Toolkit

Story: Gates on geekery and gadgets

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MS OS Running Your Home? Be Afraid!

I saw some of the CE show demos and was gobsmacked by the idea anyone would allow MS Windows to run a house?

Don't they have health and Saftey Executive in the US?

MS have not the first idea of resilient integrated systems, their OS can barely hang together for a decent session on a simple PC and is not even closely integrated with the many available PC peripheral device drivers - think fire extinguishers or intruder protection systems for a house - and it takes a technology geek to fix anything beyond a reboot, pick crashed apps from the teeth of its DOS throwback registry, etc. Been there , done that.

Run away! Run away!

There was once a good gag about what people would expect if they bought a car from Microsoft and it regularly stopped functioning without warning and required various unnatural acts to get working and keep running. Its coming true in the mind of his Billness! Do not be hypnotised and swallowed up by the evil empire. Resistance is possible. WAKE UP!

Anyone really want to trust the operation of their house to a Microsoft OS? Maybe a Mac or Linux, Mac if you want to minimise user expert knowledge and actual service interuptions.

But really this should not even be a PC architecture market. Its far too life threatening. You need to step right out of loosely integrated modular PC architectures - to MIL standard embedded processors with tight, non proprietary designs so they are required by law to work with all connected peripheral devices and run bomb proof "House Management" code the user doesn't have to maintain - and will run indefinitely without a upgrade on what is a closed and industry standard consumer unit for 20 or 30 years with the only upgrades to BIOS/firmware. Not an MS way of working.

Imagine:

"Microsoft VIstahome version 8.3.2 Release 4 has encountered a critical software error and must be rebooted. The sprinkler system has been activated. Please evacuate the property, close all active programs, cooking , heating, lighting and life support systems then reboot".

"We're sorry, you need to upgrade to House 7.3 before you can enter the property again, please authorise payment of $1,000 to Microsoft to gain entry".

etc.

.... I don't think so. This needs closed integrated industry standard devices from people who understand what real consumer utility products are, as in Honeywell Controls et al. Or motor vehicle electronics makers - who are not quite there yet either but a lot closer than MS.

Not flaky Gates' MS who demonstrably wouldn't know how to build an integrated resilient and fault tolerant system to save their lives, and have always swamped emerging CPU power with crap overweight code and pointless cunningly concealed and unuseable-by-the-rest-of-us "features" for techno "don't you know that" geeks with no lives - instead of making PCs work faster and the core features more accessible to ordinary people who live in houses instead of sleeping in their clothes under their coding stations. Would you want their idea of a user interface running your property?

With a REAL integrated approach to PCs Woz and Steve had an integrated intuitive GUI OS running on 1985 Motorola 68000 CPU technology, it took MS another 10 years - and then MS started with the licensed Mac OS for Windows 2.0 and 3.0.

Since then Jobs did Pixar, iMac and iPod. Microsoft did some more cumbersome and slower OS and Office Apps, the ignored tablet PC and played "catch up and kill the innovators" on the Internet. With smart handelds they are still forcing cool and unwanted technology on real users instead of targetting needs, as Sony , a real market led company, has.

I rest my case.

My motion is this house will never run under a Microsoft OS.

Don't let yours if you value your investment.

Brian Catt

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