Throttled connection speed now and then also comes up in Germany. Usually, it is a desperate measure by some provider that promised more than they can afford. Hint: with cheap, unlimited access you will have some customers who create more traffic than their monthly fee pays for.
Now I have little sympathy for those providers, as the problem is well known and they should simply sell something like 50 GByte/month instead, with throttling to dial-up speed when you exceed the 50 GByte. That would be plenty for most people, but cut off really excessive use. And if you have misplanned your usage, you can still check email, albeit slowly.
Halliburton? I have not followed this one in detail, but they seem to have cheated the US government (and ultimately the tax payers) by a few billions. I guess a massive fine to recover that money would be appropriate.
Blackwater? Bunch of mercenaries that might have committed war crimes. Investigate, treat by the same standards that were applied to German war criminals after WW2. Might lead to some executions...
Back to Microsoft and a hypothetical public domain release of their source code: Their source code may be a bunch of spaghetti code, but Windows is widespread enough that cleaning it up might be worthwhile. At least it should help projects like WINE or ReactOS.
After reading the thread on the Creative forum, I guess that "Daniel_K" re-enabled features for Vista rather than developing them from the ground up. Which leads us to the question why the Vista drivers were shipped in that crippled state. Between the lines of Phil O'Shaughnessy's message I read that it was a "business decision" rather than developer incompetence.
It is not the first strange decision by Creative either: While I'm happy with the hardware of the Soundblaster Live! 5.1 I bought a few years ago, even then Creative offered only driver updates for download, where others were more customer-friendly and offered complete drivers. Which is quite helpful if you have mislaid your driver CD-ROM;-)
So I agree that their management is a bunch of asshats. I also agree that onboard audio is getting better. My reason for buying that Soundblaster Live! was abysmal onboard sound on the Abit IC-7 mainboard of the computer. The new rig I built last year has quite acceptable onboard sound, and unless I see a really attractive sound card offer this one will just stick to the onboard sound chip.
The Word interface may be quite popular (I use Word 2000 at work and I'm not so impressed), but I think you are too optimistic about the time they might need to switch to ODF:
From various critical reports about OOXML I got the impression that it is an attempt at avoiding to clean up internal chaos in Word. Tags that basically say "do stuff like Word 95" hint at a lot of accumulated spaghetti code for which no clear descriptions exist. It could be malice in the sense of "let's make the OOXML standard unimplementable for non-insiders", but I consider it more likely that Microsoft themselves have no good descriptions of the finer differences between Word versions. Based on bad experience with my own "legacy" programs:-(
This said, they could probably implement ODF support that mostly works pretty quick, or might already have it prepared. With "mostly works", I mean an equivalent to the.doc import/export filter in Open Office (keeps most formatting intact, but drops the occasional detail). The interesting point is if the dropping of some details would affect things you enter in MS Word and find them changed after reloading the document from ODF. This is what currently makes working with Open Office in a Microsoft environment very painful: The little differences that happen on the round trip MS Office -> Open Office -> MS Office will foul up your layout. This is currently somewhat embarrassing for proponents of Open Office, but if it happens in the round trip MS Office -> ODF file -> MS Office it would be a Vista-scale debacle for Microsoft. People would say that Microsoft Office "cannot read its own files";-)
Really though, why should even Microsoft care? They haven't cared about standards in the past, what's changed?
Governments increasingly demand software that supports open document standards. Because they finally realize the problems vendor lock-in can give them. That means that Microsoft's OOXML has at least to look like an open standard.
If it doesn't, MS is faced with two unpleasant alternatives:
1) Rework Office to support ODF. In this case, they would lose vendor lock-in and they would also have to catch up to the implementations of others. For a few years, I guess Open Office would look a lot better than MS office because they have a head start with ODF.
