um yeah - real smart prepare the kids for the "REAL WORLD" by using a platform that is used in less than 1% of corporate environments. another completely out of touch with technology school....living in their own little world
at least with the student who already has a dell...well don't worry, you should be able to get MacOS run on it fine if you're forced to use it
Moving to MAC and Linux that will eliminate security issues...
oh wait?! MAC and Linux have security vunerabilties too? that can't be possible! hopefully i don't get banned from slashdot for suggesting that:)
personally i think it is easier to find vunerabilities in linux, as i can analyze source for bugs. but then once found it's kinda pointless, it's harder to find somebody using linux than it is to find the vunerability in the first place. maybe google will change that.
In any case now google is moving to a malware-proof secure desktop infrastructure they can lay off their security management team who didn't know how to configure Windows in an enterprise environment (despite it being clearly documented with step by step instructions on technet) including the plethora of freely available tools for auditing security configurations...
you are right legally US can do nothing, it's all political. But you're wrong about proof - go to China for a few weeks and if you can't find rampant piracy you must gone from airport to cab to hotel and locked yourself in the room the whole time. Last time I was there I could not find legitimate copies of anything, which was fine because they were absolutely dirt cheap. My personal favorite is the PC store with a large catalog of 1,000s of software, and then when you order it "that'll be 15 minutes" as they're burning copies...hahaha
It's so funny how China has to go and deny all the time the bleeding obvious. I lived in a city in Northeast China for one year and in fact it was impossible to find legitimate CDs/DVDs in the whole town. And yes they were very very very cheap, and although had some occasional issues such a s: wrong sound track to the picture (i.e. Star Wars Empire Strikes Back with Forest Gump audio??!) And while news sites, video sites, and social networking sites were often blocked torrents were pretty much widely open available from everywhere.
If it was me I would be using Windows 7. This is what they will most likely be using when they go to do work in the commercial/government world.
Microsoft offers excellent free development software via Visual Studio Express. But you can also use tools like gcc etc if you want.
Plus it offers great management capabilities and is easy to deploy.
Benchmark is not most important thing for desktop.
What is
-reliable drivers (i.e. all hardware components have windows 7 logo as per http://www.microsoft.com/compatibility
-good product support
However if you really need benchmark:
1) windows 7 has built in benchmark rating - Windows 7 rating
2) for more detailed performance analysis of performance and drivers you can use
a) Built in command line powercfg -energy
b) Enable driver verifier on drivers (verifier.exe) to see if it cause any blue screens (don't enable on too many drivers at once, or slow system down too much)
c) Use xperf.exe, part of the freely downloadable Windows Device Driver kit for detailed performance analsysi on everythign from startup/shutdown/reboots/etc
d) if graphics are important there are plenty of bench marking utilities for those such as 3dmark,etc.
the real problem here is that steve jobs & apple co want to
a) control the app market for their devices which earns them a lot of revenue
b) force developers to write applications that are more challenging to port to other platforms
so this peace plan doesn't really address the key issues. if iPhone is so 'sandboxed' and 'secure' Flash security running in a sandbox shouldn't be a major concern. As for performance - only one app is running at time, so should be able to figure out how to manage the performance for that. the argument about being a proprietry web technology is a bit of a laugh, that's what apple iPhone applications are. the key difference for apple is most flash apps/games are free (apple does not get revenue) apple apps money goes to apple.
> DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 95 to provide backwards compatibility. These have been a _disaster_ in security terms, and very difficult to address due to the closed nature of the code and difficulty of upgrading other components to preserve compatibility
These have never been a "Disaster" in security terms. Yes there have been some published exploits, that mostly not implemented in malware / attacks prior to Microsoft patching the issues.
office 2010 is so far ahead of open office it's not funny.
I've used Open Office, but the interface is much more clunky & complex, more complicated to perform simple tasks.
Office 2010 the interface is so well thougt out, so many time savings features built in, easy to access what you need to do.
I love it, and fully worth the price over the free open office in my opinion.
Really open office are way behind the game now.
Why? For a simple reason - Microsoft have paying customers and don't want to loose them and unlike what some people in slashdot may believe, Microsoft actually does listen to customers and is responding with constantly improving products.
have you actually used office 2010? it is SO far ahead of office 2003, with completely different UI. Try it before demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge on the topic.
i've had plenty of "hardware hell" in linux, bloody waste of time getting hardware to work in some cases. Windows in the worst case a five minute search to download a driver and it just 'works' Linux it is cross-your-fingers and hopes it works. And while recently linux hardware support is vastly improved, esp. with old/ancient hardware, it is not all that great with newer hardware models from what I've seen.
