I am in a humanities education course where most of my courses are things like education, history, government and english. They are all text with little in the way of diagrams and they are all things that can be very nicely outlined for the most part. I digest things in the lecture and group and catagorize main points into nice outlines that are easy to follow later. I love the easy ability to write up an outline in such a way with Mac Office's Notebook view and to be able to go back and add to a topic a few minutes if a lecturer returns to it or even a few days later if the light goes off to clarify it. I love being able to keep all of my assignments listed as Tasks on the Entourge calendar. It lets me keep everything organized in that way. I can type 75 words per minute so it gives me more time to listen and less time is needed to type/write the relevant details. It is electronic so that it is easily readable and can be easily searched, easily backed up, easily printed, etc. I only bring one thing, a 12" PowerBook, to most lectures so I have a nice light backback that I know I always have everything with me with. I back everything up every few days to a USB thumb drive and at the end of semester to a CD.
I find it better in almost every way - and these notes I stand a much better chance of still having and being able to find something in 10 months or 10 years time if I want to see it again.
It might not work for everybody or every situation but I would be very upset if one of my professors made me change from a system that works great for me because of their preconceptions of how I am using it or not learning properly. It is their lecture but it is my education and notes - and at the University level it is my perogative how I go about that...
Vonage = international long distance savings
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Vonage IPO
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I love my Vonage service but I don't use it in a normal way. My girlfriend lives in Australia now and I will be moving to join her in the not too distant future. I got Vonage and brought the box out there on a visit about a year ago. Once I got one of those 240V universal DC power adapters to work for the power the thing it came right up on her DSL connection with a 716 Buffalo phone number in Australia. I ended up leaving it there. The quality of the calls is better than Verizon's long distance was and I only pay $15 a month for 500 minutes that I used to get charged ~$.20/min for.
I know that my situation is a bit rare but I have been dazzled and amazed by Vonage and hope they don't go away - the amount of money that they have saved me in calling her is tremendous and the ability to have a local US phone number overseas for friends and family to call me on is going to be great. I highly reccomend this sort of solution for anyone who makes frequent international calls.
I have found the ultimate solution to such issues in my VMWare testing environment - snapshots. We really beat on and hose our testing machines and, to make sure we were getting an acurate test, we would always have to reimage them from a Ghost image every time we went in there. We replaced that solution with running our testing in VMWare where reverting to a previous snapshot just takes a few seconds. Not to mention that you can branch off them in a tree fashion to track and test under various changes and conditions. I really don't understand why MS can't develop a simpler version of something similar for the OS. HD space on the vast majority of user's machines is plentiful and the ability to be able to make a snapshot of your system when it is exactly the way you want it that you can go back to later quickly and easily would solve myraid problems. If you could back up that snapshot to a DVD or external HD in such a way as the hypothetical snapshot manager could restore your PC config from it in the event of a physical HD failure all the better.
Now, obviously, we would need a way to prevent a malicious program for also corrupting the backup snapshot - maybe some password that is specifically for the modifying and changing of the system snapshot.
I doubt that MS will ever be able to make an OS as secure as Unix as long as they have to provide the level of backward compatibility they do. What they could do, however, is mitigate the risk by giving us a way to get our PC back to it's pristine state without all of the trouble of app reinstalls and haphazard backups/restores. The limitation always was the hard disk space this would entail and that limitation has been blown away by modern HDs...
You have to give the global warming people some credit for somehow advancing their theory as fact and proclaiming such horrendous future consequences to it to get so much attention and funding. However, just as it was a consensus once that Earth was the center of the universe this may be just as wrong and the establishment has just as much a backlash to those who are skeptical of their assertion.
I think that there is consensus that there has been a slight warming (0.6 +/- 0.2 C in the past century; 0.1 C/decade over the last 30 years) but there is not a consensus of the cause, there is not a consensus that it will continue and there is not a consensus that it is serious enough for humanity ecologically and economically to put the kind of resouces that some are calling for in the order of Trillions of dollars. There certainly are many things that we are more sure of and affect us more that we can and should be focusing on instead of this.
There is not enough certainty here for humanity to do the things that are being called for and I believe that reducing CO2 emissions to the levels and extent called for will have a disasterous effect on many of the world's economies. For example, this was a report prepared on the costs for Denmark to meet Kyoto standard(http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Defaul t.aspx?ID=101). When you are talking those kind of consequences and costs there better be a more definite understanding and more dire consequences than less than a degree temperature change in 100 years and a theory that points to only one main cause seems a bit simplistic anyway in an ecosystem as complicated as ours. I think our energy and money is better spent on cleaning up other kinds of pollution and fixing helping with some of humanities social problems and human suffering - many things will have a much more real and substantial impact in our lives and well-being.
So now we are going to hold MS accountable for users do doing bad things with their computers? That is a very slippery slope - can the RIAA/MPAA then sue MS because users use their OS to copy CDs/DVDs and break copyrights? Everybody and their brother will be trying to get MS to restrict various things that users can do with their PCs and it would set a dangerous precedent that would affect other operating systems and companies as well.
Just because most of the people who send unsolicited email do it from windows pcs doesn't mean that MS should be able to put restrictions into their OS to keep them from doing it. And, lets say that they did, if those users then used Linux instead they could send the spam that way. Would you support restrictions being forced into the baseline linux kernel or the stock distros that would prevent them from doing it there too?
If that is what you are looking for there is no reason that it has to be done at the server. Why can't the email client automatically send out a form letter reply that the email was caught by the spam filter, and maybe even the reason why it was, and instruct them to contact the user to ensure they read it if it important?
I far prefer a client-side solution for all the reasons I mentioned - it leaves the user and not the mail administrator in control of their mail.
That isn't what is happening and your sarcasm is rather thick and misplaced.
The Outlook 2003 spam filter is very good and it doesn't move all my email to the Junk Mail folder. I am not going to say that I never get a false positive but it is rare - I would say one email it identifies as spam in fifty. And, when it does misidentify an email there is a button that says "Not Junk" that I click on and it actually learns a lesson when I tell it that and won't identify mail from that sender etc as Junk again. I have tried many different mail clients from Thunderbird to Lotus Notes (which I am forced to use at work - shudder) and nobody seems to have anything in the same league as Outlook's spam filter.
In my situation I will usually glance at the Junk Mail when I see that it has moved some things in there briefly to make sure that I don't recognize a name but other than that I don't touch it. If stuff stays in there for a week is is moved to Trash. If stuff stays in a trash for a week it is purged. So that gives me two weeks to go back and find a email if for whatever reason I don't realize there was a false positive situation. And what it means is that for the 20 spam emails I get a week I don't have to lift a finger for them to be erased and it allows me to see a nice clean view of my important new messages in my inbox when in a rush.
Everybody has to deal with spam in their own way. You can be varying degrees of agressive about it and I have found a level I am comfortable with. What I don't want is somebody else to decide for me at the server or forwarder such that I don't even get the email.
Do you people really want what you seem to be asking from MS - that they decide for you what email you do and don't want and don't even send it on to you. That would mean that they have the power to decide what you should and shouldn't see with no review on your part or input from you on what is or isn't spam? That is a scary concept to me... I like the current setup where I get it and it sets it aside for review.
And, once again, Microsoft has come as close to a solution as I think is possible and it is one that I am comfortable with.
I don't think it is a fair criticism of MS to judge them by that standard. Fistly, it makes sense that the only people who they are going to help with spam are those using their products. I take "eliminate spam" to mean that they are going to eliminate it from our inboxes. Considering that most SMTP servers are not Exchange and the majority of internet traffic doesn't run through their servers the idea that they can, and should, stop all that traffic pertaining to unsolicited emails is rather ridiculous.
Has the level of spam that I have received gone down? Most definetly it has. Are they responsible? Yes they are. It is that simple...
As a previous poster alluded to with the problems of spam filtering - I am the only one who can really decide whether a certain piece of mail is unsolicited or not and I am glad that some SMTP server or mail forwarder in the middle doesn't filter it out before it gets to me so that I never have the opportunity to decide for myself on my rules/conditions.
Needless to say, there are all kinds of problems introduced when third-parties can start to decide what mail I should and should not receive without my input/knowledge. And that means that I don't want it to be eliminated by your definition - even if it was possible.
