There are more problems with OLPC than Linux / Windows Holy wars.
Yes on one side there is Microsoft, who uses cash and influence to make sure that the OLPC can not become the "killer Linux appliance". While on the other side there are folks who love free software. Those who are caught up in the vision of giving kids a learning tool. Those who just plain HATE microsoft and saw it as a way of striking at the heart of the beast.
Beyond that, OLPC has no clue how to distribute laptops. Pretty much they are dropped off by the pallet full with a "here you go". They don't know where they are going. When a country buys them that is fine. The ones that are "donated"...that is another story. Do they end up on ebay or as netbooks for the warehouse persons family? Or do they actually get out to the villiages? There are not really going to be any sort of decent record keeping or accounting to tell us.
The kids and teachers are not properly trained. The goals of the program are scattered and unfocused. Is it a book reader? Where are the free books coming from? Is it a tool to teach programming and logical thinking? Where is the software for that on an XP system? Is it a tool to enable these kids to discover the Internet? Who has provided a net connection out in the villages for them?
I think the problem is that the way this project is turning out and is being administered it is a turd. It does not matter if you put ketchup (Linux) or mustard (Windows) on the turd. It is still a turd
Hopefully in 5 or 10 years someone will be able to dissect this mess and learn something from it. How to get laptops into the hands children in 3rd world nations and make them real learning tools.
Oh let me assure you. This was in March and April of 2007. Vista Professional on both an HP and Dell laptops. I have experienced on several machines this network lockup effect.
It could be our domain and how it is setup. It could be due to the transparent bridge our ISP provided between 2 of our offices. All I know for sure is I have never seen OSX, Linux or XP choke up on a bad URI the way Vista does.
If it would have been an RC or Beta I could forgive that. Since it was NOT a Beta, I don't know how they could release their "Flagship OS Product" where a simple typo in a URI could take out the ability to do anything on a network or safely shutdown the computer.
Yeah, after evaluating Vista by running it for a month on my new laptop the spring of 2007. I pretty much decided that Vista was a no go.
Maybe I will give it a try after SP2. My favorite issue is if I brought up Explorer and typed in the URI for another computer and I had a typo in it. I would have to hard restart the system.
Say I tried to open \\Deskop1\Share when I what I really wanted was \\Desktop1\Share. Well I realized my error and did not feel like waiting 2 minutes or so for the operation to time out. I did what I would do in Linux or on XP. Hit escape, and put in a new URI.
The only problem with that, is once I hit escape. That copy of Explorer is no longer capable of opening any type of local file or net connections. Anything typed into the Run Box wont run. As matter of fact no programs can be run. At that point I figured I had better reboot. The shutdown menu is gone. I can get to the task manager, but there is no option there to shutdown, reboot or log out.
After doing that 2 or 3 times a week. I decided that Vista was not ready for the desktop. I was able reformat and go back to Linux at the same time my boss had me reformat his Vista Laptop to XP.
Since ReactOS works with Wine. I would bet that if React OS could run 100% Microsoft Windows software. Then 85% to 95% of that software would run just fine via wine.
The same could be said of any security feature. Good security's hard, and I've found the vista pop up to be no more annoying than the ubuntu one.
That is not what I have found.
Lets say you want to move an icon from your personal desktop to the "All Users" desktop, you will get 3 UAC prompts. Ubuntu has never prompted me 3 times while performing a task.
The fact that there is no "All Users" desktop in Ubuntu and may require dropping it on all current users desktops and also dropping it into the default profile for new users is a different story alltogether. But I could do it from a root nautilus session and only have 1 UAC prompt to deal with.
No citation. Worse yet, no blog and I don't even have a newsletter you can subscribe to.
This is speculation on my part. The same gut feeling I had about the Internet when I saw it back in 1995 and where I thought it was going. I pretty much was right. I think UMPC's are a market that is really going to see explosive growth.
A UMPC is more computer than most people know what to do with. If you can browse the web, send email, play music, view video full screen and edit documents you have 95% of what most people do with a computer. Remember if the men and women, I mean men that went to the moon could do it with 32k of ram. It was enough for them it should be enough for you.
Seriously, I see the UMPC as a commodinized piece of hardware. Like a blender or a calculator. Some Chinese firm that currently is making knock-off iphones for the Chinese market will see the potential. They can take some cheep non x86 cpu, a copy of Ubuntu for UMPCs and create something that they can sell at a profit when it retails in the US at $200.00. They will give them away with a g3modem on your cell plan. Or when you open up a new bank account. You can buy one for each of the kids, and if it gets broke, get another one.
