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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
09/17/09
haha. Omg. nice opening sentence.
"The other week, we did this amazing article about how fucking amazing apple is. So since some of you complained that fucking amazing apple weren't the only computer company out there, we decided to do a follow up article on Microsoft, which is the biggest rotting turd on top of the decaying compost pile that is called the computer industry".
09/17/09
09/17/09
... and Giz, can you axe the alcohol ads on the main pages? I got kicked out of a lab today because of our zero-tolerance towards alcohol and other drugs.
09/17/09
Granted, there's still tons of debate about it. But for Microsoft's part, putting in their support of the video and audio tags for the HTML5 standard is at least a step in the right direction. I wouldn't expect a patch to come out for IE8 next week, but, according to them, whatever issues they have with the multimedia tags, they intend to work through it.
All the better, I say.
09/17/09
I feel like it should be "Dear Giz, can you give me a few reasons or examples why Microsoft is more closed and stupid in regards to standards than Apple?"
09/17/09
It may be less exciting to paint Microsoft as a good guy once in a while, but they are directly responsible for a lot thanks to their long partnerships with IBM and Intel: DOS, FAT, USB, DirectX, etc.
09/17/09
09/17/09
A lot of what Microsoft has done over the years came from the fact that most standards bodies are far, far too slow to keep up with market demand - and that for the most part, there really isn't much of a penalty for not complying with standards if there's no interoperability issues.
Microsoft doesn't care if you want to interop Word - that's not really their problem: it's the file format for their word processor - why on earth would they have a need to let other apps work with it? That's just helping the competition.
The Web really was the first (and in some ways, is the ONLY) case where interop really becomes an issue. But while we're on it: how come no one dumps on Adobe for not opening Photoshop files? Or for having made Postscript and to a lesser degree PDF files licensed technology for so long?
And how about Apple with Firewire (which IS a standard) and their now infamous 25c per device fee?
It's easy to cherry pick but the fact remains that this is a common practice across all companies. Microsoft just happens to be the biggest and most visible one.
09/17/09
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09/17/09
It's funny how, even to this day, people accuse Apple of using proprietary technology and think MS is more "standard", when historically the exact opposite is true.
09/17/09
Shamoon? *suspicious look*.....Do you know anything about this?
09/17/09
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09/17/09
09/17/09
Historically the opposite is true... what planet are you from?
All I've got to say is AppleTalk...
As a unix person who dealt with LDAP way, way back when (10 years ago against Irix 6.2 machines) I've never really messed much with AD but I can say historically there's a reason. X.500 didn't support a lot of features (features especially needed compared to Novel) that were needed. MS was trying to push into Novell networks against their directory server, which also is a bastardization of X.500 but Novell was used pretty much everywhere in business and X.500 was used hardly anywhere. MS did the same thing and extended X500.
Here's what Microsoft does, if a standard doesn't do all the stuff they want it to do, they make it close and extend it. Other people (often grumpy unix guys like myself) after a while finally get a new standard out that does what MS has extended but often in a different way that is more efficient/cleaner. Instead of switching to that new method, MS continues doing their own thing.
Apple just does things to do them, doesn't even try to be close to an original standard and extend it they go do their own thing... which sometimes is pretty damn good (OSX) and sometimes is completely annoying (AppleTalk)
09/17/09
But in all fairness, back then there wasn't really a network protocol standard. Sure, TCP/IP existed, but this was before in-house networks were connected to the internet. Everyone had their own protocol back then: Unix had TCP/IP, Novell had IPX, MS had Netbeui, and Apple had AppleTalk.
09/17/09
Then IE became the dominant player and W3C/IETF decided to finally get off their butts and implement some of the extensions in the HTML standard - but did it differently than the dominant player.
That left Microsoft in a weird position. Do they break compatibility with all the sites who used their extensions or do they ignore a standard that at the time, no one used?
Fastforward to today and we have a lot of people who have no clue as to the history of these events who are yelling at MSFT do to it *their* way.
09/18/09
But combine appletalk + localtalk and you have an unholly alliance, where (at the time I was working with them) 10base ethernet was a common standard. If I remember right you also had to use some crazy specialized serial cable because you of course couldn't use a standard rs232 like everybody else for modems
09/18/09
09/17/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
P.S. I also think PirateBay will fail....
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
07/20/09
It was Usenet.com that lost trial against the RIAA. Usenet, the network, is fine.
07/21/09
03/13/09
03/12/09
My top three favorite items in this article:
1.
SD cards are by far the industry standard on memory, and I will be the first to sign a petition outlawing every other memory format (yes, including Compact Flash). But wait! There are multiple varieties of SD cards, too, so we really are not winning any battles here.
2.
CDMA may be disliked (especially by those who have GSM phones), but do not forget that the world has hardly selected one standard for phone carriers. While GSM might be the majority player, like SD cards, it still has multiple varieties. And while the SIM card idea sounds great on paper, we have had a lot of difficulties getting them to work. (GCI in Alaska is our latest example where we have to swap SIM cards because they are moving to a different GSM network. So much for GSM being ubiquitous.)
3.
The sound quality improvement of AAC and WMA is really at very small bit rates, which is stupid in the age of 4gb shuffles. PC Magazine did a study and found that MP3 actually sounds better than both of these formats when using any bit rate above 160K. That leaves only one reason to use a format other than MP3: Because no one wants to pay the small royalties to use it. I am a cheapskate, but that seems absurd to me.
Still, the one thing I have come to accept is that the gadget community will continue to create new standards and formats that will ultimately make all of our lives ridiculously complicated. Consider it job security, folks.
03/12/09
Kodak Disk Cameras.
[en.wikipedia.org]
worst idea they ever had. I mean.. 35mm was plentiful and easy to get and use.. so they create that??
03/12/09
Apple's Mini-DVI, Micro-DVI, Mini-VGA...whatever other video ports they have. Those are just evil.
All the consoles having different video plugs and power cords.
There has to be more...just can't think of them right now.
03/12/09
03/12/09
03/12/09
Example.
So if you already have a DVI to VGA converter and you want to use either DVI or VGA though your Display Port. You have to buy both adapters.
03/12/09
Another way apple is sucking more money out of their customers. But noo...no one will complain, its apple almost everyone thinks that they are perfect. Yet they seem to be as greedy, if not more greedy then Microsoft.
03/12/09
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03/12/09