Microsoft is working to add ‘rich user interaction’ to its next-generation Windows client.
Longhorn To Get NUI Foundation Platform
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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… OS/2 warp 4 featured speach commands via natural language. NT is finally catching up to OS/2 technology.
Active Paperclip. It has AI that knows when to hide itself when the user yells at it.
MS needs to survey the state of GUI’s in Linux and OSX, and really come up with something innovative that *makes sense*. Pushing the hardware to it’s limits for no reason is wastefull. We’ve reached a plateau with the current desktop paradigm.
I don’t want any interaction with Microsoft..
What type of machine do I need for that?
Quad 5Ghz P4 with 16GB RAM as a bare minimum???
Microsoft just keeps adding more and more features claiming that each one makes the OS easier to use. Let them. Eventually, the OS will collapse under its own weight.
I wonder who it was at MS that decided that “rich” was the buzzword of choice.
If you look at any of their promotional literature or marketing stuff the word “rich” is used to describe every stinkin thing.
When I think of rich I think of german chocolate cake.
Mmmmm, cake…..
Why do I have the feeling they fired all programmers, and doubled the marketing department?
Hello geeks, MS dont care about u pimple faced nerds. They could care less about the 1000 dollar total or so of profit they get from you. These features are new to the average joe who don’t know better, who makes up most of the profits for MS.
Wonder when they will realize, that linux is their greatest enemy not because it has new and fancy features, but because it does the old trics very well… That said, if they ever add something usefull to their os (it could happen
nobody is going to notice, because we just heard too much fud…
15 comments and all are MS bashing.
Linux United on the ramapage…?
By the way, mod me down. As if this thread was going anywhere
16 comments and all are extremely useless
Seriously, what’s wrong with you people? Let’s bash microsoft for the fun of it? Obviously.
Perhpas OS/2 or Mac OS X has speech recognition already. Some of you are going around saying that such and such has had this for 10 years. Well, sorry to tell you, but 10 years ago natural lanugage recognition was still only in the research phase. Remember those early non-natural language speech recognition systems? Yeah, bad.
I remember that soundblaster came with such software for Windows 3.1. It was pretty useless. This new stuff is very different. It’s built on technology similar to dragon natrually speakign or viavoice. Not to mention, their platform will include more than just speech eventually. It will also include mouse gestures, handwritting and similar input deviced, hence the term ‘rich’.
And I didn’t see the word innovate in the entire article either! And what would you call it, if not for ‘rich input’? Multi-method non-keyboard input? Really, rich describes it just fine.
I’m so tired of these posts complaining about MS and innovation. Please, someone list the places where the open source community has innovated. There may be a few, but EVERYTHING else is the innovation of educational institutes or proprietary companies like MS, Apple, and other.
I’m afraid this has the ring of a dead-end technology: it’s been done before and hasn’t made it big because people won’t use it
I certainly shall never sit in my office barking commands into my computer – because quite apart from the ridiculousness, it would let everyone in the area know what I was doing
” Mailto Kiran Subject Aww Man Content Jeez my boss is a turd… ”
Nope. Not gonna happen. Add the probable problem of random speech being interpreted as system commands and the IT chaos which might ensue…
If you want something inovative, enforce a unified set of menus on applications and build in menu-browsing support to the keyboard
You’d see an immense increase in speed in using any application…the user is the slowest part of any computer.
Funniest thread ever LOL
I await the day when MS innovation would produce something as complex as configurable order of buttons on window titles. Or an browser that is capable of maximizing a frame and resizing text on a page. Or an email client with support for disabling HTML. Or an MP3 player or IM client that actually uses their own widget set.
“Active Paperclip. It has AI that knows when to hide itself when the user yells at it.”
ROTFLMFAO
That’s true, voice recognition would be useless in an office enironment. And it better well recognise delete accurately.
I figure it would be targetted at people with disabilities who need to use dictation, and perhaps I could see it being used in homes. I certainly would’t mind having my computer at home respond to:
Computer, play me some Beethoven.
Or similar things, a la star trek I guess.
Btw, most menues are pretty standard, and usable via the keybaord. Alt-f-s almost always saves for instance. But I do agree it would be nice to have a more strict HIG for these things.
I’ll buy any version of Windows or Office that allows the user to straighten out that sodding paperclip and tie it in knots.
i believe that speech synthesis and recognition
will be a part of the future. i believe its silly
to laugh it off and say u wouldnt use it.
there are many people in the world that would really
get a kick out of communicating with their computers
by voice.
i have done a little reading here and there about
voice technology and i was actually a little surprised
to find that micrsoft didnt do it in xp.
to make remarks about it like it doesnt matter is
quite silly.
