The sales guys at those places are rarely picked for technical knowledge, just their willingness to upsell anything, and try to get people excited about their products.
Case in point: I was looking at some Sony ultra-mini laptop with a ULV Intel chip in it, and I had one of the salesguys come up to me and try to tell me it has a Pentium 4 in it. And this is well after the Intel Core series was being shipped in volume.
I tell my family to not trust anything they say... they're trying to make a sale. The only way to get a good product is to do the research yourself, or talk to someone you actually trust.
It means that people running computationally intensive tasks on their machine better stick with XP or switch to Linux instead of considering Windows 7, because a 22% speed increase is a day of processing time if you have a job that runs for a week. For the general desktop user, it'll probably be fast enough, but you better not have older hardware you want to get things actually done with.
Because the memory commonly available isn't usually as fast as the memory that's on those cards, and is often in a different "flavor" to allow faster graphics-style access over standard memory?
There's a reason there's GDDR3 and DDR3 as different specs, not to mention that there's GDDR5 out on ATI 4870 cards right now, and you can still barely buy standard DDR3 DIMM's.
It's not truly "more reason to keep it locked in the vault". Torrents exist. Denying that they don't provide a better product for consumers is just stupid, and trying to keep content locked up only drives MORE people to torrents. It's really just basic economics. People aren't stupid... they want the product that gives them the most benefit for the best price and least amount of work. As it stands, you get a better product for putting in a little bit of work to figure out how to use bittorrent and find the seedy corners of the 'net where those torrents reside.
The ONLY choice that movie studios have is to put out a BETTER product than "pirates" provide. Give people a reason to go the official route, to pay for things. Once data is created, it's infinitely duplicable. What you need to sell are the scarce goods... sell a ticket to a movie, and sell a pricier one to the same movie that also gives you a password to download the movie at home. Say, $5 for a "normal" ticket, $15 for an "enhanced" one. Sell a $100 ticket that gets you a signed copy of the movie from the lead actor. Seats in a movie theater, access to the stars and so on are scarce goods, versus the actual data of the finished movie. You have to make money off of the scarce goods, because there's no way to control the infinite ones.
People can sell oxygen, which is an essentially infinite good... movie studios and the recording industry just need to start actually working for their money again. They're no longer the sole gatekeepers to entertainment that they were, no matter how many laws they buy and how hard they wish it wasn't so.
Guess what? I'll bet your microwave uses 1000-1200 watts, too. A watt is a per-time measure, so remember that a lot of power in a short period of time can a lot of times be less power overall than a little power constantly. An Xbox 360 on standby uses 2 watts, and up to 165 while playing a game. A Wii uses 8 on standby, but only 20 max. A marginally used game console (say, 3 times a week) will almost certainly use more power total over a year than your coffee maker will.
"obsolete" is a relative term, too. Some people who buy these realize that brand-new games might need some settings turned down, but they're still playable. Not everyone needs to run Crysis at 2560x1980 or whatever the hell it is as soon as it comes out. Two 9800's in SLI are pretty damn quick, and they'll still be pretty quick in 3 or 4 years, when laptops normally start dying. Game manufacturers make sure that people with older hardware can play their games because very, very few people actually buy new, top-of-the-line hardware to play ANY games.
Managers understand that it takes time and money to hire someone new... if there's already someone there, and the position is justified and working well, why change things?
The trick is making sure the position is justified, as the original poster is trying to do.
It'll keep being that way as long as economics lessons are from the 80's... I see a couple flickering lights of people realizing that it's better to build a strong business, but for every one of those, there are twenty that would rather make a dollar today instead of $10 tomorrow.
True, it's very easy to find IT people. The problem is that it is very hard to find GOOD IT people. Most companies I've been had, even small ones, have gone through more than a few IT people before finding someone that wasn't blisteringly incompetent (like the guy who kept a list of user names and passwords for everyone, the guy who couldn't keep Exchange running, used a "universal" username/password for very sensitive data so everyone could have access...)
Competent computer guys aren't nearly as common as your post would indicate, and if you have a good one, it's well worth keeping him around. Limping along with an MCSE-bearing Nick Burns monkey is possible, but it won't let IT get out of the way and keep working to let business get on with doing business.
The position is vital. The person is not. That's enough justification for what the original poster asked... how do you justify the existence of IT. Not "How do I justify me as being the only person capable of providing IT services?"
