But, Sun says that hardware will be free. My question is, if they open source Solaris and provide hardware for free, what's left? Pure support? Companies stopped paying big bucks for support years ago. That's why DEC died.
Whether they lock all of the hardware into their software, switch to centralized computing services, or simply require software contracts to buy computers, the boatloads of cheap computers available now for open source computing will disappear unless open source takes off on the client before then. The commodity computer manufacturers have to chase the bulk market. If they don't have markets well into the millions, they can't make it.
for by another. Essentially, Sun and Microsoft have announced that they don't think they can come up with the next generation apps (the fully immersive/pervasive computer generation) that will need next generation hardware. Thus, the hardware market will collapse. It's no wonder that Intel has been funding next generation software tech startups so much lately. The other big boys have now announced their intention to cash in on Intel's pie.
Seems like its time for Microsoft to blow the Windows name and come up with something new while they still have some command of the market.
Maybe we should help them out with some suggestions?:o)
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It seems sad that such a device would be a "pretty expensive piece of equipment". It's been 20 years since the first shoot-em-up type video games came out with technology that could detect where you were aiming (minus the
Maybe its getting the extra accuracy to really pinpoint a character sized block of pixels that causes the issue, but seems like even that would be solvable via a software search. i.e. paint a small inverse color block on every other frame and move the block around in the area that you think the sensor is pointing until the sensor is seeing a different thing precisely every other frame.
As long as you can live with at least one of the screens not running quite as fast (maybe an informational type of screen as opposed to 3D scenery?), 3 screens ia really easy today. Almost all decent AGP cards these days support 2 screens at 1600x1200. Throw in a good PCI card and you've got 3. I've been running this way for years and it works well. Actually, the PCI card isn't shabby.
The only problem I encounter in Windows is an occasional tooltip coming up on the primary monitor instead of a secondary monitor. This is not the fault of the OS, rather the application is constraining the tooltip to be on the primary monitor by forcing it to be within the primary monitor's coordinates.
Note that Matrox's single board AGP solution does not compete with this. Using a high end NVidia for the main two screens provides too much of a performance advantage to give up for Matrox's slow cards. Matrox's cards, even though on AGP, run about like the PCI cards.
Regardless, when these systems become more available, I will be one of the first to put 2 video cards in and run 3 or 4 screens from my PCI Express system. But, though I like playing 3D games this way, I do it for the extra informational surface for programming. It greatly eases things to run your application on one screen and your development environment on all of the others so that you can see everything at once. And with 19" 1920x1440 monitors (which usually manage 1600x1200 with better focus than a 1600x1200) running around $250 a pop, its a very worthwhile investment.
I thought that it was decided back in the 1980's wars between Lotus 123 and others that interfaces couldn't be protected? If they could, we'd only have one legal spreadsheet program today because that was their claim, i.e. that they had created the spreadsheet interface concept and owned it.
There is no real high tech here. If it comes out at $9K, then its obviously aimed at raping the professional market that doesn't know any better. Tivo actually does its work with a 50MHz processor. You wouldn't likely need much more here because the encoding will likely be all hardware. A case, 7-160MB drives, a CPU, and a few special boards with tuners and encoders should be
Heck, without looking for boards that I know exist and would allow it to be done more easily and less expensively, here is a brute force solution you could do yourself far cheaper. Buy 7 Tivos ($300x7=$2100), crack them, network them ($140 for USB ethernet adapters and $100 for network cabling/routers to utilize both of the MOBO's ethernet ports), add 7 160 MB Western Digital IDE drives ($80x7=$560) to a full size tower ($120 with really good supply), an ASUS motherboard that supports 7 drives + AMD64 CPU + 1G RAM and a few IDESATA converters so that the cheap drives will work on the SATA interface = $650 (just purchased that combo myself a couple of months ago). Throw a high end video card into the soup (not that you need it, you have all of the Tivos to replay with) at $300 or so, and you get a full 7 channel system for around $3870. And that's taking a really crude approach that, regardless, would be very highly functional (though you might have to throw in a few hundred more for a window air conditioner and ductwork to cool the beast:o). A couple of hours of research on encoding cards would likely bring the cost down to half that level.
What is happening here is that a designers are getting attached to their babies. Naming something you just purchased and purhaps made some relatively minor modifications to (minor in comparison to the overall original design effort) is not comparable.
I can say from experience that the emotional investment in the success of a project that you've worked say, 90 hours a week for 2 years solid, on is HUGE!!! In my case, my baby didn't fail but, rather, had its feet ripped out from under it before it was ever given a chance. It happened in the early '90s and I still carry hatred for the high level official that did the unjustified deed.
Even at 40 hours of concentrated effort a week, you are almost certainly spending more time paying focused attention to your creation than almost anyone ever pays to any member of their family. Your investment in your job in almost every measure is the biggest investment you make in your life. Next time you hear someone say something like "he put his heart and soul into _______", know that it has very real meaning behind it and feel compassion if whatever "it" is failed.
