"While the bulk telephone data remains with the NSA for now, Obama wants those records moved out of government hands, though it is uncertain where, a senior administration official said in briefing reporters on condition of not being identified."
I'm thinking, some analyst's laptop. Stored in the back of his car while he stuffs a few bills at the kitty kat lounge.
Don't know about that. Going from my iPhone 4 to my 5s got me massive improvements in processing power and camera, and a lot of good extra features. The processing power shows up in web browsing (which seems to require astonishing numbers of computrons nowadays). I got some real advantages. On the other hand, the greatly increased power in my home desktop over my five-year-old one doesn't usually matter (except for the SSD, which I could have added to my old box), and the real reason I replaced it was that the old one became unreliable, and when looking at my options I was attracted by "teh shiny".
I don't know how the iPhone 7 will compare to the 5s (assuming I keep planning my three-year cycle), or for that matter how long the 5s would last (my original iPhone developed touch screen problems about the time the 4 came out). We'll have to see.
Clearly you missed a couple of cycles. You should have traded the 4 for a 4s in 2011, the 4s for a 5 in 2012, and the 5 for a 5s in 2013. Or so a machead I know tells me. Gotta keep current.
I kept my Droid X until it stopped making calls. I currently have a RAZR Maxx which I will keep until it no longer functions. My carrier periodically informs me that I'm eligible for an upgrade. I tell them to get lost.
I do consumer PC support as a sideline, and observe that often "unreliability" in a computer is software, not hardware related. In December I received a laptop to repair or dispose of (depending on the cost of fixing). First thing I noticed was that the antivirus was incapacitated. I took out the drive and plugged it into one of my machines. My antivirus immediately started going crazy. Twelve major viruses. One reimage later, and the laptop runs as if new. The root cause was that the customer was not practicing safe computing.
During Y2K, many companies discovered that replacing or even fixing legacy systems is a really hard thing to do. Even when one's core business depends on a happy outcome. Compared to that, a mere lack of vendor support is a trifle. Make sure Norton is up to date and the firewall is correctly configured, and just sweat it out, would be the tendency.
Not to say anything about jeans and t-shirt ownership, although little boys can have black death metal t-shirts and long leather trench coats in the summer. Just saying that middle aged people trying to look young and cool is probably not going to end well.
...as I stopped using Google Maps when they discontinued Latitude. (G+ is way overkill when all you want to know is the location of family members.) I use Waze now. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.
I'm explaining why many companies will not upgrade, at least certain machines, even after Microsoft stops supporting XP. If this is Microsoft's problem in any way, it's that they will not get revenue for a new copy of the OS for awhile yet. Because the old one still demonstrably works.
> If you work in IT you are negligent if you are not upgrading or your boss is if he wont pay for it.
This is glib and perhaps accurate, but the sad fact is, many bosses can't or won't pay for it. They pay their annual subscription fee for Norton, have a backup strategy in place, have plans in place to reimage any infected machine, and hope for the best. What I'm trying to explain is this: The biggest argument for doing this (sticking with XP) is that it still runs the apps the users need. It's a strong argument, with upper management. Sysadmins can suggest but when it comes down to it, we don't make policy.
Ok. So how many of these things are of concern, not to developers or OS junkies, but end users with currently stable environments, who are running two or three applications that still run fine on XP?
Nooo! I demand people work forever patching something for me for free, a bloo bloo bloo.
Still missing the point. What I'm telling you is that there are a significant number of people out there who don't care about that. In fact, I have customers who have turned off updates and absolutely refuse my requests to install them manually, usually because sometime in the past they've had a server bricked by an update. Users have a different viewpoint from us.
I think the problem is we're talking about different things. You seem to be scared to death that Microsoft is going to "stop supporting" XP. I'm saying that there are many, many people out there who just don't care, as long as it keeps doing what it does, and as IT professionals, we need to be able to deal with that without getting hysterical. The day after support ends, XP will still boot, and it'll still run programs, and for some people, for whatever reason, that's enough.
As I said in other threads, even today I see the Windows 98 splash screen on some business systems on boot. (98 SE was fairly stable, if you didn't ask too much of it.) And support for that ended in 2006. And you bet I've mentioned this, but the answer is always that it's still working, (which is hard to argue against) and there's no budget for replacement. But security risk? It's an insurance issue. Press this point and endanger your contract.
