What if you're running late? What if you're going to return from vacation a day later than you thought, how about a day earlier?
It is easier to do nothing in all these cases. Entering a cold house is not deadly, and it can be fixed in five minutes after you walk in. If you return from vacation a day later you will fail to save the Earth from the $daily_catastrophe and we all die, isn't it so?
In reference to the "serious flaws" and weaknesses...ever wondered why none of the home automation tech we've been promised since 1950 has come to be common in homes? Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that.
It is common in some homes. There are contractors who offer automation, and there are individuals who buy pieces and arrange them. The main reason why it is not in every home is not cost and not patents, it's the low value of all that technology. I do have HA set up, and will be installing more switches and boxes. Why? Because I want to be able to centrally control lights (for example) and be able to find out where is that light that is still on when I go to bed. And to turn it off remotely. And I want to know where someone is walking and either turn the light on there automatically, or beep to tell me that someone is where nobody should be. But that's just me, because I do electronic stuff for living anyway, and I can afford it. If you have a $100K house you probably would be ill advised to spend $10K on HA - it's not even close to being worth it. But if you live in a more expensive, larger house, with some land, lawn, driveway, etc. - then you may find that $10K spent on HA increases resale value of your house because it is actually of use on a larger property.
you could trap the squirrels alive and neuter them, so they can't reproduce!
California Fish and Game regulations have this to say:
475. Methods of Take for Nongame Birds and Nongame Mammals.
(d) Traps may be used to take nongame birds and nongame mammals only in accordance with the provisions of Section 465.5 of these regulations and sections 3003.1 and 4004 of the Fish and Game Code.
465.5. Use of Traps.
(1) Immediate Dispatch or Release. All furbearing and nongame mammals that are legal to trap must be immediately killed or released. Unless released, trapped animals shall be killed by shooting where local ordinances, landowners, and safety permit. This regulation does not prohibit employees of federal, state, or local government from using chemical euthanasia to dispatch trapped animals.
As you can see, people already thought of all possibilities and made sure that only sufficiently humane ones are permitted. In fact, hunters are required to understand ethics and the exam includes quite a few questions on the subject. If you don't have a hunting license yet I recommend you to go to a weekend course and get one, the course costs only $15 and it's extremely interesting, even if you do not plan to ever hunt. The certificate that you get is yours for life, and it gives you the right to get a hunting license whenever you need it (most people apply immediately, of course.) And, as a bonus, you'll be well prepared for survival if that is ever needed.
This is a complex subject, and many people gave it a thought. I can offer you a quick summary.
Perhaps, instead of trying to shoot them all yourself, you need to find some kind of predator that'll keep their numbers down. - introduction of non-native species is likely to be disastrous; they'd likely do the job, but then you have another problem on your hands. It is very risky - remember Australian rabbits and European {sparrow,starling} in North America. Shooting of squirrels is the absolutely best, ecologically speaking, way to control the population. Poisons are largely illegal (100% illegal where it matters, like on farms.)
Would cats be good for this? - Not likely; both[1] species of California ground squirrels are about the size of a cat, and they are faster, and they have excellent underground burrows. Squirrels also live in colonies and notify each other about the danger. Squirrels prefer areas that offer good visibility of ground- and air-based predators. All in all, I doubt that a cat could even win the battle. It is also important that a wild squirrel is far more aggressive than a domestic cat, and its claws are longer than cat's own (and not retractable.)
rattlesnakes eat them - first of all, I'd take 1,000 squirrels instead of one rattler:-) Also note that some populations of adult squirrels are partially immune to the poison; also note that squirrels learned to confuse snakes by chewing on rattler's shed skin, and by heating their tails.
Maybe you could catch some feral cats and relocate them to your area. - this is illegal, even if there was an easy way to catch a feral cat:-) Also cats are rare here, somehow, which is sad because I like cats.
Trees can be protected by wrapping the base with light-gauge metal - yes, this is known, particularly useful against rabbits. Looks ugly, though:-) but in 2010 I'll probably leave my squirrels alone for a year (to let them multiply a bit) and protect the trees instead. I have no intention of exterminating them all; I only want to let them know who pays the property taxes;-)
Millions, actually. Hunting doesn't even make a dent in their population, and they cause a lot of damage to farmers and ranchers. I'm talking about ground squirrels, not about tree squirrels - the latter are game species. I had more than a hundred ground squirrels last summer near my house alone, running everywhere like rats, eating my plums right off the tree, and such. Don't know how many will be there next March. I had to work on their numbers because their burrows are eroding the hillside, and because I like plums very much:-)
In 2010 I expect to use those 17HMR, and a good deal of high velocity 22LR, in Modoc County starting in March, and later, during whole summer, in Central Valley (Carrizo Plain.)
