Anyone care to compare the US and European economies in the timeframe of the release of Win98 and WinXP (the last two major consumer releases of windows) on the one hand, the the US and European economies in the timeframe of the release of Vista? Pay specific attention to overall debt sustainability, the offset between price and wage inflation, housing prices and long-term sentiment with regard to employment, pensions and healthcare? Sure, _we_ know that high-end kit is a joke and you should buy either a Mac Mini or a 400 quid retail PC, but the man in the street thinks of a computer as being a grand. And it is, because the spotty youth next door talks them into buying some high-frame-rate gaming machine, just in order to surf and send some email. And getting a grand out of people in 2007 is harder than in 2000.
Also, XP on a >1GHz machine with 512MB and a >40GByte disk (ie a machine bought in the past few years) is adequate for most peoples' purposes. Whereas a two year old machine in 2000 was hopeless: the rate of change was taking us from `not enough' to `closer to enough'. Again, harder to sell to people.
every computer at companies that uses Windows desktops
I happened to be looking at some IT documentation for a ~75K employee UK company. This year, their focus is the final removal of NT4, and a major desktop roll-out of XP to replace w2k. They're also going to deploy Office 2003 to replace Office 97.
Given the releases they're going to, the year they're going to them and the releases they're coming from, Vista and Office 2007 are total non-starters. They probably decided to wait for Longhorn, but have given up. Technology refresh cycles in large businesses are typically five years, and therefore the huge wave of work done for Y2K is coming to the end of its life. Since only the lunatic fringe takes operating systems in the first year of their life, Microsoft's delay for 2004/5 to 2006/7 for Longhorn has neatly made it irrelevent in many businesses.
There's a GUI being produced by the wpa_supplicant people. I've not built it, because it didn't just `make' and I didn't need it enough to work on it. On SuSE, simple configurations work by the standard init scripts picking up things like WEP key and SSID from the standard config tools and then writing awpa_supplicant.conf automatically. More complex stuff did require emacs, but I think that the config I'm running is beyond most GUIs (three networks, each on different keys, names and technologies).
Showing the scars of a man who's used sixth edition on a pdp 11/34 for real work `back in the day', I move slowly on Linux distributions. Currently my main work, home and home laptop environments are OSX with some Solaris flown in via X and Windows via ICA, but my work laptop (for reasons I cannot start to go into) runs SuSE 10.0. That's fine on WPA, using wpa_supplicant, and I can't see any reason why that would be distro specific from a quick squint at the source. I've got a config that works on WPA (home) WEP (one network I visit) and WPA2 (another network I visit) without requiring the usual mess with locations: it just picks up whichever of the configured networks is ambient. I've not managed to get it working reliably with non-broadcast-SSID networks, but then anyone who does that deserves to lose anyway. I confess I had to hack the config file up by hand, and that the best documentation is gthe source, so perhaps this doesn't quite pass latte-sipping-Mac-Man muster, but writing a GUI for it would hardly be rocket science.
People who got burned in VHS vs Beta? Depends on the demographic they're targetting. How many non-geeks under forty have the first idea of what you're talking about?
For those not attuned to the cultural flow, this is just the French getting upset about Le Rock and Roll, and wanting a music service that is more Johnny Hallyday focussed. Apple's crime is not in being a monopoly, it's in being American.
Of course, Microsoft have an incentive to allow some level of piracy to flourish, just as cigarette companies want to encourage some smuggling from low-tax countries. The last thing that Microsoft would want is a situation where people with limited means cannot obtain Windows, legally or otherwise, and therefore instead opt to use Linux. At the moment, using Linux is a significantly worse outcome for Microsoft than people using pirated Windows. An increase in Linux use would mean a decrease in broken government websites that only really work with IE, for example, and that's a virtuous circle (from our point of view) and a rather less virtuous one for Bill. Likewise Office (in fact, far more so Office): it's worth almost infinite residential-market piracy to keep OpenOffice out of peoples' minds.
I don't think we've ever bought any military aircraft that weren't British developed or that we didn't at least have some development involvement
F-4 Phantom (the `UK' modifications to use RR engines don't count as development for more than political purposes). P-51 Mustang (OK, there the RR engine fit was more fundamental, but the airframe was all North American). Catalinas. Washingtons (B-29s) after the second war. B-24 Liberators, especially in their VLR maritime format. I _think_ the RAF operated some of those bizarre Bell Cobras with the engines behind the pilot. P-40 Kittyhawks. Probably more...
Is flash memory actually faster than a decent hard disk? I assume the seek time is better, but my recollection is that the transfer rates aren't anything to write home about.
