This may or may not be real, but if it is real, it’s pretty damn funny. Supposedly a Windows machine used for projections during the Olympics Opening Ceremony crashed during the show, resulting in the hilarious picture above.
Perhaps it would have been worth it to use a more stable OS (*cough*, Linux)?
WARNING: This may very well turn out to be a fake, or then not.
It’s not often that I deliberately set out to trash Windows on this blog, I just don’t see the point of it (though it sure can be fun). I find that the better approach is to highlight the benefits of FOSS. But this email from Bill Gates himself detailing some of his frustrations with Windows XP in 2003 is just too good to pass on.
The message deals with Mr. Gates’ frustration with trying to install a MS application called MovieMaker. It really is worth reading the whole text, but just to give you a preview, here are some of the best quotes:
So I gave up [on trying to find the download] and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.
[After installing some updates] it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
Everybody knows about Firefox, Open Office etc. But what about those less well known, but still very useful, open source programs? Well, here’s a Network World article that covers twenty of them.
Both the WSJ and Cnet have blog posts in favour of opening up Windows. The basic argument:
Why can’t Windows be proprietary, for-profit and copy-protected — while at the same time be open for user control and inspection?
The software’s “black boxness” was driven home for me once when XP was taking an excruciatingly long time to load, and even the best tech sleuths at Microsoft couldn’t figure out the cause. Had I been able to look under cover, I might have seen, oh, that Windows was wasting 90 seconds looking for a nonexistent drive.
The ZDNet post is more ground to earth and gives some pretty good insight into why it’s never going to happen.
Ulteo have relased a new application today which allows Windows users to run Linux programs on Windows, without rebooting or starting a VM. The Linux apps can access all the user’s documents, print and even output sound. The system uses the coLinux kernel patch, rather than a tradional VM, such as Zen or QEMU. Performance is “close to a native installation on the PC.”
Ulteo Virtual Desktop has been tested on Windows XP and Vista (32-bit only). The hardware recommendation is a dual core CPU and 1GB of RAM.
[ Ulteo]
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