These are good points, but (supporting home users as one of my jobs) I don't see a lot of people who know what a homegroup is, or use SSDs, or any kind of virtualization or indeed any of the other things you mention. They poke Outlook Express, IE and maybe Candy Crush. That's it. And given that, they don't see any particular advantage in upgrading the OS.
And although technically I agree with you that security *should* be a huge selling point for business, in actual fact there is still a large XP presence in business. Hell, there's a significant Windows 98 presence in business, especially in embedded systems. Business doesn't seem to care, in my experience. If they care at all, it's that hardware is on a replacement cycle, and this may be an excuse to adopt a more recent OS, if the training requirements are not too strenuous. (Which is one of the reasons Win8 is often a non-starter.)
> I wonder at which point smartphones will become fast enough so that people will stick the same phone for at least five years or so.
That would be... now. I think we've approached the point of the curve where smart phones are good enough, a point that PCs reached a little after the turn of the century. People trade in their iphones for the next shiny object because that's part of the culture, not because they're that much better. Test by: What was the real difference between the 4 and the 4s? A piece of software. But that didn't stop people from flocking to the store on trade-in day.
I'm not sure why we're discussing Apple in this context at all. I guess we just like also-rans here...
Because Apple is the choice of the cool crowd... and geeks secretly love the cool crowd and want to be in it.
Yeesh, if that's the case, I need to turn in my geek card. Overpriced shiny stuff for geeks who think they'll look like hipsters if they shave their pimply heads and carry an iphone in their leather trench coat while they drink absurdly expensive coffee drinks. There, fixed if for you.
Slashdot Mirror
But he PROMISED that all they data they're going to gather on you will never be looked at. Doesn't that make you happy?
Um, um, (looks around) Um, (loudly, speaking into the flower vase) YES. That Does Make Me Happy.
> Also, the President is not allowed to know everything about what the secret agencies do.
Anyone old enough to remember "plausible deniability"?
> There! I feel the hot breath of reform already. Big brother is a subcontract.
Outsourced offshore?
"While the bulk telephone data remains with the NSA for now, Obama wants those records moved out of government hands, though it is uncertain where, a senior administration official said in briefing reporters on condition of not being identified."
I'm thinking, some analyst's laptop. Stored in the back of his car while he stuffs a few bills at the kitty kat lounge.
Google bought Waze last June.
Well, crap. That means Waze will start dropping features, or disappear entirely. Time to go shopping again.
Crap.
Don't know about that. Going from my iPhone 4 to my 5s got me massive improvements in processing power and camera, and a lot of good extra features. The processing power shows up in web browsing (which seems to require astonishing numbers of computrons nowadays). I got some real advantages. On the other hand, the greatly increased power in my home desktop over my five-year-old one doesn't usually matter (except for the SSD, which I could have added to my old box), and the real reason I replaced it was that the old one became unreliable, and when looking at my options I was attracted by "teh shiny".
I don't know how the iPhone 7 will compare to the 5s (assuming I keep planning my three-year cycle), or for that matter how long the 5s would last (my original iPhone developed touch screen problems about the time the 4 came out). We'll have to see.
Clearly you missed a couple of cycles. You should have traded the 4 for a 4s in 2011, the 4s for a 5 in 2012, and the 5 for a 5s in 2013. Or so a machead I know tells me. Gotta keep current.
I kept my Droid X until it stopped making calls. I currently have a RAZR Maxx which I will keep until it no longer functions. My carrier periodically informs me that I'm eligible for an upgrade. I tell them to get lost.
I do consumer PC support as a sideline, and observe that often "unreliability" in a computer is software, not hardware related. In December I received a laptop to repair or dispose of (depending on the cost of fixing). First thing I noticed was that the antivirus was incapacitated. I took out the drive and plugged it into one of my machines. My antivirus immediately started going crazy. Twelve major viruses. One reimage later, and the laptop runs as if new. The root cause was that the customer was not practicing safe computing.
I'm a little surprised they're not trying to push one code base on PCs, tablets, phones, ATMs and Warships.
Actually, that doesn't worry me nearly as much as Windows for Warships.
Yeah, there must be, oh, thousands of ATMs out there.
