This statement annoyed me the most. Either it does or does not exist, not both.
From flatlander's point of view, a sphere does not exist anywhere in his 2D universe; however a projection of it does (a circle or a point.) The article is correct to say that a certain 4D object can not exist (such as being fully contained) within a 3D space, just as a 3D billiard ball can not be contained within a 2D sheet of paper. Even a flatlander can't deny existence of billiard balls if he can conjecture the possibility, even if he can't directly observe them.
Black holes are theorized to evaporate, and the smaller they get the faster they evaporate. However this is an unproven theory, and if it is seriously incorrect then we may have a problem.
On the other hand, if the scientists accidentally produce a constantly growing black hole that orbits above and through the planet and makes holes in everything then at least these scientists' theories will be proven wrong, and they will be ashamed of their stupidity for the rest of their lives.
Yes, very few - because it is far more practical (and cheaper) to just send people home in a highly improbable situation like that. Besides, most people in businesses don't use computers (or use more than computers) and can not work from home anyway. If even all banks will close the store will still accept your cash - provided that someone is still alive in the store to service you (and if not then you don't need to worry about paying.)
Another reason may be that many businesses are insured against natural disasters and other unforeseen circumstances; if they close for a week or two they may have a claim. However there would be no insurance pay for your preparations and training to work from home; that money is right out of your pocket. To be prepared just doesn't make business sense, unless your trade is of life-or-death type, like a hospital. But hospitals have their own, very specific plans in case of epidemics, and nobody there would be "working from home". The rest of businesses, like stock exchanges and publishing and construction and education and engineering will be better off closed, until they are specifically needed to combat the virus or whatever.
And yet another reason why businesses do not embrace working from home is accountability. If your productivity can't be objectively measured (by counting the widgets that you made during the shift) then the work at home becomes a paid family time for 90% of employees (the remaining 10% enjoy the work and honestly work their hours and more; but they are in serious minority here.) Besides, what is the chance that workers will be merrily clicking on Excel tables at home during an epidemic? They'd be buying supplies, ammo and heading for the hills, or at least sealing the premises if there are no hills nearby. Working - at home or anywhere else - will not be even considered.
I can grant you the power outlet and the power cord, but if fire starts in a Dell-made power supply then it's probably Dell's fault. Power supplies aren't supposed to go up in flames, whatever you do with their input and output. I also assume that the fire investigator didn't point at the laptop just because it was there - so was the TV set and the radio and every other electrical appliance.
There are any number of reasons the laptop could have caught fire, without it being the laptop's fault
In other words, it is OK for a laptop to legitimately and without fault catch fire? I would like to hear a few of such scenarios that could occur on a writing desk in a farm house.
Gates's Microsoft and Ballmer's Microsoft are two different companies. Just look at Office 2007 and Vista, so [unpleasantly] different they are from the previous releases. In this light it is possible that the modern MS is done with free education, and is going in for the money.
There was no bad car analogy in this thread yet, so let's introduce one. Imagine yourself being arrested and given a speeding ticket for doing 30 mph in a 30 mph zone just because your car can go faster than that.
It would be very different from arresting someone who drives at 50 mph so that you get a message and slow down.
I tried to use Word 2007 to write a 3-page document - gave up in disgust after 15 minutes of trying to find things that were obvious in Word 2003. Office 2007 is not coming to my office, thank you very much.
It's not likely that the thief would be using the laptop himself. He will sell the laptop to parents who are in need of a laptop - because they haven't won one in a national lottery, for example, or if the child had his/her laptop stolen or broken.
the audio stack in Windows Vista has been rewritten so people can have per-app audio control
Is there anyone who asked for this feature? I can't even imagine how to use it and when. Audio control on Windows is complex already, with 10 sliders for every input under the Sun, and now they added more, one for each application? Oh joy...
One solution would be immediately apparent to any mentally challenged person ("stop doing that".) Normal people can easily come up with several good plans how to fix this mess. And here we are, with MS that has no solution for days! Are we supposed to believe that MS does not know how their keys are made and what bits enable what?
But aren't OS/X upgrades sold? If so, there is definitely some p1racy potential if one Mac owner "shares" his upgrade of the OS with other Mac owners. Maybe Apple just depends on the fact that there is a 1,000 miles on average between any two Mac owners?;-)
I'm sure someone currently employed at MS is going to be looking for a new job on Monday.
Wishful thinking. First of all, it would require a sense of personal and corporate responsibility - not something that is easy to find at Microsoft. Secondly, people make mistakes, even bad mistakes. It was not one person's mistake, though - it was a whole chain of errors - from the coder to the release manager to the web developer to the QA to the tech support - they all failed, not just Jim the Coder who mistyped a number. And they are still failing by doing nothing to help the people. At the very least, the bad web page should be removed, so that no more victims are created. But I guess at $450 per mouse click it's a legit racket in MS book.