Have to second this one. If you look at the 80186 in terms of the total # of different designs that used it, it may very well have been their most successful architecture. They tried to kill it once with an embedded systems version of the 80386, but didn't come close. They ended up bringing the '186 line back after that and actually expanding on it. I was involved with at least 25 different custom Multibus II board designs through the 90's that used a '186 based core.
If you could at least determine the model of phone they are using, you might be able to use active detection of the presence of circuits by finding a frequency that you can broadcast at high enough power to excite some circuit in the phone or device that has features that match the wavelength you're using. If it were reliable, you wouldn't have to find the right box, just go to stores that carry a large stock and buy the stock if the presence of a responsive circuit is detected (after making sure that noone is in range with a cell phone:o)
Microsoft used to advertise system requirements that were the system requirements for the OS. They got chewed up and spit out for that. If you used a system made to those requirements, you couldn't run much more than Notepad before you had problems. They now put much more emphasis on the system requirements for making long term use of the OS for the tasks that they have targeted it to tackling. So, the question isn't what to recommend to run on the first day, it is what to recommend as a good foundation for the next 3 years (or however long your upgrade interval is) of computing by the target audience.
A major new OS release should be about enabling the exploration of new problem domains. Actually, most new problem domains are enabled by the hardware advances that have occurred since the last major OS release and the new release's job is to provide the infrastructure to lubricate the path for the new domains. If they aren't going to move new application domains into the mainstream, there is no reason for a new OS.
I think that Longhorn's focus is on trying to make multimedia, especially video, as common on your computer and as easy to organize and manipulate on your computer as text. If that will be the focus of their advertising, they would be negligent if not fraudulent if they didn't advise their users to get machines that can work in that domain for 3 years time.
I keep my raw digital video footage online as raw source for editing. It takes a half hour to read a one hour tape in from the camera over the firewire link, so its really something you only want to do once. Giving up 10GBs or so of hard drive space to store an hour of raw footage is a small price to pay. Actually, at 50 cents a GB, it costs less than the tapes. This kind of space usage can add up really quick, but even at today's hard drive prices, is the most cost and time effective approach. Several others in my extended family who are anything but computer geeks are also starting to do this (and are much better at the editing part than I am:o).
Anyway, the gist of my point is that an OS for the mass market has to handwalk the mass user towards capabilities in order to generate sales. Its not the OS that uses the resources, its everything that the OS was designed to enable. If they tell the typical user that the system will run with a 10GB hard drive (I'm doubtful that it TRULY requires more than that) and advertise the system enabling fanciful video editing, the users will go get systems with 10GB hard drives and scream fraud when they find they can't edit video. You and I know better, but the average user doesn't. I mean, do you really think the joke about the built in coffee cup holder was just a joke?:o)
Anyone thinking there is a greed motive for this is wrong. There is no way that Microsoft would trade this much bad press for the paltry amounts of money that this could generate. So, here's what I think is happening.
Microsoft has been pursuing various antispam paths, but the ultimate one, enforceable legislation to stop it, has encountered some resistance unless the legislation's effects are limited in some way. I think they are trying to counter some of this resistance.
There are occassions that I get "spam" from software companies (whose products I've used in the past) advertising new products. I don't mind that kind of spam, yet I almost always find them in my spam box because I use a pure white list approach and forgot to put the company on my white list.
The kind of spam that really drives me nuts and causes me to switch addresses is the spam that's looking for that one sucker in a million, the viagra spam, the refinancing spam, and the pornographic spam.
If the guidelines a) ban the improper spam while allowing contacts from other companies and b) strongly enforce requests to remove my email from a list, I could live with this system. Especially if they implement a one stop shop to manage whose lists I'm removed from.
But why would I want to live with this? Because it cuts the only leg of the spammers arguments that has been getting any mileage at all out from under them. If you create an enforceable system and say, "you can spam if you follow the rules of this system", then they can't argue that their "legitimate" spam is being blocked anymore and all antispam legislation suddenly gets a green light.
Actually, I have worked in that kind of environment and think that you're all missing the lesson of nature here. I work to maintain variety in my environment because that is the only true defense. If all of the machines are so tightly controlled to a standard that variety is absent, then the target profile you are offering to an attacker is very juicy. Once they figure out one vulnerability you haven't covered, you lose everything. If you have to protect a system with standardized, controlled PCs, I feel for you. You've been given the worst possible handicap, that of having to maintain a perfect defense, and will someday lose the game because perfection doesn't exist.
I also just left a company of software engineers who all maintain their own Windows machines and work from home. Due to the work from home nature, many of the machines were both exposed to the net and tunnelled into the company at alternate times. So, there were essentially over 100 holes in the company firewall. Over a year ago, company policy changed to everyone staying up to the week at least on their patches with heavy consequences if anybody allowed a breech by not patching. We encountered the occassional glitch, but it rarely affected more than a handful of individuals, probably due to the wide variety of configurations. Those effected usually just looked at why they were affected when the rest of us weren't and quickly figured out what they needed to change or find an update on.
