Microsoft is a Monster

[mykalberta]

http://ctv2.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080124.wmicrosoft0124/business/Business/businessBN/ctv-business


Revenue for the Redmond, Wash.-based company rose 31 per cent to $16.37-billion (U.S.) for the second quarter, with profit up 79 per cent to $ $4.71 billion, or diluted earnings per share of 50 cents. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had forecast a profit of 46 cents per share.


http://valleywag.com/347739/apple-reports-best-quarter-ever/


Apple reported (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080122/aqtu214.html?.v=16) record earnings today for the quarter ending December 31. The company had a net profit of $1.6 billion or $1.76/share on $9.6 billion in sales compared to $1 billion profit on $7.1 billion last year. Gross margin rose to 34.7 percent from 31.2 percent last year.


PC: Hey MAC, I heard you reported record earnings today for Q4 2007.

MAC: Yah we did, we are amazed at our company and our Leopard OS

PC: Yah you had 9.6 billion in revenue with a 1.6 billion in profit congrats

MAC: Hey thanks PC

PC: Its too bad we and Vista dwarfed you in profit. We had 2X your revenue with 4X your profit.

PC: Why dont you use Time Machine to go back in time until your company was better than ours.

MAC: Time machine doesnt go back that far.

PC: too bad, too bad.

[Traditional_Ale]

http://ctv2.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080124.wmicrosoft0124/business/Business/businessBN/ctv-business



http://valleywag.com/347739/apple-reports-best-quarter-ever/



PC: Hey MAC, I heard you reported record earnings today for Q4 2007.

MAC: Yah we did, we are amazed at our company and our Leopard OS

PC: Yah you had 9.6 billion in revenue with a 1.6 billion in profit congrats

MAC: Hey thanks PC

PC: Its too bad we and Vista dwarfed you in profit. We had 2X your revenue with 4X your profit.

PC: Why dont you use Time Machine to go back in time until your company was better than ours.

MAC: Time machine doesnt go back that far.

PC: too bad, too bad.

Vista 64-bit is okay. 32-bit Vista sucks.

64bit XP Pro is where its at. Cranked to like 4gb of DDR2 PC6400...drool. Softsynths are fun.

[Flaming Choy]

Haha, that would make an awesome mock-commercial!

[Hemi-Cuda]

Vista is garbage, it's the Windows ME of 2007

there's a reason Microsoft is planning to release their next Windows version in '09

[SarichFan]

Vista is garbage, it's the Windows ME of 2007

there's a reason Microsoft is planning to release their next Windows version in '09

What a load of crap that is... I've used Vista since launch. I could NEVER go back to XP by choice.

I had to upgrade my wireless card but that's it, i've had no complaints with Vista myself.

[Nehkara]

What a load of crap that is... I've used Vista since launch. I could NEVER go back to XP by choice.

I had to upgrade my wireless card but that's it, i've had no complaints with Vista myself.

I also have very few issues with it. I don't see what all these "problems" are. It works great for me. I have Vista Premium 64 bit.

[McG]

Vista is garbage, it's the Windows ME of 2007

there's a reason Microsoft is planning to release their next Windows version in '09

Yes...its called Windows 7 and sometimes Windows Vienna. Its part of their already published upgrade pathway.

[droopydrew19]

vista just seems to be a resource hog. My older laptopwith 1 gig of ram zooms running xp compared to my new (faster processor) with 1.5 gigs of ram and vista.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

I also have very few issues with it. I don't see what all these "problems" are. It works great for me. I have Vista Premium 64 bit.

+1

Vista Ultimate 32bit for 6 months now. I think a lot of Vista haters come from hearing about it rather than actually owning it. That and trying to get a 4 yr old computer to run it.


Comparing stock charts - you'd certainly want to be owing Microsoft stock, not Apple stock right now. Take that smug Mac Commercial guy.

[alltherage]

My vista is nothing special, but nothing to complain about. I didn't know windows 7 was coming. That's weak sauce.