Linux needs to start doing some work in this area
if they arent already.
Huh? Are you being sarcastic? I don’t get it, MS apps do all of these things, although I don’t know about maximising a frame. Do you mean breaking a frame? Yeah, that would be cool. But it would be cooler if people just stopped using frames.
Yeah, i know that ( Control S is faster )
What I mean is, give us buttons for the following
File: Edit: View: Tools: Help
Perhaps you aren’t familiar with OS X’s speech recognition. Out of the box it is the most powerful of its kind amongst default operating system speech recognition commands. I can play chess with it out of the box. I can script commands together with it out of the box (i.e. I yell “stereo mode” at my apple iBook and it opens iTunes, starts playing my favourite smart playlist and launches a full screen visualization). And it’s somewhat smart in that I don’t have to remember the exact command name to get it to work. It doesn’t even require nor have a training mode. MS is definitely not innovating here. If you’d like some examples of where the open source community has innovated, here are a few:
-dynamic web pages via CGI
-the web browser (developed on NeXTSteP but Mosaic was open source)
-association engines (Dashboard offers features that won’t be available on OS X, Win32 or any other proprietary platform for years)
-Computer Aided Design…conceptualized in the public domain albeit by a student of an educational institute, before there ever was such a thing as open source
I too tire of private companies getting bashed but there is tremendous innovation in open source. Don’t fall into the trap of believing there is something inherent in private companies that makes them good innovators. I own one and I know there isn’t. Humans innovate. The innovations you hear of tend to be by companies that have figured out how to make money off them. The ones you don’t hear of have no monetary backing, like innovations made in the open source community.
Microsoft may not be innovating, but they have good timing with what they make. Speech recognition has been around for years but it was worthless with the technology. Now things like speech recognition are becoming useful. Granted speech recognition itself may not be useful to a lot of people, but it does open the door for many other technologies we have forgotten or have not thought of yet.
A.K.H. had a good point in his/her comment. This just isn’t about speech recognition. Its about moving away from the cumbersome mouse and keyboard combination and into something easier (which may still include a mouse and keyboard).
My grandfather can barely use a mouse, but he can definitely scream and shout at the computer.
-W
I’m not sure how far folks want to take the “natural” paradigm. A quick peek in the mirror verifies that the world ain’t ready for Err to be using a computer in the buff, although it would make office work more interesting :>.
If you’ve ever watched someone in an office using a CAD tool, spreadsheet, or any other ‘advanced’ interface, you’d realize that interaction with the mouse and keyboard is _much_ faster.
Even mouse gestures are likely to confuse users; when they happen to move their mouse in a certain way, causing an unexpected action to occur. This technology will yield some interesting tech support calls.
The only application that I see for gestures or voice recognition is away from the computer, in an environment where a keyboard/mouse is inconvenient, or where speech is truly faster (i.e. dictation.)
The desktop paradigm is here to stay for everyday computer usage, for as long as desktop computers exist.
>15 comments and all are MS bashing.
>Linux United on the ramapage…?
>By the way, mod me down. As if this thread was going anywhere
>16 comments and all are extremely useless
Well said Thom. It is rather discouraging for a site editor to see that its readers can’t discuss with an open mind and stop the trolling.
Relax. I wasn’t saying that speech reconition is innovation. But neither did the article claim that.
And I’m not at all suprised taht OS X has cool speech stuff, I’m really quite a fan of OS X, and hope to get a mac eventually.
I don’t mean to suggest that open source *never* innovates, certainly open source assotiate with research intitutes does, and probably even some freelance stuff does too.
My point was that that open source is not the bastion of innovation that people here seem to suggest. Many many many things in open source are simply copies of existing technology. As you said, humans innovate. Historically, research institutes and companies have been the biggest source of innovation.
I don’t think that open source give any edge to innovation any more than a corporation does. Research intitutes, on the other hand, probably do. And I don’t really think it’s fair to claim that research institutes like universites are part of the open source community. Researchers don’t learn much from the open souce community, but rather from the research community. Many times, things are released for free because that’s the spirit of reseach. You publish and make your results avaliable for people to use. It’s not at all the same community that want’s to replace microsoft though.
