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Entries Tagged as 'Microsoft'

It’s market share time again – who’s winning? Windows, of course.

January 21st, 2010 · View Comments · Computing

ArsTechnica posted the latest operating system market share statistics.  As of December, 2009, Windows is still the lions share of the market at 92.21%. OS/X is a very distant second at 5.11% and Linux trails at 1.02%.
The trend is very slightly downward for Windows. It went from 93.66% in January, 2009 to 92.21% [...]

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Putting things in perspective

November 6th, 2009 · View Comments · Computing

The hot technical topic is alternative operating systems. But, with the release of Windows 7, let’s put things into perspective.
Here are the estimated Worldwide OS usage figures for October 2009:

70.48 – Windows XP
18.83 – Windows Vista
2.82 – OS/X 10.5
2.15 – Windows 7
1.17 – OS/X 10.6
0.96 – Linux (all versions)
0.93 – OS/X 10.4
0.78 – Windows [...]

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Windows and OS/X steal from each other

October 12th, 2009 · View Comments · Mac

Well, that’s no big surprise. Here’s two Infoworld slide shows that attempts to show the top 10 items each stole from the other. They got some things wrong though.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/top-10-features-apple-stole-windows-966?source=fssr
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mac/top-10-features-microsoft-stole-mac-os-x-971?source=fssr
What OS/X stole from Windows

Finder sidebar – stolen from the Explorer navigation pane. Yep.
Finder breadcrumb path display – stolen from the Explorer address [...]

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Make IE run 10 times faster

September 24th, 2009 · View Comments · JavaScript, Web

Some initial performance tests are in and Google’s Chrome Frame plugin is posting benchmarks 10 times the speed of IE 8 rendering.
I’m already seeing a wave of announcements from Web 2.0 sites that they’re going to support the Chrome Frame plug-in. Many of them had written IE 6/7 off and either didn’t bother trying [...]

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What do new PC’s cost?

July 23rd, 2009 · View Comments · Computing, Mac

According to new sales figures from NPD, the average selling price (ASP) of a new PC is $515.
When it comes to PCs, the cut-throat competition in the industry has resulted in a race to the bottom.  The netbook segment was the final nail.
The PC vendors very much want to sell the higher margin machines but [...]

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Which browser is fastest?

June 26th, 2009 · View Comments · JavaScript, Web

Depends on how you test fastest. Microsoft claims IE is the fastest browser. Everyone else, and I do mean EVERYONE else says it’s the slowest. So how do people test and how do they get the results they spout off?
Here’s the latest – http://www.codexon.com/posts/a-real-benchmark-real-websites-with-chrome-firefox-opera-safari-ie
This test is about rendering time. It doesn’t emphasize JavaScript, it shows [...]

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What’s the difference between done and done right?

May 17th, 2009 · View Comments · Consulting

We accomplish tasks. We get things done. We meet schedules and check off boxes on requirements lists. We implement features and run tests.
It doesn’t have to look pretty. It doesn’t have to be polished to a high sheen. It has to be professional and correct.
This is how you mark off requirements and move forward. This [...]

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Sun and Cloud Computing

March 18th, 2009 · View Comments · Computing, Java

Tim Bray, one of the moving forces behind XML wrote a blog entry about his work on cloud computing at Sun. It has lots of interesting information in it:

Sun is working on an open specification for creating, administrating and controlling cloud resources
Sun is implementing Amazon S3 interfaces
Sun is morphing the Q-Layer software [...]

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IE 8 Compatibility

February 19th, 2009 · View Comments · Web

Here’s a story which, while it gets some details wrong, gets the point right.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2067&tag=nl.e589
IE 8 is the first browser from Microsoft that runs in “standards mode”. This means that it doesn’t accept HTML with quirks and non-standard extensions. Ironically, most of those quirks and non-standard extensions were created by Microsoft in older IE [...]

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Held Back

December 9th, 2008 · View Comments · Computing

Microsoft’s biggest problem today is they are overwhelmed with the complexity of their software and hampered by their ancient code and old tools.
This is a quote from Keith Curtis, a former developer at Microsoft. And it matches my own perceptions.
I was asked, semi-jokingly, by a co-worker why I hated Microsoft. I told him [...]

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