I think the real question in that case is: "Why wasn't Harrison Ford busying himself with making Indiana Jones 4 instead of goofing off making some drippy techo-heist-thriller movie?"
EXCELLENT idea! If they were pro-active and started giving refunds to people for the "vista upgrade option" they purchases, it would make Dell the hero instead of them being caught in the huge nasty class action suit I see looming on the horizon if things continue in the vein they are...
I agree. The first thing I thought of when I read the article was that Kevin Cosner is going to be all over the concept like white on rice.
Serious issues remain though. Despite being remote, they will still need some sort of facility security so some random punks boating around don't run through the place naked eating the seeds and spraying grafitti everywhere. Which brings up the issue of how the surviving Kevin Cosner is going to get into the place given that all the people with the access codes/keys died in the earth destroying events.
Beyond that you have the issue of eggs being all in a single basket. Yes, they tried to mitigate risk by stratigically placing the seed bank. But what if that planet destroying meteor just happens to land on and obliterate a certain island in the north atlantic?
Narf! What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?
A friend of mine runs a support group for people who have had their surgeries botched by one single doctor. Yes, he has messed up so many peoples lives that they have built and organization around him! Her retnas were permanently damaged during a lasic procedure. The sorted tales of how these things happen are the most appauling part. The readers digest of the story is that a nurse temp that had only been on the job a day (had only been shown how to do the surgery once) did her surgery unsupervised because the doctor had a lovers spat with the regular nurse and fired her and was banging another member of the staff at that moment so there was nobody else around at the time. Appearantly he is just bad at his job as well as irresponsible because alot of people have permantent damage even when he was running the hardware. The part that is really sad and explains why this doctor is still "practicing" and the support group keeps growing is that his collegues protect him. If you call the medical board, they will tell you he has a clean record with no malpractice suits and only one "complaint" against him. And it's true, his record is clean...because the literally 100+ suits that have been brought were all settled by sneaky lawyers that make it part of the settlement that all court records are sealed and everyone invovled is under a gag order. They of course use alot of money and strong-arm tactics to coerce the victims into signing on the bottom line. The courts can't do anything because the victims signed the settlement and the medical board won't do anything because they are part of the buddy system.
So in other words the government is compensating for running ape shit all over our privacy by putting some tougher penalties on private individuals that invade our privacy? Bah! It's nothing more then an empty political manuever to make them look better while the FBI, CIA or whomever looks into our bedroom window (figuratively or literally). Sad.
Yes, I bought two of the "super compact" ones that are supposed to fit. And guess what? They were still just about 1/4 inch too big. Not to mention looking kinda dim for their "75W equivalent" rating. Still looking for ones that support photocells and motion sensors.
The ads are also aimed less at the consumer and more at doctors; doctors are the ones that have to prescribe it, after all, so they have to learn about it before patients start asking about it. Otherwise the patients will think the doctor is uninformed.
Hate to break it to you, but the ads ARE in fact aimed at the consumers. They are telling YOU to ask your doctor. You the consumer. And lucky for them there are millions of mild hypocondriacts out there that go running to their doctor the first chance they get to get a script. And for the most part the doctors ARE uninformed about the drugs they are perscribing. Pharmacists are the ones that actually have to learn about the drugs and try to catch as many dangerous interactions the doctors may or may not know about as they can. There are a whole lot of doctors out there that happilly collect the office visit fee, write the script, and then wait to collect again when their patient comes back complaining about the side effects from the dangerous medication they are taking (and didn't really need in the first place). Its a vicious cycle that is the #1 biggest reason health care is so "expensive" in the US these days (followed by the #2 reason: rapent medical malpractice settlements, most of which are kept off the public records).
