Well, a decade is an eternity in the computer business, and there can’t be that many people with that kind of loyalty. It’s good PR for them.
Not every company follows the MS lead, and most of those that did have disappeared, which is a shame because some of them produced good and useful programs… at least until the founders cashed out and were bought by MS wannabes.
]]>I ran into him at events in Southern California very early in the company’s history, but was more interested in what Paul Allen had to say. Bill was the financial/sales side, and that had no draw for me as a techie. He wasn’t married at the time.
He sounds a lot like the first Henry Ford vis-à-vis personal paranoia/privacy, and Henry was facing real threats. I guess life is tough if you’re a billionaire, but that problem could be solved quickly with a checkbook if it was a real concern.
]]>Anyway, after posting above about the few S/W companies I support, including Ashampoo, I just received an email from them (I get emails regularly from Ashampoo and O&O with news/updates/special deal (REAL special deals!) But this is a first:
Hello ***********! You are receiving this Service Letter as a registered Ashampoo® customer.
10 Years With Ashampoo – Our Birthday Present.
How it works: 1. download for free – 2. install – 3. enter full version key.
This is our birthday present for you:
Ashampoo® Burning Studio 2009 Advanced
Ashampoo® WinOptimizer 2009 Advanced
Ashampoo® UnInstaller 3
Ashampoo® PhotoCommander 6
Ashampoo® Slideshow Studio 2010
I’m kinda gobsmacked! These are not just the usual cheap low-end giveaways most companies do! These are some of Ashampoo’s top line products!
The timing is sooo wierd! But… I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, or gift eMail! 😉 😀
So, I d/l everything and got my key’s. And I didn’t have to sign anything or promise my soul or nothing! 😯
A-mazing! 😉
]]>That is, in fact, one of the primary reasons I no longer am a reg’d developer (and only was in the 90’s because it was a requirement at the company I was a proj mgr for as most of our clients ran M$ based client networks, or tried to)! It’s also one of the reasons why I despise m$ (also the fact that I actually have met The Dweeb a few times over the past few decades, and to know him is enough to make one reach for a barf bag! He truly is a paranoid sociopath! You have NO idea how much of his personal wealth is spent on keeping his family and anything at all private out of the gossip rags and press! It’s not a coincidence nobody knows much about his kids.)
Sometimes, too much knowledge can make one loose sleep at night.
]]>Explicitly breaking the software of competitors has been a fairly obvious “feature” of many MS upgrades. You were on the developers network, so it you had wanted, you could have tracked the changes that were made to specifically break software, i.e. dropping hooks, changing names, changing functions. They pull this crap all the time, and their behavior regarding anything on the web is egregious.
What people tend to miss, but we know, is that if you create web sites you want everyone to be able to see and use them. If you use MS tools, it is almost a guarantee that the site will only look right and function properly with the version of IE that was shipping at the same time as the tools. Hell, you have no guarantee that future versions of IE will be able to load the site.
If you create using the W3C standards, it will work for everyone. If there is a site I want to use and it isn’t functional using Firefox, I let them know that they have a problem – they are turning away customers. MS is in self-destruct mode. It happens to all large tech companies.
]]>I have a couple of utilities that use IE and IE8 keeps trying to “help” when it comes up, instead of displaying the information pages that are supposed to come up. It’s a quirky piece of software that makes you do more work than is actually necessary. Yes, one of my complaints about the entire line is the annoying frequency with which it misses the obvious – like the existence of the Internet connection.
]]>M$ are upto their old (usual) mischief again it seems. (What a SHOCK!! Really… no, really… It’s shocking to think a massive monopoly company liek M$ would stoop to such tactics! I’m shocked I tell you… SHOCKED! 😯
Microsoft Bypasses the Law and Breaks the Web for Opera and GNU/Linux Users, Again
Not every ASS.NET page breaks in Opera, but nearly every page that does break in Opera is built with ASS.NET. (On a side note, Silverblight won’t work at all, but who cares?)
…
This is a classic, I surfed over to Agency Spy to read his post about the new Windows 7 boot sequence, thinking hey if it’s really fast or really good, maybe I’ll switch from Ubuntu. So visiting the site, the embedded video wasn’t able to run on Ubuntu Linux, and the reason, it’s done only in Silverlight.
Can any company be more stupid than M$?? Really… I ask you? A-mazing! 😉
]]>I’m using a new v4 beta of eBoostr (that has Win7 compatibility) and has some exciting features including the ability to make use of RAM above the 3.5GB RAM limit on 32-bit systems. 🙂
The company is in Moscow apparently.
MDO Ltd
46 Tkatskaya str, suite 25
Moscow, Russia, 105187
Hope you don’t mind me giving them a little plug here. It’s rare enough to find s/w at a very reasonable price that does exactly what it’s claimed to do and works without any hassles (at least, I haven’t had any with it, and I’ve been using it almost a year now, from v2 to the net v4 beta). 🙂 There really are not that many commercial software companies I’d say that about. (O&O and Ashampoo in Germany are another couple that come to mind. O&O used to have problems with some of their products years ago, but they listened to their customers and quickly fixed the issues. Well done! I don’t expect perfection, but I do expect real problems with commercial s/w to be fixed! They also both have very good customer loyalty programs.) 🙂
]]>That’s why I don’t upgrade Windows on machines. I already know that I will be paying for the software the next time I need a Winbox, so there is no financial justification, and I know it is cheaper, and less aggravating to let someone else configure and install the OS.
I would roll my own Linux box, but Windows is just too flaky about peripherals.
The Eastern Bloc countries were stuck for the newest and the best, so they had to learn low-level programming skills, like assembler and C. As a result, they still know how to do the hard stuff, like anti-virus software and OS utilities. You can’t do that stuff with 4GL or OOP, which is why M$ can’t get the performance from the SATA interface, and their caching sucks. They probably “borrowed” their caching from a beta of a small developer, like “their” disk compression in DOS 6.0.
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