do you think it will last? Is Windows picking up momentum or is Unix losing momentum?
The figures don't actually address install bases, they don't even address the number of MS Windows server sold. They address the money spent on servers that come with MS Windows.
No mention is made regarding possible contributing factors:
MS Windows servers may be more expensive -> more money spent
MS Windows servers may be less efficient -> more money spent
It may be faster/cheaper/easier to just knuckle under and get a server with MS Windows and then install something else (e.g. Linux) -> more money spent
I wonder what the real reason this report was published. Maybe there's a minimum daily quota of MS articles to drown out stuff like Linux on the Intel-based Macs or articles on Vista on Linux.
Or maybe it's the trouble MS is having with the EC, that they'd like to hide in a cloud of smoke.
Imagine the cockroaches that are going to crawl out when those documents hit the court. Presuming of course that those documents haven't been lost, shredded or otherwise just become unavailable.
There were some interesting analyses a while back going into detail about how MS is able to effectively destroy evidence. It involves tricks with a retention policy specifying a document life span shorter than needed to carry out a delayed document request. Some bizarre naming or routing scheme ensures that those without insider information get routed to the wrong deptartment, so by the time the request gets to the right people, the documents are long gone.
While I can't comment on whether that is or isn't technically illegal, it does show bad faith, contempt for the laws of the country (and by extension for the country itself), and a lack of ethics. But we knew those last parts already.
MS relies heavily on delay tactics anyway, so this method for destruction of evidence supplments them.
If you do decide to go for this laptop insanity afterall, please please please move to the Open Office format for all documents. It is bad enough to pay what is essentially a $900 lab fee every 2 years, but to pay a $250 Microsoft Office fee is just too much. Student license fees aren't as bad as full retail prices but free is the best price of all.
You also get a lot more flexibility from OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org runs on legacy systems like MS Windows as well as most any other system. So, if you decide to move on, either for good or for just specific tasks or projects, you'll have the same program regardless of the platform.
The format, OpenDocument, also increases flexibility in that you can more easily exchange documents with users of other packages, or parse and make a searchable index of your work. If you later on decide to switch office software, you probably won't have to convert the files. Even MS is free to implement OpenDocument, though don't hold your breath -- the tricky bit there is if the new versions of MS Office really can handle arbitrary XML documents. If so then OpenDocument works. If not, then MS was just yanking your chain and you can add that feature to the long list of promised-but-not implemented features like WinFS.
Most obvious problem is that unlike a bike (even cheap ones get stolen), where you just walk to class when it gets stolen, you might as well not bother going to class if your laptop gets stolen. Not only have they lost the cost of the laptop, it is trivial compared to the cost of all their research, collected materials, and work stored on that precious hard-drive.
And if it fails and has to be sent back for repair, you might as well drop out for that semester. Maybe it'll be gone for only days, or maybe it'll take over four weeks. I've had both.
Laptops are fine within their limits, but some activities are really done better with a more powerful CPU or larger screen(s). LTSP or something similar can be used to offload much of the processing but there's little that can be done about the screen size.
Moreover, since laptops can be used just about anywhere, they probably will be. That is fine if people exercise moderation, common sense adn, above all good ergonomics. However, most places you see people prevent good ergonomics and the size/shape of the laptop hinder it, espcially the keyboard.
So, expect to see in the third year lots of lumbar injuries, neck strain, wrist problems and acid reflux or other digestive problems.
How is an image search substantially different than a text search?
They are displaying the entire copyrighted work not an excerpt.
You're missing some basic concepts there. A thumbnail is by definition an excerpt. If you don't believe me, check for yourself:
Check the number of bytes in your original image and compare it to your thumbnail.
Check the number of pixels (height x width) in your original image and compare it to your thumbnail.
You'll find that the numbers are not even close by even an order of magnitude, the size (in pixels) diminishes geometrically. That's not even counting trimming back color channels or even the number of colors per channel.
Dimensions # pixels
150 200 30k
300 400 120k
600 800 480k
1200 1600 1920k
The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it.
Or selectively deleting it. Either way it is possible rewrite history with a few key omissions or abiguities here and there. It's not necessarily the intelligence agencies, more like orders from within the current regime itself.
