Early on Gates focused his giving in ways which still somehow benefited Microsoft - i.e. education, but only for purchase of Windows PCs. If people in developing countries could benefit from technology he wanted to focus on Microsoft, even if it didn't run on any devices these people could support or use for very long.
As for space, that could mean a delay in Microsoft in space? Wull, unless Mr. Ballmer takes his fortune and decides Microsoft needs to carve out the CyberSpace in Space for their own...
"Hey, I just saw something float past the window... it looked like an office chair."
Absolutely! Would I lie to you, Mr. Joshua J. Fortenbras of 1104 W. Finster Ave, Quimby, NJ, who works at Asset Assure Investments (formerly Dewey, Cheatham & Howe). I trust you enjoyed your bacon and gerbil omlet, for breakfast this morning.
That's the fly-swatter approach - you hit the flies you can and ignore those you can't get to.
'Don't fix all security issues. Fix the security issues that matter, based on statistical relevance.'
That line reminds me of the old TQM which was run past us decades ago (and then promptly forgotten by 90% of the Franklin Planner-toting crowd), fix what really needs fixing first. I'm sure this bit of wisdom didn't require TQM to come along (you can probably find it in Hamlet if you know where to look), you fix your most grievous would first and worry about your bruises later, but we (in my department) felt rather put-upon when these TQM zombies came around and told us what a sea-change it would be for our practices and productivity when we embraced what we already knew.
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
I use SSD for my boot drive - Do the OS install, install some app suites (some of which rudely insist upon being installed on the "C:" drive) then ghost it to another SSD for the eventual day the SSD has crapped out sufficiently. All main storage is on a RAID 5, about 6TB in size with the spare drive on the shelf for when one of those 3TB HDD finally kick the bitbucket.
Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drives
Too small, trying to replace a 250GB SATA 6. Currently on Samsung 840 Pro and that's what is giving me 'data read errors' on boot, two independent systems. Might be they are just not compatible with the controller. Some scribblings indicate the timing of the SSD is throwing the the controller, and there's now way to adjust settings with Samsung's SSD tools.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Well, qualified, they are are the knees of bees.
I have a Samsung which likes to give me read errors on boot up, after a try or two it gets its act together. Tried another one and the same effect. Samsung's tech support on this is nearly as good as staring at a wall of drying paint. (If anyone has a recommendation on the best, meaning most reliable 250GB or more SSD, please feel free to pass it along)
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server and SSD would be preferable, but if you're only needing to boot up an SSD is probably a bit more than you need, though the low capacity drives are approaching the price of low capacity mechanical memory. Soon I expect most new personal data devices (i.e. PC/Mac) will all by using SSDs.
This is quite the "Oops" on the part of MSFT which, even if this is nothing more than anti-MS FUD, can ill-afford this kind of bad press with a platform which has less than 4% of market share.
Probably the result of an office memo, which came down from the top, worded something like this: More animations, more inexplicable navigation, don't worry about security or adhering to the APIs, we can fix that later.. or not.
I still use Windows XP and Windows 2000. They were good operating systems and, from my perspective, Vista, 7, and 8 haven't brought anything to the table. Quite the opposite, in fact: I went full penguin after Vista came out. It was patently clear that Microsoft was going in a direction I didn't want to go.
Yes, but what of the botnets? Who will take care of them? Without care and feeding of ineffective security updates to make users believe they are safe from such things, the botnets will wither and die.
"Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices."
You were clearly not around in the 80's.
"Big businesses" did not standardize on MS-DOS, they standardized on IBM and specifically on PC-DOS. MS-DOS was not the same and PCs that couldn't run PC-DOS were failures. Ask AT&T and TI. IBM was the company, MS was a cling-on. They would have been snuffed out if they didn't earn their way elsewhere.
On the OS front, MS has to compete with several alternatives for the PC dekstop, Topview and GEM to name a couple. It created a fully virtual windows product, Windows/386, that was the first truly useful desktop 386-specific product. It created a worthy adversary (NT) to the 286-OS/2 disaster. It created a viable, portable OS that ran on RISC workstations while still running DOS apps. That countered the threat of a dominant Intel. It had to take on IBM while partnering with them and produce a truly excellent product in Windows NT while doing so. It established Win16 and Win32 as the dominant programming interfaces while IBM was pushing their own lock-in. It accomplished all this while Novell had an absolute stranglehold in networking. It sent Novell packing at the same time, not something that people might have predicted at the time. Netware was THE product, LAN Manager was a toy. How times changed.
Meanwhile, Word quickly became a technically excellent product and their office suite competed well with another huge competitor with dominant marketshare. That market wasn't gifted to MS, they earned it and put down Wordperfect in the process.
