microsoft

I have fascination for Microsoft. The super-enthusiastic marketing by Ballmer et al. The genius programmers like Raymond Chen and Dave Cutler. The pretty pictures on computer screens that they show in the demos. The little sounds Windows makes. The mystical mystery of how someone ever thought ".NET" was a good name for anything. All the strange abbreviated code names like "NTOSKRNL" and "umdmxfrm.dll". The central importance on Internet culture for the past decade of everything to do with Microsoft and Windows. The millions of fraudulous imitators, including the Indians who telephone and claim to be from "Microsoft" and these ads posted on the street for tech support with the old Windows XP logo sketchily pasted in. The secret source code kept in Microsoft's vaults for decades, and never leaked in full. The fact that all they ever seemed to do is bullshit their way into a monopoly then rip off Apple. But also the interesting fact that NT is the only major system that isn't Unix. All the versions of Windows with the massive release launch events. The speeches from Bill Gates where he frequently uses the word "rich", perhaps as a kind of Freudian slip self-description moment, and always prefixes established technical terms like "natural language processing" by "so-called", but never prefixes things like the Microsoft Bob "agent" by "so-called". The idea that Mr. Gates is a billionaire and could spend his days watching TV and worrying about nothing while I spend my life freezing my ass in this cold country. The entire mystery of Win32 API programming, complete with dozens of complicated verbose routines and structures and lots of NULLs, and where everything is in hungarian notation. The fact that Windows XP has been running almost half the world non-stop since 2001. The decision all of sudden to make everything tablet-based with Windows 8 in 2012, for no apparent reason and with poor success. The knowledge that a lot of Windows is written in good old C and not this hipstr.js bullshit. The fact that they came up with the slogan "that's business with .NET" which sounds like an advertisment for a toilet. The Apple copying, discussed ad nauseam on millions of fanboy forums since forever.

REDMOND, WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Bill Gates’s first day at work in the newly created role of technology adviser got off to a rocky start yesterday as the Microsoft founder struggled for hours to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade.

The installation hit a snag early on, sources said, when Mr. Gates repeatedly received an error message informing him that his PC ran into a problem that it could not handle and needed to restart.
After failing to install the upgrade by lunchtime, Mr. Gates summoned the new Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, who attempted to help him with the installation, but with no success.
While the two men worked behind closed doors, one source described the situation as “tense.”
“Bill is usually a pretty calm guy, so it was weird to hear some of that language coming out of his mouth,” the source said.
A Microsoft spokesman said only that Mr. Gates’s first day in his new job had been “a learning experience” and that, for the immediate future, he would go back to running Windows 7.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2014/02/gates-spends-entire-first-day-back-in-office-trying-to-install-windows-81.html