How about in 2017 for the 40 year release, they re-release 1-3 and scrap with content that doesn't suck....maybe some miniatures and furry costumes and ditch all that nonsense CGI...and can somene shoot Jar-Jar first?
We have 2 dozen Optiplex GX240-270 PCs from that time period that were used in extreme conditions (construction jobsite trailers where it would take a FULL can of air to blow the gunk of out them, per machine) and not a single one ever had cap related motherboard problems (One did blow a power supply twice...)
We still have them (however not in service) and just fired up 6 or so to give away as donations to employees (for their little kids) and every single one fired up...
I have complaints about Dell (posting drivers for the BCOM embedded quad NICs that leak memory - well bleed like an amputation - and crash R710 servers - that was a fun one to figure out) , but I've never had any workmanship quality issues.....
Disclaimer: I'm really not to trying to come off like an arrogant sounding Yank, I did live in Australia some time ago and believe the Aussies are spot on by saying they live in God's Country down under, not Seinfeld's "asshole of the planet" comment he made on his tour there....
...but HOW is the fact that Telstra/Optus/Whoever is giving away AYCE DSL the entire driving force behind the fact that not ONE of the consumer hardware manufacturers (D-Link, Linksys/Valet/WhateverCiscoIsCallingThemTomorrow, Netgear, et al) is investing the R&D into building a good N router? I could understand if all the Bells in North America (including our Northern neighbors) had such a racket going on (~350M people between the US and CAN) but 22M in Australia is really holding back development and innovation the N Router market?
Since we're on the topic of Australians holding back the market...why are y'all hoarding the Four'N Twenty's, eh?
This guy Myerson certainly has a realistic view of what ultimately the market will think of WinPho7. I've owned units starting at Smartphone 5.0 - WinMo Pro 6.5 units, and over that lifecycle nothing ever jumped out as a gottahaveit feature between any of the versions. The core problem for Microsoft they let the OS rot for years and waited FAR too long to realize this and they needed a reset in the segement, and to fire all the people who were responsible for the impending disaster that will fall on Myerson's head.
To timeline this failure: Apple got into the phoneOS segment in late June 2007 and Google has effectively only been in the phone OS market since late 2008 / Q1 2009....Microsoft? 2000, two years before RIM and more then a half decade before Apple and Google...With a 7 year headstart on two of the major players (Google was still teething in the search engine world, and the ink hadn't been dry for long on the $150M bailout check Microsoft wrote to Apple at the time)....they did very little to keep out front of everyone.
The medium sized GC I work for is a very Microsoft laden shop (phones as well) and as the IT Manager, when we do our EOY hardware refresh for our smartphones, we will phase out our entire WinMo 6.1 fleet for a mix of Android units and iPhones, having already phased out our Blackberries and BES a few years back. I won't look even give 7 anything other then a passing glance if one of our cellular carrier reps is carrying one of these handsets and he/she happens to show it to me. Lack of Cut/Paste is the least of my worries. The fact there's better options out there from the upstart players in the segment....that is what will doom Microsoft here, period. WinPho7 needed to come out 18 months ago when Crossbow (6.0) was ready for the boneyeard if Microsoft to still have remained as a long term phoneOS player but the fumbled around with Photon (the original replacement for 6.x) and eventually canned it. Gates was probably too busy rolling around in his pile of money to kick around the WinMo dev team to stay current or didn't care since he already knew he was set to retire, and Ballmer just doesn't know when he's beat, and Microsoft executives going forward will have a lot smaller piles money to roll around in because of it.
My prediction is unless this launch goes absolutely nuts (as if it was the second coming of the iPhone) and all the handeset OEMs and cell carriers hop on board with both feet (as if they were all suddenly selling iPhones) and that's just not going to happen because WinPho7 will already be 6 months late coming to the 2010 party of the 1st 4G Android phone (Sprint Evo 4G, two weeks ago) and the iPhone 4 release (next week) Microsoft will quietly exit the phone OS market by 2015.
