I agree, after 9 years in IT, a few car accidents and *a lot* of poor personal behavior and I do have the standard "I sit all day" ailments.
I'd stress personal choice (I choose not to do back and neck exercise yet I know them all, as well as I choose to sit in a very poor manner for hours without getting up) and happenstance (a car accident seemed to set this all in motion) more than "it happens to everyone who sits all day".
He retired 4 years ago, so no real inflation to take into account. When I was growing up (20 years ago) he made about 35K and my mom was a waitress.
Now my wife doesn't have to work (she's free to do what makes her happy) if she doesn't want to and still I'm way better off than my parents were as children.
Again, I realize how good I have it. I won't ever be a millionaire, but then again I wouldn't be one if I got 10 hours of overtime per week either.
Not all IT jobs require massive (or any) amounts of overtime. I may work the occasional 50 hour week because of deadline concerns, sure, but I'll never be a permanent 50+ hour employee.
My dad worked in a union for 30 years (small steel finishing plant), topped out at about 50K per year. He had to work a lot for what he got paid (I worked there for a summer, sometimes it's real hard work, sometimes it's easy, but it's always long hours). I make twice as much as he did and I sit all day.
I realize how good I have it.
If you don't like your job, there really are plenty of jobs in IT that don't require overtime, just go find one. One place I worked at pretty much dictated 8:00-4:30 (or 8:30-5 but everyone did 8:00) every day and everyone leaves (medium insurance company IT dept). I didn't like getting there at 8am, but I sure did enjoy a 37.5 hour work week (after lunch).
It's still wrong. A bit is smaller than a byte, therefore there are more of them when you perform the conversion.
15MB/s = 120Mb/s
This is why the author of the article is indicating it's theoretically unlikely (he says completely unlikely, I'd say theoretical) to see it on a 100Mb network.
Well, they could take it and sell it, or take it to someone else and license them to sell it and not redistribute the source. His licenses do not permit that.
My Vista laptop mentioned above (1.7Ghz Pentium M) originally had 1GB of RAM and XP on it. The performance was horrendous. The 5400 RPM HDD would thrash constantly and I couldn't hardly do anything on it. This is from a fresh install with all my tools on it.
I put Vista on it, tossed a $20 1GB thumb drive in it and it asked me if I wanted to speed up my system. I did and Vista easily outperformed XP. The biggest killer to my performance was Visual Studio (which is a horrible memory hog and terribly underefficient); in XP I had to restart it every few hours and in Vista I could leave it running for days without issue.
Right, all those complaints have nothing to do with Vista, it's all with the OEM and Microsoft isn't allowed to dictate what an OEM does or does not put on the PC any more.
Without the OEM junk, there's really nothing to tun in Vista. One GB of RAM and it works real well. If you want shiny, throw in an $80 video card.
Actually 1GB is more than sufficient. A clean install of Vista without all the OEM junk performs just as well as XP did.
Any small business that would switch any OS on 6+ year old machines is asking for trouble, regardless of when it happened. I'm not going to put 2000 on my 486; it just wasn't built for that.
And for reference, I'm helping my wife's small business update their computers tomorrow. They're all on XP with 512MB RAM running numerous accounting packages. For years they've been upset that their computers are junk. I'm just popping in 1GB RAM and giving them a less resource-intensive virus scanning package. So believe it or not, 512MB RAM really isn't very good on XP either. Open 3 or more programs and the HDD will start to thrash with paging.
Vista capable hardware isn't expensive and I'm baffled why people keep saying this.
Machines I have that have Vista on them:
4+ year old gaming rig: Athlon 2Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, sound blaster, ATI Radeon 9600, small hard drive. Today's cost is about $400 for a whole unit from online retailers. 3 year old work laptop (Dell Latitude): Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 2GB RAM, bad video, bad sound, small and slow hard drive. Cost $1800 new (or thereabouts). 0 year old wife's PC: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, on-board sound, old Nvidia 7950, small hard drive. Cost $600 from NewEgg and I could have gone with a $80 video card instead of reusing an old 7950 I had. 0 year old business PC from Dell: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, low-quality dedicated Radeon video card, big hard drive. Cost a bit over $700.
Every one of those machines is "affordable". Two are from Dell. All machines except the laptop run every feature of Windows Vista Ultimate. The only feature the laptop doesn't have is Aero and I have yet to actually/use/ Aero on any of the other machines.
That said, the article has nothing to do with the hardware cost of running Vista. It mentions hardware once only in terms of the size of IMAGES needed to install Vista in a business setting. The other part has to do with training users and testing that existing applications work.