I was only picking on GP's mistake of calling ammunition "bullets" - this mistake is quite popular. Bullets alone won't do you much good, unless you are familiar with the reloading press.
But with regard to leftover ammo and guns in case of major troubles... ok, let's assume some people decide to abandon their homes and go... where? Ok, let's assume they are gone. You are standing on the road, and there are presumably empty houses around you. You can break into some, but if the house is not empty you will be very dead. If you are lucky and the house is empty you can start searching. The house is large, and ammo is usually stored hidden and locked. You can spend a lot of time searching for something that may not even exist. Your time is not free because in a conflict zone there is always something hunting you, be it zombies or just gangs. So here you are, in an abandoned house, with little ammo of your own, holding a position that the owner himself saw as indefensible. Instead of moving on you are searching for ammo and guns; meanwhile zombies come closer and closer...
Also about the weight. I think I have about 2,000 rounds of 17HMR made by Hornady, all ready for the spring squirrels. The box is not that heavy, maybe 14 lbs. If you escape in a car you can load ten times as much. If you escape on foot, I'd probably dump some food items and take all the ammo because food is easier to find; you can always shoot a bird if you have to, but you can't defend yourself with a can of beans.
I'd light a cigarette to go with my 5 o'clock shadow, strap on a bullet belt, and teach any of the dogs responsible for this mess,
And once you are well on your war path you will suddenly discover that bullets in your bullet belt don't come with cartridge, primer and powder charge. You'd have to throw them, real hard:-) or perhaps study ahead of time how this whole thing works.
RFID works using non-ionizing radiation (i.e. doesn't break molecules or DNA), not sure how there can be cancer, at least with the RF part.
It doesn't have to be related to the RF. Cells contacting the foreign material of the RFID container can become damaged and that can lead to all kinds of problems, including cancer. link
you don't generally take back a book that you didn't like and get your money back.
No, but I look through the book first to see if it is of any interest to me. There is no time limit in most book stores, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes anyway to read a few pages here and there to tell the difference between hard sci-fi and a teary, feelingsy fantasy.
Did Word push compeating product out because it was better or because it came bundled with PCs? I bet it's the later.
Not really. Microsoft bundled MS DOS and Windows 3.x with PCs, but never, to my knowledge and memory, bundled Word 6.0 or Excel. It started happening, I think, only after Office 97 was built and MS's OEM sales machine spun up. Until then PC manufacturers didn't care about the software; I don't even remember if they installed any OS on the HDD or not. The reason is that software was cheap (MS Windows 3.x was priced at $50) and the hardware was expensive (a few thousand dollars.)
In fact, early PCs (pre-1995) were built by a large number of companies (many of them dead by now) and Microsoft did not have much of weight until Windows 95. Those were the years when competition was actually alive.
Wikipedia says that Word won because it was better. I used WordPerfect myself at that time, and I must say that WP was not as slick as Word. It gave you the "reveal codes" window where you could fix any formatting issues, but in Word it was easier to just format what you want however you want and not worry about "coding your document." In any case, it hardly matters what I think because the market thought that Word is better than already established Word Perfect and some other wordprocessors. In my opinion Word was just a little better than WordPerfect, but if asked to choose I would flip a coin. Both did the job well. But Microsoft had one thing going for them - consistency and persistence. Word is still with us; WordPerfect, on the other hand, not so much. Wikipedia explains when it went downhill:
WordPerfect was late in coming to market with a Windows version. The first mature version, WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows, was released in November 1992. Prior to that, there was a WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows, introduced a year earlier. That version had to be installed from DOS and was largely unpopular due to serious stability issues. By the time WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows was introduced, Microsoft Word for Windows version 2 had been on the market for over a year and had received its third interim release, v2.0c. WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used; for example, Alt-F4 became Exit Program, as opposed to WordPerfect's Block Text. The DOS version's impressive arsenal of finely tuned printer drivers was also rendered obsolete by Windows' use of its own printer device drivers.
Internally, WordPerfect for Windows still used the WordPerfect character set as its internal code. This caused WordPerfect for Windows to be unable to support some languages -- for example Chinese -- that were natively supported by Windows.
Actually I bet if I look the only suite the major OEMs will bundle with Windows PCs is MS Office.
No, actually there is another office suite called Microsoft Works, it is bundled for free with almost everything. It uses its own unique data formats, and I never used it. The complete Office is never bundled like that simply because it's expensive, and most people that buy computers at Fry's don't need MS Office anyway. It is common, though, to find trial versions of Office; that may count for something. I personally, working with computers and electronics for quite some time, don't have MS Office on my home laptop - I have OpenOffice. If my parents had a computer they wouldn't need Office. I believe businesses are the major consumer of Office licenses; maybe students come second (but at huge discount.) Entrepreneurs and business owners come after them, and they are already at a fraction of a percent, and they often need one seat for their whole business.