There are irreplaceable positions, though. You can't do without AN IT guy is the point, not that he has to be THE IT guy. Big difference... IT as a position is necessary. This guy is trying to justify his position, not the fact that he is the one that does it.
If he insists on using IE, run Windows in a virtual machine with snapshots under Linux. Anything not 3D will run fine, and you'll be able to undo crapware installs in Windows very easily.
And honestly? I'd just block all of disney.com. They've proven through their legislation sponsoring and quadruple-charging0 that they view you as nothing more than a bag of money.
BTW, I just checked out Disney.com... most of their flash games and stuff seem to run fine under Linux, and I'm running 64bit Ubuntu with Flash9 in nspluginwrapper. No reason you can't use straight Linux.
Any site that requires javascript for navigation is broken.
How's 1995 treating you? Animated GIF's still everywhere?
I have no problem with a sitemap, something more compatible with screen readers, but seriously... JavaScript exists, and is quite good at making websites and web apps interactive. That's what it's for. Denying reality is pointless, and even though you claim that any site that requires Javascript as broken, that doesn't make it so. Google Maps, gmail, many other sites that are very useful all require JavaScript, for a very good reason.
Might be time to start running your machine as a non-admin user. I'd be willing to bet that's what the difference between your Dad's Vista PC and yours is.
Since Linus was more concerned with making his code work on an x86 machine than monetizing it, that must mean that Linux is a much lower quality OS, and therefore corporations stay away from it in droves because of it's incapability... oh, wait... no.
You don't understand the engineering mindset. The drive is not for money... it's to create something that works elegantly, something that's clever, something that fills a need. It's not for personal gain, other than perhaps accolades from other people saying "that's cool, man!".
The best engineers aren't concerned with selling their inventions, they're concerned with making them. See Da Vinci, Bernoulli, etc.
Welcome to the state of a lot of hardware. Winmodems and so on, where the CPU and driver makes up for the lack of hardware. It's cheaper (for the manufacturer) to make hardware with less in it and use software to make up the difference in functionality, even if it does end up using CPU cycles and screwing up the experience for the end user. That's why you can get a sound card very cheaply, but a good sound card costs a fair bit.
Hell, an obscure text file is easier to walk someone through editing than the registry is, and a LOT lower chance of completely hosing the entire system while you're at it.
You seem to not realize that you're comfortable with Windows and the dumbness that goes into administrating it (do you even think twice about downloading and installing drivers on a brand new PC, and uninstalling shitware?). When it's different, you all of a sudden think that this makes the new software somehow "unsuitable" for the general user. That is patently false... the people who have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who consider themselves "power users" of Windows.
Because we're engineers and just want to get things done. Everyone else is much more worried about how to make money off of our work, and how to lock it up so that no one else can use it.
There are those of us who actively dislike the shitware that is installed with 90% of drivers, and the fact that those drivers are complete crap half of the time and need updated from the web to just work anyway.
It's nice moving away from Windows... you don't need to keep those archives of crap. I always have the latest version of everything, and have access to the source if nothing else, and the number of copies of it around the world makes it very unlikely that it'll ever go away, and I can use the 330GB of space for something better than useless ancient install discs.
There have always been the lazy, and the 1337. When you get more people in a field, you get a lot more doofuses. Doesn't matter the field.
I mean, I'm no greybeard (only 28... feels like I should apply for medicare next year, though), but I know how to use mount/fsck/grep/xargs/awk/sed/find/cat, all that fun stuff. But I still LIKE having my USB music player pop up as an icon on the desktop.
The fact is that as Linux becomes more accessible, there will be a lot of Linux "experts" that only know a few tools, and can't use it as competently as a true hacker type would. The more people that use Linux, the more true that is, even among those than fancy themselves "admins".
It may remind you of using emacs, but I'm not aware of any other ways to keep an interactive session running in the background other than screen. I like being able to run any console program (hello rtorrent!) from a re-connectable interface that is resistant to connection hiccups.
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The sales guys at those places are rarely picked for technical knowledge, just their willingness to upsell anything, and try to get people excited about their products.
Case in point: I was looking at some Sony ultra-mini laptop with a ULV Intel chip in it, and I had one of the salesguys come up to me and try to tell me it has a Pentium 4 in it. And this is well after the Intel Core series was being shipped in volume.
