I've been using computers in business for 20 years now, and I was what is commonly defined a "power user"
Why am I using the past here? because, for the first time since I started 20 years back, I see absolutely no use changing to a new machine. I use Excel. I use Access.there are some other apps that work well on XP. my machine is 3 years old, in the prime of an optimized and no nonsense life. I do not play big computer games at work. THAT's the real problem with Vista. Users have to change/upgrade machine to use Vista. what for?
I think that business users might go to Linux, but what they'd really want would be to stay as they are for years to come.
Anyway, who says the NSA can't crack PGP? Some crypto-fanboy showing off how much smarterer he is than lawyers who make no claim of security expertise and have a professional obligation to err on the side of caution? ...Of course, the NSA would vigorously deny being able to do that anyway.
Apart from that, PGP-encrypted content is like an apple....leave it in the open too long and it rots away. no self-respectin' geek would use anything else than One time pads
from TFA:
a small acceleration in the direction of the Sun---8 x 10-8 cm/sec2 for Pioneer 10---remains unaccounted for. It goes withour saying that since gravity is a proportional to mass, either the sun got fatter, or some fat dude is hiding behind it without us knowing it, so.....break out the tinfoil hats!!!!
Bunkers are handy against EMP's too. You also generally get good overall physical security with a bunker, and data centers built in them tend to follow through with more practical aspects of security, like escorts instead of just letting you find your own way, as is common in most.
Bunkers also make for a relatively inexpensive readymade secure location, generally with good immortal power and HVAC. People don't put data centers in bunkers because of zomg sekure, they do it because it's often more practical than building your own from scratch.
Besides, my Chateau Laffite wine ages marvelously in that environment.....
[...]The one which stands forward most clearly in my mind was the CIO who crowed at me for a couple of minutes about what his budgets were like, and how he'd just cleared his server room to six blade servers because he'd virtualised so much of the infrastructure and blah blah blah. I spoke to his GM of Infrastructure, who told me that the CIO in question spent almost all of his time in the office, door closed, and would only pop his head out of the office to go to vendor meets or crow about who he was playing golf with that weekend. This GM was doing more of the IT to Business communication that the executive that he directly reported to was doing. I hear stories like this all the time.
Whilst my job is not in IT, I can sympatize with the GM...unless he rather engineered it that way, like I did. If you do not angle for the top post (because you like the technicality of your job, because the current management of the company you work for puts Dilbert to shame etc) being number 2 is the best place. You actually spend most of the time doing the job you like; you spend less time in unnerving meetings that vacillate between the obvious and the counterproductive, and more solving problems, especially if no 1 spends his time either in meetings or in his office!!!
The cool thing about buying something like Yahoo is you can finance against the assets of the acquisition. Typically you might issue stock of your own company reflecting your value of theirs, only risking dilution of your own stock (looking at you Time Warner). Or some combo of that and cash.
That's all well when you buy ASSETS ( a refinery, plants etc.), in Yahoo's case, MS is buying two things:
1. the combination of Intellectual Property / engineering personnel / computing power;
2. Market share / mindshare
MS has too much of point 1. if anything, the use of opensource in Yahoo is a major embarassment: "do we switch to MS software risking a major goof if anything goes sour, or stay with freeBSD and get laughed at?"
point 2. is much more tricky. part of the appeal of Yahoo is that it's not MSN, and works better; who will "buy" the other? if a Yahoo user wanted to use MSN, why wait for a takeover? Also, the other way around (spinning off the search + ad selling as a standalone company) is precluded to a company for whom "monolith" spell G-O-D, and that risks getting pressure (again!!) about spinning off software from operating system. I think this may be a major spoiling attack on the part of MS. It explains away why MS keeps its cash inhouse instead of distributing it to shareholders: it just might need it for a major takeover. As any big organization knows, shareholders are best when they are unheard of.
MS did it because they wanted to consolidate a larger advertising and search engine position, and a major internet portal. It was probably still a bad decision, but who can really say what the results would have been ten years down the line?
Frankly, having been an investment professional for 20 years, I do not see the difference between what I said and what you said. IMHO, if that had been true as a major driver MS would have bought out IBM's share in OS2 years back.