I've also found that keeping all apps up to date in addition to the OS results in far less problems. There's only so many old versions of popular apps they can afford to test against even with their farms of 1000s of machines.
As for running non-Microsoft apps, yes, as a policy, I will not touch many of the non-Microsoft apps unless I have too or they are Cygwin based. I specifically don't run anything from Symantec. They are the absolute worst about using interfaces they have no business being anywhere near, even going to the point of replacing critical system DLLs like the login application to get some of their functionality implemented. Microsoft SHOULD trash their stuff just as a matter of principle. I got bit one to many times by their cowboy hacker style programming and have now cleansed my machines of Symantec software. If you run their trash, you're asking for trouble. Beyond Symantec, Roxio (whose software makes a point of breaking all of their competitors), and Oracle (I think they go out of their way to try not to run well on Windows and the other databases including MySQL seem to prove it by not having the same issues), I've had no trouble in the non-Microsoft arena under Windows. Interestingly, the bulk of the 3rd party packages and utilities I run are GNU utilities and I've never seen any indication of the many Cygwin based programs I run breaking due to a MS patch. And you would think that Microsoft would be breaking them first:o)
I disagree on the disk. I consider the price point of the drive to be the standard. The PC makers have been squeezing more from their prices by reducing the price point of the drive. Hopefully, that won't last.
I'm generally used to paying about $150 for a drive in recent years. I bought an extra 160GB Western Digital drive for $80 after rebates at Best Buy a couple of months ago. So, that says 320GB is at my sweet spot now, though in a two drive format. Furthermore, I could have easily purchased 1TB in the form of 7 drives for $560. The 400GB drives are out and should thus be mainstream in less than a year, and I've seen indications that the generation after that may be more of a leap in the literature.
Given that drives have not fallen far from their peak rate of doubling every 12 months, we should see 1 TB for under $200 in 2006.
Microsoft didn't look at Longhorn and say what it would need, instead, they looked at the hardware that their inside information says will be there and are, very properly, designing to that spec. Time will only tell if their inside info is correct.
The hardest, most expensive part of development is the creation of the overall formula / mix of technologies that will make a successful product. Tremendous energies are spent debating the rights and wrongs of various approaches on technical, strategic technical (long term evolutionary goals), business and business technical grounds. The energies are spent both in informal and formal ways. Microsoft spends many millions just getting 100s of people to come in and use different interfaces so that they can determine scientifically which approaches are best for which populations. That is their investment and the overall look and feel and selection of technologies to employ is the result. And, they probably make that investment 20 times over before they actually have one product that really hits the right formula. Coding is the easy part.
Then people come along and copy the formula, many times under more relaxed less demanding conditions and implement something better (though years later), top it off with openly speaking of stealing the show, and actually have the GAUL to CRITICIZE when the company realizes that maybe they need to start patenting the results of their investments?
Anybody can code. Anybody can code even better when they don't have to make money on it. But few can architect. Architects are only about 1% of our population and architects with business sense and a true sense of the average joe non-geek user are far fewer. Regrettably, we, as a society in general, do not give them their due. We look at what they did and just dismiss it with "that's obvious" or "anyone could do that" or "its all been done before", all of which may be true, but if it hasn't been put together in that combination and the combination does show greater value, then they did it first, they deserve their due, others shouldn't copy it without paying their respects and dues and that's that.
Most people spend their whole life and don't come up with a single marketable idea. Some companies spend billions and only come up with a few. I admire both the people that succeed and the companies that succeed and only hope to get my turn just once.
And yes I'm a hypocrite who has made copies of all of their CDs and multiple family members listen to those copies in different places at the same time. But that's different isn't it?:o)
In that case, you're just tough out of luck, because there have been plenty of exploitable Linux and OpenBSD patches in the last couple of years. In fact, if you're a server manager, you might look through Slashdot's history for the last year. Somewhere, there was an article pointing out that the majority of the actual server breakins were not on Windows servers. After all, how could they be since there are so few Windows servers. People breaking into servers are more than happy to encounter an unpatched Linux or OpenBSD machine.
I've got both Windows and Linux machines and have them both fully autoupdating. They only time I've ever had anything "break" due to autoupdating was when one of Microsoft's patches about a year ago caused machines running Norton Antivirus to slow down in some activities. Yes, 4 or 5 years ago when NT was the game, it was different and the patches tended to bite you. But it hasn't been that way for a long time.
Overall, I'd say the risk of a patch breaking something on your specific machine (as opposed to a few random thousand of the 100s of millions out there) is much lower than the risk of a virus hitting you while you're "testing" the patches.
I think that the real driver for people using your excuse for not patching is one of responsibility shifting. If you don't patch and get hit by a virus and its not an extreme case like taking more than a year to patch, you can whine about MS even though it was really your choice to bet the farm on 10:1 odds just because whining about Microsoft is a popular thing. If you do patch and you encounter that more rare condition that the patch busted you, you'll catch hell for patching without testing. So, not patching is the safer bet for you, patching is the safer bet for your machine.