Epstein made four observations. The first was that the Apple Switch ad campaign was over, and nobody switched.
Bullshit. How then does Epstein account for the massive sales of iBooks and PowerBooks?
As far as anecdotal evidence, I know of a whole department that switched.
I can also count around a dozen 'Windows-is-just-fine-for-me' individuals and one small business (not mine) that switched as a result of either them or their peers borrowing a spare iBook.
I can also think of several dozen acquaintances, collegues or former co-workers who used to run some Wintel-based notebook, but now run one from Apple. It's not evenly distributed. MBAs, for example, won't touch anything not annointed by their esteemed Chairman Gates. So if you go to a café with too many MBAs, you'll still see mostly Wintel. Other places, especially high tech conferences, you'll see many or mostly Macs. YMMV.
It seems to me that what Oracle is doing is not to try and take over or squash MySQL but rather to buy some more time.
I agree that Oracle is just looking to keep the heat off for a bit. But what it does when that time runs out is another question.
Larry Ellison is a very successful strategist, but also most unfortunately he is one of those people that tries to shoehorn his entire view of the universe into a zero sum gain model. The zero sum gain model, a religion among some MBAs, is the believe that theire are either winners or losers and win-win is unthinkable. Larry has demonstrated time and again that it's not enough for him to 'win', everyone else must 'lose' or things are not complete for him.
Maybe Oracle, will 'get it'. I hope it does and if it follows IBM's example, then things could look quite good for both MySQL AB and Oracle.
Not ready? The US Forces that have been sent to Afghanistan and Iraq by this administration are the best equipped, most heavily armored, and most "ready" troops that this country has ever had.
Ready and "ready".
Yes, they are well equiped and heavily armored. However, Rumsfeld pushed the invasion of Iraq before the troops were in place. In that context, despite the training and equipment, they were not ready. The reason being that initial plans had involved using Turkey as a base, however in exchange Turkey planned to extend its ethnic cleansing of Kurds into northern Iraq. There were probably some other factors, but the short of it was that all those units had to be moved down to the south of Iraq, while travelling via sea and/or avoiding the airspace of certina countries. That takes time.
And not waiting for them to get in place, Rumsfeld guaranteed that the sides and back of the column from the sea to Bagdad would be under protected. And that the units in Bagdad would not be sufficient to maintain order. You don't need so many troops to do that, but you do need some. Once chaos and looting starts, it's very hard to restore order even with a large number of troops. It will take more than troops to restore the damage. For example, so much copper wiring was stripped from houses and the electrical grid, that it put a dip in world copper prices. All that, and more, has to be put back.
One can also consider that there was some opportunism involved and some interests involved planned on benefiting from a little chaos, politics or smuggling antiquities, but it got more out of hand than anticipated. And all because things were not ready.
Quickbooks is the sole reason I have any sort of windows install whatsoever to run my business and it's run via VMware on my laptop which is running Gentoo as it's sole OS
I assume you've already written to Intuit and asked about their timeline for porting Quickbooks to Linux.
Quickbooks is available for OS X, which is basically BSD. From there it's a much smaller step to port to any of the Linux distros. So unless you're really holding out for a Linux port, you can ditch your last MS-Windows install, even if it is VmWare.
Taking it a step further, Mac-on-Linux should allow you to have both Quickbooks and Linux at the same time... today.
There's more to embedded operating systems than just Linux. QNX and BSD come to mind first. There are actually very many including Symbian, Virtuoso, VxWorks, Tron and dozens of others. Even MS tries to make one, called WinCE, though unlike the others it's only used only rarely and even then only for the humor value.
Saturate, diffuse and confuse is the natural political extension of the old technical strategy of embrace, extend, and extinguish. MS has transitioned from being a software company in the early 80's to being an operating system company in the late 80's to being a marketing company in the early 90's to being a lobbying company in the late 90's to its current incarnation as a political / ideological movement. It's only natural that it's new strategies will match the needs of a movement and focus more on psyops than technology.
