... and does the MS TCO include no-bargain costs ?!
If you're a MS-only shop, then replacing a software product with a similar product from a MS competitor is hard if not impossible - giving you no room to negotiate a price cut.
If you're using open standards, then negotiating a bargain will be easier.
Being a MS-only shop means having to pay MS whatever it asks for its products - and the price for MS products is going up-and-up, because that's the only way MS can get more money from a market it dominates for almost 100%.
So even if todays MS TCO is comparable to Linux TCO, then tomorrows MS TCO won't be. The only way for MS to have a TCO comparable to Linux is accepting a smaller profit margin - somthing MS will never ever do.
I understand that certain parts of each operating systems are more or less secure than the other due to the way they were written, but the bottom line is both can be secured "sufficently" if the user / admin takes the time to do the work.
I'm sorry, but your statement is not correct. Many Windows applications require admin rights to run properly, including some application made by a certain company in Redmond. And having to run applications as an admin makes your Windows box less secure - there is nothing a user / admin can do about this problem.
I get just as many securiy bullitins from Red Hat as I do from Micorosft. I mean it's nearly 1:1
No, the ratio certainly isn't near 1:1. The security bulletins from RedHat not only address problems with Linux, they also address problems with the 1000+ packages that come with the RedHat Linux distribution.
You're first example is clear evidence for this: it's about a security problem with OpenOffice. And OpenOffice <> Linux.
And X-Chat isn't (part of) Linux either.
Please don't compare Linux distro security bulletins with Windows OS security bulletins - a Linux distro is much much more than just 'Linux'. Comparing bug counts for a complete Linux distro to bug counts for Windows OS only is unfair and biased.
And since Microsoft can (mostly) be trusted to not 0wnz0r our machines, I make an exception for windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
Yeah oh yeah - DRM and 'Trusted' Computing are just the first two examples that come to mind. And a couple of minutes searching my memory will turn up more examples of MS 0wnz0r our machines. I trust MS to 0wnz0r my machine on every occasion that makes them some money.
Maybe Darrell Huff's "How to lie with statistics" should become a mandatory read at all high schools - read an review here.
A very good read if you want to know how statistics can be (and is) abused to 'prove' all kind of things.
But, how about those numerous friends/relatives who still run win98 and can't update to something else without changing their hardware ? I find rather embarassing that none of those update packs can'be downloaded and installed *later* on other machines, it's pure nonsense to me.
I agree. And there's more to it. One of Windows biggest pains is the inability to backup the patches that have been downloaded by auto-update - I asked a MCSE and he didn't know how, so it must be impossible.
So if you reinstall Windows (and you have to reinstall Windows every now and then - it's a feature), then you have to download all those patches again. Which is a problem, because the mean time for an unpatched machine to get infected is much smaller than the time needed to download all the patches... GGGRRRRR.
With extremely limited exceptions, there are no sites out there that need to be fscking around with ActiveX. Any sites that require it are the result of unprofessional design and should be considered highly suspect.
So windowsupdate.microsoft.com is an example of unprofessional design - update functionality doesn't require ActiveX in a webbrowser, as dozens of automatic update packages prove. I use automatic updates for many software products, and only windowsupdate.microsoft.com does 'require' ActiveX in a webbrowser.
The reason MS uses ActiveX at windowsupdate.microsoft.com is simple - you have to update Windows, and if you want to update Windows in a convenient way, then you have to use ActiveX and therefore Internet Explorer. It's just a part of the browser war, there is no technological necessity to use ActiveX for this purpose.
The inability to update a machine via a 56k modem is probably another reason why I know so many friends running unpatched OSes (any offline installable M$ update anyone ?). Grrrrrrr....
You can (and maybe should) order a XP SP2 CD from Microsoft - it's free, al expenses paid by M$. Not patching your machine will only make the hackers and spammers happy.
I'm on ISDN, so downloading XP SP2 isn't an option. I ordered the patch CD, and now my XP machines are patched & secure - so I hope.... at least I'm secured against known vulnerabilities.
"I'm not proud," [Brian] Valentine [senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development] said, as he spoke to a crowd of developers here at the company's Windows.Net Server developer conference. "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers... Our products just aren't engineered for security."
What ?! MS are not engineerd for security ?! That idea has never ever crossed my mind:) .
According to my calculations, this still meets the 99.9999% reliability...
No, it doesn't. 99.9999% reliability means it's up and running at least 99.9999% of the time outside scheduled maintenance downtime. And having to apply a reboot because you have to patch a newly discovered security problem doesn't count as scheduled downtime from the user's point of view.
Worse, security patches tend to screw up existing software every now and then - making claims about 99.9999% reliability a real laugh.
And from a philosophical point of view: how can a software product be 99.9999% reliable if you have to apply security patches almost every month?!