I know that every time I read any article that mentions AMD v Intel that there will be people from the AMD side that come on and say there is not a single compeling Intel product and no reason to have a non-AMD processor in anything. I saw similar zealotry in the comments to anandtech.com's review of the processor - and they are a pretty unbiased and trustworthy source. Here is what they had to say...
"Our initial analysis still holds true, that for a notebook processor, the Core Duo will be nothing short of amazing for professionals. Looking at the performance improvements offered everywhere from media encoding to 3D rendering, you're going to be able to do a lot more on your notebook than you originally thought possible (without resorting to a 12-pound desktop replacement). In the past, power users on the go had to sacrifice mobility for CPU power, but with the Core Duo, that is no longer the case... We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller." And it accomlishes this with power consumption that is along the same lines at the previous generation high-end Pentium M chips.
I would think that as technology enthusiasts that we would be able to give credit where credit is due and recognize that, at the moment, Intel has a better processor lineup for laptops and AMD has a better line for desktops and servers - that it is possible for each to have strenghts and weaknesses as their produts evolve and change in different ways. Keeping an open mind and an up-to-date understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each helps us to choose the right tool for the job and the budget.
I just can't believe how many are unwilling to concede even one success for Intel in their belief AMD is always better... The competition is helping all of us in spurring on better products and prices and the variety of options allows us to choose the right tool for the job.
Actually Microsoft has done far more than anybody else in helping me with Spam. The spam filter for Outlook 2003 is very good and Office Update regularly provides updates to the filter that bring it up to date with some of the latest major sources/types to look for. I set it up a level in how aggressive it is, which has resulted in a false positive or two every now and again, and I have not seen any spam in my inbox in some time.
Don't knock MS on spam until you see Outlook 2003's spam filter. The question becomes if they have the technology that they do in Outlook then why can't the incorporate it into hotmail as well? I would ask the same question about Exchange but I guess they figure most people using an Exchange server are doing it with Outlook.
There are a few issues here. First of all, reinstalling Windows to solve every problem used to be viewed as the sign of a weak IT guy where I work and in the industry. The idea was every problem has a cause and a solution and putting yourself and the user through the inconvienience of having to backup all their data and reinstall windows and their software for what could be an easy solution from the knowledge base etc was a waste. That has changed here in the last couple of years.
Now, with the advent of a heavier network and server infrastructure we have all user data and documents stored on a network share and every profile is a roaming profile - nothing important at all is stored on the local workstations anymore. We also created, and keep updated, a network-hosted Norton Ghost image for each workstation type. The process of restoring the system to a 100% pristine condition from that Ghost image takes 10-15 minutes and a trained monkey could do it - and trained monkeys cost far less and free up time for the real admins to not have to deal with it anymore.
So, we have come to a world where it really is faster and easier to start with reinstalling/reimaging the workstation. It is the first step in troubleshooting as it is so quick. After that if the problem persists there is a diagnostic set that is run to check if it is a hardware problem because the reimage rules out a software issue for the most part because of the QA and testing before the Ghost image is certified/deployed.
If you feel more comfortable reinstalling your system every six months then do it but set up a system where it is really a quick process and non-issue. This sort of practice in dealing with the desktops seems to be the way the industry is trending these days...
You can mod me a troll for not seeing what the big deal here is and trying to see it in a humourous light all you want - but that doesn't change that this whole thing is being blown out of proportion.
If you had gone to the linked article you would find that we are looking at about 500 people domestically that our intelligence community saw were in commuication with suspected terrorists overseas. The communications that were monitored were all international calls to/from those suspects. I don't have a reasonable expectation that when I take a suitcase full of stuff on a plane that it won't be searched when crossing borders and 500 people's communications with suspected terrorists on an international basis being monitored doesn't bother me and won't bother most people.
To quote Jonah again... "Before 9/11, the system for listening to conversations between terrorists abroad and their accomplices on our soil had all the flexibility and creativity of John Ashcroft at a disco contest. Even with warrants issued by the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the National Security Agency usually had to erase the "American" side of the conversation between suspected terrorists before handing them over to the FBI.
Most Americans think that sort of thing is crazy. But, to keep the frenzy alive, we talk about spying on "certain Americans" -- when in reality we're trying to stop barbarians from killing 'certain Americans.'"
I have long agreed with Jonah Goldberg on many things but his take on this is spot-on...
"It reminds me of the ongoing case of the vapors contracted by much of the media and by other critics of President Bush's program of spying on "certain Americans." That's how Dan Abrams of MSNBC, for one, refers to a handful of people who are allegedly on al Qaeda's speed dial and have been in contact with terrorists overseas: "certain Americans."
"Gosh," the average viewer might say, "I'm a certain American!"
If one paid only casual attention to the news these days, one would get the sense that Bush has a big stack of phone books in the Oval Office, and he and Dick Cheney spend their days thumbing through them to find "certain Americans" to wiretap.
"Joe Smith?" says Cheney, rubbing his hands together as if over a fine meal. "Man, he's gotta qualify as a certain American. Let's listen to his conversation with his wife."
At first, I thought this NSA story was a big deal on the merits, and I wrote that Bush should have asked to fix the law rather than work his way around it. I still think that, in a perfect world, the White House would try to get the laws it needs from Congress. Nevertheless, after 9/11, Congress declared that "the president has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism" and authorized "all necessary and appropriate force" against al Qaeda. That strikes me as ample justification for tapping phone calls between al Qaeda associates in Cleveland and Cairo.
Now I'm beginning to think this is just the latest in anti-Bush hype. The New York Times, which launched this "scandal," remains at journalistic DEFCON 1, releasing a stream of articles, editorials, and Op-Ed articles as if the nation were up in arms over what some hotter heads believe to be an impeachable offense. (A writer for Newsweek.com raises the possibility that the NSA wiretapping is a prelude to right-wing death squads in the U.S.) James Risen, the reporter who uncovered the spying program and has a book on the "secret history" of Bush's antiterrorism efforts, sounds like he's already cleared space on his mantle for his Pulitzer, Profile in Courage, and Nobel prizes."
Office is just as important to MS, if not more so, than Windows is. Buisinesses might have Linux webservers or Oracle database servers but they all use Microsoft Office with very few exceptions. It is the software that actually gets the real work done, and the document formats that everybody writes that work to exchange them in, and it is a larger and more important monopoly for them in the long term.
Now Microsoft has a dilemma - do they ensure the survival of Office by making it availible on platforms like Linux to ensure it can run on every desktop or do they force you to stay on their platform by making that the only way to run it? So far they have choen to not lend legitimacy to Linux as a desktop platform and it has not hurt them very much. However, OSX is a much more appealing desktop, one that is gaining in popularity, and Microsoft chose to support it to keep the people who chose it using Office.
I think that the current balance that MS is striking between supporting their platform and supporting Office also the Mac as a second platform is working for them and to their benefit. The last thing they want is for all the Mac users to turn to another office platform - especially one that has a windows version and/or is less expensive - that they could evangelicly convert their friends and family to. People stay with Office because it is the easy and safe choice and it actually is a good product that does most of what they want and need. The most important thing that Office has, though, is it's ubiquity - and so far they have managed to be able to keep that and it is well worth what they pay to port Office to the Mac.
I think that if Linux gains enough popularity where it is 10-15% of worldwide desktops in countries that can afford Office you'll see them port it to that too...
In the very beginning of December I ran into an amazing deal on an open-box return of a 12" PowerBook G4 to Amazon. It was only a Combo drive but it was the 1.5Ghz 2005 model and it was $1000. They had a 30 day moneyback return guarantee via their warehouse_deals store that sells their returned/refurbished merchandise. After I placed the order I went through the week of waiting worried about the dead pixels or blemishes or problems I was going to encounter from a non-new machine but, when it arrived, it was absolutely perfect. It was as if somebody bought it, opened the box, turned it on, and decided that it was too small or something after a day or so and sent it back. And, thanks to them, I just saved myself $500:) I used a little of the savings to buy a 512MB DIMM to bring me up to 768 and a few accessories.
