Retraining on Linux Mint with Mate desktop might be easier. I say "might" - I'm not real sure if all Windows users are retrainable.
I keep hearing this on here and zdnet over and over about people who hate change should switch to a distro that changes every 6 months with a new version?!
It doesn't work that way. I hate to say it but Linux has regressed too in the UI. My favorite now is CentOS because it is old and has Gnome 2.x and is not flakey like Mint or Ubuntu. When Gnome shell came I switched to Windows. (Right before Metro came sigh)
You can't run 10 year old linux binaries on something that just works for years and years. Corporations love Xp because it never changes and goes on fucking forever while holding the world back in webstandards and app development.
I do not see a solution other than PC users learning to fear change more and loving obsolete browsers and operating systems. There are still XP holdouts so scared from Vista they wont even consider Windows 7! I am a Windows 7 user and will stay that way and run Linux in my VMs. MS is quite screwed as I remember in the good old days people lined up to upgrade first and proudly showed off they run the latest X. Not smirk with a smile how obsolete they are and lucky they do not have to run the latest version even if it is better! I see that with Firefox 3.x users too who refuse to upgrade.
No you don't. The bond vs currency balance has minimal impact on inflation. Especially considering what the current bond rates are.
The way that you get hyperinflation is if the currency issuer wants to consume more resources than it can tax from the economy. Considering that the US production capacity is currently underutilized, that is unlikely, outside of governmental collapse or civil war.
Also, the platinum coin itself has no impact on inflation at all. It simply removes the artificial restrictions that prevent the government from fulfilling its debts obligations. (restrictions that are constitutionally questionable I might add)
You also have a potential situation where bond investors see the value of the dollar going to shit and demanding skyhigh interest rates due to the risk. Then you have to print more and more which creates the rates even higher!
Sovereign currency issuers controls the interest rates of their own bonds. All bond traders knows that.
Tell that to Europe? Germany had to raise its rates as no bank would touch them with a 10 foot pole. Coins are just coins and its value is what someone might pay at the moment. If people are not willing to trade them for 15,000,000,000,000 then they are useless. To pay off this debt the currency issuer (The FED) will have to consume more and print more money to do so which does not cause hyperinflation. Rather it is hyperinflation.
What will happen is like Greece and Spain the bond holders will start raising their rates based on risk. The only way to stop it is to pay it off with devalued junk money printed off or to match their rates higher. If they want 8% interest, the FED will have to raise rates up to 12%. That would be disasterous but necessary.
Gold and Platnium are nice ways to avoid inflation in a bad scenario but what is best for everyone is to avoid having that happen in the first place by strengthening the dollar.
FYI we can't produce as we can't work cheaper than China. We are underutilized just like what happened with England which never recovered and are moving toward low wage service jobs selling chinese junk and financial instruments to each other. This itself is eating us alive making it worse until we are as poor as CHina and then we can start producing again.
What did you pay for gas 10 years ago? It went up 300%. How much was your house worth in 1999? My guess is 40% its current value.
That is inflation and why did it go up? Because the fed pumped money into banks. The investors made bank and they used that money to flip homes. Your health insurance company can't make a profit with interest rates near 0%. So they charge you more to make up for the low interest rates. Banks and rich with extra fed printed money just go buy up things like fuel, gold, or loan it back to the government where you pay the interest to them later etc. Gee thanks.
I do not agree iwth the Tea Party 100%. But when you have 15,000,000,000,000 something has to give. Yes, austerity is needed to pay it back. That money wont just vanish. It will be used to invest in small business again. Why should MegaBank invest in your dream home when it can loan it back to the government and be gauranteed paid! You can't compete with the US treasury so your employer can't expand etc. It is classic economics 101 and not this keysenian stuff they try to do today.
I see nothing wrong with saying NO! Show me you are going to pay back and I will sign the check?
A fiscal cliff is A HELL OF ALOT BETTER than the alternative of a currency crises. The US would collapse and I am not exgerating either. Every bank would close with every corporate and personal savings account where 90% unemployment would happen within a few months as each bank would collapse like dominos in such a frightening scenario. The 1930s would not be as bad as debt was not as contagious or as widespread as today. It is too ingrained.
Anyway the investors trusted Greece too to pay back its loan. I do not buy it that with a 150% debt to assets ratio is possible to payback without major austerity?
True he is just one guy, but I trust those with a track record first and I believe debt should be a liability instead of an asset in the accounting books. Consider I make 40k a year and maxed out my credit cards for -$10k and then claim I have $50k in assets! That is luducrious and a sign of trouble.
For history the UK never recovered from its debt and financial collapse in the depression of 1873 (The 1930s was not the first). America superseeded it as it took 50 years to pay it back and recover when it was too late.
Treasury bonds will be toxic very soon and you can mark my words. Japan made its intentions of printing more money and a crises like that will spill into the US where investors will then ask for their money and both republicans and democrats will refuse to compromise showing them they will not keep their words in seeing their money back. Simple investing 101. It is never a good time to payback to the debtor, but the US technically has been out of the recession for 2 years. That means the bill is due.
Then you have hyperinflation. We are seeing this now with home prices skyrocketing, food, fuel, insurance, and other services going up. The rich will just get richer and use the extra fake money to raise prices and collect rents off the poor making everyone not them poorer.
You also have a potential situation where bond investors see the value of the dollar going to shit and demanding skyhigh interest rates due to the risk. Then you have to print more and more which creates the rates even higher! A depression will start either way.
You can not engineer out of a debt crises. The only way out is to pay out.
The Tea Party is trying to save America from a horrible meltdown by 2018 aka Greece style with 100x worse due to the US being bigger and having assets all over the world.