[FanIn80]

I've been running Vista since the early stages of the first Beta.

After launch, I was running a retail version of 32bit Ultimate at home and 32bit Business at the office (I run the network there, so I got away with "early adopting.")

Nowadays, I run 64bit Home Premium at home with 4GB of RAM (I can't believe how smooth it runs!). I'm still using the same install of Vista Business that I installed a year ago on my main desktop at the office - which is amazing, considering I used to rebuild that machine every 3 months when I was running XP.

Needless to say, I've had very very very few problems (in fact, I can't even think of one to use as an example right now) with Vista. I tried to go back to my old XP Pro image that I have here at home, but that lasted exactly two days before I wiped it off and dumped my Vista image back on!

[I-Hate-Hulse]

For you guys on Vista 64 - are you running into many problems with drivers or apps?

"Vienna" will probably get delayed like Vista did. I'd say 2010/11 isn't out of the question. Time for a new rig by then anyways.... ;)

[Winsor_Pilates]

Comparing stock charts - you'd certainly want to be owing Microsoft stock, not Apple stock right now. Take that smug Mac Commercial guy.
Yeah, but what about computers? I don't think most people who love Macs, love them because of stocks.

Is it really a surprise that to anyone that Microsoft is profiting more then Mac? A way bigger company with a way bigger market and range of products. And some of the smartest business people in the world behind it. Microsoft sure is a beast.

[FanIn80]

For you guys on Vista 64 - are you running into many problems with drivers or apps?

"Vienna" will probably get delayed like Vista did. I'd say 2010/11 isn't out of the question. Time for a new rig by then anyways.... ;)
No problems here. They've really done a number on compatibility... I have yet to find a 32bit app that won't install on my machine.

As for the drivers, as long as they are WHQL certified, they'll install fine whether they're 32 or 64bit. The WHQL thing might sound like a pain in the arse, but it just makes you pay more attention to the hardware you're buying. It's not that difficult for a company to get their drivers certified, and knowing they are certified makes me feel better about installing them anyway.

[llama64]

People who keep giving Vista heck these days are one of two people:

1) Crappy Windows Software developers
2) Ignorant people who heard that Vista sucked at launch and haven't bothered checking if that status has changed.

I've been using Vista on development machine for 10 months straight now. The first two months were pretty brutal. The system lasted about 4-5 hours without going down due to software incompatibility issues or bad drivers. Then, new drivers were released for my hardware that were compatible with Vista and I haven't had a major system crash since then. Vista as an Operating system is surprisingly well built. The morons who make programs for it took an extended amount of time figuring out that their hacks don't work anymore with the new security model and started spreading FUD all over the place. And gullible people bought it.

Windows ME sucked because it was an insecure mess of code. There is a reason MS dumped the Dos kernel in favour of the NT stack. Vista sucked because there was no device support at launch.

I just built a brand new PC based on budget components and used 32bit Vista (never going over 2gb of ram in this one). The whole build process from start to finish took about 1.5 hours. That's including setup of the system software, installation of printer drivers and MS Office. It was the simplest experience I have ever had. My opinion of Vista went WAY up after that.

Point is, if you're still walking around talking about how crappy Vista is, man up and try it. You will not go back to XP unless you rely on software that has yet to be made compatible with Vista. Why people think the OS should be compatible with everything is beyond me... It's up to the software vendors to make their products compatible with the environment!

Apple will never match Microsoft's profit margins mainly because they will never hold a massive IT contract for an international business. Can you imagine a bunch of Drilling Engineers trying to do their work on a Mac? It's kinda comical. It's like imagining the police force in Calgary driving a bunch of Aston Martins around as their fleet vehicles.

Apple is a consumer product. It's aimed at small businesses and the home user. And in this market, Apple has the better product. Good thing the market is starting to notice!

I still maintain that if you are going to buy a laptop, buy a Mac. Desktops are Windows territory though. Unless you want that bizzare all in one iMac thing.