Jokes apart, there is a possible explanation which implies no wickedness on the part of MS: MS investments in his search engine + ad seller has been less effective than Yahoo's. MS would never be allowed to bid for Google, so it must settle for second best, which is not a bad place to be if you are much lower in the totem pole.
Given the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket, the pressure to put the money to work somewhere, or return it to shareholders, is enormous, and they cannot or would not invest it in making a better product overall.
" They're not offering Mac OS X either. Nor AmigaOS, BSD, Gnu/HURD, Irix, Solaris, VMS, MS-DOS, Plan9, BeOS...
"
......Mmmmmmm, let's see. "User", by definition, is not one that meddles into how the thingy works. I do not see many cars with the bonnets up, and their happy owners using up the last of their wrenches.
BUT, maybe, just maybe, a small percentage of the users will want to see how it all works, and start trying to change the program, a bit here, a bit there...and voilà, as a country, you are the happy owner of at least a hundred linux programmers!
So, the moral is... you have a home grown software industry. No windows user grows into a windows programmer unless he's able to access MORE programs, probably formal training. And anyway, the thing that can scare Brazil off the most is that MS quashed competitors in the US, , so there's no point in trying to establish a MS centric software industry.
[...]And I'd further venture that the "..get them fixed.." idea has occured to MS but that this isn't easy to do due to poor design."
Poor design, or deliberate choice? really, Life is easy in Windowsdome as long as the MS world is tightly integrated. You cannot put openoffice vs. Office, mozilla vs IE, windows 2000 vs. knoppix. It is a "take the whole bunch or leave it " approach.
Be advised that this is no slur to what MS has done over the years. I Have been a big fan of Excel.....4. Let 's face it , it would be a big problem for MS if an application of theirs worked perfectly and wasn't "tightly integrated in the operating system". excel was a hit in apple world. Imagine if something like this happened today with linux, and it worked better on linux than on windows. There are two problems in MS world now: problem one, there is no "killer app" on the horizon for the personal computer. problem two, there is no turning back from the integrated approach, because it would mean that they lied to the court system in the antitrust case. So, when firefox crashes, you restart firefox; when IE crashes.... I hope you saved that end of term paper you were working on, boy.
"[...]Or perhaps they were just given their knowledge from another race?"
...It has already been done, time and again, here on mother earth. First, the greek-latin culture founded the basis for the modern science; after that, the arabs copied and expanded modern science as we know it,, whilst western europe wallowed in the middle ages. after some time, the pendulum swung. The problem is, no civilization can "teach" another one scientific progress. If a culture is interested, it will try and learn whatever others have learnt, PLUS it will eventually add some original content of its own. On the other hand, a civilization that does not want to learn most probably won't.
I always recall the story about the crab nebula. it contains a pulsar, the rotating remains of a supernova, and progressively the rotation is slowing down. it one of the basis of the discovery that you can date novas by timing the rotation of the pulsar remains. We were able to ascertain that, because we know the exact date of the explosion. records say that it could be seen clearly even by day, for days on end. Point is , these records are chinese . no records are available from western europe or arab sources.
"I think there may be a market here. Say, for example, that the next generation of Unreal or Doom engine is designed around something like this. The SOFTWARE vendor could potentially, assuming they could get the cost down far enough, offer some sort of PCI or even better USB2/FW hardware accelerator bundled WITH the game."
..as a useful aside, I am buying a new rig for myself and since the specs involve some "advance work" in Pacific Fighters, it isn't what I consider cheap. At the same time, my father's computer quit on him. He uses it for the "ordinary " things, like mail, web browsing, office work, etc. The machine he needs costs less than half of mine.
My conclusion is, the more the difference between a simple rig and an advance one is add-on cards, the happier I am. I'd love to have the same basic computer for my father, son and me, with differences only in processor specs, graphic card etc. , but it is not so simple, because either you overpay for the basic rig (in a relative sense, since you are trying to buy quality components with a longer useful life) or continue with different types of computer in the house.
....It might be much worse than that: if you can touch, it is an open source in which clients get to pay to work on what they bought, so they can pay anew.
