As everyone knows, those of us who are trying to make a living and save for retirement just love to have retired folks enter our field and offer their services at "hobbiest" rates. Yeah, top of our list for things that make our day. You know, keeps us on our toes - makes us more competitive.
There's nothing like having to compete with someone who (a) doesn't have a family to support (b) a mortgage to pay (c) has a pention/retirement income and - this is the one that gets us all warm and fuzzy - is getting paid the same Social Security check that we spend 15% of our paycheck supporting, and will not exist by the time we retire.
Sounds like a member of the senior staff is miffed they got outed. So, did you get paid for this astroturfing, or are you doing it out of love for the company?;-)
The terms of service said that her mail may be deleted
I missed the part where the word "may" became "shall irrevocably". Most services in meatspace offer a grace period, and it is not unreasonable to expect a little slack on the internet. Sure, she should have logged in (I'd be afraid of what my email looked like if I didn't log in for a month), but this kind of policy does not make for happy customers. You know, the ones whos eyeballs get sold by the impression.
The policy is a poor one if you want to retain customers and compete in a crowded market. I hope they get all the negative publicity they deserve.
Well, I suppose we could blame everything on MS, but then there woudn't be time to complain about Sony, the RI/MPAA, or the fact that roland has gotten another story accepted.
So the cute blond who drops by my doctor's office with her big bag of trinkets and pro basketball tickets is not marketing?
For the sake of arguement, 17 is just over half of 32, and is not too far off from 20 and 40 as the GP suggested. A 15-20% might seem significant if you're trying to make an argument, but for a guy quoting figures to one significant digit, it's pretty good, especially when the key proporations are just about right.
Most small businesses thrive on low revenue products. Most businesses are small businesses. Small businesses are also the most flexible, and don't have as much legacy software to port. But they also don't have $40,000 to get basic services running. MS has products for that.
In the world of business you practically always have to hire someone, so it always costs money. Time I (or you) spend coding for internal purposes is time I'm not making money to pay rent.
Personal stuff is a bit different, though if your hobby isn't coding then recompiling a kernal isn't the way to spend a saturday evening (though I'll admit I've done it on a Saturday afternoon).
I guess the article hits a chord with me becuase I'd rather be a linux shop, but I find myself shelling out $600 for a SBS and 5 cals because I just need outlook's calendar and contacts to work, and I get a domain server and file services to boot. It's cheaper - in opportunity cost - to set up a SBS 15 minutes at a time, than it is to figure out how to make linux work.
The who point of Linux is that you have the source and can fix anything yourself, unless you simply aren't skilled enough to fix it.
Congratulations. You've just excluded nearly all of the business world.
With windows, if it don't work, you're forced to spend money.
What, you/i? can't write a custom app to do what you need? No wonder you spell coder with a zero and a 3.
Besides, what happens when you spend your time altering your drivers and recompiling your kernal? Are you getting paid for that time? Business is about the bottom line, and we expect things to work. As much as MS can be a royal pita, it really does work - and it works in more ways than linux does. The mods will all hate that last statement, but if that got your hackles up, tell me which application can be installed that will do calendar and contact management which will sync with an off-the-shelf PDA-phone and a desktop that can run Quickbooks. You've got 3 users, two desktops and a laptop - all Dell w/o OSes, a $2000 total software, training and installation budget, and you either have to support the products for a year or have typical employees (i.e. - the 95% who have only used MS products) who can maintain the installation themselves for a year. Go.
You've missed a critical step in your fossil fuel scenerio - delivery. Unless you happen to have a natural gas line to your home, you still have to transport the oil/coal/wood/lpg to your house, usually with a gasoline or deisel vehicle and an expensive human operator. The burn something ->boil water (or sodium) is actully pretty efficient though there are, indeed, losses. The real efficiency comes from the fact the the power can be aggregated from several sources, including non-fossil fuels, to provide better overall "green" performance. (Ok, so my electric company burns coal - touche). I do get some energy from nuclear and some from hydroelectric (pure hydro plus dual-pond peaking).