Your 401k GONE, Stocks gone, your dollars? Worthless, unless you have gold. The best way to prevent it is to raise taxes and cut spending. It is time we paid the bills. I do not agree with the NO NEW TAXES pledge at all.
Here is how an economist views this. FYI he was one of the few who predicted this recession and told everyone that a horrible crises was coming in 2006 and was laughed off stage. He was right due to looking at debt ratios.
Is it really wise to keep signing a check over and over again like this? Something has to give. Either you have Greece style panic and a 2nd great depression or Bernakke prints money fast and we all have hyper inflation (we are seeing this now in food, insurance, gas, etc).
"Yes, the fiscal cliff -- the totally preventable budget crisis"
No, this is exactly a preventative crises aka Greece style 1000x over!
I do not agree with Republicans 100% of the time including the pledge not to raise taxes when you have 160% debt to assets ratios! But this? Yes, the Tea Party said enough is enough and put their foot down saying "If you are not going to be serious grownups and live within your means with no plans to pay it back, then I wont sign the check". That is what the debt ceiling is.
It is not a new budget. It is to pay your existing bill. Every American owes $150,000 each and by not going off the fiscal cliff you are telling your creditors that you wont pay them back! In essence raising the debt ceiling is simply paying your credit card bill by charging to the same company over and over again.
Look at that video above to get an idea averaged out. So on average, we all pay $20,000 in yet owe $150,000 with no plan in site other than... oh yeah the economy will eventually get better and we all will ahve so much money after the great recession that we can pay it back. Any bond investor would be nuts to invest in the dollar right now.
Republicans are trying to do the right thing and that is do what they were hired for. To put in an ultra conservative mandate in 2010 to stop government and bailouts. Not everyone agrees with this, but I happen to feel Obama is not being serious enough with cuts and republicans know how to talk to the talk but refuse to raise taxes.
We need 5 fiscal cliffs in a row for the next 20 years to dig out of this hole. Seriously, Americans are clueless and watch what will happen next?
Yeah but I can get a cheap laptop for $450. I can even still use Google Docs if I were computer illiterate with IE. Chrome browser is available on it too with Windows.
I would not want it as I view it as dumb terminal network computer of old that uses Google Docs and an internet connection for everything.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use Android? Android has the apps and rumor is Office is coming to it as well as iOS. Google still gets to monitor your keystrokes and search engine results so there is no loss of revenue.
It seems reminiscent of Microsoft in the early 1990s. NT or Win 3.x/95? MS couldn't decide. Eventually with NT 4 the decisions was to run win 9x apps on it and move everyone to the new kernel which finally happened in XP. THe most successful OS to date and still is today.
I think Google shock kick ChromeOS. We do not want it.
I think not having support, new hardware wont run on it, and software will stop supporting it, and constant hacking and malware aka Code Red which can take down your LAN with no patch sounds reasonable to upgrade to me!
Yes, corps are cheap and anal about ancient shit, but most are reasonable and many do not want to be obsolete. Any good management team regardless of department knows being proactive and not reactive is the key to success over medoicracy and ultimately failure. IT needs this attitude as well.
Also if your pentium IVs with 256 megs of ram and McCrappy can't multitask for 4 hours every Tuesday, and take 8 minutes to boot up how much productivity do you loose? What about electrical bills for 700 computers that do not sleep because they run XP? That my friends is money out the door.
It sounds like I.T. is not respected at your company. It is best to get them involved to avoid issues like this unless of course I.T. is inept and hates to do its job.
Yes you do not need to upgrade to every new shiny version of Windows. However, the fallacy is we can live in 2001 and things work just as well today are not true. The internet is not safe and is different. The work demands of it are different too as many suppliers and vendors expect you to work from home, and or use their website to get shit done. Pretty hard when you are strapped to an ancient insecure browser made in a different era in internet time. No HTML 5, css 3, and a javascript compiler that is 80x slower and crashes when simple ads pop up. That is lost productivity and ultimate lost business if the other party can't read your files or vice versa.
The docx support in Office 2k3 is starting to wane already and by Office 2013 many.docx files will not be compatible. MS does not patch Office 2k3! The next iloveyou script attack will never see a patch!
Now tell me how that makes good business sense? The CFO is reasonable and understands this unless they are dying and just trying to keep the lights on.
A 5 year wait time on upgrades and perhaps up to 7 is reasonable. But 11 years? Forget it. Browsers are changing fast too and 3 years tops are more reasonable in your refresh.
I think the grandparent was referring to MS Access 97 addons and intranet apps made by Oracle where they are holding the company hostage for $200,000 to upgrade with hefty monthly premiums.
Most do not own the source code anyway but they have so damned part of the business processes that it can't be removed PERIOD.
However, there are ways to go forward like virtualization and upgrading. Any company that big can get the budget to upgrade and it is embarasing when you have to turn away business clients because your version of autocad is too old to read their files or because they can't read your security ridden obsolete PDF files which were created using PDF 7 and they have a more modern version.
That is lost money.
Anyway some code will never go away, but cost accountants and their IT manager need to fucking grow a pair and realize any asset needs maintenance costs. You can get away with it for 5 years maybe... but 11?! Come on, everyone else is moving on and MS wont support your ecosystem anymore. Not because they are evil greedy cocksuckers but because people want newer features like smooth scrolling in their desktop browsers that IPhone users have that can't exist in any OS because the code has to be XP compatible.
It is embarrassing that my Galaxy S1 has cool smooth graphics with my finger, yet my PhenomII with Windows 7 with an ATI 5750 is semi smooth and flickers and the sites still feed me HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 instead of CSS 3 and 5 like my phone.
I think IE 8 is still reasonable to keep using. Same with Windows 7. But after 2014 or 2015 it is time to move on. 5 - 7 years behind is reasonable wouldn't you agree?
