is dependent on each other and the dev teams not talking to each other, that looks really good.
Then we went to Gamma. I was testing the course copy against what we had and suddenly everything was different! We scrambled to change the documents. The steps to map a left handed mouse were different completely, to perform certain tasks the menus were different, the fluff that we added to the courses for fun was all wrong now, except solitaire, that still worked at least we used that to train people how to use a mouse.
We went nuts. It was 2 -6 weeks to release of software. Training manuals and courses took 6 weeks once at the printers IF we were lucky and paid premium to get it done We might get galleys back in two weeks. The head editor decided to wait until the software was released - good call on that one because upon release all of our old steps were correct. We began to suspect they released bad gammas to mislead the competition, pity they did not inform their beta testers who were writing BOOKS that might increase Windows sales. But I guess they already had a World Domination Plan and did not need us little people anymore. Who cared if we were users?
Well we all know what happened next, 95 came out and suddenly no one had any choice anymore. We all HAD to use Windows, because every business used it. By then I was into BI and tech support of BI. We moved from doing manual extracting and physically sending the data to our clients which was fairly secure to online extract and download because the clients demanded it. It is so much more convenient and so much less secure. Most people no longer have a choice and the few that do seem to be ridiculed for thinking they might use a door instead of a Window .
Except - even Microsoft seems to be thinking more about how they can make things work again. They finally got that most of us will not use I.E. They may even be ready to admit that other companies do some things better than they because they are NOT Microsoft. They should spend some time refining what they DID best and that WAS operating systems. But is it too little too late?
If I data crunch I need more RAM, fast drives and fast processors but not much in video. If I am a website designer I need great graphics. If I edit videos or record for a living I need good sound and a quiet machine. I do not need Visio to make a video, I do not need Adobe to make a flow chart. Microsoft the key to success is to be flexible enough you help everyone run their business not to MAKE everyone use your products and work the way you want them to. But Microsoft does not listen to the "little guys" like Jon, so it takes them longer to hear what is really happening out there.
I hear of more and more super user types using Ubuntu and Macs. Personal Networks are in use for everything now from work updates to hardcore gaming. Vista was a failure not because Vista was awful, but rather because it was perceived as awful by its potential users before it was even shipped. Word leaked out from BETA testers. To defend Microsoft a little there is a REASON it is Beta, bit perhaps a nationwide beta test of companies who are trying to conduct daily business on their systems is NOT a good idea. Others based the likely poor performance on experience with past Microsoft new product releases. Microsoft needs to prove to us that it can pull an IBM and get good at what they do again and to do that they need to pull back, develop and TEST instead of trying to force their standards and business models on their customers. In the mean time I will sit and watch to see if Ubuntu follows in Microsoft's footsteps while I use FREEBSD and THAT is what it is about - CHOICES that fulfill our needs and purses.
Most IT professionals have stories to tell about the giant. I have more than a few, but let me just select from the best. First you must understand Microsoft was a hero to many of us in the budding IT field in the early 80s. They took on IBM and won. IBM had been the business that bought technologies that showed promise and shut them down. They were THE defining company for computers. Microsoft changed all that. They created DOS and it WORKED! Well at least the odd numbered ones did.
Maybe we were to blame in a way. Until Windows was unveiled, Microsoft could do no wrong. Gates was hero and the company was full of renegades and geeks. They had the best PC O/S, Novell had the the best network, Epson made the best dot matrix printers and Procomm plus was the standard for PC interconnectivity. Most of the world used WordPerfect, Lotus and dBase as PC business applications. Got the computing world in your head?
Changes were coming, Crays were the fastest supercomputers and lived in a fishtank to keep cool, Apples were for artsy types but MACs were actually compared to Crays and other "real business" machines. Chips previously available all over the place from many manufacturers but were starting to standardize. The first rumblings of storms of change started when WINDOWS was released in 1985. A friend of mine called me to brag he had just gotten it on his PC. What did he need that for to code in assembler? It looked like a MacIntosh! It was a RAM hog- it needed 512 KB, great for people who did not do much crunching, but for the numbers and data types it was stupid.
Suddenly though Novell needed 1 MG ram to run. So MUCH! We upgraded our server. I sat with the manuals for a while learning how to compsurf my drive, how to put in a NIC and most of all how to set up the upgraded Novell. it was FAST. We used Paradox from Ansa, a company that had just been acquired by Borland and had one of the best networked databases there was. It all ran on DOS and we were happy - for now. But annoyed that we had upgrade our system to keep it supported because they had to recode a network the bloat from Windows.