The hardware that is good enough to do that is not a moving target. The new stuff gets better and better and faster and faster. You could mass produce a $1000.00 PC from 2001 for under $200.00 (400mhz CPU, 256megs of ram 32meg video card with 2 gig hard drive). The question is why would you want to? What people want in a UMPC is here. The type of hardware needed will not change. It will become old tech. $400 to sell at profit such a machine today. With the same specs in 5 years? $200? $125?
It fills a nitch that people want filled. Apple won't fill it. Microsoft can't fill it. Somebody will. The eeePC gave us a hint of what people want at $400.00 and will jump at for $125.00
I suspect that MSFT is already feeling the proverbial kick in the backside, and is probably in a "containment" mode right now with its OEM vendors. You wanna bet that they aren't already working on an "XP-Lite" version to counter this threat?
I doubt it.
Microsoft already has a lite version of XP. Windows FLP. It is not light enough. If Windows had something up their sleeves or could come up with something, they would not be offering XP home edition on UMPC's through the end of 2010.
The modular MiniWin they showed off last year, is just a "research project" with no plans for any OS to be built on it. Micosoft is already hard at work leveraging Windows Vista into Windows 7.
Lets recap. Windows XP home edition is as "lite" as Microsoft is getting. Microsoft is working as hard as they can to leave XP behind. Everything else they have is based on Vista. They want the UMPC market to go away. They have nothing to leverage that market.
All the OEM's know that the regular PC market is drying up, in 2 or 3 years there will only be replacement PC sales. Widnows 7 will not drive new hardware sales. Windows 7 is supposed to run on the same hardware that runs Vista. The one real area of growth is UMPC's.
No one wants to be left out of the UMPC market. That is where all the growth is going to be. Enough so that it would be worth losing Microsoft incentives now to gain a foothold in the UMPC market. So the OEMs do their best to play nice with Microsoft on the full sized PC's. But the low end UMPC market belongs to Linux. Microsoft's fear is it will pac-man into the upper end UMPC and desktop markets.
Holy Shit Batman! This Dell UMPC runs Ubuntu and Dell sells a desktop unit that is just as cool!
Suddenly Ubuntu moves on a version or two and people still running the old gadget are left in no man's land with support issues.
No mas land won't be until April 2010. The server support till April 2011 would work just as well.
A better question would be to check out how well Dapper Drake questions get answered.
I likely will not go "100%" Linux for a long long time.
I say dive in the waters is fine. I am in a MS shop with Linux and Open Source slowly moving in. I have support contracts, MS partners, etc. YMMV but I can tell you my "free" support on Linux has been better than my "paid" support for MS products.
George Lucas is an idiot savant. He just happened to hit it off with Star Wars.
At that point he started to lie. Yeah, there were 9 stories, we came in on part 4. I have it all figured out.
Watch Episode 4 from 1977 again. The Emperor was far away. Tarken held Vaders leash. He was not in some sort of personal servitude to the Emperor. He was just another cog in the great galactic machine. Yes he wiped out the Jedi, but that would have been done serving under Tarken.
Luke and Leia were NOT brother and sister. The good guy (Luke) got to kiss the girl (Leia). Han was dark and dangerous just to be dark and dangerous. He was not there to get the girl. He was there because Harrison Ford was able to convince George Lucas to make it a better part.
If you could go back to January of 1977 and ask George about it, he had no plan. If there ever was another movie, Luke would get Leia, and Vadar would play some role in it but only because Luke needed some Villain to play off of.
Vader is like Fonzie. Happy days was about nostalgia for the 50s, the good clean simple life. Every story had a moral to it and Richie was a middle child. Then America saw Fonzie and fell in love with him. It became the Fonzie Show aka "Happy Days". Fonzie took over Happy Days and changed what it was about.
America saw Star Wars and fell in love with Vader like it fell in love with Fonzie. Vader took over Star Wars and changed what it was about. The reason Lucas cant make Episodes 7 -9 is what does he have to talk about if there is no Vader?
Lucas's snot ain't honey. We can all agree with Harrison Ford, "Just because George can write it does not mean I can say it."
He took a perfectly good storyline and threw it in the trash
Ain't It Cool said something I have been saying for years. What the original Star Wars films had that made them work was Lucas' wife giving good input and reigning him in.
Now days there is no one who can tell George Lucas something is a bad idea. Midiclorians? Sure great! Yoda with a 6 pack jumping around like a frog in a blender. Cool, go for it Geroge.
Once upon a time he had a wife who could tell him no more blow jobs till he pulls that kind of crap out of his scripts. Now they are divorced and we are left to suffer.
I don't know if I want this to taint my view of the Star Wars saga.
