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Indeed, the article at http://weblog.infoworld.com/sustainableit/archives/2008/12/pc_power_manage_1.html ends with that nonsensical question, and claims that the forrester report costs $279.

But if you follow the link, Forrester's report in entitled "How Much Money Are Your Idle PCs Wasting? but costs US $749

K.

Wayner's usually a good writer, and did some good theoretical-computer-science work back in the day, but this article was too short to answer the questions he asks at the beginning, and he mostly highlighted the new shiny things from big ASPs, which is generally what Infoworld wants.

I'm particularly disappointed that while he referred to the name and history of Berkeley DB, aka Sleepycat, aka Oracle Renamed-foo, he didn't actually talk about using it. (OTOH, Infoworld did review one version of it in 2005.) I no longer have my 4.1BSD manual on the shelf, but it was useful if you wanted something faster than using grep/sed/awk/look on tab-separated text files (which were the canonical Unix database format, and what I normally used for databases.)

These days if I want a lightweight database, I usually just put build tables in Excel, and then bitch about how it doesn't have a join or even decent text-editing and filtering capabilities, and occasionally have to save it as a CSV file and install vim on Yet Another Work-owned Windows box so I can get some bloody work done. I supposed if Excel did have a join function there'd be fewer people buying MS Access...

So you're one of those, use Excel for everything guys... I don't understand why people don't use Access more, It's not rocket science.

Wayner's usually a good writer, and did some good theoretical-computer-science work back in the day, but this article was too short to answer the questions he asks at the beginning, and he mostly highlighted the new shiny things from big ASPs, which is generally what Infoworld wants.

I'm particularly disappointed that while he referred to the name and history of Berkeley DB, aka Sleepycat, aka Oracle Renamed-foo, he didn't actually talk about using it. (OTOH, Infoworld did review one version of it in 2005.) I no longer have my 4.1BSD manual on the shelf, but it was useful if you wanted something faster than using grep/sed/awk/look on tab-separated text files (which were the canonical Unix database format, and what I normally used for databases.)

These days if I want a lightweight database, I usually just put build tables in Excel, and then bitch about how it doesn't have a join or even decent text-editing and filtering capabilities, and occasionally have to save it as a CSV file and install vim on Yet Another Work-owned Windows box so I can get some bloody work done. I supposed if Excel did have a join function there'd be fewer people buying MS Access...

...In reality the BSA doesnt care about some small company thats using its photoshop license two or three times or that it has two windows 2003 servers it didnt pay for....

Ernie Ball would beg to differ.

Should be -1 Troll.

Wow, nobody has any sense of humor today....

as Microsoft has a well paid legal team at their disposal which would most likely prevent unauthorized usage of patented ideas.

Yeah, when would Microsoft ever violate patents?

Should be -1 Troll.

Wow, nobody has any sense of humor today....

as Microsoft has a well paid legal team at their disposal which would most likely prevent unauthorized usage of patented ideas.

Yeah, when would Microsoft ever violate patents?

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/09/03/20/Multicore_chips_pose_next_big_challenge_for_industry_1.html

I have to agree. i gave my copy of Vista away that I got for beta testing, and last I heard it is still being passed around like an Xmas fruitcake nobody wants. I tried it again when SP1 came out, hoping it didn't suck. Nope, still sucked. While my computer isn't some elite gamer rig it is a hell of a lot closer to what is still out there by the millions in the real world: A 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 2GB of DDR400 RAM, 750GB IDE, and a Geforce 7600GS OC.

Vista ran like a lame elephant with TB. It thrashed my 200GB OS drive to death, crap I hadn't seen since Win9X like network connectivity just dying and needing a reboot(in this day and age? WTF?) hard drive thrashing for no reason, crappy boot times, hell I could go on all day. And yes I tried all the "tweaks", although it is freaking sad that some think you should actually want an OS you have to work like hell on out of the box, but nope, still sucked. The problem with Vista is if you read Gate's interviews before it came out it was supposed to be "a new OS for next gen hardware" which was MSFT speak for needing 4GHz quad cores with 4GB of RAM just to run half as good as XP. After SP2 XP became a really decent OS, not as good IMHO as Win2K Pro SP4, but a decent OS none the less.

The problem was MSFT bet on Moore's law always being there to save their ass. If you think back and remember that Intel was talking about being able to get Netburst up to 10GHz you can understand why they may have thought that. But they didn't see green computing, or the Netbook/Nettop, or the fact that for most homes/SMBs computers passed the "good enough" level a little over 2GHz. From my experience in PC repair I can tell you the current "sweet spot" seems to be a single core between 2.2GHz and 3.6GHz with 1-2GB of RAM and usually Intel or Nvidia integrated graphics. Vista runs like total crap on a machine with that specs.