I think the whole issue of spying on barely literate peasants is overengineered by/. I could even agree that spying on city intellectuals would make at least some sense. But peasants? Forget it. If there is anything brewing in a remote village it won't be done on Internet, it will be done in tea houses, and that's where informers come into play.
So IMO the risk of spying on peasants through this 13% program is minimal. Peasants do not matter, and there are too many of them to watch each and every one personally. There will be no wasted thoughts of hypervisors in BIOS. Chinese authorities may be ruthless to political opponents, but in general they want to develop the country, and these computers would be used just for that - to help farmers to run their business better, become richer, and ultimately buy Chinese factory products. The latter is very important because currently Chinese industry depends on foreign orders too much, and if anything happens in the world China may be hit hard. So far it managed to squeak through the financial troubles, but it was a good lesson for Chinese rulers. They want to develop internal market for Chinese-made factory products.
My point is just that most people in the world (and in the USA) can't care less about their freedoms, in software and elsewhere. iPhone is just a test case. It is not hard to imagine this approach spreading to PCs. Windows already has the means built in. Simply require a valid signature on all.exe files - and guess who has the signing keys? You can sell this "for the children" or to fight viruses or to offer a guaranteed quality... the end result is the same - you lose.
They have to distribute the source code for it as well. Thus it should be much easier to spot every code that does not really belong there and aimed at spying on/restric/keeping in line the population
Chinese authorities don't need to do a thing. Just bundle a browser (IE on Windows, FF on Linux) and preconfigure its phishing checker to report all URLs to a server that is ran by the government. Preconfigure the checker to be ON by default. 99.999% of the intended audience will never realize what's happening. Those who know what it is will turn it off, but they are too smart anyway for *this level* of monitoring.
I'm not quite sure what value to assign to an oppressive government's software either
Assign a lot of value and you won't be wrong. Apple's iPhone is a shining example of a computer that doesn't allow execution of anything that is not approved by authorities. China, with all its oppression, is not there yet. Now look at Apple's profits.
someone can buy one of these and "repurpose" it to a non-legal copy of Windows, ending up with a 13% + (the price of Windows on the same machine) savings.
It's something that only a geek would do; and even if a geek does this, it doesn't matter. There aren't too many geeks in rural China, and it could be that there is more software available for Red Flag Linux in those remote areas than for Windows. Why? Because warez, even on CDs, need to be delivered and sold, and they need to be localized, and they need to be pre-cracked, and everything should work so that a rice farmer can just plug it in and use. But how many warez are like that? But RFL software can be distributed by the government, legally of course, and there is already so much of it that you need some advice on what to use (which one out of hundred text editors, for example?) IMO, a farmer would be better off getting a cheaper computer *and* a supported OS + applications. There is even no viable reason for a farmer to need Windows. You or me may need Windows to run some specific apps; but what apps a farmer needs? A Web browser, mostly. If there is no Internet link then he needs OpenOffice and a printer. His children need some programming language (which Linux distributions are not short of.) And perhaps a few thousand ebooks in the local language. Windows doesn't come with most of that, except the browser (and the browser is IE, to make things worse.)
And early production versions of MS Office worked perfectly? Or are you using a double standard?
In 1993-1995 I recall using (at work) a fairly early, pre-Office version of the Word. It had the fountain pen on the splash screen. I don't remember exactly what was the release name, but I suspect it was Word 6.0 (1993.) It worked quite well. This is why it pushed competing products (WordPerfect, AmiPro etc.) out of the way. Microsoft bundled it with Excel and called it "Office" some time in 1995, IIRC, and put some serious development into it also, as you know.
But the earliest version of MS Word that I ever saw was a monochrome Windows 3.0 application ("Word for Windows".) It was quite crude, but it was on par with the computer itself. Today MS WordPad is probably a good equivalent of it, only better. Even that, ridiculously simple by modern standards, Word worked.
StarOffice (which I tried) was a strange thing. On one hand, it had excellent functionality that Word never had to begin with. On the other hand, it was too complex for most users. Add a few bugs, and the recipe for disaster is ready. I was in fact ordered by my boss to convert a bunch of StarOffice documents to Word just so we could release the damned documentation - each time you opened it in StarOffice it paginated it in a new, unique way, and all our illustrations were horribly reshuffled. Believe me, not many were amused. Once I converted the documents to Word the problems stopped. You can attribute it to Word having more development years under its belt, but from business POV StarOffice was simply not ready for business use. It may be free, but what of that if it costs us $100 per each file open in time wasted to "fix" the formatting? You see why MS Word, being priced at a few hundred dollars, quickly appeared to be a great solution to our problems?