" i'd love to see the GSM (as in, a telephone) integrated with the PDA (as in, basic simple office work, e-mail synced, WiFi/UMTS) with a multimedia player (preferably also Vorbis-compatible). I want 1 device which is small enough but also gives me the features i want to have without using a beast such as a laptop and without having 1 device like e.g. the GSM which can phone (what i actually want), SMS (expensive!), play retro games (boring!) without the features i also would like to have."
I think that, while what you say is valid, form factor is a big issue here. I just went for a motorola mpx 200 smartphone, just because I wanted a compact pda/phone file repository without photocamera. It does have media player installed, but the screen real estate is so small that I do not see myself using its multimedia features anytime soon.
AFAIK, the consumer market is going after the blackberry/ Ipaq/ Ipod form factor, which is in my view rather unwieldy as a phone. It all depends on prevailing use, i.e. mail and multimedia or voice.
"...these are the guys (and gals) who will innocently base their entire core stratum of MS-Office macros around one obscure.NET feature and one obscure OLE2 feature and one obscure MicrosoftFeatureOfTheSeason that makes their stuff difficult to impossible to port off."
My point exactly. "Feature bloat" is a common enemy. BUT, let me relate my personal experience.
This is a sort of a coming out for me because, I have to confess, i have been a Microsoft fan once. I was a User of Lotus 1-2-3, and when, with my brand new, shining new rig , a fabulous IBM 286, came with Excel installed, I was hoooked! When excel 4 came out, I practically slept with the Function reference book (!) Macro recording, and editing, was a breeze; functions were simple. AND IT ALL STAYED ON 4 FLOPPIES. AAH, love.
Enter VBA, and it all goes sour. Why a user, however advanced, should learn a programming language? It all was downhill from here. It took me, and all of us, years, but now our ditty bag is more or less how we want it.
And let us not despair for those people: they have the crashes, they seek a better today, and oh so slowly, they are realizing that they can have it. They will come.
"They held a conference recently on MS-Office technologies and said outright that their aim was to get as many developers as possible trapped into basing stuff on MS-Office so that it would become effectively impossible for them to change out."
Neat. But the problem for them is, only developers and a narrow subset of power users can be in a way "forced" to use Their office.
I am not an IT pro, so for me "power user" means "anybody that is able to use VLOOKUP()", especially if the lookup table is not ordered. For all others, Openoffice is a very strong alternative, the more so because it is free and it is multiplatform. To the vast majority of users, Word is a typewriter, Excel is a widget that does sums and what-if's, and Access does not exists. Outlook is a funny mail program. In my view, File formats are the big clincher in MS dominance.
Provided you accept that the low end user is not a factor here, let us move upscale. People who want to send files from within the application, do mail merge in word. They record and modify macros in Excel. These are the people you are talking about, the common clay of Microsoft Land. They are prepared to withstand all of the windows problems in return for these feature set.
Onward from there, there are the Loonies (me included). People irked to the core by the blue screens of death, by the inconsistent performance, by the "design dirtiness", the fact that it could and should all be simpler than this. People that cook their own lunch, therefore they want to know the quality of the ingredients. These people are migrating away from Microsoft, and that elicits no parting tears from Redmond; personal guess, we originate most of the "nasty" help desk calls, so there is no love lost. It is a quiet and amicable divorce.
So where do things get ugly? they get ugly when a friend or relative calls, because "his computer is acting funny". What do you keep in your ditty bag? C'mon, 'fess up: knoppix, thunderbird, Firefox, openoffice, Sygate personal firewall or variation thereof. You go there, perform the rain dance, and presto!, another person knows that no, it is not a given that computer users should reboot every day. God forbid, this born again user could spill it out at WORK. Maybe install firefox on the sly. Frankly, going on like that, you do not know where it ends.
As an aside, I AM a windows user, and so is the family.
My son is 11, going on 12, and were it not for the fact that he's fond of computer games (and where oh where did he take that from?;-)), i'd build him a linux box with open office double quick; he'd learn all he would need about office application, much more than an average user about computer security (root/user, etc) without all the hassle of mantaining a windows installation. But you know, until there is Pacific Fighter for linux.... we'll have to go on like this.
"MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers.
"
How very true. in IBM's case, it continued on and off for years,like a bear hounded by a pack of dogs, until market realities, and Microsoft, reached them. Think about this: the original IBM pc used Ms DOS. Do you all see MS saying: "we see Office as our core product"?
