I come across lots of machines that can't install WGA and/or can't install Windows patches. I have a USB drive with MS tools, patches and helpfiles to force machines to install WGA and patches normally.
That's exactly the point - give me a test that evaluates the real world end to end performance of a machine and load it up with all the spyware and AV scanners you'd need to keep it running. I really don't understand why for instance one of the dual-cores can't be dedicated to security, malware, spyware, phishing and so on.
200 slide Powerpoints is where it's at. Remember kiddies, management survival and promotion is about who has the highest tolerance for mind numbing boredom.
So it's a glorified gamer machine? How fast can it start and run Lotus Notes or Thunderbird? How fast can it run a complete AV scan? How well and how fast does it run end to end, real world applications and not just RAM resident games? These benchmarks suck and pretty much ignore the fact that it's a notebook machine at all. And battery life appears to suck hard.
My plastic Crocs are the ultimate hippy shoe. That they are made out of never biodegradable plastic is something you're not supposed to notice.
Seriously, this is about the manufacturing process not the products. As long as products are built in China, India and other places that can't afford to implement environmental LAWS, then this is what you get. Of course, when they do, you will not want to pay the extra expense of their products which will then be built in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Africa. And so on.
Better than the 'phone company'? Maybe yes. Anytime you want to insinuate the phone company in this, it's bound to get fouled up. For instance I have cable and I have broadband over cable. The cable is Time Warner and the broadband is Earthlink. It all works pretty well even when something goes wrong, you know to contact TW and not Earthlink which is really more of a branded billing company in this instance. Given that, now because of work I am FORCED to get VoIP over my cable. AT&T CallVantage. Well let's just say that even making sense of the service offering and trying to order it is a challenge. I'm a week in and they're supposed to be sending me a TA any day now. When it gets here I have to install it myself. That in and of itself is no big deal - I could do that with cable too. But here's the interesting part. It will take 5-10 days after I install the TA myself to even get OUBOUND service ONLY. And another 10-15 days to get INBOUND service. Until then I'll have to rely on the landline it's replacing - which by the way is BellSouth + AT&T. So all in all it takes about 5 weeks to get VoIP running. I hope. One line. And my colleagues tell me it's going to suck up gobs of bandwidth just for voice calls.
Now I'm guessing that if I were to start from scratch and just ask Time Warner to deliver everything - cable, broadband and VoIP from scratch it would work a little more efficiently. But isn't that the same old monopoly we've been claiming we remediated with the the AT&T breakup in 1984?
Wow. I just heard how a judge narrowly decided that man who is charged with killing an animal can't be charged with civil rights violations. But the day is coming. Soon we will legally starve and kill people but it will be against the law to hurt an animal.
Is 0 for all of them. Other than a couple of Venus landers their record for going to the moon, mars or anywhere else is ZERO. I don't know if I'd take that bet.
It's not a device. The device is actually pretty simple to make. You can get 31 different new units 4GB or larger from Tigerdirect. No that's the easy part. It's marketing and focus and channel and relationships and service. Do you remember when the first iPods had that battery 'problem' where Apple initially said stuff it go buy another one? They changed their tune pretty damn quick because they wanted loyalty and marketshare. Can you imagine any other mp3 vendor doing that? I can't. Dell left the mp3 space because they never had much commitment to it in the first place. They thought they could make cheap impulse items they didn't have to service or support or worry about. But in fact it's a market in its own right.
Ok that's a weird statement but here is the basic assertion. I have a Pure Digital single use camera so I did a little googling to see if there was a way to hack it. Turns out these cameras are actually quite complex and secure. They are engineered 8 ways to Sunday to ensure that you can't really do this. Of course there is a way, more or less but it involves building your own electrical interface, reverse engineering some digital processing technology, writing some unassembler code and picking through the bytes by hand. A $20 camera. It seems to me that if someone can build this much protection into a $20 camera then it should be possible given the massive awards, time and effort of Diebold to do this for a voting machine. Let's say for the sake of argument and normal government waste that a voting machine costs a 100x what a camera costs; $2000. I don't know but let's say. So are we concluding that for $2000 we can't find anyone to build in the protection and reliability of a plastic camera that costs 1% of a voting machine?
And empty suits like the weenies at AOL are just kneejerking to respond to some soccermom who screamed at them at the PTA meeting last night. Heads will roll, I didn't know thanks for your helpful crticism etc etc etc.
Whereas they're probably just mad at someone for forgetting to SELL the information.
eBay is the world's garage sale. Maybe no one wants to buy your used crap anymore. Maybe the world is completely saturated with used crap and all the people who wanted to sell used crap to one another have bought and sold all the used crap they plan on. Also I think eBay seems to have convinced itself that used crap is worth more than it is. Maybe the used crap you want to sell really is practically worthless instead of 90% of retail new, like you think.