I tell my family to not trust anything they say... they're trying to make a sale. The only way to get a good product is to do the research yourself, or talk to someone you actually trust.
It means that people running computationally intensive tasks on their machine better stick with XP or switch to Linux instead of considering Windows 7, because a 22% speed increase is a day of processing time if you have a job that runs for a week. For the general desktop user, it'll probably be fast enough, but you better not have older hardware you want to get things actually done with.
Because the memory commonly available isn't usually as fast as the memory that's on those cards, and is often in a different "flavor" to allow faster graphics-style access over standard memory?
There's a reason there's GDDR3 and DDR3 as different specs, not to mention that there's GDDR5 out on ATI 4870 cards right now, and you can still barely buy standard DDR3 DIMM's.
It's not truly "more reason to keep it locked in the vault". Torrents exist. Denying that they don't provide a better product for consumers is just stupid, and trying to keep content locked up only drives MORE people to torrents. It's really just basic economics. People aren't stupid... they want the product that gives them the most benefit for the best price and least amount of work. As it stands, you get a better product for putting in a little bit of work to figure out how to use bittorrent and find the seedy corners of the 'net where those torrents reside.
The ONLY choice that movie studios have is to put out a BETTER product than "pirates" provide. Give people a reason to go the official route, to pay for things. Once data is created, it's infinitely duplicable. What you need to sell are the scarce goods... sell a ticket to a movie, and sell a pricier one to the same movie that also gives you a password to download the movie at home. Say, $5 for a "normal" ticket, $15 for an "enhanced" one. Sell a $100 ticket that gets you a signed copy of the movie from the lead actor. Seats in a movie theater, access to the stars and so on are scarce goods, versus the actual data of the finished movie. You have to make money off of the scarce goods, because there's no way to control the infinite ones.
People can sell oxygen, which is an essentially infinite good... movie studios and the recording industry just need to start actually working for their money again. They're no longer the sole gatekeepers to entertainment that they were, no matter how many laws they buy and how hard they wish it wasn't so.
*gasp*
Guess what? I'll bet your microwave uses 1000-1200 watts, too. A watt is a per-time measure, so remember that a lot of power in a short period of time can a lot of times be less power overall than a little power constantly. An Xbox 360 on standby uses 2 watts, and up to 165 while playing a game. A Wii uses 8 on standby, but only 20 max. A marginally used game console (say, 3 times a week) will almost certainly use more power total over a year than your coffee maker will.
"obsolete" is a relative term, too. Some people who buy these realize that brand-new games might need some settings turned down, but they're still playable. Not everyone needs to run Crysis at 2560x1980 or whatever the hell it is as soon as it comes out. Two 9800's in SLI are pretty damn quick, and they'll still be pretty quick in 3 or 4 years, when laptops normally start dying. Game manufacturers make sure that people with older hardware can play their games because very, very few people actually buy new, top-of-the-line hardware to play ANY games.
Managers understand that it takes time and money to hire someone new... if there's already someone there, and the position is justified and working well, why change things?
The trick is making sure the position is justified, as the original poster is trying to do.
It'll keep being that way as long as economics lessons are from the 80's... I see a couple flickering lights of people realizing that it's better to build a strong business, but for every one of those, there are twenty that would rather make a dollar today instead of $10 tomorrow.
True, it's very easy to find IT people. The problem is that it is very hard to find GOOD IT people. Most companies I've been had, even small ones, have gone through more than a few IT people before finding someone that wasn't blisteringly incompetent (like the guy who kept a list of user names and passwords for everyone, the guy who couldn't keep Exchange running, used a "universal" username/password for very sensitive data so everyone could have access...)
Competent computer guys aren't nearly as common as your post would indicate, and if you have a good one, it's well worth keeping him around. Limping along with an MCSE-bearing Nick Burns monkey is possible, but it won't let IT get out of the way and keep working to let business get on with doing business.
The position is vital. The person is not. That's enough justification for what the original poster asked... how do you justify the existence of IT. Not "How do I justify me as being the only person capable of providing IT services?"
There are irreplaceable positions, though. You can't do without AN IT guy is the point, not that he has to be THE IT guy. Big difference... IT as a position is necessary. This guy is trying to justify his position, not the fact that he is the one that does it.