Finally, Microsoft's bread and butter comes from software for which the industry has never produced viable competition. That's not MS's fault. As the de facto sole supplier of software platforms, it's MS's job to shepherd the industry and drive standards. By and large they do a grim job of that, but MS did PnP which was revolutionary for PCs. They, more than anyone else, create the technical umbrella under which companies like Apple can pluck off-the-shelf components and pretend to be superior engineers. PCs work because of astronomical efforts by countless engineers. MS plays a big role in that.
Sure, MS was/is ruthless and unethical, but to say MS is a product of nothing more than incredible luck for decades is simply ignorant. MS was methodical and technically excellent. They made consistently the best development tools and developed viable offerings in every area that mattered. They destroyed their competition on the field even as they stabbed them in the back off of it. MS fought their way to the top in multiple simultaneous markets.
I was there in the 1980's. The PC was the platform of choice, despite some alternatives. Even the Mac preceded the disaster known as Windows 95, but IBM didn't take desktop PCs very seriously.
The IBM PC XT and PC AT were starters, but clones were everywhere and there was a thriving upgrade market from nearly the beginning from 3rd party vendors. Then the PS/2 line came out and was a monstrosity, particularly if you wanted to upgrade anything, which you pretty much couldn't - you had to buy a higher model PS/2. They were expensive, cranky and slow. Microsoft just kept selling MS-DOS versions, because IBM let them. Had IBM at any time told Microsoft they could no longer sell their competing operating system on the 8088 and x86 systems Microsoft would be but a memory these days.
Microsoft succeeded without having to build any hardware, only sell an operating system, incrementally upgrade it and collect more fees and pick up some office software to re-brand as their own.
Competing against IBM wasn't difficult and for Microsoft there were few other operating systems to contend with on PCs they defined the growth and rolled out the massively flawed Windows 95 to unparalleled success.
Now Apple and Google (Android) are sidelining Microsoft in the same way Microsoft sidelined IBM in the PC market.
There are people in the organization who understand where things are heading in the future, and have convinced the company leadership that they need to be on iOS and Android or get left behind. But the old school mentality dies hard, and Microsoft has painted itself into a corner by making Office one of the fundamental selling points for its tablets (which is flawed thinking anyway, and shows they still don't grasp the market). So this is what you end up with - a crappy office experience on iOS and Android that only serves to make the company look bad.
Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices. They haven't lost their way, they never had it to begin it. Apple and Google have carved out the smart phone and tablet markets and made them what they are - a war for supremacy. Microsoft are still playing silly games, like they have some dominant market position.
Considering the number of people on Android, they could get the impression that Office 365 is a poor hack and opt for something else. Stupid, short-sighted move by Microsoft.
It's a one-off of getting a garbage cheap charger and taking it in with ten zorkmids (they'll check off your i-doodad, so you can only do it once) and getting a first rate (well, Apple anyway) charger for a discount (from their usually high prices.)
Either these kinds of plants are ok or they are not. If not, ban them. If so, get the hell out of the way.
Not a matter of them being OK. Dismiss that right off.
I lived for years in a city where a battle was waged by the NIMBYs and a regional power company, with the state and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sitting on a fence like so many crows and cawing in some change to regulations every now and then. It nearly bankrupted the power company, submitting, resubmitting, re-resubmitting construction plans, plant wiring, cooling system designs and plumbing, environmental impact, etc, etc, etc. Effectively they would spend months building reactor housing and then have to tear it all out and start again. After years of this the writing was on the wall, it would never become a nuclear plant (at least, most likely) The plant became a gas generating plant, though most of the structure could be converted to nuclear if the present owners feel like going to battle again. The designs were fine, but courts and red tape can kill any project.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet Russia joke laughs at YOU!
Early on Gates focused his giving in ways which still somehow benefited Microsoft - i.e. education, but only for purchase of Windows PCs. If people in developing countries could benefit from technology he wanted to focus on Microsoft, even if it didn't run on any devices these people could support or use for very long.
As for space, that could mean a delay in Microsoft in space? Wull, unless Mr. Ballmer takes his fortune and decides Microsoft needs to carve out the CyberSpace in Space for their own...
"Hey, I just saw something float past the window ... it looked like an office chair."
For the record, Dow Chemical has a very good environmental record. Please site some specifics regarding their aleged pollution.
Mine boots Kubuntu in 4-ish seconds from grub menu to KDE desktop ready to go. It's quite impressive.
I shudder to think of the day when I become complacent and feel the 3-4 second boot times are 'slow'.
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
Absolutely! Would I lie to you, Mr. Joshua J. Fortenbras of 1104 W. Finster Ave, Quimby, NJ, who works at Asset Assure Investments (formerly Dewey, Cheatham & Howe). I trust you enjoyed your bacon and gerbil omlet, for breakfast this morning.