2) Lose the government business, leading to companies who work a lot with the authorities also switching for compatibility. Another great way to erase the dominant position of MS Office;-)
Depending on jurisdiction, the EULA may not be legally binding. There is at least one case in Germany, where the courts found unbundling of OEM Windows versions legal, despite the EULA explicitly saying the opposite.
Of course, Microsoft could always put a version without "Mandatory Activation" on their download servers if the hassle of supporting old customers gets too big. It is not like you cannot get a cracked copy now, so I don't think the amount of piracy would change much.
My organisation still makes and sells a DOS based device:-p
The reason not to use Windows is that it has some realtime requirements which the standard versions of Windows don't appear to support. DOS does better here because only one task (our program) is running. Now there are multiple reasons to look for something better, maybe a real time-optimized version of Linux. But that evaluation, plus porting the software, would cost significant time and effort that does not immediately result in new features. Hence, management is not willing to invest in it...
My own PCs (including a year 2007 dual core) are still running Windows 2000 (Professional), because I really dislike the idea of an operating system with "product activation". On this one we might actually agree, given your general attitude toward Microsoft;-)
But otherwise the oldie holds up better than you suggest: -With current patches and a DSL router using NAT, I had no intrusions for a few years. -After updating a few registry settings and libraries, most current software runs fine. Here Windows 2000 shows its age, but it is still manageable.
Nevertheless, Windows 2000 will probably not be on my next PC a few years from now. Reasons are: -expected lack of drivers, but I can't really fault hardware vendors for that. Windows 2000 is dying out. -inability to fully use modern hardware. My current rig is pushing the limits of Windows 2000, the next one will exceed them. -Linux is improving year by year. I'm already keeping an eye on Ubuntu Linux and consider the operating system as good as Windows or better. If it wasn't for a few Windows games Ubuntu might already be my main OS.
Having an operating system with multiple users, whose settings are protected from each other, implies that each user has a separate configuration. I guess the simplest way of handling that is to put a set of config files in the home directory of each user, which you can backup separately. And Linux applications tend to do it that way.
The registry also has separate "branches" for each user and you can export them to text files. You can also import them back into the registry. So it is functionally equivalent, but somewhat obfuscated.
Extracting the settings is also not so easily done, in addition to a file backup you need something to extract those parts of the registry. But there are APIs to get the registry content, so I don't think Microsoft intended to make it impossible. Instead, I believe it was merely bad design;-)
There are a few reasons for the impression that Windows seems to scatter data all over the place:
1) Sloppy programming by application developers - not all applications use "My Documents". Not directly Microsoft's fault, but here Linux profits from its origins as Unix-like system: In the Unix world, it is taken for granted that the user may only write to/home/, and applications respect that. Windows still suffers a bit from its history as unsecured system, where everybody was administrator and could write all over the place. Some applications took advantage of that, and this behavior is not completely weeded out yet.
2) Data redirection: A questionable methods on Microsoft's part to fix problems with 1) in Vista. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160980.aspx for an overview. In short, Vista will silently redirect attempts to write to "forbidden" places to a place in the user's profile. This prevents the application from corrupting the system, but has of course side effects. For instance, take a group of users who used the same application in older Windows versions and were used to sharing data through a common directory (for instance a subdirectory of the installation directory). Now user A cannot see the data of user B anymore, and I doubt an average user will understand what has happened here;-)
In the past, such tweeters have been used in a few expensive high end loudspeakers, but if it is shown they can be built cheaply they might become more common.
Enforcing standards compliance will be a pain in the short run, but pay off in the long run. Because you can get away with accommodating old bugs (or bad designs, but that gets offtopic) for a while, but eventually the difficulty in maintaining all the quirks grows to a point where it is no longer doable.
I think Windows Vista is a good example of what happens when you try to maintain backwards compatibility to the assorted bugs and mis-designs of decades. See the various Vista articles on/. on how that worked out;-)
If Microsoft takes the opposite approach with IE8, I consider that a good move and a sign that they are capable of learning.
