Nothing is free in the computer world. If it is free to you, the consumer, someone ELSE paid for it.
*shrug*
If you are a corporate customer and you buying a bulk lot of systems, as I have many times in the past, I got pretty much whatever I wanted. Two or three years ago, I purchased two lots of 50 PCs from MPC. I told my rep to send me one system to create my build. He did. The "gold system" arrived per my physical spec, bare hard drive. Google, Yahoo!, whoever didn't make diddly squat on my purchase.
Now, maybe this is purely a consumer problem. Consumers don't provide as much profit per system as a corporation, so you are going to see fewer choices, like having to buy a system from Dell with Windows installed.
Don't want Windows? Buy from a Tier 2 or 3 vendor.
We would prefer that the work e-mail not be used for personal mailings. One of the reasons is file storage space.
We are willing acknowledge that the parents are going to communicate with their kids, and other folks with friends and family. It makes for better employee morale when they are permitted access to web mail for such things, leading to less abuse of work systems. It is better to use e-mail than the phone, which needs to be left free for actual business calls with clients.
Are there security concerns? Though the poster found some concerns, those concerns are easily disarmed by a good anti-virus/anti-spyware program.
Sure, we could be rather draconian and put the kabosh on all of it, but it comes back to employee morale. A happy worker is a productive worker. Our workers are given the task of being responsible and are rewarded for their success.
The only question is: "Is Yarro a liar or just a fool?"
My guess is both.
-Eric
Um, he is a politician. This was already known. The constituents he is pandering to will pat him on the back after this fails for having tried to "fight the good fight."
I had to laugh when I read the part about all packets coming from NATs to be marked evil, and then further when it recommends that all firewalls simply drop evil packets. This action would bring a halt to much of the home use of the internet, I imagine.
Only in America would this pricing scheme seem like a great deal.
Sprint offers the plan and gets new subscribers. It drives up profits and the other wireless carriers follow suit, but offer the service $5 less than Sprint. Sprint customers, locked into contracts, bend over and hand Sprint the Vasoline until one of the competitors makes an offer like paying your early contract termination fees. One year from now, these unlimited plans will have dropped to $50 (or less).
Eh. I would like to see the following wireless plane exist: you have a phone. there is no monthly fee. pre-paid minutes NEVER expire (without forcing a customer to pay for 1,000+ minutes).
I only want a cell phone for ONE purpose...an emergency phone to keep in the car. I have researched all of the non-contract phone plans and I find them all lacking. I certainly am not going to $120 per month. That is what I am paying for Phone + DSL + Satellite TV COMBINE.
Ultimately, I am not the target market. Thus, my opinion won't matter to Sprint et al. They will still make billions and I will continue waiting for the perfect emergency phone plan.
Windows suffers from being the target that is singled out the most. Could Linux withstand an onslaught of equal proportions and have its reputation survive?
So, I can conclude from this that your IT people work for free, then? And that you have a support agreement with Microsoft that doesn't cost anything? The cost might have been hidden, but it's not "free".
Companies are going to employ a number of IT people no matter what. And part of their job is to find, test, and apply patches for the software being used by the company. If they're doing that job correctly, 99.999% of the daylight savings "problem" would be handled almost unnoticed along with every other patch. Microsoft, Oracle, Linux, Mac OS, and most other software has had patches available for weeks, if not months, so it's not like this was some big surprise patch last Friday. If a company had to spend *extra* money on DST, they're doing something wrong.
Exactly! When these economic genius begin to spout off how much this cost or that cost, it baffles. Really, I am already getting paid money to be there and make sure stuff doesn't break. How much did it cost my company to fix the DST problem? I have no idea. I have thought to break down my job like that. How much money to fix that DOS system that took 15 minutes to fix? *shrug* It is all mumbo-jumbo to scare CFO's who think you can quantify a problem so easily.
I honestly do not get what the big stink is with the DST thing. This change was announced MORE THAN A FREAKIN' YEAR AGO! Any company that did not make preparations long ago DESERVES whatever problems they get. Really, this did not sneak up on us. My company prepared for it, made the appropriate changes to systems from DOS through XP. The DST change came and went. Guess what? No problems. Did it cost us any money? Um...no. When you give yourself plenty of time, you don't have to stop doing your existing job to fix the problem.
