Its risk analyse. The higher the risk and the higher the cost of the devices balanced against the cost of the warranty.
If you self insure (I do), you cannot look at it per device. You have to look at the cost of insuring all the devices vs. the risk of one or more needing being replaced. A modern family probably have more than enough devices to make it cheaper to self.insure.
If they can't find it, I'm quite sure some coders would be willing to write some for substantially less than than the $10,000
But can you find software developer with deep insight into the requirements of the software and interfaces to the equipment willing to write it for that sum? The coding is not necessarily the problem. Knowing what to code is the problem. And that will cost you.
Just to add to your examples: In the petroleum exploration industry, there is software which start at $50K per seat. A typical configuration is 100 to 200 K$. Yearly support will cost you 15-20% of purchase price. So 10k$ is not really that much...
The problem is people simplify problems, just like you read my post and latched on to one tiny aspect of the big wider picture
Disclosure: I a mot a big fan of the Win8 UI myself, but I try to not make it a bigger problem than it is.
My point was that for some things you need to unlearn bad habits. Turn off the computer: bad habit to use a menu as long as there is a power button (which can be used to shut down the computer as well. Search for "Power"). On a laptop: close it.
BTW: When it comes to the wireless, I usually go to the desktop and use the icon in systray for that.
Other than that, I never use the menu anyway. I search. So to change a network setting, I would search for "network". Works om my Win7 machine. I assume it will work on Win8 as well.
My TV is much simpler than my computer.
And still people expect to be able to use such a complex machine without going through a minimal training?
Sit a person down infront of a Windows 7 machine and ask him to shutdown the computer, takes a few seconds to figure out, now sit him in front of a Windows 8 machine, and in three days when he's still figuring it out show him things like the charm bar which has no visual que in the interface at all.
The problem is: Where does the idea come from that you use a menu to shut down the computer?
Where do you find the menu to shut off your TV or video player or even the iPod?
Use the power button!
My son got a new laptop with Win8. You are right. I could not find out how to "shut it down". So I hit the power button. Bingo!
So while you are at it, why not pin it to the taskbar? Sort of Windows 7 style? Even in Win7, I rarely use the start menu. All the frequently used programs are on the task bar.
I have used Word since 2.0 (for Windows). I can assure you, it was never free. Quite the contrary.
You may confuse it with "Works" which was given away for free with PCs for a long time. That was a very different product, an came long after Office.
I agree, the reason that MS won was the Microsoft Office Pro Package which bundled Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Viso, and Project. Once MS crushed the competition products began to slowly become "sold separately" as we see today with Viso and Project.
That is completely backwards. In the beginning all the products were sold separately. Then they created an office bundle (no Outlook at that time) which was basically the 3 first products in the same package. Only in recent years have Visio and Project become part of some of the packages.
I do not want my local experience to mimic internet search engines. There's no reason for such broad ambiguity for the simple task of starting a program. At that point, just get rid of the whole gui and run everything from a shell prompt...right? At least that has tab-complete
Just to give you an example:
I frequently need to install some program from SCCM on my work PC. I have no clue under what menu the program to do this is. I do not care. I just type "programs" in the start menu search box, and I get a number of options. All of them are related to "programs" but the one I need is usually in the top 3.
This begs two questions:
- Why should I need to remember what menu a program has been hidden away in?
- How would you solve that one from a shell?
Besides, there is also an excellent shell in Windows: PowerShell. I use it more and more for server administration. And it has tab complete.
I agree, the user base screamed bloody murder when they found out win8 didn't have a start button. Almost every review repeated this.MS released Win 8 like that anyway and are paying the price.
Why do people miss the start button? The only thing I use it for on Win7 is to get to search. I do not need a menu for that. I have noticed that I tend to get frustrated by our Win2003 servers because I have to manually find stuff in the start menu.
With Win8 it is even simpler that Win7: Just start typing!
What do you need the start menu for again?
Well, my non-tech 13 year old son got a new PC with Win8, and it took him all of 15 seconds to get the point (the desktop...).
He wanted a new PC. He got one with Win8. He really did not care that it has Win8, 'cause he got a new PC.
Even XP Mode in Windows 7, which was definitely an enterprise-focused feature, was supported on Windows 7 Professional whether or not it was a VLK version or whether it was on a domain.
Actually, XP mode was for the small to medium companies. For the enterprise there is MED-V.
Give the kids a disk each with the personal media (pictures, family videos etc). Do not care about the digital medial If your kids are like mine, they really do not care about my stuff. They are building their own collections. Let us face it: What is valuable to us is of no value to the kids. If it is, they would have taken a copy a long time ago.