This is my first Mac as a long-time Linux user (SUSE/Novell mostly these days) and a long-time Microsoft IT Support guy. I could not be more impressed with the hardware, sortware or size - the keyboard and case quality more than make the 12" PowerBook justified over the iBook and the size is perfect for my road-warrior needs. I was worried about feeling some regret for getting this a month and a half before MacWorld San Francisco and the Intel Macs but, after reading this article, I would rather have the last and best and most reliable of the G4 PowerBooks ever built than a first generation Intel machine, both in hardware and software, that will run many apps I need like Office through Rosetta emulation. I never thought I'd say this but I am a head-over-heels Mac convert and I have not even turned on my Linux desktop in a week. I have not been this excited about computing in a long time exloring the GUI, keyboard combonations and, most importantly, the way they implement their Unix layer and filesystem.
I am still trying to decide if I should pony up for the AppleCare though - I had a friend with one of the G3 iBooks with the logic board problems and he is really pushing me to do it. What do you all think about AppleCare? I am glad I have the option of waiting a few months and mulling it over - I was told I could get it as long as the 1 year warranty has not expired yet. Are there any other slashdotters that have experience on the 12" PowerBook that want to let me know their stories or have insight into whether they needed AppleCare on it? Any tips or suggestions for a Linux/Windows guy new to OSX that I might not have run across?
You are rather out of touch and mistaken. There are two modes besides off and on on a PC latptop - suspend and hibernate. A PC notebook goes into suspend when closed and, if reopened while still in suspend, comes back immedidatly to the exact state you were in when you closed it in about 1-3 seconds. Basically suspend keeps all of the current stuff retained in memory by leaving the memory powered up and takes just about everything else down to a very low power mode but it still uses battery power and will run out after a long enough time in suspend mode. So, rather than have you loose your work when the battery runs out when you put it into suspend, they came up with hibernation which writes the current contents of your RAM to your HD and then totally turns the PC off. Since this mode requires it to go through the BIOS startup and then the memory contents have to be read from the HD this mode takes a bit longer at about 10-15 seconds to right back where you left off. Usually they are used in conjunction with each other such that the laptop will go into suspend when closed or after 15 minutes of inactivity on battery. After the laptop has been in suspend for say an hour it will power back up and hibernate itself so at to not use any more battery power.
You can turn off hibernation all together and just go with suspend and get the results that you want. You just better make sure not to forget to plug it in or power it back up and save your work within about 10-15 hours or you'll loose it when the battery finally dies from the little power suspend still uses.
I have found reading the comments on this thread extremely funny. What I thought to myself reading the article is that the Slashdot crowd with either...
a.) Heckle the new interface as looking stupid/being ignorant/taking up too much space on the screen b.) Talk about how the interface change will be an opportunity for OpenOffice
I am not surprised to be proved correct. Here is what is really going to happen with the new Office. First, they will have an option in there to make it look like Office XP/2003 for those that want it. I watched a video with an interface designer from MS who said as much and it makes sense - they have always provided a way to make newer software look/behave like it's previous versions (2000->XP interface for example). Second, as they have incorporated more and more new features to Office over the years the menus and toolbars has gotten very cluttered. I find it makes perfect sense to me for Office to step back and reasses/reorganize the interface and how people use it to make getting to these options a little more intutitive as well as take advantage of the increased screen realestate that many newer monitors/flatpanels provide. I have an LCD where, at my resolution, the toolbar icons are almost too small these days. I would also like the idea of Office tailoring it's interface to the task I am trying to accomplish and helping me see what options are most common and really relevant and useful for my current what I am trying to do. This is, by many accounts, the peak of Office and it's userbase so if there is ever a time that they could leverage that to have people learn a better and more impressive interface it is now.
I like the new interface and I am going to buy the $150 Student/Teacher version when it comes out. I think that, unlike the differnce between 97, 2000, XP and 2003 where the feature differences are about office and document collaboration and other rather unsexy little sorts of things many users did not need/use, this version is about a nice looking new interface and capabilities to more easily create nicer looking new documents, charts and presentations with more eye candy. I think that you are all wrong - they changed this in a way that will get people excited about Office again and that they can easily tell the difference between it and the old versions in such a way that will have some word-of-mouth advertising between friends and coworkers who will show it off to others and talk about it. For those IT people who posted - I expect there will be a demand for the first time in years from your users and managers will be asking for it and about it.
Instead of rejoicing abuot their coming fall you should realize that this is what MS needed to do to really address OpenOffice and further differentiate themselves and their new version. I really think it will be a large sales success in ways that XP and 2003 was not and a new standard for the other suites to follow. And, most ironically, it will be it for the exact reasons that you all think it will fail.
The link in my post has all kinds of things to try. I was trying to be helpful to you and to solve the problem you mentioned and I am quite sure that going through the things listed in that link will solve this problem for you.
I didn't say anything pro-MS to start a flame or anything and was simply trying to be a good neighbor and let you know about a resouce that I found and a possible solution to your problem - which you could have found with google. It is rather telling that a helpful post about a solution to a problem that several people replied here as having doesn't get modded up and a "Why would I even want an OS that 'sometimes' breaks" is. Just like anything else this problem/bug has a solution.
I would have throught that a Linux user would have the mindset to see things in a technical manner, as a problem to be solved, rather than just give up and blame/write-off the OS for a relatively minor problem. I love Linux and use it on a daily basis and, while it has gotten better over the years in this regard, there are many little nitpicky issues that I have had over the years that took me many days of tinkering and searching newsgroups and web pages to find the answer. This isn't a random "sometimes breaks" sort of problem but one that happens under specific conditions of software and network interaction during boot. Basically it seems as if, with a bunch of software trying to add things to the system tray at near the same time, one misbehaving program or service can lock the tray for a short period of time causing some of the other programs to not be able to add their icons to it. In my case this would happen when I was not connected to a network with a UPnP device and the "UPnP User Interface" service, which is not necessary to use UPnP and created an icon representing the gateway that I didn't want anyway, would hang until a network timeout while trying to search the network for UPnP devices and lock the system tray in the process. I uninstalled it and I stopped having the problem. You are right, It is possible that another piece of software that you have installed is hanging briefly during boot and/or doing the same sort of thing. Many such cases, and their solutions, were addressed by the link in my post. All of these causes discussed seem to be rather rare pieces or combinations of software.
Stop the zealotry and take a look at the above link - that is if you really want this fixed instead of just looking for an excuse to tear down an OS that you obviously don't like for other reasons. No good deed goes unpunished on slashdot these days...
I started to have this problem all of the sudden and started pulling my hair out. Then it occured to me that it started not too long after I got a new wireless router and set up UPnP for MSN Messenger to get the Video Conferencing working through the NAT properly. There is a windows component by the name of "UPnP User Interface" that causes this problem - it is not part of the default install and you don't need it. I uninstalled it under Add/Remove Windows Components and this issue went away. See the below link for details.
This is analagous to the French Maginot Line vis a vie the Germans post WWI. "Instead of building a robust military/defensive/resistance capability to deal with the Germans when they get in why don't we just build an impenetrable wall to keep them out." I know that is a simplistic analogy and view of history but I figured it was appropriate.
The virus makers, and even more so the spyware/adware makers, will always find a way to force or trick their way onto a PC no matter what you do. Especially when the ultimate master/defender of the PC is your average clueless PC user - and as long as they have privilages to install software on their PC there is a possibility of installing something harmful. If Windows Defender(tm) can alert people whenever an app it doesn't recognize as a genuine one is trying to do weird or possibly harmful things and clean out the spyware/adware when it finds it then it fills a vital role as another layer of defense and protection.
By all means Microsoft should give us a real limited user account and force the software vendors to honor the model. They should find and plug security holes and exploits in IE and in all the services that you are running out of the box that they can. However, I for one am happy they are including this too - you can never be too spyware/adware free. To actually express the sarchastic sentiment of your subject - Thank You Microsoft. However, it is a fair question to ask "where was this two years ago?"
More and more hardware is being implemented in software. This makes sense because as the CPU has increased in speed and capability it has gained the resources and free-time to pick up the slack for less-expensive hardware implementations. If you look at the new push for multi-core and multi-CPU systems this will be even more true. Plus, as a bonus, if they mess something up then they can more easily get people to install a new driver revison successfully than to flash a device or fix a problem in the silicon.
The problem for the open-source community is that these drivers are increasingly not just the way to talk to autonomous hardware but actually implement alot of the fucntionality of the device. Taking this in mind, the manufacturers are unlikely to give out the source code for these drivers as they will be giving their competitors a more significant view into their playbook. People in the Linux community complain about the lack of certain drivers like those for wireless cards in many notebooks, which in my understanding work as described, and are left hacking together a solution to run the Windows drivers under linux in order to get them to work. If you want things like that to work and work well in Linux then you have to give them a stable subsystem and make it as easy to port their drivers as possible while providing them the means to not give away the source which contains half of their work in creating the hardware.
