It's not just if the user wants, but if the user is prepared to pay (or, more to the point, if their employer sees a reason to pay).
1) Both linux and mac os can do this. So MS has to do it to keep up.
So what? I have the good fortune to have used computers daily for over twenty-five years and never been a regular Windows user, so I don't exactly defer to Microsoft. But it's pretty unlikely that Microsoft is worried that it has to match Mac or, even more ludicrously, Linux in terms of desktop features. How many people really regard edge cases of 3D performance as determining issues? Gamers aren't the issue here, as they are tied to whatever platform their game du jour runs on. Who else?
2) It doesn't cost extra. Go to best buy and look at the computers. They all have vista, they all can do this stuff. And they aren't more expensive then they used to be. If anything, they are cheaper. Sure it might not be worth it to UPGRADE TODAY, or to buy Vista and load it on your old PC. But you can bet your next computer, whenever you do decide to upgrade, and assuming you choose windows, will come with all this.
So, at best, Microsoft have spent five years and a zillion dollars producing a new range of software (Vista and Office 2007) which no-one is going to buy, and which isn't going to drive any additional sales, but which people will get by default the next time they buy hardware? They could have done nothing and achieved the same result: would XP in 2009 really cause the Windows market to erode towards alternative platforms to an extent that justifies the cost of Vista?
You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.
It's not just if the user wants, but if the user is prepared to pay (or, more to the point, if their employer sees a reason to pay). In a tightening economy, with computers `good enough' to run a typical workplace mix or to run a single high-end application in isolation, the question becomes ``what is the benefit to being able to run two graphics intensive applications in parallel, and what is it worth to me?'' Microsoft are hoping the answers are, respectively, ``a lot'' and ``a lot''. Others think the answer might be ``a bit'' and ``not much''. The market will decide, but it looks horribly (for Microsoft) as if the market HAS decided.
It's one of the world's coolest films. Especially the scene with the slo-mo wave machine, with the whole set dressed in the exact colour of a packet of Gauloise. It came out the year before Bladerunner, and the parallels in design are perhaps not accidental. I guess geeks haven't seen it because subtitles frighten them...
Currently they believe that an increasing Linux market share will hurt their bottom line. It will. A lot. Not only does that mean customers are not buying windows, those same customers will not buy Office, Exchange server licenses, Sharepoint server licenses and so forth.
If the backend drifted towards Unix-alikes, Exchange and Sharepoint are category killers and would be fine businesses ported to Linux or Solaris. We're MS-free in the backend (Cyrus plus Oracle Collaboration Suite) but we're painfully aware of the gaps. We like counting the savings in money, though. Keeping Office off Linux forestalls the threat, but if Linux were to become a big deal on the desktop Office would be ported and would displace all the alternatives in about ten minutes.
I don't believe the numbers.
I'm reminded of the `video nasty' hysteria of the seventies. A study showed that some huge percentage of kids had seen video nasties, a study at odds with the number of video recorders in houses. So some proper researchers, rather than people looking for a headline, repeated the experiment, but rather than naming real video nasties they made up a bunch of titles. The numbers stayed the same.
Why? Because kids
Knew what the adults wanted to hear, and were keen to please; and
Knew that video nasties were cool, so wanted to appear cool to their peers and the adults.
The claim that 36% of children are meeting strangers they met online is prone to the same distortion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the number runs so counter to general experience that it must relate to a specific population, or have confounding factors. I'd be surprised if there were many communities in the UK, at least, where much more 36% of children simultaneously had access to computers and were allowed out unsupervised, which makes the number perhaps sixty percent of those with motive and opportunity. I'm sorry, I just don't believe that.
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i don't want my kids on myspace. not because I'm 'paranoid and afraid of the internets' but because I think myspace is a stupid waste of time
Precisely. I don't even bother preventing it, although I make my general contempt for all social networking known. I just steer the kids towards other things they could be doing online, and then to real-world activities (music, sport --- there's the ferrying to Saturday morning orchestras, we swim together, cycle together, etc). If it became an issue I'd split the kids' machines onto a distinct VLAN and application gateway that the outside world, and if it became a more serious issue I'd put a squid transparent proxy machine with authentication in at the border and only NAT the protocols we need to the remote destinations we need. But it doesn't arise, because the kids have plenty of better things to do.