"When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device." Wikipedia gives the half-life of the most commonly used Polonium isotope with about 138 days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium This may be fine for a bomb that is to be used shortly after manufacture, but not for a warhead that is supposed to sit in a missile silo for years. Of course, the USA wanted to use the bomb on Japan, so long-term storagewas not an issue;-)
Sure, you need some clue in both areas to run a.com company well. My favorite example are the founders of Amazon, who got a lot of things right by starting their internet-based shop:
-fast and convenient entry of orders for the customer -delivery can start earlier because the delivery time of the postcard with the order is gone -they get the order data in digital and structured form, which must save lots of money in order processing -plus the website is actually well designed.
So they understood what kind of business could profit from the internet, and they also had a good concept for the implementation. Or at least they understood how to hire good web designers and let them do their job.
But that sort of manager is so few and far between...
The top execs are the true victims of the IT bubble and nonsense IT sales pitches they bought into that ended up just costing them and their company valuable time and resources. Add to that the possibility that they lost boatloads of personal capital on IT stocks, it should be enough to justify their phobia for the sector altogether.
So, we're talking about guys who -jumped on the latest bandwagon without thinking about the actual usefulness of IT for their business -or maybe were just afraid to look obsolete -and wasted some of their own money buying the latest crap stock because it had ".com" in its name
Yeah right. Exactly the kind of guy who should NOT lead a company. Or at least only a company held privately, with himself as the only investor;-)
Well...it is true that many cheap GPUs (integrated or otherwise) are marketed with words like "extreme", "Turbo" or such. But then again this is inevitable: In a market that is not completely regulated, you will always have a few vendors who try to get more business with such weasel words. It is up to the customer to do a bit of research before buying.
I agree that the Vista Certified thing is similar. Only in this case, it is not some Joe Blow fly-by-night hardware pusher but one of the largest corporations in the field who does the misleading advertising.
It is a passable shooter. Not the best - I think Counterstrike was/is more popular for a reason. But OK.
What I personally disagree with is Sweeney's whining about the fact that not every PC has a fast GPU. There are many uses for which you don't need to spend an extra $200 on a fast graphics card, compared to a chipset with integrated graphics. Actually, 90% of office PCs match that description. So there is a large market for PCs where a fast GPU would just be a waste of time. Get used to it, Tim...
With Windows and Office, Microsoft enjoys the advantage of strong network effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) that make their technically mediocre products more attractive.
To some extent such network effects exist with cars too (a repair shop that knows GM cars in every village), but they are arguably weaker and could be overcome by Toyota with significantly better quality.
Right now, Microsoft's network effects are in danger because governments increasingly insist on open standards that can be implemented by everyone. Microsoft tries to obstruct this as long as possible, see -the attempt to push OOXML (poorly defined pseudo-standard that mostly describes Microsoft Office with all its faults) through ISO instead of supporting PDF. -their delay in publishing the server interface documentation, until the EU hit them with a large fine. But this time I think they will lose, because the EU commission is not as docile as the Bush government was in the US antitrust suit against Microsoft (I still think the judgment in the first instance, braking up Microsoft, would have been appropriate). Also, they have pretty strong opposition in IBM concerning the OOXML-as-ISO-standard business.
You'd have to hit the computer in question with enough radiation that a number of errors should occur. Then you see if the mechanism actually works. It might, of course, be somewhat expensive to build or borrow a particle accelerator that provides a passable approximation of cosmic rays;-)
As Mrsooreams wrote just one post below you, it seems not guaranteed that the particles actually hit the detector and not only the computing elements. So I'd take this one with a grain of salt...
If developers are hard to find because it is very old stuff, it might help to look at older candidates too. There is still a widespread and stupid assumption that a software developer is too old at 40. If your HR guys are guilty of that, chances are that you identified the problem right there.