That's fantastic... "they don't, but they could!" Is that really the basis of your argument? Given Micro$oft's past, it is not a matter of "could", but "will". A year now, just wait, they are going to trumpet the new Live Academic Search! Now you can search academic papers from thousands of colleges! This innovation brought to you by Micro$oft. A person does not even have to be a Micro$oft hater to understand this, it is merely an observation of repeated behavior that/. has noted on millions of occasions.
Huh? Show me where Live search is fully indexing print books and offering them up as search results? You know, the whole point of the damn lawsuit referred to in TFS, let alone TFA? Live Search may not do it RIGHT NOW. But how long until it does? Honestly, if Google can provide me this list of features, but Live Search only offers half of the features (translating into fewer search hits), why should I ever consider using Live Search?
Personally, I would not want the world to know that The Killer was on its way to hitting us. Can you imagine the mass hysteria and panic such information would cause? Lawlessness and chaos would reign. People wouldn't care to do their jobs anymore. And worse, Slashdot might go offline!
I fully intend to be reading and sending e-mail up to the last day of my existence, thank you very much. And, doubtless, someone will find a way to blame Micro$oft or SCO, causing a flood of responses for me to have to read...and then ignore.
So, no, let us NOT look for them. We are better off.
From my personal experience, the execs get the new top-end PCs and monitors to make them feel special and keep them happy with the rest of the money you are spending on everyone else. Greasing the wheels, so to speak. Though, my company is an oddity, where the chiefs are content with sub-1GHz machines and prefer the money to be spent on the engineer's PCs. I work in the twilight zone.
Why oh why are we still using "DOS Compatible" hardware???? Because DOS is still commonly used, far more than most would want to believe. Many boot diskettes are still DOS. A lot of manufacturing equipment still uses DOS. In a world where it seems like all computers are multi-GHz, there are embedded computers in the machines that run our world that are not.
What is new is old, and what is old is new. For a while, the mainframe was declared extinct. Now, the mainframe is running Linux and is all the rage again. Same for boards. What is integrated becomes separate, becomes integrated again.
For low-end computers, a board that integrates the CPU, GPU, ATA, etc, makes sense for that segment. But, there is a market segment that wants to be able to upgrade their boards more easily. I would very much prefer a board with a separate GPU socket, if I knew that it was a standard being followed by the dominant video makers. Upgrades would be easier. Power and cooling planning would be simpler.
My vision of the perfect PC has very little integrated onto the board. Give me a board with 8 to 12 PCIe slots. Let ME determine what USB and Firewire will be installed. Let ME determine if my system will have a DB9 serial port or not. Let ME choose SATA or SAS. I do not like having to pay for things I do not need and will not use. For that matter, put my CPU and RAM on a PCIe card, as well. Then, I am not tied to AMD's or Intel's ever-changing socket plans.
There are two kinds of readers in the world. Those who hate Dvorak's writings, and those who haven't read his writings, yet. He reminds of day-time TV show hosts.
Does he make a point with his article? Not really. He writes nothing that hasn't already been known by anyone who makes it a point to read anything technical. *shrug*
The problem I see is that people think that all companies buy top-of-line PCs. A Decked-out MacBook Pro? I don't think so.
I have a feeling that a lot of companies are like the one I work for. We don't have a huge I.T. budget, so we have to be creative with our computer purchases (ie, eBay). This also means we are n-1 to n-2 generations or more on hardware, and n-1 on the operating system. Though, I should note that I work at a factory where we still have production PCs running DOS. (If it ain't broke, don't rewrite it.)
If Apple brought their system prices down to that of the common beige box, then and only then could they hope to truly capture the corporate market at large. But, that would mean less profit per box. And, in the end, Apple doesn't seem to really be suffering, so why would they want to hamstring their bottom line? The last time I read about Apple's bottom line, it was very healthy.
Thus, I does it really matter that Apple only has 5% (or whatever it is) of system sales?
Vista will never be installed at my company. We rarely buy NEW computers, preferring the cost benefit of eBay. My company moves slowly. I am just now expunging Win98 from the network. Why? Because it worked. We are still running the same office version as of 5 years ago. Why? Because it still works. Seriously, our employees gain ZERO benefit from a new OS since they would still be doing the same tasks (ie, word and excel, access db, Citrix to ERP package).