BTW - efficiencies can be as high as 97-98% for natural gas boilers, but most oil heaters top out at 90%, and anything not made this decade is going to be much worse. The 1963 oil boiler I just replaced in my house was 54% efficient when it was brand new, and burned oil all year long to keep the system running properly, even though I only heat about 4-5 months of the year.
Two years ago I found out the following costs per million BTUs:
$38 - Existing oil boiler $34 - LPG @ 97% (Buderus boiler) $19 - New Oil Boiler @ 90% $17 - Electric Resistance (yes we have^Whad cheap electric) $14 - Natural Gas @97% (plus a $3500 bill to extend the gas line to our lot), not including billing fees $ 7 - Electric heat pump, 8.5 HSPF.
So, in the grand scheme of things, natural gas was on par with my 6c/kWh electric with baseboard heat, and had something like a 20-30 year payback period for the new gas line. So it turns out that electric light bulbs really are pretty efficient, especially since I could (theoretically) let the thermostat drift a degree lower as I would have supplemental heat (light) in the room I was occupying. Electric has gone up to about 8c for me, but the heat pump is still cheaper to run than gas. As for you "warm air" nazis, I actually have one resistance coil activate whent he temp drops below 35 so my register temp is the same as a gas furnace system. I lose about 25%-30% of my efficiency at those times, but my wife says it's worth it, and it still sneaks in at about $12-13/MMbtu.
Now, those light bulbs don't help in the summer, but since the sun is up about the same time I am for the two-three heating months I have, and I tend to go to bed early - only about an hour or two after dusk - there really isn't much additional load I'm putting into the system.
And then what do they do with it? Probably pay someone a fortune to "dispose" of them, which often means dumping them in a landfill in a place where the regulations are looser.
Actually, if you like the bluish, slightly frozen corpse look of Reveal lamps, you will love CFLs. It will take some looking, but see if you can find a lamp with a 5000-6000K color temp and a 95-98CRI. Philips makes a T8 in such a creature. These types of bulbs are usually billed as "full spectrum."
Me? I like incandescent. Nice, warm, and fits well with my millions-of-years-of-evolution eyes. Flourescent is for where you need lots of light, or a particular (high) color temp. Besides, a CFL won't work with my sunrizr alarm clock. (which, btw, every/.er should own).
Nope, fluorescent light is very peaky - typicall with emission only in narrow bands based on the phosphors used. You can get color corrected lamps which attempt to simulate the visible portion of blackbody radiation at a particular temperature. 5000K, 98CRI lamps can be had at most well-stocked electrical supply warehouses, or by special order from the same. 4000K and 3000K are less common, and are hard to get in higher than 95CRI. CRI, by the way, is the color rendering index, and tells you how close to an incandesent the lamp will perform wrt color. 5000K is noon sun (in Washington, DC), most normal wttage inandescents fall in the 2200-2600K range, iirc (may be a bit lower) - very "warm" looking, or biased toward the red end.
Much of what is avaialable is well below 80CRI, and looks like crap. Most CFLs won't even tell you what the color temp or CRI is. That's why you get nasty looking lighting in older buildings where the maintenance has mixed color temp and CRI. Nasty. That's one of the nice things about incandescent - a "plain" lamp will be practically the same temp as any other lamp of the same wattage (halogens are higher temp for the wattage). Of course, the other nice thing about incandescents is that our eyes have developed over millions of years to work well with blackbody radiation.
Also, dimmed incandescents are even less efficient than their full-on brothers. A dimmed lamp using 80% of the power will only produce something like 50-60% the light output.
That said, I hate fluorescent lighting for all but color-critical tasks, and for those I prefer 5000K, 98CRI lamps.
More work need to go into CFLs that are color corrected. I don't want a lamp that puts out 60W worth of incandescent light and has the color temperature of a 250W lamp - it just looks wrong. They also need to do a bit better with labeling. I find you need twice the "supposed" wattage on a CFL to make a room seem similarly bright.
