A better question is what percentage of home/small business/clueless corporate users don't have automatic update turned on. (Yes, auto update has broken a few, relatively rare programs. But if 100% of users allowed auto-update to do its stuff we'd have many fewer infected machines.)
The number of laptops sold may be related to their replacement frequency. Laptops have a much shorter lifespan than desktops--too expensive to repair, run hotter, get handled more roughly and tend to be at the lower end of performance.
The number of desktops in use is much higher than the number of laptops. There was a similar article yesterday in./ about the number of Macintoshes in use. Because of the longer lifespan of Macintoshes the number of deployed Macs is greater than their percent of yearly sales. (As an aside, the article quoted was devoid of facts and lacked any statistical significance, as does this one).
That's the job of a system administrator in a corporate environment. And perhaps you want to ask what the employees are doing if they're busy plugging in cameras and mp3 players.
If he would buy from a few number of high-quality vendors (they're out there) he would have less problems with the hardware. Many quality PC vendors (but not all) test the entire configuration--mobo, memory, disk, cooling, etc. Then don't touch it. Yes, you might spend a few bucks more for the system but you'll have far fewer problems.
I don't get it. Administering Windows XP in a corporate environment isn't that hard. There is no reason why a company that hires a competent sys admin (or multiple sys admins) cant configure and administer Windows XP so they are nearly virus-free, spyware-free and spam-free. Lock those machines down! Put in a good corporate firewall! Don't allow users to run as admin (never)! Don't allow users to install software, active-x or other junk. Use centrally maintained anti-virus and anti-spam. In a corporate environment there should be a limited list of authorized programs, nothing else should be permitted.
It isn't that hard. The permissions and controls on Windows are extremely fine grained. Learn about them and use them.
I think there are a lot of clueless or bad sys admin who use "everyone knows Windows" is insecure to cover their asses for doing a bad job. The same lousy sys admins could screw up Macs too.
I have to agree on the Axim... For nearly the same price you can buy a Axim + 1 GB SD and 2 GB CF cards giving you 3 GB of storage...with the flexibilty to swap another card in and out as needed. The cards don't suffer the data loss risk of a hard drive and can be expanded as needed. Also, for transferring big files to the device, it's handy to be able to plug the cards into a PC card reader and go.
Actually (at least on the Prius) it's not a rheostat on the gas pedal... the interface is redundant hall-effect sensors to ensure that it's not getting false readings. Systems can be designed to be redundant...the mechanical linkage could easily jam or break...either which could have catastrophic effects.
I play the excel spreadsheet game everyday. It comes in a number of varients...how much would you like the number to be? How can I use excel for a database? How many subtle bugs can I find (or leave) in spreadsheet? How slow can a make it recalculate?
Excel is a great tool for looking busy without doing anything productive.
Actually...correctly used excel is one of the best business applications ever.
There are some devices that make more sense combined.... Do you have a separate refrigerator and freezer? Or a single device? Does your video camera allow you to view your video, or do you carry a separate viewer? There are some economy of scale when you can leverage the guts of a device to do more than one thing. It just needs to be done right...and get the right balance of combined functionality with battery life, weight and ease of use. Not necessarily easy, but not impossible.
This unit was also featured on NPR's Marketplace last night. One of the features that they touted in the interview was the units very low power consumption. It's designed to be run off batteries or unreliable (which I assume means varying voltage) power sources. As they mentioned, this will help many more third-world villages have computer access. Remember even at $200 it's still a substantial amount of a year's salary.
Actually, the Prius has a very small aux (12 volt) battery. Generally, if the key* is in the all-power mode (but not the ready-mode), the engine will kick in every so often to charge the aux battery. The park lock does require power, so I suspect they were either in neutral (which will not charge the battery) or doing something else unusual with the car. The prius is very smart about power management and protecting the traction (main) battery and the 12V aux.
It's the classic Apple attitude of "it just works". Why bother with documenting those pesky errors (which never occur) for tech users. Go back to using itunes, iphoto and other apple applications.... The Mac isn't really a cross-platform business... as indicated by their low market share in the medium to large business market.
FYI... there are no wild tigers remaining in africa...in africa you'll find lions (but not panthers)...and much like the beast itself Mac users are are rare, but at the apex of the food chain.
Tigers are the biggest cats in the world. They live in wet, humid and hot jungles as well as icy cold forests. There are five different kinds or subspecies of tiger which are still alive today. These tigers are called Siberian, Indochinese, South China, Bengal, and Sumatran. Their Latin name is Panthera tigris. Tigers are an endangered species; only about 4,870 to 7,300 tigers are left in the wild. Three tiger subspecies, which are now extinct are: the Bali, Javan, and Caspian tigers. They have become so over the last 70 years...
Actually those limits are per sheet. A workbook can have (I think) 256 sheets, so the total is 65000 * 256 * 256.
