This is the standard Slashdot US broadband story. We've seen it a hundred times in different permutations. How the US is falling behind. How the phone companies screw us.
Whatever. I don't fucking care. My company has plenty of bandwidth. So does my university. Bitching that Comcast charges you $40/mo for a 6mbit connection is small potatoes. Compared to nearly any of the other issues we face, it doesn't fucking matter.
Meanwhile I'm reading Slashdot connecting through a mobile phone in rural Utah. Go figure.
Really? I can't see why. In the past, I didn't really see the point of multiple partitions but with the choice of filesystems now, they make a huge difference. Putting my/usr/portage (Gentoo) dir in a separate ReiserFS partition makes system updates a lot faster. And dealing with large video files on anything less than XFS is a slow PITA, especially when trying to delete the associated transcoding temp files. Maybe these things don't affect the average user much, but computers are never fast enough for me and I'll take what I can get.
Here's a little concept I've been working on. Why don't we use a real OS?
Here's a concept: why don't you actually look at how operating systems work before saying that.
There are a lot of reasons why we ended up with the model we have today. There are a few solutions. One is sandboxing, which is what.Net and Java do - you can run Java applets, for example, with little risk of harming your system.
Sandboxing doesn't work particularly well for legacy code, though. This isn't unique to Windows: in Mac OS X or Linux, applications expect to be able to write to your home directory. Unfortunately, that's where you keep your most important files.
Could you write an OS that's safer than that? Sure. But it's not going to run legacy code - at least not without virtulization.
This fucking story comes up every couple of months on Slashdot. Everything that can be said has already been said. The population density argument is trotted out, disproven, then proved again. We complain that people in Korea can get 100mbit connections for $10 per month (whether or not those connections can deliver 100Mbps beyond the local loop is anyone's guess - by your metrics I have a 1Gbps connection because I'm on a university campus).
Bottom line: I don't care. I can't tell a damn bit of difference between my campus connection (1 Gbps), my work connection (1 Mbps), and my home connection (Comcast 12 Mbps), unless I'm pulling from another university or Akamai (university has a local mirror).
US businesses, universites, and schools are all well connected. Homes are increasingly so. There is no crisis. Complaining that "broadband penetration is low" is like claiming that we're falling behind because we don't eat as much chocolate per capita as people in the UK. It doesn't fucking matter.
Re:No preferred media for me.
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 1
Sure current codecs are much better then mpeg1 but I think the law of diminishing returns has kicked in in the formats since mpeg2.
H.264 is about 2x as efficient as MPEG-2, and it's only going to get better as the encoders improve. But, yeah, we're going to run out of steam eventually.
Yet here we have the first vulnerability in the iPhone and it is promptly patched through a system that will distribute the patches very quickly and easily.
Quickly and easily? That's crap, and you know it. Quickly and easily would be for the iPhone to update over the air, like the T-Mobile Sidekick does. Having to connect the device to a PC running iTunes isn't "quick" or "easy".
Tell me, how is IT is going to push patches to the device?
How are users going to know to apply the patch? Maybe we should send a memo - but who will read it? What if users don't fire up iTunes frequently? What if they have disabled patching?
How do we ensure compliance? What's to stop iPhone 1.0 users/devices from connecting and downloading sensitive data?
Apple can't answer these questions because they've never handled deploying iPhones in a managed environment. As Apple deploys more devices in their own organization, I suspect their management tools will mature.
There are multiple holes in Symbian and of course Windows Mobile that remain completely unpatched.
Oh, really? Because so far I'm counting zero. That's not to say that there aren't any, but I have never seen any attack on Windows Mobile other than a proof-of-concept.
There is this meme that the iPhone is not ready for the enterprise because it doesn't have MAPI and special I-T management tools.
The iPhone isn't ready for the enterprise because you can't manage it. You can't force users to use a PIN (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can), you can't encrypt the contents of the device (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can), and you can't remotely wipe the device (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can).
Here's a pop quiz - the CFO's iPhone is lost/stolen. What do you do?
There are many reasons that the Mac is more secure than Windows, but a big reason is that OS X is such a moving target.
Bullshit. Mac OS X is fundamentally unchanged from when Tiger came out two years ago. By your logic, we should count every Microsoft update rollup as a "new version". Even major new versions of Mac OS leave most of the OS unchanged.