Unfortunately, some parents use computers like they use TV, as mind-rotting babysitters, and some have this idea that myspace is teaching people `computer skills' or `the way the world is today' or somesuch nonsense. This is like claiming hanging around in shopping centres is teaching economics.
We will also presumably have teenagers on this thread telling us that their lives are, like, so over? if they couldn't, like, hang on myspace. But teens acting out pathetic dramas about the concerns of the day are hardly new, and it's the responsibility of parents to know better, not to acquiesce to everything their children want.
Lots of friends on myspace: worthless. Lots of friends in real life and decent A Levels: worthwhile. Parents are responsible for protecting their children, including from things their children don't want to be protected from.
I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released. And that should be the real comparison.
If you're running a primary school sports day and want to be fair to the fat kid, yes. But in the real word, products that seek to displace need to be better than that which they seek to displace. If I release my special new networking protocol, do I get to compare it with TCP/IP circa the NCP->IP transition? If I release a new processor architecture, do I get to compare it with the 8086? ``Hey, never mind it only runs at 4.47MHz, think of the potential?'' If I start a car company, am I competing with the Model T, or am I competing with the cars of today?
Vista doesn't get to pick its competition. In order to succeed it has to beat OSX 10.4.10 or 10.5.1 and XP SP2, because that what's the major audiences are comparing it with. Tiger's solid but unexciting, but iLife is in some ways a step up from most bundled applications in Windows land. Although I'm typing at a copy of Leopard, that's in some ways an easier target --- FIX MY BLUETOOTH, STEVE, I WANT MY MACHINE TO SLEEP WITHOUT HAVING TO BUY A USB MOUSE --- but Apple get a free pass because of the sublime industrial design and everyone loves iPods, right. (Yes, I know that in/. land they're lame and no match for a Nomad, but we're not the audience that any vendor cares about).
But XP SP2 is a hard target. For a lot of the market, it's the only OS they've used, so it *is* computing. The economy is tightening, and a 2GHz, 2GB, 200GB machine is enough for anyone who doesn't want high frame rate first person shooters or huge amounts of copyright-dubious downloads. The competition Vista faces isn't people buying XP SP2 machines, ebcause that's something Microsoft can control. The competition it faces is people not buying another machine, but just staying with the perfectly decent machine they already have. And the losses retailers have taken on huge inventories of PCs that they expected to sell on the back of Vista but are now unloading at firesale prices shows that's what's happening.
The acid test is the retail figures for the Christmas just gone, the first `holiday season' (as you Americans have it) where Vista has been in the market place. Does it look good? The only reason corporates are going to adopt Vista, which offers essentially nothing beyond pain and expense, is if users in their droves claim that it's the only thing they know and they can't work without out (a significant factor that kills corporate adoptions of non-MS desktops is user (un)familiarity). So the home market drives aspects of the corporate market.
And speaking as someone who runs the infrastructure and desktops for 1200 users, I've not had a single request, from a user or a manager, for Vista or Office 2007. Back when we bought laptops with XP but imaged them with a standard build of 2000 SPwhatever, we had the odd protest: we don't get a single squeak when we put XPSP2+Office2003 on newly bought machines.
So Vista's out there. It exists. There's no Wow!, no buzz: no one cares one way or another. XP SP2 works sufficiently well for most people that they have no reason to care if their machine isn't running the latest and greatest bits. For non-geeks, computing's plateau'd: we're now in a position where, like cars, new models are only of interest to obsessives and those who need a new car for other reasons.
I think it was Feynmann who recounted a story of how two orthodox Jewish students were fascinated by the physics of switches. He was pleased to see their interest, until he found out that they were most interested in the presence or absence of sparks within light switches as they operated. This would determine if lights could be turned on and off during the Sabbath.
In that case, of course, no one ever claimed that Jews in New York were a poor sub-stratum. Given the problems confronted by the [insert PC word here] communities in Australia, however, if technology and funding is used for museum keeping, that seems decadent when the life expectancy is tens of years below the mean, alcoholism is rife and unemployment is sky-high. Let me guess: money from the tribes is being spent by white developers to produce an artefact for a museum mostly visited by whites.