During Y2K, many companies discovered that replacing or even fixing legacy systems is a really hard thing to do. Even when one's core business depends on a happy outcome. Compared to that, a mere lack of vendor support is a trifle. Make sure Norton is up to date and the firewall is correctly configured, and just sweat it out, would be the tendency.
> His form of schizophrenia was thinking what he saw on TV and the movies was his real life.
Geeze, calm down. I'm way over 40.
Not to say anything about jeans and t-shirt ownership, although little boys can have black death metal t-shirts and long leather trench coats in the summer. Just saying that middle aged people trying to look young and cool is probably not going to end well.
I'm explaining why many companies will not upgrade, at least certain machines, even after Microsoft stops supporting XP. If this is Microsoft's problem in any way, it's that they will not get revenue for a new copy of the OS for awhile yet. Because the old one still demonstrably works.
> If you work in IT you are negligent if you are not upgrading or your boss is if he wont pay for it.
This is glib and perhaps accurate, but the sad fact is, many bosses can't or won't pay for it. They pay their annual subscription fee for Norton, have a backup strategy in place, have plans in place to reimage any infected machine, and hope for the best. What I'm trying to explain is this: The biggest argument for doing this (sticking with XP) is that it still runs the apps the users need. It's a strong argument, with upper management. Sysadmins can suggest but when it comes down to it, we don't make policy.
Ok. So how many of these things are of concern, not to developers or OS junkies, but end users with currently stable environments, who are running two or three applications that still run fine on XP?
Nooo! I demand people work forever patching something for me for free, a bloo bloo bloo.
Still missing the point. What I'm telling you is that there are a significant number of people out there who don't care about that. In fact, I have customers who have turned off updates and absolutely refuse my requests to install them manually, usually because sometime in the past they've had a server bricked by an update. Users have a different viewpoint from us.
I think the problem is we're talking about different things. You seem to be scared to death that Microsoft is going to "stop supporting" XP. I'm saying that there are many, many people out there who just don't care, as long as it keeps doing what it does, and as IT professionals, we need to be able to deal with that without getting hysterical. The day after support ends, XP will still boot, and it'll still run programs, and for some people, for whatever reason, that's enough.
As I said in other threads, even today I see the Windows 98 splash screen on some business systems on boot. (98 SE was fairly stable, if you didn't ask too much of it.) And support for that ended in 2006. And you bet I've mentioned this, but the answer is always that it's still working, (which is hard to argue against) and there's no budget for replacement. But security risk? It's an insurance issue. Press this point and endanger your contract.
These are good points, but (supporting home users as one of my jobs) I don't see a lot of people who know what a homegroup is, or use SSDs, or any kind of virtualization or indeed any of the other things you mention. They poke Outlook Express, IE and maybe Candy Crush. That's it. And given that, they don't see any particular advantage in upgrading the OS.
And although technically I agree with you that security *should* be a huge selling point for business, in actual fact there is still a large XP presence in business. Hell, there's a significant Windows 98 presence in business, especially in embedded systems. Business doesn't seem to care, in my experience. If they care at all, it's that hardware is on a replacement cycle, and this may be an excuse to adopt a more recent OS, if the training requirements are not too strenuous. (Which is one of the reasons Win8 is often a non-starter.)
Good for you. If only more people had this level of maturity.
> I wonder at which point smartphones will become fast enough so that people will stick the same phone for at least five years or so.
That would be ... now. I think we've approached the point of the curve where smart phones are good enough, a point that PCs reached a little after the turn of the century. People trade in their iphones for the next shiny object because that's part of the culture, not because they're that much better. Test by: What was the real difference between the 4 and the 4s? A piece of software. But that didn't stop people from flocking to the store on trade-in day.
The iPhone has become like jeans and a shirt. Middle aged guys trying to look young and cool.
And failing.
I'm not sure why we're discussing Apple in this context at all. I guess we just like also-rans here...
Because Apple is the choice of the cool crowd ... and geeks secretly love the cool crowd and want to be in it.
Yeesh, if that's the case, I need to turn in my geek card. Overpriced shiny stuff for geeks who think they'll look like hipsters if they shave their pimply heads and carry an iphone in their leather trench coat while they drink absurdly expensive coffee drinks. There, fixed if for you.
I think it's pretty much been established that people don't *like* Win8.