Mon 9/20/2010 11:02 am. I have blathered endlessly on Microsoft’s dubious parallel computing efforts; see my imaginary-letters-to-the-editor page and endless linkage. But perusing a recent issue of MSDN entirely devoted to how one should use multi-tasking to make one’s programs sing and dance — the right way, as opposed to how they told us to do it last year or last week — I asked myself, why do they keep hammering this by-now all-but-hopeless cause?
And the answer is pitifully obvious: because they didn’t make a clever music player or a beautiful smart phone, but created the usual incompetent junk that seems to be their fate. ... As far as I’ve heard, they haven’t made much money off of the Xbox game console yet!
The
point is, Steve Jobs and Microsoft/Bill Gates both saw long ago that
Moore’s law would curl-up and get sick, and that, more-or-less
consequently, desktop computers were going to get real cheap and not
much faster.
Jobs, as all the world knows, forged on into the far reaches of music
players, smart phones, and now, whatever the iPad is.... Microsoft did
all of these things and failed.
Consequently, Microsoft has
to keep flogging multi-tasking as the only
way to make their pitiful operating system / business software products
attractive into the future. If Windows phone 7 or whatever it’s
supposed to be turns into a howling iphone-beating success, MSDN
magazine and all the works of Microsoft will suddenly be propagandizing
for the Mobile World of Tomorrow and pfft!
for that old-fashioned multi-core desktop / laptop stuff....
And that is how the age of my precious beautiful personal computers ends: definitely not with a bang....
Yeah I realized its all bilge. Microsoft is well aware it isnt going to convince anyone to keep buying Office 2017 or Windows 37 by flogging multi-core. Office can be as multi-tasking as they want it to be — which is unlikely to provide much of a performance boost anyway; I mean, calculate your heart out, spreadsheet! ... Basically, Microsofts consumer products are a lost cause, and presumably they know it....
Nope, theyre flogging the multi-tasking
NET, the anti-java,
and theyre doing it so corporations
will continue to use and invest in the ever-more powerful Microsoft script
language.
And I am fooled again! ... Like where I excoriated the
software guru plague
for years
without realizing it was a corporate excrescence! ... And as it is again
here with the pitiful MSDN and the NET
multi-core supposed super-script. Ive been reading the ridiculous
magazines multi-tasking propaganda forever, and thought I was so
clever to resist their blandishments— but they werent even
talking to me, or anyone like
me! ... Theyre conning the corps....
And so my precious world of personal computers will end indeed not only with a whimper, but brought low by my evil lifelong nemesis, the faceless mediocre boring corporation! ... Bitter, bitter, bitter....
1. Actually the release of Vista suggests Microsoft missed the boat even there, since the appalling product was clearly designed to run on hardware that had magically gotten much faster; only it didn’t....