John Stewart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_(musician)), in one case (``Daydream Believer'' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daydream_Believer). John Stewart was a former member of the Kingston Trio, has worked with Roseanne Cash, Nanci Griffith, Lindsey Buckingham and a pile of other people and has a solo catalogue of a depth and breadth most folk artists would kill for. Hopefully when eBay used the song in their advert Stewart got some money: he both needed and deserved it. While I was looking up the URL for his bio I see he died last week: terrible news.
As an experienced IT professional, I'm comfortable setting up WPA2-PSK (AES) on my laptops, desktops, and other wireless bits like my Wii and Smartphone.
Likewise. Indeed, I'm starting to write a simple security policy for the house, which I'll agree with my wife as the other stakeholder, so that I have a canned basis to agree or disagree to things other users (wife, kids, visitors) may want to do. Consider is ISO27001 for small companies. I've built firewalls, hardened Unix boxes, and indeed was probably one of the first people to run TCP/IP on JANET in the mid-80s. All that said, I had to shorten the WPA2 passphrase in order to get my AppleTV to play ball with my base station: as it's twelve characters generated from/dev/random I didn't worry too much, but the previous twenty characters was even better. As someone else said upthread, WPA2 is actually surprisingly tweaky to get working (I've got Apple, Linksys, several Linuxes around the house).
This is all well and good, except you're solving the wrong problem.
The turnover for mail is small: a lot of people have large, static archives. So just take a snapshot hourly, and retain those snapshots for a few days. It'll cost you 10, maybe twenty percent of your disk space, zero admin overhead and bail you out of all sorts of pain. Taking large mail spools to tape is incredibly hard, and even rsync will run forever over lots of small files in Cyrus-type environments, but surely to God no-one runs large enterprise datasets without snapshot capability?
I accept I only run ~50TB of data for my employer. But every byte of that is on servers that do snapshots (ZFS and Pillar Data, but NetApp, lots of EMC iron, BlueArc, whatever would do just as well). Before we do something committing, we take a snapshot. Takes a few seconds, consumes only the delta. Once we've done the committing thing, if things look bad we have the option to roll back (potentially ugly if changes have taken place) or to fish around in the snapshots and use that to stitch things together again. And anyway, there's snapshots happening every hour anyway. So if I were to go to our ~2TB mail server and delete 10% of the accounts, I could retrieve them to within a hour in a few minutes. If I had the presence of mind to take a snapshot prior to doing bad shit, I could recover them to a few minutes. This isn't hard, it isn't exotic and it isn't expensive.
NetApps are commodity. ZFS is free. Bigger storage iron is a competitive marketplace with thin margins. Who on earth is doing production storage without modern data management facilities?
Viewing a DVD and a Blu-ray on a decent HDTV within the same week will notify you of the difference.
Indeed: the question is if people care enough. DVD is clearly differentiated from tape: it's smaller, tidier, obviously better quality and random access. It's like CD vs the Philips Compact Cassette: no contest. hi-def is an incremental, rather than a revolutionary, change, a lot of people may see a difference but won't care to spend money, and the fact that people are buying HD TVs says nothing about their enthusiasm for HD: they're buying thin, modern, 16x9 LCD televisions, and they all happen to be HD. In the UK, at least, the key point is 16x9, as almost all broadcast content is now in that aspect ratio.
For one thing, few musicians could make enough money to get by today from live performances alone, even the good ones.
Are you sure? I follow several folk artists who tour once a year in the UK, once a year in a few places in Northern Europe, sell the odd CD at concerts, and (in one case) do some session work. They both seem to keep body and soul together.
And why is this a surprise? They can sell a couple of hundred tickets at a tenner each at a folk club once a year, times perhaps twenty or thirty dates. Most folk clubs are run on a shoestring, and an artist will get a substantial proportion of the door, but let's say it's only fifty percent. Twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year isn't a king's ransom, but it's a living wage, as their expenses are minimal. Throw in some CD sales, perhaps the odd song on a bigger artist's album (one of the guys I'm thinking of does session work for Nanci Griffith and has had a song of his on one of her albums), the occasional small festival: it's a living. They won't get rich, but they didn't ten or twenty years ago, and their ability to email their fans for free means they can sell tickets far more easily than twenty years ago, too.