Good Mobile Messaging will do what Kaspersky's trying to do - control the handsets on an administrative level. You lose your iPhone? Administrator remotely wipes your unit.
Mind you, I don't have nor want one of these toys, but it works great across our WinMo and Android fleet...
ANYONE who's silly enough to use a primary e-mail address where anything important lands for any social networking site is a fool. Hotmail, gMail, et al exist for a reason....If Suckerberg wants to read my Hotmail that's linked to my Facebook account, feel free. It's all facebook related trash anyway....since it's one of my many throwaway mail accounts, used for such activities.
a Cisco ASA 5505 would certainly do the job. I upgraded to a 5505 / 10 user unit at home after having a PIX 501 for years and it rocks. You're looking at just under 400.00 new for a 10 user unit and used is all over the place. Throw on 100.00 for SmartNet if you've never used Cisco's IOS before....
"Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Considering I have 14 Sprint Treo PRO in my phone fleet, I can tell you someone didn't do their fact checking - The unit DOES NOT run on PalmOS - it's Windows Mobile Pro 6.1
As an American who went to Swinburne, I will say the reverse bell curve grading system they had at the time I was there (have now still perhaps) was the oddest damned thing I'd ever seen. 50% of the students were REQUIRED to fail. So not only were you competing with quality of your work, you were competing with all the students in your class section for that 10% of people who could earn an HD, 20% of people who could earn a Distinction, and 20% who could earn a Pass.
I'm quite happy I managed to get through my semester there with two Distinctions and two Passes.
Had Ms Trina attended Swinburne and God forbid made it through without and job prospects, she probably would have sued all of Australia just for being a nice place to live with no way to support her.
The pricetag on all this fancy military hardware goes up to beyond reasonable returns. We're losing the war to Al-Queda where their costs are nearly nothing (I suppose sending a fundamentalist nutjob to suicide bomber school is rather cheap) and the 2 Billion dollar bomber (The B-2 Spirit) crashes in 2008 in Guam on the way to fight him. As a taxpayer I think we need to say enough is enough and I think Congress is seeing the light. As far as I'm concerned, "slightly less capable, and far less expensive" is the exact tact we need to take as a country in the midst of a crippling recession.
Until Al-Queda grows an Air Force what's wrong with our fleet of 80's movie aircraft (the F-15, F-16, etc) The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. North Korea? What are they flying these days? MIG 29S's (their few but modern units - which match to the F-15) and MIG 21's (a Vietnam era unit)
I dunno, but didn't the Nazis lose with the current "Overengineering, exepensive and too few versus" principle the US is using today to the "Just barely good enough, cheap and lots of them" principle we had in WWII? The Tiger vs the Sherman?
As an IT Manager for a construction company, one thing I've been looking for is a phone that field people cannot break within a week. The defacto standard (or former standard) would be Nextel, but the new Motorola units they've been pushing are anything short of unbreakable. Gone are the days of the bulletproof brickphone that you can run over with a grader and it still live to make another call. Motorola's replacements for the bricks are rather flimsy flip phones and rather weak candybar phones.
Well, on to Verizon we go (for the better coverage and cheaper costs) and we get into their "hardened" phones...the Casio/Verizon GZ1 Boulder, which is a complete and utter joke of misnomer. These units are the worst designed hardened units I've ever seen. The battery retention mechanism (a metal looking but actually plastic screw) will break off/apart after 1 drop and breaks the phone unless you have some duct tape handy to hold your battery in place. Of the 4 dozen we've taken delivery of, we had to replace two as DOA out of the box (bad sign #1) and 4 more within a week (bad sign #2) Now they have a problem with losing the call logs which Verizon is already aware of and the unit needs a firmware update.
If this Land Rover unit is actually as good as it says it is, US cell phone companies should take note. THIS is what we want (in construction) - not these half assed phones that Verizon and Nextel put out. I want something I can hand to my people and say "See you in a year or two"... not next week after it gets dropped twice.