I know that is not the ideal solution but thems the breaks. It is either Linux steps up with an API and binary subsystem or they will be left with fewer hardware options consisting of what more expensive all-hardware alternatives are left for many of these peripherals.
I have seen the MS strategy first hand when it comes to servers. What they go for is large #s of servers that have one main task and also have enough excess capacity to serve as seemless redundancy for other server's tasks should they fail. That is why you will see the DNS/DHCP on it's own server because it will frequently serve as a backup domain controller and/or file server. The Domain Controller will in turn serve as a backup DNS/DHCP server and so on...
They have built Server 2003 so that the replication to keep such servers up to date with each other is nice and seemless and the handover in the event of a failure is also seemless. In order for this all to work though you need alot of servers so that there is enough excess capacity to ensure that in the event one or two of them failing nothing is interrupted and the performance is still adequate.
This is an appropriate solution when money is no object and 100% uptime is 100% essential - extra capacity and redundancy never hurt anyone. For the sort of situation you described it sounds like you could have made due with far fewer servers and the MS solution still would have worked fine (I have seen AD, DNS/DHCP, Web, Exchange, File and Print all on one beefy Sun $8,000 Dual Dual Core Opteron server for an organization the size you mentioned work pretty well)- but the reseller/partner would have sold alot less servers and made alot less money and MS would have sold less licenses and made less money too. So, in short, MS Server 2003 = better than you made it out to be though MS and Partner = greedy as hell;)
P.S. The Sun Fire X4200 is sweet as hell. The system I menioned above is the "Extra Large" and it does indeed run Windows Server 2003 for those so inclined.
To be fair, your concern here doesn't seem to be Microsoft but the RIAA/MPAA and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Microsoft isn't the owner of the copyrighted material and Microsoft is not the one to choose the standard and protections with which to release it. If anything they are backing the less draconian of the two in my understanding with HD-DVD instead of BluRay.
The RIAA/MPAA see that the easy and perfect copies of digital audio and video that is possible now has resulted in all of us being able to go to torrenspy or to open LimeWire and get just about any movie or piece of music that is out today for free. I do agree in that with the next generation of BluRay/HD-DVD that the copy protection will be steeper and more draconian. I also believe that the introduction of DRM into the PC hardware will likely happen and I am not happy about it either. Vendors like Microsoft and Apple will be forced into it because they will either have to support the DRM that the content creators build into their media/playback systems or they will not be able to play that content. They are already fighting an uphill battle to be allowed to play it at all since the industry feels the format would be more secure if a computer couldn't play it and it was limited to a set top appliance they control. And, given that both MS and Apple have designs on your living room and entertainment center there is no way that they will refuse the ability to play whatever media and formats that most of tomorrow's movies are distributed in and restrictions are involved in order to do so. That doesn't exactly make all the DRM their fault.
The way that I see DRM is the way that I see the lock on the door to my house. It is not there to keep out people who really want to come in and steal it's contents (it wouldn't take much to bust in my door or to smash a window) but rather to let people know that they are breaking the law and are not welcome - to keep honest people honest. No matter what they come up with in DRM it will eventually be broken by those who really want to break it. I do expect, however, that it will be tedious enough under the 2015 system that anyone who does it will know that they are doing something illegal.
And, finally, the idea that Microsoft will keep your documents locked away from you or will somehow own them is absurd. They have already announced PDF support in the new Office and provide viewer/printer apps for all of the Office 2003 apps for free. When a 90 day evaluation version of Server 2003 or XP Pro, which they make availible for free, expires it cuts off the network interfaces to it but you can still go on the local workstation and back up your files. I can see the situation where you will no longer be able to use Windows or Office with 100% functionality under a annual membership payment system where you have not paid your bill but not one where you can't backup, read or print the documents that you created and own. That is the sort of commentary that shows me that you, and people like you, are rather parinoid and irrational in your fear and hatred of MS.
It is fair game to complain about the costs of Windows, Office and other MS products because that leads to a costs vs benefits analysis of whether it is a better value vs the time and effort spent by the users and the administration costs than other solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. It is fair game to complain about the security issues with Microsoft's products because they have admitted as much that there are issues there and regularly release patches and advisories to address them and are making the ability to run as a non-administrator level user a requirement of software written for Vista to further address it. It is fair game to quantitatively compare the performance of Microsoft's solutions versus other vendor's solutions because, as long as the setup is fair and impartial, numbers don't lie and are a useful tool for comparison of applicability and value of a solution to your needs and hardware. It is fair game to talk of particular bugs and issues you have with Microsoft's products because they have a responsibility to support their products such that they work as advertised. It is even fair game to argue subjective points like ease of use and ease of administration of Microsoft's solutions versus that of their competitors because these are things that people from desktop users to system administrators use every day as an integral part of their jobs and have some responsibility for making things as easy and productive as possible for all involved in the enterprise.
However, what is not fair game is this view of Microsoft as evil and their solutions are never to be considered and you need to "Say No To Windows." Beware those who will tell you that Microsoft is evil, that it's solutions are never better suited to your situation and who will say things about the stability and performance of the OS that fly in the face of the millions who use it without such issues day in and day out to get their work done. There are people believe in Linux and opensource almost as a religion and suffer from the logical fallacy that, if Linux is as better in every way as they believe it to be, Microsoft can only be maintaining it's dominance in marketshare by some sort of evil trickery and vendor lock-in. You are not going to get the answers you need from these sorts of individuals - the corporate solutions will never get any consideration no matter how easy to use, easy to administer, fast, stable and secure that they get. I am still waiting to see a truly fair and objective comparison on Slashdot that takes all these things into account for various situations. That is an article I'd read and the book I'd buy...
I had used FreeBSD excusively in the 4.x's on both my desktop and servers up until about a year ago. I really liked ports and found that everything just seemed like it fit together like one seamless product instead of the hodge-podge that my previous experiences with RedHat and Slackware had been. Subjectively I also found that it felt faster than the Linux at the time of my switch. I stuck with FreeBSD but also with the 4.x tree because I was a bit put off by the whole stable vs development nature they kept putting forward for 5.
That changed when Novell bought SUSE and started offering their certifications. I was asked to evauluate it by some people at work who had fond memories of Novell and wanted to see what they did with Linux and I was given the opportunity to sit for the Novell CLP (Certified Linux Professional) practicum exam if I wanted as a carrot for doing it. I decided that the only way to get comfortable enough with it for the test was to dive in and install it on my primary desktop OS and force myself to use it.
What I found was surprising. There, obviously, were some growing pains when it came to various BSD vs SYSV things and directory layout and ports vs RPM etc. What I was surprised by was that everything worked out of the box. I am used to, and almost looked forward to, having to roll up my sleeves and figure out the config files and recompile the kernel and go through newsgroups and mailing lists for fixes. This has been especially true since my primary machine is a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600). What also surprised me was that Yast configures, with either a console or X-Win GUI, just about eveything that I wanted to configure and every setting that I wanted to change. I kept waiting to run into a gotcha so I could swear it off and convince myself I had to do it all by hand but it hasn't come yet. The whole magic-black-box aspect of it scares me a little but I am amazed how little I have had to get my hands dirty. It almost feels like Windows Server 2003 -- in a good way. Also, while I was put off by the 6 CD thing at first (I have always had a pretty streamlined and small FreeBSD install for my desktop) I find that having pretty much any piece of software that you might want in RPMs you can trust (and don't suffer from the dependency hell I remember) right on the CDs is actually pretty nice.
After I take my practicum in the next few weeks I am going to try Novell's desktop offering. If it is as slick as SLES then Novell, especially when you figure in NDS and ZenWorks, is going to make huge inroads versus the other distros and FreeBSD. And, strange as it sounds to me who missed the Novell hayday, there are alot of people in the industry who seem to remember their interaction with Novell fondly for whom their name and support seems to be a big plus.
