You got it. While it seems dumb, a 12bit salt would require ~6.5tb database using these researcher's model.
Which seems like a lot, but isn't a size database engines today can't handle, and I suspect within the next 5-10 years having 1tb of drive space won't be unheard of either (considering we've got 200+gb drives today).
...when NT first came out, I was trying to switch over to using a shadow password file on my linux box... In linux land back then, you didn't even have to crack the password, you just had to replace it with a different hash that you generated...
Saving becomes investment, as soon as our current overcapacity problem works itself out. [2]
Right, which does nothing to help the "overcapacity" problem work out.
Less debt means more consumer spending Yeah, 20 years from now once their house has been paid off. People accumulate debt because they can't afford to pay cash. People prefer to pay cash when they can.
I'm middle-class, have kids, and got roughly $3000 more in refunds than had been withheld from my paycheck last year.
I'm also middle class with NO kids, and my net change in federal taxes is about $150. That's $12.50 a month, or a bit less than $2.88 a week. Wow, I'm feeling empowered already. Sponsor a healthier economy for $2.88 a week...
Last time I looked, the richest 5% of the taxpayers paid 50% of the taxes. The poorest 50% of the taxpayers paid less than 5% of the taxes
The richest 5% of taxpayers earn 34% of the countries total income, and own 80% of the private property in the country.
The poorest "50%" (average wage being under $43000) earn roughly 13% of the nation's income.
Why do the top 5% pay so much more in taxes than the bottom 50%? Maybe it has something to do with earning disproportionately more income than the bottom 50%.
Our tax system is a progressive one. Ideally, once you subtract the costs of housing, food, transportation, and so on, everyone pays the same percent on what is left over (ever wonder why tax rates for married couples are different? Or why you get a credit for children? It's designed to work in a progressive system). Just so happens that the bottom 50% spent a significant portion of their income "just living"; much more so than the top 5% do. Wow, what a shock that must be.
The tax cut passed this year moves our tax system closer to a regressive one. If tax rates were cut across the board, I'd probably still be bitching (about deficits, not the rates), but they weren't. Bush chose to cut rates very disproportionately, and threw in some leftover change for people with children to keep the majority of the "middle class" happy. There was no attempt made to "balance" the tax system as it should be balanced (a proper regressive system). It was purely a political move. Instead of doing the hard thing, what's right for the country, instead he focused on the easy thing to help ensure re-election in '04.
[2] We just finished a huge boom, so we have LOTS of over-capacity. It'll be a few years before we have much inflationary pressure. I predict that we'll see low interest rates, little change in unemployment numbers or wages, and steady growth in company profits for the next 2+ years. Buy stocks.
Overcapacity for WHAT? The only thing that was overinflated was the tech industry, with it's many startups and their dumb ideas eating cash from the venture firms.
Unemployment figures are NOT going to get better, especially with IBM laying off over a hundred thousand people over the next few years. Or all of the companies teetering on the verge of bankruptsy. Hell, unemployment figures as they are now do not portray the true state of unemployment in this country -- they do not take into account the people who've given up looking for work, the people who decided to go back to school for lack of anything else to do, or the people who've fallen off of the unemployment rolls. I expect corporate profits to continue to increase at the expense of employment figures.
If you pay zero dollars in taxes, the $400 tax credit results in you getting zero dollars back when you file your tax returns.
If you paid $200 in taxes, the $400 tax credit would result in you getting $200 back when you file your taxes.
You don't get more back than you pay into the system, at least directly. This is all assuming, of course, that these figures involve a person with a child.
So in a nutshell, poor people don't get squat, because they don't make squat. Middle class people get a bit over squat (or a bit more than that if they have kids), and upper class people get an amount that appears to be squat to them, but is a crapload to all of the poor and middleclass people.
The tax cuts have resulted in our country is now experiencing it's 2nd largest budget deficit in history, which is threatening to trigger a bout of deflation, and cause an increase in long term interest rates (low interest rates are probably the only thing keeping this country from a massive economic collapse).
Trickle down economics DOES NOT WORK. Rich people will save it. Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt. And Companies won't hire people unless they need to, even if they have extra funds available.
What does a prior conviction have to do with what they do now? Does the settlement reached by the justice department prevent them from creating new products?
