They'll add the option to switch from Metro to "Win7 mode" to the inevitable Service Packs, or Windows 8 will just be another Vista. I really can't see enterprise-level usage of Metro on the desktop.
Honestly, I'm in the market for just a plain 1:1 ripoff of win7's interface. It's minimalistic, flows well and allows me to get shit done. That is all.
My wife and I picked up a pair of identical Toshiba notebooks last year, preloaded (of course) with Windows 7. Our old machines were just that, old (7 and 8 years, respectively). Windows 7 was attractive and functional, a great step up from XP (her OS) and a lot prettier than XFCE (my preferred desktop on my ancient Dell).
What I found lacking in Win7 was virtual desktops. I had been using them for 11 years with CDE on Solaris (at work) and various flavors of Linux with Gnome, XFCE or KDE (at home), and I find virtual desktops incredibly helpful. Virtual desktops make my life easier. It seems like Microsoft should have been able to implement them by now.
Anyway, within a month I had installed Linux Mint 12 with KDE on my new notebook. I had virtual desktops back. It still bugs me, when I have occasion to use my wife's machine, that there is only one desktop in Windows.
XFCE will be the default for the CD iso only. Gnome will be on the DVD. And this is a good thing; any machine that only has a CD drive and can't read DVD's (like my ancient Dell Inspiron 1100, that I only keep around for emergencies) probably would not perform well with a heavy DE like Gnome. I settled on XFCE for that machine because Gnome3 was a serious PITA for me. I use KDE on my much newer and much more powerful quad-core laptop.
Bear in mind, the XFCE decision is not, AFAIK, set in stone yet. There's still discussion going on about it.
Odd. I rarely have trouble with inductive sensors when riding a bicycle, so long as the traffic allows me to ride over the sensor loops. They will usually trip even though my bike has an aluminum frame.
Try riding along one side of the loop. That extends your time within the sensor's effective range. I have found that technique necessary in particular intersections.
Note to city planners: you can put those sensor loops in paved bike trails too, so it is safer to cross intersecting streets. It's been done in Tallahassee and probably other places as well.
Back around 2003, I bought an HP mini-tower for gaming (I was using Mandrake Linux on my other tower and my laptop). There was some crapware, to be sure, but what really upset me was the fact that the HD was 48% fragmented on first boot! Easy to fix, but your average luser would just complain about how slow their new box was. The disk should never have left the factory in that condition.
Nevertheless I would gladly buy another HP. Right now I have a Dell laptop that my dad gave me because it was getting old and had always been slow. I added 512MB of memory (proprietary and hard to find - thanks Dell!) for $30 and now it is pretty snappy for a six-year-old dinosaur.
I would never buy a Dell, though. Too many idiosyncrasies and outright failures encountered over the years - from the DOS days to the present - from both user and IT points of view.
We had a hard drive go south in a Dell box at work a few years ago. The box was less than 6 months old, and the guy using it needed it constantly for his job (CAD).
Dell wouldn't send a replacement HD until they received the bad drive, and they were adamant that the problem probably wasn't in the drive anyway. ("Unable to find boot device" sounds a lot like a bad drive to me.)
Mind you, we were buying Dells by the truckload at the time, so it's not like we were unknown to them.
I was already skeptical of Dell - they had a history of "strange quirks," much like old Compaqs - and after the HD debacle I was convinced that no Dell product would ever cross my doorstep.
Yes, it's solder mask ReK was thinking of (though soldermask used to be applied via a silkscreening process). The "silkscreen" is the text applied to the board: reference designators ("J2", "C25", etc.), PCB part numbers, company names, et. al.
Regarding mlyle's comments about solder mask: production quality has improved greatly over the past decade. The unmasked areas are getting progressively smaller as the board manufacturers' ability to meet tight tolerances improves. It is now common for the gap between the mask and the exposed pads to be.005" or less.
Another post suggested the application of conformal coating to the board. This would work, but the folks in production - who build and test the boards - really don't like to do that. For those who don't know what conformal coat is, it's a plastic-like coating that is applied (in liquid form) to a circuit board. Once it is cured, it provides a relatively effective barrier to moisture, oxygen and corrosive pollutants.
It adds cost to the product, though, for several reasons: price of the coating material, man-hours spent masking areas not to be coated, applying the coating, sending it to cure, retrieving the cured boards, as well as added time spent repairing boards with faulty components found in the final board tests.
Personally, I support conformal coating boards - but then I'm a circuit board designer. The only work it adds for me is the addition of a note or two on the fabrication specs.
About 7 years ago I had a short stint as a "tech support" guy. I had been hired to *use* the software, but I also had to support it.