Come on, we live in the age of. "Your tongue can not repel flavor of this magnitude." George Lucas and company sold out so long ago they can't even find the receipt for it any more.
We still have to look forward to the Star Wars theme parks. Their soul has not been entirely pimped out yet.
p>If you turn your monitor to portrait mode, you don't get the horrendous screen tearing when scrolling web pages that you get in XP, at least not in Aero.
Which is a compelling feature for those who do desktop publishing and are not using a Mac.
Remember to get this feature. You will have to buy a new computer, Vista probably will not perform well in your current rig. Who but someone doing hard core Desktop Publishing would find that expense worthwile?
It doesn't *matter* whether more computers are running vista
Yes it *does* matter. As long as Vista does not penetrate the market, software stays XP compatible. People and software developers are not using Vista only features.
This means that every day Microsoft does not obtain vendor and customer lock in with Vista. Is another day XP is the target that the Wine Project is trying to hit. Linux with Wine is becoming more and more XP compatible. This is NOT good for Vista. Nor Microsoft in the long run.
Vista is good enough that if you are running some app on it, it may not be worth the time to boot back to XP. With a glowing recommendation like that I think my company will finally move to Vista.
Seriously. Vista still lacks any compelling reason for someone to upgrade to it. The great network admin tools are no use if the 5 year old, out of date software we rely on won't run on Vista. As Microsoft once said "It's the apps stupid." If an OS won't run the apps you need, people won't move to it no matter how compelling the features are.
Every system we buy at work comes with a Vista Pro license, but is already pre-loaded with XP Pro.
This is not really surprising. Gamers stuck it out with Windows 98 long after XP Pro became the defacto corporate standard. It took a good 3 years for XP driver support to get to the point where XP outperformed Windows 98, and I expect nothing less from Vista. The thing that should drive Vista is DX10 and future implementations of DX, and that really falls on game developers before it will drive OS sales to gamers.
Well then I would venture to say that Vista is a total loser then. With only a 15% uptake, game developers are going to be targeting XP for a long time. Why would I waste time developing a Vista only Direct X 10 based game for at most 15% of the market?
Vista has been out 18 months, and only has another 18 months of life. As near as I can tell. The bloom is off of Vista. Joe Sixpack is trying to avoid it. I would doubt if Vista ever makes it to 30% market penetration. I don't see there being a line of people asking for Vista installs instead of Windows 7. XP yes, Vista no.
If it falls on game developers to get gamers on Vista, then it is a lost cause. I would start practicing my talking points for Windows 7.
And there is the problem. Most business can't legally reuse licenses. OEM licenses can't be reused. Microsoft is trying to make it so the only way you can get a license so you can install XP, is to buy Vista.
I think it is fair to say, that Debian has their own way of doing things. What if you want to be able to include video codecs? Include the Adobe flash player? Binary video drivers? Nope, those things are not the Debian way.
What if you want to run software that is newer than 2 or 3 years old? Well you could go run Debian unstable, but if one of the packages gets broke, you have to wait for someone to fix it or figure it out yourself.
There are plenty of reasons why someone would want something almost Debian but not quite. If you yell loud enough in the support forms they will tell you to piss up a rope, that is not the way they do things.
What Mark Shuttleworth has done is made a Debian derivative that is essentially a binary compatible fork. It is built on top of Debian in such a manner that things can be contributed back. The way they roll is different from Debian. No need to wait 3 years for Network Manager to get put in Debian. They just put it right in without the debate, without being told they cant do that. They invested in setting up forums and running them where novices asking stupid questions can get help. Where people are not crucified for asking how come the distro does not do this and that.
When I was 11/12 back around 1977 or so. We lived in Utah were the only thing on TV was the nightly news. So As a 11 year old. I watched a lot of news.
People who had ARM's back then were losing their homes at the interest rates climbed. At that point I swore I would never take an ARM.
It is a gamblers game. Get an AMR5-1 and either sell the house before 5 years is up or get a new loan.....as long as housing prices don't drop.
I know people have been making a killing in real estate for the last 25 years. Flipping houses and all that. However, that still does not negate the fact that sooner or later housing prices adjust to a sane level. And in the muscial chairs game of bank loans, you don't want to be left holding an ARM once they start pulling chairs.
Symantec was a Microsoft Certified Partner. Internally it was a known behavior that NAV would not install on a system with low resources and the install would likely be problematic on a system with only moderate resources available.
Remember we are talking anti-virus here. The most invasive piece of software that you can install on a PC. It hooks into just about every thing. Right on top of Microsoft's house of cards they call a "stable OS".
