Windows users, if they're like my family, have no problems because I do all the heavy lifting. At most, they have to reboot the machine after a few hundred hours uptime to get a given application running again. They use Office, Limewire, AIM, Winamp, iTunes, etc. If desktop Linux can provide that level of use to ordinary users, fine.
Now in terms of deployment, Windows sucks. Everything has to be hand managed. The patches required to deal with the security problems, spyware, adware is huge problem. And managing all of this to get things running and keep them, is a chore. So again if Linux can fix this or eliminate them then great.
But ordinary users don't want to do the Linux way of installing and futzing with things that sort-of work.
You can lobby for an industry or a group of firms or for the rights of some group of people. I'm not sure you can legally 'lobby' for a unique product, forcing it upon government to buy. I'm reasonably sure that's something like graft or bribery or extortion. Normally speaking government procurement is sent out for bidding, such as cars or equipment. And whoever gets the bid gets to deliver on it. But in terms of lobbying - I'm unconvinced you can represent Ford and then pay out monies to politicians to award contracts for Ford.
Will there ever be an end to all the money, effort and legislation directed at making it more efficient for police to arrest, ticket and fine you? Seems to me we could, at some point, direct some of our resources somewhere else. Why for example is virtually every highway in the US under construction until eternity? Isn't getting that job finished at some point maybe something we should do? Come down to Wake County NC courthouse. Every single day the building is in firecode violation because Wake County hands out 10's of thousands of tickets a week and arrests thousands. Why don't we just call all this what it is - a revenue source.
My TA supports ANY phone to be plugged in, and the AT&T Callvantage VoIP service supports, as long as you're willing to reserve bandwidth for it, Fax/Modem over VoIP. The TA is a small box, smaller than the cable modem, you plug it in, and it does what it does, brainlessly. I can't see how putting any of this function on a PC is a step up.
The image install is meant to make large scale corporate deployments easier. If the image is easy corrupted then MS's corporate customers are exposed and it's not obvious how to protect from it before it happens. If you had a deployment schedule of a few thousand desktops a month and it turns out you're using 10 image servers and one of them has a bad image then that's a real problem.
Let's remember that corporate customers deploy custom images all the time, WHICH IS WHY WE WANT AN IMAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
IE6 for MS update only - Check FF 2.0 - Check Thunderbird - Check Zone Alarm - Check Avast AV - Check Ad-Aware - Check Spybot - Check CCleaner - Check Registry Mechanic - Check ERUNT - Check Winamp - Check
So given that I have XpHomeSP2 + current patches, MS Office 2003 + current patches & I use non MS for everthing else, then why am I worried? When MS makes it a hard requirement to run my current OS then I'll worry.
Mercy me I can't imagine there will be any vulnerabilities at all in this newest highest priced, longest to develop & release version of Microsoft's ratio sum ultra of enterprise operating systems. And even if there are and someone exploits them that would just be unfair and mean. I'm sure I wouldn't want to know about any exploits in this the most critical and hyped version of Microsoft Windows.
Once again, Zune is NOT a product. Zune is a massive testbed for DRM that MS is examining at the behest of the music industry for subsequent inclusion in Vista.
How much quality can you afford to create?
on
Why Do Gadgets Break?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Consumer electronics don't make much money which is why 95% of the PC companies are dead and gone now compared to the early-mid '90's. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple and everyone else. So if you're only making 2-5% on every sale what can you afford in terms of quality. For an extra hundred or two hundred bucks you'd have a hard time convincing a consumer that the engineering life of your product is longer than the economic life of your product which is probably 3 years whether it continues to work or not.
I have a house full of PCs which will probably be the last MS OS code I ever buy. Buy the time it comes to replace the machines, which I'm in no hurry to do, the hardware costs for whatever is MS code current at that time will be too costly for my taste. So I will go with down level machines and run something else like Linux or perhaps just scrap them all and buy cheap mini-Macs. But if I was the kind of person who slavishly followed MS's lead and ran out and bought new machines just to run Vista, I'd find myself in an endless upgrade cycle to keep pace with all of the MS requirements. So it's entirely probable that my 'old' hardware would only have to work for 2 years or so. Given that most hardware lasts for more than two years and the vendor gambles that x% of their market churns their machinery every two years then the value I place on having that hardware last reliably longer than two years is almost zero. I can use cheaper parts, purchased on commodity market with little or no QA or standardization. I can assemble it in the cheapest factory I can find and I will make more money not less even if a large percentage of the product fails between 2 years and some arbitrary date but less than a 'reasonable' period of time.