If you don't believe me, Google around for articles about patches breaking machines versus articles about viruses breaking machines. I think you'll see that some of the latest viruses and worms hit in the many millions, whereas the problems experienced from patches hit in the many thousands or are not completely debilitating.
in a ridiculously complicated system and all of a sudden "Bill Gates Fined $800,000". This isn't a story about Bill Gates. I'd be surprised if the overall $50 million investment was more than a blip on his radar. What's 1/600th or so of your worth to you?
Some $30K/year secretary is probably on the street for making a simple mistake. And the witchhunting mob on this and other sites is part of the reason.
I started HS in '79 and I'd agree with the fact that most of the popular crowd were also the brains though they definitely weren't "geeky". But the violence was there in spades and I think had started evolving from the violence my father spoke of in his high school.
We had one girl kill another with a butter knife in the school cafeteria for wearing jeans identical to the brand new pair she had on around 1980. I heard that the last knifing actually at the school (knifings happened all the time in the rural South outside of school,,, heck, we played "war" with real BB guns so a knife fight was a small step from enjoyable play) was between two boys in '76. Violence was considered on the decline actually, even with the death, which everyone viewed as an anomaly.
But, I see the death not as an anomaly, but as a result of declining violence. It seems that the vents have been removed in the current system and the result is that, when anger does boil over, its anger that has been suppressed for a long long time.
I'd absolutely agree with the K-12 issue. And though much of the country recognizes it, it seems as if we're powerless to do much about it. The theories the educational establishment have switched to are all wrong, but they provide their on press and can't afford to admit it. And with no form of quick discipline available, the bad boys who used to be molded into stars are now either allowed to get worse and worse and finally kicked out or drugged into submission to the status quo.
But, I think a shot at government funded research is missing the target. And, the military research budget as a portion of GDP, is nowhere near a high. It is more visible because they've made the bid process less secretive, but overall, still relatively low in comparison to other time periods in the last 50 years. But, the government has never even been the majority player in research. Private industry has been behind the majority of the research efforts in the US.
Don't forget that we're about 15 years into the aftereffects after the transition away from pure research by many of the large private firms. With the exception of a few stragglers, most corporations now have firm policies that all research must be aiming at a clear corporate payoff. So, true blue sky research has been heavily cut by private industry. This was the shortsightedness of the '90s. We heavily shifted research towards the short term. So we essentially pulled researchers off the task of making fuel for the future, and put them on burning the fuel of the past. This gave us a blazing decade, but has left us with ruins.
This is the direction that DNA and gene research need to be focusing on. True genetic therapy must be targeted. Just throwing a gene into a virus and having it deposited in cells all over the body is a wrong approach. Its treating us as if every cell is the ultimate stem cell. That's not at all true because our cells have differentiated. True genetic therapy has to be able to fix the DNA in very specific cells so that the protein byproducts are properly placed per where they are needed and where the body's regulation mechanisms are present to control them.
My interest in this area is actually selfish. I have two children who would be perfect candidates for early generations of technology like this. They have a severe form of Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy. MMD has been traced to being the result of a simple unstable sequence in one of the chromosomes. When replicated, this sequence tends to stretch. So, CTGCTG becomes CTGCTGCTGCTGCTG. The severity of the disease is at least partially indicated by the number of repeats. Theirs is in the 1000s. This repeated sequence in the middle of the chromosome, though apparently not on an active gene, apparently interferes with the proper operation of its neighbors. The interesting thing to me is the simplicity and uniqueness of the pattern. This pattern is apparently a flawed and unstable one that can be taken out wherever it exists without causing problems. i.e. it should never exist in DNA. So, if a compound could be designed that "recognizes" this pattern and no others, snips it out, and mates the broken DNA back together without this piece in the middle, you'd have a cure for the genetic flaw. So, this is one of the simplest DNA problems that could be pursued with technology like this.
The problem comes in when a company's parts (including its name recognition which can in fact be reused for other purposes) are worth more than its current sum. That's usually where you start hearing investors wanting the company to fold, seek buyers, or find some way to better utilize its assets. I think the point in investors calling for the company to quit is in fact to give them a wake up call that they'd better do something other than maintaining the status quo because few of us are rich enough to give our money away towards some ideal. Call it the tough love of capitalism.
Because the company is public and that means a bunch of people's retirement rests on the money that is in it. As an investor, would you want to finance the shrinking of your dollar to 10 cents or would you rather have the company's assets sold for 30 cents? Sun doesn't exist to give us Java, they exist to make money for their stock owners. If they can't do that, they owe it to their stock owners to terminate in the way that returns the greatest portion of the money possible.
Genesis indicates God created our Universe. A verse in Proverbs indicates that the first thing God created was "wisdom". Most interpret that to mean the laws and rules of everything in our universe from Physics to human relationships. So, he exists both outside of our universe and independently of its laws.
