Now a computer isn’t like the steak that wasn’t cooked enough, you don’t just send it back to the kitchen.  There is always a learning curve and what is very frustrating out there is not enough people know or want to know how things work.  The problem I see is that the world is convinced that Windows is the only way to go, but that isn’t true.  Like going out to eat, you have your choices.  Windows is more like Sushi, its expensive, a little dangerous and you walk away still a little hungry. While Mac is more like a steak house, you pay a lot for a lot and sometimes its just too much.  While Linux is more like the hot dog stand, you order your beef frank but have to put the mustard and relish on your self and then you might want to buy a side of fries.

There is a lot of places out there for peole to learn how to use linux and openoffice.  There are wonderful open source proudcts out in the world that will not break your bank.  However, when its free, there is usually no hands on support.  No one to call.  This is what makes it harder for people.  We all want someone to hold our hand.

After all Microsoft is still a global enterprise, despite a huge disaster of Windows Vista.  Hmmm.  The United States is still a world leader despite the huge disaster of the Iraqi war.  That is only the beginning of the similarities. This country has had its share of poor leadership and buggy software as it glides through a stormy economy and a changing world.  If you look at popularity in the world market, both Microsoft and the United States have been declining in popularity.  Now that the president-elect is making the world take a new look at the USA, is Bill Gates trying to do the same for his founding company?

Bill Gates will never be the president of the United States, but he might hold a political position in the government.  This new face of Mr. Gates will help Microsoft, since he will always be the mascot of his founding company. While he helps the world through his foundation, people will respect that and not mind a blue screen or loosing all there documents to a new virus.  The cost of the software will increase and corporations and individuals will purchase the overpriced bugy software knowing that they are helping humanity.

However, few of us will hold tightly to our Unix based computers systems as we watch the average consumer file for bankruptcy. They will wonder why it costs over $400 to fix there system at Best Buy and other retailers but will be quickly reminded that there continue support of the Microsoft empire has allowed the Gates Foundation to help the world and make Bill Gates a political adviser.

As the Van Halen song says.. “Big Bad Billy is Sweet William now!” Most Internet and monkey wrenched technically non-foreign people have heard that this is the last day on the job for Bill Gates.  Yeah you know him as the richest man in the world, the super-man of Microsoft, the geek-with-the-mostest or just the founder of Microsoft.  In tribute to the last day there are three questions that I will never get to ask Billy, three questions that have been ripping me apart for the past 25 years (Yes I’ve been following the guy since i was 6!).

Question 1:  Why do you still wear those dorky glasses when you can obviously aford laser surgery? (Who do you think you are, Clark Kent?)

Question 2: Do you really use Windows Vista? (yeah we know secretly your still playing World of Warcraft on Windows XP.)

Question 3: Why don’t you make a game show to give your money away?  (‘Who wants Bill Gates Money?’ might not crash as quick as Vista!)

So good-bye Bill Gates and hello Microsoft 2.0, a day without Bill, a day many of us thought would never happened.  We will miss you even though we barely saw you, heard from you or even wonder what you really were doing behind that large oak door in your office. Oh and I wonder if Steve Jobs is having a party today too!

After a long day and many crashing Windows machines I’ve decided to lean inward and grab good old curiosity and let her scream. I’ve done it, apparently Chavez got the wrong guy. According to popular weblore Bill Gates might be the devil, not President George W. Bush. However what makes people think that Gate’s is so Devilish? What makes so many people hate this geek? I for one can’t say I hate the guy, I may hate some of his products but lets face it when was the last time the guy coded an entire operating system himself? Never, only one man in the history of computers has done such a thing and that was Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Anyway back to the random Google experiment here, I typed in ‘Bill Gates the Devil’ into google and came up with about 448,000 results. Not bad, but how many on the first page are relevant?

Top link: The Bill Gates is Satan conspiracy theory . The site isn’t hosted in the US, so this is apparently an international belief. The Theory is quiet interesting in stating that if you add Bill Gates birth name (William Gates III) in ASCII then you get 666. Interesting theory. I wonder what mine is?