The vast majority of Mac users are using the very latest OS and have all the patches applied even though the vast majority of Mac users have no I-T staff and no I-T skills
You have no idea how patching works in IT. We don't necessarily WANT users to have "all the patches applied", at least not right away. IT needs to control patch delivery to limit compatibility issues. Or do you believe that patches never break anything?
When the iPhone first shipped and people started hacking it, there was a lot of talk then that every hack may be temporary, a software update could come down through iTunes at any time and reset the game. There is nothing like that protecting any other mobile.
Windows Mobile 6 devices can be patched over the air, and patch delivery can be managed with a variety of third-party tools. Thus far it has not been particularly necessary. We live in a world of differnet devices running different software. Attacking mobile devices doesn't make sense.
Our CTO has an iPhone. He also carries a BlackBerry. Pretending the iPhone is ready for the business environment doesn't make it so.
MythTV is not an embedded application, it's a software application that runs on a general purpose PC. I, like the GP, have a desktop computer that runs MythTV. It can record two channels at once while flagging commercials or transcoding a third TV show while I use it as a desktop or watch a fourth TV show. The audio doesn't skip nor does the desktop feel slow (as the GGP suggested) until I'm functioning at 100% CPU, which is fairly rare.
What's your point? My 6-year-old DirecTV TiVo with a 50MHz processor and 32MB of memory can record two channels at once and play back another, all while indexing the database from real-time guide data streming in from the satellite. It runs Linux, of course.
That doesn't mean there aren't issues with the scheduler.
I work 40 hours a week doing.NET programming... consistently releasing inferior products
Something doesn't fit there. There are a lot of things you can trash MS for, but their development tools are absolutely top notch. I work with ASP.net 40 hours a week, and it's amazing just how bad it makes PHP, J2EE, Rails, and most of the other frameworks out there look in comparison.
Electric energy is best stored in whatever medium delivers the best combination of cost, density, and efficiency. Right now, that means batteries. Ultracapacitors are indeed promising, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. They still need to get orders of magnitude better before they can compete with batteries.
Trains with caps on board could pick up charge at various stations, while the passengers load and unload, and then travel on cap power to the next station
This makes absolutely, positively no sense whatsoever. We already have electrified trains - catenary wires work with extremely high efficiency and reliability.
Wind and solar power could be set up at these various stations to keep a steady supply of power waiting for the next train to arrive.
If only we had some sort of efficient, reliable national network for distributing electrical energy. Oh, wait, we do! There's no need to keep the trains "off grid".
Trains also offer safety over both cars and planes. There are much fewer accidents, as there are fewer drivers and more passengers. This is also an advantage in places like Europe where passengers can make their long trips while sleeping in a cabin at night. Imagine boarding a train in Denver at 10 PM and waking up the next morning in New York City with enough time to make an 8 AM meeting. Imagine paying prices similarly to taking a bus to get there.
To make it "in time for an 8 AM meeting" (6 AM MST), that train would have to cover the distance in 7 hours. That's 254MPH, not including any stops, which is substantially faster than even the TGV (which tops out at 200MPH in commercial service).
Imagine boarding a plane in Denver at 7PM (MST) and arriving in New York City at midnight (EST). That's possible with an airplane.
I'm not opposed to fast train service where it makes sense. But let's not pretend that it's a replacement for air travel.
When you think about the time it takes to go through security, board a plane, load it with cargo, take-off, get up to cruising speed, land, get off the plane, go through security and get back on the road, there is a lot of overhead.
First of all, you don't go through security on the way out (at least not anything that takes any time). And, yeah, we all hate the overhead with air travel. It's around 3 hours all-in-all. But, even in your example (Denver - NYC, bullet train @ 200MPH), it still takes 9 hours by train, and that's assuming that the train does its top speed all the time and never stops. If you want to look at NY-SF, it's even worse - 15 hours, assuming no stops or overhead whatsoever (including overhead, it's around 8 by air).
Boston-DC makes sense. And it's one of the few areas where rail transit has been successful in the modern US. Vegas-LA and LA-SF makes sense. But there are a lot of city pairs that don't.