Slashdot Mirror
I am in a humanities education course where most of my courses are things like education, history, government and english. They are all text with little in the way of diagrams and they are all things that can be very nicely outlined for the most part. I digest things in the lecture and group and catagorize main points into nice outlines that are easy to follow later. I love the easy ability to write up an outline in such a way with Mac Office's Notebook view and to be able to go back and add to a topic a few minutes if a lecturer returns to it or even a few days later if the light goes off to clarify it. I love being able to keep all of my assignments listed as Tasks on the Entourge calendar. It lets me keep everything organized in that way. I can type 75 words per minute so it gives me more time to listen and less time is needed to type/write the relevant details. It is electronic so that it is easily readable and can be easily searched, easily backed up, easily printed, etc. I only bring one thing, a 12" PowerBook, to most lectures so I have a nice light backback that I know I always have everything with me with. I back everything up every few days to a USB thumb drive and at the end of semester to a CD.
I find it better in almost every way - and these notes I stand a much better chance of still having and being able to find something in 10 months or 10 years time if I want to see it again.
It might not work for everybody or every situation but I would be very upset if one of my professors made me change from a system that works great for me because of their preconceptions of how I am using it or not learning properly. It is their lecture but it is my education and notes - and at the University level it is my perogative how I go about that...
I love my Vonage service but I don't use it in a normal way. My girlfriend lives in Australia now and I will be moving to join her in the not too distant future. I got Vonage and brought the box out there on a visit about a year ago. Once I got one of those 240V universal DC power adapters to work for the power the thing it came right up on her DSL connection with a 716 Buffalo phone number in Australia. I ended up leaving it there. The quality of the calls is better than Verizon's long distance was and I only pay $15 a month for 500 minutes that I used to get charged ~$.20/min for.
I know that my situation is a bit rare but I have been dazzled and amazed by Vonage and hope they don't go away - the amount of money that they have saved me in calling her is tremendous and the ability to have a local US phone number overseas for friends and family to call me on is going to be great. I highly reccomend this sort of solution for anyone who makes frequent international calls.
I have found the ultimate solution to such issues in my VMWare testing environment - snapshots. We really beat on and hose our testing machines and, to make sure we were getting an acurate test, we would always have to reimage them from a Ghost image every time we went in there. We replaced that solution with running our testing in VMWare where reverting to a previous snapshot just takes a few seconds. Not to mention that you can branch off them in a tree fashion to track and test under various changes and conditions. I really don't understand why MS can't develop a simpler version of something similar for the OS. HD space on the vast majority of user's machines is plentiful and the ability to be able to make a snapshot of your system when it is exactly the way you want it that you can go back to later quickly and easily would solve myraid problems. If you could back up that snapshot to a DVD or external HD in such a way as the hypothetical snapshot manager could restore your PC config from it in the event of a physical HD failure all the better.
Now, obviously, we would need a way to prevent a malicious program for also corrupting the backup snapshot - maybe some password that is specifically for the modifying and changing of the system snapshot.
I doubt that MS will ever be able to make an OS as secure as Unix as long as they have to provide the level of backward compatibility they do. What they could do, however, is mitigate the risk by giving us a way to get our PC back to it's pristine state without all of the trouble of app reinstalls and haphazard backups/restores. The limitation always was the hard disk space this would entail and that limitation has been blown away by modern HDs...
You have to give the global warming people some credit for somehow advancing their theory as fact and proclaiming such horrendous future consequences to it to get so much attention and funding. However, just as it was a consensus once that Earth was the center of the universe this may be just as wrong and the establishment has just as much a backlash to those who are skeptical of their assertion.
9 1.shtml). There are also a theory that the warming is caused more from water vapor than CO2 and that reducing CO2 emissions will have a negligable effect on it. (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Iris/iris. html).
l t.aspx?ID=101). When you are talking those kind of consequences and costs there better be a more definite understanding and more dire consequences than less than a degree temperature change in 100 years and a theory that points to only one main cause seems a bit simplistic anyway in an ecosystem as complicated as ours. I think our energy and money is better spent on cleaning up other kinds of pollution and fixing helping with some of humanities social problems and human suffering - many things will have a much more real and substantial impact in our lives and well-being.
I think that there is consensus that there has been a slight warming (0.6 +/- 0.2 C in the past century; 0.1 C/decade over the last 30 years) but there is not a consensus of the cause, there is not a consensus that it will continue and there is not a consensus that it is serious enough for humanity ecologically and economically to put the kind of resouces that some are calling for in the order of Trillions of dollars. There certainly are many things that we are more sure of and affect us more that we can and should be focusing on instead of this.
There is a theory that the warming trend is about to reverse itself and is more tied to Pacific Decadal Oscillation than to C02 emissions. (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2002GL0151
There is not enough certainty here for humanity to do the things that are being called for and I believe that reducing CO2 emissions to the levels and extent called for will have a disasterous effect on many of the world's economies. For example, this was a report prepared on the costs for Denmark to meet Kyoto standard(http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Defau
So now we are going to hold MS accountable for users do doing bad things with their computers? That is a very slippery slope - can the RIAA/MPAA then sue MS because users use their OS to copy CDs/DVDs and break copyrights? Everybody and their brother will be trying to get MS to restrict various things that users can do with their PCs and it would set a dangerous precedent that would affect other operating systems and companies as well.
Just because most of the people who send unsolicited email do it from windows pcs doesn't mean that MS should be able to put restrictions into their OS to keep them from doing it. And, lets say that they did, if those users then used Linux instead they could send the spam that way. Would you support restrictions being forced into the baseline linux kernel or the stock distros that would prevent them from doing it there too?
If that is what you are looking for there is no reason that it has to be done at the server. Why can't the email client automatically send out a form letter reply that the email was caught by the spam filter, and maybe even the reason why it was, and instruct them to contact the user to ensure they read it if it important?
I far prefer a client-side solution for all the reasons I mentioned - it leaves the user and not the mail administrator in control of their mail.
That isn't what is happening and your sarcasm is rather thick and misplaced.
The Outlook 2003 spam filter is very good and it doesn't move all my email to the Junk Mail folder. I am not going to say that I never get a false positive but it is rare - I would say one email it identifies as spam in fifty. And, when it does misidentify an email there is a button that says "Not Junk" that I click on and it actually learns a lesson when I tell it that and won't identify mail from that sender etc as Junk again. I have tried many different mail clients from Thunderbird to Lotus Notes (which I am forced to use at work - shudder) and nobody seems to have anything in the same league as Outlook's spam filter.
In my situation I will usually glance at the Junk Mail when I see that it has moved some things in there briefly to make sure that I don't recognize a name but other than that I don't touch it. If stuff stays in there for a week is is moved to Trash. If stuff stays in a trash for a week it is purged. So that gives me two weeks to go back and find a email if for whatever reason I don't realize there was a false positive situation. And what it means is that for the 20 spam emails I get a week I don't have to lift a finger for them to be erased and it allows me to see a nice clean view of my important new messages in my inbox when in a rush.
Everybody has to deal with spam in their own way. You can be varying degrees of agressive about it and I have found a level I am comfortable with. What I don't want is somebody else to decide for me at the server or forwarder such that I don't even get the email.
Do you people really want what you seem to be asking from MS - that they decide for you what email you do and don't want and don't even send it on to you. That would mean that they have the power to decide what you should and shouldn't see with no review on your part or input from you on what is or isn't spam? That is a scary concept to me... I like the current setup where I get it and it sets it aside for review.
And, once again, Microsoft has come as close to a solution as I think is possible and it is one that I am comfortable with.
I don't think it is a fair criticism of MS to judge them by that standard. Fistly, it makes sense that the only people who they are going to help with spam are those using their products. I take "eliminate spam" to mean that they are going to eliminate it from our inboxes. Considering that most SMTP servers are not Exchange and the majority of internet traffic doesn't run through their servers the idea that they can, and should, stop all that traffic pertaining to unsolicited emails is rather ridiculous.
Has the level of spam that I have received gone down? Most definetly it has. Are they responsible? Yes they are. It is that simple...
As a previous poster alluded to with the problems of spam filtering - I am the only one who can really decide whether a certain piece of mail is unsolicited or not and I am glad that some SMTP server or mail forwarder in the middle doesn't filter it out before it gets to me so that I never have the opportunity to decide for myself on my rules/conditions.
Needless to say, there are all kinds of problems introduced when third-parties can start to decide what mail I should and should not receive without my input/knowledge. And that means that I don't want it to be eliminated by your definition - even if it was possible.
