Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.
The real world uses Linux and other Unix variants. While Windows may be fine for print servers and other non-critical business functions, no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked.
If you change the CPU, you must open your case and manipulate the hardware anyway. Changing a jumper to allow BIOS update wouldn't be a big deal in that case.
In case you didn't notice, the post I was replying to was suggesting that you make the BIOS bug-free and not upgradeable at all rather than making the BIOS upgrade more complex.
Another solution is to make sure your BIOS is bug free when you ship. That involves paying your coders slightly more than minimum Chinese wage.
Which is great until a new CPU is released and you don't support it and can't upgrade the BIOS to do so. I've seen a number of AMD users complaining because they'd been told that if they bought an AMD motherboard today they would still be able to use it for future generations of AMD CPUs, only to find that the motherboard manufacturer couldn't be bothered to issue a new BIOS two years later to support the new chips even though the hardware would work with them.
Nota bene, my point is that Apollo was good pork in 1969. If there were private contractors designing heavy-lift vehicles in the late 60s, or Mars rovers today, I guess you'd have point.
No-one was building heavy-lift rockets because they make no financial sense. One of the biggest contributors to launch cost is flight rate, and with similar technology levels a smaller rocket which flies a hundred times a year will almost always end up costing much less per pound in orbit than a huge monster than flies once a year; there are a lot of payloads for a $50 million ten-ton launcher but tthe 100+ ton payloads that can afford to pay a couple of billion dollars a time just don't exist outside of NASA and the military.
No-one would have adopted the heavy-lift approach for Apollo if not for the unlimited budget and the demand to get to the Moon by the end of the decade. It was too expensive and a technological dead-end because you could only take whatever would fit on a single launch.
The only real reason a computer needs a BIOS is to run a bootloader, and if that functionality works, then it's probably going to continue to work.
You're obviously nostalgic for the days when software was debugged as thoroughly as possible before shipping because it couldn't be upgraded later, rather than released with known major bugs because 'we can always fix it with a flash upgrade'.
Actually it was a para-sail that popped out after the parachutes slowed it down enough. They have one in the Smithsonian.
Nope. It was pop-out wings from the service module.
Ah, here we are: I thought it was on NTRS, but it's actually US patent 3,576,298
"An aerospace vehicle is described comprising a substantially conical forward crew compartment or command module mated to a substantially cylindrical rearward service module. Aerodynamic fairings are provided along the midline on the sides of the cylindrical portion and a substantial distance aft thereof for providing lift at hypersonic velocities and approximately vertical fins are provided on the fairings for aerodynamic stability and control. Wings are mounted within the aerodynamic fairings at high velocities and pivotably extended therefrom at lower velocities and altitudes to provide low speed lift." (etc)
Admittedly, pork that puts you on the moon is still pretty good pork.
If this thing ever goes to the Moon they'll find tourists waving at them at the landing site, having flown there for a fraction of the cost using a Falcon 9 Heavy.
Pedantically speaking, there was a design study for putting wings on the Apollo CSM so the Apollo crew could fly back to land rather than crashing into the sea. Though trying to land it with the limited view out of the CSM windows would have been entertaining.
Microsoft don't support it in desktop windows and probably can't because of crappy old drivers that fall over if it's enabled. And it's a horrible kludge anyway.
Of course the push for ARM will further delay the appearance of 64-bit Windows programs because developers won't want to be developing for 64-bit Windows and then find it falls over when they recompile for 32-bit ARM because someone did something stupid.
It's not the privatized health care that would be the problem (in this case) but rather the privatized medical research companies.
No, it's the regulations that massively increase the cost of drugs.
Health care companies would prefer a cure, that way they get to keep the money that you keep paying them rather than give it to someone else.
As I understand it, the health insurance companies like big payouts, because it increases their income and hence their profits. For example, if they were collecting $100 and spending $50 then they'd face a backlash from the government, but by collecting $1000 and spending $950 they get the same amount of profit but can claim their margins are very tight. Or, when the stock market is actually going up, they can invest that $1000 until they have to pay it out and make ten times as much as they would investing $100.
BTW NASA's Orion MPCV capsules are designed for water landing.
If I remember correctly, they were flip-flopping between land and water landings throughout the development, and the water landing would have been restricted to a few sites which didn't require maintaining a big fleet of ships to pick up the crew. This wouldn't have been an Apollo mission with recovery ships positioned around the globe ready to collect them from wherever they landed.
Aircraft landing is really tough. Many pilots who train for it never get the hang of it.
