Category: Microsoft

I know how you all like to laugh at Microsoft, so I thought you all might enjoy this.

I played a bit of the XBox today when I went to pick up the suprisingly awesome Grand Theft Auto 3. As before, I wasn’t impressed. That said, some of the launch games are getting some good reviews. Of course, Halo was meant to be on a Mac, so I apologize for opening old wounds. Personally, I’ll just wait a few months and then possibly contemplate getting it. We’ll see. These next coming months will be very interesting for games.

If you haven’t seen Steve Ballmer make an ass of himself in this movie or this even worse movie, you absolutely must check them out now. Once you have gasped at the spectacle, you must return for
more.


I am now *WAY MORE* scared of Microsoft than ever. Ballmer has a way more evil look in his eyes than Billy ever did.

This is the funniest thing you will ever see. How old is that Macintosh 8500? And where did the Apple logo go? It must have been hard to port Windows XP, a 64-bit OS to a 603e processor….

Also good for a laugh, here’s the SWF said screenshot came from, with the catchy tagline at the end.. The Freedom To Work The Way You Want. Funny. I’ve been doing that for 11 years on my Mac. [Via Camworld.]

At any rate, Jobs decided that he wanted to bring a team of Appleniks into PARC to see what was causing such a buzz – but again, the idea of Jobs coming in like a kid on tour at Epcot with a tape recorder hidden under his shirt is far from the truth. Apple negotiated a deal with Xerox; in return for a block of Apple stock, Xerox allowed Jobs and his team to tour PARC, take notes, and implement some of the ideas and concepts being bounced around at PARC in their own creations. I’m not sure how Xerox felt about Apple subsequently hiring half — the better half — of PARC’s staff away from them, but the process was relatively above-board – no night kidnappings or bribes under the table at Jack In the Box. Xerox allowed Apple to use their ideas in Apple machines.

This is a really great article/narrative about the history of the GUI and why the simplistic view of Microsoft stole it from Apple stole it from Xerox really isn’t all that true. Just skip the first part about the cavemen.

Here is an interesting article on HyperTransport.



Looks like it’s shaping up to be a face-off between Intel and its lapdogs (direct quote from the article, not mine) and the rest of the computer industry (which includes nVidia, Cisco and Sun). Interestingly, Apple is the only PC manufacturer on the HyperTransport consortium, with the rest of the PC industry squarely in the aforementioned lapdog category. Not that they’d have a choice anyway – they are little more than package and distribution channels for Intel and Microsoft these days.



Strangely enough, the article doesn’t mention the big fence-sitter – IBM, whose membership could decide the winner.



Macintosh and XBox sharing the same system architecture – imagine that!