Don't blame the Governator on Sacramento and Sacramentans - He LIVES in LA (not in the Governor's mansion) and commutes North when he feels like it, adding extra traveling cost burdens to the rest of us.
Anything south of Elk Grove can get wiped off the planet for all I care, but leave the one set of sane Californians alone.
And if you do end up getting one of the major carrier's 3G cards - GET the carrier's PCMCIA card - Linksys makes a WRT54G router that runs off your hardline connection (if you end up getting DSL or Cable) and will run off the card as well - The routers are about 150.00 from CDW and there's a version for Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.
We had just under a dozen Sprint EVDO cards where I work and where and when they work, they're decent - The Rev A cards were rated for 400-800k down and 200-400 up and we'd see that on occasion but if you're a streamer, you'll blow through that 5GB cap that Verizon or Sprint has in no time. We just switched to Verizon and we bounced into a cap in under a week's worth of use. VZ sells a 10GB plan for... 199.00 per month but you'd be foolish to sign up for that.
They're good for small use, but it doesn't seem like that fits your profile.
I really wish the FTC would go after these fuckwads. I first started getting them from the same number - and filed an FTC report to which I got a "can't help you" type of response in the mail from them. Thanks a lot. Since then, I get 4-6 calls A WEEK to my cell phone from various bogus VOIP callback numbers at all hours (7am - 9pm) and it's always the same thing: Press #2 if you want to be dropped from the callback list (you get d/c immediately and they will call back anyway) if prompt through to to talk to a human being, and even mention that you're on the DNC, they hang up on you, and continue to call. Since nobody has invented a way to stab someone over the phone yet, I am thinking I might go try to get the closer and the drone on the line together and fire up the 200 decibel air horn through the phone. I could give a shit less if I deafen one of these sleezeballs.
IT Managers have been spending like drunken sailors. It's quite appalling that policies and strategy of most corporate IT shops are dictated by hardware and software vendors who cozy up to the management and staff through gifts, golf games and lunches.
As an IT Manager, I have to ask...Do you even work in IT? I've been working in enterprise IT for roughly 15 years and never once has any vendor attempted to dictate terms to what we used or didn't use, nor does anyone I know in IT fall under your rather incorrect profile of IT as a whole. Maybe where you are/were employed has a corrupt group of politico-IT tyrants but that's just where you work, and very far from the norm. Those of us with these things called ethics (you may have heard of them) don't need to play empire building games and those that do, those who buddy up with vendors stop putting the people who sign the paychecks first, and then the become easy to spot, and in tough times, easy to get rid of.
Old hardware is thrown out instead of re-used, and nine times out of ten more powerful (and expensive) hardware/solution is chosen. It's time for IT to tighten the belt and re-direct some of the money lining vendors' pockets to some old fashioned internal R & D.
Time is money. If you're on a 3 or 4 year hardware refresh, and your per desktop budget is 1K, what you buy in 2009 for that thousand dollars is going to be much faster then it was in 2006. If I make all of our expensive people more productive, then we're better off. Our old hardware no longer fit for mainstream corporate use is donated to employees, or clients less fortunate (my organization was lead by rather well-known philanthropist before his death, and we've followed his vision) or whoever can still benefit for it, so everone wins.
Maybe you need to experience others outside your world....
Dell has been phasing out the number of CONSUMER options that could even get XP pre-installed since Microsoft EOL'ed XP. My company spends about 100K a year on Dell hardware, and I haven't purchased a consumer class PC for my employees on Dell's Employee Purchase Plan that they extend to their medium sized and above clients. Last I looked, they offered a low end Inspiron desktop, a high end XPS, and one 15" unimpressive laptop in their EPP that came with XP. Most of the machines I've purchased on behalf of employees were desktops that were in between the overspecced XPS and the underpowered Inspiron - nothing in between. I complained to the EPP rep 8 months ago about it and he said that's the way it was. I haven't purchased an EPP machine from him since.