That said, for some applications excel is a reasonable compromise. Use the built-in functions to let people enter and manipulate the data, add a few macros to do some magic and you've got a slick application in a hurry. Users trust excel and feel comfortable with the spreadsheet look. Duplicating the look and feel with some other application is a lot of work for not much benefit.
k
This sounds a lot like time sharing. In the 70's (and up through the 80's) a central "mainframe" would have dozens or even hundreds of "dumb" terminals connected to it. Usually the connections were RS232, but later on they got fancier. The terminals got smarter--fancier graphics and more features. Execpt in some environments they timesharing model have pretty much lost out to putting sophisticated intelligence at the point of use.
Who wants to search the desktop?
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Other than for home users, what's the point of powerful desktop searching tools? In most corporate environments, all of the files are kept on the file server. None of these "desktop" search tools extend the powerful search capabilities to the terabytes of storage on the file server. The search tools (and index) should reside on the server with a desktop-like interface on the desktop. Every user should not be indexing the server.
I start out thinking it would be easy to to a google search for a electric disk grater... something at would shred the disk so you could just end up with bits of metal. I'm sure they exist... but then I thought, you could probably just rent one of those truck-mounted tree chippers and chuck your disk drives into it. (There is probably a pun here about b-trees and leaf nodes.) A bit of overkill, but a lot of fun. Actually, the chances of collecting on an RMA, and it being worth the time and effort to file one are so small, you should just buy a dedicated disk shredder if you have a lot of them. Alternatively, store them until you've accumulated enough and have one of the mobile data grating services come and shred them along with the paper that needs to be destroyed. See http://www.shred-tech.com/mds/html/ among others.
You can actually get Windows PCs from many manufacturers with the OS. Dell sell "naked" PCs on their business site for companies who bulk buy the OS or install alternative OSs. The savings aren't that great as Dell probably gets the OS for nearly nothing. That said, I've looked at the Mac Mini and it doesn't look like a great deal in a business environment after adding more memory and Office. It's a good toy/home machine but I don't think it's Apples solution to getting any additional share in the 10+ employee firm.
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A better question is what percentage of home/small business/clueless corporate users don't have automatic update turned on. (Yes, auto update has broken a few, relatively rare programs. But if 100% of users allowed auto-update to do its stuff we'd have many fewer infected machines.)
100? VI? What's the right answer?
The number of laptops sold may be related to their replacement frequency. Laptops have a much shorter lifespan than desktops--too expensive to repair, run hotter, get handled more roughly and tend to be at the lower end of performance.
./ about the number of Macintoshes in use. Because of the longer lifespan of Macintoshes the number of deployed Macs is greater than their percent of yearly sales. (As an aside, the article quoted was devoid of facts and lacked any statistical significance, as does this one).
The number of desktops in use is much higher than the number of laptops. There was a similar article yesterday in
That's the job of a system administrator in a corporate environment. And perhaps you want to ask what the employees are doing if they're busy plugging in cameras and mp3 players.
If he would buy from a few number of high-quality vendors (they're out there) he would have less problems with the hardware. Many quality PC vendors (but not all) test the entire configuration--mobo, memory, disk, cooling, etc. Then don't touch it. Yes, you might spend a few bucks more for the system but you'll have far fewer problems.
And does that software run at all on a Mac or under Linux?
I don't get it. Administering Windows XP in a corporate environment isn't that hard. There is no reason why a company that hires a competent sys admin (or multiple sys admins) cant configure and administer Windows XP so they are nearly virus-free, spyware-free and spam-free. Lock those machines down! Put in a good corporate firewall! Don't allow users to run as admin (never)! Don't allow users to install software, active-x or other junk. Use centrally maintained anti-virus and anti-spam. In a corporate environment there should be a limited list of authorized programs, nothing else should be permitted.
It isn't that hard. The permissions and controls on Windows are extremely fine grained. Learn about them and use them.
I think there are a lot of clueless or bad sys admin who use "everyone knows Windows" is insecure to cover their asses for doing a bad job. The same lousy sys admins could screw up Macs too.
I have to agree on the Axim... For nearly the same price you can buy a Axim + 1 GB SD and 2 GB CF cards giving you 3 GB of storage...with the flexibilty to swap another card in and out as needed. The cards don't suffer the data loss risk of a hard drive and can be expanded as needed. Also, for transferring big files to the device, it's handy to be able to plug the cards into a PC card reader and go.
Actually (at least on the Prius) it's not a rheostat on the gas pedal... the interface is redundant hall-effect sensors to ensure that it's not getting false readings. Systems can be designed to be redundant...the mechanical linkage could easily jam or break...either which could have catastrophic effects.
I play the excel spreadsheet game everyday. It comes in a number of varients...how much would you like the number to be? How can I use excel for a database? How many subtle bugs can I find (or leave) in spreadsheet? How slow can a make it recalculate?