All this brainless “anti-M$” nonsense is nauseating. +15 flaming trolls and not a single modded down comment.
Regarding improved speech interaction, the most interesting part to me is not being able to speak to the computer (an acoustic commanding interface) but the other way around: the computer speaking to me (a listening interface).
The latter, indeed, already exists in a very limited way, the most used case being the (sort of obnoxious because of its actual shortcomings) text-to-speech component Microsoft put into its Reader (narrator.exe). From a Desktop user point of view, I would be pleased if instead of aiming at complex commanding technologies, Microsoft just delivered in Longhorn a most fluent narrator, next step could be real-time translation capability.
> All this brainless “anti-M$” nonsense is nauseating. +15 flaming trolls and not a single modded down comment.
I did not see you to Report an Abuse. Report an abuse and we will follow up. That’s why we have the damned link over there.
Like AT&T’s natural speech engine? That would be super cool.
I actually wanted to build a system that worked based on AT&T’s output and something like via-voice for input. I wanted sorta a star-trek like computer which would manage house things like security systems, audio systems, and phone systems. Alas, I have no time to peruse such things.
“First, we need a file system that is more of a structured database,” Lee explains. “You can’t reason with everything being a file type. That’s why we need WinFS,” the Windows File System at the heart of SQL Server “Yukon” (and the data-store component of WinFS that will be embedded in Longhorn), Lee says.
(that’s from the article)
Great thing. Reinvent the wheel again! Restructure the whole OS, add millions of new features, eat up all system resources, just to get the same functionality as before. I say “find” and the computer opens the find interface. Great! The same same feature as before achieved with completely new means. Oh great, I can say “pictures of holidays in summer 2002”, and the computer opens the pictures of summer 2002, as it did 20 years ago, too, by clicking on the correct folder.
And of course be not compatible with former OS versions, force everybody to upgrade the hardware, it’s OS and of course their file formats. And of course the WinFS format is a secret. Files are from now on being stored in a format not like common filesystems, but as a database and no machine except those from MS will ever be able to access them (For user’s protection of course). But I can talk to my computer from now on. Great!
Maybe we will have the first virus, where the wrong word leads to the total distruction of the system.
The important thing is, what you can do with computers and not how you can do this. Finding a document – be it a file or any type of database entry – still leads to the same result: You can watch a film/photo, listen to music, edit an office document and so forth. MS once more has to reinvent those features again and again, and develops an OS, which uses almost all system resources for itself, and which more and more loses transparency. And the loss of transparency will lead to security wholes again. XP did not also not become the secure OS, as it was promised, since it’s still software, no matter how colorful the interface is, why should this change with an even more complex software??
I think people are bashing the article just for the sake of bashing because it’t Microsoft. Personally I’m using speech recognition on my computer and it’ very useful. Speech recognition is not there to replace the keyboard or the mouse : it’s just there to be an additionnal help and this what the guy in the article is talking. In Office XP for example it’s very helpful to use vocal commands rather that open long menus. On my computer just with a vocal command I can open Mozilla, Windows Media Player with a specific music list, etc… very useful stuff in my opinion.
Actually, most of the first 15 or so comments were more jokes than trolls.
We see this stuff as funny because we have all read enough MS marketroid-speech to see it as somewhat farcical. The much ballyhooed MS corporate culture always shows through, using newspeak terms like “rich” “active” and “.net”.
Mostly was was said, was said in good fun by people who know what they are talking about. Ya’all are not supposed to take it so seriously.
MS is doing good things with user interfaces and the linux fan-toddlers and the Steve Jobs cult followers can only bash.
>Do I really have to use that “damned link over there” so damned comments like this get damned down
YES, you HAVE to.
Because OSAlert generates more than 500 comments every day and it is IMPOSSIBLE for us to be here 24/7. By reporting an abuse, you cut us down 90% of the work (a work that is impossible to be done as we are not here 24/7, neither we are getting paid to do so). THIS is why we have added the “Report Abuse” feature, so you can help cleaning up the site.
Ya know.. being able to lie to yourself about Windows being a decent OS doesn’t make you more respectable or highly evolved. Again, Photoshop beinga good app and running in Windows doesnt make Windows a good OS. Even MS realises that Windows is garbage, much as Apple finally admitted that the classic macos was trash.
And how is it surprising at all that readers of something as geeky as osnews, people who have probably dealt with more than their share of random windows nonsense, would be prone to making anti-windows comments? Whats the point of a public forum if not to rant and express?