2nd Link: Bill Gates is the Devil, Hitler implicated – Which is an interesting article from the register dating back to 2001. It takes a humorous look at a German article which states the unpopularity of Gates and has a picture of Hitler on the opposing page. Someone must of had fun putting that order in.

3rd and finally: Since I don’t want to take you away from updating your Windows with the latest security patch. This was not third on the list however, it is a well written article on a statement which Gates said. Devil’s Advocate: Should Microsoft be paying you to use Windows?This article from silicon.com really shows the Devil at work as he suggests Google should pay users back for using Google.  Now after reading the article and realizing that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world from the investment of one company – Microsoft – I wonder at which point he was willing to give consumers money for just using a product?

All the above may not prove that Bill Gates is the Devil, hell, it doesn’t make sense for the devil to be wearing geek clothing.  To make things fair ‘Steve Jobs The Devil’ gets  312,000 but some of those might reflect on the ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ as well.  In the end we love to symbolize anyone as good old Satan, hell, I’ve called some of my best friends the devil and sometimes a little worst. But until Bill Gates wears Prada I’d just say he’s just a geek who knew how to sweet talk and delegate.

/// PHOTO – William Henry Gates the Third Arrested for Speeding at the age of 19!  Not your average Geek!

Microsoft, most notably the number one reason for increase spending on System Administrators and Help Desk staff is entering your supper market. They will be providing software that will have a Smart Shopping Cart with ads that will ‘help’ a consumer to ‘buy’ more things. This technology will use up-links from home PC, RFID technology and coupons. While this is an interesting concept, it is a prototype and just the tip of the ice-berg of things to come. As we get more wireless and screens get smaller the computer will invade every square inch of our everyday mundane life.

“Blue Screen of Death in Isle 5,” I can here over the loudspeaker as a service technician is called out from behind the freezers.

About ten years ago there was a company giving scanners to people to do self check-out, they were attached to carts and as the customer put the item in the cart they would scan it. Today we have self-check out in many stores fixed at the exit. These first prototypes help our direction towards the future where, ads are displayed on carts and a customer can easily access information about the store, a product and maybe one day have Britney Spears tell them how much she loves Eggo’s and don’t fogert to buy her new Album so she can pay alimony.

However we are stuck in the year 2008 where these silly things of computerized shopping carts are the wave of the future, we’ll have to stick with our talking GPS’s and wireless digital cameras. Who knows, by the time Microsoft gets out of the Beta for the product we will have an Apple Driod doing our grocery shopping for us.

Microsoft Smart Shopping Carts – VIA: Information Week

Now comes Vista, which in Spanish means View, a Window with a View… HAHAHA.  So, the only view the user is getting I hear is a frustrating one. I tested vista in beta and got nothing but a headache, it crashed, never worked, none of my programs worked from Windows XP and the reply from everyone around me was “that’s to be expected, its beta and its a new product.”  When Mac OS X came out I beta tested it in 2000 while I was working for a media company, they were working on the NASADAQ Market site in Time Square and needed to render the globe.  This globe was the size of a couple stories and curved.  So, the rendering on a G4 I believe with SCSI hardrives and fast graphic adapter said it would take around 90 hours.  I was testing mac os x and put a classic os 9 environment on top of it, ran the same program on a G 3 without the SCSI hardware and did the same rendering in only 40 hours. Of course this was only BETA.  I did have other issues with the Mac OS X beta but the machine ran smooth, applications did load, things copied and most of all backwards compatibility seemed to be working just fine.

What sparks me to write this is that everyday a new bug is found in Windows Vista yet more people are using the product.  I think people have to start making the move off Vista and onto Linux or Mac OS X.  The time has passed Windows if Microsoft can not make a product that is stable enough to work efficiently.  I could go into all the little details as Microsoft Certified Professional that I’ve seen over the years but it really isn’t worth it, it’s just a crime to see a company that’s products don’t even work properly on its on operating system then blame the consumer. So, educate yourself and see a whole new world out there.