If a MS OS starts to require a drop of your blood each time you log in or unlock the computer, do you think the product would be still popular? What, in your opinion, will make the customer to finally say no? IMO and from my business' point of view, this moment has been reached with Vista.
Banks probably firewalled all XP boxes to death - as they should have done to start with. Also, if you disable automatic update service through the AD policy the XP becomes quite docile. XP can be used, and is used in such "high responsibility" environments. Vista, OTOH, may not be.
The business world has a lot of pull, and MS already extended XP support to 2011 or something. If Vista is indeed rejected by businesses then MS has plenty of time to remove the DRM and reactivation and fluff with glitter, and call it "MS Vista Industrial" - that may be acceptable (at XP prices, though.) Pretty much a small SP3 for XP, that's all that businesses want.
But the main thing is to try to get software and hardware vendors to maintain "Windows 2000/XP compatibility".
At this point it's the easiest thing to do (do nothing.) But I can foresee that MS will come up with.NET 4.0 or something that requires Vista... in any case, there are always possibilities, but XP is the second MS OS that really works (after Win2K, which generally worked, after huge number of service packs,) and there were complains about EOL of Win2K still.
The difference here is huge, though. MS forked the OS in a big way. XP was a totally painless upgrade from Win2k; you lost nothing, you changed none of the GUIs, and you got to keep your classic (or corporate) theme etc. Most people wouldn't even realize that they got upgraded over the weekend. But who can claim the same with Vista? It's so much different (I played with one of RCs and drove it into the ground in 30 minutes, easily) that *I* can't say I can use it, despite my considerable experience with anything at or above SN74HC00 level. I was seriously confused about where the Control Panel is, how to do this, how to do that... and regular folks would likely need a lifetime of retraining to get barely OK with it. And all that pain for what reason?
I'll say it again: this is the time to break free from the MS O/S monopoly.
Yes, time - but where to go? Autodesk invested billions into AutoCAD and other products; their Inventor suite is married to the most inner guts of Windows, using DirectX and OLE and COM/COM+ and every other Windows "technology" that there is. Do you think, wearing Autodesk's hat, it is practical and likely to just dump the 10M LOC codebase that they built up and switch to something else? They can ship their own Linux with each Inventor package, for all I care, and a computer to run that too, so expensive the software is ($5K for the starter version.) But they *don't have* Linux version, and with all these Windows hooks into vital body parts, how long will it take to rewrite?
Nevertheless your question is very valid because MS just demonstrated, very publicly, that it will do whatever it wants, customers be damned. You see, until now Windows was seen as an "always there" platform that everyone has and everyone uses and everyone can afford. This is changing fast, and MS made itself a huge disservice by making Vista such a beast and at the same time by threatening to pull XP from the market within a year. For people like CAD makers a year is a terribly short time; they write *today* what they will sell in a year. I don't know how they are going to take this, but from what people report AutoCAD 2007 does not work under Vista, and that's the most lightweight package they have. If I were on Autodesk's board I would seriously ask where we plan to be in 10 years, when MS, for example, decides to only sell home entertainment consoles that explode if you try to change a fuse.
So again, the industry is only now seeing how the Windows monoculture can fold within only few years. MS came up with a product that is not suitable to businesses, and at the same time it pulls sales and support of the previous, well working software. I can see serious harm to US and other businesses. If I were the Congress I would forbid MS to drop sales and support of XP - and that could be the best outcome for MS as well. Otherwise businesses may be forced into Linux's embrace, kicking and screaming probably, but with no other choice nevertheless; insanity of "renting the OS" that is programmed to die on you as soon as it suspects something (or when MS wants more money) is unacceptable from every business POV. Businesses need assurance that the s/w that they build the business upon won't explode on its own, and Vista guarantees just the opposite. Maybe it's time to borrow Hugo Chavez and nationalize MS? Seriously, it is not a private company any more, it is a national and international resource. What if MS decides to close the shop, for example? That would be unacceptable, but they can do it.
That's what most of businesses are going to do for a long time; the reason is that XP works well enough, is already customized to the specifics of the business, supports tons of essential apps, and is very well provided with drivers. There is simply no business reason to downgrade to Vista. If anyone starts talking "Aero", it's not going to work on business machines because of many reasons, in particular because IT departments don't buy screaming hot video GPUs to run Excel.