Viagra is a perfect example of a drug completely out of control. How "nessasary" is it for most of the millions who are taking it? How dangerous is it? How easilly can just about anybody email a less then completely ethical doctor somewhere and have a script mailed to them? Lets run down the possible side effects:
flushing, headache, nasal congestion, stomach discomfort following meals, abnormal vision including blurred vision, seeing shades of colors differently than before, or sensitivity to light, bladder pain, cloudy or bloody urine, dizziness, increased frequency of urination, pain on urination, diarrhea, bleeding of the eye, convulsions (seizures), decreased or double vision or other changes in vision, prolonged, painful, or inappropriate erection of penis, redness, burning, or swelling of the eye, anxiety
at least this one has relatively "mild" side effects compared to some other drugs. I have seen heartburn medication that had a possible side effect listed of "Death"...no joke. Guess they figure if you die you won't have that heartburn any more and it's a win for them.
If laws exist to keep cigarettes and alcohol from being advertized to minors, shouldn't stuff that has been shown to cause even more prompt death or permanent damage be more tightly regulated in who it's pushed on?
Most of the fixtures in my house are not CF friendly. I try to find ones that will fit but they are always a tad too tall or too wide for everything but the really old cieling fixtures in the bedrooms. Which brings up an interesting point...why is it that out of an entire wall of new lighting fixtures and Lowes/HomeDepot, only a handful of the new fixtures available to buy are designed in such a way that CFs will work?
I have never understood the whole delaying release to 3rd world countries thing. It seems to be insulting to them, IE: "We think you are scum so we won't let you have our movies till they are old to us". No wonder they all mostly hate americans. And how do they think its not going to result in rampant piracy? It seems like the most compelling reason for anyone to pirate something is that they want it and cannot obtain it through any legal means. Your observation of the costs are also noteworthy. It almost seems like they (MPAA) are TRYING to precipitate piracy in these foreign countries. Oh and as others have pointed out, if I was a Canadian and had to pay tax on media I am certain I would have no moral problem with "pirating" movies and music. After all, if I have PAID for it through the media tax then how can it be considered pirating or in any way unfiar or illegal? I would just want to get what I paid for. For those who use media for things other then burning movies and music, (aka giving pictures from thanksgiving to grandma), I'm now going to want to download a movie and burn it to a DVD because I have already paid for it after all! They have gone so far with this that its actually creating "pirates" out of people that would have been happy to buy Cds or DVDs out of the store otherwise. But now they have government mandated revenue and statistics to convince people that they are the victims so I guess they don't care.
Yup, the whole thing was a big marketing ploy. Even with the high price of copper these days its going to be cheaper in the long run to hard wire stuff. If they really wanted to get fancy, run fibre to all the seats instead of copper. Trying to concentrate that much wireless activity into one tiny area is just dumb anyway.
Where exactly could I find one of these "cheapo" mac minis? I have never seen a mini for less then $500...the cheapest on the apple site right now is $600. They would need to be half that price for me to start thinking of them as "cheapo".
Whew...had me worried there for a minute. I initially read that as "Halfway through development OF Imperial units. I don't want the military developing Imperial units. Then we will have to develop rebel units and the whole universe gets crappy.
Yes, the default user thing is pretty important. But that is sticking your finger in the leaking dam. I don't count the firewall improvements for much, a "personal software firewall" of any flavor should not be relied upon IMHO. Having a firewall on the same hardware you are trying to protect doesn't make much sense except as a last line of defence. You can't be touching the fire and not get burned as they say. IE7 is not a vista improvement as you mentioned. "Network Access Protection" is a big hack in my opinion to compensate for the fact that there are too many holes to keep them plugged. Windows Service Hardening may help, but seems to just be a way of allowing the developers to code sloppy and get away with it. Frankly the list of "security enhancements" seems pretty short for "the most secure OS ever". I'm not usually this negative about MSFT. My company actually provides MSFT based solutions. It's just that the more I am exposed to Vista, the more I find to dislike about it. The security enhancements (or lack thereof) is only a very small part of this story... The saga goes on from there, but alas it is time for bed so that story will have to be another night.