I can't speak for the whole GSM world (which includes the third world where they're more bothered right now with coverage than video messaging), but 3G seems to be pretty much rolled out across Britain, and probably most of Europe.
That's true, but is anyone making money out of it? The only person I know who has a 3 phone is my (ahem) personal trainer, who appears to have switched because it's cheap. And 3's latest campaign to get people to switch is offering to _pay_ for incoming calls (ie splitting the termination charge with the subscriber, inna-0845-stylee). If they can only shift minutes by offering prices lower than the 2.5G providers they are in deep trouble.
And "alien frequency"? Who cares? It's not exactly very difficult to make 1900 (or 850 as also used in the US) when you already have 900/1800...
Every GSM phone outside the teenage market has been 900/1800/1900 tri-band since forever. For the past twelve months 850 has been added to that (`quad-band') for most business phones.
Interesting. Here in the UK I've never seen an HDTV CRT --- the push for HiDef came after the LCD/Plasma thing. I didn't realise there were such beasts as HiDef CRT TVs!
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Where do people store their VHS tapes and DVDs? You guessed it, on top or next to their TVs... where it becomes a really serious problem.
The magnetic field generated by an LCD or Plasma TV is non-existent. The audience for spiffy new media formats is highly unlikely to own a CRT --- I know I shut the last one in my house down last year.
You're confusing Colossus (with against Baudot codes) with Bombes (used against Enigma) and, indeed, the Baudot Codes (Tunny, Sturgeon) with Engima. It's difficult to unpick your confusions, but I assume that the massively parallel devie you allude to is Turing's Bombe, fitted with Welchman's diagonal board. [[ Before someone comes in with more mis-information, Turing's bombe attacked conjectured plaintext, using the non-clashing property caused by the reflector wheel, while the Polish bomba attacked the pre-1940 indicator system. The use of similar names was a shocking piece of poor security, but also a tribute to the groundwork of the Polish effort. However, the machines attack very different problems. ]]
Although Colossus was classified, a lot of the people who worked on it went on to become the initial wave of computer builders in UK universities after the war. It's also reputed that at least one Colossus survived at Cheltenham into the 1970s, presumably working on multi-wheel stream ciphers.
I simply don't believe the original poster. I have a retail copy of XP I bought in a moment of madness for the one remaining Windows machine at home. I originally installed it on a machine with a 300MHz Celeron overclocked to 450MHz, an AOpen motherboard, a HotRod Pro IDE Raid controller with a pair of PATA drives. It's now on a 2.4GHz Pentium in an Intel motherboard, with a single SATA drive. The upgrade was done by building the new machine, transferring one of the disks over, booting off it PATA-style, then using PartitionMagic to move C: onto the SATA drive. I don't recall even having to re-activate.
I use.Mac to synch Keychains and Bookmarks between the three machines I use regularly. Safari is easier to do that with. Plus it's got native appearance.
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For some reason, people (in the US, especially) have trouble admitting that they *don't* want to buy a certain product at a certain price. This often results in lengthy diatribes about what the seller should do, rather than a simple "No, thanks."
You don't know how right you are. I've twice sat in restaurants in France which quite clearly display their menus outside, listening to Americans from Red States abuse the staff because they can't have what they want to eat. One of them was the sort of place which has no options --- you eat what they're cooking that night. How the hell do you end up there if you want a steak and chips? Apparently the restaurant will go out of business if they don't serve what Americans want.
I've also watched with an increasing urge to commit murder while a large American, again from a Red State, yelled at the front of house staff at the RSC because the production of Richard the Third ``wasn't how Shakespeare intended'' and how he would tell his friends ``not to see it''. That it was one of the two great RSC R3s of the last few decades (the Simon Russell Beale one at The Other Place in 1992, the other great one being Antony Sher in the main house in 1985) only made it funnier. And that the whole run was sold out, along with the Donmar transfer.
Just because you're a customer you don't own the company. They can choose to ignore your opinion for any number of reasons, including wilful spite. All you get to do is not do business.
Although it's not at all clear what the benefit was, aside from making the public feel that something was being done. There are plenty of documented cases of people going through the war without ID cards, and I'm not aware of cases of German spies being caught by virtue of ID card challenges. They weren't physically secure, and the Twenty Committee 0wned the wireless and crypto regime effectively enough that most spies had a reception committee waiting for them when they landed.
ian
Create a scene, add light sources, add reflection, add textures, put user controls on a floating cube in a sky, and have it be a real application that a person could click on information on the cube and store phone numbers for example, and then pick up the cube and throw it ot the back of the application 3D scene.
Hmm. And how much money will businesses pay for that particular feature? Will the CIO sign off new PCs with spiffy graphics cards on every desk on that basis?