The best way to install the product was on a fresh clean new install of the OS. Back when you had install CD's and no 3rd party apps were on the system. The further you are away from this ideal setup. The more likely you are to have problems.
As far as costing the company for support. This is how it went. The information on the website came from the same information the techs were working with. You could go there and get that information for free. It was just about free for the company to put it there
The corporate product support was a money maker. Most business that bought the Corporate product knew what they were doing.
They never made money for support on the home product. So they cut the price of the product by $10.00 and dropped free 3 month phone support. They outsourced it to a company that charged $30.00 per support incident. So they were turning a profit.
I can tell you exactly where I got that. Symantec outsourced their consumer support of their products sometime after 2001. We went through 2 weeks of training. Our instructor had over 8 years experience supporting the product and had worked with the programmers.
Let me tell you what you learned on day one back in 2004. Five things will keep you from installing Norton Anti Virus 1. Corrupted Windows Installer 2. A virus that is designed to break anti-virus products. 3. Faulty hardware (RAM, bad hardrive). 4. Windows being messed up to the point where it is unstable. 5. Low system resources
With Windows 98, you can ask two questions. How many icons do you see in the tray and what shows for available system resources? For XP all you can ask is how many icons do you have in the tray.
If someone is having a problem installing NAV and it is resource related. Try to get the resources above 70%. Under no circumstances attempt to install till you are above 60%. Here is a good rule of thumb.
Resources 80%+ No problems with installing. But it is very rare to see a system like that. Just about as mythical as a unicorn.
Resources 70% to 79%. You can get many systems to that point. No problems with installing.
Resources 60% to 69%. You can usually get a good install. If you are still having problems. Try to push for that 70% mark.
Resources 50% to 59%. Many people are able to install with that level of resources. But if someone is calling in not able to install and their resources are at that level. Get them above 65% or so and then have them try it again.
Resources 40% to 49%. Almost certain failure at installing.
Resources below 40%. If the install botches on a system like that, you will be lucky if you can boot it in anything but safe mode till you get it fixed.
I actually had a call from someone who had a live update problem. Their computer took over 10 minutes to boot and the available resources were down at 22%. I don't know how they got a working install like that.
You can make whatever snarky comments you want. I can tell you both from what I was taught and from taking support calls 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for months. If you have a good install of NAV, unless you delete some of the files that make it run, kill some registry entries or try to install another anti-virus product on top of it. It will pretty much work. The big problem at that point would be a bad download pooching live update OR trying to get a new years subscription to take.
The rest of the issues were install issues. 10% or less are related to the four other issues listed above. The remaining 90% were install issues related to system resources. On Windows 98, if you could verify you had 70% or better available system resources, you could get a good install. On Windows XP, you would just shoot to get all 3rd party apps not to run at startup so you had an empty tray.
Of course we are talking about Norton Anti-Virus 2001/2002/2003/2004 and 2005. Now days I don't know if they have changed the installer very much. If system resources matter or not. But back then they did matter. If your install failed due to lack of resources. Often you could not get a clean uninstall of what had been installed. The solution was almost always the same. Get the system resources up above 70% and try installing again.
As of 2005. CPU load was not a valid indicator of whether or not Norton Anti Virus would or would not install properly on a computer. It does not matter how crummy of an indicator "System Resources Available" was for anything else. It was a good indicator for your chances of getting a good NAV install. On XP, you just could not tell if it would work or not. All you could do is get the computer to where there was no tray icons running and then check out the process list for anything else that ran at boot time.
As far as you working tech support for a PC manufacturer. I can't tell you how many calls we had foisted on us because some one calle
What scenario would Grandma Maybel need to even know about the registry?
That one is easy for me. I used to do technical Support for Norton Antivirus.
Grandma purchased a Dell computer with 128 megs of RAM running Windows XP. She has 10 things running in the tray and the computer is crawling. She knows just enough to know that viruses are bad. Someone at Staples tells her that the $79.00 copy of Norton Antivirus will fix her computer right up.
Well there are 5 things that will pooch a Norton Install. One of them would be having a nasty virus like Klez on your system. Another is a bad hardware. Another is a corrupted windows installer system. The one that gets granny however is lack of system resources. NAV should only be installed on a system with 70% of system resourcess free, may install on a system with 60% free.
So now Granny calls for support. She can't uninstall. She is going to have to do a manual uninstall. So we email her a document with a procedure to run the computer in safe mode. Delete a bunch of files and folders AND then run regedit and pound a bunch of entries out of the registry
Trust me. I took at least 2 or 3 calls like that a day. The only ones better are the 35 year old moms trying to figure out how they got porn popups on their computer. After all the only people to ever use that computer is her and her 15 year old son.