[Barnes]

What's the point of this thread?

And seriously, Valleywag?

[llama64]

What's the point of this thread?


Waffles.


http://easywafflerecipe.com/waffles.jpg

[McG]

My vista is nothing special, but nothing to complain about. I didn't know windows 7 was coming. That's weak sauce.

sorry but i don't see why. corporations need to know so that they can plan or delay deployments based upon what is coming down the pipe, including new features.

i have already seen some of the stuff coming in office 14, and most people aren't on office 12 (no office 13 btw).

i haven't seen any release stuff beyond 2010 though...

[jammies]

In the business world, backwards compatibility is important. That's why Vista sucks - a medium size business can have hundreds of applications, most of which now require a new version ($$$) or don't even have versions that will run properly under the new "security" model under Vista. While it is all well and good to say these apps are "poorly programmed", from the end-user's perspective MS is saying "here, I'm going to fix these problems you didn't know or care that you had, and I'm going to give you problems that you won't be able to ignore or fix, PLUS I'm going to charge you triple for the privilege!"

For example, I have a customer we'll call "Golf Course", and they have some custom software that analyzes golf swings via video, then outputs a customized report on your golf swing to a colour printer in booklet format. Under Vista, it won't

1. Install properly unless you hack the registry
2. Run at more than 1/2 the speed of the same app under XP.
3. Line up the printed pictures with the premade spaces in the booklet, no matter how you adjust the page/margins/picture sizes.

And that's just one application of many. It wouldn't be such a big deal except that it's starting to get so you can't even buy XP pre-loaded anymore, so all new machines come with Vista, and if your application doesn't work under Vista - well, what do you do?

What they should have done was write a companion XP emulator using either their VirtualPC tech, or something licenced from VMWare - and let people run their obsoleted XP apps in a virtualized, sandboxed environment that wouldn't break their security model. Then they could have charged $100 for Vista, and another $100 for the optional XP emulator, and everyone would have been happy. Instead, they charge $400 for what is essentially a locked down version of XP with DRM and pretty menus, which is a ******* joke.

[llama64]

<snip>


Well, in theory I completely agree with you in that Microsoft completely flubbed up the licensing of Vista. The restriction on virtual installations was unnecessary and prevented a lot of configurations from working. Thankfully, MS wizened up and have lifted much the barriers to virtualization.

That said, your "Golf Course" customer should have verified that their mission critical apps could run on the new OS before they upgraded to it. They also should be leaning on the developers to get off their ass and fix the software to run properly on the new platform. The specs for Vista were out a long time before it was released.

Microsoft has catered to the notion of backwards compatibility for too long. This "requirement" has caused the Windows platform to stagnate while security vulnerabilities piled up. Same problem exists with Internet Explorer.

XP has had it's support window extended and is available for purchase everywhere. Most OEM manufacturers offer it for installation as well. Blaming Vista for poor IT planning isn't going to solve anything. IT is costly. Companies need to recognize this and plan accordingly. Placing blame on a new product for poor IT management isn't going to solve anything.

[RyZ]

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?

[Winsor_Pilates]

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?
Not sure, but I know the head of Microsoft games has the most expensive house in Vancouver, so they can't be doing to bad.:)

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Does it break it down any further? Is the xbox division making money yet or are they still a huge money pit?

Here's figures from their annual...
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, profit increased to $4.71 billion (U.S.), or 50 cents per share, from $2.63 billion, or 26 cents per share, in the year-ago period.


Revenue rose 31 per cent to $16.37 billion from $12.5 billion in the year-ago quarter, ahead of analysts' prediction of $15.95 billion.
And for the X360... (like they sell that many Zunes :rolleyes:)

Sales from the division behind the Xbox 360 game console and Zune digital media player edged up 3 per cent to $3.06 billion. The division swung to a profit of $357 million from a loss of $302 million last year.
So about 19% of sales comes from X360. Didn't think it was that much....

