Maybe in the USA this applies, but in my case (a EU country) the Banks NEVER report anything to the Government or their regulators that will reveal the identity of any client by identifying them with the use of a SSN or an Identity Card Number or a Passport Number.
If they report anything, then this will be a breach of banking privacy and the customers can sue the bank.
The only exceptions:
- money laundering
- where the banks suspects illegal activities (drugs, terrorism funding)
- where they are compelled by a court law to disclose
- where it is in its interest to do so (it is not as ominous as it sounds --- if they sue you for non-payment, they must disclose to the court how much money you must pay)
Banks need some sort of official identification from their clients when opening accounts, so as to be able to prove that they were not negligent if the account is subsequently used for fraud. The UK court case which is relevant is Marfani & Co Ltd v Midland Bank Ltd [1968] 1 WLR 956, 970-971. This is also the reason that in the past, Banks used to ask for references from existing customers or notable members of the public before opening accounts; although this is no longer practical.
As for tax purposes, the solution is simple: the Bank takes an X% on any interest received and pays it directly to the government as tax on behalf of its customers. The customers do not have to declare the interest received as income, since it is already net of taxes. Result: The tax man has its money and the public fills-in less paperwork
I am sorry about the legalese in the post; I had to take some banking law courses and I am still recovering from them.
I am sorry for the formatting nightmare of my previous post. I clicked on [Submit] instead of [Preview]. The persons responsible for this have been executed.
You probably meant it as a joke, but the most important thing that motivates a true geek itâ(TM)s the challenge (and the bragging rights)./n
Most of us do not do it for the money, we do it because (a) we have an innate curiosity, (b) we want to be in control of our machines and (c) because itâ(TM)s there.
For example, more than a decade ago I was obsessed with cracking a local broadcasterâ(TM)s encrypted TV signal.
They used a (now seriously obsolete) analog irdeto scheme.
It took me almost a month and I had to start learning about excrypted analog transmissions from scratch. The net had precious little information on the subject and most of it was obsolete. Funnily enough, cracking/decoding the sound was more difficult than decoding the video.
I watched the decrypted signal for maybe a full day, gloated for my accomplishment to a couple of like-minded friends, and then packed everything up and put it on storage. I still have that irdeto decoder somewhere.
Last Xmas, I set up a cardserver at my house. I share my Pay TV card through my home network. I use my Debian server at the basement and a 20 Euro card reader. I do not do anything illegal --- I pay for the card and I watch the decrypted TV only in my residence. I can share my card through the internet with friends and family but I _will_not_do_it_. I simply do not care to save a buck, I am rich enough to pay the subscription price, but I am NOT going to pay their extra 9 Euro per month for the right to use a second decoder because I consider it extorion. I like my Dreambox 7025 (Linux/MIPS processor) and my Dreambox 500 (Linux/PowerPC) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreambox) and I will not accept my providers closed source decoder which they can brick remotely or the fact that they expect that the decoder that I have paid will be bricked if I cancel my subscription.
Why the above setup? I want to be able watch TV to ALL rooms of my house without having to lug the decoder from room to room or paying extra (extortion money) for a second decoder. Plus I run a Bittorrent client inside my Sat TV decoder. Plus I stream video through VLC from my PCs to my TV.
The kicker? I simply do not watch TV (with the exception of Battlestar Galactica); I average maybe 70-90 minutes per week. During my early twenties I spend almost 4½ years without watching TV.
Why do I pay for TV when I do not watch it? My wife nagged me into it. But I managed to convert something of no value to me to something fun. I started writing and cross compiling software for my dreambox for fun. I have changed the software to exactly suite my needs and quirks.
What I am getting at, is that for us geeks, accomplishing something that few others can, and satisfying our inane curiosity, is a much stronger motivation than watching the Sunday game for free.
Give us a box and tell us that we cannot run Linux on it and you have just made our day.
That's correct. I work for a medium size European bank and _we_have_it_in_writing_ from the HR dept. that all email messages are considered private email. No one is allowed to read our emails in the absence of a court order.