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There are more problems with OLPC than Linux / Windows Holy wars.
Yes on one side there is Microsoft, who uses cash and influence to make sure that the OLPC can not become the "killer Linux appliance". While on the other side there are folks who love free software. Those who are caught up in the vision of giving kids a learning tool. Those who just plain HATE microsoft and saw it as a way of striking at the heart of the beast.
Beyond that, OLPC has no clue how to distribute laptops. Pretty much they are dropped off by the pallet full with a "here you go". They don't know where they are going. When a country buys them that is fine. The ones that are "donated"...that is another story. Do they end up on ebay or as netbooks for the warehouse persons family? Or do they actually get out to the villiages? There are not really going to be any sort of decent record keeping or accounting to tell us.
The kids and teachers are not properly trained. The goals of the program are scattered and unfocused. Is it a book reader? Where are the free books coming from? Is it a tool to teach programming and logical thinking? Where is the software for that on an XP system? Is it a tool to enable these kids to discover the Internet? Who has provided a net connection out in the villages for them?
I think the problem is that the way this project is turning out and is being administered it is a turd. It does not matter if you put ketchup (Linux) or mustard (Windows) on the turd. It is still a turd
Hopefully in 5 or 10 years someone will be able to dissect this mess and learn something from it. How to get laptops into the hands children in 3rd world nations and make them real learning tools.
Oh let me assure you. This was in March and April of 2007. Vista Professional on both an HP and Dell laptops. I have experienced on several machines this network lockup effect.
It could be our domain and how it is setup. It could be due to the transparent bridge our ISP provided between 2 of our offices. All I know for sure is I have never seen OSX, Linux or XP choke up on a bad URI the way Vista does.
If it would have been an RC or Beta I could forgive that. Since it was NOT a Beta, I don't know how they could release their "Flagship OS Product" where a simple typo in a URI could take out the ability to do anything on a network or safely shutdown the computer.
Yeah, after evaluating Vista by running it for a month on my new laptop the spring of 2007. I pretty much decided that Vista was a no go.
Maybe I will give it a try after SP2. My favorite issue is if I brought up Explorer and typed in the URI for another computer and I had a typo in it. I would have to hard restart the system.
Say I tried to open \\Deskop1\Share when I what I really wanted was \\Desktop1\Share. Well I realized my error and did not feel like waiting 2 minutes or so for the operation to time out. I did what I would do in Linux or on XP. Hit escape, and put in a new URI.
The only problem with that, is once I hit escape. That copy of Explorer is no longer capable of opening any type of local file or net connections. Anything typed into the Run Box wont run. As matter of fact no programs can be run. At that point I figured I had better reboot. The shutdown menu is gone. I can get to the task manager, but there is no option there to shutdown, reboot or log out.
After doing that 2 or 3 times a week. I decided that Vista was not ready for the desktop. I was able reformat and go back to Linux at the same time my boss had me reformat his Vista Laptop to XP.
Since ReactOS works with Wine. I would bet that if React OS could run 100% Microsoft Windows software. Then 85% to 95% of that software would run just fine via wine.
The same could be said of any security feature. Good security's hard, and I've found the vista pop up to be no more annoying than the ubuntu one.
That is not what I have found.
Lets say you want to move an icon from your personal desktop to the "All Users" desktop, you will get 3 UAC prompts. Ubuntu has never prompted me 3 times while performing a task.
The fact that there is no "All Users" desktop in Ubuntu and may require dropping it on all current users desktops and also dropping it into the default profile for new users is a different story alltogether. But I could do it from a root nautilus session and only have 1 UAC prompt to deal with.
Securest and easiest version of Windows yet?
Bill, all I can say is yada, yada, yada.
No citation. Worse yet, no blog and I don't even have a newsletter you can subscribe to.
This is speculation on my part. The same gut feeling I had about the Internet when I saw it back in 1995 and where I thought it was going. I pretty much was right. I think UMPC's are a market that is really going to see explosive growth.
A UMPC is more computer than most people know what to do with. If you can browse the web, send email, play music, view video full screen and edit documents you have 95% of what most people do with a computer. Remember if the men and women, I mean men that went to the moon could do it with 32k of ram. It was enough for them it should be enough for you.
Seriously, I see the UMPC as a commodinized piece of hardware. Like a blender or a calculator. Some Chinese firm that currently is making knock-off iphones for the Chinese market will see the potential. They can take some cheep non x86 cpu, a copy of Ubuntu for UMPCs and create something that they can sell at a profit when it retails in the US at $200.00. They will give them away with a g3modem on your cell plan. Or when you open up a new bank account. You can buy one for each of the kids, and if it gets broke, get another one.