Fact of the matter is, they can expand in new directions as long as they don't use their monopoly clout (ie: threaten to cut someone out of the loop in an area they hold a monopoly, ex: tying) to expand into new areas. The fact that they can throw rediculous amounts of money at it, nor does your dislike for them, doesn't enter into the equation.
As someone else pointed out, color laser prints and dyesub prints are two totally different animals.
Dyesub printers, while sometimes finicky, produce excellent quality prints. A company I used to work for uses them in all of their portrait studios for "on demand"/instant prints.
It is definately "different" than the print you get with a silver halide printer.. but, that's generally the difference between a $5000 printer and a $25000 printer.:) The silver halide printers are harder to tweak to output the "right" colors though -- the colors generally look "flat" (best word I can use to describe it) out of the box. They're also harder to maintain -- the one we had back at the office could have some nasty chemical spills and whatnot. I probably wouldn't use a kiosk that has one of those built in -- I'd rather send it off to a large facility that spends more time keeping their printers in calibration.
The company I used to work for was evaluating a product which was designed to produce studio quality prints in serious volumes... the thing had about 20 of those Epson printers. I was DAMN impressed with the quality of the prints, and that isn't easy to do considering how much I loath ink-based printers.
The GUI for the last version of WP I used was pretty decent actually, but the damn thing crashed so often it was utterly useless... I had more crashes from that piece of software than any other software package I have ever used, including Netscape 4.x.
Trying to select half of the menu items resulted in a crash. I could walk away for half an hour, come back, and it would have crashed. I could hit the enter key and it would crash. I could select a new font and it would crash. I would go to print my paper and it would crash. Frick'in rediculous... Never had it crash while saving, fortunately. At least they got that right...
There's nothing wrong or illegal for a monopoly to reach out in new "directions".
Now, if they said "use our product or we'll stop selling you Windows", that would be illegal. But only for a company with a monopoly in that particular market (it wouldn't be illegal for MS to say use windows or we won't sell you our digital cable box).
I have. Except instead of clicking on the close box for the IE window, I clicked on the close box in the popup (no, I wasn't paying particularly close attention to what I was doing...).
1) It is difficult to accurately interpret the second ammendment, primarily because the way the sentence was constructed is ambiguous, primarily because it has at least one comma too many and is missing another punctuation mark.
It could be interpreted to say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms can not be infringed", with the first half of the sentence being background information.
It could be interpreted to say that the right of a militia (armed group of citizens) group to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
It could be interpreted to say that there can't be a law prohibiting militias, nor a law stating that their right to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
It could be interpreted to say that there can't be a law prohibiting militias, nor a law stating that the people's right to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
I personally think the last item is the most accurate one. I also think that at the time, such a statement made a lot of sense -- the common man could afford the arms to defend his country. Today, in the age of 16 million dollar military jets, multi million dollar tanks, and guns that can empty a clip of ammo before you can react to the first shot, I don't think it does make a lot of sense.
2) (didn't think I'd ever make it to the second point, did you?) While I may not necessarily agree with it, the Supreme Court has interpreted it as meaning that the people will always have the right to keep and bear arms -- however, they also have stated that the constitution says nothing about being able to keep and bear any/all kind of arms, so as long as there is a single firearm available to a common citizen (even if it's a lousy 9mm pistol that holds 1 round) gun control laws are constutional.
Loading the CLR is very simple, though not incredibly well documented. Lookup the details on the ICORRuntimeHost and CORBindToRuntimeEx. It is simple enough that you should be able to figure out what needs to be done just by looking at the interfaces. The initial load takes about 5 seconds, but it only has to be done once.;)
It wouldn't be difficult to write a simple app that wraps the loading of the CLR and the assembly you want to use. Managing it inside of the SQLServer process space is the tricky part.
I don't think the prices MS charges are completely out of line. I think xp pro is expensive for a home user, but XP Pro is targeted at business users. I can understand why people like me would want XP Pro at home, but the vast majority of the people who want it have no use for things like remote desktop sharing, connecting to a domain, ecrypting their filesytem, or run IIS. Ask most people that are using XP Pro why they're using it instead of XP Home, they'll probably tell you "uhh...because it's better, and uh, I can do more stuff."