What was that about primary school homework? My wife and I recall there being no homework while we were at primary school (1969 onwards) while our children appear to receive quite a lot.
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I worked in the Photographers' Centre at the British Grand Prix in 2004 and 2005. They'd just removed the
darkrooms, and the space was available for yet more laptops. In 2004, there were empty 35mm film canisters around, and someone muttered that Kodak were visiting to collect stuff for processing. In 2005 I didn't see a single 35mm canister, although Darren Heath was there and I believe doing film photography for the monthly magazines.
Take a car. Don't change the oil, don't rotate the tires, don't fill them regularly, don't fill the radiator, don't replace the brakepads, don't get a tune up, fill it with the lowest octane fuel you can find, drive recklessly, and you'll get a car that breaks down pretty easily. You take care of a computer, it'll last. You don't, it won't.
As my father has asked on more than one occasion: I'm quite happy to pay to have my computer serviced, if only someone would do that for me.
If I take a Saab to a Saab dealer, I have a reasonable assurance that they will perform a service as defined by the manufacturer. In turn, one of the tasks a car manufacturer will have done is designing a service schedule which should,
all other things being equal, provide a reasonable service life. As I've taken one of my Saabs to 170K miles and I've run cars from several vendors to 120K miles I'm quite confident that given routine servicing, cars last for practical purposes indefinitely.
Now, could you explain to me where (a) the service schedule for my computer is (b) where the dealers who will perform the maintenance are? I (in the sense of my signature on my company's paper) pay computer vendors about half a million pounds a year for `maintenance', but all that appears to be is break-fix service.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, XP on a >1GHz machine with 512MB and a >40GByte disk (ie a machine bought in the past few years) is adequate for most peoples' purposes. Whereas a two year old machine in 2000 was hopeless: the rate of change was taking us from `not enough' to `closer to enough'. Again, harder to sell to people.
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Given the releases they're going to, the year they're going to them and the releases they're coming from, Vista and Office 2007 are total non-starters. They probably decided to wait for Longhorn, but have given up. Technology refresh cycles in large businesses are typically five years, and therefore the huge wave of work done for Y2K is coming to the end of its life. Since only the lunatic fringe takes operating systems in the first year of their life, Microsoft's delay for 2004/5 to 2006/7 for Longhorn has neatly made it irrelevent in many businesses.
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Interesting. Here in the UK I've never seen an HDTV CRT --- the push for HiDef came after the LCD/Plasma thing. I didn't realise there were such beasts as HiDef CRT TVs! ian
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I use .Mac to synch Keychains and Bookmarks between the three machines I use regularly. Safari is easier to do that with. Plus it's got native appearance.
ian
You don't know how right you are. I've twice sat in restaurants in France which quite clearly display their menus outside, listening to Americans from Red States abuse the staff because they can't have what they want to eat. One of them was the sort of place which has no options --- you eat what they're cooking that night. How the hell do you end up there if you want a steak and chips? Apparently the restaurant will go out of business if they don't serve what Americans want.
I've also watched with an increasing urge to commit murder while a large American, again from a Red State, yelled at the front of house staff at the RSC because the production of Richard the Third ``wasn't how Shakespeare intended'' and how he would tell his friends ``not to see it''. That it was one of the two great RSC R3s of the last few decades (the Simon Russell Beale one at The Other Place in 1992, the other great one being Antony Sher in the main house in 1985) only made it funnier. And that the whole run was sold out, along with the Donmar transfer.
Just because you're a customer you don't own the company. They can choose to ignore your opinion for any number of reasons, including wilful spite. All you get to do is not do business.
ian
Although it's not at all clear what the benefit was, aside from making the public feel that something was being done. There are plenty of documented cases of people going through the war without ID cards, and I'm not aware of cases of German spies being caught by virtue of ID card challenges. They weren't physically secure, and the Twenty Committee 0wned the wireless and crypto regime effectively enough that most spies had a reception committee waiting for them when they landed. ian
ian
What was that about primary school homework? My wife and I recall there being no homework while we were at primary school (1969 onwards) while our children appear to receive quite a lot. ian
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If I take a Saab to a Saab dealer, I have a reasonable assurance that they will perform a service as defined by the manufacturer. In turn, one of the tasks a car manufacturer will have done is designing a service schedule which should, all other things being equal, provide a reasonable service life. As I've taken one of my Saabs to 170K miles and I've run cars from several vendors to 120K miles I'm quite confident that given routine servicing, cars last for practical purposes indefinitely.
Now, could you explain to me where (a) the service schedule for my computer is (b) where the dealers who will perform the maintenance are? I (in the sense of my signature on my company's paper) pay computer vendors about half a million pounds a year for `maintenance', but all that appears to be is break-fix service.
ian