Good News – Bad News
The Good News, according to ABC [Australia], is that Bill Gates is finally going to tackle a problem that he knows a lot about: crap.
I have two minor concerns about this: plumbers may have to learn VBA to install a new toilet; and the damn thing might try to be ‘helpful’.
The Bad News, according to Charlie Pierce, is that ‘progressive pundits’ still don’t understand the Republican Party.
Nothing will make the GOP move left, because it is a religion, not a political philosophy. The core concepts can’t fail, only people can fail to properly carry them out. If Mitt Romney doesn’t win, it is because he wasn’t conservative enough. This doesn’t affect Ayn-Rand-Paul-Ryan who will be a leading candidate in 2016, as the GOP moves even further to the right.
Zero’s biggest problem is that he still doesn’t understand that the GOP won’t compromise, because that would be heresy.
19 comments
LMAO Yeah… read about the toilet thing! Been laughing for awhile! 😀
it’s completely obvious to the sane parts of the World that irony is totally lost on the Dweeb! LOL Oh Lord… what a perfect match! Gates and Toilets!! LMAO
I sincerely hope he does go ahead to reinvent the ol’ loo, and that it works as well as everything else he does, and he becomes the first one flushed down it because of an unforeseen *feature*! LOL
Well, I have always said he and everything he does is full of cr*p! 😈
And yeah… what you said about Rethugs! Been saying for ages (as have you, I know) they are nothing more than religious zealots that make the inquisitors of old seem sane and benign.
So, who seriously would consider sitting on a ‘throne’ that incorporates a MICROWAVE OVEN!!. Seriously, is there someone who doesn’t have a problem with the possibility of ‘nuking’ their private parts with M$ WC version 1.0?
The biggest problem with liberals, and US liberals in particular, is that they have ever dealt with hardcore ‘bad people’, and have no gut-level feeling for exactly how bad some people can be. They always think that people will be ‘reasonable’, and reason never enters into their minds. They see themselves as good and anyone who disagrees with them as evil. Everything is a binary choice. As the Shrubbery said ‘if you aren’t with us, you are against us.’ They view cooperation as succumbing to evil, and not even a ‘necessary’ evil.
The Incinolet has been available for quite a number of years. Reducing your output to ashes is a great way of making sure that it is sterile and not spreading diseases, and means you can build in places where flush toilets with their acouterments — typically a large 500 gallon+ septic tank and hundreds of feet of field line — are not practical. Composting toilets have also been available for years and are quite popular amongst certain types of earthy people (heh). It’s nice that Bill Gates has finally realized that there are alternatives to the flush toilet, but he’s really, really late to the party…
Windows 8 (the final release edition) was released to Technet so I guess I need to install it, since I just downloaded it. Wish me luck.
Well, Gates never gets involved with anything that is actually new, he just decides to ‘improve’ on it, which is what bothers me.
So you announce your intention to install Windows 8 and your boot disk fails. Totally unrelated of course because the hardware isn’t sentient. as we all know … 😈
Heh. My Windows 8 install proved to be a disaster, of course. The store app kept blanking out the display, the Mail app crashed when I tried to add my personal email server to the list (worked fine with hotmail.com and Gmail of course), etc., etc.. The guys at Oracle (who maintain VirtualBox) basically threw up their hands and said “What do you expect from us? Microsoft didn’t give us any kind of access, so how could we know that it wouldn’t run on VirtualBox? We got the image the same day you did, get back to us in a couple of weeks after we have a chance to figure out what Microsoft fscked up between the preview and the release!”
Good point about Bill Gates. He will either buy one of those composting toilet companies and market it as Microsoft Toilet 2.0, or steal the Incinolet’s design and market it as the Microsoft Microtoilet, because that’s all he ever did — bought other people’s products, or stole other people’s products. So it goes.
Hell, I’m at the point that if an M$ product has a clean install, it is one of their best, because I’ve seen so many -.0s from them refuse to even finish the initial install.
There were a lot of people who suspected they never released the correct hooks for the actual product until they found out what broke whose software. Back in the bad old days the guys from Lotus took it personally.
These days I just wait and watch other people fight with it. I wouldn’t have upgraded if I had another option.
Yep, that’s exactly what I was thinking, BT. Anything he actually backs will be his, regardless of who created it.
Good point about Bill Gates. He will either buy one of those composting toilet companies and market it as Microsoft Toilet 2.0, or steal the Incinolet’s design and market it as the Microsoft Microtoilet, because that’s all he ever did — bought other people’s products, or stole other people’s products.