I addressed this earlier in another post that was flamed when I suggested that MS be assessed a recycling tax for every turn of the OS version crank based on ever increasing hardware requirements that drive needless hardware sales. If they want to sell more software then they need to absorb the cost of churning the old hardware. If they want to pass that cost on to the consumer then we'll see just how receptive the consumer is to the real cost of bloated software. It's really the flip side of the same issue.
As everyone else but they know a little bit more about the process through which their own expertise derives. One need only read professional historians to understand that they have as much an agenda as anyone else for example.
And so what would happen to their market share if they had to raise their prices yet again to some absurd level. Please spare me the libertarian nonsense. I am an economist.
Since the fucking tools in Redmond are shoving ever more bloated crap at us requiring us to replace our hardware ever more frequently why the hell don't governments charge Microsoft that recycling tax instead of pushing the problem down on the consumer who has no other choice. I for one am sick as shit listening to people tell me it's my problem.
Vista is a bloated drawn out piece of crap because once again, building on previous mistakes, MS intentionally ignores what customers want and instead builds software that will maximize MS income and the income of MS's partners.
Development model? Ok here's one: The Soviet development model. The Party decides what is good and proceeds to fuck up the development of their own arrogance.
Computers, particularly word processing would lead to MORE paper not less. It's too easy to scribble something, print it and make some corrections, print it again. I have been proven correct. Computers result in lower office productivity because there is no penalty for being careless and sloppy.
As a stockholder though, the track record over the last 6 years is not good even accounting for dividends. The total return is far below the market median. The price appreciation is somewhere around -18% and reinvesting dividends would still not break even. In fact MS has been sitting on a huge cash pile it refuses to invest or distribute. Today it's in excess of $60 billion dollars. That's money that could be put to some use but MS seems unable to do it. They are unable to use it in the M&A market and they refuse to invest it in new ventures.
You have to understand that Zune is not really a product. It's an experiment in tight DRM. It's more than likely that MS's kickback is part of an underwriting quid pro quo from the music industry who may have helped fund and develop it. Six months? That will be enough for MS to collect the DRM data they need to take back to the music industry and to help themselves shape future DRM enhancements in Vista and Xbox. I'd write something more, but it's just that simple.
In order for MS to grow and for its stock to grow it has to create the equivalent of a Fortune 200 company every year. This is simply not feasible via internal organic growth. So MS has to do both of the following: it has to acquire companies ASAP and it has to grow into new markets. The problem with acquisition is that MS is a victim of their own success. There aren't that many companies left to buy. With 90% of the market, who is there left to vanquish? The problem with new markets is that it places them in the same crap shoot as everyone else. They have to be willing to bet a lot of money on projects that have a high likelihood of failure.
If Prada is mad that their own customers don't actually WANT to pay $1000 for a belt then they are free to not charge a $1000 for a belt. It's not the product that's being pirated, it's the logo and the brand.
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
FOSS is or is not better than closed source commercial code but the only way we'd ever know is to establish quantitative criteria and measure them with rigor.
Some things to quantitatively evaluate are:
Failures per release, time to release, bugs discovered, function points derived, cost-benefit, TCO, testability, verifiability, number of severity one bugs, number of severity one bugs never fixed, number of abandoned projects, time to next version, rate of customer abandonment.
There are probably 50 more I can't think of right now but the only sure way is to apply engineering and project management discipline to the criteria and comparison of those criteria. Then one must capture a candidate group of commercial and FOSS projects and track them over a multiyear period.
In other words we've been looking at the development experience instead of the results experience. How you build something is less important than what it does. Anyone who's ever seen the movie 'Apollo 13' understands this. More to the point though, development modalities reflect more the cultural aspects that the development team has almost no control over. Even in FOSS communities, they will self organize and operate according to features that have little to do with development.
We really don't know or care that much what the differences between good and mediocre closed source projects are. They are unverifiable in either case. So one cannot focus on the method. It's a black box. Instead we need to focus on the outputs and metrics that we can see.
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Windows users, if they're like my family, have no problems because I do all the heavy lifting. At most, they have to reboot the machine after a few hundred hours uptime to get a given application running again. They use Office, Limewire, AIM, Winamp, iTunes, etc. If desktop Linux can provide that level of use to ordinary users, fine.