Now, this was engineering software - so most of the callers weren't fools. Sometimes their boss would make the call; usually you end up with a fool at that point.
When you've had the privilege of having knowledgeable clients, you find that you can even learn from them.
It's the idiots that are the problem. There certainly are enough of them out there.
But I do know a *gorgeous* female programmer. Unfortunately she's already married. Love to watch her take those walks around the parking lot while I'm on a smoke break, though. Mmmm... long hair and nice body... (drool)
After many years "underground," the spirit of William Randolph Hearst appeared today to file suit against "MandrakeSoft," citing copyright infringement and loss of income.
Hearst's ghost proclaimed, "how am I supposed to support myself in the afterlife, in the manner to which I have become accustomed, with comic-strip seekers being needlessly diverted to operating system software? I have residuals to think about! This is almost as bad as that communist Orson Welles' attempt to smear me with that hack film he made."
Hearst's current landlord, one Mr. Satan (not to be confused with the hockey player of the same name), declined to comment on the allegations.
Love your sig. I actually had to explain to my ex-wife once that I was late responding to her email because my spam filter had snagged it (true), probably because of all the swearing.
In all fairness, she was upset about a doctor bill for one of the kids that hadn't been covered by my insurance. I would have been swearing too.
What was Windows doing that Mac wasn't? Selling the software without requiring proprietary hardware, that's what.
That single marketing decision made the difference. Macs are overpriced, and always have been. Yes, they are stable. Yes, they do what they do very well - but they are out of the price range of many individuals, and when a corporation is looking at the purchase of dozens, hundreds or thousands of computers, the added cost becomes very important.
Further, while the graphics and desktop publishing arenas are well represented on the Mac platform, CAD is not. Autodesk doesn't support Mac anymore, and there are no decent EDA packages for the MAC. Pro/E isn't available for Mac either.
I'd rather use *nix than Windows, but I personally have no use for Macs. More power to those who do, but Apple dug its own hole when it refused to license the software to OEM hardware manufacturers.
I take Greyhound if at all possible. It takes a little longer, the crowd is a bit different (to put it lightly), but there are no latex-glove wearing idiots inspecting by shoes and asking "did you put these insoles in yourself?" "What are odor... eaters?"
Fortunately my kids recently moved to within a couple hundred miles of my home. Now I have no reason to fly on a regular basis. A few hours on a bus beats the aggravation of an airport terminal and the potential theft of my goods from my checked baggage.
I had my PDA and digital camera stolen from my checked baggage during a short 200 mile domestic flight in the USA. The airline refused to reimburse me for the loss.
Nothing of any value goes in my checked baggage anymore. Nothing! If possible, I don't check any bags at all.
A significant percentage of the U.S. jobs exported - whether computer programming, PCB design, manufacturing, etc. - have been from the lower paid sector.
Not all U.S. programmers are overpaid, at least by U.S. standards. A great many are, in fact, underpaid by U.S. standards, yet continue to lose their jobs to outsourcing.
The problem is greed. The greed of management. I know this from personal experience; a company I worked for in NY State opened a manufacturing center in mainland China. The workers in manufacturing here in the U.S. facility were understandably concerned for the security of their jobs. The management, most of whom the production workers saw in person on a daily basis, assured everyone that "only product to be sold overseas will be manufactured in China."
Within two years, nearly all of the 200 manufacturing positions in N.Y. State were transferred to China. R&D, design and sales remained in the U.S., but almost 200 people lost their jobs. These people earned an average of about US$9.50/hour. Overpaid? On a global scale, perhaps. On a U.S. scale? They were barely surviving. And, living in Upstate N.Y., many of them had a very hard time finding work of any kind after they were let go.
At the company I speak of, nobody is overpaid, except the highest executives. Even the programmers are getting only $30K to $45K, but only if they have been there for 15 years or so.
This company may not be what you read about regularly, but it isn't all that unusual either.
When I left that firm I wasn't very happy about it, but it was necessary; once I committed to moving around the country every few months, I found that I could make a living wage. It's too bad that it is so hard to earn a decent paycheck and have a sense of security simultaneously these days.
Just the two, left and right, but they still sound better than most anything OEM I've heard in years.
Oldest software? Some DOS programs I wrote myself to hack up Mentor Graphics CAM output files back in 1991. They still do the job (recompiled for 32-bit, without a single change in the code).
The ambient temperature is slightly lower under the desk (at least it is under my desk at home - 6 foot conference table, tubular legs) because of the marginally lower altitude within the indoor environment, also because of the greater distance from the ambient heat from the monitor. During most of the year, particularly the winter months, the temperature is significantly lower at floor level, at least at my house (slab foundation, ceramic tile floor, no carpet or rug).
