Or give the users Sunray terminals. Then they are responsible for making sure they have their login token, an internet connection and power. That's it. The servers and apps are run by the IT department. If they want a general PC for Windows and personal use, they can buy one themselves.
The neat thing is the Sunrays work fine on a crappy DSL conenction, so they are perfect for users who are perminatly stationed out of the office, but the sunray laptops are crappy 8(
Car analogy:
If a company runs a fleet of vehicles for staff use, I would doubt that they make the drivers responsible for changing the oil themselves, but they may require a log book be kept and that the car is regulary serviced by an aproved mechanic for that type of car.
Even truckies who are often owner-operators still get their rigs serviced professionally. They need them for their jobs.
If this was for PC's, where would you get your users to go? Joes hardware and software supplies, "Changs Cheap As" windows software - sure it's only $50 for a copy of photoshop 8) or maybe to a major chain shop, who may know nothing about the complex suite of apps that are installed. Or to your companies own techs, who may be a team of 10 people forced to work in a cramped basement office supporting thousands of workstations, hundreds of servers, and a gazillion different business apps. That would be really interesting if every single one of those machines was from a different supplier, ran different AV software, didn't have enough resource to run the new app that needs to be deployed, have to remember to backup Mr CEO's copy of Halo before rebuilding, etc.
Even for my small clients, with 10 to 20 workstations, the biggest problem is that they have 10 to 20 different types of PCs bought at different times, so they have 10-20 different problems every week. We charge about NZ$160 an hr for desktop support. This costs a lot of time and money, and many unproductive hours while the PCs are FUBAR.
On working wit a new client, we go about standardising the hardware, installing app/inventory management tools like Altiris or Zenworks, standardise the OS build and patching, an viola, much less downtime plus interchangeable PCs that can be used by anyone. Cost - management software and investment in time to setup the apps and OS images.
For any more than 2 PC's I'd recommend users not have control over what they install on a work PC. Laptops are still a nightmare as there is no standard docking station, power supply format, and OS images have to be customised to each hardware type.
Car analogy:
I register my car for $500, its petrol, so no user road charges, thats just vehicle registration, a chunk goes to the government suposedly for roading.
But I live out in the countryside, and only have a narrow 2 rut gravel road to my house. but I'm still paying for the chunk of 4 lane highway at a city at the other end of the country. I don't think I'm getting what I paid for
The people who really care probably run an external CRT monitor anyway. I do for video editing because my LCD panel though fine for just about everything, just does not look the same as the CRT. Most people will watch my vids on a TV.
I guess most people wouldn't even know, at least not by reading the specs from Appels Website:
Glass widescreen display.
Display
Whether youve got your eye on the 20-inch or breathtaking 24-inch iMac, youll enjoy a wondrous widescreen performance from every seat in the house.
The big picture.
All iMac models feature a display with a 16:10 wide aspect ratio perfect for watching movies, viewing photos, and using applications with lots of palettes. Display How do the displays compare? The 20-inch widescreen iMac offers a resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels on its flat-panel LCD screen 36 percent more than the previous 17-inch iMac. The 24-inch iMac offers a panoramic resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels 30 percent more screen real estate than the 20-inch model.
Rich, vivid color.
No matter what you like to do on your computer watch movies, edit photos, play games, even just view a screen saver its going to look stunning on an iMac. Thats because iMac now features a glossy display with glass cover that makes graphics, photos, and videos come alive with richer colors and deeper blacks.
---------------
Note they don't mention the colour depth number, but they do say it has a nice glossy surface.
All this is to actually support the US corporate hegemony anyway. I mean do you expect corporates from the US to follow international standards while still filling their cars by the gallon, cover many miles, and put on pounds after eating hotdogs at a world-series sporting event where no other country is invited?
Don't even start me on NTSC - ugh!!
I guess we're lucky the US still agrees on the length of a second and the speed of light in a vacuum.
I always wondered why someone like dell who put so much crapware on their retail desktops couldn't include OpenOffice for free?