Vista may be glittering enough to lure a clueless home user who listens to sirens at Best Buy, but IT departments are very conservative, and for a good reason - their purchasing decisions are expensive and they can't be done or undone just like that. Most companies have paid already for their software, and it's hard to come up with a reason to spend some more cash and to retrain people and to suffer compatibility problems to do exactly the same work as before, with no gain whatsoever. Even a medium size engineering company with 100 computer users can easily look at $1,000,000 cost of the switch, considering forced upgrades of related software (that won't work on Vista) and also considering becoming beta testers of said software and of Vista itself. Training costs, with these GUI changes, will be also extreme: in this thread a geek complains that Vista is unwieldly to him; just imagine how hordes of non-geeks will react to the same!
Mandatory DRM and WPA and WGA stuff does not help either. Currently if XP is activated it stays activated; but when you have hundreds, or thousands of boxes and they randomly want to reactivate themselves - and can't, because of one reason or another - how much live, personal support will it take to resolve? Or even worse, what if the user of the computer disregards reactivation warnings until the box is done for, and then he needs some files or some work done on it right now at the latest? It easily might be a notebook outside of sysadmin's reach, with some business-critical files of a PHB. Show me a business that can be OK with that; even your typical neighbourhood business of brothers - car mechanics can't afford to have their main (and the only) accounting computer to go out, they can't bill anyone and they can't release cars to owners, and they can't do business any more! So why would any business, from the smallest to the largest, want to have *anything* to do with Vista?
So businesses will be running XP for a long, long time - unless MS removes all this non-stop WPA/WGA/DRM stuff from business computers, completely, along with new themes and new menus and new file manager, and new... but that makes it XP then. Well, software does not get obsolete on its own, so as long as ISVs keep supporting their business products on XP the XP will be alive and well. It does not even matter if MS decides to EOL it - businesses will make their displeasure heard; Microsoft may be large, but it is not larger than the rest of the US industry, not even mentioning the rest of the world. It was put on notice before.
Right now MS plans to obsolete XP "12 to 24 months after release of Vista". We shall see how that plays out. If they want to stop selling XP licenses, does it entitle current licensees of XP to deploy more XP seats for free, since MS does not want the money? We'll find out.
Toss a coin and let it land on the ground. What is the probability that the coin is heads up? If you answered 1/2, you do not understand basic probability theory, or statistics.
You are right. Obvious cases like the coin getting stuck in the air, or resting on the edge, must be considered, or even more if you get into the mass and surface properties of a particular coin... I know quite a few statisticians, though, who would be quite happy with an ideal coin. For them either of two possible outcomes would be equally probable, which puts us in the neighborhood of 1/2.
Slashdot Mirror
From flatlander's point of view, a sphere does not exist anywhere in his 2D universe; however a projection of it does (a circle or a point.) The article is correct to say that a certain 4D object can not exist (such as being fully contained) within a 3D space, just as a 3D billiard ball can not be contained within a 2D sheet of paper. Even a flatlander can't deny existence of billiard balls if he can conjecture the possibility, even if he can't directly observe them.
On the other hand, if the scientists accidentally produce a constantly growing black hole that orbits above and through the planet and makes holes in everything then at least these scientists' theories will be proven wrong, and they will be ashamed of their stupidity for the rest of their lives.
This had been discussed here, and the plan to create microscopic black holes on Earth is something to be wary of.
Another reason may be that many businesses are insured against natural disasters and other unforeseen circumstances; if they close for a week or two they may have a claim. However there would be no insurance pay for your preparations and training to work from home; that money is right out of your pocket. To be prepared just doesn't make business sense, unless your trade is of life-or-death type, like a hospital. But hospitals have their own, very specific plans in case of epidemics, and nobody there would be "working from home". The rest of businesses, like stock exchanges and publishing and construction and education and engineering will be better off closed, until they are specifically needed to combat the virus or whatever.
And yet another reason why businesses do not embrace working from home is accountability. If your productivity can't be objectively measured (by counting the widgets that you made during the shift) then the work at home becomes a paid family time for 90% of employees (the remaining 10% enjoy the work and honestly work their hours and more; but they are in serious minority here.) Besides, what is the chance that workers will be merrily clicking on Excel tables at home during an epidemic? They'd be buying supplies, ammo and heading for the hills, or at least sealing the premises if there are no hills nearby. Working - at home or anywhere else - will not be even considered.
I can grant you the power outlet and the power cord, but if fire starts in a Dell-made power supply then it's probably Dell's fault. Power supplies aren't supposed to go up in flames, whatever you do with their input and output. I also assume that the fire investigator didn't point at the laptop just because it was there - so was the TV set and the radio and every other electrical appliance.
