Does Microsoft employ retards as a public service?

[Dougal]

It has been mentioned for a while that MS is working on getting XP to run on the OLPC XO laptop.
Some details have been revealed now, which I find rather amusing...
- They have 40 people working on it
- They have been at it for the past year

Now, they're nowhere near done and they actually say this is partly because

until recently, the software maker only had a handful of machines with which to do its development and testing.

So now, when they have as many laptops as they like to work on, they predict they'll be done by the second half of 2008!

So, do you fellas think that "only a handful" of laptops would be enough for Barry (and his 40 employees!) to get Puppy running on it? Don't forget it involves such enormous obstacles as booting off a SD card (gasp)!

So, does MS have some kind of program where they employ retarded people in an attempt to help them "fit into society" or something?
Maybe it's not the people working on the OLPC laptop -- maybe it's the ones writing the code, or maybe those running things -- but something sure seems incredibly stupid over there...

[Flash]

At least half of the team must be lawyers, so the answer to your question is "yes."

[LS650]

So, does MS have some kind of program where they employ retarded people in an attempt to help them "fit into society" or something?

By saying they fit into MS, I think you've insulted retarded people everywhere!

[HairyWill]

Microsoft must write about 10 different hardware drivers to support things like the XO's special screen, its mesh networking, camera, and other unique features.

Shame.
There are already open source drivers written for these devices for linux and they have the hardware manufacturers cooperation, how hard can it be. The linux world manages to cope, sometimes without any manufacturer cooperation or exemplar.

[raffy]

Some more useful reading here.

I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.

[cthisbear]

I repudiate this post.

MS never offered me any work.

Chris.

[Bruce B]

Probably Tom Sawyer could get MS to whitewash every fence in town for free. All he'd need to do is create the illusion that he's on to a real money maker.

[Pizzasgood]

I don't blame them for having difficulties. They are trying to do this with Windows after all. Taking a hippo and trying to cram it into a one-liter bottle without seriously harming the hippo would probably be almost as hard.

[yorkiesnorkie]

I don't blame them for having difficulties. They are trying to do this with Windows after all. Taking a hippo and trying to cram it into a one-liter bottle without seriously harming the hippo would probably be almost as hard.

I just about fell out of bed laughing on reading that! Be careful!

I heard laughingly somewhere that the way they supposedly design software is by listening to all the dumbest callers and then designing the software to work for them. That's why its so annoying for the rest of the planet. For example, how many times do you have to press enter to delete a file, 2+? In the good old day's you just deleted the file and lived with it, today there's so much guilt and anguish to what used to be so simple. The Windows OS needs psychoanalysis.

Yorkiesnorkie

[BlackAdder]

Ivan Kristic of the OLPC team does not seem to think that the MS people he is working with are retards, and it is worth reading his opinion on what is happening with OLPC and MS. His blog entry is here: http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice

[John Doe]

For those of you that aren't in the US, let me quickly explain how corporate capitalizism works in an IT environment here and then you might have a better grasp on all this.

At a corporation, there is one guy that knows how everything actually works, but 20 on the "team" building it. Those other 19 spend all their time sponging off the one guy so it looks like they are doing something and they can collect a pay check. The one has to check their code for them and tell them how to implement what they are trying to do (which they originally said they could do, but can't). There are another 10 managing the 20 and justify their self worth by telling the 20 they need to work harder. The management will focus on the one doing everything and bitch at him the most and spew the same garbage over and over. Such as "you really need to get a better attitude if you want to stay part of the team". They love to spew, team, team, team over and over, because if it weren't for the "team" they would have no value at all. They would just be some jackasses with worthless degrees in "business management". The 19 spend all their time kissing the 10 managers' backsides so they "look good". Then there are a couple bosses (let's say 3). They coordinate with the company which they are selling something (they don't know quite what) to and the 10 managers. The 10 managers assure the 3 bosses everything will be great as soon as the one gets his act together and stops being such a "non-team player". Eventually the 3 make the decision to fire the one in the best interest of the corporation as he must be the one holding them back because 5 of the 19 have assure the 10 they have a "creative business solution" that will be in the best interest of the 3. The 5 assure the 10 and the 3 that the 1 has no value. Then they "reorganize" which means they try to go find another person that can do all their work for them. If they can't "reorganize" while the 3 bullshit the clients then the company fails and they start a new company. The 5 loose face but don't care because they still get a check with their demotion, the 10 have their asses covered and the 3 never gave a shit anyway (the other 14 just float along for the next ride).

rinse and repeat.

[John Doe]

p.s. it's not quite 40 but 33 is close and another 7 would just make it all take longer.

[Dougal]

Taking a hippo and trying to cram it into a one-liter bottle without seriously harming the hippo would probably be almost as hard.

Yes, but the size is not the only problem. I think lack of flexibility adds to it: MS is used to coding everything to try and make it faster by making it very fixed/restricted (that's why Office documents are in binary/non-human-readable form), so when they're trying to boot off something that's not the first partition of a primary HD...