Sounds like a problem with that poorly written enterprise app, not Windows 7
Some applications naturally require lots of RAM and CPU cycles. It doesn't have to be some half-baked internally developed Java interface to Oracle (though those are popular, and I use one myself at work now and then.) Look at most high-end engineering applications - the whole line of Autodesk products, SolidWorks, PTC/CoCreate, FloWorks, Ansys, CST or Ansoft, and you will see that they *require* about 4 GB of RAM to perform reasonably well. Some need much more.
I am often amused that so many people honestly believe that in an enterprise people only need Outlook, IE and Office. That is maybe true for a secretary. But secretaries are assistants, they do not produce the final product themselves. In my field of work engineers do that. Most people in my department at work are engineers; we have two secretaries for 30 people (they do contracts and accounting.) Those two secretaries, besides the usual Office, run that Oracle thing. But everyone else runs Xilinx tools (average compile time several hours,) ModelSim (I shouldn't probably mention average simulation time - a full simulation would take days,) Genesys and ADS for analog design, and so on and so forth. These high-end engineering applications not only need resources, they also cost lots of money and they are not replaceable by something else. They are practically single source solutions. For example, CST - theoretically Ansoft is a competitor, but in reality it isn't (too far behind.) In Xilinx world you may splurge on Synplify Pro and reduce 1% of your implementation time to 0.9% - but the bulk of time is spent in Xilinx proprietary tools like map and par, and nobody knows how to code those because they implement Xilinx's secrets.
So to summarize, maybe an old PC with 512 MB RAM and 1 GHz CPU would be somewhat adequate for order entry at your local car mechanic's office. Once in a while he walks into the office, slightly wipes his oily hands sometimes, punches client's name with one finger and the details show up on the screen. He types "repl oil, flt" and presses F10, the order is printed and that concludes his painful interaction with the computer. So for such applications sure, give him an old PC and he'd be happy as a clam. But if you are a worker who really uses the computer, slow PC is a bottleneck. Businesses can't afford to give employees slow PCs because that would lower their efficiency. The incremental cost of a modern PC (typically rental) is miniscule compared to the employee's salary.
So they haven't tried an female-only crew yet, then.
IMO six females are just as likely to become unhappy as six males.
what are you going to eat for a year? cows? frozen hamburgers?
Meat has lots of calories and can be transported dried and frozen, if necessary. You can't do that with stored vegetables. The ones you grow on board you eat, of course.
CFO: Why the hell is this accounting peon running Excel when the company switched to Open Office months ago?
IT: Because this peon is an outside contractor working for an accounting company that you hired. That company has 10,000 employees, 50,000 clients and I don't think they will want to switch to OpenOffice just for us.
FUD. I'm running Windows 7 happily on a machine that has 512 MB RAM and 1GHz processor.
FUD. My work laptop has 2 GB of RAM, 3 GHz CPU (two cores, IIRC) and it is too slow for intensive work. In the business environment booting Windows is not enough - you also need to open and keep running Outlook, Word, Excel, a corporate antivirus, a dozen of other system utilities installed by the IT, an IM, IE (a dozen tabs,) and often a poorly written "enterprise" app that will gladly eat all the RAM that you have and ask for more. All that is supposed to run very snappily, and not wedge the laptop for 5 minutes when you switch applications.
the problem is fear, once you get people to get over their fear teaching them a new system is easy.
Even worse problem is that many people actively do not want to learn a new system. Instead they use the new system as a justification why their work is not done yet. I had such workers. You have only two options with them - either fire them or to satisfy their every whim, until they run out of excuses. If I were free to choose, the former option would be frequently used. But there are other opinions and other considerations; an essential worker with unique knowledge is often valued more than all the computer equipment and software he can possibly need.
I even agree with you that modern western workers are lazy. Often they feel entitled to the job and to the salary, even if they don't do much to earn them. That's when these tricks with excuses are played, pitting IT against their managers. This is one of reasons why using non-mainstream equipment and software is risky.
I have converted several MS Office users to Open Office, they have never complained.
I tried to convert myself to OpenOffice, and had to give up after I encountered too many bugs. For example, paragraphs would jump from one page to another; three ways to anchor an image, all wrong; table of contents is way too complex and not matching the pagination of the hour. I'm sure there were other issues also. That was pre-2.x OpenOffice, something like 1.4.x, but still it was a production release and it just was not dependable. I wasn't even importing Word documents - the whole document was written in OO from start to finish, and it was highly problematic.
I currently have the latest OO installed on this laptop at home, and I'm trying to use it again, carefully. Absence of that horrible ribbon is definitely nice. But reliability-wise MS Office is probably still better. Fortunately, I do not demand too much of reliability at home. At work we all use MS Office 2007.