The only reason we are upgrading everyone to XP is for anti-virus and anti-spyware purposes. Our chosen product is eliminating support for Win98 and Win2k. All of our other software, though, still works just fine. Microsoft may not like it, but ph00ey on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing is free in the computer world. If it is free to you, the consumer, someone ELSE paid for it.
*shrug*
If you are a corporate customer and you buying a bulk lot of systems, as I have many times in the past, I got pretty much whatever I wanted. Two or three years ago, I purchased two lots of 50 PCs from MPC. I told my rep to send me one system to create my build. He did. The "gold system" arrived per my physical spec, bare hard drive. Google, Yahoo!, whoever didn't make diddly squat on my purchase.
Now, maybe this is purely a consumer problem. Consumers don't provide as much profit per system as a corporation, so you are going to see fewer choices, like having to buy a system from Dell with Windows installed.
Don't want Windows? Buy from a Tier 2 or 3 vendor.
Simply put, yes.
We would prefer that the work e-mail not be used for personal mailings. One of the reasons is file storage space.
We are willing acknowledge that the parents are going to communicate with their kids, and other folks with friends and family. It makes for better employee morale when they are permitted access to web mail for such things, leading to less abuse of work systems. It is better to use e-mail than the phone, which needs to be left free for actual business calls with clients.
Are there security concerns? Though the poster found some concerns, those concerns are easily disarmed by a good anti-virus/anti-spyware program.
Sure, we could be rather draconian and put the kabosh on all of it, but it comes back to employee morale. A happy worker is a productive worker. Our workers are given the task of being responsible and are rewarded for their success.
The proof is in the bottom line, so let's look at Google's bottom line...
Ah, look at that! Profitable. Oh, is a that the word "billion" next to their revenues in 2006?
Yeah. I feel so sorry for Google. Maybe if they they practice business more like Micro$oft, they would be more successful.
*shaking of head*
They probably got a ridiculous discount on Micro$oft licenses.
Anywho, I find most all TCO calculations to be dubious and akin to damned lies.
IANAL, but it probably goes toward reasonable doubt to the motives of the suspect.
In any case, go ahead and Google that phrase, but wait 24 months so Google can anonymize your search...per their new policy.
My guess is both.
-Eric
Um, he is a politician. This was already known. The constituents he is pandering to will pat him on the back after this fails for having tried to "fight the good fight."Um, I believe RFC3514 is probably a joke.
I had to laugh when I read the part about all packets coming from NATs to be marked evil, and then further when it recommends that all firewalls simply drop evil packets. This action would bring a halt to much of the home use of the internet, I imagine.
Reading over the RFC made me laugh.
Only in America would this pricing scheme seem like a great deal.
Sprint offers the plan and gets new subscribers. It drives up profits and the other wireless carriers follow suit, but offer the service $5 less than Sprint. Sprint customers, locked into contracts, bend over and hand Sprint the Vasoline until one of the competitors makes an offer like paying your early contract termination fees. One year from now, these unlimited plans will have dropped to $50 (or less).
Eh. I would like to see the following wireless plane exist: you have a phone. there is no monthly fee. pre-paid minutes NEVER expire (without forcing a customer to pay for 1,000+ minutes).
I only want a cell phone for ONE purpose...an emergency phone to keep in the car. I have researched all of the non-contract phone plans and I find them all lacking. I certainly am not going to $120 per month. That is what I am paying for Phone + DSL + Satellite TV COMBINE.
Ultimately, I am not the target market. Thus, my opinion won't matter to Sprint et al. They will still make billions and I will continue waiting for the perfect emergency phone plan.
Windows suffers from being the target that is singled out the most. Could Linux withstand an onslaught of equal proportions and have its reputation survive?
Companies are going to employ a number of IT people no matter what. And part of their job is to find, test, and apply patches for the software being used by the company. If they're doing that job correctly, 99.999% of the daylight savings "problem" would be handled almost unnoticed along with every other patch. Microsoft, Oracle, Linux, Mac OS, and most other software has had patches available for weeks, if not months, so it's not like this was some big surprise patch last Friday. If a company had to spend *extra* money on DST, they're doing something wrong.
Exactly! When these economic genius begin to spout off how much this cost or that cost, it baffles. Really, I am already getting paid money to be there and make sure stuff doesn't break. How much did it cost my company to fix the DST problem? I have no idea. I have thought to break down my job like that. How much money to fix that DOS system that took 15 minutes to fix? *shrug* It is all mumbo-jumbo to scare CFO's who think you can quantify a problem so easily.You just always have the pages open you had last time. If you were reading slashdot, you're still reading slashdot.