I know that every time I read any article that mentions AMD v Intel that there will be people from the AMD side that come on and say there is not a single compeling Intel product and no reason to have a non-AMD processor in anything. I saw similar zealotry in the comments to anandtech.com's review of the processor - and they are a pretty unbiased and trustworthy source. Here is what they had to say...
... We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller." And it accomlishes this with power consumption that is along the same lines at the previous generation high-end Pentium M chips.
"Our initial analysis still holds true, that for a notebook processor, the Core Duo will be nothing short of amazing for professionals. Looking at the performance improvements offered everywhere from media encoding to 3D rendering, you're going to be able to do a lot more on your notebook than you originally thought possible (without resorting to a 12-pound desktop replacement). In the past, power users on the go had to sacrifice mobility for CPU power, but with the Core Duo, that is no longer the case
I would think that as technology enthusiasts that we would be able to give credit where credit is due and recognize that, at the moment, Intel has a better processor lineup for laptops and AMD has a better line for desktops and servers - that it is possible for each to have strenghts and weaknesses as their produts evolve and change in different ways. Keeping an open mind and an up-to-date understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each helps us to choose the right tool for the job and the budget.
I just can't believe how many are unwilling to concede even one success for Intel in their belief AMD is always better... The competition is helping all of us in spurring on better products and prices and the variety of options allows us to choose the right tool for the job.
Actually Microsoft has done far more than anybody else in helping me with Spam. The spam filter for Outlook 2003 is very good and Office Update regularly provides updates to the filter that bring it up to date with some of the latest major sources/types to look for. I set it up a level in how aggressive it is, which has resulted in a false positive or two every now and again, and I have not seen any spam in my inbox in some time.
Don't knock MS on spam until you see Outlook 2003's spam filter. The question becomes if they have the technology that they do in Outlook then why can't the incorporate it into hotmail as well? I would ask the same question about Exchange but I guess they figure most people using an Exchange server are doing it with Outlook.
There are a few issues here. First of all, reinstalling Windows to solve every problem used to be viewed as the sign of a weak IT guy where I work and in the industry. The idea was every problem has a cause and a solution and putting yourself and the user through the inconvienience of having to backup all their data and reinstall windows and their software for what could be an easy solution from the knowledge base etc was a waste. That has changed here in the last couple of years.
Now, with the advent of a heavier network and server infrastructure we have all user data and documents stored on a network share and every profile is a roaming profile - nothing important at all is stored on the local workstations anymore. We also created, and keep updated, a network-hosted Norton Ghost image for each workstation type. The process of restoring the system to a 100% pristine condition from that Ghost image takes 10-15 minutes and a trained monkey could do it - and trained monkeys cost far less and free up time for the real admins to not have to deal with it anymore.
So, we have come to a world where it really is faster and easier to start with reinstalling/reimaging the workstation. It is the first step in troubleshooting as it is so quick. After that if the problem persists there is a diagnostic set that is run to check if it is a hardware problem because the reimage rules out a software issue for the most part because of the QA and testing before the Ghost image is certified/deployed.
If you feel more comfortable reinstalling your system every six months then do it but set up a system where it is really a quick process and non-issue. This sort of practice in dealing with the desktops seems to be the way the industry is trending these days...
You can mod me a troll for not seeing what the big deal here is and trying to see it in a humourous light all you want - but that doesn't change that this whole thing is being blown out of proportion.
If you had gone to the linked article you would find that we are looking at about 500 people domestically that our intelligence community saw were in commuication with suspected terrorists overseas. The communications that were monitored were all international calls to/from those suspects. I don't have a reasonable expectation that when I take a suitcase full of stuff on a plane that it won't be searched when crossing borders and 500 people's communications with suspected terrorists on an international basis being monitored doesn't bother me and won't bother most people.
To quote Jonah again...
"Before 9/11, the system for listening to conversations between terrorists abroad and their accomplices on our soil had all the flexibility and creativity of John Ashcroft at a disco contest. Even with warrants issued by the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the National Security Agency usually had to erase the "American" side of the conversation between suspected terrorists before handing them over to the FBI.
Most Americans think that sort of thing is crazy. But, to keep the frenzy alive, we talk about spying on "certain Americans" -- when in reality we're trying to stop barbarians from killing 'certain Americans.'"
I have long agreed with Jonah Goldberg on many things but his take on this is spot-on...
0 601131109.asp
"It reminds me of the ongoing case of the vapors contracted by much of the media and by other critics of President Bush's program of spying on "certain Americans." That's how Dan Abrams of MSNBC, for one, refers to a handful of people who are allegedly on al Qaeda's speed dial and have been in contact with terrorists overseas: "certain Americans."
"Gosh," the average viewer might say, "I'm a certain American!"
If one paid only casual attention to the news these days, one would get the sense that Bush has a big stack of phone books in the Oval Office, and he and Dick Cheney spend their days thumbing through them to find "certain Americans" to wiretap.
"Joe Smith?" says Cheney, rubbing his hands together as if over a fine meal. "Man, he's gotta qualify as a certain American. Let's listen to his conversation with his wife."
At first, I thought this NSA story was a big deal on the merits, and I wrote that Bush should have asked to fix the law rather than work his way around it. I still think that, in a perfect world, the White House would try to get the laws it needs from Congress. Nevertheless, after 9/11, Congress declared that "the president has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism" and authorized "all necessary and appropriate force" against al Qaeda. That strikes me as ample justification for tapping phone calls between al Qaeda associates in Cleveland and Cairo.
Now I'm beginning to think this is just the latest in anti-Bush hype. The New York Times, which launched this "scandal," remains at journalistic DEFCON 1, releasing a stream of articles, editorials, and Op-Ed articles as if the nation were up in arms over what some hotter heads believe to be an impeachable offense. (A writer for Newsweek.com raises the possibility that the NSA wiretapping is a prelude to right-wing death squads in the U.S.) James Risen, the reporter who uncovered the spying program and has a book on the "secret history" of Bush's antiterrorism efforts, sounds like he's already cleared space on his mantle for his Pulitzer, Profile in Courage, and Nobel prizes."
The rest of the article - and it is a great one - is availible here...
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg20
Office is just as important to MS, if not more so, than Windows is. Buisinesses might have Linux webservers or Oracle database servers but they all use Microsoft Office with very few exceptions. It is the software that actually gets the real work done, and the document formats that everybody writes that work to exchange them in, and it is a larger and more important monopoly for them in the long term.
Now Microsoft has a dilemma - do they ensure the survival of Office by making it availible on platforms like Linux to ensure it can run on every desktop or do they force you to stay on their platform by making that the only way to run it? So far they have choen to not lend legitimacy to Linux as a desktop platform and it has not hurt them very much. However, OSX is a much more appealing desktop, one that is gaining in popularity, and Microsoft chose to support it to keep the people who chose it using Office.
I think that the current balance that MS is striking between supporting their platform and supporting Office also the Mac as a second platform is working for them and to their benefit. The last thing they want is for all the Mac users to turn to another office platform - especially one that has a windows version and/or is less expensive - that they could evangelicly convert their friends and family to. People stay with Office because it is the easy and safe choice and it actually is a good product that does most of what they want and need. The most important thing that Office has, though, is it's ubiquity - and so far they have managed to be able to keep that and it is well worth what they pay to port Office to the Mac.
I think that if Linux gains enough popularity where it is 10-15% of worldwide desktops in countries that can afford Office you'll see them port it to that too...
In the very beginning of December I ran into an amazing deal on an open-box return of a 12" PowerBook G4 to Amazon. It was only a Combo drive but it was the 1.5Ghz 2005 model and it was $1000. They had a 30 day moneyback return guarantee via their warehouse_deals store that sells their returned/refurbished merchandise. After I placed the order I went through the week of waiting worried about the dead pixels or blemishes or problems I was going to encounter from a non-new machine but, when it arrived, it was absolutely perfect. It was as if somebody bought it, opened the box, turned it on, and decided that it was too small or something after a day or so and sent it back. And, thanks to them, I just saved myself $500 :) I used a little of the savings to buy a 512MB DIMM to bring me up to 768 and a few accessories.
