I've tried it on a multitude of powerful machines, and Vista still can't hack it *overall*. For my recent purchase of a Dell m1730 gaming laptop, I went with XP. Yes, it CAN support Vista, and probably fine, but why would I want to trade 20% of my system resources away for what I see as no gain?
As the unfortunate soul in my company that has to primarily deal with Microsoft, I was in the unique spot of writing our company's position document on it. In short: Vista is unsupported. There's a lot more than hardware specs that went into that decision. Compatibility, reliability, user interface, etc.
The true test will be when Vista SP1 is put head-to-head with XP SP3. If Vista can't perform at least EQUALLY as well as XP, then I predict most people will wait the 2 years to see if Windows 7 will be worth it.
I can tell you which one they will pick: Microsoft. Here's why, speaking from experience in a 3rd world country: Intellectual Property has ZERO respect. No one enforces it, so as a result, all software is sold at the cost of the CD. They even kindly burn the crack along with the app on the CD. I know of several shops that cater to this market in the town I visit. Remember, not all third world countries are dirt-poor with people starving in the streets. Many have some kind of economy, technology, and even basic infrastructure. Yes, a lot of folks live on $1 a day, but in a place like this, $100 a month is living very well for a family of 4.
So, the local computer shops sell PCs with a ton of apps installed on a Windows base. Why not, it doesn't cost anything! Average price for a used Compaq: about $200 fully loaded. Plus, it's virtually the industry standard OS, so any app you want to run will be tailored for Windows.
For the XO (I also own one), I can see the Windows load displacing the Linux load in no time.
Exactly. I'm the unfortunate soul tasked as the Primary Contact for our MS Gold Partnership. We use the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) to do the same thing but for hosting apps as a third party. If it weren't for that legal annoyance in their EULA, we would probably purchase the licenses even with the up front cost. There's little incentive for us to upgrade apps based on MS propaganda or some "3 year lifespan", and that's where the real savings kick in.
For example, we have a lot of very happy Office 2000 users out there that would scream if we forced them to change. If our market was demanding the latest and greatest every time it came out, it would be different. So in our case, it would make a lot more sense to purchase licenses if we were allowed.
Perhaps people are lumping the Wii in there with "next-gen" (regardless of technical prowess). Then based on the availability I guess it's fair to call it that. When you see a Wii on the shelf with some dust on it, then they can all be called "current".
Wow, the good folks in Madison must be hitting the nog pretty hard. It's obvious the ONLY connection here is youth. My favorite part of the article is how the lawmakers 'Aren't sure how much money would be generated'.
Can anyone help me understand this or is it nothing more than playing off mythical video game fears and targeting a group of people who don't vote?
Sure, you can even go to congress.org and find them. The problem is really with priorities. As the senator stated in the speech I saw (it was a private function for a company annual meeting, so he didn't have to worry about cameras or reporters), they get literally thousands of emails a day.
It's a shear numbers game. Most aren't even from people in their district. Whenever a hot button topic is up for a vote, the interested parties will rally their faithful and bombard them with form letter emails or calls to action. For example, a telephone company will probably circulate an email telling the thousands of employees to email their congressman to vote for/against whatever is in their interest, and even have the whole thing written up with just a "Submit" button and email textbox left for the sheep to fill in.
The Senator said that this is essentially useless, as they have all caught on, and that it's probably not representative of actual people's opinions, just special interests using people as tools. Phone calls are a little more effective, but it's indirect. You end up talking to an intern who then relays "100 for, 345 against today's bill Sir".
The handwritten letter is the best. It shows time was taken. Faxing it usually gets noticed since nobody faxes things to them. It's all email or postal service. When you throw in the "I'm going to post the response in my office", that's usually what takes the cake.
For this one Senator, he said it worked every time.
I was at a conference a few years ago where a former US Senator told us exactly how to get the attention of your congressman. Sending an email is a black hole and won't get noticed. A hand written letter is much better, but it has to go through all of that Anthrax screening and will probably get delayed 6-8 weeks. The solution? Faxing.
Here's what you you:
1. Hand write the letter of your dreams and include these aspects:
a. Make sure it's not overly emotional
b. Mention how you will be "posting the response in our place of business" near the end
c. Mention how many voters currently work in your office and that you are all anxiously awaiting the response
d. Include a response fax number, email, and more 2. Fax the letter to the congressman's office (you can usually find their number online) 3. Watch for your reply!
Apparently this method will get your letter to the top of the pile since it's personalized, instantly delivered via an underutilized technology, and it mentions votes.