Artists like this were always reliant on this model, and never sold records in quantity (you couldn't get them in shops), so it's hard to see how their position has changed. Artists who couldn't sell a few hundred tickets times twenty dates weren't selling records either, and for them it was strictly a hobby.
At the big end, someone like Springsteen doesn't give a stuff about record sales. Yes, he reputedly splits the take evenly with his band, but they're grossing something like three million pounds a night in stadiums, and can tour in those for months on end. Say they only get 33% of the gross, so a million a night split ten ways is a hundred thousand pounds. Times a sixty date tour. That's not poverty if they never saw another penny from record sales.
Thirty years ago, musicians toured to support record sales. Now records support tour sales. Markets change. They could always get a job in a shop if they don't like the lifestyle.
The late, and much missed, Bruce Nelson had a ``Microsoft OS/2'' bag, dating back to before IBM and MS fell out. He claimed that Gates had offered to buy it off him for some silly some of money to get it out of circulation.
I story I heard as to why OS/2 failed was that Microsoft would give anyone who could get 3 letters out of 4 right in the word `developer' full support. Compilers, API documentation, technical support, the whole nine yards. IBM, on the other hand, wanted $400 and proof that you were serious before you could have a development kit. As ever, it's the applications, stupid, and IBM's decision kept all the small companies off what was already shaping up to be a minority platform.
Let me see your e-mails from 2001-2003.
"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone."
I have the vast majority of my personal email back to 1986 on-line, although I don't have the stuff prior to that in a usable form. I have all of it from 1999 onwards.
Corporately, we retain all correspondence with our customers and suppliers indefinitely, with an archiving milter I wrote applied at the border, so we've got all of the stuff that's useful back to when we started that policy in about 2000. We have ~2TB of email on our central IMAP server and we have backup tapes of the mail spool monthly back since forever, so if we absolutely had to we could recover any piece of mail that wasn't deleted with 32 days of arrival (it's Cyrus, so the format is probably more tractable than Exchange).
But this is plain wrong. I've always used someone else for my secondary DNS servers, just to ensure that even if the primary company goes down, the secondary stays up. I make a point of never using the "same party". And I'm pretty darn sure that the Bind Cookbook and/or BOG recommends this too.
Indeed. I operate my own primaries, and have the secondary servers on other continents run either by people I've swapped favours with or by distantly related parts of my employer. But when I set them up, I asked for the IP numbers that the AXFR requests will come from, and applied zone transfer acls to the server for those addresses. This seems wise: in principle, you shouldn't put anything in your public DNS that isn't public, but in practice there will always be things in there that although not private, you'd prefer them not to be widely public. It's not a big security measure, but it costs nothing to do.
Of course, if the keyboard is supposed to give enough power to more demanding USB devices, it needs more batteries.
I have a feeling that USB is one of those things like CD, where the term is trademarked and only applicable to stuff that meets the spec. Whatever, Apple's customer base would be the wrong people to try a ``here's a USB port, but the current limit is.,...'', even assuming that you can find out what the current draw of, say, a flash memory stick is. 600mA@5V, which is the USB spec, would drain four AA lithium cells (which are Not Cheap) in about five hours --- Lithium cells are 1.5V 3Ah, Alkaline more like 2Ah.
I have it on suspicious authority that the mechanism may be inherited from a Multics mechanism with a different epoch date, but I cannot find proof.
Multics, certainly by the time I was using it in the early eighties but I believe from much earlier, used microseconds since 01/01/1901 stored as a fixed bin(71): a double word quantity on a 36-bit machine. That allows you to represent about 75 million years each side of the epoch to microsecond resolution. Multics needed microsecond resolution because the generation of several vital unique quantities, notably process directories stored in >pdd>long-random-string, were obtained by reading the clock and then doing the equivalent of base64 encoding it. The clock was locked during read so that only one process could obtain a given clock value.
The ``no USB on wireless'' is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. But what is odd is the new wireless keyboard doesn't have a number pad or cursor keys or a full-size set of shifts and modifiers: it's a laptop layout. I had a white sloping wired keyboard on my desk at work, and I had the Bluetooth variant at home: same keyboard, modulo the USB ports and (obviously) the wire. When I got a new iMac for home I unthinkingly checked the wireless option, and I shocked to find that the keyboard was a sawn-off one. But my daughter grabbed it for her (space-limited) desk to use with her Mini, and I went and bought a corded one. Which has the handy USB ports, which the iMac doesn't while the Mini it's replacing did. So in the end, all was well. Odd, though.