Another issue with linux drivers is they are often generic or not provided by the vendor, and don't offer optimal use of the hardware.
but you get what you pay for...
1) best option is to lock keep hardware models limited, and only change models when absolutely necessary. i.e.
For example you may have some categories of devices you require
-High performance laptop
-Ultra Portable Laptop
-High performance workstation
-Standard Desktop
Then assign a specific model to each category, and only purchase that model.
2) go to Windows 7, get driver updates from WSUS or internet. this will pick up large majority of drivers
i never fail to get amazed the lengths people go to justify shortcomings of apple products...
GET OVER IT.... THESE ARE FLAWS... STEVE JOBS IS NOT GOD and the iPad is not the most perfect, magical, wonderful, excellent device ever to be created.
oh and i made a song on similar topic in 'it lullaby' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umZuGLIv7xM
Hush little baby don't say a word
Daddy's going to buy you an Apple iPhone...etc
If this investigation leads to making it easter for employees to switch companies for higher benefits/pay etc it may eventually backfire on employees. Here in Australia and I suspect in US as well there is already a tedency for many IT positions reaching pay levels that are really not paying business the returns, and some companies solution to ever increasing salary demands has been redundancies and in some cases offshore the majority of work to India or China.
actually i think parenting is the top problem, not the schooling. parents have a major influence over kids development, and some people may seem to expect the school to just 'take care of everything' top students don't necessarily need to be at top schools, they spend more time at home learning, that is why they are top student. the teacher maybe can have some influence on inspiration etc, but if desire to continue learning outside of school is not there, then it can be a waste of time.
governments always try to throw money to fix things, throw more money at health, throw more money at education. working in business we actually have to work out ways to produce higher quality & quantity and faster for LESS cost. Which we continue to do...but I can't see that happening in government...budgets seem almost unlimited...
China has 5 different types of Autonomous areas:
1) Autonomous banner (in Inner Mongolia)
2) Autonomous County
3) Autonomous Prefecture
4) Autonomous Region. Autonomous region has its own local government with the right to appoint the governer (from the local minority) For example Tibetan people in Tibet, the Zhuang in Guangxi, the Uyghur in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Hui in Ningxia.
5) Special Administrative Region
Special Administrative Regions of China include Hong Kong and Macau. Special Administrative Regions are responsible for everything except diplomatic relations and national defence. So effectively Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal system, completely different from the rest of the country. More importantly unlike in mainland China in Hong Kong it is possible to watch Youtube and use Facebook.
have they used reference wines which they know to be authentic, by which to judge the accuracy of the carbon dating results?
maybe this is a last dash attempt at making their article have some appeal to the general public. i expect carbon 14 dating experts must have it tough finding jobs in Australia, maybe they are hoping wine collectors will hire them to authneticate their collections...maybe they can do stamp collections as well.
how does HTML5 eliminate Silverlight? Microsoft have already starting implmeneting components of the HTML5, co-chaired the HTML5 working group in W3C since the beginnging and continues to participate in it.
both technologies can co-exist, and they are different.
Silverlight applications can be used for web, desktop or mobile applications. More importantly development is based around.NET framework, and includes powerful development tools, both from an artist and developer perspective. In addition some things are lacking in HTML 1) if you want to create a rich DVR-like experience with live video, you need a technology like Silverlight. Silverlight's HD smooth streaming allows for picture in picture, pausing live video, rewinding, slow motion and downstreaming when bandwith slows down. With smooth streaming, the buffering is minimized and you can jump to different spots of the video almost in real-time. 2) Content protection/DRM does not exist in the video tag in HTML. This will prevent some companies from posting videos in HTML5 3) Limited by JavaScript. Javascript does not provide a true parallelism, Javascript is a cross between a functional and object-oriented language, limits code sharing, slower than.NET. Finally one HTML5 may not prove better than plugins is different implementations of the standard and JavaScript (i.e incomplete) which we already see across all browsers...and this problem is not just Microsoft...Chrome,Safari, Firefox as well don't render certain pages the same. Using a framework can ensure standard viewing experience across any browser.