They also forgot the Joe and Jane Public often buy a PC based solely on price, and both Intel and AMD were happy to sell Celeron/Sempron based single core machines to the Best Buy/Walmart crowd. It has only been in the past few months that I have seen the low end being taken by dual core, and even then they really aren't anything to write home about. Vista was simply designed for a market that they expected to go nowhere but faster in GHz, but instead went green and multicore. while I hope that Win7 is better, from the articles I have been reading it looks like by the time Win7 reaches RTM it may suck just as bad as Vista.

Maybe they will finally fire Mr Steve "We can be as cool as Apple! Really we can! Stop laughing at me!" Ballmer if Vista7 bombs and get someone in there that remembers MSFT is a BUSINESS OS manufacturer, and Windows is not supposed to be OSX. I don't know what it is with his Apple/Google penis envy, but the man needs help. Seriously. But of course I'm not the only one that thinks MSFT would do better if he wasn't there.

it's my understanding that moonlight is supposed to fill that gap.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/15/moonlight-release-puts-Silverlight-on-Linux_1.html

'over 99.9% of the vulnerabilities you are counting require physical access. You can't insert a flash drive, jack in a keyboard, put in a floppy, or even get TCP/IP access to an ATM normally, so those security problems do't count'

That may have been true until they 'upgraded' ATMs from OS/2 and moved communications from dedicated lines to the Internet.

'Last week's revelation by Diebold that its automated teller machines (ATMs) operated by two financial services customers were struck by the W32/Nachi worm raises the specter'

'Last August, the Nachi (Welchia) worm contaminated the cash machines at two financial institutions. When the Slammer virus hit the back end systems of the Bank of America in January 2003, 13,000 US ATMs became unavailable '.

Why not do some research, where you will find I was being generous.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/labnotes/workflow-transaction-times.html

The term might not be used as often, but the concept is alive and well

"the new chips will 'block unauthorized access to the frame buffer.' ...

There is a short list of parties who will be unauthorized to access your frame buffer: You. There is a long list of parties who are authorized to access your frame buffer, and that list includes Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, ATI, NVidia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, HBO, CBS, Macrovision, and all other content owners and enablers that want your machine to themselves whenever youâ(TM)re watching, listening to, reading, or shooting monsters with their products. "

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/28/14OPcurve_1.html

Actually calls for his firing have already started. When you see that The Win7 hype is just that, and when it comes to enterprise, which is where the big bucks are and where MSFT has always made boatloads of cash, that Win7 doesn't cut it anymore than Vista, I can't say that I blame them.

We have seen that under his watch he has gone from one idea to another like the whole company has ADHD, with Zune(trying to be Apple), trying to shell out WAY too much money for Yahoo(trying to be Google) and finally his very own Spruce Goose Vista, which even MSFT board members couldn't get to work with programs written by MSFT. His tenure has frankly been nothing but one failure after another, and mark my words, when Win7 comes out it will be just as bloated and slow and sell just as badly as Vista.

What the company desperately needs is a new leader that will focus on their core strengths instead of trying to be Apple. Their big money comes from corporations NOT home users who frankly as long as it doesn't crash and runs their games are happy little campers anyway. Yet instead of releasing a low resource backwards compatible enterprise OS it looks like with Win7 they are AGAIN releasing this giant bloated pig of a multimedia OS with more bling per square inch than something off of "pimp my ride". There is a REASON why you find lots of articles including on MSDN giving step by step instructions on turning Win2K8 into a workstation OS. Because WinVista is too damned bloated to be a good enterprise OS and frankly Win7 will most likely be more of the same.

They had better change their direction, starting with a good firing for Ballmer and the bringing in of someone from Office or Win2K8 that knows business. Because I have never seen this kind of mass abandonment of a MSFT OS ever, even when WinME came out. My customers happily pay me chunks of money to make Vista go away, and more and more SOHOs and SMBs are asking me "what do you know about this Linux thing?" and yet Ballmer still tries to force everyone into this multimedia nightmare of an OS instead of keeping business/home separated like it was for WinNT/Win9x. But he ain't Steve Jobs and Win7 ain't no OSX. If they don't change their direction, which I seriously doubt will happen under Ballmer, then their stock price and sales are going nowhere but down. I mean have you EVER seen companies BRAG about giving you the previous MSFT OS THREE YEARS after the new version came out? Nope, me neither.