I agree with you that the email and calendaring functionality need a serious overhaul. I am not blind to its shortcomings and I understand why some people feel so negatively against Notes.
The thing is that most users expect Notes to be a direct replacement/opponent of Outlook and Exchange. If you thing of it as a RAD workflow and distributed database development platform, then it is very good at it. Just think of it, even the email and calendaring functionality are essentially databases with custom views.
Also, the default templates are "one size fits all". For best results you must customize it to your requirements (yes, I know that this costs time and money and that's why nobody bothers with it). For example, at work, we have heavily modified the email template around the way we work, with good results.
We have no problem with Notes at work (a biggish Bank) because our email and calendaring requirements are very low. But we use it extensively for things like electronically distributing reports, workflow, electronic forms filling etc. It is interfaced with our SAP/R3 system and it is also used as a front end to many old mainframe based applications.
I believe that Lotus Notes is the type of application that the phrase "your mileage may vary" apply perfectly.
On a further note, I do not work for IBM, nor am I in any way associated with them. And I also believe that they bungled the direction of Notes many years ago (allowing exchange to capture the market) and only recently with Notes 7 and 8 tried to put things in the correct direction.
I work for a medium size European bank. Total workstations aprx. 22000 in 13 different countries.
We used to leave all our PCs on all the time in order to run updates, patches etc.
In my area of operations there are only about 3300 PCs. Nine months ago we implemented a policy where all users were required to turn off their PCs (not servers) at the end of day. Wake-on-LAN was used to turn the PCs on during the night for updates and 15 minutes before the start of the workday.
Very conservatively, we estimate that we will save about EUR153000 (USD225000) every year (I live in a country with very high electricity rates).
So, it is definitely worth it financially, our users were not adversely affected at all and it helped morale by making the workplace a greener place.
Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor who subsequently sold Cyrix to VIA Technologies. VIA used the Cyrix name on a chip designed by Centaur Technology, since VIA believed Cyrix had better name recognition than Centaur and VIA.
National Semiconductor retained the MediaGX design for a few more years, renaming it the Geode and hoping to sell it as an integrated processor. They sold the Geode to AMD in 2003.
I am doing the exact same thing. Firefox (with Noscript) for my usual browsing and Opera (with JavaScript disabled and no cookies) when I venture into dangerous waters. My bank site requires IE but Opera handles it fine with some graphic glitches.
Under Linux I again use Firefox and Opera, plus (occasionally) Konqueror.
All this is just a clever marketing trick perpetrated by Microsoft.
They saturate the media and the internet with stories that Vista sucks and XP is much better than Vista, so that we may forget that XP sucks and Linux is much better than XP.
Consider that Hormel does not export SPAM to all the countries of the world. Many consumers worldwide do not know the original product or its history and may reject Hormel's product simply because of the name.
If Hormel tries to export its product to a new market, it will probably fail because the consumers have already associated the word "SPAM" with JUNK mail. So, their brand has decreased in value considerably.
I first saw a can of SPAM in my country 6-7 years ago at a supermarket shelf. What actually caught my eye was the name; I was wondering why they named their product with the equivalent of electronic junk mail before I remembered the origin of the word spam (and yes, I knew about the Monty Pythons sketch)/
A friend of mine has a land surveying firm. He has four employees. For each employee he has a company mobile phone plus their own personal phone. Each employee uses a GPS land surveying instrument (leica) which needs to exchange data with their office (has something to do with increased accuracy of the GPS device). Also each employee has a tablet laptop with a 3G data card. At the office he uses 4 GSM data modems. He pays (at my suggestion) an additional $8 per month for the GSM lines used for the GSM instrument and the GSM data modem so that all phonecalls/data between them are free. Plus, he also has 2 mobiles (one for work, the other for personal use) and a laptop with a 3G data card.
I work in a (biggish) bank and this would fit well with our current portfolio of applications.
