OT: Microsoft patents "timed button presses"

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, May 03, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>In the relative spacial/temporal region of
>Mon, May 03, 2004 at 06:51:52PM -0400, Bill Vermillion achieved the spontaneous
>generation of the following:
>> > >checkout http://www.techweb.com/winadvantage
>> 
>[snip]
>
...
>Staffing and training probably costs less in many cases because 1) there
>are tens of thousands of MCSE's out there with nothing better to do but
>soak up jobs because there's a flood of these useless certifications
>on the market--more than anyone needs, and 2) you don't really have to
>-know- much to run 'doze, because Redmond expects you to simply apply its
>patches (whenever -those- become available...you know, say, next month
>even though a critical flaw was discovered today), and you're supposedly
>done.  How hard is it to train people to download and double-click?

Reboot, Reboot, Reinstall.  An MCSE diagnose a problem?  You gotta be
kidding.  Few of our customers have ANY IT people on staff, mostly because
most of them are running Linux or Apple OS X on the desktops, and all of
them are running *nix systems as servers.

A decent *nix admin usually can diagnose problems, and fix them without
having to reboot, much less reinstall the system.  I must admit that I had
to figure out how to reboot our main FreeBSD server here in single user
mode after screwing up an initialization script that managed to get into a
tight loop using all the file resources on the system.  It had been so long
since this machine was rebooted, I didn't remember how to get it into
single user mode.

...
>The performance benchmark figures are pretty funny too.  I wonder if those
>speed and cost ratings actually mean anything when your system is down 30%
>of the day due to attacks for things that won't have patches released for
>weeks yet.  Hmmmm.  Okay, so it runs a little faster, and therefore can
>be attacked and crash a little faster.  I suppose the upside is that it
>reboots and runs scandisk a little faster?

I thought it hilarious that Microsoft was touting one of the major features
of XP is that it boots faster.  Even my development desktop machines go for
months at a time between reboots, usually limited by hardware changes, not
OS failures.

...

Bill
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