Sadly, I don't. Their core asset is the operating system, and to keep us all on the merry go round they have to change frequently, not for efficiency's sake, but to keep one step in front of GPL'd software.
my personal opinion is that the US lost a major opportunity when it did not order MS breakup into operating system and everything else.
The company I work for has such a policy. Beside proliferating bad habits (writing down passwords, "trading" passwords between colleagues, etc), it is in a way nonsensical. Why not leave it at "passwords must be over 10 and under 255 characters"? that way, easily remembered phrases can replace unwieldy 8 chars things.
Sorry, I forgot an aspect that might interest you: since most online sims support online audio comms, hardcore simmers simply place a dot on their headset's microphone. I think that it could be possible to rig something like that, and your father could use it for remote comms .
He could also use Smartnav , or since it is practically the same thing at half the price, Trackir.
Provided you set it up properly, the only operator training needed would be for someone to put a ball cap with the reflective dot on your father's head. Lots of people use it for flight sims, especially the IL-2 series .
Since they use as a Situation awareness aid, they all know how to set it up.
"Now, here are the facts as they're found by SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES:[...]
... That's a bold statement to do. When a Company gets as big AND as dominant as Microsoft, there's no way of validating the indipendence of research anymore. Now, that's not like saying that the Borg entity bought off all studies, but no, I cannot accept the indipendence claim.
One fact nags me, tough. The worst mob to please should evidently be Indipendent internet service providers: they are more competent than the general public, they're in it for the money and not the mojo... a host of factor. So, how come that Apache server has triple the Market share of Microsoft?
"It did work, but several methods have been found to reduce the effect SA had to the point where it was no longer relevant."
It's called "differential tracking". A GPS receiver is sited as near as possible to the target, and it is linked to a RF transmitter by which it broadcasts its GPS reported position. The receiving system, knowing the exact location of the fixed receiver, cues the guidance system with the offset data. It's perfect, It's simple, It works.
Given this data, it should be rather evident that:
1.There is really no need for a third (russian glonass is operational) system for precise 3d location, either civvy or military;
2. The US military cannot, even by turning off completely the GPS system, avoid homeland menace. Any sucker could have gone on top of the twin towers with a homing beacon;
The European system underestimates costs, and completely overestimates demand. Simply populating mobile phone trasmitters with GPS receivers would allow cell phone service providers, at modest cost to themselves, to sell additional precision to people via their cell phones. If they do not do so, it means that the demand simply is not there.
this whole system is a gigantic subsidy to European domestic production, since, for the points stated above, I do not see Asian electronic producers fall over themselves in trying to produce receivers for a third comer whose domestic market will be dominated by goverment demand (military mostly), and apportioned to domestic producers accordingly.
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I've been using computers in business for 20 years now, and I was what is commonly defined a "power user"
Why am I using the past here? because, for the first time since I started 20 years back, I see absolutely no use changing to a new machine. I use Excel. I use Access.there are some other apps that work well on XP. my machine is 3 years old, in the prime of an optimized and no nonsense life. I do not play big computer games at work. THAT's the real problem with Vista. Users have to change/upgrade machine to use Vista. what for?
I think that business users might go to Linux, but what they'd really want would be to stay as they are for years to come.
Apart from that, PGP-encrypted content is like an apple....leave it in the open too long and it rots away. no self-respectin' geek would use anything else than One time pads
a small acceleration in the direction of the Sun---8 x 10-8 cm/sec2 for Pioneer 10---remains unaccounted for.
It goes withour saying that since gravity is a proportional to mass, either the sun got fatter, or some fat dude is hiding behind it without us knowing it, so.....break out the tinfoil hats!!!!
Besides, my Chateau Laffite wine ages marvelously in that environment.....
Whilst my job is not in IT, I can sympatize with the GM...unless he rather engineered it that way, like I did.
If you do not angle for the top post (because you like the technicality of your job, because the current management of the company you work for puts Dilbert to shame etc) being number 2 is the best place. You actually spend most of the time doing the job you like; you spend less time in unnerving meetings that vacillate between the obvious and the counterproductive, and more solving problems, especially if no 1 spends his time either in meetings or in his office!!!