Some obvious workarounds are ordering online and having a friend or relative buy the game.
Another obvious 'workaround' is making (illegal) copies of popular games. This law only boosts the sales of CD/DVD burners and recordable/rewritable media.
And what about the demo games that come with PC gaming magazins? Do magazin buyers need a photo ID too? If not, then this law has one big loophole in it.
I know that methane accounts for up to 20% of green house gas emissions and is much potent because it traps 23 times as much heat then CO2.
That's only part of the story. Another important factor is how fast a greenhouse gas get's removed from the atmosphere. Actually, CH4 get's removed much much faster than CO2.
Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
All 350 scheduled episodes of The Simpsons, totalling 8,080 minutes of film, could be easily stored on the new disk, dubbed MODS - for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage - by the Imperial College team.
The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends.
MODS disks will not be the first to challenge DVDs' domination of the audiovisual optical disk market. BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.
The Imperial researchers, working closely with colleagues at the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, estimate that MODS disks would cost approximately the same to manufacture as an ordinary DVD and that any system playing them would be backwards compatible with existing optical formats - meaning that CDs and DVDs could be played on a MODS system. Dr Török believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015 if his team are able to secure funding for further development.
"According to our experimental results, we can optimistically estimate that we will be able to store about one Terabyte per disk in total using our new method," said Dr Török, leader of the research. "This translates to about 250GB per layer, 10 times the amount that a BluRay disk can hold."
The Imperial researchers and colleagues at Neuchâtel and Thessaloniki filed a patent covering their ideas in July 2004.
Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and noughts. When read back, CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit.
Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a 'step' sunk within at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back. A different physical phenomenon is used to achieve the additional gain.
"We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago," says Dr Török. "But did not have the means to prove whether it worked. To do that we developed a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project. We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to approximate it."
Increasingly manufacturers are looking at miniaturising the size of optical disks, says Dr Török.
"Multiplexing and high density ODS comes in handy when manufacturers talk about miniaturisation of the disks," he says. "In 2002 Philips announced the development of a 3cm diameter optical disk to store up to 1GB of data. The future for the mobile device market is likely to require small diameter disks storing much information. This is where a MODS disk could really fill a niche."
Imperial College Innovations Ltd, the College's wholly owned technology transfer company, managed and helped to prepare the patent application.
Anyone have the tet of the article? How are transfer speeds/times?
I don't have the text of the article, but I did RTFA. The FA doesn't specify:
Transfer speed(s)
Cost of a player
Cost of a writer
If this technology can be used for RW discs
What it did 'specify' is the cost of an empty disc, they expect it to be about equal to a normal (writable ? rewritable ?) DVD; and the fact that players should be able to play normal CDs and DVDs too.
Yepp. It's intended for cellphone use, but it can also be used in other devices - PDAs, GPS units, whatever. It will end up in these devices, either when Casio sells LCDs to the device manufacturers, or when another company makes similiar LCDs and sells them.
I've seen special purpose computers using small LCD screens [and displaying MS-DOS applications:( ], I wouldn't be surprised if this new LCDs would be used in such a device to display legacy applications.
Oh, and btw, can someone show me any HMDs on Linux? Any?
If Casio would donate HMDs + technical documentation to Linus and some other kernel hackers, then support for these devices would show up in the kernel in no-time:) .
I think it would be cool to have such an HMD, not just for gaming, but also for 3D design work and scientific applications. Or for medical specialists, to look into 3D MRI scans.
Would love to buy one, if it were affordable ( < 500 Euro ) and supported by some nice applications.
If you specify the font size in an absolute way (e.g. 10 points font) this is true. If you specify the font size relative (e.g. 10 pixels high) then this is false.
There are some applications / compilers out there that make a long true and now invalid assumption about the screen resolution having some fixed number of DPI / pixel size.
But if you just try to put Windows 95 or something like that on default settings on that screen, usability would be a joke.
Exactly. One example of an application that made a now obsolete assumption about displays having a fixed number of DPI.
Higher resolution will bring better readability at the same dimensions, not just a smaller picture.
That's true only for vector images, not for bitmaps.
E.g.: if you write HTML, and specify dimensions in pixels, then your HTML could become really unreadable at this LCD.
IMHO you will need DPI independent tools / applications to benefit from this LCD.
Okay, the high pixel density is neat and all, but can anyone name an application that would need a small screen with such high resolution.
What about a wristwatch, PDA or cellphone with build-in color TV with acceptable image quality ? Or a GPS devices, with maps that show some real detail ?
I.m.h.o. the question isn't which applications need such a LCD, but whether or not the LCD will be cheap enough to make that application affordable for Joe Average.
That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?
I can tell 300 DPI from 600 DPI on a printout, but above that it looks about the same to me.
Whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots isn't directly related to DPI, but to angular resolution. Read the Wikipedia article if you want to know more about angular reolution.
Basically, whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots is related to the combination of DPI plus the distance between image and your eye.
I know that the most sophisticated VR also requires complicated head position tracking hardware, which apparently is quite difficult to get right. Existing implementations often cause nausea and vertigo in some people.
However, a nice, crisp 3D display with mouse-driven movement of the scene should be a perfectly acceptable low-cost alternative.
IIRC, the nausea and vertigo were caused by the time lag between head movement and the corresponding changes in the displayed images, not by the image not being 'crisp'.
B.t.w., the LCD is one of the most expensive parts in modern cellular phones - I doubt if a headmounted gear with two LCD's would be 'cheap'.
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Aahwwww, wait a moment - that means I would have to sue myself :( .
If there is one party that deserves to be attacked by this kind of lawsuits, then it is the bunch of politicians who gave us these stupid patent laws.
Probably a lawsuit, because your idea is so f***ing obvious it must have been patented a dozen times by now :) .
If you're a MS-only shop, then replacing a software product with a similar product from a MS competitor is hard if not impossible - giving you no room to negotiate a price cut.
If you're using open standards, then negotiating a bargain will be easier.
Being a MS-only shop means having to pay MS whatever it asks for its products - and the price for MS products is going up-and-up, because that's the only way MS can get more money from a market it dominates for almost 100%.
So even if todays MS TCO is comparable to Linux TCO, then tomorrows MS TCO won't be. The only way for MS to have a TCO comparable to Linux is accepting a smaller profit margin - somthing MS will never ever do.
I'm sorry, but your statement is not correct. Many Windows applications require admin rights to run properly, including some application made by a certain company in Redmond. And having to run applications as an admin makes your Windows box less secure - there is nothing a user / admin can do about this problem.
No, the ratio certainly isn't near 1:1. The security bulletins from RedHat not only address problems with Linux, they also address problems with the 1000+ packages that come with the RedHat Linux distribution.
You're first example is clear evidence for this: it's about a security problem with OpenOffice. And OpenOffice <> Linux.
And X-Chat isn't (part of) Linux either.
Please don't compare Linux distro security bulletins with Windows OS security bulletins - a Linux distro is much much more than just 'Linux'. Comparing bug counts for a complete Linux distro to bug counts for Windows OS only is unfair and biased.
Yeah oh yeah - DRM and 'Trusted' Computing are just the first two examples that come to mind. And a couple of minutes searching my memory will turn up more examples of MS 0wnz0r our machines. I trust MS to 0wnz0r my machine on every occasion that makes them some money.
Maybe Darrell Huff's "How to lie with statistics" should become a mandatory read at all high schools - read an review here.
A very good read if you want to know how statistics can be (and is) abused to 'prove' all kind of things.
No, it doesn't work well - when you download newgroup postings, then ZA will trash the attachments. It's a known problem, and it isn't fixed yet.
I agree. And there's more to it. One of Windows biggest pains is the inability to backup the patches that have been downloaded by auto-update - I asked a MCSE and he didn't know how, so it must be impossible. ... GGGRRRRR.
So if you reinstall Windows (and you have to reinstall Windows every now and then - it's a feature), then you have to download all those patches again. Which is a problem, because the mean time for an unpatched machine to get infected is much smaller than the time needed to download all the patches
So windowsupdate.microsoft.com is an example of unprofessional design - update functionality doesn't require ActiveX in a webbrowser, as dozens of automatic update packages prove. I use automatic updates for many software products, and only windowsupdate.microsoft.com does 'require' ActiveX in a webbrowser.
The reason MS uses ActiveX at windowsupdate.microsoft.com is simple - you have to update Windows, and if you want to update Windows in a convenient way, then you have to use ActiveX and therefore Internet Explorer. It's just a part of the browser war, there is no technological necessity to use ActiveX for this purpose.
You can (and maybe should) order a XP SP2 CD from Microsoft - it's free, al expenses paid by M$. Not patching your machine will only make the hackers and spammers happy. .... at least I'm secured against known vulnerabilities.
I'm on ISDN, so downloading XP SP2 isn't an option. I ordered the patch CD, and now my XP machines are patched & secure - so I hope
What ?! MS are not engineerd for security ?! That idea has never ever crossed my mind :) .
No, it doesn't. 99.9999% reliability means it's up and running at least 99.9999% of the time outside scheduled maintenance downtime. And having to apply a reboot because you have to patch a newly discovered security problem doesn't count as scheduled downtime from the user's point of view.
Worse, security patches tend to screw up existing software every now and then - making claims about 99.9999% reliability a real laugh.
And from a philosophical point of view: how can a software product be 99.9999% reliable if you have to apply security patches almost every month?!