In general the same thing happening to Cars happen to Computers. They are cheaper because manufacturing advances have dropped the cost of manufacturing. They are also flimsier and generally less well made.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Look at the amount of scheduled maintenance for a car from the 70s vs a car today. Look at the fit and finish of the components. Look at their reliability.
There's nothing "less well made" or "flimsier" about today's cars. Compare a Corolla from 2000 to a Corolla from 1980. Or a Five Hundred from today to the Galaxie 500 from 1968.
It's not unusual to go 100,000 miles today without any major maintenance (beyond oil/oil filters/air filters/tires) and no major mechanical problems. Such an occurence was a rare thing with cars from the 60s or 70s.
Having more steel doesn't make a car "better made".
Nielsen has been recording metrics for PVR users for years. Their software integrates with TiVo, and they provide "Live + 7" ratings that include viewers who view the program timeshifted.
Stop complaining. Recording user metrics is an imperfect science. Alexa cannot ever hope to eliminate all bias in their sampling methodology. They do the best that they can.
What a load of crap. That might be true at low speeds but if an aircraft impacts with a mountain at 400kph (thats 110 metres per second) even a 70m 747 will be crushed flat in less than a second. Barely enough time for the occupants to even register they've hit something never mind do anything about it.
You're assumiong that the "crash into mountain" accident is common. It isn't. Far more commin are accidents that occur during takeoff or landing (overrun runway, landing gear fails, etc.).
My teacher insisted it was much more efficient to buy mass amounts of generic-branded PCs because the "support was better" in case of hardware failure. Of course I argue that if I build them myself, I already know by the time each one is deployed that the hardware is not a lemon (burn-in testing), and it's probably going to last quite some time
You've never worked in a large-scale IT environment. At my company, we deploy over 7000 machines per year (1/3 of the entire infastructure) in hundreds of sites around the world.
Are you going to build and "burn in" 20 machines per day? How many people are you going to hire (probably at least two dedicated employees, which is at least $300k/year in expenses)?
Who's going to handle packaging and shipping the machines (HINT: Dell/HP/Lenovo spend a LOT of time testing to make sure the PCs arrive intact)?
When there's a problem, are you going to be able to repair them locally, or will you have to ship them back to headquarters? You can't have a dedicated tech for a 10-man site, but major manufacturers can offer support pretty much anywhere in the world.
How do you know that your images are going to work? You don't want to find out that some chipset mismatch on 2% of your PCs is causing kernel panics.
When you have a problem, who's going to fix it? HP/Dell release BIOS updates for years to fix bugs. Good luck getting ANY support out of AsusTek/ECS/Tyan/Biostar/MSI/Gigabyte/Whoever after even 1 year.
Where do you dispose of your PCs? HP/Dell have extensive recycling programs in place.
How do you handle your purchase orders? HP/Dell are very good at working with your accounting department. It's not as simple as "put it on the Visa".
Of course I argue that if I build them myself, I already know by the time each one is deployed that the hardware is not a lemon (burn-in testing), and it's probably going to last quite some time.
Of the 7396 PCs (desktop and notebook) we deployed in 2005, 143 have failed (1.9%). Generally, we find that the lifetime failure rate is below 3%. You're not even going to get close to that by building them in-house. One of my friends runs a custom-built PC business, and he sees a failure rate closer to 5%, with a large percentage being damaged during shipping.
As for "lasting quite some time", this indicates that you've never worked in a large IT environment at all. All major IT environments have some sort of lifecycle in place, typically 3 years but sometimes 4 or 5. A typical employee costs the company $150,000 per year (salary + benefits + taxes + etc) - if you replace a $1500 PC every three years, you're only spending $500 per year on the PC. It makes precisely zero sense to stick your $150,000 employee with old technology - if the new PC makes them even 0.5% more productive, you are saving $750 per year.
You may think that the big manufacturers just throw together parts, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I call BS. FDB (fluid bearing) drives are now the norm, and they are substantially BETTER than the older ball-bearing drives.
My new WD5000AAKS isn't just higher capacity and faster than the 3-year-old WD drive it replaced, it's also astoundingly quieter, and it runs cooler to boot.
You should not hear anything but "whoosh" at idle from a decent modern drive (well, maybe a bit of low-frequency vibration).