It does affect your quality of the web. Notice things are so much better on your iphone or droid with gradients and pretty icons in HTML 5 and css glory. You move your browser with your finger and it smoothly goes up and down?
hmm why aren't your Linux boxes can't do that?
The answer is the corporate users holding the web back. Firefox and Chrome do not support smooth scrolling as easily because they must support XP. They do OpenGL but it does not accelerate all the functions because of the way XP era hardware was designed 11 years ago.
No gradients in okcupid? Hmm, the PHBs there noticed IE 8 users so that was dropped. I guess you have an inferior experience as well.
Wow the games look so much nicer on an older PS3 than the pc why is that? XP level DirectX 9 doesn't do things like mult tasking 3d tasks like DirectX11 can, but PC Game developers can't use it yet, why? You guessed XP.
The list goes on and on.
Yes, corporate America does not give a shit about this or your needs. But they can't expect both of us and every hardware maker, Microsoft, and software developer to stop time so the CFO can get his bonus this year. We have been doing that for years and I think upgrading every 10 years seems reasonable. Don't you agree?
Yes, investments have costs just like their trucks and equipment. The fallacy that a PC is a PC and runs the same as 2001 is wrong. The reason being is the internet is not the same as 2001 nor or the demands of hteir workforce. Many are expected to use the web for business to business communication and do what at home from mobile devices. Having.docx files not be fully compatible is embarrasing. It gets worse with Autocad and other PDF files.
That is lost business! If a customer or vendor can't read your PDF files because they are on 11, and you are on 7 it is lost revenue. Idiots.
If it isn't broken... ok fine get a VM and run Citrix. Any IT manager and employee who does not do this is incompetent. If management says no document the hell out of it so when the axe comes you are not terminated. Intranet developers are raising prices now the last holdouts. It would have been cheaper if they upgraded 3 years but nope it is easier to put fingers in your ears and go yayaya I CAN"T HEAR YOU.
That's not a defense. It doesn't make it acceptable, it just means that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of what they're pulling.
Which explains much of the governments and corporations in the world today, they act and exploit the ignorance of people on a daily basis.
I got modded down in 2006 and in 2007 many times by calling people hypocrites if they HATE Vista DRM and the go on about how wonderful their smartphones and the new IPhone ARE!
I got replies saying, bah they are just phones. Real freedom is about the PC etc.
Well 2013 is coming and the phone and pc are coming into one with Windows 8, Gnome shell/3, iOS, and Android, as well as office and skype being ported over to tablets. Oops now you have no freedom left which make the Vista debacle about Drm look very tame.
I think phones are far more scary. They cost $100 a month for 2 year contracts = $2400 for a phone that costs $120 to make! $700 to buy it seperate with the rest of the money going to patent lawyers.
It is a nightmare of security, abusive, expense, and patent and copyright extravanga that most geeks here just ignore.
The line is where it's always been: you buy the product, it's yours, you can do whatever you like with it. It's unreasonable for a manufacturer to try to take those rights away from you.
You only buy a right to use it under very limited circumstances. Do not like it? Then go buy Linux. You can fully return in according to the EULA.
This is what RMS has been trying to say since 1984 that it is not about free beer. It is about freedom.
FYI must of you know me as a Windows zeolot, but I am reasonable on both sides. Infact, I used to be a FreeBSD zealout a decade ago.
The fact is most people are willing to be rapped or do not care about that as long as it runs their software and just works. I am willing to subject myself to this to run my software and get shit done without an update doing something or because I want to experiment with some setting that can hose my system.
Girls want their cutesy icons so they can text their friends about cute guys in school and look cool than a freedom dumb phone (do they even exist anymore?)
I prefer not to be called an idiot since I have been fairly civil.
Since you went on how virtualization is bad because it adds complexitity you then defended the use of old software by using virtualization. Which is it?
I understand and work in corporate IT. I also do not want to be around sometime in a year and a half from now and explain to the CFO why his new laptop can't run XP nor his mission critical app and we have to go buy used pcs from craigslist because we wanted to save money now and not plan for the future for the last 12 years.
If you have old stuff you have 2 choices. Virtualize or upgrade? The rest of the world will not wait nor care about your problems. Ask anyone over 35 who has worked in I.T. and they will tell you upgrading was part of the job and just because you hadn't done it in 10 years does not mean it is the new norm and something you never ever do. They were like cell phones in the 1990s.
Point is your employer only cares about making money. However, costs do not go away because we cover our eyes and ears saying no no no. Virtualization and that extra layer is part of the job. XP is going bye bye and newer software wont run it nor will your hardware and your support goes go down by upgrading to Windows 7. Disagree all you want but that is the price of doing business.
Anyone else noticed that for years the MacOSX version of Office was so much better and prettier than on Windows?
I wondered for awhile which side the developers on Redmond were on? Granted today Office 2010 and IE 10 for Windows have caught up. I guess the old Windows apis must have been really bad if they couldn't get them to be as good as another competitors OS.
This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It's not a case of being afraid to upgrade. It's the fact that users, companies and organisations have software and infrastructure that runs and is tested on XP and there is zero benefit to them changing it. Kind of like how a great deal of mainframe code is still written in COBOL. There is no benefit to rewriting it and people do not have the time or the resources. You might not like that but that's the real world.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
Anything can be deemed to be untrusted, that's the problem. I'm afraid the rootkit/virus/security angle to this stuff is just an excuse, plain and simple.
It is great for corporate customers.
It's a disaster for corporate customers. They face a future of new hardware refusing to boot existing versions of Windows or any other operating systems, enforced upgrades and a spiralling in costs, licensing and otherwise. A rootkit is the least of their worries.