If your admins are going around installing an OS and apps on each machine individually in a corporate environment, you need new admins.
Each box has to be handled individually regardless of what you do. Admins may want to reimage the HDD, they may want to do clean unattended install, or they may want to do a standard manual install. It all depends on how many boxes need to be processed and how similar the results should be. But every box has to be touched - plugged in, powered up, and booted from some CD.
And that much work is needed if you are dealing with new boxes. What if you need to upgrade existing machines? It's a night mare's job. All computers would be different. All would have some precious data on them that needs to be preserved. Some boxes would be just faulty. Some hardware would be insufficient for the upgrade. There would be 100's of different video cards, network and other I/O that needs their own, very special drivers. Windows 7 may not even have drivers for some older peripherals. No, an upgrade on a large scale would be risky and expensive, requiring a personal touch.
In other words, "costs incurred by a geek in his basement" != "costs incurred by a large company during mass deployment of a new OS". The $2K figure sounds very reasonable.
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What if you're running late? What if you're going to return from vacation a day later than you thought, how about a day earlier?
It is easier to do nothing in all these cases. Entering a cold house is not deadly, and it can be fixed in five minutes after you walk in. If you return from vacation a day later you will fail to save the Earth from the $daily_catastrophe and we all die, isn't it so?
In reference to the "serious flaws" and weaknesses...ever wondered why none of the home automation tech we've been promised since 1950 has come to be common in homes? Things like auto-opening drapes, autoadjusting lighting, stuff like that.
It is common in some homes. There are contractors who offer automation, and there are individuals who buy pieces and arrange them. The main reason why it is not in every home is not cost and not patents, it's the low value of all that technology. I do have HA set up, and will be installing more switches and boxes. Why? Because I want to be able to centrally control lights (for example) and be able to find out where is that light that is still on when I go to bed. And to turn it off remotely. And I want to know where someone is walking and either turn the light on there automatically, or beep to tell me that someone is where nobody should be. But that's just me, because I do electronic stuff for living anyway, and I can afford it. If you have a $100K house you probably would be ill advised to spend $10K on HA - it's not even close to being worth it. But if you live in a more expensive, larger house, with some land, lawn, driveway, etc. - then you may find that $10K spent on HA increases resale value of your house because it is actually of use on a larger property.
you could trap the squirrels alive and neuter them, so they can't reproduce!
California Fish and Game regulations have this to say:
475. Methods of Take for Nongame Birds and Nongame Mammals.
(d) Traps may be used to take nongame birds and nongame mammals only in accordance with the provisions of Section 465.5 of these regulations and sections 3003.1 and 4004 of the Fish and Game Code.
465.5. Use of Traps.
(1) Immediate Dispatch or Release. All furbearing and nongame mammals that are legal to trap must be immediately killed or released. Unless released, trapped animals shall be killed by shooting where local ordinances, landowners, and safety permit. This regulation does not prohibit employees of federal, state, or local government from using chemical euthanasia to dispatch trapped animals.
As you can see, people already thought of all possibilities and made sure that only sufficiently humane ones are permitted. In fact, hunters are required to understand ethics and the exam includes quite a few questions on the subject. If you don't have a hunting license yet I recommend you to go to a weekend course and get one, the course costs only $15 and it's extremely interesting, even if you do not plan to ever hunt. The certificate that you get is yours for life, and it gives you the right to get a hunting license whenever you need it (most people apply immediately, of course.) And, as a bonus, you'll be well prepared for survival if that is ever needed.
[1] The other species is Spermophilus richardsonii, they live in North California / South Oregon.
You must have a lot of squirrels in your area.
Millions, actually. Hunting doesn't even make a dent in their population, and they cause a lot of damage to farmers and ranchers. I'm talking about ground squirrels, not about tree squirrels - the latter are game species. I had more than a hundred ground squirrels last summer near my house alone, running everywhere like rats, eating my plums right off the tree, and such. Don't know how many will be there next March. I had to work on their numbers because their burrows are eroding the hillside, and because I like plums very much :-)
In 2010 I expect to use those 17HMR, and a good deal of high velocity 22LR, in Modoc County starting in March, and later, during whole summer, in Central Valley (Carrizo Plain.)
I was only picking on GP's mistake of calling ammunition "bullets" - this mistake is quite popular. Bullets alone won't do you much good, unless you are familiar with the reloading press.