ETRADE does, and the token is free if you have more than $50,000 in total balance (it's $25 otherwise). If you've got that much in your accounts (IRA, bank, brokerage - it adds up), there's absolutely no reason not to get one.
Re:Marketshare and cracking
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Zune DRM Cracked
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· Score: 2, Informative
If someone was able to make a good Mac virus
Viruses are no longer common. People who exploit systems today do it for profit. The days of some kid sitting in his room and cracking Windows are over. That kid is either cracking DRM (and there are oh so many targets, from the iPhone to the TiVo) or getting paid to run spam zombies.
My Linux box encountered some 100,000 dictionary-based SSH attacks per day before I disabled password authentication. Run a packet sniffer on a public network some time. You may be surprised with what you see.
it is more secure by design than XP
In some ways, absolutely. Windows XP's "everyone as root" approach sucked, and we all knew that it sucked.
But time and time again when I look at Macs, I see a system just begging to be exploited. What's to stop a malicious application from modifying one of the system utilities (yes, you can write to them without elevating)? And, considering that the OS doesn't bother to look at signatures before elevating, how do you know that your utilities haven't been tampered with? How do you know that the software you downloaded came from the source you thought it came from?
Vista has some very, very smart features that make it much more difficult to exploit. IE, for example, runs in a lower-privilege sandbox that can't even write to most of your home directory (just the history/cache directories). Vista checks signatures on executables after they are downloaded and every time they elevate (I can be pretty damn sure that the Firefox updater really did come from Mozilla, and that it hasn't been tampered with). Vista changes firewall settings based on what network you are connected to (and, by default, blocks all incoming connections). It displays elevation dialogs on a separate desktop that doesn't accept input from normal applications. It randomizes the address space to make buffer-overrun attacks more difficult. It can encrypt the entire volume. It supports smartcard based authentication out of the box using Active Directory.
I'm not claiming that "features" make a secure OS. But there's nothing inherent to Mac OS X that makes it more secure than Vista or Linux.
To be fair, the 360 doesn't have great compatibility either (Wikipedia puts it at 42% with the July update). However, there are some differences:
Despite the fact that the 360's compatiblity is only 42%, the vast majority of that list works more or less perfectly. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions, but Microsoft appears to have at least tested the titles that they support
Microsoft never represented backwards compatibility as a major feature. Sony has taken every opportunity to trash Microsoft's poor compatibility and play up their better support. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Sony is a lot more humble
Honestly, I think that the BC on the non-EE PS3s is perfectly acceptable. Most people who are buying a PS3 at this point already have a PS2. Those who buy the console when it is more mature (e.g. cheaper) will have a good library of PS3 titles to choose from, and BC may be better by then.
However, Sony's marketing is shit. The PS3 is actually a pretty damned good console. It has a lot of nice features (Blu-Ray, Linux, web browser, upgradable HDD, built-in WiFi) that the 360 lacks, but it has two problems: it's too damned expensive, and Sony's hubris has shot themselves in the foot.
It's OK to be enthusiastic about your product. But don't piss on us by doing a non-price-drop-price-drop. You're clearing out old inventory of 60GB PS3s, which is fine, but don't dick us around by pretending it's a price cut and then later "clarifying" that it's a limited time thing. This is a firesale. Don't dress it up another way because you produced too damn many 60GB PS3s and they are going to take months to sell at your current lousy rate.
Your hardware is fine, Sony. But your customers will only take so much shit.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the standard Slashdot US broadband story. We've seen it a hundred times in different permutations. How the US is falling behind. How the phone companies screw us.
Whatever. I don't fucking care. My company has plenty of bandwidth. So does my university. Bitching that Comcast charges you $40/mo for a 6mbit connection is small potatoes. Compared to nearly any of the other issues we face, it doesn't fucking matter.
Meanwhile I'm reading Slashdot connecting through a mobile phone in rural Utah. Go figure.
Cool, cool, cool, and WTF.
I hate PHP as much as the next guy, but Perl? Come on.
Are you trying to sound like a Gentoo ricer?
Incidentally, most of the security features in XP SP2 (Security Center, IE changes) were originally intended to be released with Vista.
Here's a concept: why don't you actually look at how operating systems work before saying that.
