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Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

Dear Bing,

I went to microsoft.com and entered "moviemaker" (one word, just like Gates) in the search box. The top site search result - powered by Bing - is an XP downloads page, which of course didn't have a Movie Maker download. I tried a Google site search with "site:microsoft.com moviemaker", and and the top result was the (correct) Movie Maker 2011 page.

I also searched google.com for "moviemaker", and again the top result was the Movie Maker 2011 page. Doing the same on bing.com, the page is the 3rd result. That, is why Google is eating your lunch (but I do like your pictures).

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I tried finding software on OS X, and I could find many pieces of software by searching for them in the App Store application. Also, the app store seems to combine download and install with marketing, as it was heavily promoting OS X Lion at the time of my visit.

I also learned that OS X Lion solves the problem where after a reboot your program state is gone, something that Bill Gates was also complaining about.

OS X Lion costs 24 euros and that, among other things, is why Apple is eating their lunch (but I do like Visual Studio and .NET).

The price of a Lion upgrade is pretty much immaterial, as the relevant price of OS X is really bundled into the price of the hardware. You cannot buy a Lion DVD and install it on a non-Mac PC.

Of course, that doesn't mean that running Lion on a PC is out of the question: http://lifehacker.com/5823837/how-do-i-upgrade-my-hackintosh...

It is if you care about staying withing legal bounds and thus respecting their EULA.

Also, OS X is not designed to run on any hardware, like Windows or Linux -- basically you have to ensure that you get the same configuration that Macs have, or you're sure to run into trouble.

This means that if you already have a desktop or a laptop, you most definitely won't be able to run OS X on it, at least without pain; instead you're far better off buying new hardware and you're even better off going for an original Mac instead, or just not using OS X altogether.

I mean, yeah, I know some people are happy with their hackintoshes, but it has been a poor experience for me and I just reverted to my reliable Ubuntu / Windows combo.

Right... but they wanted a Mac anyway. :)

I'm currently failing to install Lion, since it gets as far as the restart stage, and (from what I can gather) is attempting to create a recovery partition, fails, and thus doesn't install.

All workarounds I've seen so far seem to indicate that I need an external device of >13G which must be formatted in the process (making me exceptionally nervous about trying to repartition my current USB external backup disk)

So yeah, it's still not perfect.

Apologies for the tangent, but I had that and needed to drop into single user mode and do a fsck to fix some errors.

You realize this email discussion dates from 2003, right?

And you do realize his argument is base on how bing works in 2011, right?

That was the point I was making. Bill Gates' initial problem was finding the download on Microsoft's site. Eight years later, the same problem persists.

I'm not knocking Microsoft for the sake of knocking Microsoft. I really do wish they would make their site more usable. I used to call their link system NASCAR navigation - looking for information, you keep clicking promising links only to end up back at the page you started on. Now when I search MSDN, I just use the Google custom search [1].

[1] http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=001706605492879182808%3Ayr...

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