For our web based applications, our users are used to working with multiple browser windows opened simultaneously, each for a different part of our system (e.g. separate browser window for our credit cards system, different browser windows for our treasury system, different browser windows for our customer information system etc).
We actually forbid the use of the "back" button, and where possible we disable it (it messes up our data integrity). We also hide the address bar.
Because we also have applications developed as native windows GUI applications, Prism would probably make our web applications blend in with our GUI applications, improving the look and feel of our system.
Definitely something to check out in the future; although I doubt if it will be worth the hassle of deploying it.
I live in a EU country (one of the small ones) and I own an iPhone. I bought it from the USA and it took me about 20-25 minutes to unlock it.
In my country the vast majority of phones sold are unlocked. Therefore, $400 for an iPhone is a very good price to pay. I was planning of buying a Nokia N95 but the iPhone was only 2/3 of its price (imagine that, a country where the iPhone is considered midprice)...
I have seen full page advertisements inside local magazines (the local equivalent of TV Guide) offering iPhones for sale for -get this- about $900-$950.
A relatively large local electronics chain, which among other stuff happens to also sell Macs and iPods, is selling hacked iPhones for $950. They even display them prominently right by their entrance.
I never had problems with my iPhone and I love it, but I met one of the people who bought the iPhone for $950 from the above mentioned company. He initially was ecstatic, didn't mind the price at all, but eventually, many things that ought to work didn't, like SMS and YouTube videos (I do not have this problems --- probably his iPhone was not hacked properly). Also, the virtual keyboard is missing an easy way to input some of the special characters used in most European languages (that's a problem for me also, but it's no biggie). He is now thinking of selling it and buying the Samsung Georgio Armani phone when it becomes available.
Probably by the time (if ever) Apple officially introduces the iPhone to my country, (a) the market will have moved to other phones by Samsung, LG and Nokia, (b) people will avoid iPhones because of the current problems with the not properly hacked iPhones (similar to how I will NEVER buy a Motorola again because of past problems with their software/filmware) and (c) the market might be flooded by unlocked iPhones thereby negating the coolness and novelty factor resulting in fewer than expected sales.
BTW, in the last 1 ½ month, because of my work and a two week vacation, I have visited the following countries: Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece and Dubai. In all of the above countries I have seen unlocked iPhones in use.
I propose a community project whose purpose will be to: -
1. List every patent that MS registers
2. For every single individual MS patent, document reasons why it *might* be invalid (i.e. prior art, obviousness e.t.c.)
I am thinking something in the lines of an anti-MS patent Wiki.
Slowly, with community participation, their house of cards based on dubious patent claims will come crashing down.
Also think about it: they will know that every attempt of them to register a new patent will be so thoroughly scrutinized that it will be very difficult for MS to successfully register new patents --- especially if a process of public hearings is to be adopted by the USPO.
Furthermore, in time, we will amass all the necessary info needed to fight MS in the courts if they do a SCO on us.
I believe that only the existence of such a project will be a great showstopper for MS.
"Despite being economical to produce, the Mustang was a well-made and rugged aircraft. The definitive version of the single-seat fighter was powered by the Packard V-1650-3, a two-stage two-speed supercharged 12-cylinder Packard-built version of the legendary Rolls-Royce Merlin engine"
The initial version of the P-51 was powered by mechanically supercharged Allison V-1710 engines, which proved inadequate. The Mustang became a legend only when subsequent versions, at the insistence of the British, used the RR Merlin engine which was used on the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Beaufighter, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
Also the distinctive P-51 "bubble" canopy, which gives P-51 its excellent visibility, was introduced to the P51 after first being developed by the British for their late-model Spitfires, Typhoons and Tempests. This led to the production of the P-51D model, considered the definitive Mustang and what most people have in mind when thinking of the Mustang.
I work for a medium size bank in Europe. We use Windows 2000 in all our workstations (Win Server 2003 on servers) and have decided that we will not upgrade --- not even to XP.