There are a lot of reasons why we ended up with the model we have today. There are a few solutions. One is sandboxing, which is what
Sandboxing doesn't work particularly well for legacy code, though. This isn't unique to Windows: in Mac OS X or Linux, applications expect to be able to write to your home directory. Unfortunately, that's where you keep your most important files.
Could you write an OS that's safer than that? Sure. But it's not going to run legacy code - at least not without virtulization.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Approximately 700 people per year are killed in the US by firearm accidents.
Now, if you want to include crimes comitted with firearms, you have a point. But you said accidents.
I agree that our reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001 is overblown. But don't go making up statistics to prove your point.
Performance. There are a number of things that Fortran has (or lacks) which make writing good optimizers easier.
Not that it matters 95% of the time, but when you're working with huge datasets and complex computations on mega-clusters, every little bit helps.
This fucking story comes up every couple of months on Slashdot. Everything that can be said has already been said. The population density argument is trotted out, disproven, then proved again. We complain that people in Korea can get 100mbit connections for $10 per month (whether or not those connections can deliver 100Mbps beyond the local loop is anyone's guess - by your metrics I have a 1Gbps connection because I'm on a university campus).
Bottom line: I don't care. I can't tell a damn bit of difference between my campus connection (1 Gbps), my work connection (1 Mbps), and my home connection (Comcast 12 Mbps), unless I'm pulling from another university or Akamai (university has a local mirror).
US businesses, universites, and schools are all well connected. Homes are increasingly so. There is no crisis. Complaining that "broadband penetration is low" is like claiming that we're falling behind because we don't eat as much chocolate per capita as people in the UK. It doesn't fucking matter.
H.264 is about 2x as efficient as MPEG-2, and it's only going to get better as the encoders improve. But, yeah, we're going to run out of steam eventually.
Quickly and easily? That's crap, and you know it. Quickly and easily would be for the iPhone to update over the air, like the T-Mobile Sidekick does. Having to connect the device to a PC running iTunes isn't "quick" or "easy".
Tell me, how is IT is going to push patches to the device?
How are users going to know to apply the patch? Maybe we should send a memo - but who will read it? What if users don't fire up iTunes frequently? What if they have disabled patching?
How do we ensure compliance? What's to stop iPhone 1.0 users/devices from connecting and downloading sensitive data?
Apple can't answer these questions because they've never handled deploying iPhones in a managed environment. As Apple deploys more devices in their own organization, I suspect their management tools will mature.
Oh, really? Because so far I'm counting zero. That's not to say that there aren't any, but I have never seen any attack on Windows Mobile other than a proof-of-concept.
The iPhone isn't ready for the enterprise because you can't manage it. You can't force users to use a PIN (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can), you can't encrypt the contents of the device (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can), and you can't remotely wipe the device (BlackBerry/Windows Mobile can).
Here's a pop quiz - the CFO's iPhone is lost/stolen. What do you do?
Bullshit. Mac OS X is fundamentally unchanged from when Tiger came out two years ago. By your logic, we should count every Microsoft update rollup as a "new version". Even major new versions of Mac OS leave most of the OS unchanged.
You have no idea how patching works in IT. We don't necessarily WANT users to have "all the patches applied", at least not right away. IT needs to control patch delivery to limit compatibility issues. Or do you believe that patches never break anything?
Windows Mobile 6 devices can be patched over the air, and patch delivery can be managed with a variety of third-party tools. Thus far it has not been particularly necessary. We live in a world of differnet devices running different software. Attacking mobile devices doesn't make sense.
Our CTO has an iPhone. He also carries a BlackBerry. Pretending the iPhone is ready for the business environment doesn't make it so.
Yes, because that's where you need the most spectrum, silly!
AT&T/Verizon already have plenty of spectrum in Wyoming. Where they need more spectrum is in populated areas.
What's your point? My 6-year-old DirecTV TiVo with a 50MHz processor and 32MB of memory can record two channels at once and play back another, all while indexing the database from real-time guide data streming in from the satellite. It runs Linux, of course.
That doesn't mean there aren't issues with the scheduler.
I work 40 hours a week doing .NET programming ... consistently releasing inferior products
Something doesn't fit there. There are a lot of things you can trash MS for, but their development tools are absolutely top notch. I work with ASP.net 40 hours a week, and it's amazing just how bad it makes PHP, J2EE, Rails, and most of the other frameworks out there look in comparison.