You'd probably win. And you would spend 12 to 24 hours (or more) of your own time - partof which will be away from work - and you would likely receive a judgement for the price of the software. You would then get to try and collect from microsoft, who just might pay the judgement after 8-12 weeks, allowing you to go buy a copy of their software (on which you would pay tax out of your own pocket) which you owned.
This presumes that the MS clerk on the other end doesn't just throw the judgement in the trash or get a bug up his ass and appeal just to piss you off. BTW - who do you serve with papers in this case?
It's cheaper to just buy a new copy and save yourself the hassle. If you don't like it go use a competitors product. MS has already decided that it isn't worth their time to help you. Sad, but true.
Why would this not lead to potentially faster rendering? I didn't rtfa (presumed the server was on fire), but normally you can reduce the accuracy to improve speed, and possibly use a back-end interpolation to smooth the artifacts, then a sharpening step. The last two should be far less intensive than the CFD. The general flow and patterns would be accurate. As processors catch up, you bump the accuracy to match. I'll admit that I haven't messed with CFD models, but for FEA models, the above could certainly be true.
You're allowed to feel bad for us, even if it's only feeling bad that we have users on AOL.
The AOL thing is bad, but this is primarily a non-technical group - maybe 20-30% of our members are computer savvy, and it's very possible 20% don't even own a computer. They are also pretty far flung, with some being very rural (i.e. - no DSL, so broadband to them means 56k dialup).
I am on a mailing list for a local (okay, regional) club that has about 150-200 members. You have to opt-in to get on the list. Well, seems that one or two members didn't (or couldn't figure out how to) unsubscribe when they didn't want to read the list - they just hit the AOL "this is spam" button. That would be fine, except that AOL started blocking the listserve machine completely, and nobony who used AOL get their list emails. It took a while to petition AOL to get white listed, then some idiot got us re-blacklisted.
To get around it, the list admin ended up reworking the list so that each recipient got thier own, personally addressed email. Not to stop the spam-blocking, but to find the "problem" user. A lot of work to get the list back up and running for those on AOL.
Do you have any MCSEs in AZ? If so, why aren't they in jail, or does the proetction just extend to architects? Or, perhaps Registered Architects, which is a regulated field.
The only place to effectively prosecute MSCEs was Quebec, if I remeber correctly. Everybody else just drops their panties and bend over for industry.
By the way - IBM has a nexus in AZ, and yet they have a Cheif Architect. I don't see your AG going after her or revoking the corporation in the state.
You're not just a stupid architect, but an AC stupid architect. God, what an asshole.
Actually, they've made their phone compatible with most of the world, and only incompatible with the "stodgy old networks" of some of the legacy cell phone folks in the US. I have US Cellular and will be switching away from the locked-down pay-for-each-bit phone system as soon as my contract is up. I'm even giving up some network coverage to do it. I won't be getting an iPhone, though - having Uncle Steve dictate my phone instead of Darth Vader really isn't much better.
Actually, USCC roams on Verizon, and I've found that 2 bars means "you'll probably get cut off any moment now" around me. I'm in a relatively rural area, and got a PAYG cingular phone to check the network for a month, and the service really isn't all that much worse. A single bar on CDMA is about as useful as the NO SERVICE label on cingular - I'm not getting any real voice service with either one, and there are precious few areas where there is good signal under USCC/Verizon and no signal with cingular.
Why in the world does MS keep chansing the damned "pretty, shiny" mac crowd with an OS that I have to use to get work done? That's not meant as a slam to Mac fanbois (though I know you'll take it that way) - pretty-shiny has it's place, it just happens to get in the way of business.
I say "have to use" because I have applications that run under windows. Only. Oh, I suppose I could try them under emulation, if I wanted to pretend I was doing my work in a pool of molasses. Even with a decent computer, some of my apps use so much horsepower when fully configured that I've had to scale back to get the computer to react as fast as I can work (I do CAD, I do structural analysis; yes, I can operate a 3GHz CAD machine faster than the AutoDESK UI can keep up.)