When we choose a platform, we expect it to last for 6-10 years. It is very expensive to change the bedrock where your applications stand. For example OS/2 (v. 1.1 to v. 4) was used as our workstation OS for a decade (1991-2000). We got good utility out of it.
We currently plan during late 2007 - early 2008 to lunch a project to assess the situation and future of our corporate desktop software platform of choice (i.e. pick what to buy next).
In the mean time, we have absolutely no problems with Windows 2000. It does what we want and has served us well. As many people here on/. have pointed out, "if it aint' broken, don't fix it". And that's why we did not even upgrade to XP; Win 2000 works, why change it?
Also, please note that the vast majority of our PCs are fully capable of running Vista, they are Pentium 4s at 3+ Ghz with 1Gb RAM. They are speed demons under Win 2000; they will probably be rather average under Vista.
And if you think that running Windows 2000 puts us in the minority, think again; our main competitor still runs Windows NT on its workstations. And they are not the only ones.
And as an additional side note, besides Win 2000 workstations, we run the following additional systems: - IBM mainframes running z/OS (DB2, CICS) - IBM System p (RS/6000) running AIX (SAP, data mining, accounting and web banking) - IBM System i5 (AS/400) running OS/400 (DB2, transaction processing)
During the last 3 years we have transferred/converted our asset finance applications out of the mainframe and our credit cards system out of the AS/400 into x86 servers running Linux (Red Hat).
So, when 2008 comes and we start looking for our future desktop OS, Vista will not be the only game in town.
The original operating system was VirtuOS developed and copyrighted by Microbase. It was used in 1996, 1998 and 2000. In 2002, Unisys was incapable to set a patnership with Microbase, and Microsoft provided the Windows CE operating system free of charge. In 2004, Procomp decided to migrate to Linux as a cost reduction measure.
Slashdot Mirror
If they report anything, then this will be a breach of banking privacy and the customers can sue the bank.
The only exceptions:
- money laundering
- where the banks suspects illegal activities (drugs, terrorism funding)
- where they are compelled by a court law to disclose
- where it is in its interest to do so (it is not as ominous as it sounds --- if they sue you for non-payment, they must disclose to the court how much money you must pay)
Banks need some sort of official identification from their clients when opening accounts, so as to be able to prove that they were not negligent if the account is subsequently used for fraud. The UK court case which is relevant is Marfani & Co Ltd v Midland Bank Ltd [1968] 1 WLR 956, 970-971. This is also the reason that in the past, Banks used to ask for references from existing customers or notable members of the public before opening accounts; although this is no longer practical.
As for tax purposes, the solution is simple: the Bank takes an X% on any interest received and pays it directly to the government as tax on behalf of its customers. The customers do not have to declare the interest received as income, since it is already net of taxes. Result: The tax man has its money and the public fills-in less paperwork
I am sorry about the legalese in the post; I had to take some banking law courses and I am still recovering from them.
I am sorry for the formatting nightmare of my previous post. I clicked on [Submit] instead of [Preview]. The persons responsible for this have been executed.
You probably meant it as a joke, but the most important thing that motivates a true geek itâ(TM)s the challenge (and the bragging rights). /n
Most of us do not do it for the money, we do it because (a) we have an innate curiosity, (b) we want to be in control of our machines and (c) because itâ(TM)s there.
For example, more than a decade ago I was obsessed with cracking a local broadcasterâ(TM)s encrypted TV signal.
They used a (now seriously obsolete) analog irdeto scheme.
It took me almost a month and I had to start learning about excrypted analog transmissions from scratch. The net had precious little information on the subject and most of it was obsolete. Funnily enough, cracking/decoding the sound was more difficult than decoding the video.
I watched the decrypted signal for maybe a full day, gloated for my accomplishment to a couple of like-minded friends, and then packed everything up and put it on storage. I still have that irdeto decoder somewhere.