My local library (a twelve-block walk; what wonderful city do YOU inhabit?) doesn't give the studio a cut when I borrow a DVD. Does yours? No they buy a different license than the standard consumer license. Just like Blockbuster doens't pay $20 for the movies it rents to people, neither does the library.
Most newer routers come with CDs to let the lay people set up their routers. The CD walks them through setting up their wireless router and the recent ones inform people to pick a "security key" and it sets up the wireless security for them (I found this out because I was amazed at finding out my mom had WEP enabled, even though she had no idea what it was - and regardless of how bad WEP is, for any random house in any random neighborhood it's good enough).
So if you would RTFM and/or UTFCD the router came with, it would tell you to set up security:)
It only works with 13.56Mhz tags and only a not very widely used air protocol. This device requires intimate knowledge of the air protocol used to communicate with the tag. It must know exactly which frequencies the tag will communicate back on in order to function.
The health care market is using 13.56Mhz tags, but they're not using the air protocol her device uses, so it won't know where to do the jamming. The consumer goods market isn't currently tagging on a per-item basis, but when they do get there it'll be 900Mhz tags using the EPC Gen2 standard (at least in the US), which does not use such a predictable frequency hopping mechanism. Her device won't be able to selectively jam only certain frequencies and will likely have to be even more noisy (jam the whole 900Mhz range? doubtful).
This could be an overreaction or an appropriate reaction, we don't know the content of the essay. Since it contained no overt threats we don't currently have any way of knowing if this was a knee-jerk reaction or not.
Since you brought up Columbine, I felt I'd share what happened to a bunch of my friends. They were 2 years younger than me and all wore trench coats (because that was geek-cool back then). None of them were "outcasts", but they did all hang out only with themselves and not with the "popular" kids (jocks and the like). After Columbine, the principals (we had 2) rounded them all up and did very severe interviews of them one by one.
Mind you that these kids were all in band, were friends with the kids in band (150+ people), have never had a single problem in school (no suspensions, no detentions, were just quiet and did their homework). The principals interview of these kids were very harsh and very out in the open to where everyone knew what the round-up was for and who was getting targetted.
All emergency vehicle drivers are required by their training to slow down at a red light. They are required to slow down to a very slow rate of speed (15-25), make sure it is safe to go through, then blow through it.
Only the most anal actually do it, but they're required to nonetheless. My best friend's dad is incredibly anal and I felt very safe when I got stuck in the car with him travelling at high rates of speeds on an emergency call (bad car wreck). He definitely lost time at lights, but he didn't accidentally kill anyone.
I've seen just as many CS grads with no clue of the fundamentals as self-taught hackers who picked up the theory through an intense desire to learn what they were doing. I can't even begin to tell you the number of CS grads I've worked with who seriously make me wonder if they ever went to a CS class (not to mention all the students in my classes who were in it "for the money" and had no clue what they were doing and would spend days on an hour long class assignment).
I agree, however, that those who understand the fundamentals and know what's going on behind the covers is usually what separates the bad or mediocre programmers from the great ones.
All the big companies I've worked at (8000+ employees) the IT staff had been very adamant about non-admin users. These were all insurance companies that got hit by numerous worms (everyone downloads that "cute flash game" and gets it).
The standard business users only ever used terminal or web apps anyway, so restricting them wasn't terribly difficult. They complained but IT relented, except for the upper management types. The upper management types then got tons of viruses so IT removed their admin privileges as well.
As someone else here mentioned, Visual Studio required admin rights (it doesn't really, but working with IIS and the like does) so they let the developer groups who needed it run as admins. Funny how we never got viruses.
I have Vista on the following laptop and it outperforms my XP install:
Pentium M 1.7Ghz 1GB RAM Integrated 32MB video card 5400RPM 80GB HDD
This machine (3 years old) blows for development work (Visual Studio 2005 kills it with paging; Visual Studio 2003 sucked a bit and InstallShield always took a couple minutes to load). I put Vista on, threw in an old thumb drive to use as spare cache, and it's outperforming my XP install by far.
The Windows Vista upgrade advisor also lists my machine as Vista Capable and it is quite capable. I just don't get Aero Glass and I wouldn't dare trying to run Media Center on such a bad video card. Without the thumb drive as cache it performs just as poorly as it did in XP.
I've actually gotten a couple other developers to make that switch until our new laptops come in (this time we spec'ed out the machines so IT doesn't give us more crap).