That's all well when you buy ASSETS ( a refinery, plants etc.), in Yahoo's case, MS is buying two things:
1. the combination of Intellectual Property / engineering personnel / computing power;
2. Market share / mindshare
MS has too much of point 1. if anything, the use of opensource in Yahoo is a major embarassment: "do we switch to MS software risking a major goof if anything goes sour, or stay with freeBSD and get laughed at?"
point 2. is much more tricky. part of the appeal of Yahoo is that it's not MSN, and works better; who will "buy" the other? if a Yahoo user wanted to use MSN, why wait for a takeover? Also, the other way around (spinning off the search + ad selling as a standalone company) is precluded to a company for whom "monolith" spell G-O-D, and that risks getting pressure (again!!) about spinning off software from operating system.
I think this may be a major spoiling attack on the part of MS. It explains away why MS keeps its cash inhouse instead of distributing it to shareholders: it just might need it for a major takeover. As any big organization knows, shareholders are best when they are unheard of.
Frankly, having been an investment professional for 20 years, I do not see the difference between what I said and what you said. IMHO, if that had been true as a major driver MS would have bought out IBM's share in OS2 years back.
... that Microsoft's business acumen in providing a better product over the years has overflowed into their Corporate Finance department.....
Jokes apart, there is a possible explanation which implies no wickedness on the part of MS: MS investments in his search engine + ad seller has been less effective than Yahoo's. MS would never be allowed to bid for Google, so it must settle for second best, which is not a bad place to be if you are much lower in the totem pole.
Given the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket the cash pile burning a hole in MS pocket, the pressure to put the money to work somewhere, or return it to shareholders, is enormous, and they cannot or would not invest it in making a better product overall.
....how about "Tinfoil one" ?
" They're not offering Mac OS X either. Nor AmigaOS, BSD, Gnu/HURD, Irix, Solaris, VMS, MS-DOS, Plan9, BeOS... "
......Mmmmmmm, let's see. "User", by definition, is not one that meddles into how the thingy works. I do not see many cars with the bonnets up, and their happy owners using up the last of their wrenches.
BUT, maybe, just maybe, a small percentage of the users will want to see how it all works, and start trying to change the program, a bit here, a bit there...and voilà, as a country, you are the happy owner of at least a hundred linux programmers!
So, the moral is... you have a home grown software industry. No windows user grows into a windows programmer unless he's able to access MORE programs, probably formal training. And anyway, the thing that can scare Brazil off the most is that MS quashed competitors in the US, , so there's no point in trying to establish a MS centric software industry.
[...]And I'd further venture that the "..get them fixed.." idea has occured to MS but that this isn't easy to do due to poor design."
Poor design, or deliberate choice? really, Life is easy in Windowsdome as long as the MS world is tightly integrated. You cannot put openoffice vs. Office, mozilla vs IE, windows 2000 vs. knoppix. It is a "take the whole bunch or leave it " approach.
Be advised that this is no slur to what MS has done over the years. I Have been a big fan of Excel.....4. Let 's face it , it would be a big problem for MS if an application of theirs worked perfectly and wasn't "tightly integrated in the operating system". excel was a hit in apple world. Imagine if something like this happened today with linux, and it worked better on linux than on windows. There are two problems in MS world now: problem one, there is no "killer app" on the horizon for the personal computer. problem two, there is no turning back from the integrated approach, because it would mean that they lied to the court system in the antitrust case. So, when firefox crashes, you restart firefox; when IE crashes.... I hope you saved that end of term paper you were working on, boy.
"[...]Or perhaps they were just given their knowledge from another race?"
...It has already been done, time and again, here on mother earth.
First, the greek-latin culture founded the basis for the modern science; after that, the arabs copied and expanded modern science as we know it,, whilst western europe wallowed in the middle ages. after some time, the pendulum swung.
The problem is, no civilization can "teach" another one scientific progress. If a culture is interested, it will try and learn whatever others have learnt, PLUS it will eventually add some original content of its own. On the other hand, a civilization that does not want to learn most probably won't.