I'd just love to see some letter or contract to get out saying "I will accept money to install this software on all new devices sold, as long as we don't also include xxxxxx software, DIV-X codecs and ogg/vorbis support."
Still better effort than silverlight.
Oh, yeah, MS support this in other OS's just like they do with Mono. Not!
Just what I want, Adobe apps being able to execute more code on my desktop. Umm, no thanks.
Developers from this platform will bring all of their Windows and OSX tricks and tips with them to Linux, and you'll never know how buggy/vulnerable it is as all of the SDK is closed.
it's why I trust Apache and PHP more than IIS and.asp/.net. I know more eyeballs have looked at the code for these apps than the MS equivalents. Also eyes with no financial tie with the original authors.
I always wondered why MP3 players would manufacure a device that requires them to pay royalties to play.mp3 files and the required codecs but not play the free one,.ogg/vorbis?
The I found that they often have to sign agreements saying they will only play.mp3/wma etc, and not the free ones, or else no license to play mp3. 8(
Wow, I think I'll just continue to download the episodes I want off pirate bay. Atleast there I know exactly what I'm downloading, and I know it will be compressed. Its still better than the standard def we still get out here in NZ 8(
MS will follow the OOXML spec in the same way IE followed HTML. Documents will then be written with coding changes just to work around the rendering issues in Word, and all the other implementations of OOXML will appear broken no matter how closely they follow the spec.
Hopefully there will be something similar to the ACID test for.docx rendering. I just wish there was for.odt too.
Just like he didn't invent "Space Elevators" but did popularise them with Fountains of Paradise.
I rather preferred the idea of the first "O'Neill" style space colony or hotel to be built being called "Clarke County" 8)
Umm, duh, isn't that like a cable TV or Sattelite TV subscription. If you don't pay your cellphone bill, your phone stops working. This is computing with an appliance and software as a service and will probably start to dominate in the retail market.
I guess this frightens people who have never paid for their OS before.
One of the first reasons I switched to linux at home was because I built my first PC but couldn't afford $500 for XP, so I got OpenSuse for free off the coverdisk of an old magazine, and used that. Never looked back. (my wife still used Vista though, only because it came with it on the PC. As soon as I wean her off Outlook, that will be upgraded too 8)
Now if I was building a voting terminal, POS register or a heart monitoring PC, these secure features should be mandatory.
On my desktop or a general business PC, I don't think it has any place.
But Hey, OSX gets away with it 8)
Porsche do this with some of their onboard car computers too. FOr the Boxter, they pretty much all have the same firmware in the onboard computer, but the base model lacks the trip computer and some of the other optional extras of the upper models. It is unlocked with a software key to add features.
So when people stop seeing their computers as machines with complex replacable code, but instead as an appliance to do work on, then this sort of "feature-add" could be accepted by the mainstream.
Hey look at the old Xbox base model could do play DVD's but you had to "buy" a remote control which unlocked the DVD playback feature of the dashboard.
Thank god for the evo chip and XBox Media Centre!
How many extra features are people renting from XBox Live now the 360 is out? I say renting because in 5 years the live service will probably have ended for the 360 and MS will only be supporting the new Xbox2012 model.
If you don't want to use password for authentication, then you'd need to support certificates, but I don't think ODBC in windows can do this, so I guess it's not in MS's format.
Certificates could also be minted and added to the document and then used to encrypt the password using PGP or similar, but MS continues down the x.400 certificate route meaning getting signed certs is expensive, or you have to set up a PKI infrastructure. Makes it harder. Nothing about adding security is simple or without complexity 8)
Hell MS managed to encrypt WMA, and all the HD video content in memory, and then use tilt-bits to detect tampering in video drivers, but I guess it would be too much to ask for them to protect my data as well as Hollywoods.
Just think of the cool applications for this kind of tech:
Divers with regulators in the mouths could still communicate with their dive ship. People with trichiotamies or intubated patients (please excuse the spelling) could still talk to their doctors.