If I remember correctly, many of the RAF pilots in the Falklands war made their first carrier landings in the war zone with no prior practice at all.
Oh, you mean conventional aircraft which have to crash onto the deck at precisely the right position so that a big piece of cable can pull them to a stop? Yeah, that's probably true, but it's a heck of a lot harder than landing something that can hover and just has to shut down the engines when the landing gear touches.
Metro is an alternative to the desktop interface, it doesn't replace it.
When the OS boots up into a crappy phone interface which only gives you the option to switch to the desktop interface, and when the desktop start menu apparently switches you back to the crappy phone interface, that's a pretty damn good sign that Microsoft are abandoning the desktop.
The advantage of being able to land on a boat is being able to land almost everywhere on the sea
So long as there's a boat there.
which is quite large.
But boats are quite small.
This gives a lot of flexibility when planing trajectories.
It means you can only land where there's a boat. I don't really call that 'a lot of flexibility'.
NASA tried the landing on the water thing and I believe that their new capsules are designed to land on land because having to have boats near the landing site turned out to be extremely expensive and complex.
Cause you're an average user who doesn't know crap about computers?
Then why would you want to run Windows? I'm constantly having people ask me how to do things in Windows, from installing antivirus software to dealing with yet another malware infestation, and I'm so glad I can now say 'I don't know, I don't use it anymore'.
You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
Except treason is actually a crime and from what we've discovered since the USSR collapsed, McCarthy appears to have underestimated the number of Soviet agents in America.
He may have been a loon, but his biggest problem appears to have been that he wasn't paranoid enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work, but the real world still uses Windows Server a lot.
The real world uses Linux and other Unix variants. While Windows may be fine for print servers and other non-critical business functions, no-one in ther right mind puts a Windows server up on the Internet where it can be attacked.
If you change the CPU, you must open your case and manipulate the hardware anyway. Changing a jumper to allow BIOS update wouldn't be a big deal in that case.
In case you didn't notice, the post I was replying to was suggesting that you make the BIOS bug-free and not upgradeable at all rather than making the BIOS upgrade more complex.
Another solution is to make sure your BIOS is bug free when you ship. That involves paying your coders slightly more than minimum Chinese wage.
Which is great until a new CPU is released and you don't support it and can't upgrade the BIOS to do so. I've seen a number of AMD users complaining because they'd been told that if they bought an AMD motherboard today they would still be able to use it for future generations of AMD CPUs, only to find that the motherboard manufacturer couldn't be bothered to issue a new BIOS two years later to support the new chips even though the hardware would work with them.
Nota bene, my point is that Apollo was good pork in 1969. If there were private contractors designing heavy-lift vehicles in the late 60s, or Mars rovers today, I guess you'd have point.
No-one was building heavy-lift rockets because they make no financial sense. One of the biggest contributors to launch cost is flight rate, and with similar technology levels a smaller rocket which flies a hundred times a year will almost always end up costing much less per pound in orbit than a huge monster than flies once a year; there are a lot of payloads for a $50 million ten-ton launcher but tthe 100+ ton payloads that can afford to pay a couple of billion dollars a time just don't exist outside of NASA and the military.
No-one would have adopted the heavy-lift approach for Apollo if not for the unlimited budget and the demand to get to the Moon by the end of the decade. It was too expensive and a technological dead-end because you could only take whatever would fit on a single launch.
The only real reason a computer needs a BIOS is to run a bootloader, and if that functionality works, then it's probably going to continue to work.
You're obviously nostalgic for the days when software was debugged as thoroughly as possible before shipping because it couldn't be upgraded later, rather than released with known major bugs because 'we can always fix it with a flash upgrade'.
Actually it was a para-sail that popped out after the parachutes slowed it down enough. They have one in the Smithsonian.
Nope. It was pop-out wings from the service module.
Ah, here we are: I thought it was on NTRS, but it's actually US patent 3,576,298
"An aerospace vehicle is described comprising a substantially conical forward crew compartment or command module mated to a substantially cylindrical rearward service module. Aerodynamic fairings are provided along the midline on the sides of the cylindrical portion and a substantial distance aft thereof for providing lift at hypersonic velocities and approximately vertical fins are provided on the fairings for aerodynamic stability and control. Wings are mounted within the aerodynamic fairings at high velocities and pivotably extended therefrom at lower velocities and altitudes to provide low speed lift." (etc)
Admittedly, pork that puts you on the moon is still pretty good pork.
If this thing ever goes to the Moon they'll find tourists waving at them at the landing site, having flown there for a fraction of the cost using a Falcon 9 Heavy.