How about you fix what you can?
That's the fly-swatter approach - you hit the flies you can and ignore those you can't get to.
'Don't fix all security issues. Fix the security issues that matter, based on statistical relevance.'
That line reminds me of the old TQM which was run past us decades ago (and then promptly forgotten by 90% of the Franklin Planner-toting crowd), fix what really needs fixing first. I'm sure this bit of wisdom didn't require TQM to come along (you can probably find it in Hamlet if you know where to look), you fix your most grievous would first and worry about your bruises later, but we (in my department) felt rather put-upon when these TQM zombies came around and told us what a sea-change it would be for our practices and productivity when we embraced what we already knew.
Thats what Network Storage is for. SSDs are meant to be treated like a hot rod. Hot and fast, but burns out faster. Still worth it.
Hard to beat those SSD boot times. :)
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
I use SSD for my boot drive - Do the OS install, install some app suites (some of which rudely insist upon being installed on the "C:" drive) then ghost it to another SSD for the eventual day the SSD has crapped out sufficiently. All main storage is on a RAID 5, about 6TB in size with the spare drive on the shelf for when one of those 3TB HDD finally kick the bitbucket.
Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drives
Too small, trying to replace a 250GB SATA 6. Currently on Samsung 840 Pro and that's what is giving me 'data read errors' on boot, two independent systems. Might be they are just not compatible with the controller. Some scribblings indicate the timing of the SSD is throwing the the controller, and there's now way to adjust settings with Samsung's SSD tools.
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server . . .
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Samsung 840 Pro series
That's the bunny I'm having trouble with. When it works, it's great, but these 'data read errors' on boot are not a reassuring thing.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Well, qualified, they are are the knees of bees.
I have a Samsung which likes to give me read errors on boot up, after a try or two it gets its act together. Tried another one and the same effect. Samsung's tech support on this is nearly as good as staring at a wall of drying paint. (If anyone has a recommendation on the best, meaning most reliable 250GB or more SSD, please feel free to pass it along)
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server and SSD would be preferable, but if you're only needing to boot up an SSD is probably a bit more than you need, though the low capacity drives are approaching the price of low capacity mechanical memory. Soon I expect most new personal data devices (i.e. PC/Mac) will all by using SSDs.
This is quite the "Oops" on the part of MSFT which, even if this is nothing more than anti-MS FUD, can ill-afford this kind of bad press with a platform which has less than 4% of market share.
Probably the result of an office memo, which came down from the top, worded something like this: More animations, more inexplicable navigation, don't worry about security or adhering to the APIs, we can fix that later .. or not.
Once the patches stop and they all get infected, they'll be so busy sending junk to each other that they won't have time to compute anything.
once ... they all get infected?!? Um. Odds are they have been for years.
I still use Windows XP and Windows 2000. They were good operating systems and, from my perspective, Vista, 7, and 8 haven't brought anything to the table. Quite the opposite, in fact: I went full penguin after Vista came out. It was patently clear that Microsoft was going in a direction I didn't want to go.
Yes, but what of the botnets? Who will take care of them? Without care and feeding of ineffective security updates to make users believe they are safe from such things, the botnets will wither and die.
we can always check the oldest entry in his journal
Hey, I resemble that remark!
"Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices."
You were clearly not around in the 80's.
"Big businesses" did not standardize on MS-DOS, they standardized on IBM and specifically on PC-DOS. MS-DOS was not the same and PCs that couldn't run PC-DOS were failures. Ask AT&T and TI. IBM was the company, MS was a cling-on. They would have been snuffed out if they didn't earn their way elsewhere.
On the OS front, MS has to compete with several alternatives for the PC dekstop, Topview and GEM to name a couple. It created a fully virtual windows product, Windows/386, that was the first truly useful desktop 386-specific product. It created a worthy adversary (NT) to the 286-OS/2 disaster. It created a viable, portable OS that ran on RISC workstations while still running DOS apps. That countered the threat of a dominant Intel. It had to take on IBM while partnering with them and produce a truly excellent product in Windows NT while doing so. It established Win16 and Win32 as the dominant programming interfaces while IBM was pushing their own lock-in. It accomplished all this while Novell had an absolute stranglehold in networking. It sent Novell packing at the same time, not something that people might have predicted at the time. Netware was THE product, LAN Manager was a toy. How times changed.
Meanwhile, Word quickly became a technically excellent product and their office suite competed well with another huge competitor with dominant marketshare. That market wasn't gifted to MS, they earned it and put down Wordperfect in the process.
