Don't have a "per mile" tax and waste all this money trying to work out how to implement one, just do the same as everyone else and tax the fuel. You achieve the same end result, with the added side effect of encouraging people to drive more fuel efficient cars.
A lot of the "professionals" are fairly incompetent, and you can bet that big vendors (especially ms) would corrupt the process to ensure that you can only be licensed if you only install their products.
I've found through the years, that enthusiasts who taught themselves, learned through experience and had a genuine interest in computing tend to be very good at what they do, whereas people who attended training courses and got certifications generally were only interested in the money they could earn from a career in computing, and are often stumped by something that wasn't covered on their course.
The latter kind of people are also extremely averse to learning anything new, and will want to remain in the bubble they were originally taught while the former will actively seek out new technologies to experiment with and learn about.
I have found that the course-taught people will typically believe what vendors tell them and never question it, if a vendor tells them a product is good/secure they will assume it is, and won't do proper research on how to harden it or what else might be a better option. And they won't seek out anything that isn't advertised to them, this is why there is such a huge problem with unpatched third party apps as the article states, these people don't even realise there is a problem because there aren't any vendors heavily marketing a "solution" for it.
Having requirements like you specify is likely to do more harm than good.
Most companies won't allow users to install updates themselves...
They need to push updates with some kind of central policy and a background process doing it, otherwise you need to give users admin privs to install the updates. While firefox may have an updater, that wont work if you don't have privileges to install them. MS don't make an easy way for third party applications to be centrally updated, unlike systems such as apt and yum on linux boxes.
On some versions of windows, when you run as an unprivileged user and automatic updates are turned on, you get a dialog box telling you updates were applied and giving you the option to reboot, only you cant select that option because you don't have privileges to do so... Very stupid, you can tell it's designed as a single user os.
The problem is that while there are solutions, they often won't be considered for various reasons...
There are expensive patch management systems for windows, but they are often extremely expensive and typically complex to manage.
There is the option of moving to linux, where on any modern distro it's easy to keep all your applications up to date with patches, but people are either locked in to windows applications, afraid to try something new or simply have no knowledge of linux.
I would say that the benefits are a lot more than the 1.9% you mention, and if done correctly actually requires *less* work... I keep a small network of linux boxes fully up to date and spend very little time doing so, while other people managing a similar sized windows network tend to lag behind badly (especially on third party apps). I have the package manager update its package list daily, and alert me if theres any needed updates.
Patching msoffice is a pain, installing updates can actually break document compatibility with unpatched versions... Also unless you install something like wsus, you can't patch them easily.. Third party apps are another big problem, because there is no standard centralised way to patch them at all that doesn't cost a lot of money.
These are just some of the hidden costs of running windows, that are often overlooked and cause problems as a result (by contrast, linux typically has such functionality out of the box)
I run a network of linux machines (debian/ubuntu/gentoo) and find it very easy to keep everything up to date, every midnight our mirror server pulls down the latest package lists for the 3 distros, every 3am every box pulls the latest package list from our mirror server (and we log any boxes that fail to do so), then at 8am every box is polled by nagios to see if it requires any updates and an email alert is sent... By the time i get to work at 9am, there may or may not be a list of systems and packages which need updating.
99% of the packages we use are present in their respective distro repositories, for the very small handful which aren't, we maintain them locally on our mirror server.
As with operating systems, it tends to be the commercial vendors who don't produce and distribute packages in the standard way, instead preferring to use their own nonstandard installer which doesn't integrate with the existing mechanisms for keeping things up to date. I would consider lack of integration with the standard update system to be a big black mark against something when evaluating it relative to possible other options.
Incidentally, Nokia use apt on their maemo platform, which includes the new N900 phone too.
Aside from the fact that the store will have carried spare power supplies, ready boxed on shelves somewhere... Taking power supplies which were wired up could be a pain, but grabbing all the boxed spares would have been easy and made the rest of the stuff more valuable.
Most decent servers have some kind of lights out or serial console capability built in... Only extremely lowend servers don't (typically based on cheap desktop boards) and those are really best avoided if you care about what you're hosting. Even older highend workstations (sun, sgi etc) always had serial console capability built in, while the servers typically had full lights out (aside from the console, you get full power cycle ability, hardware monitoring etc).
Speaking of ILO tho, i have some HP DL140 and DL145 servers, which seem to only support one serial port in total (ie you can use the physical port *OR* you can use the virtual one supported by ilo).. There's no way of using the ilo as the system serial port, and gaining use of the second port (i would like to connect a serial cable to it and use it to connect to another server that only has serial capability - no ilo).