“I’ll buy any version of Windows or Office that allows the user to straighten out that sodding paperclip and tie it in knots.”
MS could come up with a kickass FPS (maybe based on HL2 or DOOM3 engine) where you walk inside windows completing missions such as killing viruses and worms, finding and installing patches, etc. Wouldn’t it be lovely to BFG the darn paperclip?
OK, I’ll bite
Or an browser that is capable of maximizing a frame
when I used IE, I wrote this myself. It’s probably two lines of JScript, and a registry entry if you want it to appear in the context menu
and resizing text on a page
what do you mean?
Or an email client with support for disabling HTML
Outlook Express 6 does
Or an MP3 player or IM client that actually uses their own widget set
Older versions of Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger used the standard widget set
Changing order of buttons on a title bar (like moving that X to the left): none
Frame maximizing: none that I can find
Text resizing in browser: doesn’t work on sites that define absolute font size (which are usually the ones that give you unreadable fonts in first place).
Setting up Outlook to read (not send!!!) messages as plaintext: impossible without ugly registry hacks
Using normal system-wide widgets in Messenger and Media Player, with same color theme: none that I know of.
>> Seriously, what’s wrong with you people? Let’s bash microsoft for the fun of it? Obviously.
They’re using my name for the fun of it, isn’t that a reason to bash them?
They’d better use something like “bills user interaction” or “steves user interaction” .. though I really don’t wanna know how that’s supposed to work…
“Whats the point of a public forum if not to rant and express?”
Do you really take yourself seriously? We could rephrase that–
“Whats the point of freedom of speech if not to rant and express?”
Still, we fight against rascism, discrimination and such. Being able to say anything you like does not mean you actually should. Normal people have manners and rationality to prevent this from happening.
when I used IE, I wrote this myself. It’s probably two lines of JScript, and a registry entry if you want it to appear in the context menu
I konw it is possible to write usch a feature, but why can’t MS “innovate” and add it? Afraid of giving control of HTML presetation to user?
what do you mean?
View/Text Size.
Older versions of Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger used the standard widget set
Older versions of WMP are even worse. They got no playlist support at all.
Ok.. sure. But see, I figured my statement was in the context of whats being discussed here. The point is that some people made some jokes about MS and its new impending new fanciness. Perhaps you and others disagree with the implications of the jokes. I find it difficult to believe that most of you dont at least have a little bit of undertanding of where those jokes are coming from. Regardless of “no OS is perfect” etc etc, however exaggerated and filled with rant those statements might be, they make a point. Nobody says you have to agree with it. You dont even have to read the post if you dont want to.
The problem is that these “jokes” are only happening on the MS threads, not on the linux ones. I am already tired of MS trolling and I know that a lot of our readers are also tired of it, we are getting emails complaining about the situation.
“Perhpas OS/2 or Mac OS X has speech recognition already. Some of you are going around saying that such and such has had this for 10 years. Well, sorry to tell you, but 10 years ago natural lanugage recognition was still only in the research phase. … This new stuff is very different. It’s built on technology similar to dragon natrually speakign or viavoice.”
Hmmmm… Bet you didn’t know that OS/2 Warp 4 was integrated with ViaVoice. And, actually it worked extremely well.
“… voice recognition would be useless in an office enironment.”
Hmmmm… You hit the nail on the head. OS/2 Warp 4 was great for taking dictation during meetings. But, in an office environment, people like to talk, which will interfere with the recognition engine. That’s why it never caught on in the office environment.
Perhaps. But more people complain about sunburns in the desert than in scotland. Maybe it’s because people are more pissed off about Windows than they are about linux. If linux sucked as badly as Windows, do you honestly think that people wouldn’t continually bitch about it?
> If linux sucked as badly as Windows, do you honestly think that people wouldn’t continually bitch about it?
Not necessarily. Hype is a big thing my friend.
Sigh. I have reason, nay, a license to bitch:
I used to provide first level internal support of MS OS’s. I got to see NT 5.0/Win2000 and Whistler/XP very early on. It went through so many damn GUI changes, it lead me to believe they had no idea what direction it should take. Ballmer started the policy of dogfooding every OS release, and the marketing people screamed the loudest. I’d always have to explain that we needed to make sure it worked before Boeing got it. It still don’t think the marketdroids understood.
The XP interface is nice to look at, but it’s the firt thing I turn off when I logon to an XP system.