I posted comments here debating slashdotters who feel anyone still running an old IE at work deserves to be hacked who do not understand corporate IT. Like the mainframes platforms of old there are solutions for them. Citrix and MS terminal servers are just 2 to run older software.
I have also seen consumers who feel XP is the best OS ever made and that Windows 7 must be a Vista as slashdotters called it Vista 2.0 and think that just because it runs on 128 megs of ram make it a supperior product over anything else etc.
Why upgrade what works fine?
The fact of the matter is new hardware does not like XP very well. I read stories of help desk spending a week hacking.ini files and reverse engineering Windows 7 drivers to run on XP for these users! USB 3, touchscreens, tablets/netbooks with strange chipsets and digitizers, and other things already do not have XP drivers nor support. XP is on life support for only the corporate laptops that are $$$ for Dell and HP units. These will get EOL'd and you are screwed as they wont run XP anymore by 2014.
It is a security risk, and the rest of the world who does not have your requirements are moving on. Already Office 2003 is not fully compatible with the newest.docx files in Office 2013 and sometimes Office 2010.
Worms are a constant problem and the situation under XP is getting drastically worse! Did you read about hte newest malware targetting the XP versions of Ie 8, 7, and 6? Who are you going to get support from after next year?
It is time to consider Hyper V, Windows Server 2003 terminals, and Citrix similiar to rally and x3700 IBM terminal software for these must have apps before it is too late. I disagree that a corporate customer wouldn't love to have documents time bomb, lock and encrypt files, and prevent software that is unathorized to steal keystrokes at bootup. Secureboot and drming of some Office files would have its benefits keeping confidentiality.
I know it is an uneccesary cost for you but come on? 12 years is a FUCKload A LOT of time and you can't expect everyone to stop innovation to service you. As it is we can't even move to HTML 5 yet due to XP. Most do not run 15 year old software and there are options so your users can move on and still run these old apps. It costs money too for Ms and everyone else to backport everything to so many browsers and operating systems and your helpdesk will love the malware and fake AV popup calls go down from a more secure browser/OS. Those ancient VB and IE 6 apps do not need internet access from your Citrix terminal program.
Windows Server 2012 is the first version of Windows (behind Linux and Solaris I may add) that is actually built to be run in a VM. For example you do not need to give it the max ram usage and have the image use 100% of it instead of dynamically use it up to the limit as it needs. VMware and Hyper-V have drivers to load without secureboot that are in Windows 8 and Server.
heh, they ask for a piece of shit and they get a piece of shit, what does that have to do with anything?
That POS you call it, does wonders to productivity. You are looking at it through a geek lense of HTML 5 features and multimedia support. My boss looks at it though how much can IT raise the shareprice. These corporate apps might not look as pretty as www.engadget.com on a HTML 5 browser with cool effects, but can display and automate business processes well.
They wont support anything above IE 8 yet (maybe 1 or 2 do as of the last 6 months) because XP wont die and IE 8 is the common gateway that runs on both operating systems. It works.
That is mine and the other guys point. Sometimes it is cooler being a geek at home running cutting edge stuff than at work, but work has different priorities than having a less bug free and prettier browser. It is about productivity, saving money, and working with what they already have.
Many viruses modify either the OS bootloader or low level drivers (SATA, PCI bus etc). By loading so early in the boot process they have full and unrestricted access to the entire machine, making them excellent and difficult to remove rootkits.
This isn't just a Windows problem either, all operating systems are vulnerable to the modification of core boot files.
One of the only cool things about Windows 7/8 do is have protected kernel paths combined with signed drivers in x64. This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
It is great for corporate customers. If this could be used for gnu/Linux the situation would be great for security.
The master keys have not been compromised. Only one of the older ones which are derived from the master for signing software under XP. MS has revoked that particular key and replaced it with another one. The bad guys also forged one of Adobe's for running signed flash applets as well but Adobe has replaced it. The master key in both situations are still secure.
It is not old flash. The issue is GPU acceleration. Chrome auto updates to the latest flash.
One of the reasons to retire XP is its horrible GPU acceleration which will become more and more of a deal as phones and tablets offer the best smooth scrolling and visual experiences with the xception of Windows 8. Windows 7 is smoother but still flickers due to WDDM 1.1.
Intel makes some very crappy graphics a half decade ago. 915 is the IE 6 of directX and OpenGL developers with so many shit needing quirks due to Intel wanting everything in software to sell more expensive CPUs. It simply cant handle h.264 and 1080p with motion blur, smooth font rendering, and other things mixed with an 11 year old GDI XP subsystem. Chrome uses more resources to appear faster which makes it crash more.
I think it is time this grandparent traded his computer in for a new one.
This user is precisely why IE 8 is still high, besides a few gray hair surfers with XP who click on the blue E like they normally since 2001 all the users are corporate. Many have finally just left IE 6 and to them IE 8 is a GREAT improvement sadly enough.
Geeks who do not work in corporate IT do not get it as these systems are not like their own pcs in their dorm rooms where it is free and easy to switch.
The same bean counters who sign for these $$$$ IE 8 only apps also sign your paycheck! If your cool browser doesn't work with these expensive investments it doesn't get deployed. The same bean counter will be happy to fire you too as you are a cost and he is an all so important profit center in his eyes... vomits.
Many corps who use IE 9 (still few) but it in IE 7 mode typically because of one tiny app used by HR wont render right so they make a group policy for the whole company. This eliminated youtube and facebook support which the PHBs even like!
Slashdot Mirror
Retraining on Linux Mint with Mate desktop might be easier. I say "might" - I'm not real sure if all Windows users are retrainable.
I keep hearing this on here and zdnet over and over about people who hate change should switch to a distro that changes every 6 months with a new version?!