By the time I was working for a company that published software training courses we were into Windows 2 and starting on 3. We got lots of betas, beta were free back then. For publishing in the technology field they were crucial. My first experience was with Win 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.0. I had to work with Windows for training purposes, but we still did not NEED it to do our work. Plain old DOS was good enough for most of what we had to do.
Back then Windows was shell that ran on top of DOS. Your machine would start DOS and you could go from there if you wanted either starting Windows or not. You could run other manufacturer's versions of DOS there was PC-DOS and DR-DOS to name 2 I remember. The new Windows was almost out. The new MS-DOS was due months later but DR-DOS was due out earlier. Suddenly the beta Windows would not run well on the beta MS-DOS - it crashed an burned a lot. Why? Because MS-DOS had changed to counter the competition's release and Windows had not. The writer testing DOS sat next to me, we both called our contacts and they pointed fingers at each other. Same company creating software that is dependent on each other and the dev teams not talking to each other, that looks really good.
Then we went to Gamma. I was testing the course copy against what we had and suddenly everything was different! We scrambled to change the documents. The steps to map a left handed mouse were different completely, to perform certain tasks the menus were different, the fluff that we added to the courses for fun was all wrong now, except solitaire, that still worked at least we used that to train people how to use a mouse.
We went nuts. It was 2 -6 weeks to release of software. Training manuals and courses took 6 weeks once at the printers IF we were lucky and paid premium to get it done We might get galleys back in two weeks. The head editor decided to wait until the software was released - good call on that one because upon release all of our old steps were correct. We began to suspect they released bad gammas to mislead the competition, pity they did not inform their beta testers who were writing BOOKS that might increase Windows sales. But I guess they already had a World Domination Plan and did not need us little people anymore. Who cared if we were users?
Well we all know what happened next, 95 came out and suddenly no one had any choice anymore. We all HAD to use Windows, because every business used it. By then I was into BI and tech support of BI. We moved from doing manual extracting and physically sending the data to our clients which was fairly secure to online extract and download because the clients demanded it. It is so much more convenient and so much less secure. Most people no longer have a choice and the few that do seem to be ridiculed for thinking they might use a door instead of a Window .
Except - even Microsoft seems to be thinking more about how they can make things work again. They finally got that most of us will not use I.E. They may even be ready to admit that other companies do some things better than they because they are NOT Microsoft. They should spend some time refining what they DID best and that WAS operating systems. But is it too little too late?
If I data crunch I need more RAM, fast drives and fast processors but not much in video. If I am a website designer I need great graphics. If I edit videos or record for a living I need good sound and a quiet machine. I do not need Visio to make a video, I do not need Adobe to make a flow chart. Microsoft the key to success is to be flexible enough you help everyone run their business not to MAKE everyone use your products and work the way you want them to. But Microsoft does not listen to the "little guys" like Jon, so it takes them longer to hear what is really happening out there.
I hear of more and more super user types using Ubuntu and Macs. Personal Networks are in use for everything now from work updates to hardcore gaming. Vista was a failure not because Vista was awful, but rather because it was perceived as awful by its potential users before it was even shipped. Word leaked out from BETA testers. To defend Microsoft a little there is a REASON it is Beta, bit perhaps a nationwide beta test of companies who are trying to conduct daily business on their systems is NOT a good idea. Others based the likely poor performance on experience with past Microsoft new product releases. Microsoft needs to prove to us that it can pull an IBM and get good at what they do again and to do that they need to pull back, develop and TEST instead of trying to force their standards and business models on their customers. In the mean time I will sit and watch to see if Ubuntu follows in Microsoft's footsteps while I use FREEBSD and THAT is what it is about - CHOICES that fulfill our needs and purses.
Friday, February 22, 2008
The Vista Rebellion
"Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista is an important update for Windows Vista. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains many security, reliability, and feature updates for Windows Vista. A program may experience a loss of functionality after you install Windows Vista SP1. However, most programs will continue to work as expected after you ..."
read more | digg story
It seems that Microsoft hasn't "gotten" it yet. There is a rebellion taking place and they are missing it. You see many users and developers hate Vista. Ok, maybe it is not so much Vista as the way in which Microsoft Corp seems to be railroading us into using it. Except they seem to have backed off that a bit.