Finally, Microsoft's bread and butter comes from software for which the industry has never produced viable competition. That's not MS's fault. As the de facto sole supplier of software platforms, it's MS's job to shepherd the industry and drive standards. By and large they do a grim job of that, but MS did PnP which was revolutionary for PCs. They, more than anyone else, create the technical umbrella under which companies like Apple can pluck off-the-shelf components and pretend to be superior engineers. PCs work because of astronomical efforts by countless engineers. MS plays a big role in that.
Sure, MS was/is ruthless and unethical, but to say MS is a product of nothing more than incredible luck for decades is simply ignorant. MS was methodical and technically excellent. They made consistently the best development tools and developed viable offerings in every area that mattered. They destroyed their competition on the field even as they stabbed them in the back off of it. MS fought their way to the top in multiple simultaneous markets.
I was there in the 1980's. The PC was the platform of choice, despite some alternatives. Even the Mac preceded the disaster known as Windows 95, but IBM didn't take desktop PCs very seriously.
The IBM PC XT and PC AT were starters, but clones were everywhere and there was a thriving upgrade market from nearly the beginning from 3rd party vendors. Then the PS/2 line came out and was a monstrosity, particularly if you wanted to upgrade anything, which you pretty much couldn't - you had to buy a higher model PS/2. They were expensive, cranky and slow. Microsoft just kept selling MS-DOS versions, because IBM let them. Had IBM at any time told Microsoft they could no longer sell their competing operating system on the 8088 and x86 systems Microsoft would be but a memory these days.
Microsoft succeeded without having to build any hardware, only sell an operating system, incrementally upgrade it and collect more fees and pick up some office software to re-brand as their own.
Competing against IBM wasn't difficult and for Microsoft there were few other operating systems to contend with on PCs they defined the growth and rolled out the massively flawed Windows 95 to unparalleled success.
Now Apple and Google (Android) are sidelining Microsoft in the same way Microsoft sidelined IBM in the PC market.
"...including a classic Microsoft dialog box that offers a choice that makes no sense"
Clippy, is that you?
That .. would actually make sense to the 2 or 3 dozen people who actually miss Clippy.
There are people in the organization who understand where things are heading in the future, and have convinced the company leadership that they need to be on iOS and Android or get left behind. But the old school mentality dies hard, and Microsoft has painted itself into a corner by making Office one of the fundamental selling points for its tablets (which is flawed thinking anyway, and shows they still don't grasp the market). So this is what you end up with - a crappy office experience on iOS and Android that only serves to make the company look bad.
Once again this underscores the incredible luck Microsoft have been riding for decades, after big businesses opted to standardize micro computers on MS-DOS PCs. Microsoft never had to claw their way to the top, they just bundled, bought up and drove other competition to ruin by immoral business practices. They haven't lost their way, they never had it to begin it. Apple and Google have carved out the smart phone and tablet markets and made them what they are - a war for supremacy. Microsoft are still playing silly games, like they have some dominant market position.
Considering the number of people on Android, they could get the impression that Office 365 is a poor hack and opt for something else. Stupid, short-sighted move by Microsoft.
It's a one-off of getting a garbage cheap charger and taking it in with ten zorkmids (they'll check off your i-doodad, so you can only do it once) and getting a first rate (well, Apple anyway) charger for a discount (from their usually high prices.)
Either these kinds of plants are ok or they are not. If not, ban them. If so, get the hell out of the way.
Not a matter of them being OK. Dismiss that right off.
I lived for years in a city where a battle was waged by the NIMBYs and a regional power company, with the state and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sitting on a fence like so many crows and cawing in some change to regulations every now and then. It nearly bankrupted the power company, submitting, resubmitting, re-resubmitting construction plans, plant wiring, cooling system designs and plumbing, environmental impact, etc, etc, etc. Effectively they would spend months building reactor housing and then have to tear it all out and start again. After years of this the writing was on the wall, it would never become a nuclear plant (at least, most likely) The plant became a gas generating plant, though most of the structure could be converted to nuclear if the present owners feel like going to battle again. The designs were fine, but courts and red tape can kill any project.
I thought Google defined the data-center.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/0-4-Google.htm
They just re-defined it. Don't forget, Google began with a ton of commodity PC motherboards stuck in racks.
Now they have money, the redefined their needs.
Meanwhile ... we started with a broom closet and still need to get the water sprinklers removed :(
lowered into his grave by power cables.
industrial HVAC to maintain constant temperature and humidity in the burial chamber
And a couple LS-120's set about to log the event on tractor feed paper, right out of a box.
Why can't Iphone / ipad have usb port for charging and not high priced apple changes with iffy knock offs?
Jobs wanted it so. (not the iffy knock offs, he hated those)