Convienience on the web is live text chat. It has WAY less pitfalls then VOIP. Text Chat doesn't suffer from QOS problems. Text Chat will probably not drop the connection if there is high latency or a momentary loss of connectivity. The system can be anything with a keyboard. Agents can potentially handle multiple chat sessions at once.
Meanwhile VOIP requires a relatively modern computer, sound card, speakers, microphone, larger software footprint. Call quality can be horrible or downright unusable for a variety of reasons from microphone (or lack thereof) to speakers to latency to audio on "mute" to localized accents of people in east vs west or whereever. An agent is only going to be able to handle one VOIP caller at a time, ever.
Fancy and flashy makes headlines and gives pointy hairs something to BS about and force their subordinates to impliment, simple and reliable makes cusomers happy and companies efficient. The high pressure marketers will argue that they make more sales if they actually get to talk to the customer as the agent can keep them as a captive audience more or less if they are any good at controlling the conversation. But I still have to go back to the above comparison. If the customer can't connect or can't communicate with the agent, then you are pretty much guaranteed to lose the sale as the customer's short attention span will be maxed out and they will move on to the next best option (IE: one of your competitors).
Nah, they aren't really scared of being uselss. It's just a marketing battle. Microsoft started it by creating an OS that makes the user "feel" more secure and then making all sorts of forward looking statements about how it's "the most secure OS ever". (my analysis of Vista so far has yielded little in the way of concrete security improvments, but lots of little gadget things that appear to be intended only to make the average user "feel secure".) Given the impressive bloat, mid-stream changes, and overall changes, you know there has to be a whole new playground of exploits waiting to be found. Assuming the AV companies can figure out how to protect a target this big, they will keep the people buying far into the night as long as they can offset micrsoft's brainwashing attempts. And even then, the first time Joe Average starts noticing his computer "isn't running right", he will probably get the idea that this thing isn't as secure as they let on and start shopping for AV software again. Allthough, after spending that much on the OS, maybe they will have had enough and just chuck it out the window and get a Mac.
While I agree with you that 99.9% of business would scoff at the notion of cutting off exchange of Word documents in the name of protection, the idea that there is no "real world risk" is naive. And the minute an exploit starts bringing business to an abrupt halt, I guarantee you that everyone from the CEO down will be screeming for the bleeding to be stopped by ANY means nessasary. And that would include ceasing to use Word and finding some alternate method of exchanging business documents that is safer.
Re:I won't believe it until confirmed
on
New Mars Discoveries
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Please allow K'Breel some time to provide a response. The esteemed speaker is very busy right now overseeing the analysis of the recently captured "Global Surveyor" human craft.
4-5 years!?!? That would have to be in a VERY ideal situation (IE: a place where its never cloudy and electricity is VERY expensive.) For the other 99.9% of the population, the numbers don't look as good. Even if it's not cloudy, you only get the equivalent of about 5 hours of peak output from your panels per day. When it is cloudy, the output drops dramatically (as I have seen first hand in the output graphs from the system in the building I'm typing this from in recent winter months). For most parts of the country, you will be very lucky if you manage to recoup the cost of materials after 20 years. If you had to pay someone to install the system (which most people do), then it really can never pay for itself because the panels wear out after 20-30 years and you have other maintinence such as the inverter, interconnect wires, disconnects, ect.
Another problem is raw materials. Current panel technologies use materials that are very rare in the earth's crust. Not only does that keep prices high, but it also puts a hard cap on how many panels can be produced (IE: there is not enough raw materials to produce enough panels to generate all our power even if we wanted to).
***put on tin foil hat***
This company http://www.solfocus.com/technology_gen2.html seems to have a good idea of built in concentrators. And according to TFA the DOE came up with 30% efficient panels 12 years ago. My question is: why are these breakthrough technologies being exclusively sold to the space program and utilities? Are they just too expensive to be marketed to consumers? Or is there some sort of conspiriacy going on to keep this stuff out of our hands?