On the other hand, sometimes old platforms need to be ditched because they lack the capability to handle modern hardware. As an example, the company I work for still has a DOS based device in the market. It does the job but I think it is no longer a reasonable choice for the next generation: We are almost out of DOS base memory as the code has slowly grown over the years, and modern peripherals are out due to lack of drivers.
Lonewolf, hoping that management will understand the need to put some resources into porting to a better OS;-)
The deal appears to be that SNCP is committed to loaning SCO $95 million, but only once. If the SNCP loans SCO $95 million on Monday and SCO repays the loan on Tuesday, it appears that the commitment has been fulfilled.
Hmm... If SCO has the $95 million in its bank account, even for just one day, which debt must be paid first? In other words, would they maybe have to pay Novell first?
I think there are a lot of open questions here, and even an experienced lawyer might find it difficult to predict the outcome.
"Upgrade" implies that the new version is significantly better. Vista is -worse in performance -maybe better in security (UAC is a nice try, but reportedly many people just switch it off because it is too annoying) -has DX10 (whatever you think about it...) -has more eyecandy if Aero is available By pushing a version without Aero at all, Microsoft have thrown away (for that version) one of the two things thing that would immediately signal "Hey, I am new and shiny". That sort of mistake is quite untypical for them. It would not be the first time that Microsoft sells something that looks good and later turns out to be an unreliable POS. But selling something without "bells and whistles" factor is new for them.
If the electronics in the unit are beyond repair, it should still be possible to take a new unit and put the old case on it. That makes a few minutes of extra work, but once the service representative has promised to keep the artwork intact it can be expected.
So I think we are looking at one or both of the following: -incompetent service employee on the phone (makes empty promises) -poor organization (even promises the hotline is empowered to make are lost in the system)
Considering the EULA: That may or may not be valid depending on country. But either way, the PR backlash is far greater than the cost of handling this properly would have been. Slashdot has some influence...
Slashdot Mirror
Throttled connection speed now and then also comes up in Germany. Usually, it is a desperate measure by some provider that promised more than they can afford. Hint:
with cheap, unlimited access you will have some customers who create more traffic than their monthly fee pays for.
Now I have little sympathy for those providers, as the problem is well known and they should simply sell something like 50 GByte/month instead, with throttling to dial-up speed when you exceed the 50 GByte. That would be plenty for most people, but cut off really excessive use. And if you have misplanned your usage, you can still check email, albeit slowly.
Halliburton?
I have not followed this one in detail, but they seem to have cheated the US government (and ultimately the tax payers) by a few billions. I guess a massive fine to recover that money would be appropriate.
Blackwater?
Bunch of mercenaries that might have committed war crimes. Investigate, treat by the same standards that were applied to German war criminals after WW2. Might lead to some executions...
Back to Microsoft and a hypothetical public domain release of their source code:
Their source code may be a bunch of spaghetti code, but Windows is widespread enough that cleaning it up might be worthwhile. At least it should help projects like WINE or ReactOS.
After reading the thread on the Creative forum, I guess that "Daniel_K" re-enabled features for Vista rather than developing them from the ground up. Which leads us to the question why the Vista drivers were shipped in that crippled state. Between the lines of Phil O'Shaughnessy's message I read that it was a "business decision" rather than developer incompetence.
;-)
It is not the first strange decision by Creative either:
While I'm happy with the hardware of the Soundblaster Live! 5.1 I bought a few years ago, even then Creative offered only driver updates for download, where others were more customer-friendly and offered complete drivers. Which is quite helpful if you have mislaid your driver CD-ROM
So I agree that their management is a bunch of asshats. I also agree that onboard audio is getting better. My reason for buying that Soundblaster Live! was abysmal onboard sound on the Abit IC-7 mainboard of the computer. The new rig I built last year has quite acceptable onboard sound, and unless I see a really attractive sound card offer this one will just stick to the onboard sound chip.