One other interesting tidbit:

Microsoft's "client" division, responsible for Vista, posted revenue of $4.34 billion. It has sold 100 million copies of Vista since its January 2007 launch.

[llama64]

<snip>
Sales from the division behind the Xbox 360 game console and Zune digital media player edged up 3 per cent to $3.06 billion. The division swung to a profit of $357 million from a loss of $302 million last year.
So about 19% of sales comes from X360. Didn't think it was that much....

<snip>



That's an impressive turn-around for the XBOX division. I bet next years numbers won't be so rosey though due to the warranty issues.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

That's an impressive turn-around for the XBOX division. I bet next years numbers won't be so rosey though due to the warranty issues.

By accounting rules, they should have setup a liability for this and expensed it last year - so no impact for 2008 unless the problem is worse than they originally provided for.

But components will get cheaper, so profit could increase even more, especially if Gears of War 2 gets released soon.

[Regorium]

I'm an XP holdout, but the more I play around with Vista on my GF's laptop the more I want to upgrade.

Everything's set up just right on my current computer right now and I just don't want to mess with it!

[I_H8_Crawford]

My laptop died so have been messing around with Vista on a new laptop... once you turn off that ######ed security that asks if you want to do something 5x it isn't that bad; I don't mind it... definitely not the horror story you hear from everywhere.

[Red]

My laptop died so have been messing around with Vista on a new laptop... once you turn off that ######ed security that asks if you want to do something 5x it isn't that bad; I don't mind it... definitely not the horror story you hear from everywhere.

Funny thing is that my Vista only asks me once.

This is how Vista gets its bad rep, people exaggerate things and the masses just keep repeating them.

[4X4]

I'm an XP holdout, but the more I play around with Vista on my GF's laptop the more I want to upgrade.

Everything's set up just right on my current computer right now and I just don't want to mess with it!

I wouldn't call myself a holdout, just someone that didn't need to upgrade. My desktop is 5 years old and my laptop ain't broke so I'm not going to fix it.
My dad just developed his basement into an office and put a couple new machines in there that both run vista. I have to say that I like Vista. It was soo easy to set everything up. The only tricky think was setting up the network so that all the computers in the house can print (the main computer still runs XP).

But yeah, Vista isn't the boogeyman program that I thought it was going to be. Actually pretty nice.

[Jagger]

I'm running Vista Premium 64 on my new(ish) laptop. I have had a few compatibility problems with both drivers and software. I simply cannot get my GPS60cs or Palm to sync with it so have to use one of our XP desktops. Certain new games (Hoyle card games for one) will not run normally on Vista, no matter what the packaging says. You can get it to run via a back door method but it's a pain.

After saying that, I still like Vista and given the choice would not want to go back to XP. It's certainly better than the bad reviews it gets, and this is coming from somebody who has actually had problems with it.

[jammies]

That said, your "Golf Course" customer should have verified that their mission critical apps could run on the new OS before they upgraded to it. They also should be leaning on the developers to get off their ass and fix the software to run properly on the new platform. The specs for Vista were out a long time before it was released.

They didn't WANT to upgrade, but their standard laptop no longer comes with XP, so they have a choice of either changing laptop vendors (which defeats the purpose of standardization, and causes me headaches) or..... hmmm.

Saying "well they should do this" or "they should do that" is missing the point entirely. If Vista wasn't forced down their throats, they wouldn't have to do ANYTHING at all, as their current needs are already met by XP. For that matter, I'd say I have exactly 0% of customers who "need" to upgrade to Vista - it's a solution in search of a problem.

There is nothing at all about it that makes me think, "Wow, I could sure use this to solve (whatever)." The "security" model is the only thing I see as an improvement, and frankly, that could have been retrofitted to XP without much trouble, so I'm not seeing the big value in paying hundreds of dollars for it, especially as corporate networks have their machines locked down with system policies anyway, which does 90% of what this feature is supposed to do.