While we have two TVs in our family, the kids stopped watching TV several years ago. They only watch when there is something special we, the adults, think they may be interested in. For the rest, they watch moving pictures on their laptops.
Also interesting is that when we stay at our summer house, nobody miss the TV. A few weeks without TV? Nothing lost.
I've often wondered why we never see bare-metal versions of things like LISP or Erlang
One reason is that there are just too many variations of hardware you would need to write code for. The nice thing about Xen (and other hypervisors) is that you only need to care one set of virtual devices. Sort of the same reason we have operating systems so that the applications do not need to handle stuff like file systems and network and stuff...
So instead of booting a general purpose OS, the system uses one OS specifically for running other OSes (XEN) and one minimal special purpose OS for running the application (Erlang runtime). Whether you cal it a hypervisor or a runtime system, it is still an OS.
Instead of focusing on the irrelevant and incorrect "not using an OS", why not focus on the more interesting fact that for some tasks, it may be worth the effort to create a custom build of the OS with only the functions needed. That version may even be automatically created (or chosen) as part of the application build.
We actually had a reasonably busy Windows 2000 mail server with Post.Office up for approx 250 days. No big deal really as Post.Office apparently was a well behaved application. As far as i remember we had to take it down due to server room power maintenance. That was before all the network worms hit so that we had to start patching it... which ended the fun...
and whilst usernames of more than 8 characters are supported, Linux usually only reads the first 8 characters anyway on login.
Our automatic user provisioning system uses initial + last name + a number (if initial + last name is not unique). I have several times had to rename user accounts due to some department using some Unix systems with an 8 character limit on usernames... Why should arbitrary (and too short by any modern standard) limits in the OS dictate how we manage our users?
The fact that users have learned to live with it and work around it does not mean it is good. On the contrary. Having to work around it for normal use just means decisions were made which in hindsight were not as good as they could have been (need I mention IPV4?).
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Its risk analyse. The higher the risk and the higher the cost of the devices balanced against the cost of the warranty.
If you self insure (I do), you cannot look at it per device. You have to look at the cost of insuring all the devices vs. the risk of one or more needing being replaced. A modern family probably have more than enough devices to make it cheaper to self.insure.
If they can't find it, I'm quite sure some coders would be willing to write some for substantially less than than the $10,000
But can you find software developer with deep insight into the requirements of the software and interfaces to the equipment willing to write it for that sum? The coding is not necessarily the problem. Knowing what to code is the problem. And that will cost you.
Just to add to your examples: In the petroleum exploration industry, there is software which start at $50K per seat. A typical configuration is 100 to 200 K$. Yearly support will cost you 15-20% of purchase price. So 10k$ is not really that much...
XP mode has the same vulnerabilities as XP. Its support will stop when the XP support stops.
The problem is people simplify problems, just like you read my post and latched on to one tiny aspect of the big wider picture
Disclosure: I a mot a big fan of the Win8 UI myself, but I try to not make it a bigger problem than it is.
My point was that for some things you need to unlearn bad habits. Turn off the computer: bad habit to use a menu as long as there is a power button (which can be used to shut down the computer as well. Search for "Power"). On a laptop: close it.
BTW: When it comes to the wireless, I usually go to the desktop and use the icon in systray for that.
Other than that, I never use the menu anyway. I search. So to change a network setting, I would search for "network". Works om my Win7 machine. I assume it will work on Win8 as well.
My TV is much simpler than my computer.
And still people expect to be able to use such a complex machine without going through a minimal training?
Sit a person down infront of a Windows 7 machine and ask him to shutdown the computer, takes a few seconds to figure out, now sit him in front of a Windows 8 machine, and in three days when he's still figuring it out show him things like the charm bar which has no visual que in the interface at all.
The problem is: Where does the idea come from that you use a menu to shut down the computer?
Where do you find the menu to shut off your TV or video player or even the iPod?
Use the power button!
My son got a new laptop with Win8. You are right. I could not find out how to "shut it down". So I hit the power button. Bingo!
So while you are at it, why not pin it to the taskbar? Sort of Windows 7 style? Even in Win7, I rarely use the start menu. All the frequently used programs are on the task bar.
MS gave Word away.
I have used Word since 2.0 (for Windows). I can assure you, it was never free. Quite the contrary.
You may confuse it with "Works" which was given away for free with PCs for a long time. That was a very different product, an came long after Office.
I agree, the reason that MS won was the Microsoft Office Pro Package which bundled Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Viso, and Project. Once MS crushed the competition products began to slowly become "sold separately" as we see today with Viso and Project.