Odds are the overlap is probably on purpose. Here's a sample:
IANAM (I am not a mathematician) but I recall the terms 'set theory' and 'boundary theory' being used by mathematics researchers when they were talking about search engines and ranking / grouping the results.
Regarding the US Navy warships,
1. Newport News Shipbuilding is awarded a contract for the first of the new "Ronald Reagan" class of aircraft carriers.
2. Bill Gates gets out his check book and instantly becomes the second largest stockholder (owner) in Newport News Shipbuilding.
3. Newport News Shipbuilding selects Microsoft to develop the warfare systems. Microsoft, a company with no experience in warfare systems, and a reputation for unstable, insecure software, will base the Ronald Reagan's warfare systems on an unproven operating system with 63,000 known bugs . . err, oops, I meant "points of focus" - Windows 2000.
4. Press releases were sent out assuring us Bill Gates' huge investment had nothing to do with the decision. So see there, Doreen - what we did last month had nothing to do with your pregnancy - it's right here in my press release.
5. Once Newport News is in too deep to bail out, Bill Gates will be free to sell his stock holdings and use the money to make sure some other company makes the "right" decision.
group think is definitely a factor, but there is also Chairman Gates' investments to think of .
Along the same lines, back before The Register got all soft on Gates, the posted his major purchase. Actually it was made by his investment firm, such firms being almost textbook examples of group think, it was the deciding piece in realizing the US would soon enter protracted war. Such stocks are only 'undervalued' if prolonged war is planned. It's not like a shipyard can just squeeze out a carrier or two per quarter.
Too bad, as it was a good way to accept international eBay auction payments without PayPal fees or having to go to a Western Union outlet to collect the money...
What surprised me about beta 1 was that they hadn't even finished implementing features that were already on the final product's feature list.
In that case the product has not even reached beta stage yet. You know, the stage where everything is actually implemented and you're just hammering on it to verify that it does what it was supposed to in the way it was supposed to. Using the non-MS definition of beta, I'm not so sure many of MS' products have even reached beta. Certainly, none have passed.
The official ballot has to remain tangible, because it makes a chain of custody possible. That means paper (or punched metal, or whatever). Electronic ballots are subject to a range of tomfoolery that make the process unsuitable for chain of custody, recounts, and the all-important public trust.
Then the electronic ballots are only a disadvantage and extra work. An all-paper / only-paper model sounds more practical.
The electronic ballots get counted first, naturally, and sent in. That makes getting unofficial results very quick, suitable for our instant gratification-based world. But the official count is done, by hand or machine, with the paper ballots which were printed out and (presumably) were individually verified by the voter.
Exit polls take care of getting the unofficial results. Or at least they have in all elections except the last one...
Again, if the electronic tallies are not sound, then they are a waste of resources to set up and maintain. There are ways to mess with a paper ballot election, but we should go back to paper-only until Diebold and company are out of the way.
The message from Microsoft: Never visit your grandma without your 512MB flash stick full of patches and antispyware progs.
Be kind to her and just cough up for a Mac mini or something. It will take a heck of a lot of stress and worry out of being online for her.
Or just upgrade that crappy old Wintel to Ubuntu, or another distro provided you can trick it out for her. Get everything set up and neither of you will have to worry.
Then you can spend you visits being with your Grandma rather than with her computer. Odds are she only wants a computer to check/send e-mail, maybe write and print a letter, trade digital photos and listen to music. None of that requires MS Windows and all of is far easier to do on OS X (you know it is, just admit it) or even on a highly tuned desktop like Ubuntu (you know that, too). She won't love you any less when her computer no longer needs fixing. You'll get more good will drinking coffee (or harder) with her than from an age of MS Windows repairs.
Saab and Volvo don't exist anymore, at least not in the context you were thinking of. GM bought Saab. Ford bought Volvo. Cue cut backs in R&D, followed by cut backs in production, followed by offshoring remaining production, followed by layoffs. We're at the layoff stage now.
Ford and GM are not run by fools. They saw the imminent end for the suburban utility vehicles when the safety myth got shot down and the oil fields (economically) passed peak. Saab and Volvo would then have the SUVs beat in both safety and mileage. While neither get great mileage, they do easiy beat an SUV.