Article on copying issue with Vista: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=829 

Consumer group demanding XP over Vista 

It seems the PC world has another scam up there sleeves. To save them money they have the consumer make recovery disks. This just means the Manufacture is trying everything these days not to do their job. I always hated the concept of having a recovery partition and having to make your own disks, why can’t the machine work right out of the box? What this means is you have a choice of making the disks (an hour of your time before using the computer) or actually paying the computer company that you just bought the computer from for a CD. This of course doesn’t happen on a the Apple’s MAC computers. I also find that Dell doesn’t seem to charge anymore for the media, but I could be wrong. Are the computer companies trying to make things more difficult then they have to be? They seem to be able to package the AOL disks pretty well. This article in PC World really pissed me off — http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136496/article.html — Where it seems the large retails stores are profiting from the apparent Recovery Disk issues by forcing customers to buy the retails stores recovery disks, claiming it is the only way to recover your computer if something goes wrong.

Now I have dealt with both Apple and many PC vendors. Dell has been the only company that I haven’t seen the recovery disk issue come up with, but you have to check a box to get the disks. Why don’t do they give you the disks like Apple has for years? Why is Apple the only one that has stayed constant and gives a proper and simple restoration procces if things go wrong. For example I had two computers that the hard drives failed. An iMac and a Dell. The iMac took less then two hours to format, install the OS from recovery 1 disk and be back online with updates and all. The Dell took half the day and I had to put different disks in, plus find updates online. If I wasn’t as technical as I am, I would of given up and paid someone to figure it out.

It seems to me that the Microsoft Windows world maybe the basis of the Chaos for the recovery disk and getting back up and running quickly without spending a huge amount of money. Issues happen with computers, whether its a PC or a Mac, however what counts is how long it takes to recover and of course how much extra in time and money it takes to have those recovery disks available when that time comes. Always backup your data and if your on a Mac keep those original recovery disks in a safe place.

Now these guys over at … Microsucks… — Love the Name — Have some good reasons why MS is so bad. Now before you read, realize that the business world does depend on these products and majority of users run there home-based systems off of Microsoft products. There are a ton of alternates and those are getting better by the day, but the list is very true.

And here are the reasons why Microsoft is so bad: http://fuckmicrosoft.com/content/whatsbad.shtml

So the question really is, which products are better? I can be opinionated, but lets look at some interesting things. Microsoft has announced a new computer called “Surface” today. Now this is a very cool and new wave of computing that has been in development for a long time. The demo this morning on NBC was almost a large scale version of the iPhone demo done in January by Apple’s Steve Jobs. Now all will agree that this type of touch interface will be the next jump in the industry and both parties have the approach.

Apple approach: Building something small, a portable computer for the size of your hand. The iPone is the start of many things to come that uses this new Touch Screen technology. The iPhone which is coming out in June has been known and talked about since January when it was first revealed. Now the interface allows multiple touching, increase pictures, select and move things around by touching. The first consumer product with this technology will be the iPod.

Microsoft approach: Now since everyone knows about the iPod it was only a matter of time that other companies use this technology and take it in other directions. Now Microsoft’s “Surface” is a pretty big computer under a table. This will be the first of a generation of table-top computers with full interaction. The table-top or ‘Surface’ would interact instead of a keyboard and mouse. Now touch screen computers have never been very popular because multi-touch wasn’t around. Now Microsoft’s approach is to give this to companies, restaurants and other service like industries. The demo Bill Gates gave was a restaurant, the menu in front of you and you visually select you meal. Then when paying you place you credit card on the table, select the items you want to put on the credit card and drag them over.

Overall the technology for a more hand friendly interface is here. We will be interacting with our computers and gadgets in a whole new way with this and many other new technologies on the way. The thing is its the same based technology and both companies will package it with a different name and brand. This is what makes things confusing in the wonderful world of Tech.

Apple will make it to the consumer market first with a portable version of this technology we may say they started this new trend. Since there won’t be a consumer version of ‘Surface’ for many years Apple has plenty of time to create a consumer multi-touch entertainment computer that works great with Apple TV and the iPod. I personally think that Microsoft is still playing catch-up to Apple’s baked goods.