Now I suggest a medium spec'd business class Vostro unit for someone looking for a new machine, if for no other reason is the hardware is comparable if not better then the Inspiron consumer class, and the support is US based, rather then overseas based which is where all the consumer line support goes, and I can get much better prices from my rep then I can from the EPP guy. Some of the Vostros can be configured with medium end gaming class video cards (Nvidia 8800GT) which will get by for the few people who have kids who want to play the occasional game or two....
On the Business lines (Vostro, Optiplex, Latitude, etc), the XP "downgrade" is still going for $99.00 and comes standard on every machine we order (Vista and Vista SP1 choke on two particular apps used in our environment).... and frankly, my rep likes me....I get the hardware at prices much, much lower then the configured list prices...which is why we still buy their hardware.
A list price $1350.00 usually gets to me under 1K.....overnighted....
Or Alpha even... when it comes out, they'll most likely crank up the FPS to something blistering in the neighborhood of 11 or 12 maybe....or if they're REALLY good, double it to 14 and some change!
So what you're saying is Roy is the same to the FOSS community that Jack Thompson *was* to the murder simulator...er...gaming community?
If things shake out like they do from time to time, this guy will probably happen to find his way under a bus, metaphorically speaking, the same way JT did...
1. We admitted we were powerless over the Internet (even the filtered one in China) - that our lives had become unmanageable (Communism is good).
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (already defined as Google) could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (Eric Schmidt) as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral database inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God...er Eric, aka EES, to ourselves and to another human being (Probably in the IT Department) the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have EES remove all these defects of using another browser other then Chrome.
7. Humbly asked EES to remove our IE8 Beta installs.
8. Made a list of all persons we had pwnd, and became willing to make amends to them all (China's really working on this list too, really, honest).
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, buy supplying them with stolen credit card numbers and boxed copies of the English show "The IT Crowd" except when to do so would injure them or others, or if they already own it.
10. Continued to rewrite our personal inventory database and when we were wrong promptly debug it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with EES as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out that we will no longer "Do Any Evil" .
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other Chinese Internet Addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs on our brand new Android equipped devices.
(disclaimer: I'm in REAL 12 step program - if you are too and don't see the humor in this, tough shit)
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825Mbs @ 400m ... I'd rather not live INSIDE the CO, thanks....
How about in 2017 for the 40 year release, they re-release 1-3 and scrap with content that doesn't suck....maybe some miniatures and furry costumes and ditch all that nonsense CGI ...and can somene shoot Jar-Jar first?
We have 2 dozen Optiplex GX240-270 PCs from that time period that were used in extreme conditions (construction jobsite trailers where it would take a FULL can of air to blow the gunk of out them, per machine) and not a single one ever had cap related motherboard problems (One did blow a power supply twice...) We still have them (however not in service) and just fired up 6 or so to give away as donations to employees (for their little kids) and every single one fired up... I have complaints about Dell (posting drivers for the BCOM embedded quad NICs that leak memory - well bleed like an amputation - and crash R710 servers - that was a fun one to figure out) , but I've never had any workmanship quality issues.....
Since we're on the topic of Australians holding back the market...why are y'all hoarding the Four'N Twenty's, eh?
This guy Myerson certainly has a realistic view of what ultimately the market will think of WinPho7. I've owned units starting at Smartphone 5.0 - WinMo Pro 6.5 units, and over that lifecycle nothing ever jumped out as a gottahaveit feature between any of the versions. The core problem for Microsoft they let the OS rot for years and waited FAR too long to realize this and they needed a reset in the segement, and to fire all the people who were responsible for the impending disaster that will fall on Myerson's head.
To timeline this failure: Apple got into the phoneOS segment in late June 2007 and Google has effectively only been in the phone OS market since late 2008 / Q1 2009....Microsoft? 2000, two years before RIM and more then a half decade before Apple and Google...With a 7 year headstart on two of the major players (Google was still teething in the search engine world, and the ink hadn't been dry for long on the $150M bailout check Microsoft wrote to Apple at the time)....they did very little to keep out front of everyone.