I'm still waiting to see these promised new bells and whistles in action. I have heard alot of talk about all the magical things that Vista is going to do for us, but so far have not seen one thing that XP wasn't capable of (though some features may have required 3rd party add-ons, but that is beside the point). And yes, I have installed RC2 and played with it and Aero. So far it appears to be nothing more then bloat for the sake of bloat and no real innovation. Maybe somebody will come up with something that really takes advantage of the new OS and wows the crowds. But so far I'm not seeing it. Everyone seems to think that Vista cannot fail because of Microsoft's position in the market. But people thought the Itanium was the next big thing and Intel could do no wrong for a while too. Either Microsoft with deprecate it themselves with something that truely looks appealing, or someone else will pop up and take the limelight. I would say this is an excellent time for Apple/OSX to emerge as the new market leader. Just my $0.02
Yeah, I'm thinking this is the type of power generation they were talking about in the Matrix. First I find out that there is in fact a company that makes advanced robotics called "skynet", then the crazy idea of buring the sky to prevent global warming (stupid eco-terrorists!), now this!
Well, the exact same hardware was running XP fast and happy just a few hours before playing Medal or Honor and Call of Duty. Don't know how it could have gotten "screwed up" just by installing a new OS. And I was using the very latest RC2 build downloaded directly from MSDN. As another poster mentioned, maybe it was just a bad install. I'll try installing it again and see if the results are any different. But certainly re-installing isn't going to change the features of the OS. It still doesn't make any sense financially.
So, how exactly is the 64bit support in Vista all that much of a "big improvement" when there is already a 64bit XP? Are the 64 bits that Vista have more shiney then the 64bits XP has? My observation is just the opposite...there more more XP 64bit drivers available for hardware right now then 64bit vista drivers by far. And no, you can't use 64bit XP drivers in Vista. And in my experience 64bit Internet Explorer is much more stable in XP/2003 then Vista. Where is all this mis-information coming from that you have to use Vista in order to support 64bit anyway?
True...
I worked in the telecom industry for a few years and encountered countless instances of phone companies "shooting themselves in the foot" by techs ripping out wires indiscrimantly, hooking up things wrong and other nice things (mostly baby bells). Little of it had to do with any sort of politics or grudges or anything. 99% of the time it just came down to sloppy techs that were too lazy (or hungover/high) to do a decent job of it.
I installed Vista and longhorn over the weekend to test them out. Well, I should say I tried to install Longhorn...it would get to the end of the install and then crash out every time. Vista being the main subject though, I will stick to that. I spent several hours with it exploring the features and trying out different operations I might do in a typical day. Overall it felt like a recurring nightmare...the nightmare that was Windows ME. Much added bloat with little material gain. Like windows ME, it adds out of the box support for some additional hardware that previous versions didn't. Like Windows ME, it consumes more resources then previous versions (for no appearant reason). Like Windows ME its highly unstable so far (I had Explorer crash countless times doing things as mundane as browsing a network share or checking my e-mail). The one thing it does "better" then Windows ME is that it actually breaks driver support for alot of current hardware (couldn't get the embedded sound working on a motherboard that is only a year old or use my printer). I have trouble imagining how feature-poor the lower editions will be, but the Ultimate edition has little more then XP did. The only good things I can say about it are the included support for iSCSI, addition of a pretty good chess game, and inclusion of a DVD authoring program. Given the pricing of the Ultimate edition, its not at all worth it (buy a 3rd party chess program, iSCSI driver, and DVD authoring software and you will come out ahead financially)
Oh, by the way...I was running on 2Ghz athlon64 with 1gb of ram, Gamer's video card and SATA hard drive and performance was abysmal. Turning off the Aero features made clicking between file browsing windows a little less painful, but still not very responsive. I didn't see any benefit to the Aero features for the average user anyway.
Based on this experience, I am declaring Vista the most skippable Windows version since ME. Hopefully, MSFT will come back and redeem themselves with a truely worthly OS like they did with Win2K.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the real question in that case is: "Why wasn't Harrison Ford busying himself with making Indiana Jones 4 instead of goofing off making some drippy techo-heist-thriller movie?"
