Selling out

Date: Monday 20th August 2007 11:01 BST

Music: Prodigy

I an not a fanboy of Microsoft nor Apple. I use both without problems but I am not happy with the new attitude of these companies. They seem to be more interested in making money than high quality products. Apple have moved over to Intel for what I have been lead to believe was for bulk discounts on orders and increased performance. IBM however have argued that Apple's benchmark between PowerPC and Intel X86_64 was unfair as the software did not take advantage of the PowerPC architecture. When IBM compiled the same benchmark from the source with their PowerPC optimised compiler they got a 187% improvement over apples score on the same system. (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=678). This makes me think that Apple could have done a better job with PowerPC and that there was no real need to drop IBM for Intel especially since the POWER6 processor seems to be what Apple wanted.

What I think MS and Apple should do is make one OS for computers / workstations and another for servers but instead Apple have put back their OS in favour of the iPhone, it's shinny but not worth it in my option. MS on the other had have made about 7 different versions just for computers, they haven't even released the ones for the servers yet. To try and stop people from illegally downloading their OS they made a starter version for them which is heavily handicapped. The best way to encourage them to by the OS is to make a really shit one that they can afford, cos that will work.

My bitch about apple and MS take 2.

In the past year both Apple and Microsoft have been getting on my nervous with their attitude. They seem to be more interested in making profit than high quality products that people would want to buy.

Microsoft are pushing people to upgrade to Vista, their new operating system, by not releasing DirectX10 for windows XP meaning that if people want to play the latest games they have to have a vista computer. Microsoft have also caused confusion not only for it’s general users but the computer experts as well by releasing several different versions of the same OS. With Windows XP you had home edition or the professional edition if you wanted extra security and network abilities, There is also the 64bit version of Windows XP Professional for those who needed a lot of memory or used 64bit programs but this was only used by the high end market. Vista has about 5 different versions and that is without going into the different types of ways you get it. These are just the versions for the desktop or workstation, they probably have just as many versions for the servers. I think it would be so much easier for everyone if they had one OS for desktops and workstations and another OS for servers.

Apple have been annoying me with they iPod / iPhone because they seem to have put in a lot of resources into this instead of concentrating on their computers. Apple used to be mainly a computer company as shown by their name that was Apple Computers Inc. before they changed it to Apple Inc. after they starting making shinny things that you can put in your pocket. The development of the iPhone has pushed back the release of the new OS called Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and as a result OS X 10.4 Tiger has gone to subversion 11 instead of stopping at the subversion of 9 like all the other releases of OS X have.