Last Xmas, I set up a cardserver at my house. I share my Pay TV card through my home network. I use my Debian server at the basement and a 20 Euro card reader. I do not do anything illegal --- I pay for the card and I watch the decrypted TV only in my residence. I can share my card through the internet with friends and family but I _will_not_do_it_. I simply do not care to save a buck, I am rich enough to pay the subscription price, but I am NOT going to pay their extra 9 Euro per month for the right to use a second decoder because I consider it extorion. I like my Dreambox 7025 (Linux/MIPS processor) and my Dreambox 500 (Linux/PowerPC) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreambox) and I will not accept my providers closed source decoder which they can brick remotely or the fact that they expect that the decoder that I have paid will be bricked if I cancel my subscription.
Why the above setup? I want to be able watch TV to ALL rooms of my house without having to lug the decoder from room to room or paying extra (extortion money) for a second decoder. Plus I run a Bittorrent client inside my Sat TV decoder. Plus I stream video through VLC from my PCs to my TV.
The kicker? I simply do not watch TV (with the exception of Battlestar Galactica); I average maybe 70-90 minutes per week. During my early twenties I spend almost 4½ years without watching TV.
Why do I pay for TV when I do not watch it? My wife nagged me into it. But I managed to convert something of no value to me to something fun. I started writing and cross compiling software for my dreambox for fun. I have changed the software to exactly suite my needs and quirks.
What I am getting at, is that for us geeks, accomplishing something that few others can, and satisfying our inane curiosity, is a much stronger motivation than watching the Sunday game for free.
Give us a box and tell us that we cannot run Linux on it and you have just made our day.
That's correct. I work for a medium size European bank and _we_have_it_in_writing_ from the HR dept. that all email messages are considered private email. No one is allowed to read our emails in the absence of a court order.
So "... annoyances such as repeatedly changing the desktop background to black" do not affect me.
Take that Vista!
Backup daily PC1 to PC2, PC2 to PC3, and so on...
Use something like rsync.
Encrypt backups.
For additional redudancy, you can use a scheme like backing up PC1 to PC3 to PC4, PC2 to PC4 to PC5 and so on.
This does not give you the virtual file system that you were hoping for, but at least it puts to partial use the unused space.
I agree with you that the email and calendaring functionality need a serious overhaul. I am not blind to its shortcomings and I understand why some people feel so negatively against Notes.
The thing is that most users expect Notes to be a direct replacement/opponent of Outlook and Exchange. If you thing of it as a RAD workflow and distributed database development platform, then it is very good at it. Just think of it, even the email and calendaring functionality are essentially databases with custom views.
Also, the default templates are "one size fits all". For best results you must customize it to your requirements (yes, I know that this costs time and money and that's why nobody bothers with it). For example, at work, we have heavily modified the email template around the way we work, with good results.
We have no problem with Notes at work (a biggish Bank) because our email and calendaring requirements are very low. But we use it extensively for things like electronically distributing reports, workflow, electronic forms filling etc. It is interfaced with our SAP/R3 system and it is also used as a front end to many old mainframe based applications.
I believe that Lotus Notes is the type of application that the phrase "your mileage may vary" apply perfectly.
On a further note, I do not work for IBM, nor am I in any way associated with them. And I also believe that they bungled the direction of Notes many years ago (allowing exchange to capture the market) and only recently with Notes 7 and 8 tried to put things in the correct direction.
I wholeheartedly agree with your sig.
/. crowd seems to hate Notes with a passion and so it is very difficult for someone to admit that Notes does some things VERY well.
The
I use Notes at work and all of my colleagues are very happy with it.
The trick is to hire Notes developers that know what they are doing (having lots of bandwidth and powerful servers helps).
I work for a medium size European bank. Total workstations aprx. 22000 in 13 different countries.
We used to leave all our PCs on all the time in order to run updates, patches etc.
In my area of operations there are only about 3300 PCs. Nine months ago we implemented a policy where all users were required to turn off their PCs (not servers) at the end of day. Wake-on-LAN was used to turn the PCs on during the night for updates and 15 minutes before the start of the workday.