Heck, "Beware of Service Pack" was my lesson after some sleepless nights. Judging by the general IT reaction to Vista, it seems that everyone is jockeying for the coveted Last On The Block award. For good reason.
One qualifier on that: Windows NT SP2 was widely recognized as a complete screw up, even by Microsoft. It essentially made the system highly unstable. However, it was one of the few times that MS actually owned up to their fault on the issue. That's a big reason why they started beta testing packs with end users instead of releasing it into the wild and crossing fingers.
I worked for an ISP in the 90s and we considered a Premium Filtered internet option. The big deal back then was trying to filter content for the children. Our VP wanted to look into having two tiers of service, keeping in mind it was all dialup at the time: Unrestricted access to the internet (the base package at $20 per month back then), or a "Safe" premium connection that used filter tech on the ISP side to reduce the porn and viruses (at $40 per month, yes for dialup).
In the end we didn't try it out becase the market research showed that people weren't willing to pay for it. Our backup plan was to offer a client side software solution. I wonder if the market has changed since then? Would people pay a premium for access that WAS filtered? I mean, if you're not surfing P2P, maybe you want to get that porn a lot faster and know that the RIAA isn't going to knock on your door?
I wasn't aware of any RFID tags that could take the beating, quite interesting. The manufacturers of medical grade instruments might still have a hard time fitting even those small tags into some instruments. Plus, you start to go down the slipperly legal slope of what happens if they do get all the instruments tagged and something doesn't scan. They'll still need to do a raw count in the end.
I guess even if you did find a way, cost would be the ultimate decider. Dot peening is in the range of under a dollar an instrument. Not doing anything is in the range of $0, and you're still going to need to could everything by hand anyway to appease the lawyers circling in the parking lot.
Sorry to get too offtopic, since this is about disposable sponges after all. It's a bit more complicated issue than just tracking one particular element of a procedure. I think that gets lost in the article.
I honestly couldn't tell you if that would be a viable solution, but it seems sound for the purpose of keeping junk out of the patient. Cost will be the main issue. Most hospitals are financially driven to make sure they don't lose and destroy instruments throughout the rest of the OR instrument lifecycle since they generally have fair (even if not perfect) mechanisms for counting things.
I've got a whole country I can drive you around where the vast, vast majority of people are not starving, including the beggars, and they would benefit tremendously from this technology.
Sorry D-man, but just because it's not the solution for EVERYONE doesn't mean that it's a waste of effort.
Unfortunately, the process of sterilization tends to completely destroy even the simplest of technology. Most hospitals use pressurized steam autoclaves. They would have to switch to an Ethylene oxide autoclave, which has a seriously large number of risks associated with it. Not to mention that the main byproduct of a single run is the chenical equivalent of antifreeze, but having a few canisters of this stuff lying around is enough to wipe out a city block's worth of people if it popped. This might be reasonable for the factory that makes the sponges since they can closely control the process, but there are a heck of a lot of items in use in the OR, so it would only address a small number of items.
Instruments make up the bulk of the "things" used in a procedure. The emerging tech for tracking those is called dot peen marking. It's mostly designed to help the Central Supply staff (who clean and sterilize equipment) keep their sets together and track where things are in the overall process.
I got the m1730 a month ago, just not the WOW branded version. I get about 2 hours out of a charge. It came with a spare battery and a power adapter that's about the size and weight of an actual brick.
I also upgraded to XP Pro instead of going with Vista, of course. I would imagine that Vista chomps that number down to about 90 minutes since it has to do all that indexing in the background. You never known when you need instant access to that horribly outdated resume you wrote 8 years ago.
That might explain why I had more trouble getting in and out during my last trip to SE Asia. I got stopped a couple more times than usual coming back into the US. At least in Cambodia they're friendly about it and have a reasonable system for customs and immigration. Heck, they sent me an online "satisfaction survey" 2 weeks later!
Is there any freedom of information act mechanism for me to view this info that I undoubtedly have on file now?
As my username might suggest, I actually do get out to Cambodia once a year. There's a big stigma there with Propane cars. Apparently you can retrofit a standard car to run on propane, but there have been some instances of cars exploding in gigantic fireballs that have soured most people on the concept. This is in a place where landmines are still a threat, so people tend to be rather cautious in general. Even with high gas prices they still won't do it, and there a $1 a liter can be the difference between feeding your family or begging on the street.
Americans however are probably not that diligent in their fear. Anyone here have a problem buying Firestone tires?
Yes, XP was treated the same until SP2. Once people got over the "How dare you add features as part of a Service Pack!", the dust settled and we were left with a functional OS that was better than 2000. Will Vista be the same after it goes through SP1, or will it end up like Windows NT Service Pack 2, which I seem to have nightmares of for some reason.