When are we going to get a real business edition that strips away all the superfluous fluff and provides a basic platform for business. I don't want more stuff in the business version, I want less. Less graphics, less "help" (incessant indexing, promiscuous wifi, 40MB printer drivers [okay, not all their fault], a dozen places where apps can start from at boot), less obfuscation of the basic components. How about starting with all the ports closed by default. You really don't need all that stuff for a business setting - we can open what we need. If you feel there's a critical need to dumb it down, give us a nice GUI with the ports shown and the description. Use the "verified" leverage you have over driver developers to whittle down the driver bloat and be transparent with the system resources (like the aforementioned ports).
Make it better, not just prettier. There's a reason that the Dodge Sprinter is a popular business van - and it's not because there's so much space to put the subwoofer.
You are correct. And given the multitude of things that modern OSes need to do to "help us", we need these cores. I wish my laptop could be upgraded to a multi-core system, as there are too many things that will bod down the system that have to run in the background. Having a processor (or two) for them would significantly increase the responsiveness of my system.
A decade ago I had a dual PP200 that was one of the nicest machines I had ever run. I ran some unruly apps at the time, and having an extra idle processor to cut those processes of at the knee without rebooting was a nice benefit. Nothing was multi-threaded back then, but having two processors was still valuable.
Give it up. Protected titles ceased to be protected decades ago when industry decided that it didn't need to be regulated. Architect means nothing these days, nor does engineer or doctor. We can throw around RA and PE and MD all we want, but the common words will always be crapped on. Interstingly, accountant and lawyer seems pretty safe - I guess we just need to choose fields that nobody wants to be associated with if we want to keep our monikers pristine.
Hey, I live in the south (on the fringe, actually), and up until just a decade or two ago, we still had blue laws - i.e. businesses could not be open on Sundays. You would ba amazed at the self-rightousness of these people.
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As everyone knows, those of us who are trying to make a living and save for retirement just love to have retired folks enter our field and offer their services at "hobbiest" rates. Yeah, top of our list for things that make our day. You know, keeps us on our toes - makes us more competitive.
There's nothing like having to compete with someone who (a) doesn't have a family to support (b) a mortgage to pay (c) has a pention/retirement income and - this is the one that gets us all warm and fuzzy - is getting paid the same Social Security check that we spend 15% of our paycheck supporting, and will not exist by the time we retire.
I just want to be the first to say - "thanks".
Sounds like a member of the senior staff is miffed they got outed. So, did you get paid for this astroturfing, or are you doing it out of love for the company? ;-)
The terms of service said that her mail may be deleted
I missed the part where the word "may" became "shall irrevocably". Most services in meatspace offer a grace period, and it is not unreasonable to expect a little slack on the internet. Sure, she should have logged in (I'd be afraid of what my email looked like if I didn't log in for a month), but this kind of policy does not make for happy customers. You know, the ones whos eyeballs get sold by the impression.
The policy is a poor one if you want to retain customers and compete in a crowded market. I hope they get all the negative publicity they deserve.
You could have been a little kinder and linked to goatse. Now I have to go around with that image (Bob, not goatse) in my head all night.
Well, I suppose we could blame everything on MS, but then there woudn't be time to complain about Sony, the RI/MPAA, or the fact that roland has gotten another story accepted.
that should keep the number of Vista zombie machines in check for a while.
So the cute blond who drops by my doctor's office with her big bag of trinkets and pro basketball tickets is not marketing?
For the sake of arguement, 17 is just over half of 32, and is not too far off from 20 and 40 as the GP suggested. A 15-20% might seem significant if you're trying to make an argument, but for a guy quoting figures to one significant digit, it's pretty good, especially when the key proporations are just about right.
Most small businesses thrive on low revenue products. Most businesses are small businesses. Small businesses are also the most flexible, and don't have as much legacy software to port. But they also don't have $40,000 to get basic services running. MS has products for that.
In the world of business you practically always have to hire someone, so it always costs money. Time I (or you) spend coding for internal purposes is time I'm not making money to pay rent.