Very conservatively, we estimate that we will save about EUR153000 (USD225000) every year (I live in a country with very high electricity rates).
So, it is definitely worth it financially, our users were not adversely affected at all and it helped morale by making the workplace a greener place.
Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor who subsequently sold Cyrix to VIA Technologies. VIA used the Cyrix name on a chip designed by Centaur Technology, since VIA believed Cyrix had better name recognition than Centaur and VIA.
National Semiconductor retained the MediaGX design for a few more years, renaming it the Geode and hoping to sell it as an integrated processor. They sold the Geode to AMD in 2003.
I am doing the exact same thing. Firefox (with Noscript) for my usual browsing and Opera (with JavaScript disabled and no cookies) when I venture into dangerous waters. My bank site requires IE but Opera handles it fine with some graphic glitches.
Under Linux I again use Firefox and Opera, plus (occasionally) Konqueror.
I never had a browser related security problem.
All this is just a clever marketing trick perpetrated by Microsoft.
They saturate the media and the internet with stories that Vista sucks and XP is much better than Vista, so that we may forget that XP sucks and Linux is much better than XP.
It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!
Consider that Hormel does not export SPAM to all the countries of the world. Many consumers worldwide do not know the original product or its history and may reject Hormel's product simply because of the name.
If Hormel tries to export its product to a new market, it will probably fail because the consumers have already associated the word "SPAM" with JUNK mail. So, their brand has decreased in value considerably.
I first saw a can of SPAM in my country 6-7 years ago at a supermarket shelf. What actually caught my eye was the name; I was wondering why they named their product with the equivalent of electronic junk mail before I remembered the origin of the word spam (and yes, I knew about the Monty Pythons sketch)/
Anecdotal evidence:
A friend of mine has a land surveying firm. He has four employees. For each employee he has a company mobile phone plus their own personal phone. Each employee uses a GPS land surveying instrument (leica) which needs to exchange data with their office (has something to do with increased accuracy of the GPS device). Also each employee has a tablet laptop with a 3G data card. At the office he uses 4 GSM data modems. He pays (at my suggestion) an additional $8 per month for the GSM lines used for the GSM instrument and the GSM data modem so that all phonecalls/data between them are free. Plus, he also has 2 mobiles (one for work, the other for personal use) and a laptop with a 3G data card.
So for 5 persons, 23 mobile phone accounts exist.
I work in a (biggish) bank and this would fit well with our current portfolio of applications.
For our web based applications, our users are used to working with multiple browser windows opened simultaneously, each for a different part of our system (e.g. separate browser window for our credit cards system, different browser windows for our treasury system, different browser windows for our customer information system etc).
We actually forbid the use of the "back" button, and where possible we disable it (it messes up our data integrity). We also hide the address bar.
Because we also have applications developed as native windows GUI applications, Prism would probably make our web applications blend in with our GUI applications, improving the look and feel of our system.
Definitely something to check out in the future; although I doubt if it will be worth the hassle of deploying it.
I live in a EU country (one of the small ones) and I own an iPhone. I bought it from the USA and it took me about 20-25 minutes to unlock it.
In my country the vast majority of phones sold are unlocked. Therefore, $400 for an iPhone is a very good price to pay. I was planning of buying a Nokia N95 but the iPhone was only 2/3 of its price (imagine that, a country where the iPhone is considered midprice)...
I have seen full page advertisements inside local magazines (the local equivalent of TV Guide) offering iPhones for sale for -get this- about $900-$950.
A relatively large local electronics chain, which among other stuff happens to also sell Macs and iPods, is selling hacked iPhones for $950. They even display them prominently right by their entrance.
I never had problems with my iPhone and I love it, but I met one of the people who bought the iPhone for $950 from the above mentioned company. He initially was ecstatic, didn't mind the price at all, but eventually, many things that ought to work didn't, like SMS and YouTube videos (I do not have this problems --- probably his iPhone was not hacked properly). Also, the virtual keyboard is missing an easy way to input some of the special characters used in most European languages (that's a problem for me also, but it's no biggie). He is now thinking of selling it and buying the Samsung Georgio Armani phone when it becomes available.