The bigger problem is that XP really has turned out to be "Fine" for the majority of the email using public. There just isn't enough value in upgrading everything for your email to have more "Wow" according to MS. For IT, it's DEFINITELY not worth the trouble.
I seem to think that any one of the power switches featured in a previous article would do nicely to reduce power consumption. Something about disabling electronics with the extreme prejudice of a "thud" followed by the lights flickering tells me that I'm going to save some cash.
As the number of voters decreases, the impact of the individual vote increases. If I can find a way to get most people to stay home glued to their free iPod, then my friends and I can walk right down the polling place and elect ourselves into whatever office we choose.
Perhaps the ruling two party system already figured it out. They just get people to stay home by bombarding them with political garbage to the point of nausea. Then their buddies go and cast straight tickets. Oops, looks like this plan is already firmly in place.
I know I'm going to end up baiting some developers, but I work for a specialized ASP and see a ton of third party software from a perspective few get...
Normally, the smaller the company the more agile. No surprise. They also get patches out faster too. Also no surprise.
When we look at vendors of equal size, the ones who are really quick at sending out patches are in that situation because their software is more buggy, and they have a *lot* of practice. It never fails.
In response to your question, I would suggest that you should look more at the frequency of patches and less at the duration. Sure, it might not be as fast as your support group wants, but if you start reflexivly sending out patches every time someone yells, then your overall product will suffer since you can't possibly do the proper QA to ensure THAT patch you just whipped up doesn't break something else.
After reading the articles linked from previous posts, it looks like the third outage was related to their cooling units not coming back online from the power outage linked to the Semi vs. Transformer battle. I know the units in our data center aren't hooked up to the UPS, but instead are wired directly to the generator in case of outage. I belive this is due to the massive number of additional cells that would be needed to keep up with the wattage requirements. The theory is that if the power goes out, you can live without cooling for the couple minutes while the generator pumps out the first giant plumes of black diesel and revs up to max capacity.
We had a similar unplanned test when the local grid had a brownout. Luckily, our units functioned as designed. I wonder if their issues before did more damage to the units than they would have expected...
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried it on a multitude of powerful machines, and Vista still can't hack it *overall*. For my recent purchase of a Dell m1730 gaming laptop, I went with XP. Yes, it CAN support Vista, and probably fine, but why would I want to trade 20% of my system resources away for what I see as no gain?
As the unfortunate soul in my company that has to primarily deal with Microsoft, I was in the unique spot of writing our company's position document on it. In short: Vista is unsupported. There's a lot more than hardware specs that went into that decision. Compatibility, reliability, user interface, etc.
The true test will be when Vista SP1 is put head-to-head with XP SP3. If Vista can't perform at least EQUALLY as well as XP, then I predict most people will wait the 2 years to see if Windows 7 will be worth it.
I can tell you which one they will pick: Microsoft. Here's why, speaking from experience in a 3rd world country: Intellectual Property has ZERO respect. No one enforces it, so as a result, all software is sold at the cost of the CD. They even kindly burn the crack along with the app on the CD. I know of several shops that cater to this market in the town I visit. Remember, not all third world countries are dirt-poor with people starving in the streets. Many have some kind of economy, technology, and even basic infrastructure. Yes, a lot of folks live on $1 a day, but in a place like this, $100 a month is living very well for a family of 4.
So, the local computer shops sell PCs with a ton of apps installed on a Windows base. Why not, it doesn't cost anything! Average price for a used Compaq: about $200 fully loaded. Plus, it's virtually the industry standard OS, so any app you want to run will be tailored for Windows.
For the XO (I also own one), I can see the Windows load displacing the Linux load in no time.
Exactly. I'm the unfortunate soul tasked as the Primary Contact for our MS Gold Partnership. We use the Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) to do the same thing but for hosting apps as a third party. If it weren't for that legal annoyance in their EULA, we would probably purchase the licenses even with the up front cost. There's little incentive for us to upgrade apps based on MS propaganda or some "3 year lifespan", and that's where the real savings kick in.
For example, we have a lot of very happy Office 2000 users out there that would scream if we forced them to change. If our market was demanding the latest and greatest every time it came out, it would be different. So in our case, it would make a lot more sense to purchase licenses if we were allowed.
Perhaps people are lumping the Wii in there with "next-gen" (regardless of technical prowess). Then based on the availability I guess it's fair to call it that. When you see a Wii on the shelf with some dust on it, then they can all be called "current".
Aren't they a bit behind schedule? I thought this was going to happen in a couple years.
Oh wait, that wasn't a documentary was it...