Not one of my customers - not one - has embraced Vista. And these range from little 10-20 user shops, to companies with hundreds of desktops. Why? Because, as I said, it just causes problems, and it doesn't solve any, and any sane business doesn't go down that path if they don't have to.

[llama64]

They didn't WANT to upgrade, but their standard laptop no longer comes with XP, so they have a choice of either changing laptop vendors (which defeats the purpose of standardization, and causes me headaches) or..... hmmm.

Saying "well they should do this" or "they should do that" is missing the point entirely. If Vista wasn't forced down their throats, they wouldn't have to do ANYTHING at all, as their current needs are already met by XP. For that matter, I'd say I have exactly 0% of customers who "need" to upgrade to Vista - it's a solution in search of a problem.


I agree fully with you. Microsoft tried to do exactly what it's done in the past by forcing everyone to the next platform.

But the problem still remains at the business IT level. If the applications needed to run a business cannot be run properly on the Vista platform, they shouldn't have upgraded. Accepting a vendor that refuses to meet your needs is bad management, regardless if it causes headaches. Or are you saying that the problems being created by Vista are less of a headache then finding a decent hardware vendor?

Even at launch there were computer vendors that still shipped products with XP installed.

[Regorium]

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080201/microsoft_yahoo.html

They truly are monstrous. Everyone thinks the economy is terrible, and Microsoft offers 45 billion dollars for an acquisition.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

Vista SP1 should be out by the end of the month...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,142054-c,vistalonghorn/article.html

[mykalberta]

Smart money says buy when the seller is weak, I personally would have waited, I am waiting before I turn a large chunk of my PC Financial cash into stocks because the market and certain industries in particular have a lot longer way to fall.

[McG]

i haven't yet wrapped my head around how much better microsoft will be with yahoo...more to the point that it didn't go to google...which m$ says it couldn't have.

maybe they didn't want to buy SAP any more?

[jammies]

maybe they didn't want to buy SAP any more?

They probably figured out that combining the legendary SAP lack of quality with world-class Microsoft buffoonery wasn't a good plan.

Seriously, I don't know how SAP manages to sell even one piece of software - any implementation I've ever heard of has always been WAY over budget (including one place that was spending over ONE MILLION DOLLARS A MONTH in consultants trying to get it to be more or less workable) and using it feels like you're inside a Kafka novel, being berated by an insane bureaucrat in pig Latin while perverted clowns pummel you with rubber chickens.

[I-Hate-Hulse]

i haven't yet wrapped my head around how much better microsoft will be with yahoo...more to the point that it didn't go to google...which m$ says it couldn't have.

There's no way a Google / Yahoo merger gets approved by the anti-trust regulators - too much of a monopoly on search and advertising. Google had to sit by and watch Redmond move in.

[sclitheroe]

vista just seems to be a resource hog. My older laptopwith 1 gig of ram zooms running xp compared to my new (faster processor) with 1.5 gigs of ram and vista.

Yeah, and I bet your previous machines "zoomed" with Windows 98 compared to Windows 2000 when it came out. XP was famously "a hog" when it came out, too, compared to Win98 and Windows 2000.

Fact of the matter is that Vista is doing a lot more under the hood than any of the previous OSs did, the same as it's been with each generation.

BTW, it's the same for Macs, Leopard is undeniably fatter than Tiger, all you have to do is look at how much more it uses the swapfile, which is significantly more. The only real difference is that most Mac users already had a gig or more of RAM before they upgraded.

-Scott

[jammies]

Fact of the matter is that Vista is doing a lot more under the hood than any of the previous OSs did, the same as it's been with each generation.

Should it be doing more "under the hood", though? You know what would have impressed me as a new release of Windows? If they had taken XP, dropped its memory footprint down by a third, tightened the security, cut the bootup time in half, increased the speed, increased the stability, and left the interface alone except for maybe some snazzy transparency effects. And done it in late 2005/early 2006.