The home version can be found for about $80. For comparison, MacOS X costs about $120. If you compare their prices to those of other business offerings from other companies, they're not too out of line there either (albeit, there isn't much else to compare with until you hit server software).
So why is there almost universal disdain for Microsoft? (Hint: it has to do with past behavior, not because they are successful, as one Microsoft apologist I know argues.)
There isn't universal disdain for Microsoft. In THESE forums there is almost universal disdain. On top of that, just about anything they do is going to piss off SOMEONE, while making other people happy. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you don't have to be on slashdot long to see that people will find fault with anything they do, regardless of intention. Hell, the frick'in conspiracy theorys are almost as bad as the government conspiracy theories (which you'll also find here quite often)...
The vendor sets terms however they want. Isn't this true when dealing with any vendor? Hell, when I go to get waranty work done on my car, what options do I have if they say "nope, not covered because we think you raced it"?
shortens upgrade cycles (hence widespread complaints of "forced upgrades"), raises prices in the guise of restructuring, EOL's products that business is dependant on.
EOL of a product should NEVER be a surprise to anyone using it. EOL information is published when the product ships. My personal opinion is that people demanding that a product be supported for infinity for free are being unreasonable. The logistics of supporting something for more than a few years is crazy, especially when you're dealing with anything the size of NT.
Regarding upgrade cycles for products, they vary. The next major release of Windows is scheduled to be out in 2005, and I'd bet money it won't hit shelves until 2006. That's 3 years off down the road, which is as long of a cycle has been since Windows 95 was released. And I still don't understand why people feel forced to buy & use the latest and greatest if it doesn't do anything for them.
I hope by now it is clear why customers feel subserviant to the vendor in this relationship. Even if you do want to continue using the same stuff for a long time, you should be able to get support for it. If vendor A won't give it, then vendor B would. This is absolutely true in a competitive market. If there is a market for it, someone will provide it. But, oops, there is no vendor B.
So, using that reasoning, Apple is in the same boat. If you buy OS X you're stuck with apple for the duration....but not only are you stuck with them for an OS, you're stuck with them for hardware too. Apple has done some pretty evil things in their little world too...
Not only are OEM machines being build cheaper, but they're trying to design the systems in such a way that you can only get parts from them as well.
The dev box (a Dell of somesort) I use at work was just had an extra cpu dropped in (mmm...dual P4 2.4ghz Xeons...yummy). They ordered CPU's from some place other than Dell; came with the Intel provided heatsink. When they went stick the new CPU in the box, they encountered two problems: 1) There was no mounting bracket for the 2nd cpu socket 2) The "shroud" (the case has a windtunnel type thing with fans that suck air out the back of the case instead of having a fan mounted directly on the cpu) that went over the cpu wouldn't fit over the heatsink.
So the hardware guy goes and calls Dell to order the mounting brackets for all the machines...Dell tells him that they won't sell him the mounting brackets unless he buys the CPUs from him.
They ended up getting ahold of mounting brackets from a 3rd party that would work, and they had to cut out some of the plastic from the shroud...Utterly stupid and unneccessary.
It seems that you are suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the *nix way. I don't know where you're coming up with these alledged "converter programs", since everything in *nix is done in plain text. That makes it neither fragile, nor hard to maintain.
Just because the output of a program is in text form doesn't mean that all programs somehow magically understand its contents. XML makes this somewhat better (one hell of a lot easier to parse at anyrate), but you've still got to create an xslt to get from one schema to the other...
Wrong! Net change: Linux has no per seat licensing, so costs now favor Linux terminals over seperate systems.
You misunderstand the point of that statement. The person I was replying to was complaining how you had to buy a liscense (for commercial software) for each computer you put software on, and how much better it was to have a single computer with a bunch of terminals.
To reduce admin costs, since it is MUCH simpler to maintain a single machine, or a handful of machines (redundancy is good).
But you aren't just maintaining one machine, you're maintaining N+1 machines -- the monitor doesn't just plug into the ethernet port.
A computer is only obsolete once it is no longer capable of doing what you want it to do.