Add to those the question, why are they still paving the strongest agricultural areas where materials for biodiesel grows in abundance? So I'm wondering why they're permanently destroying so much of that topsoil and paving the regions with the best farming weather. It's like there's a contest to see how fast they can pave it over.
Canola thrives in the climate of southern Sweden and does poorly further north. Maybe we'll hear soon of a break through in making biodiesel from lichens, mosquitos and large boulders.
Slashdot Mirror
No mention is made regarding possible contributing factors:
I wonder what the real reason this report was published. Maybe there's a minimum daily quota of MS articles to drown out stuff like Linux on the Intel-based Macs or articles on Vista on Linux. Or maybe it's the trouble MS is having with the EC, that they'd like to hide in a cloud of smoke.
While I can't comment on whether that is or isn't technically illegal, it does show bad faith, contempt for the laws of the country (and by extension for the country itself), and a lack of ethics. But we knew those last parts already.
MS relies heavily on delay tactics anyway, so this method for destruction of evidence supplments them.
OpenOffice.org runs on legacy systems like MS Windows as well as most any other system. So, if you decide to move on, either for good or for just specific tasks or projects, you'll have the same program regardless of the platform.
The format, OpenDocument, also increases flexibility in that you can more easily exchange documents with users of other packages, or parse and make a searchable index of your work. If you later on decide to switch office software, you probably won't have to convert the files. Even MS is free to implement OpenDocument, though don't hold your breath -- the tricky bit there is if the new versions of MS Office really can handle arbitrary XML documents. If so then OpenDocument works. If not, then MS was just yanking your chain and you can add that feature to the long list of promised-but-not implemented features like WinFS.
Laptops are fine within their limits, but some activities are really done better with a more powerful CPU or larger screen(s). LTSP or something similar can be used to offload much of the processing but there's little that can be done about the screen size.
Moreover, since laptops can be used just about anywhere, they probably will be. That is fine if people exercise moderation, common sense adn, above all good ergonomics. However, most places you see people prevent good ergonomics and the size/shape of the laptop hinder it, espcially the keyboard.
So, expect to see in the third year lots of lumbar injuries, neck strain, wrist problems and acid reflux or other digestive problems.
You'll find that the numbers are not even close by even an order of magnitude, the size (in pixels) diminishes geometrically. That's not even counting trimming back color channels or even the number of colors per channel. Dimensions # pixels
150 200 30k
300 400 120k
600 800 480k
1200 1600 1920k
The head of the national archives and records administration (NARA), a supposedly independent administration, has been replaced at the request of top levels of the Bush regime. Not only is that rather unusual, but there are some big issues with the new appointment, Weinstein. All that means is that NARA now has a politcal appointee at its head, unlikely to stand up for freedom of information.
As far as anecdotal evidence, I know of a whole department that switched.
I can also count around a dozen 'Windows-is-just-fine-for-me' individuals and one small business (not mine) that switched as a result of either them or their peers borrowing a spare iBook.
I can also think of several dozen acquaintances, collegues or former co-workers who used to run some Wintel-based notebook, but now run one from Apple. It's not evenly distributed. MBAs, for example, won't touch anything not annointed by their esteemed Chairman Gates. So if you go to a café with too many MBAs, you'll still see mostly Wintel. Other places, especially high tech conferences, you'll see many or mostly Macs. YMMV.
Larry Ellison is a very successful strategist, but also most unfortunately he is one of those people that tries to shoehorn his entire view of the universe into a zero sum gain model. The zero sum gain model, a religion among some MBAs, is the believe that theire are either winners or losers and win-win is unthinkable. Larry has demonstrated time and again that it's not enough for him to 'win', everyone else must 'lose' or things are not complete for him.
Maybe Oracle, will 'get it'. I hope it does and if it follows IBM's example, then things could look quite good for both MySQL AB and Oracle.
Yes, they are well equiped and heavily armored. However, Rumsfeld pushed the invasion of Iraq before the troops were in place. In that context, despite the training and equipment, they were not ready. The reason being that initial plans had involved using Turkey as a base, however in exchange Turkey planned to extend its ethnic cleansing of Kurds into northern Iraq. There were probably some other factors, but the short of it was that all those units had to be moved down to the south of Iraq, while travelling via sea and/or avoiding the airspace of certina countries. That takes time.
