I've had CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that I burned over a decade ago still read fine. However, those disks were verified burns where I immmediately read back the data with Nero to make sure they were ok.
There was a time when I didn't do verified burns. Those disks have a ridiculously high failure rate, but I'm betting they were bad burns in the first place. With most media I get close to a 10% failure rate on verifying the burns.
I plan to purchase a copy and install it, having skipped Vista as I didn't have "Vista capable" hardware for the past couple of years. The old WinXP box just kept chugging along, and I didn't really "need" to upgrade. But with XP getting a little long in the tooth and Microsoft dropping free support/patches for XP in a year or so, it's time to "invest" again.
However, I'll be upgrading my CPU (P4 3.8 GHz) before I consider springing money on Windows 7. What I might do is buy the upgraded CPU and Windows 7 at the same time so I can get an OEM edition instead of wasting money on a retail version.
Every bank I worked for (and Telco, for that matter) does a reboot of it's Unix and Windows boxen, and a restart of the mainframe regions on Sunday morning. The systems are unavailable for 4-8 hours, depending on the system in question.
Software updates and patches are rolled immediately after that image backup and restart, so that there is an image to roll back to in case of problems.
Unlike your experience, Christmas/Year End is a "freeze" where only emergency patches can be done.
Microsoft doesn't need a "browser" for the sake of the internet, but rather for the sake of driving the deployment of.Net and Silverlight applications to the desktop in the corporate world. The fact that you can VPN-client those applications is crucial to a world where remote support and wandering workers are now a fact of life.
I don't think they really care about web standards, because the "standards" supported by their own tools are all that matters to the corporate world. I've recently (2 weeks) started doing some code in C#.Net instead of Java, and I must say it's one seductively integrated toolkit/framework compared to Java land. I'm actually productive after only a couple of weeks, where Java and J2EE took me a couple of years to learn to any useful degree.
Nor am I finding that C#.Net is anything remotely like Java. It's more reminiscent of VB to me than Java.
I just did a "normal" upgrade, overwriting the 3.0.x directory with 3.5. All of my account settings, passwords, bookmarks, toolbars, etc. are working just fine. I've had no problems accessing any websites, and even the old cache entries seem to be getting used.
I download cracked games and MP3s to check out the content before I part with my hard-to-come-by money. While I no longer spend nearly as much on either as I used to, I am much happier with the items I do purchase.
And no, you can't really get a feal for whether a game is going to be worth playing on your home system from a demo at the store. Aside from that, the only game demos I see running are on consoles, not PCs.
Some music stores let you listen to a select set of albums before you buy them, but usually it's limited to the current top 10 or 20 CDs, which are rarely what I'm interested in. For that matter, I find I just gave up on shopping at the local CD store and go straight to the internet to order new CDs -- the stuff I want is rarely stocked by the local stores. (Ask them about Blind Pig Records and you just get a blank stare.)
To me, the biggest reason for downloading a game or a movie is to check it out before I spend money on a proper copy of it. It's not my fault that 90% of what I download is crap that flat out isn't worth the money.
Take Terminator 4 -- I couldn't even stomach watching the whole movie. I deleted it after the first 45 minutes.
They may still be profitable, but the trend is definitely there: they aren't making as much money on each movie as they used to.
Personally I blame the movies themselves. They've been written to a more and more simplistic audience as time has gone on, while their earlier films almost told different stories on the surface (children) and if you got the references (adults.) Lately they've been forgetting to cater to the adults that buy the movie tickets and DVDs.
I don't think they'll be down to the level of a still suit for quite a few years yet. Equipment like the urine/water recycling system on the space station or the article's desert "dehumidifier" are bulky.
Plus we just don't have any real economic incentive for creating still suits -- we don't have a lot of people who want to live in the deep deserts.
I just ordered a new motherboard that I think is compatible with my old P4 570 CPU. (It's 800MHz FSB, so it should work, I hope!)
The one thing I've learned over the years is to buy a good motherboard that lists your current CPU as one of the oldest ones it supports -- that way you've got plenty of room for future upgrades if you need them. The simple truth is that if I end up upgrading my CPU in the near future, it'll be because the new mobo isn't compatible, not because I need more speed.