But with regard to leftover ammo and guns in case of major troubles ... ok, let's assume some people decide to abandon their homes and go ... where? Ok, let's assume they are gone. You are standing on the road, and there are presumably empty houses around you. You can break into some, but if the house is not empty you will be very dead. If you are lucky and the house is empty you can start searching. The house is large, and ammo is usually stored hidden and locked. You can spend a lot of time searching for something that may not even exist. Your time is not free because in a conflict zone there is always something hunting you, be it zombies or just gangs. So here you are, in an abandoned house, with little ammo of your own, holding a position that the owner himself saw as indefensible. Instead of moving on you are searching for ammo and guns; meanwhile zombies come closer and closer...
Also about the weight. I think I have about 2,000 rounds of 17HMR made by Hornady, all ready for the spring squirrels. The box is not that heavy, maybe 14 lbs. If you escape in a car you can load ten times as much. If you escape on foot, I'd probably dump some food items and take all the ammo because food is easier to find; you can always shoot a bird if you have to, but you can't defend yourself with a can of beans.
I'd light a cigarette to go with my 5 o'clock shadow, strap on a bullet belt, and teach any of the dogs responsible for this mess,
And once you are well on your war path you will suddenly discover that bullets in your bullet belt don't come with cartridge, primer and powder charge. You'd have to throw them, real hard :-) or perhaps study ahead of time how this whole thing works.
RFID works using non-ionizing radiation (i.e. doesn't break molecules or DNA), not sure how there can be cancer, at least with the RF part.
It doesn't have to be related to the RF. Cells contacting the foreign material of the RFID container can become damaged and that can lead to all kinds of problems, including cancer. link
you don't generally take back a book that you didn't like and get your money back.
No, but I look through the book first to see if it is of any interest to me. There is no time limit in most book stores, and it doesn't take more than a few minutes anyway to read a few pages here and there to tell the difference between hard sci-fi and a teary, feelingsy fantasy.
Did Word push compeating product out because it was better or because it came bundled with PCs? I bet it's the later.
Not really. Microsoft bundled MS DOS and Windows 3.x with PCs, but never, to my knowledge and memory, bundled Word 6.0 or Excel. It started happening, I think, only after Office 97 was built and MS's OEM sales machine spun up. Until then PC manufacturers didn't care about the software; I don't even remember if they installed any OS on the HDD or not. The reason is that software was cheap (MS Windows 3.x was priced at $50) and the hardware was expensive (a few thousand dollars.)
In fact, early PCs (pre-1995) were built by a large number of companies (many of them dead by now) and Microsoft did not have much of weight until Windows 95. Those were the years when competition was actually alive.
Wikipedia says that Word won because it was better. I used WordPerfect myself at that time, and I must say that WP was not as slick as Word. It gave you the "reveal codes" window where you could fix any formatting issues, but in Word it was easier to just format what you want however you want and not worry about "coding your document." In any case, it hardly matters what I think because the market thought that Word is better than already established Word Perfect and some other wordprocessors. In my opinion Word was just a little better than WordPerfect, but if asked to choose I would flip a coin. Both did the job well. But Microsoft had one thing going for them - consistency and persistence. Word is still with us; WordPerfect, on the other hand, not so much. Wikipedia explains when it went downhill:
Actually I bet if I look the only suite the major OEMs will bundle with Windows PCs is MS Office.
No, actually there is another office suite called Microsoft Works, it is bundled for free with almost everything. It uses its own unique data formats, and I never used it. The complete Office is never bundled like that simply because it's expensive, and most people that buy computers at Fry's don't need MS Office anyway. It is common, though, to find trial versions of Office; that may count for something. I personally, working with computers and electronics for quite some time, don't have MS Office on my home laptop - I have OpenOffice. If my parents had a computer they wouldn't need Office. I believe businesses are the major consumer of Office licenses; maybe students come second (but at huge discount.) Entrepreneurs and business owners come after them, and they are already at a fraction of a percent, and they often need one seat for their whole business.
On Windows I preferred
I think the whole issue of spying on barely literate peasants is overengineered by /. I could even agree that spying on city intellectuals would make at least some sense. But peasants? Forget it. If there is anything brewing in a remote village it won't be done on Internet, it will be done in tea houses, and that's where informers come into play.
So IMO the risk of spying on peasants through this 13% program is minimal. Peasants do not matter, and there are too many of them to watch each and every one personally. There will be no wasted thoughts of hypervisors in BIOS. Chinese authorities may be ruthless to political opponents, but in general they want to develop the country, and these computers would be used just for that - to help farmers to run their business better, become richer, and ultimately buy Chinese factory products. The latter is very important because currently Chinese industry depends on foreign orders too much, and if anything happens in the world China may be hit hard. So far it managed to squeak through the financial troubles, but it was a good lesson for Chinese rulers. They want to develop internal market for Chinese-made factory products.
My point is just that most people in the world (and in the USA) can't care less about their freedoms, in software and elsewhere. iPhone is just a test case. It is not hard to imagine this approach spreading to PCs. Windows already has the means built in. Simply require a valid signature on all .exe files - and guess who has the signing keys? You can sell this "for the children" or to fight viruses or to offer a guaranteed quality... the end result is the same - you lose.