Wow, the good folks in Madison must be hitting the nog pretty hard. It's obvious the ONLY connection here is youth. My favorite part of the article is how the lawmakers 'Aren't sure how much money would be generated'.
Can anyone help me understand this or is it nothing more than playing off mythical video game fears and targeting a group of people who don't vote?
Sure, you can even go to congress.org and find them. The problem is really with priorities. As the senator stated in the speech I saw (it was a private function for a company annual meeting, so he didn't have to worry about cameras or reporters), they get literally thousands of emails a day.
It's a shear numbers game. Most aren't even from people in their district. Whenever a hot button topic is up for a vote, the interested parties will rally their faithful and bombard them with form letter emails or calls to action. For example, a telephone company will probably circulate an email telling the thousands of employees to email their congressman to vote for/against whatever is in their interest, and even have the whole thing written up with just a "Submit" button and email textbox left for the sheep to fill in.
The Senator said that this is essentially useless, as they have all caught on, and that it's probably not representative of actual people's opinions, just special interests using people as tools. Phone calls are a little more effective, but it's indirect. You end up talking to an intern who then relays "100 for, 345 against today's bill Sir".
The handwritten letter is the best. It shows time was taken. Faxing it usually gets noticed since nobody faxes things to them. It's all email or postal service. When you throw in the "I'm going to post the response in my office", that's usually what takes the cake.
For this one Senator, he said it worked every time.
I was at a conference a few years ago where a former US Senator told us exactly how to get the attention of your congressman. Sending an email is a black hole and won't get noticed. A hand written letter is much better, but it has to go through all of that Anthrax screening and will probably get delayed 6-8 weeks. The solution? Faxing.
Here's what you you:
1. Hand write the letter of your dreams and include these aspects:
a. Make sure it's not overly emotional
b. Mention how you will be "posting the response in our place of business" near the end
c. Mention how many voters currently work in your office and that you are all anxiously awaiting the response
d. Include a response fax number, email, and more
2. Fax the letter to the congressman's office (you can usually find their number online)
3. Watch for your reply!
Apparently this method will get your letter to the top of the pile since it's personalized, instantly delivered via an underutilized technology, and it mentions votes.
Enjoy!
Heck, "Beware of Service Pack" was my lesson after some sleepless nights. Judging by the general IT reaction to Vista, it seems that everyone is jockeying for the coveted Last On The Block award. For good reason.
One qualifier on that: Windows NT SP2 was widely recognized as a complete screw up, even by Microsoft. It essentially made the system highly unstable. However, it was one of the few times that MS actually owned up to their fault on the issue. That's a big reason why they started beta testing packs with end users instead of releasing it into the wild and crossing fingers.
I worked for an ISP in the 90s and we considered a Premium Filtered internet option. The big deal back then was trying to filter content for the children. Our VP wanted to look into having two tiers of service, keeping in mind it was all dialup at the time: Unrestricted access to the internet (the base package at $20 per month back then), or a "Safe" premium connection that used filter tech on the ISP side to reduce the porn and viruses (at $40 per month, yes for dialup).
In the end we didn't try it out becase the market research showed that people weren't willing to pay for it. Our backup plan was to offer a client side software solution. I wonder if the market has changed since then? Would people pay a premium for access that WAS filtered? I mean, if you're not surfing P2P, maybe you want to get that porn a lot faster and know that the RIAA isn't going to knock on your door?
Hopefully this isn't too offtopic...
I wasn't aware of any RFID tags that could take the beating, quite interesting. The manufacturers of medical grade instruments might still have a hard time fitting even those small tags into some instruments. Plus, you start to go down the slipperly legal slope of what happens if they do get all the instruments tagged and something doesn't scan. They'll still need to do a raw count in the end. I guess even if you did find a way, cost would be the ultimate decider. Dot peening is in the range of under a dollar an instrument. Not doing anything is in the range of $0, and you're still going to need to could everything by hand anyway to appease the lawyers circling in the parking lot. Sorry to get too offtopic, since this is about disposable sponges after all. It's a bit more complicated issue than just tracking one particular element of a procedure. I think that gets lost in the article.
I honestly couldn't tell you if that would be a viable solution, but it seems sound for the purpose of keeping junk out of the patient. Cost will be the main issue. Most hospitals are financially driven to make sure they don't lose and destroy instruments throughout the rest of the OR instrument lifecycle since they generally have fair (even if not perfect) mechanisms for counting things.
I've got a whole country I can drive you around where the vast, vast majority of people are not starving, including the beggars, and they would benefit tremendously from this technology.
Sorry D-man, but just because it's not the solution for EVERYONE doesn't mean that it's a waste of effort.