Pedantically speaking, there was a design study for putting wings on the Apollo CSM so the Apollo crew could fly back to land rather than crashing into the sea. Though trying to land it with the limited view out of the CSM windows would have been entertaining.
Physical Address Extensions.
Microsoft don't support it in desktop windows and probably can't because of crappy old drivers that fall over if it's enabled. And it's a horrible kludge anyway.
Of course the push for ARM will further delay the appearance of 64-bit Windows programs because developers won't want to be developing for 64-bit Windows and then find it falls over when they recompile for 32-bit ARM because someone did something stupid.
It's not the privatized health care that would be the problem (in this case) but rather the privatized medical research companies.
No, it's the regulations that massively increase the cost of drugs.
Health care companies would prefer a cure, that way they get to keep the money that you keep paying them rather than give it to someone else.
As I understand it, the health insurance companies like big payouts, because it increases their income and hence their profits. For example, if they were collecting $100 and spending $50 then they'd face a backlash from the government, but by collecting $1000 and spending $950 they get the same amount of profit but can claim their margins are very tight. Or, when the stock market is actually going up, they can invest that $1000 until they have to pay it out and make ten times as much as they would investing $100.
FUD back at you again. Most apps DON'T use Metro. Metro is for HTML5 + Ajax crap.
And it's now the preferred interface with the desktop as an 'option'.
My Windows 7 desktop has been up for 125 days and the last reboot was because I hook up a UPS after we had two power outages in a week.
Malware writers must love you.
BTW NASA's Orion MPCV capsules are designed for water landing.
If I remember correctly, they were flip-flopping between land and water landings throughout the development, and the water landing would have been restricted to a few sites which didn't require maintaining a big fleet of ships to pick up the crew. This wouldn't have been an Apollo mission with recovery ships positioned around the globe ready to collect them from wherever they landed.
Aircraft landing is really tough. Many pilots who train for it never get the hang of it.
If I remember correctly, many of the RAF pilots in the Falklands war made their first carrier landings in the war zone with no prior practice at all.
Oh, you mean conventional aircraft which have to crash onto the deck at precisely the right position so that a big piece of cable can pull them to a stop? Yeah, that's probably true, but it's a heck of a lot harder than landing something that can hover and just has to shut down the engines when the landing gear touches.
Metro is an alternative to the desktop interface, it doesn't replace it.
When the OS boots up into a crappy phone interface which only gives you the option to switch to the desktop interface, and when the desktop start menu apparently switches you back to the crappy phone interface, that's a pretty damn good sign that Microsoft are abandoning the desktop.
This feature is probably more useful for removing pre-installed vendor bloat.
Surely this will re-install vendor bloat, the way that the current recovery partition does?
I think the most shocking and relevant reveal of today's release was the inclusion of ARM processing. This is big.
Microsoft can display web pages on ARM! It's amazing! Phenomenal! Who could have predicted that?
The advantage of being able to land on a boat is being able to land almost everywhere on the sea
So long as there's a boat there.
which is quite large.
But boats are quite small.
This gives a lot of flexibility when planing trajectories.
It means you can only land where there's a boat. I don't really call that 'a lot of flexibility'.
NASA tried the landing on the water thing and I believe that their new capsules are designed to land on land because having to have boats near the landing site turned out to be extremely expensive and complex.
because itunes doesn't run on linux
Sure, but that's not a reason to run Windows. There are other operating systems which don't come from Microsoft, and some of them run itunes.
Cause you're an average user who doesn't know crap about computers?
Then why would you want to run Windows? I'm constantly having people ask me how to do things in Windows, from installing antivirus software to dealing with yet another malware infestation, and I'm so glad I can now say 'I don't know, I don't use it anymore'.
From what I've read on that page, only HTML+CSS+Javascript apps will be compatible with both x86 and ARM.
Isn't this what we used to call 'a web page'?
If I may add, I do believe that a monitor with touch is just as dead as a monitor without touch. Correct me if I'm wrong. :>
You just aren't touching it right :).
this is for the 99% of users out there who don't have hundreds of arcane applications on their computers. just the basic ones and a few games.
If you don't have a ton of arcane Windows apps that won't run in Wine, why would you want to run Windows?
'User Interface Designers' are clueless about what users actually want; news at eleven.
You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
Except treason is actually a crime and from what we've discovered since the USSR collapsed, McCarthy appears to have underestimated the number of Soviet agents in America.
He may have been a loon, but his biggest problem appears to have been that he wasn't paranoid enough.