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But, Sun says that hardware will be free. My question is, if they open source Solaris and provide hardware for free, what's left? Pure support? Companies stopped paying big bucks for support years ago. That's why DEC died.
Whether they lock all of the hardware into their software, switch to centralized computing services, or simply require software contracts to buy computers, the boatloads of cheap computers available now for open source computing will disappear unless open source takes off on the client before then. The commodity computer manufacturers have to chase the bulk market. If they don't have markets well into the millions, they can't make it.
for by another. Essentially, Sun and Microsoft have announced that they don't think they can come up with the next generation apps (the fully immersive/pervasive computer generation) that will need next generation hardware. Thus, the hardware market will collapse. It's no wonder that Intel has been funding next generation software tech startups so much lately. The other big boys have now announced their intention to cash in on Intel's pie.
Show me the teen that wants one of these and I'll show you a hopeless virgin. If you can't do it in the car, it just ain't an American car.
Seems like its time for Microsoft to blow the Windows name and come up with something new while they still have some command of the market.
Maybe we should help them out with some suggestions? :o)
It seems sad that such a device would be a "pretty expensive piece of equipment". It's been 20 years since the first shoot-em-up type video games came out with technology that could detect where you were aiming (minus the
Maybe its getting the extra accuracy to really pinpoint a character sized block of pixels that causes the issue, but seems like even that would be solvable via a software search. i.e. paint a small inverse color block on every other frame and move the block around in the area that you think the sensor is pointing until the sensor is seeing a different thing precisely every other frame.
Maybe the devil is in some details.
As long as you can live with at least one of the screens not running quite as fast (maybe an informational type of screen as opposed to 3D scenery?), 3 screens ia really easy today. Almost all decent AGP cards these days support 2 screens at 1600x1200. Throw in a good PCI card and you've got 3. I've been running this way for years and it works well. Actually, the PCI card isn't shabby.
The only problem I encounter in Windows is an occasional tooltip coming up on the primary monitor instead of a secondary monitor. This is not the fault of the OS, rather the application is constraining the tooltip to be on the primary monitor by forcing it to be within the primary monitor's coordinates.
Note that Matrox's single board AGP solution does not compete with this. Using a high end NVidia for the main two screens provides too much of a performance advantage to give up for Matrox's slow cards. Matrox's cards, even though on AGP, run about like the PCI cards.
Regardless, when these systems become more available, I will be one of the first to put 2 video cards in and run 3 or 4 screens from my PCI Express system. But, though I like playing 3D games this way, I do it for the extra informational surface for programming. It greatly eases things to run your application on one screen and your development environment on all of the others so that you can see everything at once. And with 19" 1920x1440 monitors (which usually manage 1600x1200 with better focus than a 1600x1200) running around $250 a pop, its a very worthwhile investment.
I thought that it was decided back in the 1980's wars between Lotus 123 and others that interfaces couldn't be protected? If they could, we'd only have one legal spreadsheet program today because that was their claim, i.e. that they had created the spreadsheet interface concept and owned it.
There is no real high tech here. If it comes out at $9K, then its obviously aimed at raping the professional market that doesn't know any better. Tivo actually does its work with a 50MHz processor. You wouldn't likely need much more here because the encoding will likely be all hardware. A case, 7-160MB drives, a CPU, and a few special boards with tuners and encoders should be
Heck, without looking for boards that I know exist and would allow it to be done more easily and less expensively, here is a brute force solution you could do yourself far cheaper. Buy 7 Tivos ($300x7=$2100), crack them, network them ($140 for USB ethernet adapters and $100 for network cabling/routers to utilize both of the MOBO's ethernet ports), add 7 160 MB Western Digital IDE drives ($80x7=$560) to a full size tower ($120 with really good supply), an ASUS motherboard that supports 7 drives + AMD64 CPU + 1G RAM and a few IDESATA converters so that the cheap drives will work on the SATA interface = $650 (just purchased that combo myself a couple of months ago). Throw a high end video card into the soup (not that you need it, you have all of the Tivos to replay with) at $300 or so, and you get a full 7 channel system for around $3870. And that's taking a really crude approach that, regardless, would be very highly functional (though you might have to throw in a few hundred more for a window air conditioner and ductwork to cool the beast :o). A couple of hours of research on encoding cards would likely bring the cost down to half that level.
What is happening here is that a designers are getting attached to their babies. Naming something you just purchased and purhaps made some relatively minor modifications to (minor in comparison to the overall original design effort) is not comparable.
I can say from experience that the emotional investment in the success of a project that you've worked say, 90 hours a week for 2 years solid, on is HUGE!!! In my case, my baby didn't fail but, rather, had its feet ripped out from under it before it was ever given a chance. It happened in the early '90s and I still carry hatred for the high level official that did the unjustified deed.