The downside to this situation, of course, is an increased level of dust and/or pet dander. Regular maintenance can control these problems.
While this might seem to minimize the aesthetic benefit of a "pretty case," that isn't necessarily so; what's really unattractive (in my room at least) are the numerous stacks of O'Reilly books, VHS tapes, DVDs and Dr. Dobb's Journal magazines, plus the 20 or so speakers, 4 subwoofers and the three 19" monitors. Oh, and the whiteboard on the wall, covered with multicolored scrawlings. Did I mention the old bedsheets used as window curtains? Those velcro cable ties from CaseLogic make great curtain tiebacks!
A nice-looking PC tower might help to distract (albeit only slightly) from the rest of the unholy mess.
Thank goodness for OpenGL screensavers! A bit of psychedelic culture in my hopelessly geeky life!
I don't know, I'd like to get one of those "AlienWare" cases. AS it is I bought an Antec for my last homegrown, and put a "Linux Inside" logo on it.
The XSpider looks pretty cool, though, as long as I can get it in MegaTower form for all the extra stuff I usually end up cramming into a case. Don't like the "two fan" thing, though. I have two fans now (plus the power supply fan, of course) and am seriously thinking about a third. Those high-end graphics cards may have their own fans, but you still need to move the air. The option for a third fan in MegaTower configuration would be nice. Bottom front, bottom back, and top back, I guess. But then there's a new mobo configuration coming out, so that may have to change...
There are also plenty of US businesses operating in China
Yes, many of them employing Chinese citizens to do jobs that used to be performed by American citizens on American soil. Many of my friends were "displaced" in exactly this manner, within two years of having been assured by our employer that none of our jobs would be moved overseas. In fact, the entire manufacturing operation was moved to mainland China within the final six months of that two-year period. Only the engineering, R&D, sales and upper management remained in the US.
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They'll add the option to switch from Metro to "Win7 mode" to the inevitable Service Packs, or Windows 8 will just be another Vista. I really can't see enterprise-level usage of Metro on the desktop.
Honestly, I'm in the market for just a plain 1:1 ripoff of win7's interface. It's minimalistic, flows well and allows me to get shit done. That is all.
My wife and I picked up a pair of identical Toshiba notebooks last year, preloaded (of course) with Windows 7. Our old machines were just that, old (7 and 8 years, respectively). Windows 7 was attractive and functional, a great step up from XP (her OS) and a lot prettier than XFCE (my preferred desktop on my ancient Dell).
What I found lacking in Win7 was virtual desktops. I had been using them for 11 years with CDE on Solaris (at work) and various flavors of Linux with Gnome, XFCE or KDE (at home), and I find virtual desktops incredibly helpful. Virtual desktops make my life easier. It seems like Microsoft should have been able to implement them by now.
Anyway, within a month I had installed Linux Mint 12 with KDE on my new notebook. I had virtual desktops back. It still bugs me, when I have occasion to use my wife's machine, that there is only one desktop in Windows.
XFCE will be the default for the CD iso only. Gnome will be on the DVD. And this is a good thing; any machine that only has a CD drive and can't read DVD's (like my ancient Dell Inspiron 1100, that I only keep around for emergencies) probably would not perform well with a heavy DE like Gnome. I settled on XFCE for that machine because Gnome3 was a serious PITA for me. I use KDE on my much newer and much more powerful quad-core laptop.
Bear in mind, the XFCE decision is not, AFAIK, set in stone yet. There's still discussion going on about it.
Last fall I bought a Toshiba L755D. It has the best keyboard I've ever used on a laptop, including a full numeric keypad. No complaints whatsoever.
Odd. I rarely have trouble with inductive sensors when riding a bicycle, so long as the traffic allows me to ride over the sensor loops. They will usually trip even though my bike has an aluminum frame.
Try riding along one side of the loop. That extends your time within the sensor's effective range. I have found that technique necessary in particular intersections.
Note to city planners: you can put those sensor loops in paved bike trails too, so it is safer to cross intersecting streets. It's been done in Tallahassee and probably other places as well.
Back around 2003, I bought an HP mini-tower for gaming (I was using Mandrake Linux on my other tower and my laptop). There was some crapware, to be sure, but what really upset me was the fact that the HD was 48% fragmented on first boot! Easy to fix, but your average luser would just complain about how slow their new box was. The disk should never have left the factory in that condition.
Nevertheless I would gladly buy another HP. Right now I have a Dell laptop that my dad gave me because it was getting old and had always been slow. I added 512MB of memory (proprietary and hard to find - thanks Dell!) for $30 and now it is pretty snappy for a six-year-old dinosaur.