Excel is a great tool for looking busy without doing anything productive.
Actually...correctly used excel is one of the best business applications ever.
The real question is whether someone will hack it to run Mac OS X? It's a (custom) PowerPC. Perhaps this is a stealth anti-mac move by MS.
Getting there first isn't what always counts. Perhaps Apple got there first, but it's getting marketplace momemtum that counts in the end.
Would that be IBM?
There are some devices that make more sense combined.... Do you have a separate refrigerator and freezer? Or a single device? Does your video camera allow you to view your video, or do you carry a separate viewer? There are some economy of scale when you can leverage the guts of a device to do more than one thing. It just needs to be done right...and get the right balance of combined functionality with battery life, weight and ease of use. Not necessarily easy, but not impossible.
I think Steve is beyond the new Porsche every year and up to the new Gulfstream business jet league.
This unit was also featured on NPR's Marketplace last night. One of the features that they touted in the interview was the units very low power consumption. It's designed to be run off batteries or unreliable (which I assume means varying voltage) power sources. As they mentioned, this will help many more third-world villages have computer access. Remember even at $200 it's still a substantial amount of a year's salary.
1 0/PM200505102.html for more details
See http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/05/
I believe you'll use less fuel if you walk, bicycle or take public transportation. Besides,this will mean fewer cars on the road for the rest of us.
Actually, the Prius has a very small aux (12 volt) battery. Generally, if the key* is in the all-power mode (but not the ready-mode), the engine will kick in every so often to charge the aux battery. The park lock does require power, so I suspect they were either in neutral (which will not charge the battery) or doing something else unusual with the car. The prius is very smart about power management and protecting the traction (main) battery and the 12V aux.
It's the classic Apple attitude of "it just works". Why bother with documenting those pesky errors (which never occur) for tech users. Go back to using itunes, iphoto and other apple applications.... The Mac isn't really a cross-platform business ... as indicated by their low market share in the medium to large business market.
FYI... there are no wild tigers remaining in africa...in africa you'll find lions (but not panthers)...and much like the beast itself Mac users are are rare, but at the apex of the food chain. Tigers are the biggest cats in the world. They live in wet, humid and hot jungles as well as icy cold forests. There are five different kinds or subspecies of tiger which are still alive today. These tigers are called Siberian, Indochinese, South China, Bengal, and Sumatran. Their Latin name is Panthera tigris. Tigers are an endangered species; only about 4,870 to 7,300 tigers are left in the wild. Three tiger subspecies, which are now extinct are: the Bali, Javan, and Caspian tigers. They have become so over the last 70 years...
Actually those limits are per sheet. A workbook can have (I think) 256 sheets, so the total is 65000 * 256 * 256. That said, for some applications excel is a reasonable compromise. Use the built-in functions to let people enter and manipulate the data, add a few macros to do some magic and you've got a slick application in a hurry. Users trust excel and feel comfortable with the spreadsheet look. Duplicating the look and feel with some other application is a lot of work for not much benefit. k
This sounds a lot like time sharing. In the 70's (and up through the 80's) a central "mainframe" would have dozens or even hundreds of "dumb" terminals connected to it. Usually the connections were RS232, but later on they got fancier. The terminals got smarter--fancier graphics and more features. Execpt in some environments they timesharing model have pretty much lost out to putting sophisticated intelligence at the point of use.
Other than for home users, what's the point of powerful desktop searching tools? In most corporate environments, all of the files are kept on the file server. None of these "desktop" search tools extend the powerful search capabilities to the terabytes of storage on the file server. The search tools (and index) should reside on the server with a desktop-like interface on the desktop. Every user should not be indexing the server.
I start out thinking it would be easy to to a google search for a electric disk grater... something at would shred the disk so you could just end up with bits of metal. I'm sure they exist... but then I thought, you could probably just rent one of those truck-mounted tree chippers and chuck your disk drives into it. (There is probably a pun here about b-trees and leaf nodes.) A bit of overkill, but a lot of fun. Actually, the chances of collecting on an RMA, and it being worth the time and effort to file one are so small, you should just buy a dedicated disk shredder if you have a lot of them. Alternatively, store them until you've accumulated enough and have one of the mobile data grating services come and shred them along with the paper that needs to be destroyed. See http://www.shred-tech.com/mds/html/ among others.
You can actually get Windows PCs from many manufacturers with the OS. Dell sell "naked" PCs on their business site for companies who bulk buy the OS or install alternative OSs. The savings aren't that great as Dell probably gets the OS for nearly nothing. That said, I've looked at the Mac Mini and it doesn't look like a great deal in a business environment after adding more memory and Office. It's a good toy/home machine but I don't think it's Apples solution to getting any additional share in the 10+ employee firm.