My current machine is a K7/500. It was a top of the line machine when I bought it...shoot, probably almost 5 years ago. I got it so I could get better than 4 fps in Q3a. And boy did it ever...:) But, Q3a was the "hardest" app that computer has ever run. I don't do much else on it except play games (though I don't even do that much anymore) and surf the web, occasionally ripping a cd for mp3s.
The problem is that the bearings in the fans are starting to go out... the case fans aren't a big deal... the fan on the video card is...
I don't think the problem is so much that the hardware is made poorly, but rather it's being pushed harder and being made cheaper. Shoot, a top of the line video card is it's own cpu & mobo in and of itself these days, and I can find 52x cdrom drives for $40.
You misread me. I mean that with MS you have to upgrade the whole network.
I think that highly depends on the enviornment you're running in (and what your'e doing in that environment). But in the case of Munich it's irrelevent, because they're not going to. They're wanting a solution that they can stick on a bunch of machines, roll out, and stick into maintenance mode.
Yeah, there are still small UI differences (mainly in machine management if I remember correctly), but I don't remember having any problems dealing with them. I think the biggest one was trying to figure out where to turn off the animations...whoopie.:)
If we agree that you can run each system for as long as you run, using whatever software you want, how are you "subserviant" to a vendor?
Regarding cost, initial cash layout on a system that will be running for a decade is nothing compared to the costs of administering said systems. I can almost guarantee you that linux beats windows in certain areas, and windows beats linux in other areas, but as I keep trying to point out it isn't a simple matter of looking at the price tag on a software box. It pretty much IS for a home user, but not for a corporate user.
My point is that the item with a lower initial cost is not necessarily cheaper than one with a higher initial cost.
I'm not saying that windows is cheaper to maintain, rather I'm saying that an analasys must be done to determine how much it'll cost you to run once you're using one of those systems (both cost time to run -- for a home user, time is essentially free, for a corporation it is not).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the one other critical element that Id games have -- a high funfactor level. :)
You got it. While it seems dumb, a 12bit salt would require ~6.5tb database using these researcher's model.
Which seems like a lot, but isn't a size database engines today can't handle, and I suspect within the next 5-10 years having 1tb of drive space won't be unheard of either (considering we've got 200+gb drives today).
...when NT first came out, I was trying to switch over to using a shadow password file on my linux box... In linux land back then, you didn't even have to crack the password, you just had to replace it with a different hash that you generated...
Saving becomes investment, as soon as our current overcapacity problem works itself out. [2]
Right, which does nothing to help the "overcapacity" problem work out.
Less debt means more consumer spending
Yeah, 20 years from now once their house has been paid off. People accumulate debt because they can't afford to pay cash. People prefer to pay cash when they can.
I'm middle-class, have kids, and got roughly $3000 more in refunds than had been withheld from my paycheck last year.
I'm also middle class with NO kids, and my net change in federal taxes is about $150. That's $12.50 a month, or a bit less than $2.88 a week. Wow, I'm feeling empowered already. Sponsor a healthier economy for $2.88 a week...
Last time I looked, the richest 5% of the taxpayers paid 50% of the taxes. The poorest 50% of the taxpayers paid less than 5% of the taxes
The richest 5% of taxpayers earn 34% of the countries total income, and own 80% of the private property in the country.
The poorest "50%" (average wage being under $43000) earn roughly 13% of the nation's income.
Why do the top 5% pay so much more in taxes than the bottom 50%? Maybe it has something to do with earning disproportionately more income than the bottom 50%.
Our tax system is a progressive one. Ideally, once you subtract the costs of housing, food, transportation, and so on, everyone pays the same percent on what is left over (ever wonder why tax rates for married couples are different? Or why you get a credit for children? It's designed to work in a progressive system). Just so happens that the bottom 50% spent a significant portion of their income "just living"; much more so than the top 5% do. Wow, what a shock that must be.
The tax cut passed this year moves our tax system closer to a regressive one. If tax rates were cut across the board, I'd probably still be bitching (about deficits, not the rates), but they weren't. Bush chose to cut rates very disproportionately, and threw in some leftover change for people with children to keep the majority of the "middle class" happy. There was no attempt made to "balance" the tax system as it should be balanced (a proper regressive system). It was purely a political move. Instead of doing the hard thing, what's right for the country, instead he focused on the easy thing to help ensure re-election in '04.