All they have to do is create an alias at Gmail, Yahoo, etc.
There's an acceptable use policy in our house, documented, which the kids have had explained to them. If they break it, they'll find that there aren't computers available for them use, and they can explain any ensuing school problems themselves. I could, if I wished, enforce the ``only mail accounts permitted are those on the Cyrus server Dad keeps in a datacentre'' at the border by transparently proxying into Squid. But at the moment the AUP is sufficient. I've said to the kids that I personally regard things like Myspace as an utter waste of time, and if they want to use them, they'll need to justify it as an alternative to reading a book. I don't see them as pathways to abuse and evil, but I do see them as incredibly tacky. But still, if parents want to have their children minded by illiterate fourteen year old rather than getting an education, who am I to complain: one less competitor in the job market for my children.
Teaching kids subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic isn't too bad of an idea either. I know, I know, it's a bit unorthodox.
You'd like to think, wouldn't you? It took a very determined government policy, pushed through against the howling of teaching unions (which only a Labour government could do, really) to get this point home in the UK in 1990s. But I have some sympathy: from the ripe old age of 43, I'll remind people of the prevalent meme of the 1960s and 1970s that reading would be rendered obsolete by the Philips Compact Cassette. Silly, yes, but in its own terms no sillier than some of the crazier Web 2.0 type madness that holds libraries and expertise to be secondary to wikifiddlers.
It suits the purposes of the powerful to encourage the idea that education need not contain true education: you can rest assured that Eton or (fill in for-money US school of the rich and powerful) aren't neglecting reading in favour of Excel, aren't `on the one hand, on the other hand'ing about science and aren't pretending that OK magazine is as valuable a text as Hamlet. You won't do media studies or psychology or business studies or any of the non-A Levels there, either: you'll be Maths, Physics, Chemistry and maybe Biology on the one hand, or English, French, History and something else on the other. You'll not do Tourism at the University of Luton, you'll do PPE at Oxford.
For as long as the disempowered think the it's in _their_ interests for education to be reduced to training, the children of the rich and powerful are rendered even more successful. My wife has a cousin at Westminster School: his education has been unchanged for fifty years, and computers are seen as low-status tools for the dim. Will he find that not being able to use the more obscure features of Office 2003 is a handicap, with a Westminster education and a degree from Oxford, Cambrdige or Durham? I rather think not.
``kids probably still need to learn to use Office 2007 because, like it or not, that's what the Real World (TM) uses. ''
When I was at school in the seventies, the bright kids got an education. The less bright girls learnt to type, because there would always be work for copy typists, and the less bright boys learnt to use a lathe, because here in Birmingham (England, not Alabama) there would always be work in the car industry.
I wonder how that's working out? I was taught transferrable skills, like how to learn, and thirty years later I'm still learning. Meanwhile, there's no car industry and copy typing, shorthand and the rest may as well be candle making for all the traction they have.
I don't know what software my children will use in the workplace in ten or twenty years' time, and if I did I'd be making a fortune producing it. I don't know what JOBS they'll be doing in ten or twenty years time, perhaps (indeed probably) in a very different landscape to where we are now. What I do know is that flexibility, adaptability, the ability to learn and reskill and change, are going to be vital in a world where the linear career is dead. And that's why the best thing you can learn is how to learn.
So as a matter of policy, whatever software the kids are using at school, we use something else at home. School right now is Office 2003 on XP, so home is iWork '08 on Mac. Spreadsheet problems I show them how to do by hand, and I'm about to start showing them how to knock up code to do it (and I'm choosing a language they're highly unlikely to use in school: I'm torn between Scheme and Processing). We did a poster project with Keynote, but also with a razor blade and cowgum.
You can teach your children ``the workplace'' if you like. I think you Americans call those sorts of lessons ``shop''. Someone who has a good degree in a pure science or a legitimate humanity can learn to use Word to a sufficient standard in a morning. Someone who knows Word, but can't use a library or do calculus, is welcome to try learning those in a morning. How many successful authors can touch type, and how many just did hunt and peck? Same principle.