It doesn't work that way. I hate to say it but Linux has regressed too in the UI. My favorite now is CentOS because it is old and has Gnome 2.x and is not flakey like Mint or Ubuntu. When Gnome shell came I switched to Windows. (Right before Metro came sigh)
You can't run 10 year old linux binaries on something that just works for years and years. Corporations love Xp because it never changes and goes on fucking forever while holding the world back in webstandards and app development.
I do not see a solution other than PC users learning to fear change more and loving obsolete browsers and operating systems. There are still XP holdouts so scared from Vista they wont even consider Windows 7! I am a Windows 7 user and will stay that way and run Linux in my VMs. MS is quite screwed as I remember in the good old days people lined up to upgrade first and proudly showed off they run the latest X. Not smirk with a smile how obsolete they are and lucky they do not have to run the latest version even if it is better! I see that with Firefox 3.x users too who refuse to upgrade.
Then you have hyperinflation.
No you don't. The bond vs currency balance has minimal impact on inflation. Especially considering what the current bond rates are.
The way that you get hyperinflation is if the currency issuer wants to consume more resources than it can tax from the economy. Considering that the US production capacity is currently underutilized, that is unlikely, outside of governmental collapse or civil war.
Also, the platinum coin itself has no impact on inflation at all. It simply removes the artificial restrictions that prevent the government from fulfilling its debts obligations. (restrictions that are constitutionally questionable I might add)
You also have a potential situation where bond investors see the value of the dollar going to shit and demanding skyhigh interest rates due to the risk. Then you have to print more and more which creates the rates even higher!
Sovereign currency issuers controls the interest rates of their own bonds. All bond traders knows that.
Tell that to Europe? Germany had to raise its rates as no bank would touch them with a 10 foot pole. Coins are just coins and its value is what someone might pay at the moment. If people are not willing to trade them for 15,000,000,000,000 then they are useless. To pay off this debt the currency issuer (The FED) will have to consume more and print more money to do so which does not cause hyperinflation. Rather it is hyperinflation.
What will happen is like Greece and Spain the bond holders will start raising their rates based on risk. The only way to stop it is to pay it off with devalued junk money printed off or to match their rates higher. If they want 8% interest, the FED will have to raise rates up to 12%. That would be disasterous but necessary.
Gold and Platnium are nice ways to avoid inflation in a bad scenario but what is best for everyone is to avoid having that happen in the first place by strengthening the dollar.
FYI we can't produce as we can't work cheaper than China. We are underutilized just like what happened with England which never recovered and are moving toward low wage service jobs selling chinese junk and financial instruments to each other. This itself is eating us alive making it worse until we are as poor as CHina and then we can start producing again.
What did you pay for gas 10 years ago? It went up 300%. How much was your house worth in 1999? My guess is 40% its current value.
That is inflation and why did it go up? Because the fed pumped money into banks. The investors made bank and they used that money to flip homes. Your health insurance company can't make a profit with interest rates near 0%. So they charge you more to make up for the low interest rates. Banks and rich with extra fed printed money just go buy up things like fuel, gold, or loan it back to the government where you pay the interest to them later etc. Gee thanks.
I do not agree iwth the Tea Party 100%. But when you have 15,000,000,000,000 something has to give. Yes, austerity is needed to pay it back. That money wont just vanish. It will be used to invest in small business again. Why should MegaBank invest in your dream home when it can loan it back to the government and be gauranteed paid! You can't compete with the US treasury so your employer can't expand etc. It is classic economics 101 and not this keysenian stuff they try to do today.
I see nothing wrong with saying NO! Show me you are going to pay back and I will sign the check?
A fiscal cliff is A HELL OF ALOT BETTER than the alternative of a currency crises. The US would collapse and I am not exgerating either. Every bank would close with every corporate and personal savings account where 90% unemployment would happen within a few months as each bank would collapse like dominos in such a frightening scenario. The 1930s would not be as bad as debt was not as contagious or as widespread as today. It is too ingrained.
The same investors bought internet stocks in 1999 and also exotic home mortgage instruments too. This one got laughed off Fox news and was mocked in 1999 when his predictions came true. Here is is talking talking about the economic crises of 2009, back in 2006 saying mortgage back securities are not assets but liabilities.
Anyway the investors trusted Greece too to pay back its loan. I do not buy it that with a 150% debt to assets ratio is possible to payback without major austerity?
True he is just one guy, but I trust those with a track record first and I believe debt should be a liability instead of an asset in the accounting books. Consider I make 40k a year and maxed out my credit cards for -$10k and then claim I have $50k in assets! That is luducrious and a sign of trouble.
For history the UK never recovered from its debt and financial collapse in the depression of 1873 (The 1930s was not the first). America superseeded it as it took 50 years to pay it back and recover when it was too late.
Treasury bonds will be toxic very soon and you can mark my words. Japan made its intentions of printing more money and a crises like that will spill into the US where investors will then ask for their money and both republicans and democrats will refuse to compromise showing them they will not keep their words in seeing their money back. Simple investing 101. It is never a good time to payback to the debtor, but the US technically has been out of the recession for 2 years. That means the bill is due.
Then you have hyperinflation. We are seeing this now with home prices skyrocketing, food, fuel, insurance, and other services going up. The rich will just get richer and use the extra fake money to raise prices and collect rents off the poor making everyone not them poorer.
You also have a potential situation where bond investors see the value of the dollar going to shit and demanding skyhigh interest rates due to the risk. Then you have to print more and more which creates the rates even higher! A depression will start either way.
You can not engineer out of a debt crises. The only way out is to pay out.
The Tea Party is trying to save America from a horrible meltdown by 2018 aka Greece style with 100x worse due to the US being bigger and having assets all over the world.