I don't think PCs are ruled out. "and may be designed for other purposes." In a very real sense, a PC is a game console that is "designed for other purposes."
Being introduced to "C" was a major breakthrough, as I'd cut my teeth on TRS-80 BASIC and Z-80 machine language (not assembler -- POKE'ing values into memory.) "C" was a portable assembler, so close to the PDP-11/70 metal that I could almost taste it.
If it's an issue of editing XML documents in the sense of using XML to store structured data (such as Ooo documents), then the patent should be overturned. The whole point of XML is to provide a generic (and thereby obvious) means of structuring and editing data.
You're right about using drive images. However, when I was responsible for rolling out lease-return machines, we were re-imaging the systems from install CDs, rather than using "hard drive arrays." It's far easier to pop an auto-installing CD into the tray than it is to remove the hard drive, install it in an array, re-image it, then re-install it back into the PC.
It's not a very painful process -- about all you had to do was click "Ok" after the imaging CD booted and asked you if you were sure you wanted to re-image the machine.
Then again, IBM has always had some pretty slick install/imaging utilities for their machines.
I couldn't agree more. Continuing to buy iPhones and other Apple products only encourages them to continue behaving as they have. Since when is it up to a company to censor products, especially when the censorship is so unevenly applied as to allow other eBook readers to access the Kama Sutra?
Unfortunately, the simple fact of the matter is that people will not boycott Apple over such behaviour. In fact, many of their hordes of minions will probably be more likely to buy, claiming that Apple is "family friendly."
Apparently the "On Demand" part of cable services isn't protected at this point in time. That actually makes sense, as it's a "new" service being offered by the cable cos that bypasses the whole idea of prime-time scheduling.
I don't blame them for skipping the time shifting argument. Prior cases against web companies haven't succeeded in using that argument to justify their provisioning of torrent caps of TV shows for members to view.
I believe the *AA wants to ensure they get another licensing slice for allowing VOD. I doubt they're actually foolish enough to want to make the practice illegal, so they're not using the "big guns" that might force the cable cos to drop the service.
Personally I still think direct subscription to shows over the internet is the way the future will go. Rather than subscribing to a "channel", you'll subscribe to the particular show you want. Channels will only exist in the future if they provide a heavily discounted bundle of shows to be watched on demand.
Let's face it -- with PVRs, VOD, and torrents, we're already half way there. They just need to figure out how to monetize it, and standardize the streaming services so they can be built into TVs.
The latest dirty trick that's ticking me off are mouse-over popups. They buy a wide banner placement, and if you make the mistake of scrolling over them, up pops a huge screen-grabbing popup. Fortunately adblock plus takes care of the danged banners in the first place, so I haven't been getting those since I installed it.
The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not. Does that not constitute fraud? Would there not be an option to have the publisher and the pharmacorp charged with fraud?
Regina Leader-Post runs a hybrid model. They have a single front page of interesting stories with links, though rarely the "real" front page article from the print paper. For a monthly fee, you can subscribe to the electronic edition of the full newspaper, which many people do (it's cheaper than the print version, of course.)
At last, an article from a major outlet that doesn't break up into ten seperate pages, one for each item, all in hopes of getting more page/ad views.:)
Doesn't IBM use Open Office as the core for one of their products as well? If that's the case, it would seem that a Mozilla or Apache license would be needed to allow them to continue development and shipping as well.
It's a big step for a project to shift from sponsored to self-sustaining. I hope the OOo team isn't biting off more than they can chew with their plans to shift to an independant project.
More to the point, Glassfish has been sold with support to a number of companies. Unlike JavaFX (which has virtually no market share), a significant number of paying customers have bought into the Sun Application Server/Glassfish.
In other words, Sun has contractual obligations to continue with Glassfish, and Oracle has inherited those obligations. They can't just drop support.
I've got an old GF2MX400 card in my Ubuntu box. Unfortunately, Ubuntu dropped support for older releases of X11 which also means dropping support for older video cards. The newer releases of X don't add any features that I need or want, but 3D support for my hardware is no more.
Once upon a time Linux was famous for running on old hardware, but Ubuntu has changed that (or rather, the support from the X team has.)
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I've had CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that I burned over a decade ago still read fine. However, those disks were verified burns where I immmediately read back the data with Nero to make sure they were ok.