EXCELLENT idea! If they were pro-active and started giving refunds to people for the "vista upgrade option" they purchases, it would make Dell the hero instead of them being caught in the huge nasty class action suit I see looming on the horizon if things continue in the vein they are...
Now every child, even the poor ones, can have access to the vast porn resources of the internet!
I agree. The first thing I thought of when I read the article was that Kevin Cosner is going to be all over the concept like white on rice.
Serious issues remain though. Despite being remote, they will still need some sort of facility security so some random punks boating around don't run through the place naked eating the seeds and spraying grafitti everywhere. Which brings up the issue of how the surviving Kevin Cosner is going to get into the place given that all the people with the access codes/keys died in the earth destroying events.
Beyond that you have the issue of eggs being all in a single basket. Yes, they tried to mitigate risk by stratigically placing the seed bank. But what if that planet destroying meteor just happens to land on and obliterate a certain island in the north atlantic?
Narf! What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?
A friend of mine runs a support group for people who have had their surgeries botched by one single doctor. Yes, he has messed up so many peoples lives that they have built and organization around him! Her retnas were permanently damaged during a lasic procedure. The sorted tales of how these things happen are the most appauling part. The readers digest of the story is that a nurse temp that had only been on the job a day (had only been shown how to do the surgery once) did her surgery unsupervised because the doctor had a lovers spat with the regular nurse and fired her and was banging another member of the staff at that moment so there was nobody else around at the time. Appearantly he is just bad at his job as well as irresponsible because alot of people have permantent damage even when he was running the hardware. The part that is really sad and explains why this doctor is still "practicing" and the support group keeps growing is that his collegues protect him. If you call the medical board, they will tell you he has a clean record with no malpractice suits and only one "complaint" against him. And it's true, his record is clean...because the literally 100+ suits that have been brought were all settled by sneaky lawyers that make it part of the settlement that all court records are sealed and everyone invovled is under a gag order. They of course use alot of money and strong-arm tactics to coerce the victims into signing on the bottom line. The courts can't do anything because the victims signed the settlement and the medical board won't do anything because they are part of the buddy system.
So in other words the government is compensating for running ape shit all over our privacy by putting some tougher penalties on private individuals that invade our privacy? Bah! It's nothing more then an empty political manuever to make them look better while the FBI, CIA or whomever looks into our bedroom window (figuratively or literally). Sad.
Yes, I bought two of the "super compact" ones that are supposed to fit. And guess what? They were still just about 1/4 inch too big. Not to mention looking kinda dim for their "75W equivalent" rating. Still looking for ones that support photocells and motion sensors.
The ads are also aimed less at the consumer and more at doctors; doctors are the ones that have to prescribe it, after all, so they have to learn about it before patients start asking about it. Otherwise the patients will think the doctor is uninformed.
Hate to break it to you, but the ads ARE in fact aimed at the consumers. They are telling YOU to ask your doctor. You the consumer. And lucky for them there are millions of mild hypocondriacts out there that go running to their doctor the first chance they get to get a script. And for the most part the doctors ARE uninformed about the drugs they are perscribing. Pharmacists are the ones that actually have to learn about the drugs and try to catch as many dangerous interactions the doctors may or may not know about as they can. There are a whole lot of doctors out there that happilly collect the office visit fee, write the script, and then wait to collect again when their patient comes back complaining about the side effects from the dangerous medication they are taking (and didn't really need in the first place). Its a vicious cycle that is the #1 biggest reason health care is so "expensive" in the US these days (followed by the #2 reason: rapent medical malpractice settlements, most of which are kept off the public records).