Electric energy is best stored in whatever medium delivers the best combination of cost, density, and efficiency. Right now, that means batteries. Ultracapacitors are indeed promising, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. They still need to get orders of magnitude better before they can compete with batteries.
This makes absolutely, positively no sense whatsoever. We already have electrified trains - catenary wires work with extremely high efficiency and reliability.
If only we had some sort of efficient, reliable national network for distributing electrical energy. Oh, wait, we do! There's no need to keep the trains "off grid".
To make it "in time for an 8 AM meeting" (6 AM MST), that train would have to cover the distance in 7 hours. That's 254MPH, not including any stops, which is substantially faster than even the TGV (which tops out at 200MPH in commercial service).
Imagine boarding a plane in Denver at 7PM (MST) and arriving in New York City at midnight (EST). That's possible with an airplane.
I'm not opposed to fast train service where it makes sense. But let's not pretend that it's a replacement for air travel.
First of all, you don't go through security on the way out (at least not anything that takes any time). And, yeah, we all hate the overhead with air travel. It's around 3 hours all-in-all. But, even in your example (Denver - NYC, bullet train @ 200MPH), it still takes 9 hours by train, and that's assuming that the train does its top speed all the time and never stops. If you want to look at NY-SF, it's even worse - 15 hours, assuming no stops or overhead whatsoever (including overhead, it's around 8 by air).
Boston-DC makes sense. And it's one of the few areas where rail transit has been successful in the modern US. Vegas-LA and LA-SF makes sense. But there are a lot of city pairs that don't.
We can have both air and rail transit.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Look at the amount of scheduled maintenance for a car from the 70s vs a car today. Look at the fit and finish of the components. Look at their reliability.
There's nothing "less well made" or "flimsier" about today's cars. Compare a Corolla from 2000 to a Corolla from 1980. Or a Five Hundred from today to the Galaxie 500 from 1968.
It's not unusual to go 100,000 miles today without any major maintenance (beyond oil/oil filters/air filters/tires) and no major mechanical problems. Such an occurence was a rare thing with cars from the 60s or 70s.
Having more steel doesn't make a car "better made".
Nielsen has been recording metrics for PVR users for years. Their software integrates with TiVo, and they provide "Live + 7" ratings that include viewers who view the program timeshifted.
Stop complaining. Recording user metrics is an imperfect science. Alexa cannot ever hope to eliminate all bias in their sampling methodology. They do the best that they can.
You're assumiong that the "crash into mountain" accident is common. It isn't. Far more commin are accidents that occur during takeoff or landing (overrun runway, landing gear fails, etc.).
Car travel is a valid benchmark to measure our risk tolerance. It's not about whether the danger has ANYTHING TO DO with car travel.
Confounding variables are irrelevent, because we're not trying to determine WHY either activity is dangerous - only HOW dangerous it is.
Yeah, it gives a figure that's more misleading because YOU SPEND LESS TIME IN THE AIR.
You've never worked in a large-scale IT environment. At my company, we deploy over 7000 machines per year (1/3 of the entire infastructure) in hundreds of sites around the world.
Are you going to build and "burn in" 20 machines per day? How many people are you going to hire (probably at least two dedicated employees, which is at least $300k/year in expenses)?
Who's going to handle packaging and shipping the machines (HINT: Dell/HP/Lenovo spend a LOT of time testing to make sure the PCs arrive intact)?
When there's a problem, are you going to be able to repair them locally, or will you have to ship them back to headquarters? You can't have a dedicated tech for a 10-man site, but major manufacturers can offer support pretty much anywhere in the world.
How do you know that your images are going to work? You don't want to find out that some chipset mismatch on 2% of your PCs is causing kernel panics.
When you have a problem, who's going to fix it? HP/Dell release BIOS updates for years to fix bugs. Good luck getting ANY support out of AsusTek/ECS/Tyan/Biostar/MSI/Gigabyte/Whoever after even 1 year.
Where do you dispose of your PCs? HP/Dell have extensive recycling programs in place.
How do you handle your purchase orders? HP/Dell are very good at working with your accounting department. It's not as simple as "put it on the Visa".