Those with motor-neuron disease could use this to train other parts of their nervous system to act as their voice.
I agree. The advantage of choice is a varied ecosystem of software. When Adobe disclosed a java execution issue with Acrobat reader 7, that was cross platform and affected Windows and Linux and Mac equally, but then completely failed to release a patched version of acrobat for linux for more than 6 months, I started using kpdf instead. Now I don't even install acrobat on my pc.
Why are they connected to the internet? So the DoD can edit wikipedia entries to make the unwarranted invasion of other nations and support of thirdworld dictators appear more favourable 8)
Drivers - I have a nice modern PC, but my scanner is no longer supported under Windows by the manufacturer. The drivers for XP do not work in Vista (I actually had trouble with it since XP SP1) and HP will not be releasing new drivers for Vista. Under Suse 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.04 it works fine. Why? because some other linux hackers have the same sort of scanner and reverse engineered the driver. it will probably keep on being supported and working until the SCSI interface no longer exists.
I call that better driver support. Under an opensource system the hardware can still be supported by people who still feel that that hardware has value, long after the manufacturer has abandoned the product. Take the Apple Newton and Amiga as examples for complete abandoned systems that still have an active user base.
The problems with IIS etc is not that they wont run without a GUI, they just cant install becuase the installation requires the GUI. No with Nix and Netware, startx would load a GUI for their installs, then it could be unloaded. Why not have all the explorer interface ready to run but not in memory unless called. Sort of "Safemode" but with all services running normally.
I cant remember he last time I actually had to log into one of our AD or IIS servers to do anything during normal admin.
I use the blackberry at work just so I can be mobile at work (not at my desk) but the damn thing is off when I go home or just left on my desk unless I'm on call. That way if someone really wants me, they call my Cell or page me with an SMS message. I get paid if I'm paged, but not if I answer an email. 8)
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Or give the users Sunray terminals. Then they are responsible for making sure they have their login token, an internet connection and power. That's it. The servers and apps are run by the IT department. If they want a general PC for Windows and personal use, they can buy one themselves. The neat thing is the Sunrays work fine on a crappy DSL conenction, so they are perfect for users who are perminatly stationed out of the office, but the sunray laptops are crappy 8(
Car analogy: If a company runs a fleet of vehicles for staff use, I would doubt that they make the drivers responsible for changing the oil themselves, but they may require a log book be kept and that the car is regulary serviced by an aproved mechanic for that type of car. Even truckies who are often owner-operators still get their rigs serviced professionally. They need them for their jobs. If this was for PC's, where would you get your users to go? Joes hardware and software supplies, "Changs Cheap As" windows software - sure it's only $50 for a copy of photoshop 8) or maybe to a major chain shop, who may know nothing about the complex suite of apps that are installed. Or to your companies own techs, who may be a team of 10 people forced to work in a cramped basement office supporting thousands of workstations, hundreds of servers, and a gazillion different business apps. That would be really interesting if every single one of those machines was from a different supplier, ran different AV software, didn't have enough resource to run the new app that needs to be deployed, have to remember to backup Mr CEO's copy of Halo before rebuilding, etc. Even for my small clients, with 10 to 20 workstations, the biggest problem is that they have 10 to 20 different types of PCs bought at different times, so they have 10-20 different problems every week. We charge about NZ$160 an hr for desktop support. This costs a lot of time and money, and many unproductive hours while the PCs are FUBAR. On working wit a new client, we go about standardising the hardware, installing app/inventory management tools like Altiris or Zenworks, standardise the OS build and patching, an viola, much less downtime plus interchangeable PCs that can be used by anyone. Cost - management software and investment in time to setup the apps and OS images. For any more than 2 PC's I'd recommend users not have control over what they install on a work PC. Laptops are still a nightmare as there is no standard docking station, power supply format, and OS images have to be customised to each hardware type.