What you're thinking of is dependency bloat, which is pretty unavoidable with binary packages... You either compile support for everything in, and create lots of dependencies, or you compile support for nothing optional and make the packages useless for many users.
Typically enterprise users care very little about efficiency or flexibility, it is not uncommon to see a quad core server with a complete install of RHEL (including all the X11 gui stuff) on a massive hardware raid array, doing nothing but running bind etc.
Yes, the primary drawback of RH/Centos is a lack of flexibility (enterprise customers don't want flexibility, they typically have a small number of specific needs)... Flexibility which simply isn't required if you're just planning to serve static HTML.
Plenty of posters wondered why people were cheering the i4i patent ruling over microsoft...
This is exactly why, if they get screwed enough by the current system in the us then maybe they will stop trying to push that same flawed system on other people.
Itanium was hardly affordable, Alpha based systems were available reasonably cheaply in the mid to late 90s and were quite popular with Linux for a while, look at some old linux magazines and there will be advertisements for alpha based machines that were price competitive with mid to high end x86 systems.
And in any medium to large size company, you would have seen 64bit servers from the likes of Sun, DEC, IBM or SGI back in the 90s too.
Just because you don't provide a 64bit version of your code, doesn't mean it should be coded so poorly as to not even support being compiled as 64bit, sooner or later you will have no choice. As for customers asking, we use all kinds of crappy software at work which has a multitude of problems, and the vendors couldn't care less when you report bugs or ask for features, so we simply don't bother anymore.
And it is this corporate "profit above all else" attitude which is making microsoft artificially restrict the availability of PAE, at the expense of customers who might want to use it.
It should be free to download/play with ads, or you can pay for have a version without ads... I extremely resent having to pay for something and then be bombarded with ads as well.
An ad supported game may be a better long term strategy than selling the games anyway, you get ongoing revenue so long as people play the game and you effectively eliminate piracy since it becomes easier to download the legit copy , so long as the ads aren't so intrusive that they detract from gameplay (or pirates may come out with an ad-free version).
On the other hand, it means the game developers have to actually produce a decent addictive game, churning out their typical "fun for 10 minutes" crap won't generate many ad hits.
Having not tried the wordpad in windows 7, i will have a look at it sometime...
That said, and OS does need to support document formats, it can come with rudimentary programs (wordpad/textedit), it needs to be able to parse the format to search it properly (don't most modern os include search/indexing functions?), and should probably include viewers for common formats if not editors...
Or at the very least, an os should detect files they don't directly support, and direct you to a list of applications you can use to open that format.
You could get the FastLane SCSI card which also supported up to 256Mb of ram (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/fastlane), and was made in 1993... Theoretically the A4000/A3000 machines had 4 Zorro slots and the tower versions had more (7 i think?), but i seem to remember the Z3 bus not being able to address more than 512Mb. The processors in the Amiga could theoretically address up to 4Gb in total, tho i've never seen anyone with anything close to that, most amiga users i knew had less than 64mb...
The only reason mine has so much is because i added to it later when the ram became worthless and was being thrown out... It had 34mb when i was still actively using it.
They should open up the server code then... I can still play quake, the first quake, online today because if all else fails i can run my own server. I can also run my own server on a LAN, and play against friends without needing any internet connectivity whatsoever. Anonymous online play is one thing, but getting together with a group of friends to play is a lot more fun.
You only have to look at what people were able to do with the C64 and Amiga platforms by pushing the hardware directly, relative to similarly specced machines when going through an abstraction layer...
Also, try speccing up a PC similar to the original xbox (700mhz cpu, geforce 3, 64mb ram i believe) and try to play something like halo on it...The first xbox is probably the easiest example simply because of its similarity to the pc.
Assuming it uses the x87 floating point unit, which Intel are trying to deprecate... Modern x86 processors support SSE instructions for floating point math, which will outperform the x87 equivalents.
Yes, a lot of coders cut corners and just spit raw data out over the wire, so you get differences as you describe where the fpus differ (intel fpus use 80bit precision, most use 64 for example), or the byte ordering differs, or integers are a different size (64bit vs 32bit)... And yet, games like quake managed to be perfectly cross platform playable, i used to use an SGI machine to play against windows mac and amiga users easily.
It can be perfectly equal, so long as the game is coded to support appropriate control methods. Last i checked, the xbox has USB ports, and you can buy USB keyboards and mice easily and cheaply, cheaper than an xbox controller and that's assuming you don't already have one. So write the games to support keyboard/mouse if one is present!
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Don't have a "per mile" tax and waste all this money trying to work out how to implement one, just do the same as everyone else and tax the fuel. You achieve the same end result, with the added side effect of encouraging people to drive more fuel efficient cars.