Been saying that for decades.. ever since ‘Micro Soft’! The only thing the Dweeb ever created, was disaster and cr*p. But he was clever enough to realise that the majority of humanity are moronic superficial drones who, when told something often enough, and it’s wrapped in pretty packaging, will buy any garbage at any price. Apple almost died before they realised that and finally began down the same path, though they haven’t quite plunged to the depths of M$, but give them time. After all, the Dweeb owns 40% of Apple now. Just goes to prove… there are $billions to be made in sh*t! And millions of people willing to buy it! LMAO
I warned you about Win 8. 😉 I gave up after a day. My most stable Win box runs XP, though I also use W7 x64 when I have to use 64-bit apps. The XP box generally requires a wipe and reinstall every year, or sooner, depending on how heavy I use it. *shrug*
The will get Win 8 working reasonably well just before they release win 9 (or whatever) and OEL 8, as is the case with 7! LOL
M$ could probably sell a few million MS Toilet 1.0’s if they would place an image of Bill at the bottom of the bowl. Hey, they’re known as a company that will do anything for a buck…
Oh, Windows 8 is a disaster, Kryten. *FOUR* hot corners, none of which do the same thing? That said, the preview ran just fine inside VirtualBox while the actual release… not so much. Bryan may have a point with his notion that Microsoft waits to finalize their API until they figure out how to break competitors’ products :twisted:. (VirtualBox is, of course, a competitor to Microsoft’s own Virtual PC, except more flexible since it will run other vendors’ OS’s too).
Windows 7 is actually usable. Not great, but usable. It seems to be much more stable than XP was, my Win7 install is used for testing as well as software development and thus far repeated install/uninstall of apps under development haven’t turned it into a toaster yet. Windows 8… not so much. What a mess.
And oh, BTW, MSDN developers didn’t get access to the Win8 final release until this week. Just in case you’re wondering. The last Win8 we had access to before this was the consumer preview released in mid-May. Any API changes between then and now? There are? And we folks who forked over over $1K for the “privilege” of developing for this bilge weren’t given any sort of notice or access of such? You don’t say!
If I had my choice, I’d give both index fingers up for Microsoft. Alas, 99% of our customers are running Windows on their desktop (and the other 1% are running Macs). Siiiiiigh.
Steve, that image would only be available on the “Developers’ Edition” of the toilet, and could only be leased.
My version of Win 7 Professional, which is almost identical in appearance to XP is stable, but is getting updates every other day. If they hadn’t screwed up the file manager I wouldn’t care, but that’s a real pain when I have to use it. Wordpad is also worse, as is has delusions of Word and keeps trying to format straight text.
I guess the days when the purpose of the OS was to support the applications has gone. Part of the problem may be that certain parts of the API were too similar to the standards used in various flavors of Unix. They would have to be as they are all running on the same basic hardware, so M$ is inserting crap to make code re-use even harder.
The best file manager I’ve used, and have been using for about 2 decades, is Total Commander. It works on every version of Win ever made, and there is now (finally) an x64 version (though many of the extensions have yet to be ported to x64, and some will never be because they have been abandoned. Oh well.) Still, even without the extensions, it’s pretty powerful and extremely flexible in it’s own right.
Actually, TC represents one of the first Win anti-competitive attacks on a 3rd party product that the Dweeb was afraid of. It used to be called Windows Commander, but the Dweebs grey suit brigade tried to force Ghisler to stop using that name, even though in fact, he had been using ‘Windows Commander’ before M$ had even developed Windows 1. Though he would most likely have won his case, he simply couldn’t afford the expense of a legal battle. And M$ always count on that. Still, I think Total Commander is a better name anyway! 😀
The only reason for Win 8 is to make mostly young (naive) people believe it’s all new and exciting and *cool*. The fact that it also pisses off mainstream users doesn’t matter, what are we going to do about it? As badtux says, for the most part, we have little choice. M$ wants to ensure that lock as many people in as possible. Their sales have been dropping, and they know it! (Amusingly, this is primarily thanks to Android, which is based on linux, and iOS. Hence the focus of Win 8 on mobile/embedded devices. I suspect the desktop variants were almost afterthoughts). Hopefully, the mobile/embedded industry will see it for the garbage it is and stay away!
Total Commander was overkill for me, so I went with Free Commander which does the job and takes care of the FTP needs I have. Unfortunately other programs have copied the ‘look and feel’ of the Windows version for their internal file management needs.
I have set the Win version to list details repeatedly but it never seems to hold more than a few days.