The medium sized GC I work for is a very Microsoft laden shop (phones as well) and as the IT Manager, when we do our EOY hardware refresh for our smartphones, we will phase out our entire WinMo 6.1 fleet for a mix of Android units and iPhones, having already phased out our Blackberries and BES a few years back. I won't look even give 7 anything other then a passing glance if one of our cellular carrier reps is carrying one of these handsets and he/she happens to show it to me. Lack of Cut/Paste is the least of my worries. The fact there's better options out there from the upstart players in the segment....that is what will doom Microsoft here, period. WinPho7 needed to come out 18 months ago when Crossbow (6.0) was ready for the boneyeard if Microsoft to still have remained as a long term phoneOS player but the fumbled around with Photon (the original replacement for 6.x) and eventually canned it. Gates was probably too busy rolling around in his pile of money to kick around the WinMo dev team to stay current or didn't care since he already knew he was set to retire, and Ballmer just doesn't know when he's beat, and Microsoft executives going forward will have a lot smaller piles money to roll around in because of it.
My prediction is unless this launch goes absolutely nuts (as if it was the second coming of the iPhone) and all the handeset OEMs and cell carriers hop on board with both feet (as if they were all suddenly selling iPhones) and that's just not going to happen because WinPho7 will already be 6 months late coming to the 2010 party of the 1st 4G Android phone (Sprint Evo 4G, two weeks ago) and the iPhone 4 release (next week) Microsoft will quietly exit the phone OS market by 2015.
Thanks for playin', Microsoft!
At least everyone knows that Intel's integrated stuff sucks. Some of you might have forgotten the i740. Bet Otellini didn't
I was reading somewhere that BFG was in some ugly financial straits as well....They're just dumping one of their not-so-lucrative lines....
Good Mobile Messaging will do what Kaspersky's trying to do - control the handsets on an administrative level. You lose your iPhone? Administrator remotely wipes your unit.
Mind you, I don't have nor want one of these toys, but it works great across our WinMo and Android fleet...
ANYONE who's silly enough to use a primary e-mail address where anything important lands for any social networking site is a fool. Hotmail, gMail, et al exist for a reason....If Suckerberg wants to read my Hotmail that's linked to my Facebook account, feel free. It's all facebook related trash anyway....since it's one of my many throwaway mail accounts, used for such activities.
"Marlinspike declined to say who operates his compute cluster"
I guess he can't come out and say he's using botted boxes, right?
a Cisco ASA 5505 would certainly do the job. I upgraded to a 5505 / 10 user unit at home after having a PIX 501 for years and it rocks. You're looking at just under 400.00 new for a 10 user unit and used is all over the place. Throw on 100.00 for SmartNet if you've never used Cisco's IOS before....
Go rent Starblazers. It will all become clear.
Good luck on renting it ... just buy it ...
http://www.starblazers.com/category.php?page_id=29&featured_product=50
"Palm has officially retired Palm OS and is now focusing hard on its next-generation WebOS in the Palm Pre, the company is still selling Palm OS-powered smartphones; two current models are the Treo Pro on Sprint and the Centro."
Considering I have 14 Sprint Treo PRO in my phone fleet, I can tell you someone didn't do their fact checking - The unit DOES NOT run on PalmOS - it's Windows Mobile Pro 6.1
http://nextelonline.nextel.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPhones?phoneSKU=PTR850HK
Way to go, Appscout.
As an American who went to Swinburne, I will say the reverse bell curve grading system they had at the time I was there (have now still perhaps) was the oddest damned thing I'd ever seen. 50% of the students were REQUIRED to fail. So not only were you competing with quality of your work, you were competing with all the students in your class section for that 10% of people who could earn an HD, 20% of people who could earn a Distinction, and 20% who could earn a Pass.
I'm quite happy I managed to get through my semester there with two Distinctions and two Passes.
Had Ms Trina attended Swinburne and God forbid made it through without and job prospects, she probably would have sued all of Australia just for being a nice place to live with no way to support her.
