News: Microsoft Could Be Obsolete By 2017

[zombie67]

OSX can be competitive, depending on which machine you buy it on. When trying to build my CPU cruncher (see earlier threads), the goal was to beat the cost/performance of the mac mini. It's damn hard to do! And that's without even including all the great applications that come with OSX.

[John P. Myers]

And another nail in the coffin...

Microsoft cedes consoles to Sony, gives up on gaming
XBox 720 loses badly because Microsoft didn't try

GDC this year made one thing clear, Sony wins the next generation console race, period. This came as a bit of a surprise, but the real shock was that Microsoft didn’t even show up to the fight. No, we are not joking, Sony made a gaming console in the PS4, Microsoft made all the wrong moves to counter with the XBox 720. What you end up with are two very different products, one with a purpose, the other without. Microsoft didn’t try this round.

Time and time again at GDC developers who had both consoles praised the job Sony had done with the PS4. There were several demos run on the PS4 dev kits too, the author saw at least one dev kit directly and knows of a few more at the show. XBox 720 kits were as absent as the praise directed at Microsoft, some devs even mocked the hardware Redmond is offering.

With a little bit of knowledge about the hardware one thing became very clear, why this happened was not actually a technical problem. Microsoft didn’t screw up, Microsoft didn’t misjudge the market, and Microsoft didn’t botch the design, they got exactly what they were aiming for. Anyone who has been following the company of late may see an eerie similarity to the rest of their business, management is so out of touch with customers that they don’t understand what to make anymore.

Yep. M$ got exactly what they were aiming for, which turned out to be a steaming pile of crap when the PS4 out-performs the Xbox 720 by a factor of 1.5x. Not to mention the Xbox 720 requiring an internet connection to even start a game. If your connection drops for over 3 minutes, you're ejected and locked out until your internet comes back. Gotta love that! And yes, it includes games that normally wouldn't even require internet to play them. The reason is because M$ decided it was a great idea to use the internet to authenticate your software. If you're not online, it can't spy on you and panics. Good goin'.

Back to the PS4 out-performing the 720 by 1.5x...that number is based on hardware. In reality it is a bit more than that, due to the large amount of resources used up by M$'s bloated whore of an OS (ever notice you only get 15GB usable space on a 32GB Surface tablet?)

Things like this make me smile

[Mumps]

(ever notice you only get 15GB usable space on a 32GB Surface tablet?)

What I find surprising is that M$oft is pleased they actually "managed" to slim down an O/S to *only* 17 Gig of storage...

(As I install yet *another* instance of Ubuntu to run from a 1 Gig USB key...)

Did I mention that pretty much everything I've ever plugged into these barebones Ubuntu installs works? Without adding drivers? It was perfectly happy to install on an IBM X41 Tablet and use the touch screen without any fanfare. And the 10 year old Radio Shack USB->Serial adapter? I plug it in and get a serial port. No drivers necessary. You may get the picture. Oh yeah, and the reason that Tablet has Ubuntu on it is the Win XP Tablet edition install that *was* on it happily found an unreadable sector in the software hive and went completely unbootable and unrecoverable.

[pinhodecarlos]

I think the only thing that fails on Ubuntu linux are the tools to burn DVD's like K3B and Brasero. In 7 tries to burn a DVD9 only had one success. After installing Windows I managed to burn all DVD9's without a failure using DVD Decrypter.

[John P. Myers]

International space station switches from windows to linux for improved reliability

[Fire$torm]

International space station switches from windows to linux for improved reliability

[John P. Myers]

Acer $400 'PC' will run Android, pack Intel's Haswell chip

Brilliant move, really. Windows was hoping to do something similar with Win8, thinking people familiar with it on their desktop would find it simple to use on their phones and tablets. Too bad it's such a clock-gobbling bloated whore of an OS. On the other hand, Google Announces It Has Reached 900,000,000 Android Activations. Seems quite a few ppl are already familiar with Android and actually like it. Goodbye Winblows