***This thread is about the GUI, nothing else***
The descriptions I’ve heard of Longhorn’s GUI sound like the OSX GUI tarted up. Spinning, fading, breaking windows, etc. I’ll need to see it before I can really make any sound judgement though.
I’m not a big voice nor a Star Trek fan, so I personally don’t care as long as they don’t remove the keyboard/mouse combo. Gimme 1001 buttons over voice any day… Then again, I know some people have problems with buttons (for example, my mother is still mystified by the F buttons), so I guess it would mean more power for these people.
Of the 15 first posts, half of the ones being critical of MS make valid points. Most of the others are easy jokes and trolls, and one is a very vocal anti-Linux troll (using the old cliche that Linux users are “pimple faced nerds) that didn’t get modded down despite the fact that it used offensive language.
Now, we have all those people who react by crying foul. Well, the truth is that some people have the opinion that this new voice-recognition interface by MS is not new at all, but just more marketese coming from Redmond. This may or may not be true, but it is a reasonable opinion. You don’t like it? Debate it. Tell us, those who do believe that this isn’t “innovation” or even newsworthy, that we are wrong.
I don’t like MS trolling any more than Linux trolling (and, yes, they both happen regularly on the site), however, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical of MS. After all, when an OS is on 90 to 95% of desktops, it’s only normal that it gets the lion’s share of criticisms. As much as OSAlert would like Windows to be “one OS among many”, the reality is that it represents the Big Bad Monopoly. This makes it not only a prime target for viruses and security exploits, but for legitimate criticism as well.
Which, btw, won’t have any effect on its market dominance.
Windows just keeps getting better and better!
does ‘rich’ user mean that they will be targeting the rich users with this update? (also known as mac users?) [sorry about the jab but I couldn’t resist]
Oh that’s ok, cuz it gets funnier and funnier everytime we hear it. :rolleyes:
If they get it right, it will be a useful and powerful tool.
Too many people see a computer as a box with a screen, that you sit down in front of and control with a mouse and keyboard. Microsoft are looking to the future where this is not the only way a computer is used.
For instance, you could be listening to emails and dictating new emails while walking down the street, or at the same time as doing some web browsing in front of the screen.
The problem is, speech technology is still in it’s infancy, and even if the speech recognition is good, the computer does not understand the context or meaning very well.
From the article….
“Then, we need to ask, if the richer (data) store lets you reason about nouns, why not verbs … like ‘format,’ ‘delete,’ ‘print’?”
Saying “Remove all the files except for my letters” could mean so many things in different contexts that it’s too risky to implement. Even saying “delete that file” could do almost anything.
So, people would have to learn a very restricted set of commands, and exactly when (and how) to say them, and exactly how the computer is going to interpret their request in that context. I think that would be harder to use than simply selecting the file with the mouse, and rightclick+delete.
Would you trust a computer to know exactly what you are reffering to when you say “delete” or “format”? If you have to select with the mouse first, is it that much harder to delete with mouse as well?
“” If linux sucked as badly as Windows, do you honestly think that people wouldn’t continually bitch about it?””
No, because any attempt to b*tch about Linux in that situation would be met with the “They’re enthusiasts, and you’re getting it for free” as happened in the early Linux years. Even though Linux has evolved well past this and now has big business involved it still hasn’t shaken off this image. Which is one of the reasons (But not really one of the big ones) flaws in Linux attract less hostility than flaws in Windows.
For instance, you could be listening to emails and dictating new emails while walking down the street, or at the same time as doing some web browsing in front of the screen.
Well, perhaps some day. Have you ever tried dictating a letter? It is not easy to formulate your messages on the fly, it will not sound formal anyway. You need a secretary to do that or computers with so kind of common sense/awareness.
If we can accomplish that I see the speech recognition could be most useful in teaching the computer. It would be great, if you could save little “macros” for some repetative tasks along the way you are working. Just show how to do something once (text editing, formatting etc.) and ask computer to do the same for rest of the cases.
Just for the little things.
For instance, you could be listening to emails and dictating new emails while walking down the street, or at the same time as doing some web browsing in front of the screen.
>>>>>>>>>>
Like we need to make people be any *more* anti-social in public? I’d like to see the first person who walks obliviously into traffic while checking his email.
Speech recognition to carry out command in the UI? You mean like that stuff that was in Mac OS 8? Wow, that’s innovation I guess.
Yes that’s true. If the article is talking about speech technologies to command Ui of an os, MacOs has been proposing this staff in a very powerful way since MacOs8, and with MacOsX almost all the finder (and some os applications) can be controled by natural langage.