They have to distribute the source code for it as well. Thus it should be much easier to spot every code that does not really belong there and aimed at spying on/restric/keeping in line the population
Chinese authorities don't need to do a thing. Just bundle a browser (IE on Windows, FF on Linux) and preconfigure its phishing checker to report all URLs to a server that is ran by the government. Preconfigure the checker to be ON by default. 99.999% of the intended audience will never realize what's happening. Those who know what it is will turn it off, but they are too smart anyway for *this level* of monitoring.
I'm not quite sure what value to assign to an oppressive government's software either
Assign a lot of value and you won't be wrong. Apple's iPhone is a shining example of a computer that doesn't allow execution of anything that is not approved by authorities. China, with all its oppression, is not there yet. Now look at Apple's profits.
someone can buy one of these and "repurpose" it to a non-legal copy of Windows, ending up with a 13% + (the price of Windows on the same machine) savings.
It's something that only a geek would do; and even if a geek does this, it doesn't matter. There aren't too many geeks in rural China, and it could be that there is more software available for Red Flag Linux in those remote areas than for Windows. Why? Because warez, even on CDs, need to be delivered and sold, and they need to be localized, and they need to be pre-cracked, and everything should work so that a rice farmer can just plug it in and use. But how many warez are like that? But RFL software can be distributed by the government, legally of course, and there is already so much of it that you need some advice on what to use (which one out of hundred text editors, for example?) IMO, a farmer would be better off getting a cheaper computer *and* a supported OS + applications. There is even no viable reason for a farmer to need Windows. You or me may need Windows to run some specific apps; but what apps a farmer needs? A Web browser, mostly. If there is no Internet link then he needs OpenOffice and a printer. His children need some programming language (which Linux distributions are not short of.) And perhaps a few thousand ebooks in the local language. Windows doesn't come with most of that, except the browser (and the browser is IE, to make things worse.)
Having to buy a "qualifying" computer just to get 13% off doesn't seem like a deal.
Computers are still expensive. Those 13% translate to some visible savings to a Chinese peasant.
And early production versions of MS Office worked perfectly? Or are you using a double standard?
In 1993-1995 I recall using (at work) a fairly early, pre-Office version of the Word. It had the fountain pen on the splash screen. I don't remember exactly what was the release name, but I suspect it was Word 6.0 (1993.) It worked quite well. This is why it pushed competing products (WordPerfect, AmiPro etc.) out of the way. Microsoft bundled it with Excel and called it "Office" some time in 1995, IIRC, and put some serious development into it also, as you know.
But the earliest version of MS Word that I ever saw was a monochrome Windows 3.0 application ("Word for Windows".) It was quite crude, but it was on par with the computer itself. Today MS WordPad is probably a good equivalent of it, only better. Even that, ridiculously simple by modern standards, Word worked.
StarOffice (which I tried) was a strange thing. On one hand, it had excellent functionality that Word never had to begin with. On the other hand, it was too complex for most users. Add a few bugs, and the recipe for disaster is ready. I was in fact ordered by my boss to convert a bunch of StarOffice documents to Word just so we could release the damned documentation - each time you opened it in StarOffice it paginated it in a new, unique way, and all our illustrations were horribly reshuffled. Believe me, not many were amused. Once I converted the documents to Word the problems stopped. You can attribute it to Word having more development years under its belt, but from business POV StarOffice was simply not ready for business use. It may be free, but what of that if it costs us $100 per each file open in time wasted to "fix" the formatting? You see why MS Word, being priced at a few hundred dollars, quickly appeared to be a great solution to our problems?
Sounds like a problem with that poorly written enterprise app, not Windows 7
Some applications naturally require lots of RAM and CPU cycles. It doesn't have to be some half-baked internally developed Java interface to Oracle (though those are popular, and I use one myself at work now and then.) Look at most high-end engineering applications - the whole line of Autodesk products, SolidWorks, PTC/CoCreate, FloWorks, Ansys, CST or Ansoft, and you will see that they *require* about 4 GB of RAM to perform reasonably well. Some need much more.
I am often amused that so many people honestly believe that in an enterprise people only need Outlook, IE and Office. That is maybe true for a secretary. But secretaries are assistants, they do not produce the final product themselves. In my field of work engineers do that. Most people in my department at work are engineers; we have two secretaries for 30 people (they do contracts and accounting.) Those two secretaries, besides the usual Office, run that Oracle thing. But everyone else runs Xilinx tools (average compile time several hours,) ModelSim (I shouldn't probably mention average simulation time - a full simulation would take days,) Genesys and ADS for analog design, and so on and so forth. These high-end engineering applications not only need resources, they also cost lots of money and they are not replaceable by something else. They are practically single source solutions. For example, CST - theoretically Ansoft is a competitor, but in reality it isn't (too far behind.) In Xilinx world you may splurge on Synplify Pro and reduce 1% of your implementation time to 0.9% - but the bulk of time is spent in Xilinx proprietary tools like map and par, and nobody knows how to code those because they implement Xilinx's secrets.
