Forgot your password?

Comment: Microsoft and BestBuy are Thieves (Score 1) 381

Here is the most remarkable fact about Surface RT (Windows on Arm) in combination with the new Windows Store at BestBuy:

A significant amount of the floorspace of America's last remaining generic brick and mortar electronics vendor, is now devoted to a product that does not sell.

The Surface RT is product does not have a naturally won position in the market place. The product exists simply because Microsoft has the money, a long standing relationship with BestBuy, and the desperation to place the excess inventory in front of customers who do not want to buy it.

Microsoft and BestBuy are flogging a product (Windows on Arm) which is doomed. Everyone in the industry knows it is. I can only feel sorry for the unsuspecting customers who purchase Windows on Arm.

Microsoft and BestBuy are stealing money from people in a last gasp attempt at flogging a dead platform.

Comment: Finger Grease on a Laptop Screen? (Score 1) 294

by bryanbrunton (#44768177) Attached to: Surface Pro 2 and Surface 2: Now With New Kickstand!

This is a serious question of Surface users. My laptop screen must stay pristine.

How do Surface users, when toggling the device back to desktop mode, deal with the finger grease?

- Battery life
- Disk space
- Decent keyboard
- Screen size

These all take second place to the chore of dealing with a smudged up screen on a machine that would seek to function as a tablet and a laptop.

Comment: The need someone who innovates less! (Score 3, Insightful) 196

by bryanbrunton (#44706101) Attached to: Elop Favored By Gamblers As Microsoft's Next Chief Executive

Let's face it, Microsoft has recently seen a huge amount of innovation.

  - a completely new UI for Windows
  - gambling a couple billion dollars on Windows RT
  - locking down the XBox with draconian DRM

These were HUGE gambles, Ballmer had HUGE stones. They were really betting the company on this dynamic new strategic path.

It just so happens that this is innovation that really fscking sucked. They need a CEO who recognizes that Microsoft cannot innovate. It is not something that the company does well.

Comment: Where is Microsoft's Edward Snowden? (Score 5, Insightful) 413

by bryanbrunton (#44693921) Attached to: Devs Flay Microsoft For Withholding Windows 8.1 RTM

This post is a public plea for someone within Microsoft to come forward with documentation on the rationale behind the recent apparent loss of all reason and common sense by the company.

Please, please come forward now!

The actions of this company make no sense to us. We are bewildered by the illogically behavior of Microsoft's direction.

Everyone knows that to ruin the useability of Windows by the utter donkey skit that is the Metro Interface makes no sense. There must be some greater reason behind these mysterious decisions that Microsoft has recently under taken.

So give us an internal memo or two! There must have been voices of intelligence within Microsoft who argued against the self-destructive path that it has recently undertaken.

Let us know why Microsoft is committing public suicide.

Comment: Re:Too little too late (Score 2) 496

Sorry, I got the email monitoring covered elsewhere. I got a web browser open, I got Outlook alerts in the lower right of the screen.

When I open the open the start menu to run some old program (the name of which I have probably forgotten because I installed in 2 year ago), I don't want to learn about my inbox, my facebook, the price of MSFT.

Combining these functional areas is brain damage.

Comment: Re:Too little too late (Score 3, Insightful) 496

No, no and no.

To all the Microsoft Shills who insist on listing 100 different windows key combinations to replicate what was available from the old start menu, or if you are going to advise me to start typing in program names to launch programs on my mouse operated graphical user interface:



No, the 'minimum effort' way to access programs is to put a Quick Launch Bar into the Windows task bar. One mouse flick, one click. I have 20 programs with icons there that I launch without the back-assward, 20th century methodology of typing in program names.

Comment: Re:Too little too late (Score 5, Insightful) 496

The old menu allows quick access to the majority of system functions. It did this with a minimum of clicks, mouse movement and extraneous information.

If I am working, I don't want to see weather information, stock quotes and baseball scores. Sure, you can remove those tiles from the start screen, but then that defeats the purpose of having that information available when I am not working.

I actually might enjoy the start screen when I am not working, but that goes back to the core malfunction of the start screen: it is mixing core functional areas:

(1) Program/System/Settings Launcher
(2) Information Provider

Why is so freaking difficult for the so-called User Interface experts at Microsoft to understand that this is a colossal fuck up to jam these two key functional areas onto the Start Screen?

Comment: Re:What if Ballmer and Gates had not been such dic (Score 0) 406

by bryanbrunton (#44669205) Attached to: Microsoft Needs a Catch-Up Artist

Web apps have not destroyed the need for a Windows operating system. Smart phones and tablets are not winning/selling because they have web apps. They are winning because they have a innovative touch interface designed for the hardware, and a huge amount of non-web app software. The browser is just another application which is installed on the phone/tablet, an application which usually takes back seat to a custom app.

Gmail and Yahoo Mail were going to succeed if accessed via Internet Explorer or via Netscape.

In the battle to place the box under the desk, Microsoft still reigns supreme. And web apps have nothing to do with that market. The battle to place the phone in the pocket isn't being decided by which web browser is on the phone.

Comment: Re:Blame DoJ (Score 1) 406

by bryanbrunton (#44667539) Attached to: Microsoft Needs a Catch-Up Artist

Microsoft gained nothing by destroying Netscape and limiting adoption of Java. They lost hundreds of millions in legal fees, and then billions went out door to the EU. Microsoft was going to make their money. They had the desktop monopoly. Apple will never gain much desktop market share with their pricing structure. Java was a joke, a complete user interface travesty. They could have fired everyone on the IE team, and licensed Netscape, and it wouldn't have affected one bit the Office and Windows money train that was coming down the tracks.

It doesn't matter one iota which web browser a windows machine is using. Microsoft already got paid. Browsers are commodities. Ballmer and Gates were such paranoid dicks, and non-technologists, that they couldn't see that.

Comment: What if Ballmer and Gates had not been such dicks? (Score 3, Interesting) 406

by bryanbrunton (#44667243) Attached to: Microsoft Needs a Catch-Up Artist

Purely as an exercise in alternate reality, it is interesting to wonder how the computing landscape would have been different, most certainly superior to state of affairs now, if Ballmer and Gates had not been such conniving, backstabbing dicks.

The company would almost certainly be an order of magnitude wealthier, more respected and better positioned in the marketplace, if those two guys hadn't felt it necessary to throw the company's weight around by executing the many well known monopolistic and consumer-unfriendly practices that they are so well known for.

If anything, the strategic failure of Microsoft as a company to set itself against so many others in the industry, is missing from the debate about the good and bad aspects of Steve Ballmer's legacy.

Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it.

It is fairly easy to posit that a good amount of the effort behind the rise of Linux was simply due to a common reaction against the back alley tactics deployed by Microsoft. And if Linux is not as developed as it was in 2008, does Google have something upon which to build Android? Something which can be released and developed under the GNU license? And that is just one potential hypothetical.

Comment: No missile batteries or other defenses? (Score 1) 545

by bryanbrunton (#44542787) Attached to: Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'?

So obviously there were numerous plot holes in the movies, but the most egregious was the station's lack of defense systems.

So the super rich, who have enslaved the majority of humanity on hell earth, spend billions on a floating space station and they don't bother to defend the thing?

Comment: Re:Start Menu use case: How do you find old stuff? (Score 1) 740

by bryanbrunton (#42206599) Attached to: Windows 8: a 'Christmas Gift For Someone You Hate'

This is probably a stupid question, is the list of applications on the tile screen and desktop screen inclusive of both tablet apps and desktop apps?

There is probably just one list of programs.

How does one know if a program is a tablet app or a desktop app?