Even at 40 hours of concentrated effort a week, you are almost certainly spending more time paying focused attention to your creation than almost anyone ever pays to any member of their family. Your investment in your job in almost every measure is the biggest investment you make in your life. Next time you hear someone say something like "he put his heart and soul into _______", know that it has very real meaning behind it and feel compassion if whatever "it" is failed.
Have to second this one. If you look at the 80186 in terms of the total # of different designs that used it, it may very well have been their most successful architecture. They tried to kill it once with an embedded systems version of the 80386, but didn't come close. They ended up bringing the '186 line back after that and actually expanding on it. I was involved with at least 25 different custom Multibus II board designs through the 90's that used a '186 based core.
If you could at least determine the model of phone they are using, you might be able to use active detection of the presence of circuits by finding a frequency that you can broadcast at high enough power to excite some circuit in the phone or device that has features that match the wavelength you're using. If it were reliable, you wouldn't have to find the right box, just go to stores that carry a large stock and buy the stock if the presence of a responsive circuit is detected (after making sure that noone is in range with a cell phone :o)
Microsoft used to advertise system requirements that were the system requirements for the OS. They got chewed up and spit out for that. If you used a system made to those requirements, you couldn't run much more than Notepad before you had problems. They now put much more emphasis on the system requirements for making long term use of the OS for the tasks that they have targeted it to tackling. So, the question isn't what to recommend to run on the first day, it is what to recommend as a good foundation for the next 3 years (or however long your upgrade interval is) of computing by the target audience.
A major new OS release should be about enabling the exploration of new problem domains. Actually, most new problem domains are enabled by the hardware advances that have occurred since the last major OS release and the new release's job is to provide the infrastructure to lubricate the path for the new domains. If they aren't going to move new application domains into the mainstream, there is no reason for a new OS.
I think that Longhorn's focus is on trying to make multimedia, especially video, as common on your computer and as easy to organize and manipulate on your computer as text. If that will be the focus of their advertising, they would be negligent if not fraudulent if they didn't advise their users to get machines that can work in that domain for 3 years time.
I keep my raw digital video footage online as raw source for editing. It takes a half hour to read a one hour tape in from the camera over the firewire link, so its really something you only want to do once. Giving up 10GBs or so of hard drive space to store an hour of raw footage is a small price to pay. Actually, at 50 cents a GB, it costs less than the tapes. This kind of space usage can add up really quick, but even at today's hard drive prices, is the most cost and time effective approach. Several others in my extended family who are anything but computer geeks are also starting to do this (and are much better at the editing part than I am :o).
Anyway, the gist of my point is that an OS for the mass market has to handwalk the mass user towards capabilities in order to generate sales. Its not the OS that uses the resources, its everything that the OS was designed to enable. If they tell the typical user that the system will run with a 10GB hard drive (I'm doubtful that it TRULY requires more than that) and advertise the system enabling fanciful video editing, the users will go get systems with 10GB hard drives and scream fraud when they find they can't edit video. You and I know better, but the average user doesn't. I mean, do you really think the joke about the built in coffee cup holder was just a joke? :o)
Anyone thinking there is a greed motive for this is wrong. There is no way that Microsoft would trade this much bad press for the paltry amounts of money that this could generate. So, here's what I think is happening.
Microsoft has been pursuing various antispam paths, but the ultimate one, enforceable legislation to stop it, has encountered some resistance unless the legislation's effects are limited in some way. I think they are trying to counter some of this resistance.
There are occassions that I get "spam" from software companies (whose products I've used in the past) advertising new products. I don't mind that kind of spam, yet I almost always find them in my spam box because I use a pure white list approach and forgot to put the company on my white list.
The kind of spam that really drives me nuts and causes me to switch addresses is the spam that's looking for that one sucker in a million, the viagra spam, the refinancing spam, and the pornographic spam.
If the guidelines a) ban the improper spam while allowing contacts from other companies and b) strongly enforce requests to remove my email from a list, I could live with this system. Especially if they implement a one stop shop to manage whose lists I'm removed from.
But why would I want to live with this? Because it cuts the only leg of the spammers arguments that has been getting any mileage at all out from under them. If you create an enforceable system and say, "you can spam if you follow the rules of this system", then they can't argue that their "legitimate" spam is being blocked anymore and all antispam legislation suddenly gets a green light.
Actually, I have worked in that kind of environment and think that you're all missing the lesson of nature here. I work to maintain variety in my environment because that is the only true defense. If all of the machines are so tightly controlled to a standard that variety is absent, then the target profile you are offering to an attacker is very juicy. Once they figure out one vulnerability you haven't covered, you lose everything. If you have to protect a system with standardized, controlled PCs, I feel for you. You've been given the worst possible handicap, that of having to maintain a perfect defense, and will someday lose the game because perfection doesn't exist.