Now in terms of deployment, Windows sucks. Everything has to be hand managed. The patches required to deal with the security problems, spyware, adware is huge problem. And managing all of this to get things running and keep them, is a chore. So again if Linux can fix this or eliminate them then great.
But ordinary users don't want to do the Linux way of installing and futzing with things that sort-of work.
You can lobby for an industry or a group of firms or for the rights of some group of people. I'm not sure you can legally 'lobby' for a unique product, forcing it upon government to buy. I'm reasonably sure that's something like graft or bribery or extortion. Normally speaking government procurement is sent out for bidding, such as cars or equipment. And whoever gets the bid gets to deliver on it. But in terms of lobbying - I'm unconvinced you can represent Ford and then pay out monies to politicians to award contracts for Ford.
Will there ever be an end to all the money, effort and legislation directed at making it more efficient for police to arrest, ticket and fine you? Seems to me we could, at some point, direct some of our resources somewhere else. Why for example is virtually every highway in the US under construction until eternity? Isn't getting that job finished at some point maybe something we should do? Come down to Wake County NC courthouse. Every single day the building is in firecode violation because Wake County hands out 10's of thousands of tickets a week and arrests thousands. Why don't we just call all this what it is - a revenue source.
My TA supports ANY phone to be plugged in, and the AT&T Callvantage VoIP service supports, as long as you're willing to reserve bandwidth for it, Fax/Modem over VoIP. The TA is a small box, smaller than the cable modem, you plug it in, and it does what it does, brainlessly. I can't see how putting any of this function on a PC is a step up.
The image install is meant to make large scale corporate deployments easier. If the image is easy corrupted then MS's corporate customers are exposed and it's not obvious how to protect from it before it happens. If you had a deployment schedule of a few thousand desktops a month and it turns out you're using 10 image servers and one of them has a bad image then that's a real problem.
Let's remember that corporate customers deploy custom images all the time, WHICH IS WHY WE WANT AN IMAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
IE6 for MS update only - Check
FF 2.0 - Check
Thunderbird - Check
Zone Alarm - Check
Avast AV - Check
Ad-Aware - Check
Spybot - Check
CCleaner - Check
Registry Mechanic - Check
ERUNT - Check
Winamp - Check
So given that I have XpHomeSP2 + current patches, MS Office 2003 + current patches & I use non MS for everthing else, then why am I worried? When MS makes it a hard requirement to run my current OS then I'll worry.
Ceramic Zirconia blades used for cutting Kevlar, fiber optic, etc. work great.
Mercy me I can't imagine there will be any vulnerabilities at all in this newest highest priced, longest to develop & release version of Microsoft's ratio sum ultra of enterprise operating systems. And even if there are and someone exploits them that would just be unfair and mean. I'm sure I wouldn't want to know about any exploits in this the most critical and hyped version of Microsoft Windows.
Once again, Zune is NOT a product. Zune is a massive testbed for DRM that MS is examining at the behest of the music industry for subsequent inclusion in Vista.
Consumer electronics don't make much money which is why 95% of the PC companies are dead and gone now compared to the early-mid '90's. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple and everyone else. So if you're only making 2-5% on every sale what can you afford in terms of quality. For an extra hundred or two hundred bucks you'd have a hard time convincing a consumer that the engineering life of your product is longer than the economic life of your product which is probably 3 years whether it continues to work or not.
I have a house full of PCs which will probably be the last MS OS code I ever buy. Buy the time it comes to replace the machines, which I'm in no hurry to do, the hardware costs for whatever is MS code current at that time will be too costly for my taste. So I will go with down level machines and run something else like Linux or perhaps just scrap them all and buy cheap mini-Macs. But if I was the kind of person who slavishly followed MS's lead and ran out and bought new machines just to run Vista, I'd find myself in an endless upgrade cycle to keep pace with all of the MS requirements. So it's entirely probable that my 'old' hardware would only have to work for 2 years or so. Given that most hardware lasts for more than two years and the vendor gambles that x% of their market churns their machinery every two years then the value I place on having that hardware last reliably longer than two years is almost zero. I can use cheaper parts, purchased on commodity market with little or no QA or standardization. I can assemble it in the cheapest factory I can find and I will make more money not less even if a large percentage of the product fails between 2 years and some arbitrary date but less than a 'reasonable' period of time.