The pricetag on all this fancy military hardware goes up to beyond reasonable returns. We're losing the war to Al-Queda where their costs are nearly nothing (I suppose sending a fundamentalist nutjob to suicide bomber school is rather cheap) and the 2 Billion dollar bomber (The B-2 Spirit) crashes in 2008 in Guam on the way to fight him. As a taxpayer I think we need to say enough is enough and I think Congress is seeing the light. As far as I'm concerned, "slightly less capable, and far less expensive" is the exact tact we need to take as a country in the midst of a crippling recession.
Until Al-Queda grows an Air Force what's wrong with our fleet of 80's movie aircraft (the F-15, F-16, etc) The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. North Korea? What are they flying these days? MIG 29S's (their few but modern units - which match to the F-15) and MIG 21's (a Vietnam era unit)
I dunno, but didn't the Nazis lose with the current "Overengineering, exepensive and too few versus" principle the US is using today to the "Just barely good enough, cheap and lots of them" principle we had in WWII? The Tiger vs the Sherman?
We lost our way.
As an IT Manager for a construction company, one thing I've been looking for is a phone that field people cannot break within a week. The defacto standard (or former standard) would be Nextel, but the new Motorola units they've been pushing are anything short of unbreakable. Gone are the days of the bulletproof brickphone that you can run over with a grader and it still live to make another call. Motorola's replacements for the bricks are rather flimsy flip phones and rather weak candybar phones.
Well, on to Verizon we go (for the better coverage and cheaper costs) and we get into their "hardened" phones...the Casio/Verizon GZ1 Boulder, which is a complete and utter joke of misnomer. These units are the worst designed hardened units I've ever seen. The battery retention mechanism (a metal looking but actually plastic screw) will break off/apart after 1 drop and breaks the phone unless you have some duct tape handy to hold your battery in place. Of the 4 dozen we've taken delivery of, we had to replace two as DOA out of the box (bad sign #1) and 4 more within a week (bad sign #2) Now they have a problem with losing the call logs which Verizon is already aware of and the unit needs a firmware update.
If this Land Rover unit is actually as good as it says it is, US cell phone companies should take note. THIS is what we want (in construction) - not these half assed phones that Verizon and Nextel put out. I want something I can hand to my people and say "See you in a year or two" ... not next week after it gets dropped twice.
Californian here! Can Sacramento go third?
Don't blame the Governator on Sacramento and Sacramentans - He LIVES in LA (not in the Governor's mansion) and commutes North when he feels like it, adding extra traveling cost burdens to the rest of us.
Anything south of Elk Grove can get wiped off the planet for all I care, but leave the one set of sane Californians alone.
And if you do end up getting one of the major carrier's 3G cards - GET the carrier's PCMCIA card - Linksys makes a WRT54G router that runs off your hardline connection (if you end up getting DSL or Cable) and will run off the card as well - The routers are about 150.00 from CDW and there's a version for Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.
We had just under a dozen Sprint EVDO cards where I work and where and when they work, they're decent - The Rev A cards were rated for 400-800k down and 200-400 up and we'd see that on occasion but if you're a streamer, you'll blow through that 5GB cap that Verizon or Sprint has in no time. We just switched to Verizon and we bounced into a cap in under a week's worth of use. VZ sells a 10GB plan for ... 199.00 per month but you'd be foolish to sign up for that.
They're good for small use, but it doesn't seem like that fits your profile.
I really wish the FTC would go after these fuckwads. I first started getting them from the same number - and filed an FTC report to which I got a "can't help you" type of response in the mail from them. Thanks a lot. Since then, I get 4-6 calls A WEEK to my cell phone from various bogus VOIP callback numbers at all hours (7am - 9pm) and it's always the same thing: Press #2 if you want to be dropped from the callback list (you get d/c immediately and they will call back anyway) if prompt through to to talk to a human being, and even mention that you're on the DNC, they hang up on you, and continue to call. Since nobody has invented a way to stab someone over the phone yet, I am thinking I might go try to get the closer and the drone on the line together and fire up the 200 decibel air horn through the phone. I could give a shit less if I deafen one of these sleezeballs.