I also just left a company of software engineers who all maintain their own Windows machines and work from home. Due to the work from home nature, many of the machines were both exposed to the net and tunnelled into the company at alternate times. So, there were essentially over 100 holes in the company firewall. Over a year ago, company policy changed to everyone staying up to the week at least on their patches with heavy consequences if anybody allowed a breech by not patching. We encountered the occassional glitch, but it rarely affected more than a handful of individuals, probably due to the wide variety of configurations. Those effected usually just looked at why they were affected when the rest of us weren't and quickly figured out what they needed to change or find an update on.
I've also found that keeping all apps up to date in addition to the OS results in far less problems. There's only so many old versions of popular apps they can afford to test against even with their farms of 1000s of machines.
As for running non-Microsoft apps, yes, as a policy, I will not touch many of the non-Microsoft apps unless I have too or they are Cygwin based. I specifically don't run anything from Symantec. They are the absolute worst about using interfaces they have no business being anywhere near, even going to the point of replacing critical system DLLs like the login application to get some of their functionality implemented. Microsoft SHOULD trash their stuff just as a matter of principle. I got bit one to many times by their cowboy hacker style programming and have now cleansed my machines of Symantec software. If you run their trash, you're asking for trouble. Beyond Symantec, Roxio (whose software makes a point of breaking all of their competitors), and Oracle (I think they go out of their way to try not to run well on Windows and the other databases including MySQL seem to prove it by not having the same issues), I've had no trouble in the non-Microsoft arena under Windows. Interestingly, the bulk of the 3rd party packages and utilities I run are GNU utilities and I've never seen any indication of the many Cygwin based programs I run breaking due to a MS patch. And you would think that Microsoft would be breaking them first :o)
I disagree on the disk. I consider the price point of the drive to be the standard. The PC makers have been squeezing more from their prices by reducing the price point of the drive. Hopefully, that won't last.
I'm generally used to paying about $150 for a drive in recent years. I bought an extra 160GB Western Digital drive for $80 after rebates at Best Buy a couple of months ago. So, that says 320GB is at my sweet spot now, though in a two drive format. Furthermore, I could have easily purchased 1TB in the form of 7 drives for $560. The 400GB drives are out and should thus be mainstream in less than a year, and I've seen indications that the generation after that may be more of a leap in the literature.
Given that drives have not fallen far from their peak rate of doubling every 12 months, we should see 1 TB for under $200 in 2006.
Microsoft didn't look at Longhorn and say what it would need, instead, they looked at the hardware that their inside information says will be there and are, very properly, designing to that spec. Time will only tell if their inside info is correct.
The hardest, most expensive part of development is the creation of the overall formula / mix of technologies that will make a successful product. Tremendous energies are spent debating the rights and wrongs of various approaches on technical, strategic technical (long term evolutionary goals), business and business technical grounds. The energies are spent both in informal and formal ways. Microsoft spends many millions just getting 100s of people to come in and use different interfaces so that they can determine scientifically which approaches are best for which populations. That is their investment and the overall look and feel and selection of technologies to employ is the result. And, they probably make that investment 20 times over before they actually have one product that really hits the right formula. Coding is the easy part.
Then people come along and copy the formula, many times under more relaxed less demanding conditions and implement something better (though years later), top it off with openly speaking of stealing the show, and actually have the GAUL to CRITICIZE when the company realizes that maybe they need to start patenting the results of their investments?
Anybody can code. Anybody can code even better when they don't have to make money on it. But few can architect. Architects are only about 1% of our population and architects with business sense and a true sense of the average joe non-geek user are far fewer. Regrettably, we, as a society in general, do not give them their due. We look at what they did and just dismiss it with "that's obvious" or "anyone could do that" or "its all been done before", all of which may be true, but if it hasn't been put together in that combination and the combination does show greater value, then they did it first, they deserve their due, others shouldn't copy it without paying their respects and dues and that's that.
Most people spend their whole life and don't come up with a single marketable idea. Some companies spend billions and only come up with a few. I admire both the people that succeed and the companies that succeed and only hope to get my turn just once.
And yes I'm a hypocrite who has made copies of all of their CDs and multiple family members listen to those copies in different places at the same time. But that's different isn't it? :o)
In that case, you're just tough out of luck, because there have been plenty of exploitable Linux and OpenBSD patches in the last couple of years. In fact, if you're a server manager, you might look through Slashdot's history for the last year. Somewhere, there was an article pointing out that the majority of the actual server breakins were not on Windows servers. After all, how could they be since there are so few Windows servers. People breaking into servers are more than happy to encounter an unpatched Linux or OpenBSD machine.
I've got both Windows and Linux machines and have them both fully autoupdating. They only time I've ever had anything "break" due to autoupdating was when one of Microsoft's patches about a year ago caused machines running Norton Antivirus to slow down in some activities. Yes, 4 or 5 years ago when NT was the game, it was different and the patches tended to bite you. But it hasn't been that way for a long time.
Overall, I'd say the risk of a patch breaking something on your specific machine (as opposed to a few random thousand of the 100s of millions out there) is much lower than the risk of a virus hitting you while you're "testing" the patches.