What EXACTLY is MS going to do to improve my mp3 "experience"? Seriously, it's a codec, a screen and some controls. This isn't Star Trek you know. And there are lots of non iPods out there that do yeoman's service. I have a Chinese USB thumbdrive mp3 player that doubles as an optional encrypted data drive and a voice recorder. If they wanted to stoke my "experience" they'd make the screen a little bigger and double the flash. But for the $30 it cost me, I don't care. In fact I could buy another one and carry both of them.
$300? C'mon. I got one of those for one of my kids who HAD to have a video iPod. Guess what - after about a month of squinting he stopped watching videos. Now it's a just a big audio mp3 player. It's nice to have that storage but functionally it's LESS functional; e.g. heavier and more fragile, then my other kid's 4GB nano. So the 'function' tops out at about $129.
Next we come to what I call the Furious Factor. Let's face facts; it's an MS device. It will require gobs-o-hardware which translates to limited battery life. It will probably try to force me to adopt it as a PDA or ignore the duplicative PDA functions.
It will likely ladle on generous scoops of DRM making is useless for most people.
It will likely not interface well with any other MS code let alone the 'other' MS hardware, the Xbox360.
It will likely not interface at all with any high end phone.
It will be over promised and undermanufactured creating instant unavailability.
Airlines love to advertise services like this or phones on planes when they first came out and then you discover that it's only slightly less expensive than a heroin habit. This is why airlines are winding down in flight phones - not because of cell phones or security but instead after the first few years of some yahoo calling "Woo Hoo guess what Cleetus I'm callin ya from tha plane!!!!!" the charm of a $40 phone call wears off.
You can get ruggedized laptops that are ideal for military, contractor, construction site, law enforcement work. They're heavy and expensive but, if you're concerned about durability they're a good bet.
If it's a support issue that's one thing, but be aware that the cost per seat on the server side is QUITE high vis a vis something like Citrix. In other words you have to weigh the support costs versus the VERY large server you will need to run a large number of clients, per. Also keep in mind that one server crash = x clients versus one client in the 'traditional' environment. As otherse have noted, the thin client isn't entirely dead, yeat. Maybe some Wyse thin PC clients that load everything off the server each time?
I don't care. People should start shooting RIAA staffers in the streets. Someone needs to carbomb their offices and burning down the homes of their executives. These fuckers will not learn until a few hundred of their family members are lynched from lightpoles.
Didn't you realize that? Horders, clutterfreaks, the chronically disorganized are secretly in love with the power it gives them. It's a kind of narcissism.
a) they are the ONLY one who can find something because to everyone else it looks like a trash heap
b) they love the drama because everything has to go through them first
c) they get to make you stand there and watch them fumble through the clutter while they pretend to be doing you a favor
d) and if they can't find it, they just lash out at you for pressuring them
If the goal is to offload as much of the network processing, which btw is going upstream to a link MUCH slower than any NIC, assuming not everyone is in the same LAN, then why does it have such large host processing requirements?
I myself am living through the hell of a family member's minor criminal infraction being repeatedly mishandled and miscoded by the 2 courts and 3 police departments that have some jurisdiction. Now on a daily basis there are cops at my house with one kind of arrest warrant or another for a charge that was dropped months ago.
So yeah let's give the cops more power and more data to peer into and let's give them more of an excuse to wave a piece of paper in my face and tell me "I don't care what you say, this piece of paper says I'm right and you're going to jail.." Yeah let's do that.
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I come across lots of machines that can't install WGA and/or can't install Windows patches. I have a USB drive with MS tools, patches and helpfiles to force machines to install WGA and patches normally.
But they suck. They're the slowest creakiest pieces of shit evah.
That's exactly the point - give me a test that evaluates the real world end to end performance of a machine and load it up with all the spyware and AV scanners you'd need to keep it running. I really don't understand why for instance one of the dual-cores can't be dedicated to security, malware, spyware, phishing and so on.
Yeah those gold tipped cables that cost $60 gonna make the neon tubes in the cabinet 1.04% faster than anything you or yo momma can build.
200 slide Powerpoints is where it's at. Remember kiddies, management survival and promotion is about who has the highest tolerance for mind numbing boredom.
So it's a glorified gamer machine? How fast can it start and run Lotus Notes or Thunderbird? How fast can it run a complete AV scan? How well and how fast does it run end to end, real world applications and not just RAM resident games? These benchmarks suck and pretty much ignore the fact that it's a notebook machine at all. And battery life appears to suck hard.
My plastic Crocs are the ultimate hippy shoe. That they are made out of never biodegradable plastic is something you're not supposed to notice.
Seriously, this is about the manufacturing process not the products. As long as products are built in China, India and other places that can't afford to implement environmental LAWS, then this is what you get. Of course, when they do, you will not want to pay the extra expense of their products which will then be built in Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Africa. And so on.