Sure, sending me to the homepage of Dell is a strong argument. And don't tell me you didn't realize we were talking about Xeon Nehalem because that would mean that didn't even check the spec of the Mac Pro !
Here, I'll help you a little :
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/03/Apple_jumpstarts_Nehalem_launch_for_Intel_1.html
Now please go back playing with your toys.

Funny you should mention that.

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Nov-04.html/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/09/16/HNopenoffice_1.html/

Witness Miguel gush about how Microsoft allowed Sun to ship Mono with Solaris... (yuck)

Microsoft is, in fact, out to get Linux. Miguel is either credulous or corrupted, and Mono is poison.

Actually Mr too cowardly to even have an account, I am a Windows repairman who has made his living with MSFT products sine the days of Win3.1 and am pretty fucking tired of seeing the company whose products I service and support pissed down the drain by Mr. "I want to be Apple so damned bad it hurts!" Ballmer. Of course I am not the only one that think Mr. Ballmer should be righteously fired for his incompetence, and as it gets closer to relase date we are seeing that Win7 is looking more and more like "Vista SE" instead of the new direction which was sorely needed in the company.

What we NEED is to go back to the division we had during the WinNT/Win9x days, where the business OS was a low resource backwards compatible OS with low system requirements so you don't need a gamer rig for your secretary. What it appears we will get AGAIN is another bloated as hell giant pig of an OS with more bling than you can shake a stick at because Ballmer wants to be Steve Jobs. But news flash, Steve Ballmer ain't Steve Jobs and Windows ain't OSX. You can run Leopard just fine on 5 year old machines, in fact according to my Mac friends they even run a little FASTER with the new version.

Compare that to Windows where you need a dual core with 3GB of RAM just to keep Vista from feeling like a 486 struggling to run Win98. I mean it is pretty fucking sad when I have WinXP running smooth and easy on a 733MHz with 384MB of PC100 RAM and Vista ran like a dead elephant on my 3.6GHz HT enabled P4 with 2Gb of RAM. The Vista codebase either needs to be stripped down and rebuilt or tossed over their shoulder into the trash. The consumer has spoken and they don't want it. Putting lipstick on the pig ain't gonna turn pork chops into steak and it ain't gonna sell Vista SE...errr Win7 either.

If they are determined to be Apple then put out the "Apple extra bling" edition for the home users and give us "Win2K10 Professional" for the business users that just want to get their work done without the bloat. Otherwise all of the businesses who got burned with Vista are going to start looking elsewhere. Why do you think there are all these sites including on MSDN showing how to make 2K8 into a desktop OS? Because for the enterprise Vista ain't cutting it and neither will Win7.

But believe what you will, but mark my words: Win7 will fail,just as Vista did. Then maybe Ballmer will be fired and we will have a decent OS by Win8. But I can't keep buying copies of XP for my customers for forever and they have made it clear there will be NO Vista for them.

So not only did he withhold passwords.

And have modems attached to computers.

But it's going to take 250,000$ to fix.

Can the defense claim insanity on behalf of the prosecution, 'cause I think we've just hit bat country!

Just open it in something other than Adobe Reader 9.

Not quite. From the InfoWorld article:

The flaw affects version 9 of Reader and Acrobat as well as earlier versions, according to Adobe's advisory.

here is an archiv of the pdf's available from the public record. Some of this is really whacked. http://weblog.infoworld.com/venezia/archives/017979.html

It should also be noted that Childs handed over passwords to the Mayor while in jail.

What law says "you must hand out a password to your boss when he requests it or you will be prosecuted as a felon"?

The lawyer in the referenced articles has stated "The response to suspend him was arguably legal. The response to prosecute him is not." That means, if you don't give up a password, you can be suspended or fired, as you could be in any job, but that doesn't mean you can be prosecuted. If you use those passwords for nefarious means after you are fired, then yes you can, but so far the articles don't point to anything Child's did. There have been some wild claims, but InfoWorld has a special report page with articles that seem to call into question the accusations that are being leveled at Childs.

"On Friday, June 20, there was an altercation between Childs and Jeana Pieralde, the new DTIS security manager at the 1 Market Street datacenter in San Francisco. Until her promotion, she had been a city network engineer who worked with Childs"

Why didn't anyone tell Childs of this promotion, and who got her the 'promotion'?

"Childs disputed this interpretation of events, claiming in court documents that Pieralde was conducting clandestine searches of DTIS employee workspaces and had removed a hard drive from an office when he confronted her. He also denied taking photos of Pieralde"

Were there or were there not photographs taken of Pieralde by Childs. Was Pieralde authorized to conduct such audits and where now is this 'SF Owned cell phone', and what exactly did Childs intend to do with these photographs.