I always recall the story about the crab nebula. it contains a pulsar, the rotating remains of a supernova, and progressively the rotation is slowing down. it one of the basis of the discovery that you can date novas by timing the rotation of the pulsar remains. We were able to ascertain that, because we know the exact date of the explosion. records say that it could be seen clearly even by day, for days on end. Point is , these records are chinese . no records are available from western europe or arab sources.
"I think there may be a market here. Say, for example, that the next generation of Unreal or Doom engine is designed around something like this. The SOFTWARE vendor could potentially, assuming they could get the cost down far enough, offer some sort of PCI or even better USB2/FW hardware accelerator bundled WITH the game."
..as a useful aside, I am buying a new rig for myself and since the specs involve some "advance work" in Pacific Fighters, it isn't what I consider cheap.
At the same time, my father's computer quit on him. He uses it for the "ordinary " things, like mail, web browsing, office work, etc. The machine he needs costs less than half of mine.
My conclusion is, the more the difference between a simple rig and an advance one is add-on cards, the happier I am. I'd love to have the same basic computer for my father, son and me, with differences only in processor specs, graphic card etc. , but it is not so simple, because either you overpay for the basic rig (in a relative sense, since you are trying to buy quality components with a longer useful life) or continue with different types of computer in the house.
....It might be much worse than that: if you can touch, it is an open source in which clients get to pay to work on what they bought, so they can pay anew.
" i'd love to see the GSM (as in, a telephone) integrated with the PDA (as in, basic simple office work, e-mail synced, WiFi/UMTS) with a multimedia player (preferably also Vorbis-compatible). I want 1 device which is small enough but also gives me the features i want to have without using a beast such as a laptop and without having 1 device like e.g. the GSM which can phone (what i actually want), SMS (expensive!), play retro games (boring!) without the features i also would like to have."
I think that, while what you say is valid, form factor is a big issue here. I just went for a motorola mpx 200 smartphone, just because I wanted a compact pda/phone file repository without photocamera.
It does have media player installed, but the screen real estate is so small that I do not see myself using its multimedia features anytime soon.
AFAIK, the consumer market is going after the blackberry/ Ipaq/ Ipod form factor, which is in my view rather unwieldy as a phone. It all depends on prevailing use, i.e. mail and multimedia or voice.
"...these are the guys (and gals) who will innocently base their entire core stratum of MS-Office macros around one obscure .NET feature and one obscure OLE2 feature and one obscure MicrosoftFeatureOfTheSeason that makes their stuff difficult to impossible to port off."
My point exactly. "Feature bloat" is a common enemy.
BUT, let me relate my personal experience.
This is a sort of a coming out for me because, I have to confess, i have been a Microsoft fan once. I was a User of Lotus 1-2-3, and when, with my brand new, shining new rig , a fabulous IBM 286, came with Excel installed, I was hoooked!
When excel 4 came out, I practically slept with the Function reference book (!) Macro recording, and editing, was a breeze; functions were simple. AND IT ALL STAYED ON 4 FLOPPIES. AAH, love.
Enter VBA, and it all goes sour. Why a user, however advanced, should learn a programming language?
It all was downhill from here. It took me, and all of us, years, but now our ditty bag is more or less how we want it.
And let us not despair for those people: they have the crashes, they seek a better today, and oh so slowly, they are realizing that they can have it. They will come.
"They held a conference recently on MS-Office technologies and said outright that their aim was to get as many developers as possible trapped into basing stuff on MS-Office so that it would become effectively impossible for them to change out."
Neat. But the problem for them is, only developers and a narrow subset of power users can be in a way "forced" to use Their office.
I am not an IT pro, so for me "power user" means "anybody that is able to use VLOOKUP()", especially if the lookup table is not ordered. For all others, Openoffice is a very strong alternative, the more so because it is free and it is multiplatform. To the vast majority of users, Word is a typewriter, Excel is a widget that does sums and what-if's, and Access does not exists. Outlook is a funny mail program. In my view, File formats are the big clincher in MS dominance.
Provided you accept that the low end user is not a factor here, let us move upscale. People who want to send files from within the application, do mail merge in word. They record and modify macros in Excel. These are the people you are talking about, the common clay of Microsoft Land. They are prepared to withstand all of the windows problems in return for these feature set.