Unfortunately, the process of sterilization tends to completely destroy even the simplest of technology. Most hospitals use pressurized steam autoclaves. They would have to switch to an Ethylene oxide autoclave, which has a seriously large number of risks associated with it. Not to mention that the main byproduct of a single run is the chenical equivalent of antifreeze, but having a few canisters of this stuff lying around is enough to wipe out a city block's worth of people if it popped. This might be reasonable for the factory that makes the sponges since they can closely control the process, but there are a heck of a lot of items in use in the OR, so it would only address a small number of items.
Instruments make up the bulk of the "things" used in a procedure. The emerging tech for tracking those is called dot peen marking. It's mostly designed to help the Central Supply staff (who clean and sterilize equipment) keep their sets together and track where things are in the overall process.
I got the m1730 a month ago, just not the WOW branded version. I get about 2 hours out of a charge. It came with a spare battery and a power adapter that's about the size and weight of an actual brick.
I also upgraded to XP Pro instead of going with Vista, of course. I would imagine that Vista chomps that number down to about 90 minutes since it has to do all that indexing in the background. You never known when you need instant access to that horribly outdated resume you wrote 8 years ago.
That might explain why I had more trouble getting in and out during my last trip to SE Asia. I got stopped a couple more times than usual coming back into the US. At least in Cambodia they're friendly about it and have a reasonable system for customs and immigration. Heck, they sent me an online "satisfaction survey" 2 weeks later!
Is there any freedom of information act mechanism for me to view this info that I undoubtedly have on file now?
As my username might suggest, I actually do get out to Cambodia once a year. There's a big stigma there with Propane cars. Apparently you can retrofit a standard car to run on propane, but there have been some instances of cars exploding in gigantic fireballs that have soured most people on the concept. This is in a place where landmines are still a threat, so people tend to be rather cautious in general. Even with high gas prices they still won't do it, and there a $1 a liter can be the difference between feeding your family or begging on the street.
Americans however are probably not that diligent in their fear. Anyone here have a problem buying Firestone tires?
Yes, XP was treated the same until SP2. Once people got over the "How dare you add features as part of a Service Pack!", the dust settled and we were left with a functional OS that was better than 2000. Will Vista be the same after it goes through SP1, or will it end up like Windows NT Service Pack 2, which I seem to have nightmares of for some reason.
The bigger problem is that XP really has turned out to be "Fine" for the majority of the email using public. There just isn't enough value in upgrading everything for your email to have more "Wow" according to MS. For IT, it's DEFINITELY not worth the trouble.
We're sorry, but your brain does not appear to be genuine. You will now be placed into limited functionality mode.
I seem to think that any one of the power switches featured in a previous article would do nicely to reduce power consumption. Something about disabling electronics with the extreme prejudice of a "thud" followed by the lights flickering tells me that I'm going to save some cash.
As the number of voters decreases, the impact of the individual vote increases. If I can find a way to get most people to stay home glued to their free iPod, then my friends and I can walk right down the polling place and elect ourselves into whatever office we choose.
Perhaps the ruling two party system already figured it out. They just get people to stay home by bombarding them with political garbage to the point of nausea. Then their buddies go and cast straight tickets. Oops, looks like this plan is already firmly in place.
I know I'm going to end up baiting some developers, but I work for a specialized ASP and see a ton of third party software from a perspective few get...
Normally, the smaller the company the more agile. No surprise. They also get patches out faster too. Also no surprise.
When we look at vendors of equal size, the ones who are really quick at sending out patches are in that situation because their software is more buggy, and they have a *lot* of practice. It never fails.
In response to your question, I would suggest that you should look more at the frequency of patches and less at the duration. Sure, it might not be as fast as your support group wants, but if you start reflexivly sending out patches every time someone yells, then your overall product will suffer since you can't possibly do the proper QA to ensure THAT patch you just whipped up doesn't break something else.
That brings me to the age old choice:
Pick 2 of the following:
Speed
Quality
Cost
After reading the articles linked from previous posts, it looks like the third outage was related to their cooling units not coming back online from the power outage linked to the Semi vs. Transformer battle. I know the units in our data center aren't hooked up to the UPS, but instead are wired directly to the generator in case of outage. I belive this is due to the massive number of additional cells that would be needed to keep up with the wattage requirements. The theory is that if the power goes out, you can live without cooling for the couple minutes while the generator pumps out the first giant plumes of black diesel and revs up to max capacity. We had a similar unplanned test when the local grid had a brownout. Luckily, our units functioned as designed. I wonder if their issues before did more damage to the units than they would have expected...