I download goat pr0n and warez just to watch it throw up all over itself when run under Wine. The message logs are amusing ;)
If he insists on using IE, run Windows in a virtual machine with snapshots under Linux. Anything not 3D will run fine, and you'll be able to undo crapware installs in Windows very easily.
And honestly? I'd just block all of disney.com. They've proven through their legislation sponsoring and quadruple-charging0 that they view you as nothing more than a bag of money.
BTW, I just checked out Disney.com... most of their flash games and stuff seem to run fine under Linux, and I'm running 64bit Ubuntu with Flash9 in nspluginwrapper. No reason you can't use straight Linux.
How's 1995 treating you? Animated GIF's still everywhere?
I have no problem with a sitemap, something more compatible with screen readers, but seriously... JavaScript exists, and is quite good at making websites and web apps interactive. That's what it's for. Denying reality is pointless, and even though you claim that any site that requires Javascript as broken, that doesn't make it so. Google Maps, gmail, many other sites that are very useful all require JavaScript, for a very good reason.
Might be time to start running your machine as a non-admin user. I'd be willing to bet that's what the difference between your Dad's Vista PC and yours is.
Since Linus was more concerned with making his code work on an x86 machine than monetizing it, that must mean that Linux is a much lower quality OS, and therefore corporations stay away from it in droves because of it's incapability... oh, wait... no.
You don't understand the engineering mindset. The drive is not for money... it's to create something that works elegantly, something that's clever, something that fills a need. It's not for personal gain, other than perhaps accolades from other people saying "that's cool, man!".
The best engineers aren't concerned with selling their inventions, they're concerned with making them. See Da Vinci, Bernoulli, etc.
Welcome to the state of a lot of hardware. Winmodems and so on, where the CPU and driver makes up for the lack of hardware. It's cheaper (for the manufacturer) to make hardware with less in it and use software to make up the difference in functionality, even if it does end up using CPU cycles and screwing up the experience for the end user. That's why you can get a sound card very cheaply, but a good sound card costs a fair bit.
So antivirus software, even Microsoft Office itself, is not even close to ready for (l)users by your metric. Hell, fixing the registry should apparently be part of normal system maintenance.
Hell, an obscure text file is easier to walk someone through editing than the registry is, and a LOT lower chance of completely hosing the entire system while you're at it.
You seem to not realize that you're comfortable with Windows and the dumbness that goes into administrating it (do you even think twice about downloading and installing drivers on a brand new PC, and uninstalling shitware?). When it's different, you all of a sudden think that this makes the new software somehow "unsuitable" for the general user. That is patently false... the people who have the hardest time switching to Linux are those who consider themselves "power users" of Windows.
Because we're engineers and just want to get things done. Everyone else is much more worried about how to make money off of our work, and how to lock it up so that no one else can use it.
If the law isn't comprehensible by the people governed by it, is it really a just law?
The treble was punnier when you didn't explain it
The main problem is that half of the benchmarks they're running are server-style benchmarks, and they're using a desktop-optimized kernel.
Phoronix should install the ubuntu-server kernel and see what changes happen when they're running server-style loads.
There are those of us who actively dislike the shitware that is installed with 90% of drivers, and the fact that those drivers are complete crap half of the time and need updated from the web to just work anyway.
It's nice moving away from Windows... you don't need to keep those archives of crap. I always have the latest version of everything, and have access to the source if nothing else, and the number of copies of it around the world makes it very unlikely that it'll ever go away, and I can use the 330GB of space for something better than useless ancient install discs.
There have always been the lazy, and the 1337. When you get more people in a field, you get a lot more doofuses. Doesn't matter the field.
I mean, I'm no greybeard (only 28... feels like I should apply for medicare next year, though), but I know how to use mount/fsck/grep/xargs/awk/sed/find/cat, all that fun stuff. But I still LIKE having my USB music player pop up as an icon on the desktop.
The fact is that as Linux becomes more accessible, there will be a lot of Linux "experts" that only know a few tools, and can't use it as competently as a true hacker type would. The more people that use Linux, the more true that is, even among those than fancy themselves "admins".
It may remind you of using emacs, but I'm not aware of any other ways to keep an interactive session running in the background other than screen. I like being able to run any console program (hello rtorrent!) from a re-connectable interface that is resistant to connection hiccups.