Your 401k GONE, Stocks gone, your dollars? Worthless, unless you have gold. The best way to prevent it is to raise taxes and cut spending. It is time we paid the bills. I do not agree with the NO NEW TAXES pledge at all.
Here is how an economist views this. FYI he was one of the few who predicted this recession and told everyone that a horrible crises was coming in 2006 and was laughed off stage. He was right due to looking at debt ratios.
Is it really wise to keep signing a check over and over again like this? Something has to give. Either you have Greece style panic and a 2nd great depression or Bernakke prints money fast and we all have hyper inflation (we are seeing this now in food, insurance, gas, etc).
"Yes, the fiscal cliff -- the totally preventable budget crisis"
No, this is exactly a preventative crises aka Greece style 1000x over!
I do not agree with Republicans 100% of the time including the pledge not to raise taxes when you have 160% debt to assets ratios! But this? Yes, the Tea Party said enough is enough and put their foot down saying "If you are not going to be serious grownups and live within your means with no plans to pay it back, then I wont sign the check". That is what the debt ceiling is.
It is not a new budget. It is to pay your existing bill. Every American owes $150,000 each and by not going off the fiscal cliff you are telling your creditors that you wont pay them back! In essence raising the debt ceiling is simply paying your credit card bill by charging to the same company over and over again.
Look at that video above to get an idea averaged out. So on average, we all pay $20,000 in yet owe $150,000 with no plan in site other than ... oh yeah the economy will eventually get better and we all will ahve so much money after the great recession that we can pay it back. Any bond investor would be nuts to invest in the dollar right now.
Republicans are trying to do the right thing and that is do what they were hired for. To put in an ultra conservative mandate in 2010 to stop government and bailouts. Not everyone agrees with this, but I happen to feel Obama is not being serious enough with cuts and republicans know how to talk to the talk but refuse to raise taxes.
We need 5 fiscal cliffs in a row for the next 20 years to dig out of this hole. Seriously, Americans are clueless and watch what will happen next?
Yeah but I can get a cheap laptop for $450. I can even still use Google Docs if I were computer illiterate with IE. Chrome browser is available on it too with Windows.
So why bother with such a limited device?
I know I may get flamed for it but I like that game and feel Star Wars the Old Republic has improved dramatically over hte last year.
I would not want it as I view it as dumb terminal network computer of old that uses Google Docs and an internet connection for everything.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use Android? Android has the apps and rumor is Office is coming to it as well as iOS. Google still gets to monitor your keystrokes and search engine results so there is no loss of revenue.
It seems reminiscent of Microsoft in the early 1990s. NT or Win 3.x/95? MS couldn't decide. Eventually with NT 4 the decisions was to run win 9x apps on it and move everyone to the new kernel which finally happened in XP. THe most successful OS to date and still is today.
I think Google shock kick ChromeOS. We do not want it.
I think not having support, new hardware wont run on it, and software will stop supporting it, and constant hacking and malware aka Code Red which can take down your LAN with no patch sounds reasonable to upgrade to me!
Yes, corps are cheap and anal about ancient shit, but most are reasonable and many do not want to be obsolete. Any good management team regardless of department knows being proactive and not reactive is the key to success over medoicracy and ultimately failure. IT needs this attitude as well.
Also if your pentium IVs with 256 megs of ram and McCrappy can't multitask for 4 hours every Tuesday, and take 8 minutes to boot up how much productivity do you loose? What about electrical bills for 700 computers that do not sleep because they run XP? That my friends is money out the door.
It sounds like I.T. is not respected at your company. It is best to get them involved to avoid issues like this unless of course I.T. is inept and hates to do its job.
Yes you do not need to upgrade to every new shiny version of Windows. However, the fallacy is we can live in 2001 and things work just as well today are not true. The internet is not safe and is different. The work demands of it are different too as many suppliers and vendors expect you to work from home, and or use their website to get shit done. Pretty hard when you are strapped to an ancient insecure browser made in a different era in internet time. No HTML 5, css 3, and a javascript compiler that is 80x slower and crashes when simple ads pop up. That is lost productivity and ultimate lost business if the other party can't read your files or vice versa.
The docx support in Office 2k3 is starting to wane already and by Office 2013 many .docx files will not be compatible. MS does not patch Office 2k3! The next iloveyou script attack will never see a patch!
Now tell me how that makes good business sense? The CFO is reasonable and understands this unless they are dying and just trying to keep the lights on.
A 5 year wait time on upgrades and perhaps up to 7 is reasonable. But 11 years? Forget it. Browsers are changing fast too and 3 years tops are more reasonable in your refresh.
I think the grandparent was referring to MS Access 97 addons and intranet apps made by Oracle where they are holding the company hostage for $200,000 to upgrade with hefty monthly premiums.
Most do not own the source code anyway but they have so damned part of the business processes that it can't be removed PERIOD.
However, there are ways to go forward like virtualization and upgrading. Any company that big can get the budget to upgrade and it is embarasing when you have to turn away business clients because your version of autocad is too old to read their files or because they can't read your security ridden obsolete PDF files which were created using PDF 7 and they have a more modern version.
That is lost money.
Anyway some code will never go away, but cost accountants and their IT manager need to fucking grow a pair and realize any asset needs maintenance costs. You can get away with it for 5 years maybe ... but 11?! Come on, everyone else is moving on and MS wont support your ecosystem anymore. Not because they are evil greedy cocksuckers but because people want newer features like smooth scrolling in their desktop browsers that IPhone users have that can't exist in any OS because the code has to be XP compatible.
It is embarrassing that my Galaxy S1 has cool smooth graphics with my finger, yet my PhenomII with Windows 7 with an ATI 5750 is semi smooth and flickers and the sites still feed me HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 instead of CSS 3 and 5 like my phone.