The hardware that is good enough to do that is not a moving target. The new stuff gets better and better and faster and faster. You could mass produce a $1000.00 PC from 2001 for under $200.00 (400mhz CPU, 256megs of ram 32meg video card with 2 gig hard drive). The question is why would you want to? What people want in a UMPC is here. The type of hardware needed will not change. It will become old tech. $400 to sell at profit such a machine today. With the same specs in 5 years? $200? $125?
It fills a nitch that people want filled. Apple won't fill it. Microsoft can't fill it. Somebody will. The eeePC gave us a hint of what people want at $400.00 and will jump at for $125.00
I suspect that MSFT is already feeling the proverbial kick in the backside, and is probably in a "containment" mode right now with its OEM vendors. You wanna bet that they aren't already working on an "XP-Lite" version to counter this threat?
I doubt it.
Microsoft already has a lite version of XP. Windows FLP. It is not light enough. If Windows had something up their sleeves or could come up with something, they would not be offering XP home edition on UMPC's through the end of 2010.
The modular MiniWin they showed off last year, is just a "research project" with no plans for any OS to be built on it. Micosoft is already hard at work leveraging Windows Vista into Windows 7.
Lets recap. Windows XP home edition is as "lite" as Microsoft is getting. Microsoft is working as hard as they can to leave XP behind. Everything else they have is based on Vista. They want the UMPC market to go away. They have nothing to leverage that market.
All the OEM's know that the regular PC market is drying up, in 2 or 3 years there will only be replacement PC sales. Widnows 7 will not drive new hardware sales. Windows 7 is supposed to run on the same hardware that runs Vista. The one real area of growth is UMPC's.
No one wants to be left out of the UMPC market. That is where all the growth is going to be. Enough so that it would be worth losing Microsoft incentives now to gain a foothold in the UMPC market. So the OEMs do their best to play nice with Microsoft on the full sized PC's. But the low end UMPC market belongs to Linux. Microsoft's fear is it will pac-man into the upper end UMPC and desktop markets.
Holy Shit Batman! This Dell UMPC runs Ubuntu and Dell sells a desktop unit that is just as cool!
Suddenly Ubuntu moves on a version or two and people still running the old gadget are left in no man's land with support issues.
No mas land won't be until April 2010. The server support till April 2011 would work just as well. A better question would be to check out how well Dapper Drake questions get answered.
I likely will not go "100%" Linux for a long long time.
I say dive in the waters is fine. I am in a MS shop with Linux and Open Source slowly moving in. I have support contracts, MS partners, etc. YMMV but I can tell you my "free" support on Linux has been better than my "paid" support for MS products.
George Lucas is an idiot savant. He just happened to hit it off with Star Wars.
At that point he started to lie. Yeah, there were 9 stories, we came in on part 4. I have it all figured out.
Watch Episode 4 from 1977 again. The Emperor was far away. Tarken held Vaders leash. He was not in some sort of personal servitude to the Emperor. He was just another cog in the great galactic machine. Yes he wiped out the Jedi, but that would have been done serving under Tarken.
Luke and Leia were NOT brother and sister. The good guy (Luke) got to kiss the girl (Leia). Han was dark and dangerous just to be dark and dangerous. He was not there to get the girl. He was there because Harrison Ford was able to convince George Lucas to make it a better part.
If you could go back to January of 1977 and ask George about it, he had no plan. If there ever was another movie, Luke would get Leia, and Vadar would play some role in it but only because Luke needed some Villain to play off of.
Vader is like Fonzie. Happy days was about nostalgia for the 50s, the good clean simple life. Every story had a moral to it and Richie was a middle child. Then America saw Fonzie and fell in love with him. It became the Fonzie Show aka "Happy Days". Fonzie took over Happy Days and changed what it was about.
America saw Star Wars and fell in love with Vader like it fell in love with Fonzie. Vader took over Star Wars and changed what it was about. The reason Lucas cant make Episodes 7 -9 is what does he have to talk about if there is no Vader?
Lucas's snot ain't honey. We can all agree with Harrison Ford, "Just because George can write it does not mean I can say it."
He took a perfectly good storyline and threw it in the trash
Ain't It Cool said something I have been saying for years. What the original Star Wars films had that made them work was Lucas' wife giving good input and reigning him in.
Now days there is no one who can tell George Lucas something is a bad idea. Midiclorians? Sure great! Yoda with a 6 pack jumping around like a frog in a blender. Cool, go for it Geroge.