"the city stated that Childs was placed under surveillance and was arrested on the evening of July 12 as he was parking his vehicle near his home in the suburb of Pittsburg. At the time of his arrest, he was found to have $10,000 cash on his person and receipts showing that he had traveled to Sparks, Nevada, where he had looked at renting storage units. Following his arrest, police searched his house and workspaces. Police turned up 9mm and .45 caliber bullets, but apparently no weapons"

Like, if he was under surveillance (and his cell/pager conficated), wouldn't they have noticed that he wasn't actually near a computer whern the pager went off ?

"Considering that normal bail for a murder case is $1 million -- one fifth of what Childs' bail was set at -- this filing was unexpected"

-------

"it is a mystery what exactly Jeana Pieralde was doing performing an unannounced, after-hours "security audit" in a City office other than that in which she herself worked. It was during that secret "security audit" on the evening of Friday, June 20th, 2008, in which Jeana Pieralde took a hard drive from another City employee's office and was photographed by Terry Childs as she did so"

"The office from which Pieralde removed the hard drive belonged to DTIS Security Officer Nancy Hastings (who naturally was not present in the office because the "security audit" was being conducted after hours.)" "Terry Childs had returned late to the offices (which do include his office and do not include Jeana Pieralde's office) at about 5:15 P.M. to find Jeana Pieralde (who does not work in those offices) taking a hard drive from one of Terry's co-workers offices. Terry photographed this act with the camera in his cellphone"

Did Pieralde really remove a harddrive. What was the name of this co-worker, where is this harddrive now. What motovated Pieralde to remove the harddrive. What's really going on here. Was Pieralde caught with her-in-th-cookie-jar, and someone decide to frame Childs to distract from something?

Does anyone find it curious that the city managers claim they couldn't get access to the system without Childs passwords. I mean how difficult is it technically to reset a password, especially with physical access to the system. And with most reported 'news' nowadays, the facts keep changing with each new itteration:

Sep 10 2008 "The SF rogue admin Terry Childs installed a 'terminal server,' which appears to be a router, on the city's network, but investigators haven't been able to find or log into it"

"Childs has become increasingly hostile at work and defiant toward certain managers and has failed to comply with standard work procedure, as described above by the only system administrator situation"

"On the late afternoon of Friday 6-20-08, Security Manager J. Pieralde was conducting an audit inventory of equipment at the OMP Data Center. As she proceeded with her work, she was confronted by Childs and Childs began taking pictures of her, using his SF Owned cell phone. Pieralde became so concerned for her personal safety that she locked herself in a room and contacted Director R. Robinson by cell phone, informing him of (S) Childs' behavior .."

"Over the last months, Childs has refused and not authorized or allowed any other system administrators to the FiberWAN .."

"
"
"The Labor Relations representative, Mr. Leung, then informed Childs that because of his insubordination and his failure to answer questions by a superior of his insubordination and his failure to answer questions by a superior he was being suspended from his employment .."

" Childs' City owned work cell phone, pager, ID cards, and access cards were taken from him .."

"Approximatly, an hour later, a page was received on the pager and a check of messages revealed a message from one of the routers . .Security Director J. Pieralde .. highly suggests that Childs still had current system admin rights .."

"Mr. Maupin was also able to determine that Mr' Childs had, in fact, intentionally configured multiple Cicso network devices with a command that erases all configuration date in the event that someone tries to restore administrative access or tries to perform disaster recovery. This command was created for military applications that require deployment of network devices in areas that may have the possibility of hostile forces that could get physical access to network devices .."

Does anyone else apart from me think this is technologically nonsense

Does anyone find it curious that the city managers claim they couldn't get access to the system without Childs passwords. I mean how difficult is it technically to reset a password, especially with physical access to the system. And with most reported 'news' nowadays, the facts keep changing with each new itteration:

Sep 10 2008 "The SF rogue admin Terry Childs installed a 'terminal server,' which appears to be a router, on the city's network, but investigators haven't been able to find or log into it"

"Childs has become increasingly hostile at work and defiant toward certain managers and has failed to comply with standard work procedure, as described above by the only system administrator situation"

"On the late afternoon of Friday 6-20-08, Security Manager J. Pieralde was conducting an audit inventory of equipment at the OMP Data Center. As she proceeded with her work, she was confronted by Childs and Childs began taking pictures of her, using his SF Owned cell phone. Pieralde became so concerned for her personal safety that she locked herself in a room and contacted Director R. Robinson by cell phone, informing him of (S) Childs' behavior .."

"Over the last months, Childs has refused and not authorized or allowed any other system administrators to the FiberWAN .."

