Computer Science Stuff

Of all the years I have been on this planet have never seen Microsoft get so desperate or feel the need to compete at a great level. Now that it is becoming more and more prevalent that they are no longer the big kid on the block anymore they are going on all out attacks now against Google and Apple. This is all because of their steadily declining market share.

Market Share lossage and to who

1. Internet browser(Internet Explorer) – lossage to Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari
2. Operating system (Windows) – lossage to Apple Mac OS X and Linux
3. Search Engine (live.com) – lossage to Google and Yahoo

Not even mentioning other competitors such as Adobe (Multimedia) Flash vs Microsoft Silverlight and Sony (Game Consoles) Ps3 vs Microsoft XBOX 360 vs Nintendo Wii, Microsoft is really feeling the effects of spreading themselves thinner and thinner and producing products of lesser and lesser quality. Even some of the competitors who they are going against have a focus and produce so very nice products. Now they are spending more money creating attack ads against Apple and Google. People see it as strategy but I see it as a act of desperation before the giant falls. If you want a good website for identifying market share go here to see the information for yourself.

What can Microsoft do?

Being that they still have the upper hand in most of their markets they need to create reliable products that cannot be compromised so easily. Firstly with windows it is known for viruses and its price. There are other products out there that are free and becoming easier to use for example linux. Or have little to no viruses and good quality, people go to apple mac os x. So if they can increase the quality of their product, include a higher level of security and speed and present it well I think we can see a nice increase in their market share. To even further back it up ask people who played around with Windows 7. They are impressed with the usability and speed which has increased alot of people’s curiosity and confidence. Now if they can launch a full-spectrum campaign on increasing quality of their products and decrease prices on licenses I guarantee we will see change in market share but only going up.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Yesterday I was on the radio station talking about how to find new customers through social networking sites along with the founder and president for Eye for Change. We were talking tapping into the power of Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. After putting our ideas together we came up with a formula!

First figure out who is your target market?

Who are you trying to appeal to? Which social network are your audience most likely to go to? For example in the early stages of Facebook it was trying to appeal to people in college or use to be in college. So if your target market was for college students you would have fun fest. So do the research because there are literally hundreds and hundreds of social networking sites and you don’t want to waste your throwing the wrong message at the wrong people.

What are you selling and is it of high value or interest?

Remember people on social networking sites don’t respond well to direct advertising. They need something that is put into their line of sight and attention grasping! That all links from knowing your target market and what arouses their interests. So if your product is information writing a really grasping article! If it is a product then design it around their needs!

Next, be personable, let people know who you are and what you are about!

Being on a social networking site isn’t all about selling a product but getting to know people. So if you are strictly about business and selling people will see right through it. So open up a little but don’t expose yourself completely telling everything. Having a blog sometimes gives people a good feeling about a company when they see how the leader thinks. You ever know who you might meet or attracting, it might be your next ex-wife or ex-husband, lol, but try it out and have fun with it.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Ubuntu has been by far the most stable and user friendly linux os I have used thus far. As soon as it was fully installed it adapted to all of my hardware and provided such an enjoyable experience. It even features three different versions on the website for the desktop, server and netbooks! Let’s take a look at some of the main features:

1. X.Org server 1.6
2. Boot performance
3. Linux kernel 2.6.28
4. Ext4 filesystem support
5. Cloud computing
6. GNOME 2.26

All these components are not foreign to other linux distro but they are featured in this distro and has such nice integration in ubuntu. One thing that pops out is the boot time. When installed on my laptop it has a boot time of 20 – 25 seconds.

Stuff I like

I used the Desktop Edition 64 bit version, and the features that jump out me was how you can control the individual speed of each your processors if you have a multi-processor chip. The programs it comes with it, how it can control the brightness of my laptop (ASUS N50), when I needed certain plugins it downloaded them with ease. The linux kernel is definitely making great strides and is becoming more and more dependable for people out the box. This operating system runs pretty fast and efficient other that I have no complaints or do it?

Stuff I didn’t like

I didn’t like the fact that every time I would use hibernate I would get some error message. I also didn’t like that fact I couldn’t perform a software raid. Your best bet if you want to do this is to solve this hardware wise and buy a raid controller. One other thing I realize is that firefox 3.0 would crash a good amount which turned out be annoying from time to time.

Conclusion

I feel as though this is the best linux distro for a windows user or someone starting in linux and for 2009. Ubuntu support is great and continuing to show great strides. I would suggest for users starting out to use th 32 bit version to have more access to programs they would commonly use. I feel comfortable putting this linux on someone computer for their main os now. I still feel as though Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is still slightly better though, but that only because of the better support of hardware for computers. Anyways, look out fo 9.10 in October 2009.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I stumbled across this picture on the internet and thought that all my viewers needed to see this!  This is a picture of the virginity rates among students at Wellesley College according to the student’s major. Wow there are no virgins in the studio arts majors! But look at where computer science is at! The top five! It goes to show that we are not all about computers, lol.

Popularity: 24% [?]