A blog about computers, open source, software and other perceptions gained over the years as a sysadmin.

Monday, February 22, 2010

A character assasination on a journalist.

Img courtesy of Juen.


Devil Mountain Software recently publicized numbers from their vast network of performance monitors that suggested Windows 7 has some of the same performance issues that Windows Vista has. A problem with how Windows 7 handles virtual memory seems to make the computers consume to much memory and not releasing it properly, thus resulting in sluggish trashing of the hard drives.


The research in question was overwhelmed by astroturfers crying out loud about anything they could think of but none of them managed to rebut the facts gathered. On many machines, Windows 7 is just as sluggish as Windows Vista. Its really not possible to argue about this, anyone can look at someones computer with less than 4 Gb ram and see it for themselves or look one with some heavy applications on. This research only supported that, yes, this seems to be the case for many computers. It proved what many of us has already seen for ourselves wasn't isolated happenings.

Now Microsoft has gone out and made an all out character assassination on Randall C. Kennedy because he had written under a pseudonym as Craig Barth. Writing like this under a different name is not exactly unheard of or even contested. 


Still even if it was bad not using your real name, the timing of the outing is all to convenient to be a coincidence.  From my understanding Windows 7 is really just Vista with some tweaks, twists and bugs fixed and as such has inherited much of the problems Vista was released with. Microsoft do not want that perception to leak out to the general public. They want people to think Windows 7 is much faster than XP, more secure and better in any way.


My belief is that Randall C. Kennedy hit a little to close to comfort and set the Microsoft PR-machinery into full action. If they hadn't found this, it would have been just about anything that could drag his name in the dirt.


The message is pretty clear, dont you dare write anything even remotely critical about Microsoft or their products. Sit journalist sit!



3 comments:

  1. Well... The problem is that the "critical" information was made up and all the data too.

    That's just called slander...

    But I guess a Google-astroturfer such as yourself wouldn't know anything about slander now, would you?

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  2. Well... Since the data was all made up it's called "Slander" in folkmouth.

    But being a Google-astroturfer as yourself... You wouldn't know anything about that now, would you?

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  3. Hi Jason. Where have you gotten the information that the data was made up?

    As for being a Google "astroturf", I'm not. I wont deny i like their business ethics and angle. I also like their products but that do not make me an astroturfer.

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