I would never buy a Dell, though. Too many idiosyncrasies and outright failures encountered over the years - from the DOS days to the present - from both user and IT points of view.
I once had my PDA and digital camera stolen from my "safely" checked baggage. Thank God I took my laptop on board as a carry-on.
We had a hard drive go south in a Dell box at work a few years ago. The box was less than 6 months old, and the guy using it needed it constantly for his job (CAD).
Dell wouldn't send a replacement HD until they received the bad drive, and they were adamant that the problem probably wasn't in the drive anyway. ("Unable to find boot device" sounds a lot like a bad drive to me.)
Mind you, we were buying Dells by the truckload at the time, so it's not like we were unknown to them.
I was already skeptical of Dell - they had a history of "strange quirks," much like old Compaqs - and after the HD debacle I was convinced that no Dell product would ever cross my doorstep.
Yes, it's solder mask ReK was thinking of (though soldermask used to be applied via a silkscreening process). The "silkscreen" is the text applied to the board: reference designators ("J2", "C25", etc.), PCB part numbers, company names, et. al.
.005" or less.
Regarding mlyle's comments about solder mask: production quality has improved greatly over the past decade. The unmasked areas are getting progressively smaller as the board manufacturers' ability to meet tight tolerances improves. It is now common for the gap between the mask and the exposed pads to be
Another post suggested the application of conformal coating to the board. This would work, but the folks in production - who build and test the boards - really don't like to do that. For those who don't know what conformal coat is, it's a plastic-like coating that is applied (in liquid form) to a circuit board. Once it is cured, it provides a relatively effective barrier to moisture, oxygen and corrosive pollutants.
It adds cost to the product, though, for several reasons: price of the coating material, man-hours spent masking areas not to be coated, applying the coating, sending it to cure, retrieving the cured boards, as well as added time spent repairing boards with faulty components found in the final board tests.
Personally, I support conformal coating boards - but then I'm a circuit board designer. The only work it adds for me is the addition of a note or two on the fabrication specs.
You would recommend Microsoft Bob?! I guess it does run smoothly on a 486 with only 8 MB of RAM....
Yeah, but you should see how Bob screams when you recompile him for Linux!
About 7 years ago I had a short stint as a "tech support" guy. I had been hired to *use* the software, but I also had to support it.
Now, this was engineering software - so most of the callers weren't fools. Sometimes their boss would make the call; usually you end up with a fool at that point.
When you've had the privilege of having knowledgeable clients, you find that you can even learn from them.
It's the idiots that are the problem. There certainly are enough of them out there.
Naturally polluted? Thats an edumacated statement.
It's a perfectly cromulent phrase!
But I do know a *gorgeous* female programmer. Unfortunately she's already married. Love to watch her take those walks around the parking lot while I'm on a smoke break, though. Mmmm ... long hair and nice body ... (drool)
Damn, I knew something looked familiar ...
After many years "underground," the spirit of William Randolph Hearst appeared today to file suit against "MandrakeSoft," citing copyright infringement and loss of income.
Hearst's ghost proclaimed, "how am I supposed to support myself in the afterlife, in the manner to which I have become accustomed, with comic-strip seekers being needlessly diverted to operating system software? I have residuals to think about! This is almost as bad as that communist Orson Welles' attempt to smear me with that hack film he made."
Hearst's current landlord, one Mr. Satan (not to be confused with the hockey player of the same name), declined to comment on the allegations.
Totally off-topic, but:
Love your sig. I actually had to explain to my ex-wife once that I was late responding to her email because my spam filter had snagged it (true), probably because of all the swearing.
In all fairness, she was upset about a doctor bill for one of the kids that hadn't been covered by my insurance. I would have been swearing too.
Palm also introduced the Grafiti writing system, which actually recognized what you wrote. A significant advantage.
Apple still doesn't sell PDAs, at least since the Newton tanked. Palm does.
What was Windows doing that Mac wasn't? Selling the software without requiring proprietary hardware, that's what.
That single marketing decision made the difference. Macs are overpriced, and always have been. Yes, they are stable. Yes, they do what they do very well - but they are out of the price range of many individuals, and when a corporation is looking at the purchase of dozens, hundreds or thousands of computers, the added cost becomes very important.
Further, while the graphics and desktop publishing arenas are well represented on the Mac platform, CAD is not. Autodesk doesn't support Mac anymore, and there are no decent EDA packages for the MAC. Pro/E isn't available for Mac either.
I'd rather use *nix than Windows, but I personally have no use for Macs. More power to those who do, but Apple dug its own hole when it refused to license the software to OEM hardware manufacturers.
