Les Actualites – Computing Technology, Software & Operating Systems

In the last year the most amazing thing has happened, all sorts of fantastic new operating systems have sprung up. Android, Chrome OS, iPhone OS and all of them really good whether they’re there for a niche market or not.

Now these operating systems have begun to propagate with iPhone OS and Android appearing on tablets, the kind of thing everybody would use in the home instead of a laptop. One of the biggest changes this will mean for users is that it will no longer matter what operating system we use and most people won’t even notice anyway.

If you look at the average things a casual user will do with a computer or computing device then, email, browsing and shopping, photo editing, playing music and watching video would all top the list. In fact these are the activities people would do 90+% of the time.

All of these OSes are either capable of doing all of these activities out of the box, or with the very simple and quick addition of a bolt-on bit of software. More’s the point it can easily be argued that the App stores for Apple devices and Google make it even easier on those devices than a Mac or Windows.

Despite the major differences between these operating systems, required to give each one its own identity and prevent litigation cases in court, they’re all fundamentally the same. Only things like the top-of-the-screen menu system on the Mac and the ribbon in Windows pose anything different to the norm.

Now at this point Ballmer and Jobs would disagree with me immensely and point out the huge and fundamental differences that make their operating system the best and easiest. Take Windows 7 for instance, it’s certainly the most flexible and for a power-user such as myself, more attractive because of that.

But this is nothing more than corporate greed playing on the pack-animal nature of humanity. When it boils down to it we’re all human and all in the same boat wanting to do the same things. Psychology plays a large part here though and major companies attract fans and loyal supporters the same way your local football or baseball teams might. For example, only this morning I received an email from someone who didn’t like the things I’ve been writing here about Apple recently, accusing me of all sorts of things and being a bit rude in the process. This was even though I’ve been quite complimentary about the company in recent days.

This is really quite clever on their part and I’m certain they all have psychologists on staff. What they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades is grooming us into becoming ambassadors for their companies.

None of this really has anything to do with how good the actual product is because if you take a step back and think about the things you want to do on your device for 90% of the time, any-old device will probably do and most of your stuff’s now in the clouds, USB hard drives or pen drives anyway.

Even the old familiarity argument is fading fast with people picking up and mastering iPhone OS and Android as quickly as they can get a new microwave to cook a lasagne.

It will be interesting to see what each company do with their operating systems in the future, especially Windows 8 which has a monumental battle to fight now to prevent Microsoft from losing market share. Looks like they’ll need those psychologists to rally the troops again.

Source: Windows7 News

ITIL course – Web Design Harrogate

This is a story which speaks volumes about Microsoft, its corporate customers and the mentality that both have. You might remember in recent weeks the argument between Google and the Chinese government about the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents being hacked.

The problem was traced back to Internet Explorer 6, most internet-based problems are traced back to IE6 to be honest. This browser has now been around for almost ten years. It’s been superseded twice and it’s widely acknowledged that this is possibly the worst and most insecure browser you can have on your computer.

IE6 came out at a time when Microsoft had won the browser wars and Netscape had largely disappeared. Firefox had yet to appear and the Redmond giant had 99% of the browser market. They had nobody to compete with and internet commerce was in its infancy. Thus Microsoft just let the browser stagnate for many years until finally forced to innovate by the likes of the Mozilla Foundation, who realised that adequate security was the minimum specification their new browser should have.

But IE6 was buggy in all sorts of other ways too, mostly in the notoriously bad way it rendered HTML code. Microsoft seemed to have their own ideas about how HTML worked and so most web pages had to be ‘fixed’ to work on it. But this had to happen because of Microsoft’s 99% market share. I was working in web design at the time and I can remember the constant complaints which still continue today.

Eventually with Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft released far superior and better protected versions of the browser but by this time big business had already developed their web-apps and portals to work with IE and made it clear that they didn’t want to spend the tens of thousands needed each to reformat them so they worked in IE7 or IE8.

Now Google is taking the bull by the horns and dropping support for IE6 from some of its products, starting with Google Docs. They’re doing what Microsoft should be doing. Not pandering to big business and causing the world a headache, but forcing people to stop using this buggy, insecure piece of antiquated rubbish.

Google are only giving you a month to prepare too. From the 1st March some services, there’s no definitive list yet, will no longer operate properly in IE6. Hopefully this will spur Microsoft to withdraw support for IE6 soon too, but somehow I doubt it.

This speaks volumes about Microsoft’s business model, and of how important to the company its volume licensing customers are. In some ways Microsoft execs will warmly welcome the move by Google. They’re doing what Microsoft can’t and it can only be a good thing.

It may even encourage more businesses to roll out Windows 7 before the first service pack is released later this year, traditionally the time when businesses begin deploying a new version of Windows.

We can only hope that IE6 is very soon dead, forgotten and that the world can concentrate on the security issues of today, not fixing the security nightmare of the 20th century.

Source: Windows7 News