In other words, it is OK for a laptop to legitimately and without fault catch fire? I would like to hear a few of such scenarios that could occur on a writing desk in a farm house.
Gates's Microsoft and Ballmer's Microsoft are two different companies. Just look at Office 2007 and Vista, so [unpleasantly] different they are from the previous releases. In this light it is possible that the modern MS is done with free education, and is going in for the money.
There was no bad car analogy in this thread yet, so let's introduce one. Imagine yourself being arrested and given a speeding ticket for doing 30 mph in a 30 mph zone just because your car can go faster than that. It would be very different from arresting someone who drives at 50 mph so that you get a message and slow down.
I tried to use Word 2007 to write a 3-page document - gave up in disgust after 15 minutes of trying to find things that were obvious in Word 2003. Office 2007 is not coming to my office, thank you very much.
In that case real bombs formed a happy face. But it is not possible for any number of happy faces to form a bomb and explode.
No, it means that you need to turn it on first.
It's not likely that the thief would be using the laptop himself. He will sell the laptop to parents who are in need of a laptop - because they haven't won one in a national lottery, for example, or if the child had his/her laptop stolen or broken.
Is there anyone who asked for this feature? I can't even imagine how to use it and when. Audio control on Windows is complex already, with 10 sliders for every input under the Sun, and now they added more, one for each application? Oh joy...
One solution would be immediately apparent to any mentally challenged person ("stop doing that".) Normal people can easily come up with several good plans how to fix this mess. And here we are, with MS that has no solution for days! Are we supposed to believe that MS does not know how their keys are made and what bits enable what?
But aren't OS/X upgrades sold? If so, there is definitely some p1racy potential if one Mac owner "shares" his upgrade of the OS with other Mac owners. Maybe Apple just depends on the fact that there is a 1,000 miles on average between any two Mac owners? ;-)
Wishful thinking. First of all, it would require a sense of personal and corporate responsibility - not something that is easy to find at Microsoft. Secondly, people make mistakes, even bad mistakes. It was not one person's mistake, though - it was a whole chain of errors - from the coder to the release manager to the web developer to the QA to the tech support - they all failed, not just Jim the Coder who mistyped a number. And they are still failing by doing nothing to help the people. At the very least, the bad web page should be removed, so that no more victims are created. But I guess at $450 per mouse click it's a legit racket in MS book.
If a MS OS starts to require a drop of your blood each time you log in or unlock the computer, do you think the product would be still popular? What, in your opinion, will make the customer to finally say no? IMO and from my business' point of view, this moment has been reached with Vista.
Banks probably firewalled all XP boxes to death - as they should have done to start with. Also, if you disable automatic update service through the AD policy the XP becomes quite docile. XP can be used, and is used in such "high responsibility" environments. Vista, OTOH, may not be.
The business world has a lot of pull, and MS already extended XP support to 2011 or something. If Vista is indeed rejected by businesses then MS has plenty of time to remove the DRM and reactivation and fluff with glitter, and call it "MS Vista Industrial" - that may be acceptable (at XP prices, though.) Pretty much a small SP3 for XP, that's all that businesses want.
Sir, I presume you are familiar with this document that comes directly from Microsoft?
At this point it's the easiest thing to do (do nothing.) But I can foresee that MS will come up with .NET 4.0 or something that requires Vista... in any case, there are always possibilities, but XP is the second MS OS that really works (after Win2K, which generally worked, after huge number of service packs,) and there were complains about EOL of Win2K still.
The difference here is huge, though. MS forked the OS in a big way. XP was a totally painless upgrade from Win2k; you lost nothing, you changed none of the GUIs, and you got to keep your classic (or corporate) theme etc. Most people wouldn't even realize that they got upgraded over the weekend. But who can claim the same with Vista? It's so much different (I played with one of RCs and drove it into the ground in 30 minutes, easily) that *I* can't say I can use it, despite my considerable experience with anything at or above SN74HC00 level. I was seriously confused about where the Control Panel is, how to do this, how to do that... and regular folks would likely need a lifetime of retraining to get barely OK with it. And all that pain for what reason?
I'll say it again: this is the time to break free from the MS O/S monopoly.
Yes, time - but where to go? Autodesk invested billions into AutoCAD and other products; their Inventor suite is married to the most inner guts of Windows, using DirectX and OLE and COM/COM+ and every other Windows "technology" that there is. Do you think, wearing Autodesk's hat, it is practical and likely to just dump the 10M LOC codebase that they built up and switch to something else? They can ship their own Linux with each Inventor package, for all I care, and a computer to run that too, so expensive the software is ($5K for the starter version.) But they *don't have* Linux version, and with all these Windows hooks into vital body parts, how long will it take to rewrite?