I can not see what is new here, or is it just something that Microsoft discovered that it is possible to do, some years after Apple?
However if the filing system could associate a project with a file i.e. if you’re working on the project ‘foo’ and you say to your computer
You: ‘Create me a new image file in project foo’
You: ‘Add comment. Totall fooed’
You: ‘Save file as bar’
Computer: ‘File saved’
then later you say
You: ‘Show me all documents in project foo’
Comuter shows you list of files in project foo
You: ‘Load image bar’
Or even
You: ‘Load image bar’
Computer: ‘There are images called bar in projects foo and totally foo, which one do you want?’
You: ‘project foo’
Then that might be quite useful.
“Perhaps you aren’t familiar with OS X’s speech recognition. Out of the box it is the most powerful of its kind amongst default operating system speech recognition commands”
Yeah, perhaps you are not familiar with the fact that apple didn’t invent anything about voice recognition. They bought it. The same for speech synthesis (which was pretty bad on mac OS 9, and worse on Mac OS, from some friends’s point of view).
Nobody here knows a bit about voice recognition : the two big firms which are doing research in it are Microsoft and IBM. IBM stoped it for “joe user”, and now propose services to professionnal ( Via voice is discontinued). Other “small” firms are doing research on it.
http://research.microsoft.com/speech/
Here are several people who are pretty famous, like Melvar. He is just the guy who developped MDCT, used in useless things like MP3, AAC, etc…
But it is so fashionable to speak about something without having a clue how it is working. It is called… Marketing, that’s it ? Funny to see all this FUD from people who don’t like it.
Let’s speak about the facts presented on the site : the ideas are not new, of course. But there was never real implementation of it on the mass market. If it works, it can be a great step toward.
If Mac OS X and Linux are so great, anyway, why bother ?
I’m currently using speech to control Mac OS X and although there are a few issues it’s generally excellent. For examples, when reading these comments, I say “Page down” to move down the page. However, it also works if I say “Scroll down” or “Move down the page”.
I can switch between applications and open them simply by saying “Switch to iTunes” or “Switch to Safari”. I can even delete files in the Finder by saying “Move file to trash”. Adding commands is incredible simple too. I can just say “Define keyboard commands” and press the key combination that the program uses to perform the function I want, then type in the phrase I want to say to make it work. For example, in Safari, I command “Go to Apple” and Apple.com opens. One gotcha is iTunes. I set it up to play and pause with the command “Play music” and to skip songs with “Skip track”. Sadly, when the music stops playing it isn’t so easy to voice command it to stop. That however can be fixed with a pair of headphones,
Honestly, Microsoft really have some nerve if this is basically what their technology is to call it innovation. Macs have been doing it for years.
“Speech recognition to carry out command in the UI? You mean like that stuff that was in Mac OS 8? Wow, that’s innovation I guess.”
Mac OS 8 – September 1997
OS/2 Warp 4 – September 1996
Yes, like the stuff that was in Mac OS 8, but only a year before ;-P
> What I mean is, give us buttons for the following
> File: Edit: View: Tools: Help
Alt-F, Alt-E, Alt-V, Alt-T, F1
Well spoken
We live in a world where one OS has gained dominance thru some questionable
means and the others have suffered because of it. And while some may argue that
most of MS’ “deals” walk the thin line of legality one cannot deny this has been
going on for quite some time.
Fast forward to today, open source is everywhere and what does MS do, quickly
calls it a “cancer”. They also pay for “studies” to prove what ever they want them too.
Attacking people who have donated their spare time to create tools for all to use, IMHO,
is just asking for retaliation. And now today, we have much talk about voice req with far
too little talk about security, improving initial product to the consumer, and cutting costs.
I’ll admit it, I hope I never have to update my W2K machine (It plays my games just fine) unless forced, yet I look forward to my distro’s next release. The problem is reputation. I bought
a 98se system and had problems. I bought a laptop with ME and had tons of issues. I even bought a W2K licence in hopes most issues would dissappear, but they didn’t. I then spent
$20 on a linux release and was happy. My cousin bought an Apple and he was happy.
Until their reputation improves (not an overnight thing) expect MS bashing/trolling/whatever
to continue. Sorry but IMHO, they have no one to blame but themselves.
1) Rish-User Interaction: In other words, only the “rich user” will be anble to interact until he becomes a “ppor user” and has to find something else because of said interaction.