How did Brunel build the Great Western without the help of Office? Which was more important: using Office, or being a great engineer?
And before anyone makes the point, I realise these aren't binary, black/white choices. But in terms of mentality, they are: do you regard education as about learning the direct skills of today, or the ability to learn the skills of tomorrow? There's a word for people with the first sort of education, or indeed training, and the word is `poor'.
Yes, that's correct. My memory is that giving alcohol to children under five is presumed to be child abuse. You can't drink in licensed premises until eighteen, but with a meal in a restaurant no one is going to worry if a teenager has a glass of wine. The rules about children being in licensed premises but not drinking are complex, and no one really understands them: by and large it's the licensee's call. It's perfectly legitimate to offer children alcohol in private houses, although obviously there's a variety of other crimes to do with soliciting that you might be committing in connection with it. The offence isn't with the child anyway, any more than a girl of fifteen having sex commits a crime: the crime is with license holder, householder or whomever.
My kids would be offered wine or champagne when it's around the place on special occasions, but not with an ordinary meal, and drink a small amount of it, and have done so since forever. I've not got into the whole wine-and-water thing, mostly because it gives a false impression of sensible amounts of wine to drink. The whole US thing where it's an actual offence to drink under a certain age strikes me as bizarre: I presume it's a holdover from Prohibition (how did that work out for you, again?)
I realise that. But the risk is smaller than a keylogger getting the password which alone provides access. I struggle to see the argument that it's not valid to use two factors because they could both be stolen, so it's better to use one. And realistically, and I realise this is a variation on security through obscurity, key loggers that look for id_dsa could be made harder by naming my key some_file_name.
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Knew what the adults wanted to hear, and were keen to please; and
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Knew that video nasties were cool, so wanted to appear cool to their peers and the adults.
The claim that 36% of children are meeting strangers they met online is prone to the same distortion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the number runs so counter to general experience that it must relate to a specific population, or have confounding factors. I'd be surprised if there were many communities in the UK, at least, where much more 36% of children simultaneously had access to computers and were allowed out unsupervised, which makes the number perhaps sixty percent of those with motive and opportunity. I'm sorry, I just don't believe that. ianUnfortunately, some parents use computers like they use TV, as mind-rotting babysitters, and some have this idea that myspace is teaching people `computer skills' or `the way the world is today' or somesuch nonsense. This is like claiming hanging around in shopping centres is teaching economics.
We will also presumably have teenagers on this thread telling us that their lives are, like, so over? if they couldn't, like, hang on myspace. But teens acting out pathetic dramas about the concerns of the day are hardly new, and it's the responsibility of parents to know better, not to acquiesce to everything their children want.
Lots of friends on myspace: worthless. Lots of friends in real life and decent A Levels: worthwhile. Parents are responsible for protecting their children, including from things their children don't want to be protected from.
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Vista doesn't get to pick its competition. In order to succeed it has to beat OSX 10.4.10 or 10.5.1 and XP SP2, because that what's the major audiences are comparing it with. Tiger's solid but unexciting, but iLife is in some ways a step up from most bundled applications in Windows land. Although I'm typing at a copy of Leopard, that's in some ways an easier target --- FIX MY BLUETOOTH, STEVE, I WANT MY MACHINE TO SLEEP WITHOUT HAVING TO BUY A USB MOUSE --- but Apple get a free pass because of the sublime industrial design and everyone loves iPods, right. (Yes, I know that in /. land they're lame and no match for a Nomad, but we're not the audience that any vendor cares about).
But XP SP2 is a hard target. For a lot of the market, it's the only OS they've used, so it *is* computing. The economy is tightening, and a 2GHz, 2GB, 200GB machine is enough for anyone who doesn't want high frame rate first person shooters or huge amounts of copyright-dubious downloads. The competition Vista faces isn't people buying XP SP2 machines, ebcause that's something Microsoft can control. The competition it faces is people not buying another machine, but just staying with the perfectly decent machine they already have. And the losses retailers have taken on huge inventories of PCs that they expected to sell on the back of Vista but are now unloading at firesale prices shows that's what's happening.