Nevertheless your question is very valid because MS just demonstrated, very publicly, that it will do whatever it wants, customers be damned. You see, until now Windows was seen as an "always there" platform that everyone has and everyone uses and everyone can afford. This is changing fast, and MS made itself a huge disservice by making Vista such a beast and at the same time by threatening to pull XP from the market within a year. For people like CAD makers a year is a terribly short time; they write *today* what they will sell in a year. I don't know how they are going to take this, but from what people report AutoCAD 2007 does not work under Vista, and that's the most lightweight package they have. If I were on Autodesk's board I would seriously ask where we plan to be in 10 years, when MS, for example, decides to only sell home entertainment consoles that explode if you try to change a fuse.
So again, the industry is only now seeing how the Windows monoculture can fold within only few years. MS came up with a product that is not suitable to businesses, and at the same time it pulls sales and support of the previous, well working software. I can see serious harm to US and other businesses. If I were the Congress I would forbid MS to drop sales and support of XP - and that could be the best outcome for MS as well. Otherwise businesses may be forced into Linux's embrace, kicking and screaming probably, but with no other choice nevertheless; insanity of "renting the OS" that is programmed to die on you as soon as it suspects something (or when MS wants more money) is unacceptable from every business POV. Businesses need assurance that the s/w that they build the business upon won't explode on its own, and Vista guarantees just the opposite. Maybe it's time to borrow Hugo Chavez and nationalize MS? Seriously, it is not a private company any more, it is a national and international resource. What if MS decides to close the shop, for example? That would be unacceptable, but they can do it.
That's what most of businesses are going to do for a long time; the reason is that XP works well enough, is already customized to the specifics of the business, supports tons of essential apps, and is very well provided with drivers. There is simply no business reason to downgrade to Vista. If anyone starts talking "Aero", it's not going to work on business machines because of many reasons, in particular because IT departments don't buy screaming hot video GPUs to run Excel.
Vista may be glittering enough to lure a clueless home user who listens to sirens at Best Buy, but IT departments are very conservative, and for a good reason - their purchasing decisions are expensive and they can't be done or undone just like that. Most companies have paid already for their software, and it's hard to come up with a reason to spend some more cash and to retrain people and to suffer compatibility problems to do exactly the same work as before, with no gain whatsoever. Even a medium size engineering company with 100 computer users can easily look at $1,000,000 cost of the switch, considering forced upgrades of related software (that won't work on Vista) and also considering becoming beta testers of said software and of Vista itself. Training costs, with these GUI changes, will be also extreme: in this thread a geek complains that Vista is unwieldly to him; just imagine how hordes of non-geeks will react to the same!
Mandatory DRM and WPA and WGA stuff does not help either. Currently if XP is activated it stays activated; but when you have hundreds, or thousands of boxes and they randomly want to reactivate themselves - and can't, because of one reason or another - how much live, personal support will it take to resolve? Or even worse, what if the user of the computer disregards reactivation warnings until the box is done for, and then he needs some files or some work done on it right now at the latest? It easily might be a notebook outside of sysadmin's reach, with some business-critical files of a PHB. Show me a business that can be OK with that; even your typical neighbourhood business of brothers - car mechanics can't afford to have their main (and the only) accounting computer to go out, they can't bill anyone and they can't release cars to owners, and they can't do business any more! So why would any business, from the smallest to the largest, want to have *anything* to do with Vista?
So businesses will be running XP for a long, long time - unless MS removes all this non-stop WPA/WGA/DRM stuff from business computers, completely, along with new themes and new menus and new file manager, and new ... but that makes it XP then. Well, software does not get obsolete on its own, so as long as ISVs keep supporting their business products on XP the XP will be alive and well. It does not even matter if MS decides to EOL it - businesses will make their displeasure heard; Microsoft may be large, but it is not larger than the rest of the US industry, not even mentioning the rest of the world. It was put on notice before.
Right now MS plans to obsolete XP "12 to 24 months after release of Vista". We shall see how that plays out. If they want to stop selling XP licenses, does it entitle current licensees of XP to deploy more XP seats for free, since MS does not want the money? We'll find out.
RSX-11M did that on PDP-11 before VAX was even built.
Well, there are examples, like Carly Fiorina and Patricia Dunn -- success upon success, and one after another to boot :-)
You are right. Obvious cases like the coin getting stuck in the air, or resting on the edge, must be considered, or even more if you get into the mass and surface properties of a particular coin... I know quite a few statisticians, though, who would be quite happy with an ideal coin. For them either of two possible outcomes would be equally probable, which puts us in the neighborhood of 1/2.