Viagra is a perfect example of a drug completely out of control. How "nessasary" is it for most of the millions who are taking it? How dangerous is it? How easilly can just about anybody email a less then completely ethical doctor somewhere and have a script mailed to them? Lets run down the possible side effects:
flushing, headache, nasal congestion, stomach discomfort following meals, abnormal vision including blurred vision, seeing shades of colors differently than before, or sensitivity to light, bladder pain, cloudy or bloody urine, dizziness, increased frequency of urination, pain on urination, diarrhea, bleeding of the eye, convulsions (seizures), decreased or double vision or other changes in vision, prolonged, painful, or inappropriate erection of penis, redness, burning, or swelling of the eye, anxiety
at least this one has relatively "mild" side effects compared to some other drugs. I have seen heartburn medication that had a possible side effect listed of "Death"...no joke. Guess they figure if you die you won't have that heartburn any more and it's a win for them.
If laws exist to keep cigarettes and alcohol from being advertized to minors, shouldn't stuff that has been shown to cause even more prompt death or permanent damage be more tightly regulated in who it's pushed on?
I was a pharmacist's assistant.
Most of the fixtures in my house are not CF friendly. I try to find ones that will fit but they are always a tad too tall or too wide for everything but the really old cieling fixtures in the bedrooms. Which brings up an interesting point...why is it that out of an entire wall of new lighting fixtures and Lowes/HomeDepot, only a handful of the new fixtures available to buy are designed in such a way that CFs will work?
I have never understood the whole delaying release to 3rd world countries thing. It seems to be insulting to them, IE: "We think you are scum so we won't let you have our movies till they are old to us". No wonder they all mostly hate americans. And how do they think its not going to result in rampant piracy? It seems like the most compelling reason for anyone to pirate something is that they want it and cannot obtain it through any legal means. Your observation of the costs are also noteworthy. It almost seems like they (MPAA) are TRYING to precipitate piracy in these foreign countries. Oh and as others have pointed out, if I was a Canadian and had to pay tax on media I am certain I would have no moral problem with "pirating" movies and music. After all, if I have PAID for it through the media tax then how can it be considered pirating or in any way unfiar or illegal? I would just want to get what I paid for. For those who use media for things other then burning movies and music, (aka giving pictures from thanksgiving to grandma), I'm now going to want to download a movie and burn it to a DVD because I have already paid for it after all! They have gone so far with this that its actually creating "pirates" out of people that would have been happy to buy Cds or DVDs out of the store otherwise. But now they have government mandated revenue and statistics to convince people that they are the victims so I guess they don't care.
Yup, the whole thing was a big marketing ploy. Even with the high price of copper these days its going to be cheaper in the long run to hard wire stuff. If they really wanted to get fancy, run fibre to all the seats instead of copper. Trying to concentrate that much wireless activity into one tiny area is just dumb anyway.
Where exactly could I find one of these "cheapo" mac minis? I have never seen a mini for less then $500...the cheapest on the apple site right now is $600. They would need to be half that price for me to start thinking of them as "cheapo".
Whew...had me worried there for a minute. I initially read that as "Halfway through development OF Imperial units. I don't want the military developing Imperial units. Then we will have to develop rebel units and the whole universe gets crappy.
Yes, the default user thing is pretty important. But that is sticking your finger in the leaking dam. I don't count the firewall improvements for much, a "personal software firewall" of any flavor should not be relied upon IMHO. Having a firewall on the same hardware you are trying to protect doesn't make much sense except as a last line of defence. You can't be touching the fire and not get burned as they say. IE7 is not a vista improvement as you mentioned. "Network Access Protection" is a big hack in my opinion to compensate for the fact that there are too many holes to keep them plugged. Windows Service Hardening may help, but seems to just be a way of allowing the developers to code sloppy and get away with it. Frankly the list of "security enhancements" seems pretty short for "the most secure OS ever". I'm not usually this negative about MSFT. My company actually provides MSFT based solutions. It's just that the more I am exposed to Vista, the more I find to dislike about it. The security enhancements (or lack thereof) is only a very small part of this story... The saga goes on from there, but alas it is time for bed so that story will have to be another night.