"
"
"The Labor Relations representative, Mr. Leung, then informed Childs that because of his insubordination and his failure to answer questions by a superior of his insubordination and his failure to answer questions by a superior he was being suspended from his employment .."

" Childs' City owned work cell phone, pager, ID cards, and access cards were taken from him .."

"Approximatly, an hour later, a page was received on the pager and a check of messages revealed a message from one of the routers . .Security Director J. Pieralde .. highly suggests that Childs still had current system admin rights .."

"Mr. Maupin was also able to determine that Mr' Childs had, in fact, intentionally configured multiple Cicso network devices with a command that erases all configuration date in the event that someone tries to restore administrative access or tries to perform disaster recovery. This command was created for military applications that require deployment of network devices in areas that may have the possibility of hostile forces that could get physical access to network devices .."

Does anyone else apart from me think this is technologically nonsense

Here you go, wiki is your friend! I would ask you to please note the following part, quote:"n order to prevent users from copying DRM content, Windows Vista provides process isolation and continually monitors what kernel-mode software is loaded." Please note the words CONTINUALLY MONITORS. You DO know that you can't get something for nothing right? And that everything has a cost? The ONLY way for the "protected path" DRM to work would be for it to monitor you 24/7/365, otherwise you could simply hack it or load an Alcohol 120% style virtual device with hacked keys BEFORE you loaded the DRM content. So to ensure you "filthy pirate you" that you don't pull any fast ones it HAS to monitor you 24/7.

So while all the Vista fans(all 6 of you) would love to think that they have invented some magically "resource free" DRM, sorry to burst your bubble. Everything costs, and DRM doesn't really have a prayer in hell if it can actually be turned off for ANY reason, even if you are not doing anything to actually NEED DRM. And if you want to know why you are being boned with this crap, please read Comes VS Microsoft to see where Jim Allchin and Bill Gates talk about DRM and their need for "scenarios" to try to shut down the iPod. pretty much ALL they talk about is how to lock in the users. And for those that work in business here is a view of Win7 from the enterprise perspective, and here is a view of Win7 from the performance POV.

I hope this illuminates readers and helps your realize that complaint about DRM are NOT FUD, but simply complaints about performance robbing crap that does ZERO for the user. I myself saw it with Vista Beta 1, which ran damned fast on this 3.6GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM, but when RTM rolled around and I got my free copy for Beta testing it was like those car commercials where they dump the ton of sludge on the race car. It sucked so bad I gave my copy of Vista away and last I heard it was being passed from person to person like an unwanted fruitcake.

I'd be most interested in seeing a YouTube clip of it trying to avoid a hail of bullets fired from different angles.

You may get to see IBM's executive team demonstrate it after pulling a stunt like this.

Any ideas about what made IBM pursue this line of research?

I have a few guesses....

...and WSJ's position is backed by evidence. Typical Japanese Internet users were blazing at 50Mbps at about $30 a month in 2007 while U.S. users were paying about $50 for 6Mbps. Why? Government infusion of cash and competition. See http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/04/HNjapbroadband_1.html

Amen, brother.

In our company we achieved a pretty good uptime of our major systems last year.

We had only 3 major outages of something longer than a few hours. Two of them where because some kill-switch in the software was triggered.

One bug in a Citrix License server, one was this vmware problem.

The third outage was a backhoe cutting a cable.

In truth, says Forrester, lean software is less a methodology or a dogma as it is a trend. Citing the growing use of open source toolkits, lightweight object containers, SaaS, and (yes) cloud computing, among other emerging technologies, Forrester claims that a leading segment of developers is already moving toward lean software as a natural reaction to the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional enterprise development process.

So which is it, Neil? Fat apps on the desktop, or thin/lean apps on the web?

But that doesn't address the more fundamental problem, which is MSFT completely ignoring one of their biggest markets which is a consistent breadwinner(business customers) to suddenly switch gears and ONLY release a home OS. Don't take my word for it, read this article from the enterprise desktop perspective. The conclusion? "Just as consumer-focused as Vista. Home Groups. Media Sharing. Federated Search. All very cool. All very slick. And all very much irrelevant to the enterprise desktop customer"

It is like MSFT has adopted the Chewbacca defense, in that they have decided to make NO sense. The business market, from the SOHOs to the enterprise customers is a BIG market, with huge profit margins at stake. Why in the 9 hells would they risk tossing that away for the home consumer, who frankly was happy with XP and never asked for all this bling bling in the first place? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But mark my words and mark them well. After being completely ignored for TWO OS releases in a row(Vista & Win7) the business customers are going to start looking for another OS in mass. Why? Because they simply won't have a choice. What else CAN they do, stay with XP?(not likely as Ballmer will kill it when Win7 is released), buy server licenses just so they can "roll their own" business OS? Go with all that bloated multimedia glitz which does them no good and buy gamer rigs for their secretaries?