Car analogy: I register my car for $500, its petrol, so no user road charges, thats just vehicle registration, a chunk goes to the government suposedly for roading. But I live out in the countryside, and only have a narrow 2 rut gravel road to my house. but I'm still paying for the chunk of 4 lane highway at a city at the other end of the country. I don't think I'm getting what I paid for
The people who really care probably run an external CRT monitor anyway. I do for video editing because my LCD panel though fine for just about everything, just does not look the same as the CRT. Most people will watch my vids on a TV.
I guess most people wouldn't even know, at least not by reading the specs from Appels Website: Glass widescreen display. Display Whether youve got your eye on the 20-inch or breathtaking 24-inch iMac, youll enjoy a wondrous widescreen performance from every seat in the house. The big picture. All iMac models feature a display with a 16:10 wide aspect ratio perfect for watching movies, viewing photos, and using applications with lots of palettes. Display How do the displays compare? The 20-inch widescreen iMac offers a resolution of 1680 by 1050 pixels on its flat-panel LCD screen 36 percent more than the previous 17-inch iMac. The 24-inch iMac offers a panoramic resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels 30 percent more screen real estate than the 20-inch model. Rich, vivid color. No matter what you like to do on your computer watch movies, edit photos, play games, even just view a screen saver its going to look stunning on an iMac. Thats because iMac now features a glossy display with glass cover that makes graphics, photos, and videos come alive with richer colors and deeper blacks. --------------- Note they don't mention the colour depth number, but they do say it has a nice glossy surface.
Thats OK, they'll just track your cellphone instead.
All this is to actually support the US corporate hegemony anyway. I mean do you expect corporates from the US to follow international standards while still filling their cars by the gallon, cover many miles, and put on pounds after eating hotdogs at a world-series sporting event where no other country is invited? Don't even start me on NTSC - ugh!! I guess we're lucky the US still agrees on the length of a second and the speed of light in a vacuum.
I always wondered why someone like dell who put so much crapware on their retail desktops couldn't include OpenOffice for free? I'd just love to see some letter or contract to get out saying "I will accept money to install this software on all new devices sold, as long as we don't also include xxxxxx software, DIV-X codecs and ogg/vorbis support."
Still better effort than silverlight. Oh, yeah, MS support this in other OS's just like they do with Mono. Not! Just what I want, Adobe apps being able to execute more code on my desktop. Umm, no thanks. Developers from this platform will bring all of their Windows and OSX tricks and tips with them to Linux, and you'll never know how buggy/vulnerable it is as all of the SDK is closed. it's why I trust Apache and PHP more than IIS and .asp/.net. I know more eyeballs have looked at the code for these apps than the MS equivalents. Also eyes with no financial tie with the original authors.
I always wondered why MP3 players would manufacure a device that requires them to pay royalties to play .mp3 files and the required codecs but not play the free one, .ogg/vorbis?
The I found that they often have to sign agreements saying they will only play .mp3/wma etc, and not the free ones, or else no license to play mp3. 8(
Wow, I think I'll just continue to download the episodes I want off pirate bay. Atleast there I know exactly what I'm downloading, and I know it will be compressed. Its still better than the standard def we still get out here in NZ 8(
MS will follow the OOXML spec in the same way IE followed HTML. Documents will then be written with coding changes just to work around the rendering issues in Word, and all the other implementations of OOXML will appear broken no matter how closely they follow the spec. Hopefully there will be something similar to the ACID test for .docx rendering. I just wish there was for .odt too.
Or the first perminant off-earth base - "Clarketown"
Just like he didn't invent "Space Elevators" but did popularise them with Fountains of Paradise. I rather preferred the idea of the first "O'Neill" style space colony or hotel to be built being called "Clarke County" 8)
Why is this differnct to Vista now? Only got home basic, upgrade to premium for $xxx insert OEM DVD and viola!