Yep, it's still in a limited roll-out phase. My account was enabled for it a week or two ago and another here at my office still says "available by June 2007".
And furthermore, while the Office XML format may not be proprietary due to it being published to a standards body, it's not something one should expect anyone other than Microsoft to implement.
Microsoft published it as a standard in response to external pressures to shut some critics up. There are things in that standard that are nowhere near spelled out how to implement (for instance I think there's a Word95 compatibility flag but no definition of what changes when it's on other than "renders in Word95 compatibility mode").
That said, the number of documents that will have these weird-ass flags and unusual behavior will be few and far between (I'm pretty sure most are to emulate old behavior) and just creating a new document in Word probably won't use them.
The practical use in this case is a business need. Microsoft has customers saying "we want the option to leave you" and competitors saying "hey we can convert their documents! Move to OpenOffice!". The customer might not actually want to leave Microsoft, but doesn't want to be forced to stick with them forever so they want that option. Microsoft made the right move and sponsored a way to convert their document format to ODF to make customers believe they can move away from Office if necessary.
That's more the party line of XML rather than the real world of XML. While translating XML from one format to another may be trivial in some cases, translating the content the XML contains (in this case the content is document formatting) may be incredibly difficult when the two XML formats are incredibly different (which they are, considering the 6000 page doc versus the 700 page doc).
A coworker of mine had the DVD the week before 24 aired. His girlfriend works at Blockbuster and they had gotten their shipment of the DVDs three or four days before it aired. The Blockbuster manager allows employees to "rent" anything before it goes on shelves so she got them and he watched them that weekend.
All editions/versions of Vista are on the same DVD/CDs for a given processor architecture.
That actually brings up an interesting point (I think). If I purchase Vista (retail box) for x86, throw that computer away and get an x64 and install Vista (which is allowed by licensing now) do I have to go and buy another copy? I assume that the retail box only comes with either x64 or x86, but not both.
Obviously I could still install x86 on my Core 2/AMD 64, but I probably wouldn't want to (if driver support was available).
I read this a short while ago somewhere on the internet and now can't find it so can't provide proof, but someone was complaining that a x64 bit ISO for a distro didn't come with the source whereas the x86 did.
Not sure if some distros are having issues like that. According to this (what I think is a legitimate mirror) download Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop x86 is actually bigger than x64 (by a few MB): http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu/edgy/
Slashdot Mirror
Zing
I agree, after 9 years in IT, a few car accidents and *a lot* of poor personal behavior and I do have the standard "I sit all day" ailments.
I'd stress personal choice (I choose not to do back and neck exercise yet I know them all, as well as I choose to sit in a very poor manner for hours without getting up) and happenstance (a car accident seemed to set this all in motion) more than "it happens to everyone who sits all day".
He retired 4 years ago, so no real inflation to take into account. When I was growing up (20 years ago) he made about 35K and my mom was a waitress.
Now my wife doesn't have to work (she's free to do what makes her happy) if she doesn't want to and still I'm way better off than my parents were as children.
Again, I realize how good I have it. I won't ever be a millionaire, but then again I wouldn't be one if I got 10 hours of overtime per week either.
Not all IT jobs require massive (or any) amounts of overtime. I may work the occasional 50 hour week because of deadline concerns, sure, but I'll never be a permanent 50+ hour employee.
My dad worked in a union for 30 years (small steel finishing plant), topped out at about 50K per year. He had to work a lot for what he got paid (I worked there for a summer, sometimes it's real hard work, sometimes it's easy, but it's always long hours). I make twice as much as he did and I sit all day.
I realize how good I have it.
If you don't like your job, there really are plenty of jobs in IT that don't require overtime, just go find one. One place I worked at pretty much dictated 8:00-4:30 (or 8:30-5 but everyone did 8:00) every day and everyone leaves (medium insurance company IT dept). I didn't like getting there at 8am, but I sure did enjoy a 37.5 hour work week (after lunch).
It's still wrong. A bit is smaller than a byte, therefore there are more of them when you perform the conversion.
15MB/s = 120Mb/s
This is why the author of the article is indicating it's theoretically unlikely (he says completely unlikely, I'd say theoretical) to see it on a 100Mb network.
Well, they could take it and sell it, or take it to someone else and license them to sell it and not redistribute the source. His licenses do not permit that.
My Vista laptop mentioned above (1.7Ghz Pentium M) originally had 1GB of RAM and XP on it. The performance was horrendous. The 5400 RPM HDD would thrash constantly and I couldn't hardly do anything on it. This is from a fresh install with all my tools on it.