This is my first Mac as a long-time Linux user (SUSE/Novell mostly these days) and a long-time Microsoft IT Support guy. I could not be more impressed with the hardware, sortware or size - the keyboard and case quality more than make the 12" PowerBook justified over the iBook and the size is perfect for my road-warrior needs. I was worried about feeling some regret for getting this a month and a half before MacWorld San Francisco and the Intel Macs but, after reading this article, I would rather have the last and best and most reliable of the G4 PowerBooks ever built than a first generation Intel machine, both in hardware and software, that will run many apps I need like Office through Rosetta emulation. I never thought I'd say this but I am a head-over-heels Mac convert and I have not even turned on my Linux desktop in a week. I have not been this excited about computing in a long time exloring the GUI, keyboard combonations and, most importantly, the way they implement their Unix layer and filesystem.
I am still trying to decide if I should pony up for the AppleCare though - I had a friend with one of the G3 iBooks with the logic board problems and he is really pushing me to do it. What do you all think about AppleCare? I am glad I have the option of waiting a few months and mulling it over - I was told I could get it as long as the 1 year warranty has not expired yet. Are there any other slashdotters that have experience on the 12" PowerBook that want to let me know their stories or have insight into whether they needed AppleCare on it? Any tips or suggestions for a Linux/Windows guy new to OSX that I might not have run across?
You are rather out of touch and mistaken. There are two modes besides off and on on a PC latptop - suspend and hibernate. A PC notebook goes into suspend when closed and, if reopened while still in suspend, comes back immedidatly to the exact state you were in when you closed it in about 1-3 seconds. Basically suspend keeps all of the current stuff retained in memory by leaving the memory powered up and takes just about everything else down to a very low power mode but it still uses battery power and will run out after a long enough time in suspend mode. So, rather than have you loose your work when the battery runs out when you put it into suspend, they came up with hibernation which writes the current contents of your RAM to your HD and then totally turns the PC off. Since this mode requires it to go through the BIOS startup and then the memory contents have to be read from the HD this mode takes a bit longer at about 10-15 seconds to right back where you left off. Usually they are used in conjunction with each other such that the laptop will go into suspend when closed or after 15 minutes of inactivity on battery. After the laptop has been in suspend for say an hour it will power back up and hibernate itself so at to not use any more battery power.
You can turn off hibernation all together and just go with suspend and get the results that you want. You just better make sure not to forget to plug it in or power it back up and save your work within about 10-15 hours or you'll loose it when the battery finally dies from the little power suspend still uses.
I have found reading the comments on this thread extremely funny. What I thought to myself reading the article is that the Slashdot crowd with either...
a.) Heckle the new interface as looking stupid/being ignorant/taking up too much space on the screen
b.) Talk about how the interface change will be an opportunity for OpenOffice
I am not surprised to be proved correct. Here is what is really going to happen with the new Office. First, they will have an option in there to make it look like Office XP/2003 for those that want it. I watched a video with an interface designer from MS who said as much and it makes sense - they have always provided a way to make newer software look/behave like it's previous versions (2000->XP interface for example). Second, as they have incorporated more and more new features to Office over the years the menus and toolbars has gotten very cluttered. I find it makes perfect sense to me for Office to step back and reasses/reorganize the interface and how people use it to make getting to these options a little more intutitive as well as take advantage of the increased screen realestate that many newer monitors/flatpanels provide. I have an LCD where, at my resolution, the toolbar icons are almost too small these days. I would also like the idea of Office tailoring it's interface to the task I am trying to accomplish and helping me see what options are most common and really relevant and useful for my current what I am trying to do. This is, by many accounts, the peak of Office and it's userbase so if there is ever a time that they could leverage that to have people learn a better and more impressive interface it is now.
I like the new interface and I am going to buy the $150 Student/Teacher version when it comes out. I think that, unlike the differnce between 97, 2000, XP and 2003 where the feature differences are about office and document collaboration and other rather unsexy little sorts of things many users did not need/use, this version is about a nice looking new interface and capabilities to more easily create nicer looking new documents, charts and presentations with more eye candy. I think that you are all wrong - they changed this in a way that will get people excited about Office again and that they can easily tell the difference between it and the old versions in such a way that will have some word-of-mouth advertising between friends and coworkers who will show it off to others and talk about it. For those IT people who posted - I expect there will be a demand for the first time in years from your users and managers will be asking for it and about it.
Instead of rejoicing abuot their coming fall you should realize that this is what MS needed to do to really address OpenOffice and further differentiate themselves and their new version. I really think it will be a large sales success in ways that XP and 2003 was not and a new standard for the other suites to follow. And, most ironically, it will be it for the exact reasons that you all think it will fail.
The link in my post has all kinds of things to try. I was trying to be helpful to you and to solve the problem you mentioned and I am quite sure that going through the things listed in that link will solve this problem for you.
I didn't say anything pro-MS to start a flame or anything and was simply trying to be a good neighbor and let you know about a resouce that I found and a possible solution to your problem - which you could have found with google. It is rather telling that a helpful post about a solution to a problem that several people replied here as having doesn't get modded up and a "Why would I even want an OS that 'sometimes' breaks" is. Just like anything else this problem/bug has a solution.
I would have throught that a Linux user would have the mindset to see things in a technical manner, as a problem to be solved, rather than just give up and blame/write-off the OS for a relatively minor problem. I love Linux and use it on a daily basis and, while it has gotten better over the years in this regard, there are many little nitpicky issues that I have had over the years that took me many days of tinkering and searching newsgroups and web pages to find the answer. This isn't a random "sometimes breaks" sort of problem but one that happens under specific conditions of software and network interaction during boot. Basically it seems as if, with a bunch of software trying to add things to the system tray at near the same time, one misbehaving program or service can lock the tray for a short period of time causing some of the other programs to not be able to add their icons to it. In my case this would happen when I was not connected to a network with a UPnP device and the "UPnP User Interface" service, which is not necessary to use UPnP and created an icon representing the gateway that I didn't want anyway, would hang until a network timeout while trying to search the network for UPnP devices and lock the system tray in the process. I uninstalled it and I stopped having the problem. You are right, It is possible that another piece of software that you have installed is hanging briefly during boot and/or doing the same sort of thing. Many such cases, and their solutions, were addressed by the link in my post. All of these causes discussed seem to be rather rare pieces or combinations of software.
Stop the zealotry and take a look at the above link - that is if you really want this fixed instead of just looking for an excuse to tear down an OS that you obviously don't like for other reasons. No good deed goes unpunished on slashdot these days...
I started to have this problem all of the sudden and started pulling my hair out. Then it occured to me that it started not too long after I got a new wireless router and set up UPnP for MSN Messenger to get the Video Conferencing working through the NAT properly. There is a windows component by the name of "UPnP User Interface" that causes this problem - it is not part of the default install and you don't need it. I uninstalled it under Add/Remove Windows Components and this issue went away. See the below link for details.
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxSystray.htm
This is analagous to the French Maginot Line vis a vie the Germans post WWI. "Instead of building a robust military/defensive/resistance capability to deal with the Germans when they get in why don't we just build an impenetrable wall to keep them out." I know that is a simplistic analogy and view of history but I figured it was appropriate.
The virus makers, and even more so the spyware/adware makers, will always find a way to force or trick their way onto a PC no matter what you do. Especially when the ultimate master/defender of the PC is your average clueless PC user - and as long as they have privilages to install software on their PC there is a possibility of installing something harmful. If Windows Defender(tm) can alert people whenever an app it doesn't recognize as a genuine one is trying to do weird or possibly harmful things and clean out the spyware/adware when it finds it then it fills a vital role as another layer of defense and protection.
By all means Microsoft should give us a real limited user account and force the software vendors to honor the model. They should find and plug security holes and exploits in IE and in all the services that you are running out of the box that they can. However, I for one am happy they are including this too - you can never be too spyware/adware free. To actually express the sarchastic sentiment of your subject - Thank You Microsoft. However, it is a fair question to ask "where was this two years ago?"
More and more hardware is being implemented in software. This makes sense because as the CPU has increased in speed and capability it has gained the resources and free-time to pick up the slack for less-expensive hardware implementations. If you look at the new push for multi-core and multi-CPU systems this will be even more true. Plus, as a bonus, if they mess something up then they can more easily get people to install a new driver revison successfully than to flash a device or fix a problem in the silicon.