I think that the real driver for people using your excuse for not patching is one of responsibility shifting. If you don't patch and get hit by a virus and its not an extreme case like taking more than a year to patch, you can whine about MS even though it was really your choice to bet the farm on 10:1 odds just because whining about Microsoft is a popular thing. If you do patch and you encounter that more rare condition that the patch busted you, you'll catch hell for patching without testing. So, not patching is the safer bet for you, patching is the safer bet for your machine.
If you don't believe me, Google around for articles about patches breaking machines versus articles about viruses breaking machines. I think you'll see that some of the latest viruses and worms hit in the many millions, whereas the problems experienced from patches hit in the many thousands or are not completely debilitating.
in a ridiculously complicated system and all of a sudden "Bill Gates Fined $800,000". This isn't a story about Bill Gates. I'd be surprised if the overall $50 million investment was more than a blip on his radar. What's 1/600th or so of your worth to you?
Some $30K/year secretary is probably on the street for making a simple mistake. And the witchhunting mob on this and other sites is part of the reason.
I started HS in '79 and I'd agree with the fact that most of the popular crowd were also the brains though they definitely weren't "geeky". But the violence was there in spades and I think had started evolving from the violence my father spoke of in his high school.
We had one girl kill another with a butter knife in the school cafeteria for wearing jeans identical to the brand new pair she had on around 1980. I heard that the last knifing actually at the school (knifings happened all the time in the rural South outside of school,,, heck, we played "war" with real BB guns so a knife fight was a small step from enjoyable play) was between two boys in '76. Violence was considered on the decline actually, even with the death, which everyone viewed as an anomaly.
But, I see the death not as an anomaly, but as a result of declining violence. It seems that the vents have been removed in the current system and the result is that, when anger does boil over, its anger that has been suppressed for a long long time.
But, I think a shot at government funded research is missing the target. And, the military research budget as a portion of GDP, is nowhere near a high. It is more visible because they've made the bid process less secretive, but overall, still relatively low in comparison to other time periods in the last 50 years. But, the government has never even been the majority player in research. Private industry has been behind the majority of the research efforts in the US.
Don't forget that we're about 15 years into the aftereffects after the transition away from pure research by many of the large private firms. With the exception of a few stragglers, most corporations now have firm policies that all research must be aiming at a clear corporate payoff. So, true blue sky research has been heavily cut by private industry. This was the shortsightedness of the '90s. We heavily shifted research towards the short term. So we essentially pulled researchers off the task of making fuel for the future, and put them on burning the fuel of the past. This gave us a blazing decade, but has left us with ruins.
This is the direction that DNA and gene research need to be focusing on. True genetic therapy must be targeted. Just throwing a gene into a virus and having it deposited in cells all over the body is a wrong approach. Its treating us as if every cell is the ultimate stem cell. That's not at all true because our cells have differentiated. True genetic therapy has to be able to fix the DNA in very specific cells so that the protein byproducts are properly placed per where they are needed and where the body's regulation mechanisms are present to control them.
My interest in this area is actually selfish. I have two children who would be perfect candidates for early generations of technology like this. They have a severe form of Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy. MMD has been traced to being the result of a simple unstable sequence in one of the chromosomes. When replicated, this sequence tends to stretch. So, CTGCTG becomes CTGCTGCTGCTGCTG. The severity of the disease is at least partially indicated by the number of repeats. Theirs is in the 1000s. This repeated sequence in the middle of the chromosome, though apparently not on an active gene, apparently interferes with the proper operation of its neighbors. The interesting thing to me is the simplicity and uniqueness of the pattern. This pattern is apparently a flawed and unstable one that can be taken out wherever it exists without causing problems. i.e. it should never exist in DNA. So, if a compound could be designed that "recognizes" this pattern and no others, snips it out, and mates the broken DNA back together without this piece in the middle, you'd have a cure for the genetic flaw. So, this is one of the simplest DNA problems that could be pursued with technology like this.
The problem comes in when a company's parts (including its name recognition which can in fact be reused for other purposes) are worth more than its current sum. That's usually where you start hearing investors wanting the company to fold, seek buyers, or find some way to better utilize its assets. I think the point in investors calling for the company to quit is in fact to give them a wake up call that they'd better do something other than maintaining the status quo because few of us are rich enough to give our money away towards some ideal. Call it the tough love of capitalism.
Because the company is public and that means a bunch of people's retirement rests on the money that is in it. As an investor, would you want to finance the shrinking of your dollar to 10 cents or would you rather have the company's assets sold for 30 cents? Sun doesn't exist to give us Java, they exist to make money for their stock owners. If they can't do that, they owe it to their stock owners to terminate in the way that returns the greatest portion of the money possible.
Genesis indicates God created our Universe. A verse in Proverbs indicates that the first thing God created was "wisdom". Most interpret that to mean the laws and rules of everything in our universe from Physics to human relationships. So, he exists both outside of our universe and independently of its laws.