I use a lot of utilities, freeware and shareware. I believe in supporting those who make a good tool or a neat gizmo. Vista has been out for over a year. Yet, a lot of both commercial and shareware apps do not support it. Why? Because we have finally had enough of being told what we MUST do.
I hit my first instance of that way back when helped develop proprietary software. We had hired a consulting firm to help us with a 'quick start' on an app we had to port over to Windows 95, The were a Microsoft Solutions provider so guess what they suggested we use? Yep a Microsoft product. It was a database app so they suggested Access. Except... When we attempted to recreate a lot of the queries we had built in Paradox for DOS we got a "query is too complex" Message.
Fine for use we knew how to work around it but for users who needed to create different reports, we needed an easy solution. We mentioned this to the Consultants who said, "They will have to deal with it." My answer was "no, they do not they can buy another company's product and services." For years, it seemed the companies, end users and even developers did not believe this. Finally the last straw seems to have been reached. The high-handed way in which Microsoft decided everything must be Vista started the rebellion. People refused to buy it. Developers refuse to develop for it. Microsoft seems to have relented a little.
Now the service pack. Guess what every one of those companies listed have put forth the effort to build a product that works on Vista or did in some way prior to the service pack. They spent money on developers' salaries, testing, hardware and software. Now they will not work. Zone Labs already has their fix out as does Trend Micro, but at what cost? And what happens when SP2 is realeased?
The companies who are listed above at least put forth the effort to create a package that works with Vista. Now Microsoft in their usual high-handed manner lists them as not working on the fixed O/S and says contact them for more information. It doesn't care if your preferred firewall doesn't work, if your emergency virus removal doesn't work. Why? Because they are Microsoft. Never mind that the consumer of THEIR product probably put out money for the packages.
Like it or not, there is a recession on. That means people do not have that extra money to spend. That means the next O/S upgrade that costs consumers up front and has hidden costs such as this will refuse to buy. Get the message Microsoft - We do not HAVE to there is always *nix and OS 10.
read more | digg story
It seems that Microsoft hasn't "gotten" it yet. There is a rebellion taking place and they are missing it. You see many users and developers hate Vista. Ok, maybe it is not so much Vista as the way in which Microsoft Corp seems to be railroading us into using it. Except they seem to have backed off that a bit.
I use a lot of utilities, freeware and shareware. I believe in supporting those who make a good tool or a neat gizmo. Vista has been out for over a year. Yet, a lot of both commercial and shareware apps do not support it. Why? Because we have finally had enough of being told what we MUST do.
I hit my first instance of that way back when helped develop proprietary software. We had hired a consulting firm to help us with a 'quick start' on an app we had to port over to Windows 95, The were a Microsoft Solutions provider so guess what they suggested we use? Yep a Microsoft product. It was a database app so they suggested Access. Except... When we attempted to recreate a lot of the queries we had built in Paradox for DOS we got a "query is too complex" Message.
Fine for use we knew how to work around it but for users who needed to create different reports, we needed an easy solution. We mentioned this to the Consultants who said, "They will have to deal with it." My answer was "no, they do not they can buy another company's product and services." For years, it seemed the companies, end users and even developers did not believe this. Finally the last straw seems to have been reached. The high-handed way in which Microsoft decided everything must be Vista started the rebellion. People refused to buy it. Developers refuse to develop for it. Microsoft seems to have relented a little.
Now the service pack. Guess what every one of those companies listed have put forth the effort to build a product that works on Vista or did in some way prior to the service pack. They spent money on developers' salaries, testing, hardware and software. Now they will not work. Zone Labs already has their fix out as does Trend Micro, but at what cost? And what happens when SP2 is realeased?
The companies who are listed above at least put forth the effort to create a package that works with Vista. Now Microsoft in their usual high-handed manner lists them as not working on the fixed O/S and says contact them for more information. It doesn't care if your preferred firewall doesn't work, if your emergency virus removal doesn't work. Why? Because they are Microsoft. Never mind that the consumer of THEIR product probably put out money for the packages.
Like it or not, there is a recession on. That means people do not have that extra money to spend. That means the next O/S upgrade that costs consumers up front and has hidden costs such as this will refuse to buy. Get the message Microsoft - We do not HAVE to there is always *nix and OS 10.
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