I just hope companies like Red Hat and Canonical have their A games ready. I'm sure I'm not the only lifelong MSFT business user whose starting to get tired of being ignored. And when they pull the plug on Win2K Pro and WinXP Pro we're going to need something to replace them and it looks like MSFT expects us to wait for Win8 in the hopes of another business OS from them. I know that I'm having a lot more SOHO and SMB owners ask me about "this Linux thing" and frankly I NEVER thought I'd see the day when that would happen. But that is what happens when you give a large section of your userbase the finger. They start looking for other options.

Or post the link to the "printable" version which doesn't have the clutter! Like here: http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/09/01/22/Bugs_in_Microsoft_tech_documentation_continue_to_rise_1.html

Print view

I would contend that all articles should link to the print preview if the article has obnoxious ads or superfluous page breaks, but then they'd just stop providing print views.

Keep this to yourselves. ;)

First, go to the real story, bypassing an intermediate blog and two interstitial ads.

Second, the article says the performance of the newer OSs is worse than XP. "In fact, during extensive multiprocess benchmark testing, Windows 7 essentially mirrored Vista in almost every scenario. Database tasks? Roughly 118 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 92 percent slower) and 19 percent slower than XP on quad-core (identical to Vista). Workflow? A respectable 38 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 98 percent slower) and 59 percent slower on quad-core (Vista was 66 percent slower)."

Third, there are no tables or graphs anywhere in these articles, and very few numbers. As a benchmarking article, this is awful.

Ok so who is faster XP, or Vista?

The header says Vista and Windows 7, but yet in the article:

It should come as no surprise that Windows 7 performs very much like its predecessor. In fact, during extensive multiprocess benchmark testing, Windows 7 essentially mirrored Vista in almost every scenario. Database tasks? Roughly 118 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 92 percent slower) and 19 percent slower than XP on quad-core (identical to Vista). Workflow? A respectable 38 percent slower than XP on dual-core (Vista was 98 percent slower) and 59 percent slower on quad-core (Vista was 66 percent slower).

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/22/03TC-windows-multicore_4.html

So therefore Vista and Windows 7 suck in performance to XP?

Microsoft donates to Apache
Microsoft donates to moonlight
Microsoft supports ODF
IE to be standards compliant by default
Microsoft assist SAMBA team with interop ...and of course, the "Windows 7 might actually be rather good" article in TFA.

Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.

Microsoft donates to Apache
Microsoft donates to moonlight
Microsoft supports ODF
IE to be standards compliant by default
Microsoft assist SAMBA team with interop ...and of course, the "Windows 7 might actually be rather good" article in TFA.

Maybe; just maybe, Microsoft isn't the evil machine some slashdotters make out.

Revisionist history. It wasn't Slashdot that made people think Vista was slower than XP.

it was Infoworld:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/17/12TC-vista-versus-xp_6.html

and Fox news:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,314141,00.html

and PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129410/vista_ui_is_a_step_back_for_microsoft.html

and MICROSOFT when they told the gaming industry Vista was 10 to 15 percent slower (or virtually identical in your world)

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/027/1003027/vista-gaming-will-be-10-to-15-per-cent-slower-than-xp

(links from searching vista slower) Go on, now you can talk about how that was before the service pack, or pre-release, or whatever, but that is when reputations are built. Windows 7 is getting praise because the FIRST IMPRESSION is that it doesn't suck. Vista's first impression was that it generally was slower and used more memory. It isn't all about different caching strategies or Vista wouldn't be almost unusable on netbooks (and if that weren't the case Microsoft wouldn't have agreed to keep selling XP to netbook vendors). So give it a fucking rest and go troll some people who are stupid enough to believe you.

Not at all. If you have more than 1 service sharing a database, then you are doing it wrong. The idea here is to have many well defined and independent services. These services are called using a workflow like process. This workflow process is "business aligned". The benefit comes when multiple business workflows can share the services, and as business workflows change simply by re-sequencing the service calls. But forget all that, SOA is already dead. http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2009/01/burton_group_as_1.html

