21–26 of 26 posts
'In fact "Microsoft is Dead" was what we in the trade call a metaphor.' It kind of saddens me that this clarification was necessary, but at least I got a good laugh out of it :)
The Cliff Notes probably aren't the whole story: the "Microsoft is Dead" and "Cliff Notes" essays were released in the midst of the selection process for Y Combinator's 2007 summer funding program. Interesting timing...
Apropos of Microsoft versus Google A senior researcher from Google gave a talk at the compter science colloquium at my institution in December 2005. It was supposed to be about such things as the Google Maps API, but it really was a talk about how great it was to work at Google. At the time, while doing research for my Strategic Defenestration Initiative (another story), I had read an editorial (URL: http://linux.sys…
1. Why would they quit?
2. Why is this funny?
XP is stable. It loads executables, runs them, moves files around etc, without much fuss. Google's code runs mostly on interpreters, so...wtf? The only people who should care are the accountants who would have to pay Microsoft. I mean: Is the punchline, "Ha, ha, google's engineers really are as immature as the bean bag chairs suggest"?
(I withdraw my question if the answer is, "Because they wouldn't want to spend months on useless administrative tasks like re-installing OSes.")
'In fact "Microsoft is Dead" was what we in the trade call a metaphor.' It kind of saddens me that this clarification was necessary, but at least I got a good laugh out of it :)
The Cliff Notes probably aren't the whole story: the "Microsoft is Dead" and "Cliff Notes" essays were released in the midst of the selection process for Y Combinator's 2007 summer funding program. Interesting timing...
(If you were suggesting I wrote it to attract attention to YC, the time to have done that would have been before the application deadline. This is the least useful time to attract attention.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Cliff Notes probably aren't the whole story: the "Microsoft is Dead" and "Cliff Notes" essays were released in the midst of the selection process for Y Combinator's 2007 summer funding program. Interesting timing...
Actually, it's true that it wasn't a coincidence. I've been doing nothing but reading applications all day, and I missed real work. I wanted to write something, but I couldn't take the time to write a proper essay, which takes weeks. So I just wrote down something I'd been thinking about lately. (If you were suggesting I wrote it to attract attention to YC, the time to have done that would have been before the applic…
The problem with the net is that the hordes of people who do not and may never understand metaphors or the rhetorical history of phrases such as "X is dead" will swamp you every time with their literalism. At some point you have to filter them out and trust that the people who are able to understand have understood and move on.
Apropos of Microsoft versus Google A senior researcher from Google gave a talk at the compter science colloquium at my institution in December 2005. It was supposed to be about such things as the Google Maps API, but it really was a talk about how great it was to work at Google. At the time, while doing research for my Strategic Defenestration Initiative (another story), I had read an editorial (URL: http://linux.sys…
One of two questions: 1. Why would they quit? 2. Why is this funny? XP is stable. It loads executables, runs them, moves files around etc, without much fuss. Google's code runs mostly on interpreters, so...wtf? The only people who should care are the accountants who would have to pay Microsoft. I mean: Is the punchline, "Ha, ha, google's engineers really are as immature as the bean bag chairs suggest"? (I withdraw my…
However, one of the more substantive complaints about Windows I've heard (beyond the usual instability and insecurity) is that it isn't easily programmable. You can't (I've read) effortlessly connect small, well-designed, single-purpose programs together with things like pipes, redirection, etc. And, most programs by default (again, I've read) are inextricably attached to their GUIs, so you can't make them scriptable like you can with a command-line Unix tool plus a shell script. That would mightily suck for anyone who's used to the high level of programmability in Unix.