Umm, duh, isn't that like a cable TV or Sattelite TV subscription. If you don't pay your cellphone bill, your phone stops working. This is computing with an appliance and software as a service and will probably start to dominate in the retail market. I guess this frightens people who have never paid for their OS before. One of the first reasons I switched to linux at home was because I built my first PC but couldn't afford $500 for XP, so I got OpenSuse for free off the coverdisk of an old magazine, and used that. Never looked back. (my wife still used Vista though, only because it came with it on the PC. As soon as I wean her off Outlook, that will be upgraded too 8)
Now if I was building a voting terminal, POS register or a heart monitoring PC, these secure features should be mandatory. On my desktop or a general business PC, I don't think it has any place. But Hey, OSX gets away with it 8)
Porsche do this with some of their onboard car computers too. FOr the Boxter, they pretty much all have the same firmware in the onboard computer, but the base model lacks the trip computer and some of the other optional extras of the upper models. It is unlocked with a software key to add features. So when people stop seeing their computers as machines with complex replacable code, but instead as an appliance to do work on, then this sort of "feature-add" could be accepted by the mainstream. Hey look at the old Xbox base model could do play DVD's but you had to "buy" a remote control which unlocked the DVD playback feature of the dashboard. Thank god for the evo chip and XBox Media Centre! How many extra features are people renting from XBox Live now the 360 is out? I say renting because in 5 years the live service will probably have ended for the 360 and MS will only be supporting the new Xbox2012 model.
If you don't want to use password for authentication, then you'd need to support certificates, but I don't think ODBC in windows can do this, so I guess it's not in MS's format. Certificates could also be minted and added to the document and then used to encrypt the password using PGP or similar, but MS continues down the x.400 certificate route meaning getting signed certs is expensive, or you have to set up a PKI infrastructure. Makes it harder. Nothing about adding security is simple or without complexity 8) Hell MS managed to encrypt WMA, and all the HD video content in memory, and then use tilt-bits to detect tampering in video drivers, but I guess it would be too much to ask for them to protect my data as well as Hollywoods.
Just think of the cool applications for this kind of tech: Divers with regulators in the mouths could still communicate with their dive ship. People with trichiotamies or intubated patients (please excuse the spelling) could still talk to their doctors. Those with motor-neuron disease could use this to train other parts of their nervous system to act as their voice.
I agree. The advantage of choice is a varied ecosystem of software. When Adobe disclosed a java execution issue with Acrobat reader 7, that was cross platform and affected Windows and Linux and Mac equally, but then completely failed to release a patched version of acrobat for linux for more than 6 months, I started using kpdf instead. Now I don't even install acrobat on my pc.
Why are they connected to the internet? So the DoD can edit wikipedia entries to make the unwarranted invasion of other nations and support of thirdworld dictators appear more favourable 8)
Drivers - I have a nice modern PC, but my scanner is no longer supported under Windows by the manufacturer. The drivers for XP do not work in Vista (I actually had trouble with it since XP SP1) and HP will not be releasing new drivers for Vista. Under Suse 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.04 it works fine. Why? because some other linux hackers have the same sort of scanner and reverse engineered the driver. it will probably keep on being supported and working until the SCSI interface no longer exists. I call that better driver support. Under an opensource system the hardware can still be supported by people who still feel that that hardware has value, long after the manufacturer has abandoned the product. Take the Apple Newton and Amiga as examples for complete abandoned systems that still have an active user base.
The problems with IIS etc is not that they wont run without a GUI, they just cant install becuase the installation requires the GUI. No with Nix and Netware, startx would load a GUI for their installs, then it could be unloaded. Why not have all the explorer interface ready to run but not in memory unless called. Sort of "Safemode" but with all services running normally. I cant remember he last time I actually had to log into one of our AD or IIS servers to do anything during normal admin.
I use the blackberry at work just so I can be mobile at work (not at my desk) but the damn thing is off when I go home or just left on my desk unless I'm on call. That way if someone really wants me, they call my Cell or page me with an SMS message. I get paid if I'm paged, but not if I answer an email. 8)