The Word interface may be quite popular (I use Word 2000 at work and I'm not so impressed), but I think you are too optimistic about the time they might need to switch to ODF:
:-(
.doc import/export filter in Open Office (keeps most formatting intact, but drops the occasional detail). ;-)
From various critical reports about OOXML I got the impression that it is an attempt at avoiding to clean up internal chaos in Word. Tags that basically say "do stuff like Word 95" hint at a lot of accumulated spaghetti code for which no clear descriptions exist.
It could be malice in the sense of "let's make the OOXML standard unimplementable for non-insiders", but I consider it more likely that Microsoft themselves have no good descriptions of the finer differences between Word versions. Based on bad experience with my own "legacy" programs
This said, they could probably implement ODF support that mostly works pretty quick, or might already have it prepared. With "mostly works", I mean an equivalent to the
The interesting point is if the dropping of some details would affect things you enter in MS Word and find them changed after reloading the document from ODF. This is what currently makes working with Open Office in a Microsoft environment very painful:
The little differences that happen on the round trip
MS Office -> Open Office -> MS Office
will foul up your layout. This is currently somewhat embarrassing for proponents of Open Office, but if it happens in the round trip
MS Office -> ODF file -> MS Office
it would be a Vista-scale debacle for Microsoft. People would say that Microsoft Office "cannot read its own files"
Governments increasingly demand software that supports open document standards. Because they finally realize the problems vendor lock-in can give them. That means that Microsoft's OOXML has at least to look like an open standard.
If it doesn't, MS is faced with two unpleasant alternatives:
1) Rework Office to support ODF. In this case, they would lose vendor lock-in and they would also have to catch up to the implementations of others. For a few years, I guess Open Office would look a lot better than MS office because they have a head start with ODF.
2) Lose the government business, leading to companies who work a lot with the authorities also switching for compatibility. Another great way to erase the dominant position of MS Office
Depending on jurisdiction, the EULA may not be legally binding. There is at least one case in Germany, where the courts found unbundling of OEM Windows versions legal, despite the EULA explicitly saying the opposite.
Of course, Microsoft could always put a version without "Mandatory Activation" on their download servers if the hassle of supporting old customers gets too big. It is not like you cannot get a cracked copy now, so I don't think the amount of piracy would change much.
My organisation still makes and sells a DOS based device :-p
The reason not to use Windows is that it has some realtime requirements which the standard versions of Windows don't appear to support. DOS does better here because only one task (our program) is running.
Now there are multiple reasons to look for something better, maybe a real time-optimized version of Linux. But that evaluation, plus porting the software, would cost significant time and effort that does not immediately result in new features. Hence, management is not willing to invest in it...
My own PCs (including a year 2007 dual core) are still running Windows 2000 (Professional), because I really dislike the idea of an operating system with "product activation". On this one we might actually agree, given your general attitude toward Microsoft ;-)
But otherwise the oldie holds up better than you suggest:
-With current patches and a DSL router using NAT, I had no intrusions for a few years.
-After updating a few registry settings and libraries, most current software runs fine. Here Windows 2000 shows its age, but it is still manageable.
Nevertheless, Windows 2000 will probably not be on my next PC a few years from now. Reasons are:
-expected lack of drivers, but I can't really fault hardware vendors for that. Windows 2000 is dying out.
-inability to fully use modern hardware. My current rig is pushing the limits of Windows 2000, the next one will exceed them.
-Linux is improving year by year. I'm already keeping an eye on Ubuntu Linux and consider the operating system as good as Windows or better. If it wasn't for a few Windows games Ubuntu might already be my main OS.
Having an operating system with multiple users, whose settings are protected from each other, implies that each user has a separate configuration.
;-)
I guess the simplest way of handling that is to put a set of config files in the home directory of each user, which you can backup separately. And Linux applications tend to do it that way.
The registry also has separate "branches" for each user and you can export them to text files. You can also import them back into the registry. So it is functionally equivalent, but somewhat obfuscated.
