Tag: Microsoft

325,000 Students Compete (in the Cloud) for $240,000 from Microsoft

Cloud

From Scientific American…

Compassionate Coding:

Students Compete in Microsoft Competition to Write Humanitarian Apps

With the understanding that emergency, health care and other services’ reliance on software will only grow over time, Microsoft has for the past eight years hosted a global competition that challenges high school and college students to develop applications that address some of the planet’s most urgent needs.

The event’s popularity has expanded rapidly–about 325,000 students from more than 100 countries registered to compete this year. The company’s Eighth Annual Imagine Cup finals wrapped up Thursday in Warsaw, Poland, with 400 students vying for $240,000 in prize money.

As one might suspect, a prerequisite is that all competitors develop their programs using Microsoft products, including software writing tools, databases and the Windows operating system.

325,000 high-school geeks hard at work for Microsoft, for an average “wage” of $0.75.

IOKIYMS – It’s OK if You’re Microsoft

When a $230 Billion multi-national corporation mugs one of the little guys – is it even a crime in this day and age?  Not if you ask the multi-national corporation it ain’t.  The corporate gangsters at Microsoft seem to think that their immensity grants them impunity.

IOKIYMS

Black Monday

Another “teen idol” turns “slut” in this society and somehow we are surprised?

The wife left for work with the TV on something called the entertainment channel, God, it hurts, I can almost feel my brain cells dying off.

BTW one of the photos of “Hannah” shows her giving the “sign of Satan” which I am sure the Illuminati watchers all picked up on.  Aw, crap, they don’t watch TV.

http://benfrank.net/nuke/inaug…

Aside from that I have come to the conclusion that the internet and alot of technology in general sucks.  It is more about constructing constructs of control and letting these evil memes seep into the mainstream and society itself.  Stay with me as I am going to jump around incoherently.

Lawsuit exposes Microsoft executives’ complaints about Vista

Anyone who has had to endure the incompatibility issues, bugs, and gaping holes in software should get a kick out of this New York Times article.

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me – I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category – “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop – logo or no logo – lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.

So Microsoft execs have been caught acknowledging that they shoved a piece of shit operating system on the public, knowing full well that it was actually inferior to their last piece of shit operating system.  But it never would have happened, had somebody not been brave enough to sue Microsoft.  According to the article:

We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.

Last month, Judge Marsha A. Pechman granted class-action status to the suit, which is scheduled to go to trial in October. (Microsoft last week appealed the certification decision.)

Given that one of the first actions as dictator by George W. Bush was to drop the anti-trust against Microsoft, I doubt this suit shall go anywhere this year.  But it has served at least one purpose: to expose the true thoughts of those who push inferior, and often-times, lethal products on consumers.