" reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft â" casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold."
While there may be doubt over how many have actually been sold, what this datapoint highlights is not how many copies are being sold but rather how many are being sold but not used.
For a significant number of people Windows is a hidden cost in the total price of buying a computer. They aren't used to having to pay for their OS directly and suddenly having to do so may prove to be a psychological barrier to a lot of them. Just something to consider.
Note that Django 1.0 is due this fall and it looks to be actually on track. I used Zope for personal and freelance projects for about 9 years and professionally for about 2. I migrated my site and the majority of the content over in about a week, and that included the process of learning django.
I will note that one of the things I liked about Zope was the admin interface, which was clunky and minimal but a far sight better than what most other app servers had at the time (late 90's/early 00's). Django's is immensely better.
I've also Read The Fine Book reviewed here and concur with the reviewer. This book is a great introduction to a useful tool.
I agree that crap math is the key to this story. If there are 1,000,000*.ru sites and 6.8% are hostile, that's almost 70000 sites, if there are 25,000.hk sites and 19% are hostile that's (lemme get my slide rule real quick) 4,750 sites. Clearly the.ru TLD is more likely to cause troubles.
Note I'm pulling all numbers out of thin air for demonstration purposes, I've no idea if these are the actual numbers but it's safe to assume that McAfee spent less than half the time and effort on their report than I did in writing this comment.
Jimmy Carter was on the Skeptics Guide podcast not long ago and they brought up the UFO incident, as he is often cited by the conspiracy theorists as 'proof' that aliens are among us and the government is covering it up. No, I can't explain their logic. Carter was unaware that he'd been coopted in this manner and quite forcefully noted that what he saw was indeed a UFO because he couldn't identify what it was, making it unidentified. He was at the same time quite sure that it was likely not an alien craft of any sort. It's one of the few times I've heard someone make the point that because you don't know what it is, then by definition it's an unidentified flying object. A conclusion that has no relation whatsoever to the *nature* of the object (e.g. alien, human).
I used linux as my full time desktop both at work and at home for 4 years. And I enjoyed it mostly. I was able to do most of what I wanted to. But multimedia production (video editing, multitrack music production) was a huge pain in the ass to do and from what I've seen hasn't improved much.
Thing is, back when I used linux full time (99-2003) I didn't own a house. I didn't have kids. I enjoyed building my own computers and futzing around with configuration and getting packages to build for hours or days at a time. Now I've got kids, a house to maintain, and little or no free time.
If I have to spend a half hour on administration a month on my computer then I simply won't even turn it on, it's not worth the hassle. There's way more important things I can be doing. I can either spend the next two hours trying to figure out why an upgrade to a kde or gnome core library broke Totem or I can play with my kids. Easy decision to make.
I switched to OS X for all my multimedia production needs in 2002, and shut down my linux box permanently in 2003 as the birth of my first child approached. It does everything I wanted linux to do and I don't have to *do* anything to keep it running. My priorities are obviously going to be different from that of a lot of linux fans, but those fans need to realize that most non-fans will have no interest in linux on the desktop until it becomes less of a pain to use than Windows is.
Bingo. I work in a fairly average large government agency. We adopted XP SP2 last year as the powers that be were finally satisfied that it was as stable and secure as the Win2K they were replacing on all the machines. The projected target for installing Vista on some test machines is 2011. Maybe.
The point being that there are different types of music consumers. Some of us are interested in depth and breadth of an artists and will want to hear the whole album and the b-sides and etc. Others are only interested in the hit single. Others are somewhere between the two. Digital delivery allows the labels to secure the money of *all* of them, whereas physical delivery restricts them to only offering the most profitable format(s) to the exclusion of the outliers.
If twitter is as big a 'failure' as podcasting then they'll be quite happy I'm sure. Starts with a false premise, adds in zero facts other than the names of the founders, and the only real 'reason' they call it a future failure is because IM clients can do much of the same thing. Newsflash: you can integrate twitter with your IM. And anyone who only uses one IM protocol is living in the dark ages.