Once upon a time he had a wife who could tell him no more blow jobs till he pulls that kind of crap out of his scripts. Now they are divorced and we are left to suffer.
I don't know if I want this to taint my view of the Star Wars saga.
Come on, we live in the age of. "Your tongue can not repel flavor of this magnitude." George Lucas and company sold out so long ago they can't even find the receipt for it any more.
We still have to look forward to the Star Wars theme parks. Their soul has not been entirely pimped out yet.
p>If you turn your monitor to portrait mode, you don't get the horrendous screen tearing when scrolling web pages that you get in XP, at least not in Aero.
Which is a compelling feature for those who do desktop publishing and are not using a Mac.
Remember to get this feature. You will have to buy a new computer, Vista probably will not perform well in your current rig. Who but someone doing hard core Desktop Publishing would find that expense worthwile?
More like when XP is outlawed. Only outlaws will run XP
Or Pirates...
It doesn't *matter* whether more computers are running vista
Yes it *does* matter. As long as Vista does not penetrate the market, software stays XP compatible. People and software developers are not using Vista only features.
This means that every day Microsoft does not obtain vendor and customer lock in with Vista. Is another day XP is the target that the Wine Project is trying to hit. Linux with Wine is becoming more and more XP compatible. This is NOT good for Vista. Nor Microsoft in the long run.
Parent post is spot on.
Vista is good enough that if you are running some app on it, it may not be worth the time to boot back to XP. With a glowing recommendation like that I think my company will finally move to Vista.
Seriously. Vista still lacks any compelling reason for someone to upgrade to it. The great network admin tools are no use if the 5 year old, out of date software we rely on won't run on Vista. As Microsoft once said "It's the apps stupid." If an OS won't run the apps you need, people won't move to it no matter how compelling the features are.
Every system we buy at work comes with a Vista Pro license, but is already pre-loaded with XP Pro.
This is not really surprising. Gamers stuck it out with Windows 98 long after XP Pro became the defacto corporate standard. It took a good 3 years for XP driver support to get to the point where XP outperformed Windows 98, and I expect nothing less from Vista. The thing that should drive Vista is DX10 and future implementations of DX, and that really falls on game developers before it will drive OS sales to gamers.
Well then I would venture to say that Vista is a total loser then. With only a 15% uptake, game developers are going to be targeting XP for a long time. Why would I waste time developing a Vista only Direct X 10 based game for at most 15% of the market?
Vista has been out 18 months, and only has another 18 months of life. As near as I can tell. The bloom is off of Vista. Joe Sixpack is trying to avoid it. I would doubt if Vista ever makes it to 30% market penetration. I don't see there being a line of people asking for Vista installs instead of Windows 7. XP yes, Vista no.
If it falls on game developers to get gamers on Vista, then it is a lost cause. I would start practicing my talking points for Windows 7.
Keeping XP on the old machines
And there is the problem. Most business can't legally reuse licenses. OEM licenses can't be reused. Microsoft is trying to make it so the only way you can get a license so you can install XP, is to buy Vista.
I think it is fair to say, that Debian has their own way of doing things. What if you want to be able to include video codecs? Include the Adobe flash player? Binary video drivers? Nope, those things are not the Debian way.
What if you want to run software that is newer than 2 or 3 years old? Well you could go run Debian unstable, but if one of the packages gets broke, you have to wait for someone to fix it or figure it out yourself.
There are plenty of reasons why someone would want something almost Debian but not quite. If you yell loud enough in the support forms they will tell you to piss up a rope, that is not the way they do things.
What Mark Shuttleworth has done is made a Debian derivative that is essentially a binary compatible fork. It is built on top of Debian in such a manner that things can be contributed back. The way they roll is different from Debian. No need to wait 3 years for Network Manager to get put in Debian. They just put it right in without the debate, without being told they cant do that. They invested in setting up forums and running them where novices asking stupid questions can get help. Where people are not crucified for asking how come the distro does not do this and that.
When I was 11/12 back around 1977 or so. We lived in Utah were the only thing on TV was the nightly news. So As a 11 year old. I watched a lot of news.
People who had ARM's back then were losing their homes at the interest rates climbed. At that point I swore I would never take an ARM.
It is a gamblers game. Get an AMR5-1 and either sell the house before 5 years is up or get a new loan.....as long as housing prices don't drop.
I know people have been making a killing in real estate for the last 25 years. Flipping houses and all that. However, that still does not negate the fact that sooner or later housing prices adjust to a sane level. And in the muscial chairs game of bank loans, you don't want to be left holding an ARM once they start pulling chairs.