There was a time when I didn't do verified burns. Those disks have a ridiculously high failure rate, but I'm betting they were bad burns in the first place. With most media I get close to a 10% failure rate on verifying the burns.
I plan to purchase a copy and install it, having skipped Vista as I didn't have "Vista capable" hardware for the past couple of years. The old WinXP box just kept chugging along, and I didn't really "need" to upgrade. But with XP getting a little long in the tooth and Microsoft dropping free support/patches for XP in a year or so, it's time to "invest" again.
However, I'll be upgrading my CPU (P4 3.8 GHz) before I consider springing money on Windows 7. What I might do is buy the upgraded CPU and Windows 7 at the same time so I can get an OEM edition instead of wasting money on a retail version.
Every bank I worked for (and Telco, for that matter) does a reboot of it's Unix and Windows boxen, and a restart of the mainframe regions on Sunday morning. The systems are unavailable for 4-8 hours, depending on the system in question.
Software updates and patches are rolled immediately after that image backup and restart, so that there is an image to roll back to in case of problems.
Unlike your experience, Christmas/Year End is a "freeze" where only emergency patches can be done.
Microsoft doesn't need a "browser" for the sake of the internet, but rather for the sake of driving the deployment of .Net and Silverlight applications to the desktop in the corporate world. The fact that you can VPN-client those applications is crucial to a world where remote support and wandering workers are now a fact of life.
I don't think they really care about web standards, because the "standards" supported by their own tools are all that matters to the corporate world. I've recently (2 weeks) started doing some code in C#.Net instead of Java, and I must say it's one seductively integrated toolkit/framework compared to Java land. I'm actually productive after only a couple of weeks, where Java and J2EE took me a couple of years to learn to any useful degree.
Nor am I finding that C#.Net is anything remotely like Java. It's more reminiscent of VB to me than Java.
I just did a "normal" upgrade, overwriting the 3.0.x directory with 3.5. All of my account settings, passwords, bookmarks, toolbars, etc. are working just fine. I've had no problems accessing any websites, and even the old cache entries seem to be getting used.
I download cracked games and MP3s to check out the content before I part with my hard-to-come-by money. While I no longer spend nearly as much on either as I used to, I am much happier with the items I do purchase.
And no, you can't really get a feal for whether a game is going to be worth playing on your home system from a demo at the store. Aside from that, the only game demos I see running are on consoles, not PCs.
Some music stores let you listen to a select set of albums before you buy them, but usually it's limited to the current top 10 or 20 CDs, which are rarely what I'm interested in. For that matter, I find I just gave up on shopping at the local CD store and go straight to the internet to order new CDs -- the stuff I want is rarely stocked by the local stores. (Ask them about Blind Pig Records and you just get a blank stare.)
To me, the biggest reason for downloading a game or a movie is to check it out before I spend money on a proper copy of it. It's not my fault that 90% of what I download is crap that flat out isn't worth the money.
Take Terminator 4 -- I couldn't even stomach watching the whole movie. I deleted it after the first 45 minutes.
They may still be profitable, but the trend is definitely there: they aren't making as much money on each movie as they used to.
Personally I blame the movies themselves. They've been written to a more and more simplistic audience as time has gone on, while their earlier films almost told different stories on the surface (children) and if you got the references (adults.) Lately they've been forgetting to cater to the adults that buy the movie tickets and DVDs.
I don't think they'll be down to the level of a still suit for quite a few years yet. Equipment like the urine/water recycling system on the space station or the article's desert "dehumidifier" are bulky.
Plus we just don't have any real economic incentive for creating still suits -- we don't have a lot of people who want to live in the deep deserts.
I just ordered a new motherboard that I think is compatible with my old P4 570 CPU. (It's 800MHz FSB, so it should work, I hope!)
The one thing I've learned over the years is to buy a good motherboard that lists your current CPU as one of the oldest ones it supports -- that way you've got plenty of room for future upgrades if you need them. The simple truth is that if I end up upgrading my CPU in the near future, it'll be because the new mobo isn't compatible, not because I need more speed.
I don't think PCs are ruled out. "and may be designed for other purposes." In a very real sense, a PC is a game console that is "designed for other purposes."