Extracting the settings is also not so easily done, in addition to a file backup you need something to extract those parts of the registry. But there are APIs to get the registry content, so I don't think Microsoft intended to make it impossible. Instead, I believe it was merely bad design
There are a few reasons for the impression that Windows seems to scatter data all over the place:
/home/, and applications respect that. Windows still suffers a bit from its history as unsecured system, where everybody was administrator and could write all over the place. Some applications took advantage of that, and this behavior is not completely weeded out yet.
;-)
1) Sloppy programming by application developers - not all applications use "My Documents". Not directly Microsoft's fault, but here Linux profits from its origins as Unix-like system:
In the Unix world, it is taken for granted that the user may only write to
2) Data redirection:
A questionable methods on Microsoft's part to fix problems with 1) in Vista.
See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160980.aspx for an overview. In short, Vista will silently redirect attempts to write to "forbidden" places to a place in the user's profile. This prevents the application from corrupting the system, but has of course side effects. For instance, take a group of users who used the same application in older Windows versions and were used to sharing data through a common directory (for instance a subdirectory of the installation directory). Now user A cannot see the data of user B anymore, and I doubt an average user will understand what has happened here
If these things are mass-produced and cheap, I can see people experimenting with modulating the high voltage to use them as plasma tweeters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_loudspeaker
In the past, such tweeters have been used in a few expensive high end loudspeakers, but if it is shown they can be built cheaply they might become more common.
Enforcing standards compliance will be a pain in the short run, but pay off in the long run. Because you can get away with accommodating old bugs (or bad designs, but that gets offtopic) for a while, but eventually the difficulty in maintaining all the quirks grows to a point where it is no longer doable.
/. on how that worked out ;-)
I think Windows Vista is a good example of what happens when you try to maintain backwards compatibility to the assorted bugs and mis-designs of decades. See the various Vista articles on
If Microsoft takes the opposite approach with IE8, I consider that a good move and a sign that they are capable of learning.
"When polonium is crushed onto beryllium by explosion, reaction occurs between polonium alpha emissions and beryllium leading to Carbon-12 & 1 neutron. This, in practice, would lead to a predictable neutron flux, sufficient to set off device." ;-)
Wikipedia gives the half-life of the most commonly used Polonium isotope with about 138 days:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium
This may be fine for a bomb that is to be used shortly after manufacture, but not for a warhead that is supposed to sit in a missile silo for years. Of course, the USA wanted to use the bomb on Japan, so long-term storagewas not an issue
Sure, you need some clue in both areas to run a .com company well. My favorite example are the founders of Amazon, who got a lot of things right by starting their internet-based shop:
...
-fast and convenient entry of orders for the customer
-delivery can start earlier because the delivery time of the postcard with the order is gone
-they get the order data in digital and structured form, which must save lots of money in order processing
-plus the website is actually well designed.
So they understood what kind of business could profit from the internet, and they also had a good concept for the implementation. Or at least they understood how to hire good web designers and let them do their job.
But that sort of manager is so few and far between
So, we're talking about guys who
-jumped on the latest bandwagon without thinking about the actual usefulness of IT for their business
-or maybe were just afraid to look obsolete
-and wasted some of their own money buying the latest crap stock because it had ".com" in its name
Yeah right. Exactly the kind of guy who should NOT lead a company. Or at least only a company held privately, with himself as the only investor
Well...it is true that many cheap GPUs (integrated or otherwise) are marketed with words like "extreme", "Turbo" or such. But then again this is inevitable:
In a market that is not completely regulated, you will always have a few vendors who try to get more business with such weasel words. It is up to the customer to do a bit of research before buying.
I agree that the Vista Certified thing is similar. Only in this case, it is not some Joe Blow fly-by-night hardware pusher but one of the largest corporations in the field who does the misleading advertising.
It is a passable shooter. Not the best - I think Counterstrike was/is more popular for a reason. But OK.