A lot of the "professionals" are fairly incompetent, and you can bet that big vendors (especially ms) would corrupt the process to ensure that you can only be licensed if you only install their products.
I've found through the years, that enthusiasts who taught themselves, learned through experience and had a genuine interest in computing tend to be very good at what they do, whereas people who attended training courses and got certifications generally were only interested in the money they could earn from a career in computing, and are often stumped by something that wasn't covered on their course.
The latter kind of people are also extremely averse to learning anything new, and will want to remain in the bubble they were originally taught while the former will actively seek out new technologies to experiment with and learn about.
I have found that the course-taught people will typically believe what vendors tell them and never question it, if a vendor tells them a product is good/secure they will assume it is, and won't do proper research on how to harden it or what else might be a better option.
And they won't seek out anything that isn't advertised to them, this is why there is such a huge problem with unpatched third party apps as the article states, these people don't even realise there is a problem because there aren't any vendors heavily marketing a "solution" for it.
Having requirements like you specify is likely to do more harm than good.
Most companies won't allow users to install updates themselves...
They need to push updates with some kind of central policy and a background process doing it, otherwise you need to give users admin privs to install the updates. While firefox may have an updater, that wont work if you don't have privileges to install them. MS don't make an easy way for third party applications to be centrally updated, unlike systems such as apt and yum on linux boxes.
On some versions of windows, when you run as an unprivileged user and automatic updates are turned on, you get a dialog box telling you updates were applied and giving you the option to reboot, only you cant select that option because you don't have privileges to do so... Very stupid, you can tell it's designed as a single user os.
The problem is that while there are solutions, they often won't be considered for various reasons...
There are expensive patch management systems for windows, but they are often extremely expensive and typically complex to manage.
There is the option of moving to linux, where on any modern distro it's easy to keep all your applications up to date with patches, but people are either locked in to windows applications, afraid to try something new or simply have no knowledge of linux.
I would say that the benefits are a lot more than the 1.9% you mention, and if done correctly actually requires *less* work... I keep a small network of linux boxes fully up to date and spend very little time doing so, while other people managing a similar sized windows network tend to lag behind badly (especially on third party apps). I have the package manager update its package list daily, and alert me if theres any needed updates.
Patching msoffice is a pain, installing updates can actually break document compatibility with unpatched versions... Also unless you install something like wsus, you can't patch them easily..
Third party apps are another big problem, because there is no standard centralised way to patch them at all that doesn't cost a lot of money.
These are just some of the hidden costs of running windows, that are often overlooked and cause problems as a result (by contrast, linux typically has such functionality out of the box)
I run a network of linux machines (debian/ubuntu/gentoo) and find it very easy to keep everything up to date, every midnight our mirror server pulls down the latest package lists for the 3 distros, every 3am every box pulls the latest package list from our mirror server (and we log any boxes that fail to do so), then at 8am every box is polled by nagios to see if it requires any updates and an email alert is sent... By the time i get to work at 9am, there may or may not be a list of systems and packages which need updating.
99% of the packages we use are present in their respective distro repositories, for the very small handful which aren't, we maintain them locally on our mirror server.
As with operating systems, it tends to be the commercial vendors who don't produce and distribute packages in the standard way, instead preferring to use their own nonstandard installer which doesn't integrate with the existing mechanisms for keeping things up to date.
I would consider lack of integration with the standard update system to be a big black mark against something when evaluating it relative to possible other options.
Incidentally, Nokia use apt on their maemo platform, which includes the new N900 phone too.
Why?
Having power supplies would make the devices easier to sell, and surely selling is the ultimate goal.
Aside from the fact that the store will have carried spare power supplies, ready boxed on shelves somewhere... Taking power supplies which were wired up could be a pain, but grabbing all the boxed spares would have been easy and made the rest of the stuff more valuable.
They will remember your friend for that, and if they ever see him or his truck around they will try to get their revenge.
Of the Apple stores i've been to, all the laptops did have kingston locks, and even the iphones had something similar holding them to the tables.
Most decent servers have some kind of lights out or serial console capability built in... Only extremely lowend servers don't (typically based on cheap desktop boards) and those are really best avoided if you care about what you're hosting.
Even older highend workstations (sun, sgi etc) always had serial console capability built in, while the servers typically had full lights out (aside from the console, you get full power cycle ability, hardware monitoring etc).
Speaking of ILO tho, i have some HP DL140 and DL145 servers, which seem to only support one serial port in total (ie you can use the physical port *OR* you can use the virtual one supported by ilo).. There's no way of using the ilo as the system serial port, and gaining use of the second port (i would like to connect a serial cable to it and use it to connect to another server that only has serial capability - no ilo).