I think IE 8 is still reasonable to keep using. Same with Windows 7. But after 2014 or 2015 it is time to move on. 5 - 7 years behind is reasonable wouldn't you agree?
It does affect your quality of the web. Notice things are so much better on your iphone or droid with gradients and pretty icons in HTML 5 and css glory. You move your browser with your finger and it smoothly goes up and down?
hmm why aren't your Linux boxes can't do that?
The answer is the corporate users holding the web back. Firefox and Chrome do not support smooth scrolling as easily because they must support XP. They do OpenGL but it does not accelerate all the functions because of the way XP era hardware was designed 11 years ago.
No gradients in okcupid? Hmm, the PHBs there noticed IE 8 users so that was dropped. I guess you have an inferior experience as well.
Wow the games look so much nicer on an older PS3 than the pc why is that? XP level DirectX 9 doesn't do things like mult tasking 3d tasks like DirectX11 can, but PC Game developers can't use it yet, why? You guessed XP.
The list goes on and on.
Yes, corporate America does not give a shit about this or your needs. But they can't expect both of us and every hardware maker, Microsoft, and software developer to stop time so the CFO can get his bonus this year. We have been doing that for years and I think upgrading every 10 years seems reasonable. Don't you agree?
Yes, investments have costs just like their trucks and equipment. The fallacy that a PC is a PC and runs the same as 2001 is wrong. The reason being is the internet is not the same as 2001 nor or the demands of hteir workforce. Many are expected to use the web for business to business communication and do what at home from mobile devices. Having .docx files not be fully compatible is embarrasing. It gets worse with Autocad and other PDF files.
That is lost business! If a customer or vendor can't read your PDF files because they are on 11, and you are on 7 it is lost revenue. Idiots.
If it isn't broken ... ok fine get a VM and run Citrix. Any IT manager and employee who does not do this is incompetent. If management says no document the hell out of it so when the axe comes you are not terminated. Intranet developers are raising prices now the last holdouts. It would have been cheaper if they upgraded 3 years but nope it is easier to put fingers in your ears and go yayaya I CAN"T HEAR YOU.
That's not a defense. It doesn't make it acceptable, it just means that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of what they're pulling.
Which explains much of the governments and corporations in the world today, they act and exploit the ignorance of people on a daily basis.
I got modded down in 2006 and in 2007 many times by calling people hypocrites if they HATE Vista DRM and the go on about how wonderful their smartphones and the new IPhone ARE!
I got replies saying, bah they are just phones. Real freedom is about the PC etc.
Well 2013 is coming and the phone and pc are coming into one with Windows 8, Gnome shell/3, iOS, and Android, as well as office and skype being ported over to tablets. Oops now you have no freedom left which make the Vista debacle about Drm look very tame.
I think phones are far more scary. They cost $100 a month for 2 year contracts = $2400 for a phone that costs $120 to make! $700 to buy it seperate with the rest of the money going to patent lawyers.
It is a nightmare of security, abusive, expense, and patent and copyright extravanga that most geeks here just ignore.
The line is where it's always been: you buy the product, it's yours, you can do whatever you like with it. It's unreasonable for a manufacturer to try to take those rights away from you.
You only buy a right to use it under very limited circumstances. Do not like it? Then go buy Linux. You can fully return in according to the EULA.
This is what RMS has been trying to say since 1984 that it is not about free beer. It is about freedom.
FYI must of you know me as a Windows zeolot, but I am reasonable on both sides. Infact, I used to be a FreeBSD zealout a decade ago.
The fact is most people are willing to be rapped or do not care about that as long as it runs their software and just works. I am willing to subject myself to this to run my software and get shit done without an update doing something or because I want to experiment with some setting that can hose my system.
Girls want their cutesy icons so they can text their friends about cute guys in school and look cool than a freedom dumb phone (do they even exist anymore?)
I prefer not to be called an idiot since I have been fairly civil.
Since you went on how virtualization is bad because it adds complexitity you then defended the use of old software by using virtualization. Which is it?
I understand and work in corporate IT. I also do not want to be around sometime in a year and a half from now and explain to the CFO why his new laptop can't run XP nor his mission critical app and we have to go buy used pcs from craigslist because we wanted to save money now and not plan for the future for the last 12 years.
If you have old stuff you have 2 choices. Virtualize or upgrade? The rest of the world will not wait nor care about your problems. Ask anyone over 35 who has worked in I.T. and they will tell you upgrading was part of the job and just because you hadn't done it in 10 years does not mean it is the new norm and something you never ever do. They were like cell phones in the 1990s.
Point is your employer only cares about making money. However, costs do not go away because we cover our eyes and ears saying no no no. Virtualization and that extra layer is part of the job. XP is going bye bye and newer software wont run it nor will your hardware and your support goes go down by upgrading to Windows 7. Disagree all you want but that is the price of doing business.
Anyone else noticed that for years the MacOSX version of Office was so much better and prettier than on Windows?
I wondered for awhile which side the developers on Redmond were on? Granted today Office 2010 and IE 10 for Windows have caught up. I guess the old Windows apis must have been really bad if they couldn't get them to be as good as another competitors OS.
This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It's not a case of being afraid to upgrade. It's the fact that users, companies and organisations have software and infrastructure that runs and is tested on XP and there is zero benefit to them changing it. Kind of like how a great deal of mainframe code is still written in COBOL. There is no benefit to rewriting it and people do not have the time or the resources. You might not like that but that's the real world.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
Anything can be deemed to be untrusted, that's the problem. I'm afraid the rootkit/virus/security angle to this stuff is just an excuse, plain and simple.
It is great for corporate customers.