Convienience on the web is live text chat. It has WAY less pitfalls then VOIP. Text Chat doesn't suffer from QOS problems. Text Chat will probably not drop the connection if there is high latency or a momentary loss of connectivity. The system can be anything with a keyboard. Agents can potentially handle multiple chat sessions at once.
Meanwhile VOIP requires a relatively modern computer, sound card, speakers, microphone, larger software footprint. Call quality can be horrible or downright unusable for a variety of reasons from microphone (or lack thereof) to speakers to latency to audio on "mute" to localized accents of people in east vs west or whereever. An agent is only going to be able to handle one VOIP caller at a time, ever.
Fancy and flashy makes headlines and gives pointy hairs something to BS about and force their subordinates to impliment, simple and reliable makes cusomers happy and companies efficient. The high pressure marketers will argue that they make more sales if they actually get to talk to the customer as the agent can keep them as a captive audience more or less if they are any good at controlling the conversation. But I still have to go back to the above comparison. If the customer can't connect or can't communicate with the agent, then you are pretty much guaranteed to lose the sale as the customer's short attention span will be maxed out and they will move on to the next best option (IE: one of your competitors).
Nah, they aren't really scared of being uselss. It's just a marketing battle. Microsoft started it by creating an OS that makes the user "feel" more secure and then making all sorts of forward looking statements about how it's "the most secure OS ever". (my analysis of Vista so far has yielded little in the way of concrete security improvments, but lots of little gadget things that appear to be intended only to make the average user "feel secure".) Given the impressive bloat, mid-stream changes, and overall changes, you know there has to be a whole new playground of exploits waiting to be found. Assuming the AV companies can figure out how to protect a target this big, they will keep the people buying far into the night as long as they can offset micrsoft's brainwashing attempts. And even then, the first time Joe Average starts noticing his computer "isn't running right", he will probably get the idea that this thing isn't as secure as they let on and start shopping for AV software again. Allthough, after spending that much on the OS, maybe they will have had enough and just chuck it out the window and get a Mac.
While I agree with you that 99.9% of business would scoff at the notion of cutting off exchange of Word documents in the name of protection, the idea that there is no "real world risk" is naive. And the minute an exploit starts bringing business to an abrupt halt, I guarantee you that everyone from the CEO down will be screeming for the bleeding to be stopped by ANY means nessasary. And that would include ceasing to use Word and finding some alternate method of exchanging business documents that is safer.
Please allow K'Breel some time to provide a response. The esteemed speaker is very busy right now overseeing the analysis of the recently captured "Global Surveyor" human craft.
4-5 years!?!? That would have to be in a VERY ideal situation (IE: a place where its never cloudy and electricity is VERY expensive.) For the other 99.9% of the population, the numbers don't look as good. Even if it's not cloudy, you only get the equivalent of about 5 hours of peak output from your panels per day. When it is cloudy, the output drops dramatically (as I have seen first hand in the output graphs from the system in the building I'm typing this from in recent winter months). For most parts of the country, you will be very lucky if you manage to recoup the cost of materials after 20 years. If you had to pay someone to install the system (which most people do), then it really can never pay for itself because the panels wear out after 20-30 years and you have other maintinence such as the inverter, interconnect wires, disconnects, ect.
Another problem is raw materials. Current panel technologies use materials that are very rare in the earth's crust. Not only does that keep prices high, but it also puts a hard cap on how many panels can be produced (IE: there is not enough raw materials to produce enough panels to generate all our power even if we wanted to).
***put on tin foil hat***
This company http://www.solfocus.com/technology_gen2.html seems to have a good idea of built in concentrators. And according to TFA the DOE came up with 30% efficient panels 12 years ago. My question is: why are these breakthrough technologies being exclusively sold to the space program and utilities? Are they just too expensive to be marketed to consumers? Or is there some sort of conspiriacy going on to keep this stuff out of our hands?