Personal stuff is a bit different, though if your hobby isn't coding then recompiling a kernal isn't the way to spend a saturday evening (though I'll admit I've done it on a Saturday afternoon).
I guess the article hits a chord with me becuase I'd rather be a linux shop, but I find myself shelling out $600 for a SBS and 5 cals because I just need outlook's calendar and contacts to work, and I get a domain server and file services to boot. It's cheaper - in opportunity cost - to set up a SBS 15 minutes at a time, than it is to figure out how to make linux work.
The who point of Linux is that you have the source and can fix anything yourself, unless you simply aren't skilled enough to fix it.
Congratulations. You've just excluded nearly all of the business world.
With windows, if it don't work, you're forced to spend money.
What, you/i? can't write a custom app to do what you need? No wonder you spell coder with a zero and a 3.
Besides, what happens when you spend your time altering your drivers and recompiling your kernal? Are you getting paid for that time? Business is about the bottom line, and we expect things to work. As much as MS can be a royal pita, it really does work - and it works in more ways than linux does. The mods will all hate that last statement, but if that got your hackles up, tell me which application can be installed that will do calendar and contact management which will sync with an off-the-shelf PDA-phone and a desktop that can run Quickbooks. You've got 3 users, two desktops and a laptop - all Dell w/o OSes, a $2000 total software, training and installation budget, and you either have to support the products for a year or have typical employees (i.e. - the 95% who have only used MS products) who can maintain the installation themselves for a year. Go.
It's not Vista's fault your laptop uses a Sony battery. MS can't be blamed for everything, you know.
You've missed a critical step in your fossil fuel scenerio - delivery. Unless you happen to have a natural gas line to your home, you still have to transport the oil/coal/wood/lpg to your house, usually with a gasoline or deisel vehicle and an expensive human operator. The burn something ->boil water (or sodium) is actully pretty efficient though there are, indeed, losses. The real efficiency comes from the fact the the power can be aggregated from several sources, including non-fossil fuels, to provide better overall "green" performance. (Ok, so my electric company burns coal - touche). I do get some energy from nuclear and some from hydroelectric (pure hydro plus dual-pond peaking).
BTW - efficiencies can be as high as 97-98% for natural gas boilers, but most oil heaters top out at 90%, and anything not made this decade is going to be much worse. The 1963 oil boiler I just replaced in my house was 54% efficient when it was brand new, and burned oil all year long to keep the system running properly, even though I only heat about 4-5 months of the year.
Two years ago I found out the following costs per million BTUs:
$38 - Existing oil boiler
$34 - LPG @ 97% (Buderus boiler)
$19 - New Oil Boiler @ 90%
$17 - Electric Resistance (yes we have^Whad cheap electric)
$14 - Natural Gas @97% (plus a $3500 bill to extend the gas line to our lot), not including billing fees
$ 7 - Electric heat pump, 8.5 HSPF.
So, in the grand scheme of things, natural gas was on par with my 6c/kWh electric with baseboard heat, and had something like a 20-30 year payback period for the new gas line. So it turns out that electric light bulbs really are pretty efficient, especially since I could (theoretically) let the thermostat drift a degree lower as I would have supplemental heat (light) in the room I was occupying. Electric has gone up to about 8c for me, but the heat pump is still cheaper to run than gas. As for you "warm air" nazis, I actually have one resistance coil activate whent he temp drops below 35 so my register temp is the same as a gas furnace system. I lose about 25%-30% of my efficiency at those times, but my wife says it's worth it, and it still sneaks in at about $12-13/MMbtu.
Now, those light bulbs don't help in the summer, but since the sun is up about the same time I am for the two-three heating months I have, and I tend to go to bed early - only about an hour or two after dusk - there really isn't much additional load I'm putting into the system.
And then what do they do with it? Probably pay someone a fortune to "dispose" of them, which often means dumping them in a landfill in a place where the regulations are looser.