The danger with Microsoft is are they drinking the Open Source kool-aid or have we started to drink the Microsoft kool-aid?
You filed at least two P1 bugs right?
You are kidding right?
Symantec was a Microsoft Certified Partner. Internally it was a known behavior that NAV would not install on a system with low resources and the install would likely be problematic on a system with only moderate resources available.
Remember we are talking anti-virus here. The most invasive piece of software that you can install on a PC. It hooks into just about every thing. Right on top of Microsoft's house of cards they call a "stable OS".
The best way to install the product was on a fresh clean new install of the OS. Back when you had install CD's and no 3rd party apps were on the system. The further you are away from this ideal setup. The more likely you are to have problems.
As far as costing the company for support. This is how it went. The information on the website came from the same information the techs were working with. You could go there and get that information for free. It was just about free for the company to put it there
The corporate product support was a money maker. Most business that bought the Corporate product knew what they were doing.
They never made money for support on the home product. So they cut the price of the product by $10.00 and dropped free 3 month phone support. They outsourced it to a company that charged $30.00 per support incident. So they were turning a profit.
I can tell you exactly where I got that. Symantec outsourced their consumer support of their products sometime after 2001. We went through 2 weeks of training. Our instructor had over 8 years experience supporting the product and had worked with the programmers.
Let me tell you what you learned on day one back in 2004. Five things will keep you from installing Norton Anti Virus 1. Corrupted Windows Installer 2. A virus that is designed to break anti-virus products. 3. Faulty hardware (RAM, bad hardrive). 4. Windows being messed up to the point where it is unstable. 5. Low system resources
With Windows 98, you can ask two questions. How many icons do you see in the tray and what shows for available system resources? For XP all you can ask is how many icons do you have in the tray.
If someone is having a problem installing NAV and it is resource related. Try to get the resources above 70%. Under no circumstances attempt to install till you are above 60%. Here is a good rule of thumb.
I actually had a call from someone who had a live update problem. Their computer took over 10 minutes to boot and the available resources were down at 22%. I don't know how they got a working install like that.
You can make whatever snarky comments you want. I can tell you both from what I was taught and from taking support calls 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for months. If you have a good install of NAV, unless you delete some of the files that make it run, kill some registry entries or try to install another anti-virus product on top of it. It will pretty much work. The big problem at that point would be a bad download pooching live update OR trying to get a new years subscription to take.
The rest of the issues were install issues. 10% or less are related to the four other issues listed above. The remaining 90% were install issues related to system resources. On Windows 98, if you could verify you had 70% or better available system resources, you could get a good install. On Windows XP, you would just shoot to get all 3rd party apps not to run at startup so you had an empty tray.
Of course we are talking about Norton Anti-Virus 2001/2002/2003/2004 and 2005. Now days I don't know if they have changed the installer very much. If system resources matter or not. But back then they did matter. If your install failed due to lack of resources. Often you could not get a clean uninstall of what had been installed. The solution was almost always the same. Get the system resources up above 70% and try installing again.
As of 2005. CPU load was not a valid indicator of whether or not Norton Anti Virus would or would not install properly on a computer. It does not matter how crummy of an indicator "System Resources Available" was for anything else. It was a good indicator for your chances of getting a good NAV install. On XP, you just could not tell if it would work or not. All you could do is get the computer to where there was no tray icons running and then check out the process list for anything else that ran at boot time.
As far as you working tech support for a PC manufacturer. I can't tell you how many calls we had foisted on us because some one calle
What scenario would Grandma Maybel need to even know about the registry?
That one is easy for me. I used to do technical Support for Norton Antivirus.
Grandma purchased a Dell computer with 128 megs of RAM running Windows XP. She has 10 things running in the tray and the computer is crawling. She knows just enough to know that viruses are bad. Someone at Staples tells her that the $79.00 copy of Norton Antivirus will fix her computer right up.
Well there are 5 things that will pooch a Norton Install. One of them would be having a nasty virus like Klez on your system. Another is a bad hardware. Another is a corrupted windows installer system. The one that gets granny however is lack of system resources. NAV should only be installed on a system with 70% of system resourcess free, may install on a system with 60% free.
So now Granny calls for support. She can't uninstall. She is going to have to do a manual uninstall. So we email her a document with a procedure to run the computer in safe mode. Delete a bunch of files and folders AND then run regedit and pound a bunch of entries out of the registry
Trust me. I took at least 2 or 3 calls like that a day. The only ones better are the 35 year old moms trying to figure out how they got porn popups on their computer. After all the only people to ever use that computer is her and her 15 year old son.
Sorry, in the Game of Life you are not allowed to make bad puns like that.