Cross platform is software that works on more than one system platform. Does not have to be 'every platform' and does not have to include Linux. This technology is cross platform because it is working across 3 system platforms. Windows Phone Series 7 != Windows and XBOX != Windows
Slashdot Mirror
um yeah - real smart prepare the kids for the "REAL WORLD" by using a platform that is used in less than 1% of corporate environments. another completely out of touch with technology school....living in their own little world at least with the student who already has a dell...well don't worry, you should be able to get MacOS run on it fine if you're forced to use it
Moving to MAC and Linux that will eliminate security issues... oh wait?! MAC and Linux have security vunerabilties too? that can't be possible! hopefully i don't get banned from slashdot for suggesting that :)
personally i think it is easier to find vunerabilities in linux, as i can analyze source for bugs. but then once found it's kinda pointless, it's harder to find somebody using linux than it is to find the vunerability in the first place. maybe google will change that.
In any case now google is moving to a malware-proof secure desktop infrastructure they can lay off their security management team who didn't know how to configure Windows in an enterprise environment (despite it being clearly documented with step by step instructions on technet) including the plethora of freely available tools for auditing security configurations...
you are right legally US can do nothing, it's all political. But you're wrong about proof - go to China for a few weeks and if you can't find rampant piracy you must gone from airport to cab to hotel and locked yourself in the room the whole time. Last time I was there I could not find legitimate copies of anything, which was fine because they were absolutely dirt cheap. My personal favorite is the PC store with a large catalog of 1,000s of software, and then when you order it "that'll be 15 minutes" as they're burning copies...hahaha
It's so funny how China has to go and deny all the time the bleeding obvious. I lived in a city in Northeast China for one year and in fact it was impossible to find legitimate CDs/DVDs in the whole town. And yes they were very very very cheap, and although had some occasional issues such a s: wrong sound track to the picture (i.e. Star Wars Empire Strikes Back with Forest Gump audio??!) And while news sites, video sites, and social networking sites were often blocked torrents were pretty much widely open available from everywhere.
If it was me I would be using Windows 7. This is what they will most likely be using when they go to do work in the commercial/government world. Microsoft offers excellent free development software via Visual Studio Express. But you can also use tools like gcc etc if you want. Plus it offers great management capabilities and is easy to deploy.
Benchmark is not most important thing for desktop. What is -reliable drivers (i.e. all hardware components have windows 7 logo as per http://www.microsoft.com/compatibility -good product support However if you really need benchmark: 1) windows 7 has built in benchmark rating - Windows 7 rating 2) for more detailed performance analysis of performance and drivers you can use a) Built in command line powercfg -energy b) Enable driver verifier on drivers (verifier.exe) to see if it cause any blue screens (don't enable on too many drivers at once, or slow system down too much) c) Use xperf.exe, part of the freely downloadable Windows Device Driver kit for detailed performance analsysi on everythign from startup/shutdown/reboots/etc d) if graphics are important there are plenty of bench marking utilities for those such as 3dmark,etc.
um Windows 7 works great on SSDs - so you don't have to use HDDs
the real problem here is that steve jobs & apple co want to a) control the app market for their devices which earns them a lot of revenue b) force developers to write applications that are more challenging to port to other platforms so this peace plan doesn't really address the key issues. if iPhone is so 'sandboxed' and 'secure' Flash security running in a sandbox shouldn't be a major concern. As for performance - only one app is running at time, so should be able to figure out how to manage the performance for that. the argument about being a proprietry web technology is a bit of a laugh, that's what apple iPhone applications are. the key difference for apple is most flash apps/games are free (apple does not get revenue) apple apps money goes to apple.
without performance hit or RELIABILITY hits...
> DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 95 to provide backwards compatibility. These have been a _disaster_ in security terms, and very difficult to address due to the closed nature of the code and difficulty of upgrading other components to preserve compatibility These have never been a "Disaster" in security terms. Yes there have been some published exploits, that mostly not implemented in malware / attacks prior to Microsoft patching the issues.
linux systems guard more money & data? where? linux market share is next to nothing compared to windows, just a drop in an ocean.
office 2010 is so far ahead of open office it's not funny. I've used Open Office, but the interface is much more clunky & complex, more complicated to perform simple tasks. Office 2010 the interface is so well thougt out, so many time savings features built in, easy to access what you need to do. I love it, and fully worth the price over the free open office in my opinion. Really open office are way behind the game now. Why? For a simple reason - Microsoft have paying customers and don't want to loose them and unlike what some people in slashdot may believe, Microsoft actually does listen to customers and is responding with constantly improving products.
have you actually used office 2010? it is SO far ahead of office 2003, with completely different UI. Try it before demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge on the topic.
i've had plenty of "hardware hell" in linux, bloody waste of time getting hardware to work in some cases. Windows in the worst case a five minute search to download a driver and it just 'works' Linux it is cross-your-fingers and hopes it works. And while recently linux hardware support is vastly improved, esp. with old/ancient hardware, it is not all that great with newer hardware models from what I've seen. Another issue with linux drivers is they are often generic or not provided by the vendor, and don't offer optimal use of the hardware. but you get what you pay for...