Actually, if you like the bluish, slightly frozen corpse look of Reveal lamps, you will love CFLs. It will take some looking, but see if you can find a lamp with a 5000-6000K color temp and a 95-98CRI. Philips makes a T8 in such a creature. These types of bulbs are usually billed as "full spectrum."
/.er should own).
Me? I like incandescent. Nice, warm, and fits well with my millions-of-years-of-evolution eyes. Flourescent is for where you need lots of light, or a particular (high) color temp. Besides, a CFL won't work with my sunrizr alarm clock. (which, btw, every
Nope, fluorescent light is very peaky - typicall with emission only in narrow bands based on the phosphors used. You can get color corrected lamps which attempt to simulate the visible portion of blackbody radiation at a particular temperature. 5000K, 98CRI lamps can be had at most well-stocked electrical supply warehouses, or by special order from the same. 4000K and 3000K are less common, and are hard to get in higher than 95CRI. CRI, by the way, is the color rendering index, and tells you how close to an incandesent the lamp will perform wrt color. 5000K is noon sun (in Washington, DC), most normal wttage inandescents fall in the 2200-2600K range, iirc (may be a bit lower) - very "warm" looking, or biased toward the red end.
Much of what is avaialable is well below 80CRI, and looks like crap. Most CFLs won't even tell you what the color temp or CRI is. That's why you get nasty looking lighting in older buildings where the maintenance has mixed color temp and CRI. Nasty. That's one of the nice things about incandescent - a "plain" lamp will be practically the same temp as any other lamp of the same wattage (halogens are higher temp for the wattage). Of course, the other nice thing about incandescents is that our eyes have developed over millions of years to work well with blackbody radiation.
Some of them already are compatible with dimmers.
Also, dimmed incandescents are even less efficient than their full-on brothers. A dimmed lamp using 80% of the power will only produce something like 50-60% the light output.
That said, I hate fluorescent lighting for all but color-critical tasks, and for those I prefer 5000K, 98CRI lamps.
More work need to go into CFLs that are color corrected. I don't want a lamp that puts out 60W worth of incandescent light and has the color temperature of a 250W lamp - it just looks wrong. They also need to do a bit better with labeling. I find you need twice the "supposed" wattage on a CFL to make a room seem similarly bright.
You'd probably win. And you would spend 12 to 24 hours (or more) of your own time - partof which will be away from work - and you would likely receive a judgement for the price of the software. You would then get to try and collect from microsoft, who just might pay the judgement after 8-12 weeks, allowing you to go buy a copy of their software (on which you would pay tax out of your own pocket) which you owned.
This presumes that the MS clerk on the other end doesn't just throw the judgement in the trash or get a bug up his ass and appeal just to piss you off. BTW - who do you serve with papers in this case?
It's cheaper to just buy a new copy and save yourself the hassle. If you don't like it go use a competitors product. MS has already decided that it isn't worth their time to help you. Sad, but true.
Why would this not lead to potentially faster rendering? I didn't rtfa (presumed the server was on fire), but normally you can reduce the accuracy to improve speed, and possibly use a back-end interpolation to smooth the artifacts, then a sharpening step. The last two should be far less intensive than the CFD. The general flow and patterns would be accurate. As processors catch up, you bump the accuracy to match. I'll admit that I haven't messed with CFD models, but for FEA models, the above could certainly be true.
You're allowed to feel bad for us, even if it's only feeling bad that we have users on AOL.
The AOL thing is bad, but this is primarily a non-technical group - maybe 20-30% of our members are computer savvy, and it's very possible 20% don't even own a computer. They are also pretty far flung, with some being very rural (i.e. - no DSL, so broadband to them means 56k dialup).
I am on a mailing list for a local (okay, regional) club that has about 150-200 members. You have to opt-in to get on the list. Well, seems that one or two members didn't (or couldn't figure out how to) unsubscribe when they didn't want to read the list - they just hit the AOL "this is spam" button. That would be fine, except that AOL started blocking the listserve machine completely, and nobony who used AOL get their list emails. It took a while to petition AOL to get white listed, then some idiot got us re-blacklisted.