Ivan Kristic of the OLPC team does not seem to think that the MS people he is working with are retards, and it is worth reading his opinion on what is happening with OLPC and MS. His blog entry is here:

Yes, I read his blog and noticed he said they were really into it, but note that I didn't claim it's necessarily the people who are working on the OLPC -- I offered the option that it's the people who wrote the OS in the first place... or their superiors who force them to do stupid things.

John Doe: the "Vista crapfest" link that Raffy posted shows this pretty nicely... I remember when Barry first posted that link I went and read the comments, where a lot of MS employees who came over from Joel On Software were saying really stupid things (like that he can't comment on GUI design since he's got "no training in ergonomics"...).

[Sage]

the people who wrote the OS in the first place

M$ never wrote an original line of code themselves. Vista is just a more bloated, b*st*rdised version of XP, which is....ditto W98...ditto95...ditto W3.1...ditto ditto ditto...DOS1.0 which was conned out of a couple of students at Berkley in an overnight blitz. Everything is borrowed or stolen from companies illegally (I refer to proven USDoJ cases) closed down. After that, everything has been shoehorned into the proverbial pint pot just like the hippo. When will the good citizens awake and realise that they are sponsoring a bunch of felons?!
What a travesty that they should even think about SW patents!

[cb88]

from raffy's link above : We had a Mac [owned personally by a team member] that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI.

LOL!!!

[yorkiesnorkie]

I can understand the process used in a "corporate" organization to generate a product. Jumping through hoops until it works. It seems futile for the people involved. However there's just no excuse for a shoddy product at the end. Even the company I work for recognizes that "Vista" is simply not an option and is simply continuing to use XP and will do so until the Brain Trust at MS get their problems solved.

At home my Daughter had lots of problems with her PC running Vista. Just to play along I ended up doing a complete Vista re-install of her PC when it just wouldn't connect to the net anymore. It was loaded with spyware and had a trojan. So much for default security, not that the user helps that cause any. Her lack of concern for security is awful. Nevertheless I'd expect better default security and protection.

In the end though I simply couldn't fix the installed OS or connect to the net at all, and I can't begin to tell you how many times I hated clicking on the "did you intend to do this" dialog boxes while I was trying to sort it out. Even System Restore was useless because whats the use of backing up to another infected copy. Anyway, the re-install literally took all day to do in order to get it to a usable state. What a horrible waste of time. There's a few hours of my life I'll never get back. However I'm sure it was planned exactly that way to employ IS people. It seems the more complicated something is the more experts you need to employ.

My daughter was very shocked when I demonstrated how Puppy works in under 100mb and installs in minutes.

Yorkiesnorkie

[cthisbear]

" Microsoft takes 10 years to return support call "

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/155511/micr ... -call.html

Because we care.

Chris

[Dougal]

Vista is just a more bloated, b*st*rdised version of XP, which is....ditto W98...ditto95...ditto W3.1...ditto ditto ditto...DOS1.0 which was conned out of a couple of students at Berkley in an overnight blitz.

That's incorrect, actually.

MS-DOS was originally named QDOS (Quick n Dirty OS), quickly written by the people at Seattle Computer Products for the purpose of testing products...
That was used as the base until Win98, but then they bought from NEC the WinNT kernel, which was used until XP.
I think that Vista might be something new -- maybe that's why it's so crap.

[Sage]

Detail, Dougal! The Berkley students borrowed QDOS but it wasn't originated in Seattle anyway, CP/M was a precursor for so much as were developments from IBM and elsewhere, NT was never 'new', DRDOS did multi-tasking, windowing had already been around for more than a decade when W1.0 appeared, - it's all 'borrowed' stuff, believe me. I would never allow Vista through my door, but am advised that, apart from yet another layer, underneath it's just XP in disguise?
You won't find much truth in any textbooks, Wikis, etc about all that - you have to have lived through it all for fifty years. Goodness knows how much originated on these shores; difficult to believe we used to be world leaders in computing when the MD at IBM still couldn't see any future in them!

[prehistoric]

Arguing about MSDOS isn't explaining Bill's success. His greatest triumph was taking a language which had already been implemented by about a dozen companies and wrecking compatibility, so people had to buy his version for IBM's PC. His brilliant insight was that Kurtz and Kemeny had failed (deliberately, as it happens,) to register BASIC as a trademark or force a consensus on a national standard. He then called his version, not Tiny Basic, as others were already doing, but MicroSoft BASIC, implying this was merely his implementation of a well-known and well-liked timesharing language, like DEC BASIC, or GE BASIC. I had a book full of programs which would run on both, (also running them on DG's Nova mini,) and not a single program of any size would run on early MS BASIC without alteration, sometimes a rewrite. I gave that book away when I saw the handwriting on the wall.

Those 40 people are busy trying to figure out how Bill can make money from OLPC and screw everyone else. Programming is entirely secondary.

My guess is that they will conclude that Bill makes the most money if OLPC sinks like a stone and millions are forced to spend money they can't afford to buy newer machines. Anyone want to offer me odds?

prehistoric