Oh, it's from Industry Standard. My criticism was redundant then.
You had credibility right up to "Gateway". In terms of the quality of hardware used you'd have to stick with HP, IBM/Lenovo, or Sony to get the same quality of parts (let alone industrial design, which isn't without it's value).
Apple isn't the answer in all situations and there are plenty of very large gaps in their product line, but comparing them to one of the lowest quality vendors doesn't do your argument any good.
I'm on a government project. None of the software we need to use is approved. IDE, debugger, sql optimizer, photoshop, etc etc. The network administrators aren't allowed to have PuTTY, nmap, etc. If the branch chief's secretary doesn't need it, they don't see why we would.
I just called to get one of these scam voicemail services removed from my account (interesting: if you called the number the voicemail was supposedly active for, it would ring 15 times then go to fax tone). The rep from the VM company indicated that pretty much anyone can sign up pretty much anyone else for this voicemail service on some web page somewhere and the company doesn't care because they can bill it.
The rep from ATT was pretty bothered by my explanation of what happened and opined that there was no way it should be legal and that it was bad business for ATT to even bill for this crap. Then he spent 20 minutes going over every service we have on our account and giving me the lowest price available for the ones we wanted to keep and eliminating the rest. Cut my bill by about 30%.
I'd have to say "I got bored" is a bullshit excuse. He was trying to minimize the degree of culpability that he was admitting to. I've seen a lot of porn in my day and I've never once been tempted to look at something that I didn't have at least some interest (be it child porn, animal porn, or relatively speaking 'tamer' stuff like furries or bdsm or whatever). And being familiar with both usenet and Google I'm well aware that I could view pictures featuring any of those topics or hundreds of others at a moments notice. Being bored is simply not enough reason unless you're already interested in the topic.
Actually I think it was Rob Enderle (of all people) on NPR this morning pointing out that Google has their ad network all over the web, whereas the Yahoo/MSFT portal model requires users to go to them. It's a merging of dinosaurs who can't adapt without starting over from scratch. Combined they barely have 20% of the market to google's 60%.
Actually, they already did. At CES there was announcement (it was carried by AP, but I'm too lazy to look for it) declaring that the major porn companies wouldn't be producing any more HD-DVD titles, citing a sales ratio of 4:1 in favor of BlueRay.
Personally I think this had way more impact than Warner.
Oh I don't know, I've been through 4 different positions in 7 years. All on the same project. Only one of those position changes was a promotion, the others were all cases of the needs of the project changing and me being willing and able to do what was needed to help the project succeed (for sufficiently loose definitions of success).
The people I work with are entirely unaware that email can be faked. If it's on the computer screen, it MUST be true. They also believe anything they read on the internet.
I do configuration management. For years (and possibly decades before I ever came on the scene) it was pretty routine for code to be written, 'tested', and put in production with no paper trail of any sort. We would constantly be pounded on by various business groups for broken code making it to production and the defense of "Well, you told us it passed your test and was OK for production" was worthless because they'd simply deny it.
Maybe you're just lucky and haven't worked in a business environment where CYA is more important than anything else. I've been thrown under the bus, and seen other IT pros thrown enough that I don't trust any other business group (including other IT groups, like Support and DB) at all and won't do anything if it's not in writing.
Actually the market generally reacts very favorably to layoffs. Now repeated rounds of layoffs are a sign of something seriously wrong, and the one time charge to this years earnings might hurt a bit, but head to any stock brokerage firm when a Fortune 500 announces they're laying off 10,000 people and you'll see people breaking out champagne. I worked at a brokerage for 5 years, every time big layoffs were announced the brokers celebrated and the investors saw it as a 'forward thinking move to lower long term costs' and rewarded the share priced with increased purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
"i'm just typing out my ass "
That's a really disturbing visual. Thanks.
" reportedly shipping PCs with a Vista Business license but with Windows XP pre-loaded in the majority of business computers sold since the June 30 Windows XP execution date established by Microsoft â" casting a lot of doubt over how many copies of Vista have actually been sold."