Probably by the time (if ever) Apple officially introduces the iPhone to my country, (a) the market will have moved to other phones by Samsung, LG and Nokia, (b) people will avoid iPhones because of the current problems with the not properly hacked iPhones (similar to how I will NEVER buy a Motorola again because of past problems with their software/filmware) and (c) the market might be flooded by unlocked iPhones thereby negating the coolness and novelty factor resulting in fewer than expected sales.
BTW, in the last 1 ½ month, because of my work and a two week vacation, I have visited the following countries: Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece and Dubai. In all of the above countries I have seen unlocked iPhones in use.
1. List every patent that MS registers
2. For every single individual MS patent, document reasons why it *might* be invalid (i.e. prior art, obviousness e.t.c.)
I am thinking something in the lines of an anti-MS patent Wiki.
Slowly, with community participation, their house of cards based on dubious patent claims will come crashing down.
Also think about it: they will know that every attempt of them to register a new patent will be so thoroughly scrutinized that it will be very difficult for MS to successfully register new patents --- especially if a process of public hearings is to be adopted by the USPO.
Furthermore, in time, we will amass all the necessary info needed to fight MS in the courts if they do a SCO on us.
I believe that only the existence of such a project will be a great showstopper for MS.
The P-51 used the same Rolls-Royce engine that the Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane used.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P51:
The initial version of the P-51 was powered by mechanically supercharged Allison V-1710 engines, which proved inadequate. The Mustang became a legend only when subsequent versions, at the insistence of the British, used the RR Merlin engine which was used on the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Beaufighter, the Halifax and the Lancaster.
Also the distinctive P-51 "bubble" canopy, which gives P-51 its excellent visibility, was introduced to the P51 after first being developed by the British for their late-model Spitfires, Typhoons and Tempests. This led to the production of the P-51D model, considered the definitive Mustang and what most people have in mind when thinking of the Mustang.
I work for a medium size bank in Europe. We use Windows 2000 in all our workstations (Win Server 2003 on servers) and have decided that we will not upgrade --- not even to XP.
/. have pointed out, "if it aint' broken, don't fix it". And that's why we did not even upgrade to XP; Win 2000 works, why change it?
When we choose a platform, we expect it to last for 6-10 years. It is very expensive to change the bedrock where your applications stand. For example OS/2 (v. 1.1 to v. 4) was used as our workstation OS for a decade (1991-2000). We got good utility out of it.
We currently plan during late 2007 - early 2008 to lunch a project to assess the situation and future of our corporate desktop software platform of choice (i.e. pick what to buy next).
In the mean time, we have absolutely no problems with Windows 2000. It does what we want and has served us well. As many people here on
Also, please note that the vast majority of our PCs are fully capable of running Vista, they are Pentium 4s at 3+ Ghz with 1Gb RAM. They are speed demons under Win 2000; they will probably be rather average under Vista.
And if you think that running Windows 2000 puts us in the minority, think again; our main competitor still runs Windows NT on its workstations. And they are not the only ones.
And as an additional side note, besides Win 2000 workstations, we run the following additional systems:
- IBM mainframes running z/OS (DB2, CICS)
- IBM System p (RS/6000) running AIX (SAP, data mining, accounting and web banking)
- IBM System i5 (AS/400) running OS/400 (DB2, transaction processing)
During the last 3 years we have transferred/converted our asset finance applications out of the mainframe and our credit cards system out of the AS/400 into x86 servers running Linux (Red Hat).
So, when 2008 comes and we start looking for our future desktop OS, Vista will not be the only game in town.
Wouldn't have been cheaper to just bribe the execs to buy Unisys stuff? ;-)
On second though, doesn't Unisys bribe them already by inflating their ego?
Does it run linux?
The answer is probably, yes.