The acid test is the retail figures for the Christmas just gone, the first `holiday season' (as you Americans have it) where Vista has been in the market place. Does it look good? The only reason corporates are going to adopt Vista, which offers essentially nothing beyond pain and expense, is if users in their droves claim that it's the only thing they know and they can't work without out (a significant factor that kills corporate adoptions of non-MS desktops is user (un)familiarity). So the home market drives aspects of the corporate market.
And speaking as someone who runs the infrastructure and desktops for 1200 users, I've not had a single request, from a user or a manager, for Vista or Office 2007. Back when we bought laptops with XP but imaged them with a standard build of 2000 SPwhatever, we had the odd protest: we don't get a single squeak when we put XPSP2+Office2003 on newly bought machines.
So Vista's out there. It exists. There's no Wow!, no buzz: no one cares one way or another. XP SP2 works sufficiently well for most people that they have no reason to care if their machine isn't running the latest and greatest bits. For non-geeks, computing's plateau'd: we're now in a position where, like cars, new models are only of interest to obsessives and those who need a new car for other reasons.
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In that case, of course, no one ever claimed that Jews in New York were a poor sub-stratum. Given the problems confronted by the [insert PC word here] communities in Australia, however, if technology and funding is used for museum keeping, that seems decadent when the life expectancy is tens of years below the mean, alcoholism is rife and unemployment is sky-high. Let me guess: money from the tribes is being spent by white developers to produce an artefact for a museum mostly visited by whites.
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The turnover for mail is small: a lot of people have large, static archives. So just take a snapshot hourly, and retain those snapshots for a few days. It'll cost you 10, maybe twenty percent of your disk space, zero admin overhead and bail you out of all sorts of pain. Taking large mail spools to tape is incredibly hard, and even rsync will run forever over lots of small files in Cyrus-type environments, but surely to God no-one runs large enterprise datasets without snapshot capability?
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NetApps are commodity. ZFS is free. Bigger storage iron is a competitive marketplace with thin margins. Who on earth is doing production storage without modern data management facilities?
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IAN
And why is this a surprise? They can sell a couple of hundred tickets at a tenner each at a folk club once a year, times perhaps twenty or thirty dates. Most folk clubs are run on a shoestring, and an artist will get a substantial proportion of the door, but let's say it's only fifty percent. Twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year isn't a king's ransom, but it's a living wage, as their expenses are minimal. Throw in some CD sales, perhaps the odd song on a bigger artist's album (one of the guys I'm thinking of does session work for Nanci Griffith and has had a song of his on one of her albums), the occasional small festival: it's a living. They won't get rich, but they didn't ten or twenty years ago, and their ability to email their fans for free means they can sell tickets far more easily than twenty years ago, too.
Artists like this were always reliant on this model, and never sold records in quantity (you couldn't get them in shops), so it's hard to see how their position has changed. Artists who couldn't sell a few hundred tickets times twenty dates weren't selling records either, and for them it was strictly a hobby.
At the big end, someone like Springsteen doesn't give a stuff about record sales. Yes, he reputedly splits the take evenly with his band, but they're grossing something like three million pounds a night in stadiums, and can tour in those for months on end. Say they only get 33% of the gross, so a million a night split ten ways is a hundred thousand pounds. Times a sixty date tour. That's not poverty if they never saw another penny from record sales.
Thirty years ago, musicians toured to support record sales. Now records support tour sales. Markets change. They could always get a job in a shop if they don't like the lifestyle.
ian
I story I heard as to why OS/2 failed was that Microsoft would give anyone who could get 3 letters out of 4 right in the word `developer' full support. Compilers, API documentation, technical support, the whole nine yards. IBM, on the other hand, wanted $400 and proof that you were serious before you could have a development kit. As ever, it's the applications, stupid, and IBM's decision kept all the small companies off what was already shaping up to be a minority platform.
ian
You can look at the documentation for the Multics equivalent of ctime, date_time_ () at http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/date_time_.info. You get the basic timestamp with block_ () http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/doc/info_segments/clock_.info. I have a feeling that times were stored in the filesystem as 54 bit quantities (a word and a half), giving the same range but only quarter-second resolution, to save space, but I can't quickly find the documentation for that and I can't put my hand to any source code that would show it in use.