I put Vista on it, tossed a $20 1GB thumb drive in it and it asked me if I wanted to speed up my system. I did and Vista easily outperformed XP. The biggest killer to my performance was Visual Studio (which is a horrible memory hog and terribly underefficient); in XP I had to restart it every few hours and in Vista I could leave it running for days without issue.
Right, all those complaints have nothing to do with Vista, it's all with the OEM and Microsoft isn't allowed to dictate what an OEM does or does not put on the PC any more.
Without the OEM junk, there's really nothing to tun in Vista. One GB of RAM and it works real well. If you want shiny, throw in an $80 video card.
Actually 1GB is more than sufficient. A clean install of Vista without all the OEM junk performs just as well as XP did.
Any small business that would switch any OS on 6+ year old machines is asking for trouble, regardless of when it happened. I'm not going to put 2000 on my 486; it just wasn't built for that.
And for reference, I'm helping my wife's small business update their computers tomorrow. They're all on XP with 512MB RAM running numerous accounting packages. For years they've been upset that their computers are junk. I'm just popping in 1GB RAM and giving them a less resource-intensive virus scanning package. So believe it or not, 512MB RAM really isn't very good on XP either. Open 3 or more programs and the HDD will start to thrash with paging.
Vista capable hardware isn't expensive and I'm baffled why people keep saying this.
/use/ Aero on any of the other machines.
Machines I have that have Vista on them:
4+ year old gaming rig: Athlon 2Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, sound blaster, ATI Radeon 9600, small hard drive. Today's cost is about $400 for a whole unit from online retailers.
3 year old work laptop (Dell Latitude): Pentium M 1.7Ghz, 2GB RAM, bad video, bad sound, small and slow hard drive. Cost $1800 new (or thereabouts).
0 year old wife's PC: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, on-board sound, old Nvidia 7950, small hard drive. Cost $600 from NewEgg and I could have gone with a $80 video card instead of reusing an old 7950 I had.
0 year old business PC from Dell: Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, low-quality dedicated Radeon video card, big hard drive. Cost a bit over $700.
Every one of those machines is "affordable". Two are from Dell. All machines except the laptop run every feature of Windows Vista Ultimate. The only feature the laptop doesn't have is Aero and I have yet to actually
That said, the article has nothing to do with the hardware cost of running Vista. It mentions hardware once only in terms of the size of IMAGES needed to install Vista in a business setting. The other part has to do with training users and testing that existing applications work.
Most newer routers come with CDs to let the lay people set up their routers. The CD walks them through setting up their wireless router and the recent ones inform people to pick a "security key" and it sets up the wireless security for them (I found this out because I was amazed at finding out my mom had WEP enabled, even though she had no idea what it was - and regardless of how bad WEP is, for any random house in any random neighborhood it's good enough).
:)
So if you would RTFM and/or UTFCD the router came with, it would tell you to set up security
Not quite.
It only works with 13.56Mhz tags and only a not very widely used air protocol. This device requires intimate knowledge of the air protocol used to communicate with the tag. It must know exactly which frequencies the tag will communicate back on in order to function.
The health care market is using 13.56Mhz tags, but they're not using the air protocol her device uses, so it won't know where to do the jamming. The consumer goods market isn't currently tagging on a per-item basis, but when they do get there it'll be 900Mhz tags using the EPC Gen2 standard (at least in the US), which does not use such a predictable frequency hopping mechanism. Her device won't be able to selectively jam only certain frequencies and will likely have to be even more noisy (jam the whole 900Mhz range? doubtful).
This could be an overreaction or an appropriate reaction, we don't know the content of the essay. Since it contained no overt threats we don't currently have any way of knowing if this was a knee-jerk reaction or not.
Since you brought up Columbine, I felt I'd share what happened to a bunch of my friends. They were 2 years younger than me and all wore trench coats (because that was geek-cool back then). None of them were "outcasts", but they did all hang out only with themselves and not with the "popular" kids (jocks and the like). After Columbine, the principals (we had 2) rounded them all up and did very severe interviews of them one by one.
Mind you that these kids were all in band, were friends with the kids in band (150+ people), have never had a single problem in school (no suspensions, no detentions, were just quiet and did their homework). The principals interview of these kids were very harsh and very out in the open to where everyone knew what the round-up was for and who was getting targetted.
All emergency vehicle drivers are required by their training to slow down at a red light. They are required to slow down to a very slow rate of speed (15-25), make sure it is safe to go through, then blow through it.