Why everyone in Human Resources should be fired.
What is the most important job for the government, which
'belongs' to all of us?
Counter-Espionage, yet FBI hired and promoted Robert Hanssen.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,221911,00.html
Personality tests and even Polygraph Tests are lazy crutches
for Human Resources.
http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml
Is this an historical pattern of Non-scientific methods and magic?
Salem Witch Trials
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/salem.htm
In the Civil War, the North had the big advantage of money (all the
gold was in New York City), factories, naval blockade, large armies.
What General did Abraham Lincoln Hire That ALMOST LOST THE WAR?
General George McClellan was ill for a time, which further delayed his action, but on his return he continued to find reasons not to move forward. Frustrated, Lincoln at one point sent General McClellan a note asking whether, if the general did not plan to use his army, he, Lincoln, might borrow it.
What did the Washington HUMAN RESOURCES think of General Grant, who
eventually WON THE WAR?
        General U. S. Grant, graduate of West Point was a DRUNKARD
and had been cashiered from the Army because of that problem.
Even after his convincing victories at Forts Henry, Donelson, and at the Battle of Shiloh, there were still grave doubts in Washington about his competence.
Would Einstein have been hired when he had few references?
        Einstein tried to 'argue with his professors.'
Please, the following is a joke, FICTIONAL humor.
Would MOST Human Resources have been hired after passing a STRICT MENSA TEST (high IQ) and programming test?
Human Resources is in charge of salaries and EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION.
Almost ALL OF HUMAN RESOURCES at HR Conferences say ethics is VERY IMPORTANT,
yet they may be hypocritical?
stock option manipulation
http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/010282.html
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/18/technology/monster_options/index.htm

According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org,

I guess it's time for Steve Ballmer to catch the next flight to Hanoi with cash and incentives in his briefcase. If this approach worked in the past why shouldn't it work one more time?

Go Ballmer go!

Isn't it supposed to be with his fucking killstick?

According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org,

I guess it's time for Steve Ballmer to catch the next flight to Hanoi with cash and incentives in his briefcase. If this approach worked in the past why shouldn't it work one more time?

Go Ballmer go!

Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.

There was one set of benchmarks that showed no improvement: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html/. There was another set of benchmarks done on a later build that showed improvements: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3182&page=1/.

As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?

Cynicism, conspiracy and an ad hominem attacks all in one. You're going all the way to +5 insightful!

Not sure its still necessary - the RIAA seems to have lost key points already - http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/5928.cfm . The problem is that unless you read /. or follow these cases for other reasons, you won't know that. Secondly, it is up to you or your attorney to point out the appropriate case law, so if you get scared and settle, or if you don't have an attorney that brings forth these issues - you lose regardless of whether or not you did anything wrong. What is needed is a direct case against the RIAA like this one - http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/12/boston_illegal.html and a cease and desist order from a judge. At least that way things can be moved to the criminal courts or counterclaims could be filed against them.

Just go to Paul Venezia's blog at Infoworld.com http://weblog.infoworld.com/venezia/ and read his series on the prosecution of San Francisco Network Admin Terry Childs, who has been in jail since last July simply for doing his job too well. His own supervisors who accused him of hijacking the network didn't even know that his job was to secure the infrastructure against ingnoramuses like themselves. This tragic story is one of the worst examples of governments hiring "computer experts" who are nothing more than political hacks who aren't qualified to run any distro of Linux, let alone configure root access to Cisco switches.

Check out Groovy! It has some neat features which is on par with LINQ

Here it's done in Groovy: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.groovy.user/5526

Here it's done in LINQ: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/09/28.html#a1310

As a criminal, let's say that it's going to cost me $10,000 to hire some eastern european hacker to develop malware for my criminal enterprise (number totally made up). I get to chose which platform I have the hacker target - I can target Windows with 90% of the market, I can target OSX with 8% of the market or I can target Linux with 2% of the market (market share numbers also made up, but probably in the right ballpark).

That means that if I'm interested in profit (and this IS a criminal enterprise, so profit is the primary motive), I want to have my hacker target the platform with the highest ROI. That means that the hacker's going to go after Windows and ignore OSX and Linux.

As the Mac's market share increases, it is going to be an increasingly more attractive target for hackers, because the ROI is higher.

Sure - market share is one factor on ROI. But it's not the only factor. Another big part of ROI is how long you get to keep control of your target. If the target doesn't remain compromised very long, then you've wasted your resources (unless of course you only needed a short window - but that's implying a targeted attack and is beyond the scope of this conversation). The thing is, if you look at malware in the wild, you'll find that there are plenty of examples for Unix malware but they just don't survive long (with one exception - more on that shortly). This makes Unix platform poor ROI performers for bot herders to target.

Yet that 8% of the market issue still persists. Is that a significant enough number to warrant interest from malware producers? I don't see why not. An 8% market still a sizable number of potential hosts - far larger than most botnets. The Witty worm demonstrated that not only will small numbers be targeted, but doing so can be very successful. If the Mac's 8% were fertile territory, it would be very much in a botnet herder's interests to target it.