The ``no USB on wireless'' is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. But what is odd is the new wireless keyboard doesn't have a number pad or cursor keys or a full-size set of shifts and modifiers: it's a laptop layout. I had a white sloping wired keyboard on my desk at work, and I had the Bluetooth variant at home: same keyboard, modulo the USB ports and (obviously) the wire. When I got a new iMac for home I unthinkingly checked the wireless option, and I shocked to find that the keyboard was a sawn-off one. But my daughter grabbed it for her (space-limited) desk to use with her Mini, and I went and bought a corded one. Which has the handy USB ports, which the iMac doesn't while the Mini it's replacing did. So in the end, all was well. Odd, though.
It suits the purposes of the powerful to encourage the idea that education need not contain true education: you can rest assured that Eton or (fill in for-money US school of the rich and powerful) aren't neglecting reading in favour of Excel, aren't `on the one hand, on the other hand'ing about science and aren't pretending that OK magazine is as valuable a text as Hamlet. You won't do media studies or psychology or business studies or any of the non-A Levels there, either: you'll be Maths, Physics, Chemistry and maybe Biology on the one hand, or English, French, History and something else on the other. You'll not do Tourism at the University of Luton, you'll do PPE at Oxford.
For as long as the disempowered think the it's in _their_ interests for education to be reduced to training, the children of the rich and powerful are rendered even more successful. My wife has a cousin at Westminster School: his education has been unchanged for fifty years, and computers are seen as low-status tools for the dim. Will he find that not being able to use the more obscure features of Office 2003 is a handicap, with a Westminster education and a degree from Oxford, Cambrdige or Durham? I rather think not.
When I was at school in the seventies, the bright kids got an education. The less bright girls learnt to type, because there would always be work for copy typists, and the less bright boys learnt to use a lathe, because here in Birmingham (England, not Alabama) there would always be work in the car industry.
I wonder how that's working out? I was taught transferrable skills, like how to learn, and thirty years later I'm still learning. Meanwhile, there's no car industry and copy typing, shorthand and the rest may as well be candle making for all the traction they have.
I don't know what software my children will use in the workplace in ten or twenty years' time, and if I did I'd be making a fortune producing it. I don't know what JOBS they'll be doing in ten or twenty years time, perhaps (indeed probably) in a very different landscape to where we are now. What I do know is that flexibility, adaptability, the ability to learn and reskill and change, are going to be vital in a world where the linear career is dead. And that's why the best thing you can learn is how to learn.
So as a matter of policy, whatever software the kids are using at school, we use something else at home. School right now is Office 2003 on XP, so home is iWork '08 on Mac. Spreadsheet problems I show them how to do by hand, and I'm about to start showing them how to knock up code to do it (and I'm choosing a language they're highly unlikely to use in school: I'm torn between Scheme and Processing). We did a poster project with Keynote, but also with a razor blade and cowgum.
You can teach your children ``the workplace'' if you like. I think you Americans call those sorts of lessons ``shop''. Someone who has a good degree in a pure science or a legitimate humanity can learn to use Word to a sufficient standard in a morning. Someone who knows Word, but can't use a library or do calculus, is welcome to try learning those in a morning. How many successful authors can touch type, and how many just did hunt and peck? Same principle.
How did Brunel build the Great Western without the help of Office? Which was more important: using Office, or being a great engineer?
And before anyone makes the point, I realise these aren't binary, black/white choices. But in terms of mentality, they are: do you regard education as about learning the direct skills of today, or the ability to learn the skills of tomorrow? There's a word for people with the first sort of education, or indeed training, and the word is `poor'.
ian
My kids would be offered wine or champagne when it's around the place on special occasions, but not with an ordinary meal, and drink a small amount of it, and have done so since forever. I've not got into the whole wine-and-water thing, mostly because it gives a false impression of sensible amounts of wine to drink. The whole US thing where it's an actual offence to drink under a certain age strikes me as bizarre: I presume it's a holdover from Prohibition (how did that work out for you, again?)
I realise that. But the risk is smaller than a keylogger getting the password which alone provides access. I struggle to see the argument that it's not valid to use two factors because they could both be stolen, so it's better to use one. And realistically, and I realise this is a variation on security through obscurity, key loggers that look for id_dsa could be made harder by naming my key some_file_name.