While there may be doubt over how many have actually been sold, what this datapoint highlights is not how many copies are being sold but rather how many are being sold but not used.
For a significant number of people Windows is a hidden cost in the total price of buying a computer. They aren't used to having to pay for their OS directly and suddenly having to do so may prove to be a psychological barrier to a lot of them. Just something to consider.
Thanks for the clarification. And ++ on the sig :)
Note that Django 1.0 is due this fall and it looks to be actually on track. I used Zope for personal and freelance projects for about 9 years and professionally for about 2. I migrated my site and the majority of the content over in about a week, and that included the process of learning django.
I will note that one of the things I liked about Zope was the admin interface, which was clunky and minimal but a far sight better than what most other app servers had at the time (late 90's/early 00's). Django's is immensely better.
I've also Read The Fine Book reviewed here and concur with the reviewer. This book is a great introduction to a useful tool.
I agree that crap math is the key to this story. If there are 1,000,000* .ru sites and 6.8% are hostile, that's almost 70000 sites, if there are 25,000 .hk sites and 19% are hostile that's (lemme get my slide rule real quick) 4,750 sites. Clearly the .ru TLD is more likely to cause troubles.
Note I'm pulling all numbers out of thin air for demonstration purposes, I've no idea if these are the actual numbers but it's safe to assume that McAfee spent less than half the time and effort on their report than I did in writing this comment.
I hate seeing comments like this when I don't have mod points. ++ to you sir, said better than I would have.
Jimmy Carter was on the Skeptics Guide podcast not long ago and they brought up the UFO incident, as he is often cited by the conspiracy theorists as 'proof' that aliens are among us and the government is covering it up. No, I can't explain their logic. Carter was unaware that he'd been coopted in this manner and quite forcefully noted that what he saw was indeed a UFO because he couldn't identify what it was, making it unidentified. He was at the same time quite sure that it was likely not an alien craft of any sort. It's one of the few times I've heard someone make the point that because you don't know what it is, then by definition it's an unidentified flying object. A conclusion that has no relation whatsoever to the *nature* of the object (e.g. alien, human).
That's actually a common interface on non-Windows systems. Given that GIMP was originally created on and for UNIX-y systems it's pretty logical.
I used linux as my full time desktop both at work and at home for 4 years. And I enjoyed it mostly. I was able to do most of what I wanted to. But multimedia production (video editing, multitrack music production) was a huge pain in the ass to do and from what I've seen hasn't improved much.
Thing is, back when I used linux full time (99-2003) I didn't own a house. I didn't have kids. I enjoyed building my own computers and futzing around with configuration and getting packages to build for hours or days at a time. Now I've got kids, a house to maintain, and little or no free time.
If I have to spend a half hour on administration a month on my computer then I simply won't even turn it on, it's not worth the hassle. There's way more important things I can be doing. I can either spend the next two hours trying to figure out why an upgrade to a kde or gnome core library broke Totem or I can play with my kids. Easy decision to make.
I switched to OS X for all my multimedia production needs in 2002, and shut down my linux box permanently in 2003 as the birth of my first child approached. It does everything I wanted linux to do and I don't have to *do* anything to keep it running. My priorities are obviously going to be different from that of a lot of linux fans, but those fans need to realize that most non-fans will have no interest in linux on the desktop until it becomes less of a pain to use than Windows is.
Bingo. I work in a fairly average large government agency. We adopted XP SP2 last year as the powers that be were finally satisfied that it was as stable and secure as the Win2K they were replacing on all the machines. The projected target for installing Vista on some test machines is 2011. Maybe.
The point being that there are different types of music consumers. Some of us are interested in depth and breadth of an artists and will want to hear the whole album and the b-sides and etc. Others are only interested in the hit single. Others are somewhere between the two. Digital delivery allows the labels to secure the money of *all* of them, whereas physical delivery restricts them to only offering the most profitable format(s) to the exclusion of the outliers.
http://indiekazoo.com/. Take control of your own music sales.
disclaimer: the creator of the site is a friend of mine. It's still an awesome service.