[2] We just finished a huge boom, so we have LOTS of over-capacity. It'll be a few years before we have much inflationary pressure. I predict that we'll see low interest rates, little change in unemployment numbers or wages, and steady growth in company profits for the next 2+ years. Buy stocks.
Overcapacity for WHAT? The only thing that was overinflated was the tech industry, with it's many startups and their dumb ideas eating cash from the venture firms.
Unemployment figures are NOT going to get better, especially with IBM laying off over a hundred thousand people over the next few years. Or all of the companies teetering on the verge of bankruptsy. Hell, unemployment figures as they are now do not portray the true state of unemployment in this country -- they do not take into account the people who've given up looking for work, the people who decided to go back to school for lack of anything else to do, or the people who've fallen off of the unemployment rolls. I expect corporate profits to continue to increase at the expense of employment figures.
If you pay zero dollars in taxes, the $400 tax credit results in you getting zero dollars back when you file your tax returns.
If you paid $200 in taxes, the $400 tax credit would result in you getting $200 back when you file your taxes.
You don't get more back than you pay into the system, at least directly. This is all assuming, of course, that these figures involve a person with a child.
So in a nutshell, poor people don't get squat, because they don't make squat. Middle class people get a bit over squat (or a bit more than that if they have kids), and upper class people get an amount that appears to be squat to them, but is a crapload to all of the poor and middleclass people.
The tax cuts have resulted in our country is now experiencing it's 2nd largest budget deficit in history, which is threatening to trigger a bout of deflation, and cause an increase in long term interest rates (low interest rates are probably the only thing keeping this country from a massive economic collapse).
Trickle down economics DOES NOT WORK. Rich people will save it. Middle class people will use it to pay down debt. Poor people use it instead of building up debt. And Companies won't hire people unless they need to, even if they have extra funds available.
What does a prior conviction have to do with what they do now? Does the settlement reached by the justice department prevent them from creating new products?
Fact of the matter is, they can expand in new directions as long as they don't use their monopoly clout (ie: threaten to cut someone out of the loop in an area they hold a monopoly, ex: tying) to expand into new areas. The fact that they can throw rediculous amounts of money at it, nor does your dislike for them, doesn't enter into the equation.
Microsoft spends less on political campaign contributions each year than it does on soda for its employees...By about a factor of 4.
Figured I'd put things into a bit of perspective.
As someone else pointed out, color laser prints and dyesub prints are two totally different animals.
.. but, that's generally the difference between a $5000 printer and a $25000 printer. :) The silver halide printers are harder to tweak to output the "right" colors though -- the colors generally look "flat" (best word I can use to describe it) out of the box. They're also harder to maintain -- the one we had back at the office could have some nasty chemical spills and whatnot. I probably wouldn't use a kiosk that has one of those built in -- I'd rather send it off to a large facility that spends more time keeping their printers in calibration.
Dyesub printers, while sometimes finicky, produce excellent quality prints. A company I used to work for uses them in all of their portrait studios for "on demand"/instant prints.
It is definately "different" than the print you get with a silver halide printer
The company I used to work for was evaluating a product which was designed to produce studio quality prints in serious volumes ... the thing had about 20 of those Epson printers. I was DAMN impressed with the quality of the prints, and that isn't easy to do considering how much I loath ink-based printers.
If it makes you feel any better, the Windows version of WordPerfect worked about as well for me as the Linux version did for you. :)
The GUI for the last version of WP I used was pretty decent actually, but the damn thing crashed so often it was utterly useless ... I had more crashes from that piece of software than any other software package I have ever used, including Netscape 4.x.
Trying to select half of the menu items resulted in a crash. I could walk away for half an hour, come back, and it would have crashed. I could hit the enter key and it would crash. I could select a new font and it would crash. I would go to print my paper and it would crash. Frick'in rediculous... Never had it crash while saving, fortunately. At least they got that right...
There's nothing wrong or illegal for a monopoly to reach out in new "directions".
Now, if they said "use our product or we'll stop selling you Windows", that would be illegal. But only for a company with a monopoly in that particular market (it wouldn't be illegal for MS to say use windows or we won't sell you our digital cable box).