I'm still waiting to see these promised new bells and whistles in action. I have heard alot of talk about all the magical things that Vista is going to do for us, but so far have not seen one thing that XP wasn't capable of (though some features may have required 3rd party add-ons, but that is beside the point). And yes, I have installed RC2 and played with it and Aero. So far it appears to be nothing more then bloat for the sake of bloat and no real innovation. Maybe somebody will come up with something that really takes advantage of the new OS and wows the crowds. But so far I'm not seeing it. Everyone seems to think that Vista cannot fail because of Microsoft's position in the market. But people thought the Itanium was the next big thing and Intel could do no wrong for a while too. Either Microsoft with deprecate it themselves with something that truely looks appealing, or someone else will pop up and take the limelight. I would say this is an excellent time for Apple/OSX to emerge as the new market leader. Just my $0.02
Yeah, I'm thinking this is the type of power generation they were talking about in the Matrix. First I find out that there is in fact a company that makes advanced robotics called "skynet", then the crazy idea of buring the sky to prevent global warming (stupid eco-terrorists!), now this!
Beware of the machines.
Well, the exact same hardware was running XP fast and happy just a few hours before playing Medal or Honor and Call of Duty. Don't know how it could have gotten "screwed up" just by installing a new OS. And I was using the very latest RC2 build downloaded directly from MSDN. As another poster mentioned, maybe it was just a bad install. I'll try installing it again and see if the results are any different. But certainly re-installing isn't going to change the features of the OS. It still doesn't make any sense financially.
So, how exactly is the 64bit support in Vista all that much of a "big improvement" when there is already a 64bit XP? Are the 64 bits that Vista have more shiney then the 64bits XP has? My observation is just the opposite...there more more XP 64bit drivers available for hardware right now then 64bit vista drivers by far. And no, you can't use 64bit XP drivers in Vista. And in my experience 64bit Internet Explorer is much more stable in XP/2003 then Vista. Where is all this mis-information coming from that you have to use Vista in order to support 64bit anyway?
True... I worked in the telecom industry for a few years and encountered countless instances of phone companies "shooting themselves in the foot" by techs ripping out wires indiscrimantly, hooking up things wrong and other nice things (mostly baby bells). Little of it had to do with any sort of politics or grudges or anything. 99% of the time it just came down to sloppy techs that were too lazy (or hungover/high) to do a decent job of it.
I installed Vista and longhorn over the weekend to test them out. Well, I should say I tried to install Longhorn...it would get to the end of the install and then crash out every time. Vista being the main subject though, I will stick to that. I spent several hours with it exploring the features and trying out different operations I might do in a typical day. Overall it felt like a recurring nightmare...the nightmare that was Windows ME. Much added bloat with little material gain. Like windows ME, it adds out of the box support for some additional hardware that previous versions didn't. Like Windows ME, it consumes more resources then previous versions (for no appearant reason). Like Windows ME its highly unstable so far (I had Explorer crash countless times doing things as mundane as browsing a network share or checking my e-mail). The one thing it does "better" then Windows ME is that it actually breaks driver support for alot of current hardware (couldn't get the embedded sound working on a motherboard that is only a year old or use my printer). I have trouble imagining how feature-poor the lower editions will be, but the Ultimate edition has little more then XP did. The only good things I can say about it are the included support for iSCSI, addition of a pretty good chess game, and inclusion of a DVD authoring program. Given the pricing of the Ultimate edition, its not at all worth it (buy a 3rd party chess program, iSCSI driver, and DVD authoring software and you will come out ahead financially)
Oh, by the way...I was running on 2Ghz athlon64 with 1gb of ram, Gamer's video card and SATA hard drive and performance was abysmal. Turning off the Aero features made clicking between file browsing windows a little less painful, but still not very responsive. I didn't see any benefit to the Aero features for the average user anyway. Based on this experience, I am declaring Vista the most skippable Windows version since ME. Hopefully, MSFT will come back and redeem themselves with a truely worthly OS like they did with Win2K.