If twitter is as big a 'failure' as podcasting then they'll be quite happy I'm sure. Starts with a false premise, adds in zero facts other than the names of the founders, and the only real 'reason' they call it a future failure is because IM clients can do much of the same thing. Newsflash: you can integrate twitter with your IM. And anyone who only uses one IM protocol is living in the dark ages.
Oh, it's from Industry Standard. My criticism was redundant then.
You had credibility right up to "Gateway". In terms of the quality of hardware used you'd have to stick with HP, IBM/Lenovo, or Sony to get the same quality of parts (let alone industrial design, which isn't without it's value).
Apple isn't the answer in all situations and there are plenty of very large gaps in their product line, but comparing them to one of the lowest quality vendors doesn't do your argument any good.
I'm on a government project. None of the software we need to use is approved. IDE, debugger, sql optimizer, photoshop, etc etc. The network administrators aren't allowed to have PuTTY, nmap, etc. If the branch chief's secretary doesn't need it, they don't see why we would.
I just called to get one of these scam voicemail services removed from my account (interesting: if you called the number the voicemail was supposedly active for, it would ring 15 times then go to fax tone). The rep from the VM company indicated that pretty much anyone can sign up pretty much anyone else for this voicemail service on some web page somewhere and the company doesn't care because they can bill it.
The rep from ATT was pretty bothered by my explanation of what happened and opined that there was no way it should be legal and that it was bad business for ATT to even bill for this crap. Then he spent 20 minutes going over every service we have on our account and giving me the lowest price available for the ones we wanted to keep and eliminating the rest. Cut my bill by about 30%.
I'd have to say "I got bored" is a bullshit excuse. He was trying to minimize the degree of culpability that he was admitting to. I've seen a lot of porn in my day and I've never once been tempted to look at something that I didn't have at least some interest (be it child porn, animal porn, or relatively speaking 'tamer' stuff like furries or bdsm or whatever). And being familiar with both usenet and Google I'm well aware that I could view pictures featuring any of those topics or hundreds of others at a moments notice. Being bored is simply not enough reason unless you're already interested in the topic.
Actually I think it was Rob Enderle (of all people) on NPR this morning pointing out that Google has their ad network all over the web, whereas the Yahoo/MSFT portal model requires users to go to them. It's a merging of dinosaurs who can't adapt without starting over from scratch. Combined they barely have 20% of the market to google's 60%.
Actually, they already did. At CES there was announcement (it was carried by AP, but I'm too lazy to look for it) declaring that the major porn companies wouldn't be producing any more HD-DVD titles, citing a sales ratio of 4:1 in favor of BlueRay.
Personally I think this had way more impact than Warner.
Oh I don't know, I've been through 4 different positions in 7 years. All on the same project. Only one of those position changes was a promotion, the others were all cases of the needs of the project changing and me being willing and able to do what was needed to help the project succeed (for sufficiently loose definitions of success).
Microsoft was never 'cool'.
The people I work with are entirely unaware that email can be faked. If it's on the computer screen, it MUST be true. They also believe anything they read on the internet.
I do configuration management. For years (and possibly decades before I ever came on the scene) it was pretty routine for code to be written, 'tested', and put in production with no paper trail of any sort. We would constantly be pounded on by various business groups for broken code making it to production and the defense of "Well, you told us it passed your test and was OK for production" was worthless because they'd simply deny it.
Maybe you're just lucky and haven't worked in a business environment where CYA is more important than anything else. I've been thrown under the bus, and seen other IT pros thrown enough that I don't trust any other business group (including other IT groups, like Support and DB) at all and won't do anything if it's not in writing.
Actually the market generally reacts very favorably to layoffs. Now repeated rounds of layoffs are a sign of something seriously wrong, and the one time charge to this years earnings might hurt a bit, but head to any stock brokerage firm when a Fortune 500 announces they're laying off 10,000 people and you'll see people breaking out champagne. I worked at a brokerage for 5 years, every time big layoffs were announced the brokers celebrated and the investors saw it as a 'forward thinking move to lower long term costs' and rewarded the share priced with increased purchases.