Onward from there, there are the Loonies (me included). People irked to the core by the blue screens of death, by the inconsistent performance, by the "design dirtiness", the fact that it could and should all be simpler than this. People that cook their own lunch, therefore they want to know the quality of the ingredients. These people are migrating away from Microsoft, and that elicits no parting tears from Redmond; personal guess, we originate most of the "nasty" help desk calls, so there is no love lost. It is a quiet and amicable divorce.
So where do things get ugly? they get ugly when a friend or relative calls, because "his computer is acting funny". What do you keep in your ditty bag? C'mon, 'fess up: knoppix, thunderbird, Firefox, openoffice, Sygate personal firewall or variation thereof. You go there, perform the rain dance, and presto!, another person knows that no, it is not a given that computer users should reboot every day. God forbid, this born again user could spill it out at WORK. Maybe install firefox on the sly.
Frankly, going on like that, you do not know where it ends.
As an aside, I AM a windows user, and so is the family. My son is 11, going on 12, and were it not for the fact that he's fond of computer games (and where oh where did he take that from?;-)), i'd build him a linux box with open office double quick; he'd learn all he would need about office application, much more than an average user about computer security (root/user, etc) without all the hassle of mantaining a windows installation.
But you know, until there is Pacific Fighter for linux.... we'll have to go on like this.
"MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers. "
How very true. in IBM's case, it continued on and off for years,like a bear hounded by a pack of dogs, until market realities, and Microsoft, reached them.
Think about this: the original IBM pc used Ms DOS. Do you all see MS saying: "we see Office as our core product"?
Sadly, I don't. Their core asset is the operating system, and to keep us all on the merry go round they have to change frequently, not for efficiency's sake, but to keep one step in front of GPL'd software.
my personal opinion is that the US lost a major opportunity when it did not order MS breakup into operating system and everything else.
The company I work for has such a policy. Beside proliferating bad habits (writing down passwords, "trading" passwords between colleagues, etc), it is in a way nonsensical. Why not leave it at "passwords must be over 10 and under 255 characters"? that way, easily remembered phrases can replace unwieldy 8 chars things.
Sorry, I forgot an aspect that might interest you: since most online sims support online audio comms, hardcore simmers simply place a dot on their headset's microphone. I think that it could be possible to rig something like that, and your father could use it for remote comms .
He could also use Smartnav , or since it is practically the same thing at half the price, Trackir.
Provided you set it up properly, the only operator training needed would be for someone to put a ball cap with the reflective dot on your father's head. Lots of people use it for flight sims, especially the IL-2 series .
Since they use as a Situation awareness aid, they all know how to set it up.
"Now, here are the facts as they're found by SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES:[...]
... That's a bold statement to do.
When a Company gets as big AND as dominant as Microsoft, there's no way of validating the indipendence of research anymore. Now, that's not like saying that the Borg entity bought off all studies, but no, I cannot accept the indipendence claim.
One fact nags me, tough. The worst mob to please should evidently be Indipendent internet service providers: they are more competent than the general public, they're in it for the money and not the mojo... a host of factor. So, how come that Apache server has triple the Market share of Microsoft?
"It did work, but several methods have been found to reduce the effect SA had to the point where it was no longer relevant."
:
It's called "differential tracking". A GPS receiver is sited as near as possible to the target, and it is linked to a RF transmitter by which it broadcasts its GPS reported position. The receiving system, knowing the exact location of the fixed receiver, cues the guidance system with the offset data. It's perfect, It's simple, It works.
Given this data, it should be rather evident that
1.There is really no need for a third (russian glonass is operational) system for precise 3d location, either civvy or military;
2. The US military cannot, even by turning off completely the GPS system, avoid homeland menace. Any sucker could have gone on top of the twin towers with a homing beacon;
The European system underestimates costs, and completely overestimates demand. Simply populating mobile phone trasmitters with GPS receivers would allow cell phone service providers, at modest cost to themselves, to sell additional precision to people via their cell phones. If they do not do so, it means that the demand simply is not there.
this whole system is a gigantic subsidy to European domestic production, since, for the points stated above, I do not see Asian electronic producers fall over themselves in trying to produce receivers for a third comer whose domestic market will be dominated by goverment demand (military mostly), and apportioned to domestic producers accordingly.
Let's sue it for damages!
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