We know 8% market share is suitable because botnet herders are going after smaller targets; namely the 2% Linux market. But there's some caveats to this. First - we're dealing with a very different mode of attack. Researchers at Sophos believe that the attack involves a 6yr-old piece of malware - a virus called Linux/Rst-B. But the interesting thing is that if the virus is being used, it's as something of a simplified rootkit. Hosts are either being intentionally infected by this virus to provide a quick root shell or the attackers are moving around tools that are unintentionally infected. In either case, the existence of this malware is due to an already bad situation. Secondly, we're probably not really dealing with 2% - its more like ~12% of the server market. So we're dealing with a larger market share but hardly the largest (still a strike against marketshare driving attacks).

So what is making Linux worth the ROI? Smaller numbers. Compromised Linux hosts are providing stable controllers for botnets. As one needs fewer controllers than zombies in a botnet, Linux fits the bill nicely. All one needs is a mismanaged server on a stable link and a controller is gained.

So what do we get with all this? Marketshare isn't the driver that people make it out to be. Numbers are important. But there are additional factors that add weight to that importance. In the end, it's all about ROI. And that determines whether a platform makes a good target.

I think if IA-64 ever achieved the kind of volume the x86 market has, it would end up being a fine processor with lots of room for improvement still. It never really stood a chance: it was marketed as a server processor and Microsoft offerer only a half-assed support for it (it's their best interest to keep computers a commodity and they will fight any attempt to differentiate in that space). In addition, by the time it could be a viable high-power desktop workstation for developers or data-crunchers (a space it shines in) there was no Fedora or Ubuntu for it.

Instead, AMD came out with a set of extensions to the crufty x86 and that is what we use today. We would be much better if we started from a clean sheet.

And much, much better, if binary compatibility to x86 wasn't such a big issue.

None of that is true. Microsoft ported NT based kernels to Itanium (and spent vast amounts of time doing so because there are some subtle issues). Still since it was made by Intel it was pretty much guaranteed to get Windows support.

An Opteron 246 had about the same SpecInt as an Itanium 2 even when both were running native code.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/11/05/amd-benchmarks-opteron-against--itanium-xeons-piiis

An Itanium was much slower running x86 binaries. Even the second generation run x86 binaries slowly

http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Itanium-loses-x86-hardware-support/0,339028227,339230300,00.htm

Microsoft Windows and major Linux versions include IA-32 EL. The emulation layer is considerably slower than a modern Xeon however: A 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processor runs emulated x86 instructions at about the same speed as a 1.5GHz Xeon processor, according to Intel.

At that point the fastest Xeon was much faster than 1.5Ghz

Opteron systems were much cheaper

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/57718-28-opteron-kill-itanium

and they tended to win on real world benchmarks

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30FE64linux_3.html

Basically Itanium was a chance for a company with vast resources to start from scratch and it wasn't faster than x86. The Risc chips that NT supported actually had a better performance advantage, at one point up to 2x the SpecInt. And that wasn't enough to get people to bear the pain of switching over.

The fact is you can't judge computer architecture by aesthetic principles. x86 and x64 may look ugly but that is subjective. The thing that counts is performance and x86 has been beating competing architectures on SpecInt for ages.

Amd64 vs Ia64 was particularly dramatic. Intel had a huge financial advantage and at one point desktop Athlon 64s were the fastest processor in the world, beating far more expensive Ia64 server processors. It's the same now with Nehalem -

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-i.html

it beats far more expensive non x86 chips, including ones from Intel.

Actually it wins on FP now, which is something that non x86 chips tended to do well at

http://www.onscale.de/specbrowser/2006-f.html

It's easy to say that it would be easy to start from a clean sheet, but Intel has tried that, poured money into it got the entire industry (including Microsoft) to announce transition plans from x86 to Ia64 and it still failed. Hell Ia64 isn't even that aesthetically pleasing, the more you look at it the more crufty it is.

killer monitoring apps

From the article (there's quite a bit more): "Using the PHP Network Weathermap plug-in for Cacti, you can easily create live network maps showing link utilization between network devices, complete with graphs that appear when you hover over a depiction of a network link. In many places where I've implemented Cacti, these maps wind up running 24x7 on 42-inch LCD monitors mounted high on the wall, providing the whole IT staff with at-a-glance updates on network utilization and link status."

killer monitoring apps

Verified:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/12/FBI-worried-as-DoD-sold-counterfeit-Cisco-gear_1.html

http://www.hereinreality.com/likashing.html

http://www.fas.org/news/china/1998/h980618-prc8.htm