Being introduced to "C" was a major breakthrough, as I'd cut my teeth on TRS-80 BASIC and Z-80 machine language (not assembler -- POKE'ing values into memory.) "C" was a portable assembler, so close to the PDP-11/70 metal that I could almost taste it.
Your set of options sounds like doing a Linux install, save for including MS options. :)
If it's an issue of editing XML documents in the sense of using XML to store structured data (such as Ooo documents), then the patent should be overturned. The whole point of XML is to provide a generic (and thereby obvious) means of structuring and editing data.
You're right about using drive images. However, when I was responsible for rolling out lease-return machines, we were re-imaging the systems from install CDs, rather than using "hard drive arrays." It's far easier to pop an auto-installing CD into the tray than it is to remove the hard drive, install it in an array, re-image it, then re-install it back into the PC.
It's not a very painful process -- about all you had to do was click "Ok" after the imaging CD booted and asked you if you were sure you wanted to re-image the machine.
Then again, IBM has always had some pretty slick install/imaging utilities for their machines.
I couldn't agree more. Continuing to buy iPhones and other Apple products only encourages them to continue behaving as they have. Since when is it up to a company to censor products, especially when the censorship is so unevenly applied as to allow other eBook readers to access the Kama Sutra?
Unfortunately, the simple fact of the matter is that people will not boycott Apple over such behaviour. In fact, many of their hordes of minions will probably be more likely to buy, claiming that Apple is "family friendly."
Apparently the "On Demand" part of cable services isn't protected at this point in time. That actually makes sense, as it's a "new" service being offered by the cable cos that bypasses the whole idea of prime-time scheduling.
I don't blame them for skipping the time shifting argument. Prior cases against web companies haven't succeeded in using that argument to justify their provisioning of torrent caps of TV shows for members to view.
I believe the *AA wants to ensure they get another licensing slice for allowing VOD. I doubt they're actually foolish enough to want to make the practice illegal, so they're not using the "big guns" that might force the cable cos to drop the service.
Personally I still think direct subscription to shows over the internet is the way the future will go. Rather than subscribing to a "channel", you'll subscribe to the particular show you want. Channels will only exist in the future if they provide a heavily discounted bundle of shows to be watched on demand.
Let's face it -- with PVRs, VOD, and torrents, we're already half way there. They just need to figure out how to monetize it, and standardize the streaming services so they can be built into TVs.
The latest dirty trick that's ticking me off are mouse-over popups. They buy a wide banner placement, and if you make the mistake of scrolling over them, up pops a huge screen-grabbing popup. Fortunately adblock plus takes care of the danged banners in the first place, so I haven't been getting those since I installed it.
I think they're more concerned about sites that get automatically filtered, rather than ones you've explicitly added to the block list.
The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not. Does that not constitute fraud? Would there not be an option to have the publisher and the pharmacorp charged with fraud?
Regina Leader-Post runs a hybrid model. They have a single front page of interesting stories with links, though rarely the "real" front page article from the print paper. For a monthly fee, you can subscribe to the electronic edition of the full newspaper, which many people do (it's cheaper than the print version, of course.)
At last, an article from a major outlet that doesn't break up into ten seperate pages, one for each item, all in hopes of getting more page/ad views. :)
Doesn't IBM use Open Office as the core for one of their products as well? If that's the case, it would seem that a Mozilla or Apache license would be needed to allow them to continue development and shipping as well.
It's a big step for a project to shift from sponsored to self-sustaining. I hope the OOo team isn't biting off more than they can chew with their plans to shift to an independant project.
More to the point, Glassfish has been sold with support to a number of companies. Unlike JavaFX (which has virtually no market share), a significant number of paying customers have bought into the Sun Application Server/Glassfish.
In other words, Sun has contractual obligations to continue with Glassfish, and Oracle has inherited those obligations. They can't just drop support.
I've got an old GF2MX400 card in my Ubuntu box. Unfortunately, Ubuntu dropped support for older releases of X11 which also means dropping support for older video cards. The newer releases of X don't add any features that I need or want, but 3D support for my hardware is no more.
Once upon a time Linux was famous for running on old hardware, but Ubuntu has changed that (or rather, the support from the X team has.)