It's a disaster for corporate customers. They face a future of new hardware refusing to boot existing versions of Windows or any other operating systems, enforced upgrades and a spiralling in costs, licensing and otherwise. A rootkit is the least of their worries.
I posted comments here debating slashdotters who feel anyone still running an old IE at work deserves to be hacked who do not understand corporate IT. Like the mainframes platforms of old there are solutions for them. Citrix and MS terminal servers are just 2 to run older software.
I have also seen consumers who feel XP is the best OS ever made and that Windows 7 must be a Vista as slashdotters called it Vista 2.0 and think that just because it runs on 128 megs of ram make it a supperior product over anything else etc.
Why upgrade what works fine?
The fact of the matter is new hardware does not like XP very well. I read stories of help desk spending a week hacking .ini files and reverse engineering Windows 7 drivers to run on XP for these users! USB 3, touchscreens, tablets/netbooks with strange chipsets and digitizers, and other things already do not have XP drivers nor support. XP is on life support for only the corporate laptops that are $$$ for Dell and HP units. These will get EOL'd and you are screwed as they wont run XP anymore by 2014.
It is a security risk, and the rest of the world who does not have your requirements are moving on. Already Office 2003 is not fully compatible with the newest .docx files in Office 2013 and sometimes Office 2010.
Worms are a constant problem and the situation under XP is getting drastically worse! Did you read about hte newest malware targetting the XP versions of Ie 8, 7, and 6? Who are you going to get support from after next year?
It is time to consider Hyper V, Windows Server 2003 terminals, and Citrix similiar to rally and x3700 IBM terminal software for these must have apps before it is too late. I disagree that a corporate customer wouldn't love to have documents time bomb, lock and encrypt files, and prevent software that is unathorized to steal keystrokes at bootup. Secureboot and drming of some Office files would have its benefits keeping confidentiality.
I know it is an uneccesary cost for you but come on? 12 years is a FUCKload A LOT of time and you can't expect everyone to stop innovation to service you. As it is we can't even move to HTML 5 yet due to XP. Most do not run 15 year old software and there are options so your users can move on and still run these old apps. It costs money too for Ms and everyone else to backport everything to so many browsers and operating systems and your helpdesk will love the malware and fake AV popup calls go down from a more secure browser/OS. Those ancient VB and IE 6 apps do not need internet access from your Citrix terminal program.
Not true at all.
Windows Server 2012 is the first version of Windows (behind Linux and Solaris I may add) that is actually built to be run in a VM. For example you do not need to give it the max ram usage and have the image use 100% of it instead of dynamically use it up to the limit as it needs. VMware and Hyper-V have drivers to load without secureboot that are in Windows 8 and Server.
heh, they ask for a piece of shit and they get a piece of shit, what does that have to do with anything?
That POS you call it, does wonders to productivity. You are looking at it through a geek lense of HTML 5 features and multimedia support. My boss looks at it though how much can IT raise the shareprice. These corporate apps might not look as pretty as www.engadget.com on a HTML 5 browser with cool effects, but can display and automate business processes well.
They wont support anything above IE 8 yet (maybe 1 or 2 do as of the last 6 months) because XP wont die and IE 8 is the common gateway that runs on both operating systems. It works.
That is mine and the other guys point. Sometimes it is cooler being a geek at home running cutting edge stuff than at work, but work has different priorities than having a less bug free and prettier browser. It is about productivity, saving money, and working with what they already have.
Many viruses modify either the OS bootloader or low level drivers (SATA, PCI bus etc). By loading so early in the boot process they have full and unrestricted access to the entire machine, making them excellent and difficult to remove rootkits.
This isn't just a Windows problem either, all operating systems are vulnerable to the modification of core boot files.
One of the only cool things about Windows 7/8 do is have protected kernel paths combined with signed drivers in x64. This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
It is great for corporate customers. If this could be used for gnu/Linux the situation would be great for security.
The master keys have not been compromised. Only one of the older ones which are derived from the master for signing software under XP. MS has revoked that particular key and replaced it with another one. The bad guys also forged one of Adobe's for running signed flash applets as well but Adobe has replaced it. The master key in both situations are still secure.
It is not old flash. The issue is GPU acceleration. Chrome auto updates to the latest flash.
One of the reasons to retire XP is its horrible GPU acceleration which will become more and more of a deal as phones and tablets offer the best smooth scrolling and visual experiences with the xception of Windows 8. Windows 7 is smoother but still flickers due to WDDM 1.1.
Intel makes some very crappy graphics a half decade ago. 915 is the IE 6 of directX and OpenGL developers with so many shit needing quirks due to Intel wanting everything in software to sell more expensive CPUs. It simply cant handle h.264 and 1080p with motion blur, smooth font rendering, and other things mixed with an 11 year old GDI XP subsystem. Chrome uses more resources to appear faster which makes it crash more.
I think it is time this grandparent traded his computer in for a new one.
This user is precisely why IE 8 is still high, besides a few gray hair surfers with XP who click on the blue E like they normally since 2001 all the users are corporate. Many have finally just left IE 6 and to them IE 8 is a GREAT improvement sadly enough.
Geeks who do not work in corporate IT do not get it as these systems are not like their own pcs in their dorm rooms where it is free and easy to switch.
The same bean counters who sign for these $$$$ IE 8 only apps also sign your paycheck! If your cool browser doesn't work with these expensive investments it doesn't get deployed. The same bean counter will be happy to fire you too as you are a cost and he is an all so important profit center in his eyes ... vomits.
I wonder that too.
Many corps who use IE 9 (still few) but it in IE 7 mode typically because of one tiny app used by HR wont render right so they make a group policy for the whole company. This eliminated youtube and facebook support which the PHBs even like!