So to summarize, maybe an old PC with 512 MB RAM and 1 GHz CPU would be somewhat adequate for order entry at your local car mechanic's office. Once in a while he walks into the office, slightly wipes his oily hands sometimes, punches client's name with one finger and the details show up on the screen. He types "repl oil, flt" and presses F10, the order is printed and that concludes his painful interaction with the computer. So for such applications sure, give him an old PC and he'd be happy as a clam. But if you are a worker who really uses the computer, slow PC is a bottleneck. Businesses can't afford to give employees slow PCs because that would lower their efficiency. The incremental cost of a modern PC (typically rental) is miniscule compared to the employee's salary.
How you can measure your mass in space: link
So they haven't tried an female-only crew yet, then.
IMO six females are just as likely to become unhappy as six males.
what are you going to eat for a year? cows? frozen hamburgers?
Meat has lots of calories and can be transported dried and frozen, if necessary. You can't do that with stored vegetables. The ones you grow on board you eat, of course.
CFO: Why the hell is this accounting peon running Excel when the company switched to Open Office months ago?
IT: Because this peon is an outside contractor working for an accounting company that you hired. That company has 10,000 employees, 50,000 clients and I don't think they will want to switch to OpenOffice just for us.
FUD. I'm running Windows 7 happily on a machine that has 512 MB RAM and 1GHz processor.
FUD. My work laptop has 2 GB of RAM, 3 GHz CPU (two cores, IIRC) and it is too slow for intensive work. In the business environment booting Windows is not enough - you also need to open and keep running Outlook, Word, Excel, a corporate antivirus, a dozen of other system utilities installed by the IT, an IM, IE (a dozen tabs,) and often a poorly written "enterprise" app that will gladly eat all the RAM that you have and ask for more. All that is supposed to run very snappily, and not wedge the laptop for 5 minutes when you switch applications.
the problem is fear, once you get people to get over their fear teaching them a new system is easy.
Even worse problem is that many people actively do not want to learn a new system. Instead they use the new system as a justification why their work is not done yet. I had such workers. You have only two options with them - either fire them or to satisfy their every whim, until they run out of excuses. If I were free to choose, the former option would be frequently used. But there are other opinions and other considerations; an essential worker with unique knowledge is often valued more than all the computer equipment and software he can possibly need.
I even agree with you that modern western workers are lazy. Often they feel entitled to the job and to the salary, even if they don't do much to earn them. That's when these tricks with excuses are played, pitting IT against their managers. This is one of reasons why using non-mainstream equipment and software is risky.
I have converted several MS Office users to Open Office, they have never complained.
I tried to convert myself to OpenOffice, and had to give up after I encountered too many bugs. For example, paragraphs would jump from one page to another; three ways to anchor an image, all wrong; table of contents is way too complex and not matching the pagination of the hour. I'm sure there were other issues also. That was pre-2.x OpenOffice, something like 1.4.x, but still it was a production release and it just was not dependable. I wasn't even importing Word documents - the whole document was written in OO from start to finish, and it was highly problematic.
I currently have the latest OO installed on this laptop at home, and I'm trying to use it again, carefully. Absence of that horrible ribbon is definitely nice. But reliability-wise MS Office is probably still better. Fortunately, I do not demand too much of reliability at home. At work we all use MS Office 2007.
If your admins are going around installing an OS and apps on each machine individually in a corporate environment, you need new admins.
Each box has to be handled individually regardless of what you do. Admins may want to reimage the HDD, they may want to do clean unattended install, or they may want to do a standard manual install. It all depends on how many boxes need to be processed and how similar the results should be. But every box has to be touched - plugged in, powered up, and booted from some CD.
And that much work is needed if you are dealing with new boxes. What if you need to upgrade existing machines? It's a night mare's job. All computers would be different. All would have some precious data on them that needs to be preserved. Some boxes would be just faulty. Some hardware would be insufficient for the upgrade. There would be 100's of different video cards, network and other I/O that needs their own, very special drivers. Windows 7 may not even have drivers for some older peripherals. No, an upgrade on a large scale would be risky and expensive, requiring a personal touch.
In other words, "costs incurred by a geek in his basement" != "costs incurred by a large company during mass deployment of a new OS". The $2K figure sounds very reasonable.