Another obvious 'workaround' is making (illegal) copies of popular games. This law only boosts the sales of CD/DVD burners and recordable/rewritable media.
And what about the demo games that come with PC gaming magazins? Do magazin buyers need a photo ID too? If not, then this law has one big loophole in it.
That's only part of the story. Another important factor is how fast a greenhouse gas get's removed from the atmosphere. Actually, CH4 get's removed much much faster than CO2.
Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
All 350 scheduled episodes of The Simpsons, totalling 8,080 minutes of film, could be easily stored on the new disk, dubbed MODS - for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage - by the Imperial College team.
The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends.
MODS disks will not be the first to challenge DVDs' domination of the audiovisual optical disk market. BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.
The Imperial researchers, working closely with colleagues at the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, estimate that MODS disks would cost approximately the same to manufacture as an ordinary DVD and that any system playing them would be backwards compatible with existing optical formats - meaning that CDs and DVDs could be played on a MODS system. Dr Török believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015 if his team are able to secure funding for further development.
"According to our experimental results, we can optimistically estimate that we will be able to store about one Terabyte per disk in total using our new method," said Dr Török, leader of the research. "This translates to about 250GB per layer, 10 times the amount that a BluRay disk can hold."
The Imperial researchers and colleagues at Neuchâtel and Thessaloniki filed a patent covering their ideas in July 2004.
Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and noughts. When read back, CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit.
Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a 'step' sunk within at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back. A different physical phenomenon is used to achieve the additional gain.
"We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago," says Dr Török. "But did not have the means to prove whether it worked. To do that we developed a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project. We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to approximate it."
Increasingly manufacturers are looking at miniaturising the size of optical disks, says Dr Török.
"Multiplexing and high density ODS comes in handy when manufacturers talk about miniaturisation of the disks," he says. "In 2002 Philips announced the development of a 3cm diameter optical disk to store up to 1GB of data. The future for the mobile device market is likely to require small diameter disks storing much information. This is where a MODS disk could really fill a niche."
Imperial College Innovations Ltd, the College's wholly owned technology transfer company, managed and helped to prepare the patent application.
I don't have the text of the article, but I did RTFA. The FA doesn't specify:
- Transfer speed(s)
- Cost of a player
- Cost of a writer
- If this technology can be used for RW discs
What it did 'specify' is the cost of an empty disc, they expect it to be about equal to a normal (writable ? rewritable ?) DVD; and the fact that players should be able to play normal CDs and DVDs too.Yepp. It's intended for cellphone use, but it can also be used in other devices - PDAs, GPS units, whatever. It will end up in these devices, either when Casio sells LCDs to the device manufacturers, or when another company makes similiar LCDs and sells them. :( ], I wouldn't be surprised if this new LCDs would be used in such a device to display legacy applications.
I've seen special purpose computers using small LCD screens [and displaying MS-DOS applications
If Casio would donate HMDs + technical documentation to Linus and some other kernel hackers, then support for these devices would show up in the kernel in no-time :) .
I think it would be cool to have such an HMD, not just for gaming, but also for 3D design work and scientific applications. Or for medical specialists, to look into 3D MRI scans.
Would love to buy one, if it were affordable ( < 500 Euro ) and supported by some nice applications.
If you specify the font size in an absolute way (e.g. 10 points font) this is true. If you specify the font size relative (e.g. 10 pixels high) then this is false.
There are some applications / compilers out there that make a long true and now invalid assumption about the screen resolution having some fixed number of DPI / pixel size.
But if you just try to put Windows 95 or something like that on default settings on that screen, usability would be a joke.
Exactly. One example of an application that made a now obsolete assumption about displays having a fixed number of DPI.
That's true only for vector images, not for bitmaps.
E.g.: if you write HTML, and specify dimensions in pixels, then your HTML could become really unreadable at this LCD.
IMHO you will need DPI independent tools / applications to benefit from this LCD.
What about a wristwatch, PDA or cellphone with build-in color TV with acceptable image quality ? Or a GPS devices, with maps that show some real detail ?
I.m.h.o. the question isn't which applications need such a LCD, but whether or not the LCD will be cheap enough to make that application affordable for Joe Average.
Whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots isn't directly related to DPI, but to angular resolution. Read the Wikipedia article if you want to know more about angular reolution.
Basically, whether or not you can distinguishing between indiviudal dots is related to the combination of DPI plus the distance between image and your eye.
However, a nice, crisp 3D display with mouse-driven movement of the scene should be a perfectly acceptable low-cost alternative.
IIRC, the nausea and vertigo were caused by the time lag between head movement and the corresponding changes in the displayed images, not by the image not being 'crisp'.
B.t.w., the LCD is one of the most expensive parts in modern cellular phones - I doubt if a headmounted gear with two LCD's would be 'cheap'.