To get around it, the list admin ended up reworking the list so that each recipient got thier own, personally addressed email. Not to stop the spam-blocking, but to find the "problem" user. A lot of work to get the list back up and running for those on AOL.
Do you have any MCSEs in AZ? If so, why aren't they in jail, or does the proetction just extend to architects? Or, perhaps Registered Architects, which is a regulated field.
The only place to effectively prosecute MSCEs was Quebec, if I remeber correctly. Everybody else just drops their panties and bend over for industry.
By the way - IBM has a nexus in AZ, and yet they have a Cheif Architect. I don't see your AG going after her or revoking the corporation in the state.
You're not just a stupid architect, but an AC stupid architect. God, what an asshole.
Actually, they've made their phone compatible with most of the world, and only incompatible with the "stodgy old networks" of some of the legacy cell phone folks in the US. I have US Cellular and will be switching away from the locked-down pay-for-each-bit phone system as soon as my contract is up. I'm even giving up some network coverage to do it. I won't be getting an iPhone, though - having Uncle Steve dictate my phone instead of Darth Vader really isn't much better.
Actually, USCC roams on Verizon, and I've found that 2 bars means "you'll probably get cut off any moment now" around me. I'm in a relatively rural area, and got a PAYG cingular phone to check the network for a month, and the service really isn't all that much worse. A single bar on CDMA is about as useful as the NO SERVICE label on cingular - I'm not getting any real voice service with either one, and there are precious few areas where there is good signal under USCC/Verizon and no signal with cingular.
Why in the world does MS keep chansing the damned "pretty, shiny" mac crowd with an OS that I have to use to get work done? That's not meant as a slam to Mac fanbois (though I know you'll take it that way) - pretty-shiny has it's place, it just happens to get in the way of business.
I say "have to use" because I have applications that run under windows. Only. Oh, I suppose I could try them under emulation, if I wanted to pretend I was doing my work in a pool of molasses. Even with a decent computer, some of my apps use so much horsepower when fully configured that I've had to scale back to get the computer to react as fast as I can work (I do CAD, I do structural analysis; yes, I can operate a 3GHz CAD machine faster than the AutoDESK UI can keep up.)
When are we going to get a real business edition that strips away all the superfluous fluff and provides a basic platform for business. I don't want more stuff in the business version, I want less. Less graphics, less "help" (incessant indexing, promiscuous wifi, 40MB printer drivers [okay, not all their fault], a dozen places where apps can start from at boot), less obfuscation of the basic components. How about starting with all the ports closed by default. You really don't need all that stuff for a business setting - we can open what we need. If you feel there's a critical need to dumb it down, give us a nice GUI with the ports shown and the description. Use the "verified" leverage you have over driver developers to whittle down the driver bloat and be transparent with the system resources (like the aforementioned ports).
Make it better, not just prettier. There's a reason that the Dodge Sprinter is a popular business van - and it's not because there's so much space to put the subwoofer.
You are correct. And given the multitude of things that modern OSes need to do to "help us", we need these cores. I wish my laptop could be upgraded to a multi-core system, as there are too many things that will bod down the system that have to run in the background. Having a processor (or two) for them would significantly increase the responsiveness of my system.
A decade ago I had a dual PP200 that was one of the nicest machines I had ever run. I ran some unruly apps at the time, and having an extra idle processor to cut those processes of at the knee without rebooting was a nice benefit. Nothing was multi-threaded back then, but having two processors was still valuable.
Give it up. Protected titles ceased to be protected decades ago when industry decided that it didn't need to be regulated. Architect means nothing these days, nor does engineer or doctor. We can throw around RA and PE and MD all we want, but the common words will always be crapped on. Interstingly, accountant and lawyer seems pretty safe - I guess we just need to choose fields that nobody wants to be associated with if we want to keep our monikers pristine.
Overzeetop, PE
Hey, I live in the south (on the fringe, actually), and up until just a decade or two ago, we still had blue laws - i.e. businesses could not be open on Sundays. You would ba amazed at the self-rightousness of these people.