As an IT Manager, I have to ask...Do you even work in IT? I've been working in enterprise IT for roughly 15 years and never once has any vendor attempted to dictate terms to what we used or didn't use, nor does anyone I know in IT fall under your rather incorrect profile of IT as a whole. Maybe where you are/were employed has a corrupt group of politico-IT tyrants but that's just where you work, and very far from the norm. Those of us with these things called ethics (you may have heard of them) don't need to play empire building games and those that do, those who buddy up with vendors stop putting the people who sign the paychecks first, and then the become easy to spot, and in tough times, easy to get rid of.
Time is money. If you're on a 3 or 4 year hardware refresh, and your per desktop budget is 1K, what you buy in 2009 for that thousand dollars is going to be much faster then it was in 2006. If I make all of our expensive people more productive, then we're better off. Our old hardware no longer fit for mainstream corporate use is donated to employees, or clients less fortunate (my organization was lead by rather well-known philanthropist before his death, and we've followed his vision) or whoever can still benefit for it, so everone wins. Maybe you need to experience others outside your world....
Dell has been phasing out the number of CONSUMER options that could even get XP pre-installed since Microsoft EOL'ed XP. My company spends about 100K a year on Dell hardware, and I haven't purchased a consumer class PC for my employees on Dell's Employee Purchase Plan that they extend to their medium sized and above clients. Last I looked, they offered a low end Inspiron desktop, a high end XPS, and one 15" unimpressive laptop in their EPP that came with XP. Most of the machines I've purchased on behalf of employees were desktops that were in between the overspecced XPS and the underpowered Inspiron - nothing in between. I complained to the EPP rep 8 months ago about it and he said that's the way it was. I haven't purchased an EPP machine from him since.
Now I suggest a medium spec'd business class Vostro unit for someone looking for a new machine, if for no other reason is the hardware is comparable if not better then the Inspiron consumer class, and the support is US based, rather then overseas based which is where all the consumer line support goes, and I can get much better prices from my rep then I can from the EPP guy. Some of the Vostros can be configured with medium end gaming class video cards (Nvidia 8800GT) which will get by for the few people who have kids who want to play the occasional game or two....
On the Business lines (Vostro, Optiplex, Latitude, etc), the XP "downgrade" is still going for $99.00 and comes standard on every machine we order (Vista and Vista SP1 choke on two particular apps used in our environment) .... and frankly, my rep likes me....I get the hardware at prices much, much lower then the configured list prices...which is why we still buy their hardware.
A list price $1350.00 usually gets to me under 1K.....overnighted....
Or Alpha even ... when it comes out, they'll most likely crank up the FPS to something blistering in the neighborhood of 11 or 12 maybe....or if they're REALLY good, double it to 14 and some change!
So what you're saying is Roy is the same to the FOSS community that Jack Thompson *was* to the murder simulator...er...gaming community?
If things shake out like they do from time to time, this guy will probably happen to find his way under a bus, metaphorically speaking, the same way JT did...
I'll run your comment off right off the rail
1. We admitted we were powerless over the Internet (even the filtered one in China) - that our lives had become unmanageable (Communism is good).
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (already defined as Google) could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (Eric Schmidt) as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral database inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God...er Eric, aka EES, to ourselves and to another human being (Probably in the IT Department) the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have EES remove all these defects of using another browser other then Chrome.
7. Humbly asked EES to remove our IE8 Beta installs.
8. Made a list of all persons we had pwnd, and became willing to make amends to them all (China's really working on this list too, really, honest).
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, buy supplying them with stolen credit card numbers and boxed copies of the English show "The IT Crowd" except when to do so would injure them or others, or if they already own it.
10. Continued to rewrite our personal inventory database and when we were wrong promptly debug it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with EES as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out that we will no longer "Do Any Evil" .
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other Chinese Internet Addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs on our brand new Android equipped devices.
(disclaimer: I'm in REAL 12 step program - if you are too and don't see the humor in this, tough shit)