I take Greyhound if at all possible. It takes a little longer, the crowd is a bit different (to put it lightly), but there are no latex-glove wearing idiots inspecting by shoes and asking "did you put these insoles in yourself?" "What are odor ... eaters?"
Fortunately my kids recently moved to within a couple hundred miles of my home. Now I have no reason to fly on a regular basis. A few hours on a bus beats the aggravation of an airport terminal and the potential theft of my goods from my checked baggage.
I had my PDA and digital camera stolen from my checked baggage during a short 200 mile domestic flight in the USA. The airline refused to reimburse me for the loss. Nothing of any value goes in my checked baggage anymore. Nothing! If possible, I don't check any bags at all.
Nice supposition, but a bit broadly expressed.
A significant percentage of the U.S. jobs exported - whether computer programming, PCB design, manufacturing, etc. - have been from the lower paid sector.
Not all U.S. programmers are overpaid, at least by U.S. standards. A great many are, in fact, underpaid by U.S. standards, yet continue to lose their jobs to outsourcing.
The problem is greed. The greed of management. I know this from personal experience; a company I worked for in NY State opened a manufacturing center in mainland China. The workers in manufacturing here in the U.S. facility were understandably concerned for the security of their jobs. The management, most of whom the production workers saw in person on a daily basis, assured everyone that "only product to be sold overseas will be manufactured in China."
Within two years, nearly all of the 200 manufacturing positions in N.Y. State were transferred to China. R&D, design and sales remained in the U.S., but almost 200 people lost their jobs. These people earned an average of about US$9.50/hour. Overpaid? On a global scale, perhaps. On a U.S. scale? They were barely surviving. And, living in Upstate N.Y., many of them had a very hard time finding work of any kind after they were let go.
At the company I speak of, nobody is overpaid, except the highest executives. Even the programmers are getting only $30K to $45K, but only if they have been there for 15 years or so.
This company may not be what you read about regularly, but it isn't all that unusual either.
When I left that firm I wasn't very happy about it, but it was necessary; once I committed to moving around the country every few months, I found that I could make a living wage. It's too bad that it is so hard to earn a decent paycheck and have a sense of security simultaneously these days.
Just the two, left and right, but they still sound better than most anything OEM I've heard in years.
Oldest software? Some DOS programs I wrote myself to hack up Mentor Graphics CAM output files back in 1991. They still do the job (recompiled for 32-bit, without a single change in the code).
The ambient temperature is slightly lower under the desk (at least it is under my desk at home - 6 foot conference table, tubular legs) because of the marginally lower altitude within the indoor environment, also because of the greater distance from the ambient heat from the monitor. During most of the year, particularly the winter months, the temperature is significantly lower at floor level, at least at my house (slab foundation, ceramic tile floor, no carpet or rug).
The downside to this situation, of course, is an increased level of dust and/or pet dander. Regular maintenance can control these problems.
While this might seem to minimize the aesthetic benefit of a "pretty case," that isn't necessarily so; what's really unattractive (in my room at least) are the numerous stacks of O'Reilly books, VHS tapes, DVDs and Dr. Dobb's Journal magazines, plus the 20 or so speakers, 4 subwoofers and the three 19" monitors. Oh, and the whiteboard on the wall, covered with multicolored scrawlings. Did I mention the old bedsheets used as window curtains? Those velcro cable ties from CaseLogic make great curtain tiebacks!
A nice-looking PC tower might help to distract (albeit only slightly) from the rest of the unholy mess.
Thank goodness for OpenGL screensavers! A bit of psychedelic culture in my hopelessly geeky life!
I don't know, I'd like to get one of those "AlienWare" cases. AS it is I bought an Antec for my last homegrown, and put a "Linux Inside" logo on it.
...
The XSpider looks pretty cool, though, as long as I can get it in MegaTower form for all the extra stuff I usually end up cramming into a case. Don't like the "two fan" thing, though. I have two fans now (plus the power supply fan, of course) and am seriously thinking about a third. Those high-end graphics cards may have their own fans, but you still need to move the air. The option for a third fan in MegaTower configuration would be nice. Bottom front, bottom back, and top back, I guess. But then there's a new mobo configuration coming out, so that may have to change
There are also plenty of US businesses operating in China
Yes, many of them employing Chinese citizens to do jobs that used to be performed by American citizens on American soil. Many of my friends were "displaced" in exactly this manner, within two years of having been assured by our employer that none of our jobs would be moved overseas. In fact, the entire manufacturing operation was moved to mainland China within the final six months of that two-year period. Only the engineering, R&D, sales and upper management remained in the US.