I have. Except instead of clicking on the close box for the IE window, I clicked on the close box in the popup (no, I wasn't paying particularly close attention to what I was doing...).
Two points:
1) It is difficult to accurately interpret the second ammendment, primarily because the way the sentence was constructed is ambiguous, primarily because it has at least one comma too many and is missing another punctuation mark.
It could be interpreted to say "The right of the people to keep and bear arms can not be infringed", with the first half of the sentence being background information.
It could be interpreted to say that the right of a militia (armed group of citizens) group to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
It could be interpreted to say that there can't be a law prohibiting militias, nor a law stating that their right to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
It could be interpreted to say that there can't be a law prohibiting militias, nor a law stating that the people's right to keep and bear arms can not be infringed.
I personally think the last item is the most accurate one. I also think that at the time, such a statement made a lot of sense -- the common man could afford the arms to defend his country. Today, in the age of 16 million dollar military jets, multi million dollar tanks, and guns that can empty a clip of ammo before you can react to the first shot, I don't think it does make a lot of sense.
2) (didn't think I'd ever make it to the second point, did you?) While I may not necessarily agree with it, the Supreme Court has interpreted it as meaning that the people will always have the right to keep and bear arms -- however, they also have stated that the constitution says nothing about being able to keep and bear any/all kind of arms, so as long as there is a single firearm available to a common citizen (even if it's a lousy 9mm pistol that holds 1 round) gun control laws are constutional.
That's a better idea than the one I had below. ;)
Loading the CLR is very simple, though not incredibly well documented. Lookup the details on the ICORRuntimeHost and CORBindToRuntimeEx. It is simple enough that you should be able to figure out what needs to be done just by looking at the interfaces. The initial load takes about 5 seconds, but it only has to be done once. ;)
It wouldn't be difficult to write a simple app that wraps the loading of the CLR and the assembly you want to use. Managing it inside of the SQLServer process space is the tricky part.
You forgot another option: Don't dispose of sensative documents. :) (you should see my file cabinet...I really should clean it out).
I don't think the prices MS charges are completely out of line. I think xp pro is expensive for a home user, but XP Pro is targeted at business users. I can understand why people like me would want XP Pro at home, but the vast majority of the people who want it have no use for things like remote desktop sharing, connecting to a domain, ecrypting their filesytem, or run IIS. Ask most people that are using XP Pro why they're using it instead of XP Home, they'll probably tell you "uhh...because it's better, and uh, I can do more stuff."
The home version can be found for about $80. For comparison, MacOS X costs about $120. If you compare their prices to those of other business offerings from other companies, they're not too out of line there either (albeit, there isn't much else to compare with until you hit server software).
So why is there almost universal disdain for Microsoft? (Hint: it has to do with past behavior, not because they are successful, as one Microsoft apologist I know argues.)
There isn't universal disdain for Microsoft. In THESE forums there is almost universal disdain. On top of that, just about anything they do is going to piss off SOMEONE, while making other people happy. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you don't have to be on slashdot long to see that people will find fault with anything they do, regardless of intention. Hell, the frick'in conspiracy theorys are almost as bad as the government conspiracy theories (which you'll also find here quite often)...
The vendor sets terms however they want.
Isn't this true when dealing with any vendor? Hell, when I go to get waranty work done on my car, what options do I have if they say "nope, not covered because we think you raced it"?
shortens upgrade cycles (hence widespread complaints of "forced upgrades"), raises prices in the guise of restructuring, EOL's products that business is dependant on.
EOL of a product should NEVER be a surprise to anyone using it. EOL information is published when the product ships. My personal opinion is that people demanding that a product be supported for infinity for free are being unreasonable. The logistics of supporting something for more than a few years is crazy, especially when you're dealing with anything the size of NT.
Regarding upgrade cycles for products, they vary. The next major release of Windows is scheduled to be out in 2005, and I'd bet money it won't hit shelves until 2006. That's 3 years off down the road, which is as long of a cycle has been since Windows 95 was released. And I still don't understand why people feel forced to buy & use the latest and greatest if it doesn't do anything for them.
I hope by now it is clear why customers feel subserviant to the vendor in this relationship. Even if you do want to continue using the same stuff for a long time, you should be able to get support for it. If vendor A won't give it, then vendor B would. This is absolutely true in a competitive market. If there is a market for it, someone will provide it. But, oops, there is no vendor B.