I addressed this earlier in another post that was flamed when I suggested that MS be assessed a recycling tax for every turn of the OS version crank based on ever increasing hardware requirements that drive needless hardware sales. If they want to sell more software then they need to absorb the cost of churning the old hardware. If they want to pass that cost on to the consumer then we'll see just how receptive the consumer is to the real cost of bloated software. It's really the flip side of the same issue.
As everyone else but they know a little bit more about the process through which their own expertise derives. One need only read professional historians to understand that they have as much an agenda as anyone else for example.
And so what would happen to their market share if they had to raise their prices yet again to some absurd level. Please spare me the libertarian nonsense. I am an economist.
Since the fucking tools in Redmond are shoving ever more bloated crap at us requiring us to replace our hardware ever more frequently why the hell don't governments charge Microsoft that recycling tax instead of pushing the problem down on the consumer who has no other choice. I for one am sick as shit listening to people tell me it's my problem.
when he bubbles up out of the ocean then?
Vista is a bloated drawn out piece of crap because once again, building on previous mistakes, MS intentionally ignores what customers want and instead builds software that will maximize MS income and the income of MS's partners.
Development model? Ok here's one: The Soviet development model. The Party decides what is good and proceeds to fuck up the development of their own arrogance.
Computers, particularly word processing would lead to MORE paper not less. It's too easy to scribble something, print it and make some corrections, print it again. I have been proven correct. Computers result in lower office productivity because there is no penalty for being careless and sloppy.
As a stockholder though, the track record over the last 6 years is not good even accounting for dividends. The total return is far below the market median. The price appreciation is somewhere around -18% and reinvesting dividends would still not break even. In fact MS has been sitting on a huge cash pile it refuses to invest or distribute. Today it's in excess of $60 billion dollars. That's money that could be put to some use but MS seems unable to do it. They are unable to use it in the M&A market and they refuse to invest it in new ventures.
You have to understand that Zune is not really a product. It's an experiment in tight DRM. It's more than likely that MS's kickback is part of an underwriting quid pro quo from the music industry who may have helped fund and develop it. Six months? That will be enough for MS to collect the DRM data they need to take back to the music industry and to help themselves shape future DRM enhancements in Vista and Xbox. I'd write something more, but it's just that simple.
In order for MS to grow and for its stock to grow it has to create the equivalent of a Fortune 200 company every year. This is simply not feasible via internal organic growth. So MS has to do both of the following: it has to acquire companies ASAP and it has to grow into new markets. The problem with acquisition is that MS is a victim of their own success. There aren't that many companies left to buy. With 90% of the market, who is there left to vanquish? The problem with new markets is that it places them in the same crap shoot as everyone else. They have to be willing to bet a lot of money on projects that have a high likelihood of failure.
Was probably a more efficient way to make hurricanes and earthquakes.
If Prada is mad that their own customers don't actually WANT to pay $1000 for a belt then they are free to not charge a $1000 for a belt. It's not the product that's being pirated, it's the logo and the brand.
Because let's face reality. All of the gear, clothing, designer shoes and everything else are ALL coming out of the SAME factories whether the product is legit or pirated. Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from. Samsung contracts phones to the same lines that copy them. The only difference being that the brand name charges more.
I bet a house made of duct tape can outlast nails. It can hold anything to anything.
My Thinkpad if you removed the keyboard, monitor, battery would not be any bigger than its power supply.
FOSS is or is not better than closed source commercial code but the only way we'd ever know is to establish quantitative criteria and measure them with rigor.
Some things to quantitatively evaluate are:
Failures per release, time to release, bugs discovered, function points derived, cost-benefit, TCO, testability, verifiability, number of severity one bugs, number of severity one bugs never fixed, number of abandoned projects, time to next version, rate of customer abandonment.
There are probably 50 more I can't think of right now but the only sure way is to apply engineering and project management discipline to the criteria and comparison of those criteria. Then one must capture a candidate group of commercial and FOSS projects and track them over a multiyear period.
In other words we've been looking at the development experience instead of the results experience. How you build something is less important than what it does. Anyone who's ever seen the movie 'Apollo 13' understands this. More to the point though, development modalities reflect more the cultural aspects that the development team has almost no control over. Even in FOSS communities, they will self organize and operate according to features that have little to do with development.
We really don't know or care that much what the differences between good and mediocre closed source projects are. They are unverifiable in either case. So one cannot focus on the method. It's a black box. Instead we need to focus on the outputs and metrics that we can see.
Didn't you mates start out as criminals?