1) best option is to lock keep hardware models limited, and only change models when absolutely necessary. i.e. For example you may have some categories of devices you require -High performance laptop -Ultra Portable Laptop -High performance workstation -Standard Desktop Then assign a specific model to each category, and only purchase that model. 2) go to Windows 7, get driver updates from WSUS or internet. this will pick up large majority of drivers
i never fail to get amazed the lengths people go to justify shortcomings of apple products... GET OVER IT .... THESE ARE FLAWS ... STEVE JOBS IS NOT GOD and the iPad is not the most perfect, magical, wonderful, excellent device ever to be created.
oh and i made a song on similar topic in 'it lullaby' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umZuGLIv7xM Hush little baby don't say a word Daddy's going to buy you an Apple iPhone...etc
buy more iPhones and iPADs
If this investigation leads to making it easter for employees to switch companies for higher benefits/pay etc it may eventually backfire on employees. Here in Australia and I suspect in US as well there is already a tedency for many IT positions reaching pay levels that are really not paying business the returns, and some companies solution to ever increasing salary demands has been redundancies and in some cases offshore the majority of work to India or China.
actually i think parenting is the top problem, not the schooling. parents have a major influence over kids development, and some people may seem to expect the school to just 'take care of everything' top students don't necessarily need to be at top schools, they spend more time at home learning, that is why they are top student. the teacher maybe can have some influence on inspiration etc, but if desire to continue learning outside of school is not there, then it can be a waste of time. governments always try to throw money to fix things, throw more money at health, throw more money at education. working in business we actually have to work out ways to produce higher quality & quantity and faster for LESS cost. Which we continue to do...but I can't see that happening in government...budgets seem almost unlimited...
China has 5 different types of Autonomous areas: 1) Autonomous banner (in Inner Mongolia) 2) Autonomous County 3) Autonomous Prefecture 4) Autonomous Region. Autonomous region has its own local government with the right to appoint the governer (from the local minority) For example Tibetan people in Tibet, the Zhuang in Guangxi, the Uyghur in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Hui in Ningxia. 5) Special Administrative Region Special Administrative Regions of China include Hong Kong and Macau. Special Administrative Regions are responsible for everything except diplomatic relations and national defence. So effectively Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal system, completely different from the rest of the country. More importantly unlike in mainland China in Hong Kong it is possible to watch Youtube and use Facebook.
have they used reference wines which they know to be authentic, by which to judge the accuracy of the carbon dating results? maybe this is a last dash attempt at making their article have some appeal to the general public. i expect carbon 14 dating experts must have it tough finding jobs in Australia, maybe they are hoping wine collectors will hire them to authneticate their collections...maybe they can do stamp collections as well.
how does HTML5 eliminate Silverlight? Microsoft have already starting implmeneting components of the HTML5, co-chaired the HTML5 working group in W3C since the beginnging and continues to participate in it. both technologies can co-exist, and they are different. Silverlight applications can be used for web, desktop or mobile applications. More importantly development is based around .NET framework, and includes powerful development tools, both from an artist and developer perspective. In addition some things are lacking in HTML 1) if you want to create a rich DVR-like experience with live video, you need a technology like Silverlight. Silverlight's HD smooth streaming allows for picture in picture, pausing live video, rewinding, slow motion and downstreaming when bandwith slows down. With smooth streaming, the buffering is minimized and you can jump to different spots of the video almost in real-time. 2) Content protection/DRM does not exist in the video tag in HTML. This will prevent some companies from posting videos in HTML5 3) Limited by JavaScript. Javascript does not provide a true parallelism, Javascript is a cross between a functional and object-oriented language, limits code sharing, slower than .NET. Finally one HTML5 may not prove better than plugins is different implementations of the standard and JavaScript (i.e incomplete) which we already see across all browsers...and this problem is not just Microsoft...Chrome,Safari, Firefox as well don't render certain pages the same. Using a framework can ensure standard viewing experience across any browser.
...and the ease of SilverLight development....
Cross platform is software that works on more than one system platform. Does not have to be 'every platform' and does not have to include Linux. This technology is cross platform because it is working across 3 system platforms. Windows Phone Series 7 != Windows and XBOX != Windows