Of the 7396 PCs (desktop and notebook) we deployed in 2005, 143 have failed (1.9%). Generally, we find that the lifetime failure rate is below 3%. You're not even going to get close to that by building them in-house. One of my friends runs a custom-built PC business, and he sees a failure rate closer to 5%, with a large percentage being damaged during shipping.
As for "lasting quite some time", this indicates that you've never worked in a large IT environment at all. All major IT environments have some sort of lifecycle in place, typically 3 years but sometimes 4 or 5. A typical employee costs the company $150,000 per year (salary + benefits + taxes + etc) - if you replace a $1500 PC every three years, you're only spending $500 per year on the PC. It makes precisely zero sense to stick your $150,000 employee with old technology - if the new PC makes them even 0.5% more productive, you are saving $750 per year.
You may think that the big manufacturers just throw together parts, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I call BS. FDB (fluid bearing) drives are now the norm, and they are substantially BETTER than the older ball-bearing drives.
My new WD5000AAKS isn't just higher capacity and faster than the 3-year-old WD drive it replaced, it's also astoundingly quieter, and it runs cooler to boot.
You should not hear anything but "whoosh" at idle from a decent modern drive (well, maybe a bit of low-frequency vibration).
ETRADE does, and the token is free if you have more than $50,000 in total balance (it's $25 otherwise). If you've got that much in your accounts (IRA, bank, brokerage - it adds up), there's absolutely no reason not to get one.
Viruses are no longer common. People who exploit systems today do it for profit. The days of some kid sitting in his room and cracking Windows are over. That kid is either cracking DRM (and there are oh so many targets, from the iPhone to the TiVo) or getting paid to run spam zombies.
My Linux box encountered some 100,000 dictionary-based SSH attacks per day before I disabled password authentication. Run a packet sniffer on a public network some time. You may be surprised with what you see.
In some ways, absolutely. Windows XP's "everyone as root" approach sucked, and we all knew that it sucked.
But time and time again when I look at Macs, I see a system just begging to be exploited. What's to stop a malicious application from modifying one of the system utilities (yes, you can write to them without elevating)? And, considering that the OS doesn't bother to look at signatures before elevating, how do you know that your utilities haven't been tampered with? How do you know that the software you downloaded came from the source you thought it came from?
Vista has some very, very smart features that make it much more difficult to exploit. IE, for example, runs in a lower-privilege sandbox that can't even write to most of your home directory (just the history/cache directories). Vista checks signatures on executables after they are downloaded and every time they elevate (I can be pretty damn sure that the Firefox updater really did come from Mozilla, and that it hasn't been tampered with). Vista changes firewall settings based on what network you are connected to (and, by default, blocks all incoming connections). It displays elevation dialogs on a separate desktop that doesn't accept input from normal applications. It randomizes the address space to make buffer-overrun attacks more difficult. It can encrypt the entire volume. It supports smartcard based authentication out of the box using Active Directory.
I'm not claiming that "features" make a secure OS. But there's nothing inherent to Mac OS X that makes it more secure than Vista or Linux.
Linux can do this through a variety of methods, as can Windows since Windows 95.
But, hey, it's not like Windows or Linux can hold a candle to the popularity of BeOS!
Honestly, I think that the BC on the non-EE PS3s is perfectly acceptable. Most people who are buying a PS3 at this point already have a PS2. Those who buy the console when it is more mature (e.g. cheaper) will have a good library of PS3 titles to choose from, and BC may be better by then.
However, Sony's marketing is shit. The PS3 is actually a pretty damned good console. It has a lot of nice features (Blu-Ray, Linux, web browser, upgradable HDD, built-in WiFi) that the 360 lacks, but it has two problems: it's too damned expensive, and Sony's hubris has shot themselves in the foot.
It's OK to be enthusiastic about your product. But don't piss on us by doing a non-price-drop-price-drop. You're clearing out old inventory of 60GB PS3s, which is fine, but don't dick us around by pretending it's a price cut and then later "clarifying" that it's a limited time thing. This is a firesale. Don't dress it up another way because you produced too damn many 60GB PS3s and they are going to take months to sell at your current lousy rate.
Your hardware is fine, Sony. But your customers will only take so much shit.