Oh, yeah, Windows without unlimited resources – that will really work … never. They are probably plotting a thin client for the device, and then having it work though an on-line system – another 3270 emulator in the making.
They are going to have to bribe someone to try it; I don’t see any other way given their history. Make them pay for it up front rather than creating something and having them ‘adopt’ it.
Bryan, Microsoft couldn’t even bribe someone to try Windows 8 Tablet Version. They’re releasing their own tablet. They did bribe Nokia to release phones with Windows Phone 7, but now they’re releasing Windows Phone 8 which is totally incompatible with Windows Phone 7. Lurch is a terrible CEO, but as long as Microsoft still has billions in the bank the shareholders don’t seem interested in rocking the boat.
All our development efforts right now are aimed at Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008R2, but we have to make sure they work on Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 also. Thus why I was installing a Windows 8 virtual machine. It works in Parallels, which sells Microsoft OS’s to Mac users, so I think Microsoft had to explicitly break the Oracle Virtualbox virtualization between the prerelease and the RTM. But I’m going to stick with Windows 7 as long as I can, because Windows 8 is just a big stinking mess.
Nokia will be thrilled given how close to the edge they are.
No M$ OS is a stable beta release until after service pack 1.
When I bought Win7 for the new machine they offered me a coupon for 8 – I told them no thanks.
The reason so many organizations are still using XP is because of the disaster that was Vista which terrified a lot of system admins when they tested it. People are no longer automatically updating because of that mess and the generally sucky business environment.
The same things that made that huge pile of cash possible are killing the long term survival of the corporation. You need the institutional memory and skills to keep going. When you attempt to maximized profits for the short term you kill long term growth.
The biggest cause of Windows 8 being a big reeking mess is the Metro err “Modern” interface, which is built in and not removable by service packs or otherwise. (Just love how they had to change the name of their new user interface after Germany’s Metro Stores threatened to sue them!). I’m sure the bugs like Mail not being able to properly handle imap will eventually get fixed, but you can’t polish a turd. Or you can, but what you end up with is just a polished turd.
Windows 7 / Win2k8r2 are the new Windows XP. Corporate America is going to stick with these for as long as they can, because Windows 8 is just impossible.
I sometimes wonder who thinks that the new interfaces/themes that M$ comes up with are a good idea. They keep pushing people onto the ‘Net for the most trivial of things, and the connection to the ‘Net is another point for failure if you are a Sys Admin.
I have wasted a lot of time waiting for the comm lines to come back up to check out at stores, and it is seriously annoying. If you have a major portion of your work dependent on something on the ‘Net and you link goes down, you are paying people to sit around and do nothing.
The majority of people don’t like or trust change, so making obvious changes to the way things look or work always meets with resistance, even when it will make life easier for them in the long term. People generally want tomorrow to be just like today, so they know what to expect.
The funny thing about XP is that M$ were forced to extend it’s EOL date, and thought *officially* it’s now an ‘end of life’ product, M$ still maintain updates and patches for it, and will do so for the foreseeable future. Hardware vendors (such as Dell, HP etc) are not pleased because many corporate clients see no need to update their desktop hardware that is fine for XP as they have no intention of using anything else. Some are going to a 7-9 year cycle rather than the old norm of 3 (or 5 in some cases). Of course, this also helps their bottom lines so most bean counters are all for it. 🙂
One of the biggest problems for corporate/institutional users isn’t so much the cost of hardware/software, but the cost of training and the time it takes to become comfortable and familiar to use. With Win 8, this is quite high. There is also the cost of migration of software/hardware to a new OS especially those developed in-house. many companies were bitten hard with this with Vista/Win 7, and have no desire to repeat it. There is a good reason that the early Win 7 quickly had the ‘XP Compatibility Mode’ (which is simply XP running on M$ Virtual PC). Some of the biggest companies (such as mining for eg.) still use DOS or even in 3.11! The software many use or created in-house works fine on this and they see no reason to waste money just because the newer OS’s look pretty! LOL Of course, these are mainly in the field and their Admin systems usually do run Win. 😉
M$ never learn. This is a good thing. And hopefully, one day, people will wake up. We can but hope! 😉 😀
The reason I have the XP compatibility on both my Win 7 machines is because I have clients who are still using software I wrote for DOS decades ago, and they refuse to give it up or try something else. The software does exactly what they want done exactly as they want to do it. In one case the software was written for the father of the guy who currently owns the company. They are in a niche business, and there is no general purpose software that does what they need done. Parts of that system were originally written using dBASE II for a CPM machine.
It ain’t broke, and they don’t want to “fix” it.