What I personally disagree with is Sweeney's whining about the fact that not every PC has a fast GPU. There are many uses for which you don't need to spend an extra $200 on a fast graphics card, compared to a chipset with integrated graphics.
Actually, 90% of office PCs match that description. So there is a large market for PCs where a fast GPU would just be a waste of time. Get used to it, Tim...
With Windows and Office, Microsoft enjoys the advantage of strong network effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) that make their technically mediocre products more attractive.
To some extent such network effects exist with cars too (a repair shop that knows GM cars in every village), but they are arguably weaker and could be overcome by Toyota with significantly better quality.
Right now, Microsoft's network effects are in danger because governments increasingly insist on open standards that can be implemented by everyone. Microsoft tries to obstruct this as long as possible, see
-the attempt to push OOXML (poorly defined pseudo-standard that mostly describes Microsoft Office with all its faults) through ISO instead of supporting PDF.
-their delay in publishing the server interface documentation, until the EU hit them with a large fine.
But this time I think they will lose, because the EU commission is not as docile as the Bush government was in the US antitrust suit against Microsoft (I still think the judgment in the first instance, braking up Microsoft, would have been appropriate).
Also, they have pretty strong opposition in IBM concerning the OOXML-as-ISO-standard business.
You'd have to hit the computer in question with enough radiation that a number of errors should occur. Then you see if the mechanism actually works. It might, of course, be somewhat expensive to build or borrow a particle accelerator that provides a passable approximation of cosmic rays ;-)
As Mrsooreams wrote just one post below you, it seems not guaranteed that the particles actually hit the detector and not only the computing elements. So I'd take this one with a grain of salt...
But even then, I submit the choice of OS is NOT irrelevant.
Would you want to have a resource hog with poor driver availability, or a well supported, lean OS to run your browser on?
If developers are hard to find because it is very old stuff, it might help to look at older candidates too.
;-)
There is still a widespread and stupid assumption that a software developer is too old at 40. If your HR guys are guilty of that, chances are that you identified the problem right there.
On the other hand, sometimes old platforms need to be ditched because they lack the capability to handle modern hardware. As an example, the company I work for still has a DOS based device in the market. It does the job but I think it is no longer a reasonable choice for the next generation:
We are almost out of DOS base memory as the code has slowly grown over the years, and modern peripherals are out due to lack of drivers.
Lonewolf, hoping that management will understand the need to put some resources into porting to a better OS
As Zpin wrote a few posts above, the linked PDF contains pre-CFS kernel benchmarks.
Short version:
Linux pre-CFS is faster than post-CFS, but FreeBSD still comes out ahead, by maybe 5%.
Hmm...
If SCO has the $95 million in its bank account, even for just one day, which debt must be paid first? In other words, would they maybe have to pay Novell first?
I think there are a lot of open questions here, and even an experienced lawyer might find it difficult to predict the outcome.
"Upgrade" implies that the new version is significantly better.
Vista is
-worse in performance
-maybe better in security (UAC is a nice try, but reportedly many people just switch it off because it is too annoying)
-has DX10 (whatever you think about it...)
-has more eyecandy if Aero is available
By pushing a version without Aero at all, Microsoft have thrown away (for that version) one of the two things thing that would immediately signal "Hey, I am new and shiny". That sort of mistake is quite untypical for them. It would not be the first time that Microsoft sells something that looks good and later turns out to be an unreliable POS. But selling something without "bells and whistles" factor is new for them.
If the electronics in the unit are beyond repair, it should still be possible to take a new unit and put the old case on it. That makes a few minutes of extra work, but once the service representative has promised to keep the artwork intact it can be expected.
So I think we are looking at one or both of the following:
-incompetent service employee on the phone (makes empty promises)
-poor organization (even promises the hotline is empowered to make are lost in the system)
Considering the EULA:
That may or may not be valid depending on country. But either way, the PR backlash is far greater than the cost of handling this properly would have been. Slashdot has some influence...