The problem for the open-source community is that these drivers are increasingly not just the way to talk to autonomous hardware but actually implement alot of the fucntionality of the device. Taking this in mind, the manufacturers are unlikely to give out the source code for these drivers as they will be giving their competitors a more significant view into their playbook. People in the Linux community complain about the lack of certain drivers like those for wireless cards in many notebooks, which in my understanding work as described, and are left hacking together a solution to run the Windows drivers under linux in order to get them to work. If you want things like that to work and work well in Linux then you have to give them a stable subsystem and make it as easy to port their drivers as possible while providing them the means to not give away the source which contains half of their work in creating the hardware.
I know that is not the ideal solution but thems the breaks. It is either Linux steps up with an API and binary subsystem or they will be left with fewer hardware options consisting of what more expensive all-hardware alternatives are left for many of these peripherals.
I have seen the MS strategy first hand when it comes to servers. What they go for is large #s of servers that have one main task and also have enough excess capacity to serve as seemless redundancy for other server's tasks should they fail. That is why you will see the DNS/DHCP on it's own server because it will frequently serve as a backup domain controller and/or file server. The Domain Controller will in turn serve as a backup DNS/DHCP server and so on...
;)
= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=138713
They have built Server 2003 so that the replication to keep such servers up to date with each other is nice and seemless and the handover in the event of a failure is also seemless. In order for this all to work though you need alot of servers so that there is enough excess capacity to ensure that in the event one or two of them failing nothing is interrupted and the performance is still adequate.
This is an appropriate solution when money is no object and 100% uptime is 100% essential - extra capacity and redundancy never hurt anyone. For the sort of situation you described it sounds like you could have made due with far fewer servers and the MS solution still would have worked fine (I have seen AD, DNS/DHCP, Web, Exchange, File and Print all on one beefy Sun $8,000 Dual Dual Core Opteron server for an organization the size you mentioned work pretty well)- but the reseller/partner would have sold alot less servers and made alot less money and MS would have sold less licenses and made less money too. So, in short, MS Server 2003 = better than you made it out to be though MS and Partner = greedy as hell
P.S. The Sun Fire X4200 is sweet as hell. The system I menioned above is the "Extra Large" and it does indeed run Windows Server 2003 for those so inclined.
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process
To be fair, your concern here doesn't seem to be Microsoft but the RIAA/MPAA and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Microsoft isn't the owner of the copyrighted material and Microsoft is not the one to choose the standard and protections with which to release it. If anything they are backing the less draconian of the two in my understanding with HD-DVD instead of BluRay.
The RIAA/MPAA see that the easy and perfect copies of digital audio and video that is possible now has resulted in all of us being able to go to torrenspy or to open LimeWire and get just about any movie or piece of music that is out today for free. I do agree in that with the next generation of BluRay/HD-DVD that the copy protection will be steeper and more draconian. I also believe that the introduction of DRM into the PC hardware will likely happen and I am not happy about it either. Vendors like Microsoft and Apple will be forced into it because they will either have to support the DRM that the content creators build into their media/playback systems or they will not be able to play that content. They are already fighting an uphill battle to be allowed to play it at all since the industry feels the format would be more secure if a computer couldn't play it and it was limited to a set top appliance they control. And, given that both MS and Apple have designs on your living room and entertainment center there is no way that they will refuse the ability to play whatever media and formats that most of tomorrow's movies are distributed in and restrictions are involved in order to do so. That doesn't exactly make all the DRM their fault.
The way that I see DRM is the way that I see the lock on the door to my house. It is not there to keep out people who really want to come in and steal it's contents (it wouldn't take much to bust in my door or to smash a window) but rather to let people know that they are breaking the law and are not welcome - to keep honest people honest. No matter what they come up with in DRM it will eventually be broken by those who really want to break it. I do expect, however, that it will be tedious enough under the 2015 system that anyone who does it will know that they are doing something illegal.
And, finally, the idea that Microsoft will keep your documents locked away from you or will somehow own them is absurd. They have already announced PDF support in the new Office and provide viewer/printer apps for all of the Office 2003 apps for free. When a 90 day evaluation version of Server 2003 or XP Pro, which they make availible for free, expires it cuts off the network interfaces to it but you can still go on the local workstation and back up your files. I can see the situation where you will no longer be able to use Windows or Office with 100% functionality under a annual membership payment system where you have not paid your bill but not one where you can't backup, read or print the documents that you created and own. That is the sort of commentary that shows me that you, and people like you, are rather parinoid and irrational in your fear and hatred of MS.
It is fair game to complain about the costs of Windows, Office and other MS products because that leads to a costs vs benefits analysis of whether it is a better value vs the time and effort spent by the users and the administration costs than other solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. It is fair game to complain about the security issues with Microsoft's products because they have admitted as much that there are issues there and regularly release patches and advisories to address them and are making the ability to run as a non-administrator level user a requirement of software written for Vista to further address it. It is fair game to quantitatively compare the performance of Microsoft's solutions versus other vendor's solutions because, as long as the setup is fair and impartial, numbers don't lie and are a useful tool for comparison of applicability and value of a solution to your needs and hardware. It is fair game to talk of particular bugs and issues you have with Microsoft's products because they have a responsibility to support their products such that they work as advertised. It is even fair game to argue subjective points like ease of use and ease of administration of Microsoft's solutions versus that of their competitors because these are things that people from desktop users to system administrators use every day as an integral part of their jobs and have some responsibility for making things as easy and productive as possible for all involved in the enterprise.
However, what is not fair game is this view of Microsoft as evil and their solutions are never to be considered and you need to "Say No To Windows." Beware those who will tell you that Microsoft is evil, that it's solutions are never better suited to your situation and who will say things about the stability and performance of the OS that fly in the face of the millions who use it without such issues day in and day out to get their work done. There are people believe in Linux and opensource almost as a religion and suffer from the logical fallacy that, if Linux is as better in every way as they believe it to be, Microsoft can only be maintaining it's dominance in marketshare by some sort of evil trickery and vendor lock-in. You are not going to get the answers you need from these sorts of individuals - the corporate solutions will never get any consideration no matter how easy to use, easy to administer, fast, stable and secure that they get. I am still waiting to see a truly fair and objective comparison on Slashdot that takes all these things into account for various situations. That is an article I'd read and the book I'd buy...
I had used FreeBSD excusively in the 4.x's on both my desktop and servers up until about a year ago. I really liked ports and found that everything just seemed like it fit together like one seamless product instead of the hodge-podge that my previous experiences with RedHat and Slackware had been. Subjectively I also found that it felt faster than the Linux at the time of my switch. I stuck with FreeBSD but also with the 4.x tree because I was a bit put off by the whole stable vs development nature they kept putting forward for 5.
That changed when Novell bought SUSE and started offering their certifications. I was asked to evauluate it by some people at work who had fond memories of Novell and wanted to see what they did with Linux and I was given the opportunity to sit for the Novell CLP (Certified Linux Professional) practicum exam if I wanted as a carrot for doing it. I decided that the only way to get comfortable enough with it for the test was to dive in and install it on my primary desktop OS and force myself to use it.
What I found was surprising. There, obviously, were some growing pains when it came to various BSD vs SYSV things and directory layout and ports vs RPM etc. What I was surprised by was that everything worked out of the box. I am used to, and almost looked forward to, having to roll up my sleeves and figure out the config files and recompile the kernel and go through newsgroups and mailing lists for fixes. This has been especially true since my primary machine is a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600). What also surprised me was that Yast configures, with either a console or X-Win GUI, just about eveything that I wanted to configure and every setting that I wanted to change. I kept waiting to run into a gotcha so I could swear it off and convince myself I had to do it all by hand but it hasn't come yet. The whole magic-black-box aspect of it scares me a little but I am amazed how little I have had to get my hands dirty. It almost feels like Windows Server 2003 -- in a good way. Also, while I was put off by the 6 CD thing at first (I have always had a pretty streamlined and small FreeBSD install for my desktop) I find that having pretty much any piece of software that you might want in RPMs you can trust (and don't suffer from the dependency hell I remember) right on the CDs is actually pretty nice.
After I take my practicum in the next few weeks I am going to try Novell's desktop offering. If it is as slick as SLES then Novell, especially when you figure in NDS and ZenWorks, is going to make huge inroads versus the other distros and FreeBSD. And, strange as it sounds to me who missed the Novell hayday, there are alot of people in the industry who seem to remember their interaction with Novell fondly for whom their name and support seems to be a big plus.