That is completely backwards. In the beginning all the products were sold separately. Then they created an office bundle (no Outlook at that time) which was basically the 3 first products in the same package. Only in recent years have Visio and Project become part of some of the packages.
I do not want my local experience to mimic internet search engines. There's no reason for such broad ambiguity for the simple task of starting a program. At that point, just get rid of the whole gui and run everything from a shell prompt...right? At least that has tab-complete
Just to give you an example:
I frequently need to install some program from SCCM on my work PC. I have no clue under what menu the program to do this is. I do not care. I just type "programs" in the start menu search box, and I get a number of options. All of them are related to "programs" but the one I need is usually in the top 3.
This begs two questions:
- Why should I need to remember what menu a program has been hidden away in?
- How would you solve that one from a shell?
Besides, there is also an excellent shell in Windows: PowerShell. I use it more and more for server administration. And it has tab complete.
I agree, the user base screamed bloody murder when they found out win8 didn't have a start button. Almost every review repeated this.MS released Win 8 like that anyway and are paying the price.
Why do people miss the start button? The only thing I use it for on Win7 is to get to search. I do not need a menu for that. I have noticed that I tend to get frustrated by our Win2003 servers because I have to manually find stuff in the start menu.
With Win8 it is even simpler that Win7: Just start typing!
What do you need the start menu for again?
Well, my non-tech 13 year old son got a new PC with Win8, and it took him all of 15 seconds to get the point (the desktop...).
He wanted a new PC. He got one with Win8. He really did not care that it has Win8, 'cause he got a new PC.
Even XP Mode in Windows 7, which was definitely an enterprise-focused feature, was supported on Windows 7 Professional whether or not it was a VLK version or whether it was on a domain.
Actually, XP mode was for the small to medium companies. For the enterprise there is MED-V.
Give the kids a disk each with the personal media (pictures, family videos etc). Do not care about the digital medial If your kids are like mine, they really do not care about my stuff. They are building their own collections. Let us face it: What is valuable to us is of no value to the kids. If it is, they would have taken a copy a long time ago.
While we have two TVs in our family, the kids stopped watching TV several years ago. They only watch when there is something special we, the adults, think they may be interested in. For the rest, they watch moving pictures on their laptops.
Also interesting is that when we stay at our summer house, nobody miss the TV. A few weeks without TV? Nothing lost.
I've often wondered why we never see bare-metal versions of things like LISP or Erlang
One reason is that there are just too many variations of hardware you would need to write code for. The nice thing about Xen (and other hypervisors) is that you only need to care one set of virtual devices. Sort of the same reason we have operating systems so that the applications do not need to handle stuff like file systems and network and stuff...
So to develop this further, we could create reusable OS-less (or minimal-OS VMs, if you prefer) instances to save the boot time.
Oh, wait, I guess we just reinvented the process...
So instead of booting a general purpose OS, the system uses one OS specifically for running other OSes (XEN) and one minimal special purpose OS for running the application (Erlang runtime). Whether you cal it a hypervisor or a runtime system, it is still an OS.
Instead of focusing on the irrelevant and incorrect "not using an OS", why not focus on the more interesting fact that for some tasks, it may be worth the effort to create a custom build of the OS with only the functions needed. That version may even be automatically created (or chosen) as part of the application build.
We actually had a reasonably busy Windows 2000 mail server with Post.Office up for approx 250 days. No big deal really as Post.Office apparently was a well behaved application. As far as i remember we had to take it down due to server room power maintenance. That was before all the network worms hit so that we had to start patching it... which ended the fun...
There have been cases where I live (Europe) where missing calibration certificates caused a ticket to be cancelled when it was appealed
It is odd, and most likely not true.
It was Opera software who originally complained, an one would assume they have taken five minutes occasionally to check.
So somebody allegedly told the EU something that the EU would have found out if they did a minimum effort to monitor the agreement.
Big deal.
Next on Slahshdot: Where is my ass?
And in case you did not get it: DO NOT COLLECT JUNK!
So basically what he has is a very noisy heater with some computing capacity...
and whilst usernames of more than 8 characters are supported, Linux usually only reads the first 8 characters anyway on login.
Our automatic user provisioning system uses initial + last name + a number (if initial + last name is not unique). I have several times had to rename user accounts due to some department using some Unix systems with an 8 character limit on usernames... Why should arbitrary (and too short by any modern standard) limits in the OS dictate how we manage our users?
The fact that users have learned to live with it and work around it does not mean it is good. On the contrary. Having to work around it for normal use just means decisions were made which in hindsight were not as good as they could have been (need I mention IPV4?).