So, using that reasoning, Apple is in the same boat. If you buy OS X you're stuck with apple for the duration....but not only are you stuck with them for an OS, you're stuck with them for hardware too. Apple has done some pretty evil things in their little world too...
Not only are OEM machines being build cheaper, but they're trying to design the systems in such a way that you can only get parts from them as well.
The dev box (a Dell of somesort) I use at work was just had an extra cpu dropped in (mmm...dual P4 2.4ghz Xeons...yummy). They ordered CPU's from some place other than Dell; came with the Intel provided heatsink. When they went stick the new CPU in the box, they encountered two problems:
1) There was no mounting bracket for the 2nd cpu socket
2) The "shroud" (the case has a windtunnel type thing with fans that suck air out the back of the case instead of having a fan mounted directly on the cpu) that went over the cpu wouldn't fit over the heatsink.
So the hardware guy goes and calls Dell to order the mounting brackets for all the machines...Dell tells him that they won't sell him the mounting brackets unless he buys the CPUs from him.
They ended up getting ahold of mounting brackets from a 3rd party that would work, and they had to cut out some of the plastic from the shroud...Utterly stupid and unneccessary.
It seems that you are suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the *nix way. I don't know where you're coming up with these alledged "converter programs", since everything in *nix is done in plain text. That makes it neither fragile, nor hard to maintain.
Just because the output of a program is in text form doesn't mean that all programs somehow magically understand its contents. XML makes this somewhat better (one hell of a lot easier to parse at anyrate), but you've still got to create an xslt to get from one schema to the other...
Wrong! Net change: Linux has no per seat licensing, so costs now favor Linux terminals over seperate systems.
You misunderstand the point of that statement. The person I was replying to was complaining how you had to buy a liscense (for commercial software) for each computer you put software on, and how much better it was to have a single computer with a bunch of terminals.
To reduce admin costs, since it is MUCH simpler to maintain a single machine, or a handful of machines (redundancy is good).
But you aren't just maintaining one machine, you're maintaining N+1 machines -- the monitor doesn't just plug into the ethernet port.
A computer is only obsolete once it is no longer capable of doing what you want it to do.
... the case fans aren't a big deal ... the fan on the video card is ...
My current machine is a K7/500. It was a top of the line machine when I bought it...shoot, probably almost 5 years ago. I got it so I could get better than 4 fps in Q3a. And boy did it ever...:) But, Q3a was the "hardest" app that computer has ever run. I don't do much else on it except play games (though I don't even do that much anymore) and surf the web, occasionally ripping a cd for mp3s.
The problem is that the bearings in the fans are starting to go out
I don't think the problem is so much that the hardware is made poorly, but rather it's being pushed harder and being made cheaper. Shoot, a top of the line video card is it's own cpu & mobo in and of itself these days, and I can find 52x cdrom drives for $40.
You misread me. I mean that with MS you have to upgrade the whole network.
:)
I think that highly depends on the enviornment you're running in (and what your'e doing in that environment). But in the case of Munich it's irrelevent, because they're not going to. They're wanting a solution that they can stick on a bunch of machines, roll out, and stick into maintenance mode.
Yeah, there are still small UI differences (mainly in machine management if I remember correctly), but I don't remember having any problems dealing with them. I think the biggest one was trying to figure out where to turn off the animations...whoopie.
If we agree that you can run each system for as long as you run, using whatever software you want, how are you "subserviant" to a vendor?
Regarding cost, initial cash layout on a system that will be running for a decade is nothing compared to the costs of administering said systems. I can almost guarantee you that linux beats windows in certain areas, and windows beats linux in other areas, but as I keep trying to point out it isn't a simple matter of looking at the price tag on a software box. It pretty much IS for a home user, but not for a corporate user.
My point is that the item with a lower initial cost is not necessarily cheaper than one with a higher initial cost.
I'm not saying that windows is cheaper to maintain, rather I'm saying that an analasys must be done to determine how much it'll cost you to run once you're using one of those systems (both cost time to run -- for a home user, time is essentially free, for a corporation it is not).
Or Atari? Or Commodore?