We don't *need* an OS that takes up hundreds of megs of memory just to run, and we don't *need* any more "features". What we *do* need is stability, security and usability. MS should move to something like a 3 release cycle over a 6-8 year period - first release you incorporate most of your innovations, next two releases are evolutionary and are intended to streamline and stabilize the OS, not fatten it.

[sclitheroe]

Should it be doing more "under the hood", though? You know what would have impressed me as a new release of Windows? If they had taken XP, dropped its memory footprint down by a third, tightened the security, cut the bootup time in half, increased the speed, increased the stability, and left the interface alone except for maybe some snazzy transparency effects. And done it in late 2005/early 2006.

We don't *need* an OS that takes up hundreds of megs of memory just to run, and we don't *need* any more "features". What we *do* need is stability, security and usability.

Most of the memory footprint of Vista is taken up by Superfetch, which pre-loads system and application libraries into memory to improve application launch speed and performance. If you disable Superfetch, you'll see that Vista doesn't take much more RAM than XP did. Superfetch does also slow down boot times - you'll see a lot of hard drive activity when you boot up, and for a couple minutes after loading the OS, as it pulls in those libraries. That's also why power management is vastly improved in Vista - you should be sleeping machines regularly, not always shutting them down.

Your also ignoring so many of the advances in Vista that position it well for machines released now and in the next few years. The GDI has been largely replaced with new graphics libraries that are finally accelerated, Vista actively uses the Shadow Copy technology that debuted in XP to backup your files on the fly, it's got a better, although not perfect, security layer bolted in, etc. Not to mention a better network stack, vastly improved wireless networking, etc. Wait till SP1 hits, and you got hot-patching (no more reboots for patches interrupting your work), plus lots of the inevitable bugs worked out of a .0 release.

So maybe you don't need or want an OS that is maturing with hardware capabilities, but to dismiss Vista out of hand is silly.

-Scott

[Hakan]

One of the only reasons I saw to upgrading to Vista, WinFS, was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

I've used Vista, it's basically bloated XP with a bunch of crap I don't need. What else is new with MS.

As usual, I'll wait until one or two significant revisions of the OS has been completed before I install it. XP works just great for me.

[llama64]

One of the only reasons I saw to upgrading to Vista, WinFS, was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

I've used Vista, it's basically bloated XP with a bunch of crap I don't need. What else is new with MS.

As usual, I'll wait until one or two significant revisions of the OS has been completed before I install it. XP works just great for me.

Vista is good if you are buying a new PC designed for it. Upgrading an existing PC from XP to Vista is usually a bad decision. Vista is a better OS, but it requires more horses to power it.

That all said, I get the feeling Vista was primarily a test bed for Microsoft in that it lays the groundwork for the next version. Vista really needs to get some good tools installed into it. SSH, a decent shell (Power Shell comes close), easier application installation (the registry needs to be ditched). Then it would probably be the best OS on the market. For now, OS X meets all my needs better and for cheaper.

There is a sense going around the industry that the open-source products are starting to become mature enough to challenge the desktop. People are beginning to "seriously" predict that within 5 years most home users will be running an open-source OS with open-source office products. The corporate world would not be far behind. This kinda puts the Microsoft+Yahoo event into perspective. MS may be forecasting the same thing and is taking steps to branch away from a strict software sales model and more into web based products. Could be interesting to watch

[McG]

Vista is good if you are buying a new PC designed for it. Upgrading an existing PC from XP to Vista is usually a bad decision. Vista is a better OS, but it requires more horses to power it.

That all said, I get the feeling Vista was primarily a test bed for Microsoft in that it lays the groundwork for the next version. Vista really needs to get some good tools installed into it. SSH, a decent shell (Power Shell comes close), easier application installation (the registry needs to be ditched). Then it would probably be the best OS on the market. For now, OS X meets all my needs better and for cheaper.