So, my computer is reading slashdot while I am asleep? THAT explains the attitude it has been giving me.I honestly do not get what the big stink is with the DST thing. This change was announced MORE THAN A FREAKIN' YEAR AGO! Any company that did not make preparations long ago DESERVES whatever problems they get. Really, this did not sneak up on us. My company prepared for it, made the appropriate changes to systems from DOS through XP. The DST change came and went. Guess what? No problems. Did it cost us any money? Um...no. When you give yourself plenty of time, you don't have to stop doing your existing job to fix the problem.
I have found FEBE and CLEO to be invaluable.
You bastards! You killed Cap!
Personally, I would not want the world to know that The Killer was on its way to hitting us. Can you imagine the mass hysteria and panic such information would cause? Lawlessness and chaos would reign. People wouldn't care to do their jobs anymore. And worse, Slashdot might go offline!
I fully intend to be reading and sending e-mail up to the last day of my existence, thank you very much. And, doubtless, someone will find a way to blame Micro$oft or SCO, causing a flood of responses for me to have to read...and then ignore.
So, no, let us NOT look for them. We are better off.
Yes, divert the attention on to someone else while your own search engine is just as guilty. The FUD is really flying today.
From my personal experience, the execs get the new top-end PCs and monitors to make them feel special and keep them happy with the rest of the money you are spending on everyone else. Greasing the wheels, so to speak. Though, my company is an oddity, where the chiefs are content with sub-1GHz machines and prefer the money to be spent on the engineer's PCs. I work in the twilight zone.
What is new is old, and what is old is new. For a while, the mainframe was declared extinct. Now, the mainframe is running Linux and is all the rage again. Same for boards. What is integrated becomes separate, becomes integrated again.
For low-end computers, a board that integrates the CPU, GPU, ATA, etc, makes sense for that segment. But, there is a market segment that wants to be able to upgrade their boards more easily. I would very much prefer a board with a separate GPU socket, if I knew that it was a standard being followed by the dominant video makers. Upgrades would be easier. Power and cooling planning would be simpler.
My vision of the perfect PC has very little integrated onto the board. Give me a board with 8 to 12 PCIe slots. Let ME determine what USB and Firewire will be installed. Let ME determine if my system will have a DB9 serial port or not. Let ME choose SATA or SAS. I do not like having to pay for things I do not need and will not use. For that matter, put my CPU and RAM on a PCIe card, as well. Then, I am not tied to AMD's or Intel's ever-changing socket plans.
There are two kinds of readers in the world. Those who hate Dvorak's writings, and those who haven't read his writings, yet. He reminds of day-time TV show hosts.
Does he make a point with his article? Not really. He writes nothing that hasn't already been known by anyone who makes it a point to read anything technical. *shrug*
The problem I see is that people think that all companies buy top-of-line PCs. A Decked-out MacBook Pro? I don't think so.
I have a feeling that a lot of companies are like the one I work for. We don't have a huge I.T. budget, so we have to be creative with our computer purchases (ie, eBay). This also means we are n-1 to n-2 generations or more on hardware, and n-1 on the operating system. Though, I should note that I work at a factory where we still have production PCs running DOS. (If it ain't broke, don't rewrite it.)
If Apple brought their system prices down to that of the common beige box, then and only then could they hope to truly capture the corporate market at large. But, that would mean less profit per box. And, in the end, Apple doesn't seem to really be suffering, so why would they want to hamstring their bottom line? The last time I read about Apple's bottom line, it was very healthy.
Thus, I does it really matter that Apple only has 5% (or whatever it is) of system sales?
Vista will never be installed at my company. We rarely buy NEW computers, preferring the cost benefit of eBay. My company moves slowly. I am just now expunging Win98 from the network. Why? Because it worked. We are still running the same office version as of 5 years ago. Why? Because it still works. Seriously, our employees gain ZERO benefit from a new OS since they would still be doing the same tasks (ie, word and excel, access db, Citrix to ERP package).
The only reason we are upgrading everyone to XP is for anti-virus and anti-spyware purposes. Our chosen product is eliminating support for Win98 and Win2k. All of our other software, though, still works just fine. Microsoft may not like it, but ph00ey on them.