And not waiting for them to get in place, Rumsfeld guaranteed that the sides and back of the column from the sea to Bagdad would be under protected. And that the units in Bagdad would not be sufficient to maintain order. You don't need so many troops to do that, but you do need some. Once chaos and looting starts, it's very hard to restore order even with a large number of troops. It will take more than troops to restore the damage. For example, so much copper wiring was stripped from houses and the electrical grid, that it put a dip in world copper prices. All that, and more, has to be put back.
One can also consider that there was some opportunism involved and some interests involved planned on benefiting from a little chaos, politics or smuggling antiquities, but it got more out of hand than anticipated. And all because things were not ready.
Taking it a step further, Mac-on-Linux should allow you to have both Quickbooks and Linux at the same time ... today.
There's more to embedded operating systems than just Linux. QNX and BSD come to mind first. There are actually very many including Symbian, Virtuoso, VxWorks, Tron and dozens of others. Even MS tries to make one, called WinCE, though unlike the others it's only used only rarely and even then only for the humor value.
Odds are the overlap is probably on purpose. Here's a sample:
Someone familiar with the special terms MS uses could probably dig up plenty more.
Want to mess with the search results? Simply put links on some of your pages to the non-MS definition.
IANAM (I am not a mathematician) but I recall the terms 'set theory' and 'boundary theory' being used by mathematics researchers when they were talking about search engines and ranking / grouping the results.
2. Bill Gates gets out his check book and instantly becomes the second largest stockholder (owner) in Newport News Shipbuilding.
3. Newport News Shipbuilding selects Microsoft to develop the warfare systems. Microsoft, a company with no experience in warfare systems, and a reputation for unstable, insecure software, will base the Ronald Reagan's warfare systems on an unproven operating system with 63,000 known bugs . . err, oops, I meant "points of focus" - Windows 2000.
4. Press releases were sent out assuring us Bill Gates' huge investment had nothing to do with the decision. So see there, Doreen - what we did last month had nothing to do with your pregnancy - it's right here in my press release.
5. Once Newport News is in too deep to bail out, Bill Gates will be free to sell his stock holdings and use the money to make sure some other company makes the "right" decision.
-- http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M000714.html
group think is definitely a factor, but there is also Chairman Gates' investments to think of .Along the same lines, back before The Register got all soft on Gates, the posted his major purchase. Actually it was made by his investment firm, such firms being almost textbook examples of group think, it was the deciding piece in realizing the US would soon enter protracted war. Such stocks are only 'undervalued' if prolonged war is planned. It's not like a shipyard can just squeeze out a carrier or two per quarter.
And that $x per student is going into a service locked exclusively into MS Windows.
Or for that matter reliable electricity.
Again, if the electronic tallies are not sound, then they are a waste of resources to set up and maintain. There are ways to mess with a paper ballot election, but we should go back to paper-only until Diebold and company are out of the way.
Or just upgrade that crappy old Wintel to Ubuntu, or another distro provided you can trick it out for her. Get everything set up and neither of you will have to worry.
Then you can spend you visits being with your Grandma rather than with her computer. Odds are she only wants a computer to check/send e-mail, maybe write and print a letter, trade digital photos and listen to music. None of that requires MS Windows and all of is far easier to do on OS X (you know it is, just admit it) or even on a highly tuned desktop like Ubuntu (you know that, too). She won't love you any less when her computer no longer needs fixing. You'll get more good will drinking coffee (or harder) with her than from an age of MS Windows repairs.
Ford and GM are not run by fools. They saw the imminent end for the suburban utility vehicles when the safety myth got shot down and the oil fields (economically) passed peak. Saab and Volvo would then have the SUVs beat in both safety and mileage. While neither get great mileage, they do easiy beat an SUV.
Canola thrives in the climate of southern Sweden and does poorly further north. Maybe we'll hear soon of a break through in making biodiesel from lichens, mosquitos and large boulders.