Only the most anal actually do it, but they're required to nonetheless. My best friend's dad is incredibly anal and I felt very safe when I got stuck in the car with him travelling at high rates of speeds on an emergency call (bad car wreck). He definitely lost time at lights, but he didn't accidentally kill anyone.
I've seen just as many CS grads with no clue of the fundamentals as self-taught hackers who picked up the theory through an intense desire to learn what they were doing. I can't even begin to tell you the number of CS grads I've worked with who seriously make me wonder if they ever went to a CS class (not to mention all the students in my classes who were in it "for the money" and had no clue what they were doing and would spend days on an hour long class assignment).
I agree, however, that those who understand the fundamentals and know what's going on behind the covers is usually what separates the bad or mediocre programmers from the great ones.
All the big companies I've worked at (8000+ employees) the IT staff had been very adamant about non-admin users. These were all insurance companies that got hit by numerous worms (everyone downloads that "cute flash game" and gets it).
The standard business users only ever used terminal or web apps anyway, so restricting them wasn't terribly difficult. They complained but IT relented, except for the upper management types. The upper management types then got tons of viruses so IT removed their admin privileges as well.
As someone else here mentioned, Visual Studio required admin rights (it doesn't really, but working with IIS and the like does) so they let the developer groups who needed it run as admins. Funny how we never got viruses.
I have Vista on the following laptop and it outperforms my XP install:
Pentium M 1.7Ghz
1GB RAM
Integrated 32MB video card
5400RPM 80GB HDD
This machine (3 years old) blows for development work (Visual Studio 2005 kills it with paging; Visual Studio 2003 sucked a bit and InstallShield always took a couple minutes to load). I put Vista on, threw in an old thumb drive to use as spare cache, and it's outperforming my XP install by far.
The Windows Vista upgrade advisor also lists my machine as Vista Capable and it is quite capable. I just don't get Aero Glass and I wouldn't dare trying to run Media Center on such a bad video card. Without the thumb drive as cache it performs just as poorly as it did in XP.
I've actually gotten a couple other developers to make that switch until our new laptops come in (this time we spec'ed out the machines so IT doesn't give us more crap).
Yep, it's still in a limited roll-out phase. My account was enabled for it a week or two ago and another here at my office still says "available by June 2007".
And furthermore, while the Office XML format may not be proprietary due to it being published to a standards body, it's not something one should expect anyone other than Microsoft to implement.
Microsoft published it as a standard in response to external pressures to shut some critics up. There are things in that standard that are nowhere near spelled out how to implement (for instance I think there's a Word95 compatibility flag but no definition of what changes when it's on other than "renders in Word95 compatibility mode").
That said, the number of documents that will have these weird-ass flags and unusual behavior will be few and far between (I'm pretty sure most are to emulate old behavior) and just creating a new document in Word probably won't use them.
The practical use in this case is a business need. Microsoft has customers saying "we want the option to leave you" and competitors saying "hey we can convert their documents! Move to OpenOffice!". The customer might not actually want to leave Microsoft, but doesn't want to be forced to stick with them forever so they want that option. Microsoft made the right move and sponsored a way to convert their document format to ODF to make customers believe they can move away from Office if necessary.
That's more the party line of XML rather than the real world of XML. While translating XML from one format to another may be trivial in some cases, translating the content the XML contains (in this case the content is document formatting) may be incredibly difficult when the two XML formats are incredibly different (which they are, considering the 6000 page doc versus the 700 page doc).
A coworker of mine had the DVD the week before 24 aired. His girlfriend works at Blockbuster and they had gotten their shipment of the DVDs three or four days before it aired. The Blockbuster manager allows employees to "rent" anything before it goes on shelves so she got them and he watched them that weekend.
All editions/versions of Vista are on the same DVD/CDs for a given processor architecture.
That actually brings up an interesting point (I think). If I purchase Vista (retail box) for x86, throw that computer away and get an x64 and install Vista (which is allowed by licensing now) do I have to go and buy another copy? I assume that the retail box only comes with either x64 or x86, but not both.
Obviously I could still install x86 on my Core 2/AMD 64, but I probably wouldn't want to (if driver support was available).
I read this a short while ago somewhere on the internet and now can't find it so can't provide proof, but someone was complaining that a x64 bit ISO for a distro didn't come with the source whereas the x86 did.
Not sure if some distros are having issues like that. According to this (what I think is a legitimate mirror) download Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop x86 is actually bigger than x64 (by a few MB):
http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu/edgy/