There is a sense going around the industry that the open-source products are starting to become mature enough to challenge the desktop. People are beginning to "seriously" predict that within 5 years most home users will be running an open-source OS with open-source office products. The corporate world would not be far behind. This kinda puts the Microsoft+Yahoo event into perspective. MS may be forecasting the same thing and is taking steps to branch away from a strict software sales model and more into web based products. Could be interesting to watch

while I don't want to challenge your last paragraph too much, because I do think that there is a sense out there that M$ doesn't always know best, for the forseeable future I cannot see corporations going away from M$ on the desktop or internally. There is way too much invested in the M$ environment to move away from it. Forever? who can say. but certainly i cannot see this in the next 5 to 10 years.

M$'s acquisition of Yahoo is to try to consolidate and grow revenues via internet channels, and to expand reach. Most companies reach a critical size and it becomes difficult for them to organically grow...and so they are forced to use acquisition to expand. what else would M$ do with all that cash anyways?

[Azure]

I read somewhere yesterday that Yahoo wanted to reject Microsoft?

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8UN0LIO1&show_article=1

[Clarkey]

Can someone explain the 32 bit vs. 64 bit difference? Is this a hardware or software differentiation, what does it mean to me, the user?

[llama64]

Can someone explain the 32 bit vs. 64 bit difference? Is this a hardware or software differentiation, what does it mean to me, the user?

In a practical sense to us as end users, going to 64bit means unsupported hardware, crappy drivers and endless headaches. Supposedly it means a faster system but in all my experience with XP64, Vista x64 and Ubuntu x64, I've never noticed.

It really comes into play if you're doing a lot of media work with video or large sound files. It means the the amount of instructions that are fed into the CPU is essentially doubled over x32bit leading to faster processing on more of the data.

If you feel like giving yourself a technology migraine (:D), check out this explanation at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#32_vs_64_bit

[Barnes]

Heard an interesting piece of information on a podcast I listen to. Microsoft would have to borrow money in order to purchase Yahoo. Apparently they only have about 30 billion in cash. Compared to Apple who is a much smaller company but with 18 billion in cash on hand.

Microsoft has been buying up their own stock recently so I guess that would explain some of it.

[Bobblehead]

I'm thinking my next machine will run a 64-bit OS. Drivers have come a long way - unless you still want to run that 10 year old dot-matrix printer you shouldn't have much trouble with newer hardware.

What blows my mind is people who tell other people how to turn off all the security measures in Vista. Microsoft has been raked over the coals for years about their security model (justifiably in most cases), so they start getting one in place to address the issues and people turn it off. C'mon, the only time it pops up it is probably a very good thing that you are being warned about what happening. If this is happening so much that it becomes obtrusive, you had better sit back and think about what it is you are doing.

And as for memory footprint, Vista took a different approach this time. They try to predict what you are using and load as much into memory as they can. If you have the memory, why not try to use it?

I like many of Microsoft's products, their programmers a VERY intelligent, yet despise Microsoft's marketing/licensing practices.

And I also run a home machine with linux (Fedora, and Ubuntu for a while), and am very comfortable doing things from command line (a la MS-DOS, Commodore DOS). Haveing worked in software development, all I can say is for a program as complex as any version of Windows to work as well as it does is amazing.

[Clarkey]

In a practical sense to us as end users, going to 64bit means unsupported hardware, crappy drivers and endless headaches. Supposedly it means a faster system but in all my experience with XP64, Vista x64 and Ubuntu x64, I've never noticed.

It really comes into play if you're doing a lot of media work with video or large sound files. It means the the amount of instructions that are fed into the CPU is essentially doubled over x32bit leading to faster processing on more of the data.

If you feel like giving yourself a technology migraine (:D), check out this explanation at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#32_vs_64_bit

No comprende :blink:?

[llama64]

No comprende :blink:?

Basically, if all you need a computer for is emails, internet and the occasional game, going 64bit will not result in anything different then a standard 32bit system. Really, going 64bit will just increase the likely hood of coming across problems on your system.