You would need a lights out management card, many servers have them built in but they're not usually found on desktops.
What you're thinking of is dependency bloat, which is pretty unavoidable with binary packages... You either compile support for everything in, and create lots of dependencies, or you compile support for nothing optional and make the packages useless for many users.
Typically enterprise users care very little about efficiency or flexibility, it is not uncommon to see a quad core server with a complete install of RHEL (including all the X11 gui stuff) on a massive hardware raid array, doing nothing but running bind etc.
Yes, the primary drawback of RH/Centos is a lack of flexibility (enterprise customers don't want flexibility, they typically have a small number of specific needs)... Flexibility which simply isn't required if you're just planning to serve static HTML.
Plenty of posters wondered why people were cheering the i4i patent ruling over microsoft...
This is exactly why, if they get screwed enough by the current system in the us then maybe they will stop trying to push that same flawed system on other people.
Itanium was hardly affordable, Alpha based systems were available reasonably cheaply in the mid to late 90s and were quite popular with Linux for a while, look at some old linux magazines and there will be advertisements for alpha based machines that were price competitive with mid to high end x86 systems.
And in any medium to large size company, you would have seen 64bit servers from the likes of Sun, DEC, IBM or SGI back in the 90s too.
Just because you don't provide a 64bit version of your code, doesn't mean it should be coded so poorly as to not even support being compiled as 64bit, sooner or later you will have no choice. As for customers asking, we use all kinds of crappy software at work which has a multitude of problems, and the vendors couldn't care less when you report bugs or ask for features, so we simply don't bother anymore.
And it is this corporate "profit above all else" attitude which is making microsoft artificially restrict the availability of PAE, at the expense of customers who might want to use it.
It should be free to download/play with ads, or you can pay for have a version without ads...
I extremely resent having to pay for something and then be bombarded with ads as well.
An ad supported game may be a better long term strategy than selling the games anyway, you get ongoing revenue so long as people play the game and you effectively eliminate piracy since it becomes easier to download the legit copy , so long as the ads aren't so intrusive that they detract from gameplay (or pirates may come out with an ad-free version).
On the other hand, it means the game developers have to actually produce a decent addictive game, churning out their typical "fun for 10 minutes" crap won't generate many ad hits.
Having not tried the wordpad in windows 7, i will have a look at it sometime...
That said, and OS does need to support document formats, it can come with rudimentary programs (wordpad/textedit), it needs to be able to parse the format to search it properly (don't most modern os include search/indexing functions?), and should probably include viewers for common formats if not editors...
Or at the very least, an os should detect files they don't directly support, and direct you to a list of applications you can use to open that format.
You could get the FastLane SCSI card which also supported up to 256Mb of ram (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/fastlane), and was made in 1993...
Theoretically the A4000/A3000 machines had 4 Zorro slots and the tower versions had more (7 i think?), but i seem to remember the Z3 bus not being able to address more than 512Mb.
The processors in the Amiga could theoretically address up to 4Gb in total, tho i've never seen anyone with anything close to that, most amiga users i knew had less than 64mb...
The only reason mine has so much is because i added to it later when the ram became worthless and was being thrown out... It had 34mb when i was still actively using it.
They should open up the server code then...
I can still play quake, the first quake, online today because if all else fails i can run my own server. I can also run my own server on a LAN, and play against friends without needing any internet connectivity whatsoever. Anonymous online play is one thing, but getting together with a group of friends to play is a lot more fun.
You only have to look at what people were able to do with the C64 and Amiga platforms by pushing the hardware directly, relative to similarly specced machines when going through an abstraction layer...
Also, try speccing up a PC similar to the original xbox (700mhz cpu, geforce 3, 64mb ram i believe) and try to play something like halo on it...The first xbox is probably the easiest example simply because of its similarity to the pc.
Assuming it uses the x87 floating point unit, which Intel are trying to deprecate... Modern x86 processors support SSE instructions for floating point math, which will outperform the x87 equivalents.
Yes, a lot of coders cut corners and just spit raw data out over the wire, so you get differences as you describe where the fpus differ (intel fpus use 80bit precision, most use 64 for example), or the byte ordering differs, or integers are a different size (64bit vs 32bit)...
And yet, games like quake managed to be perfectly cross platform playable, i used to use an SGI machine to play against windows mac and amiga users easily.
It can be perfectly equal, so long as the game is coded to support appropriate control methods.
Last i checked, the xbox has USB ports, and you can buy USB keyboards and mice easily and cheaply, cheaper than an xbox controller and that's assuming you don't already have one. So write the games to support keyboard/mouse if one is present!