Better than the 'phone company'? Maybe yes. Anytime you want to insinuate the phone company in this, it's bound to get fouled up. For instance I have cable and I have broadband over cable. The cable is Time Warner and the broadband is Earthlink. It all works pretty well even when something goes wrong, you know to contact TW and not Earthlink which is really more of a branded billing company in this instance. Given that, now because of work I am FORCED to get VoIP over my cable. AT&T CallVantage. Well let's just say that even making sense of the service offering and trying to order it is a challenge. I'm a week in and they're supposed to be sending me a TA any day now. When it gets here I have to install it myself. That in and of itself is no big deal - I could do that with cable too. But here's the interesting part. It will take 5-10 days after I install the TA myself to even get OUBOUND service ONLY. And another 10-15 days to get INBOUND service. Until then I'll have to rely on the landline it's replacing - which by the way is BellSouth + AT&T. So all in all it takes about 5 weeks to get VoIP running. I hope. One line. And my colleagues tell me it's going to suck up gobs of bandwidth just for voice calls.
Now I'm guessing that if I were to start from scratch and just ask Time Warner to deliver everything - cable, broadband and VoIP from scratch it would work a little more efficiently. But isn't that the same old monopoly we've been claiming we remediated with the the AT&T breakup in 1984?
Wow. I just heard how a judge narrowly decided that man who is charged with killing an animal can't be charged with civil rights violations. But the day is coming. Soon we will legally starve and kill people but it will be against the law to hurt an animal.
Is 0 for all of them. Other than a couple of Venus landers their record for going to the moon, mars or anywhere else is ZERO. I don't know if I'd take that bet.
It's not a device. The device is actually pretty simple to make. You can get 31 different new units 4GB or larger from Tigerdirect. No that's the easy part. It's marketing and focus and channel and relationships and service. Do you remember when the first iPods had that battery 'problem' where Apple initially said stuff it go buy another one? They changed their tune pretty damn quick because they wanted loyalty and marketshare. Can you imagine any other mp3 vendor doing that? I can't. Dell left the mp3 space because they never had much commitment to it in the first place. They thought they could make cheap impulse items they didn't have to service or support or worry about. But in fact it's a market in its own right.
Ok that's a weird statement but here is the basic assertion. I have a Pure Digital single use camera so I did a little googling to see if there was a way to hack it. Turns out these cameras are actually quite complex and secure. They are engineered 8 ways to Sunday to ensure that you can't really do this. Of course there is a way, more or less but it involves building your own electrical interface, reverse engineering some digital processing technology, writing some unassembler code and picking through the bytes by hand. A $20 camera. It seems to me that if someone can build this much protection into a $20 camera then it should be possible given the massive awards, time and effort of Diebold to do this for a voting machine. Let's say for the sake of argument and normal government waste that a voting machine costs a 100x what a camera costs; $2000. I don't know but let's say. So are we concluding that for $2000 we can't find anyone to build in the protection and reliability of a plastic camera that costs 1% of a voting machine?
See what I mean. All Hail the 'Soft.
As that would generate the usual screed of MS apologists modding down anyone here who dare mock the Holy Windows.
And empty suits like the weenies at AOL are just kneejerking to respond to some soccermom who screamed at them at the PTA meeting last night. Heads will roll, I didn't know thanks for your helpful crticism etc etc etc.
Whereas they're probably just mad at someone for forgetting to SELL the information.
eBay is the world's garage sale. Maybe no one wants to buy your used crap anymore. Maybe the world is completely saturated with used crap and all the people who wanted to sell used crap to one another have bought and sold all the used crap they plan on. Also I think eBay seems to have convinced itself that used crap is worth more than it is. Maybe the used crap you want to sell really is practically worthless instead of 90% of retail new, like you think.
What EXACTLY is MS going to do to improve my mp3 "experience"? Seriously, it's a codec, a screen and some controls. This isn't Star Trek you know. And there are lots of non iPods out there that do yeoman's service. I have a Chinese USB thumbdrive mp3 player that doubles as an optional encrypted data drive and a voice recorder. If they wanted to stoke my "experience" they'd make the screen a little bigger and double the flash. But for the $30 it cost me, I don't care. In fact I could buy another one and carry both of them.
$300? C'mon. I got one of those for one of my kids who HAD to have a video iPod. Guess what - after about a month of squinting he stopped watching videos. Now it's a just a big audio mp3 player. It's nice to have that storage but functionally it's LESS functional; e.g. heavier and more fragile, then my other kid's 4GB nano. So the 'function' tops out at about $129.
Next we come to what I call the Furious Factor. Let's face facts; it's an MS device. It will require gobs-o-hardware which translates to limited battery life. It will probably try to force me to adopt it as a PDA or ignore the duplicative PDA functions.
It will likely ladle on generous scoops of DRM making is useless for most people.
It will likely not interface well with any other MS code let alone the 'other' MS hardware, the Xbox360.
It will likely not interface at all with any high end phone.
It will be over promised and undermanufactured creating instant unavailability.
Airlines love to advertise services like this or phones on planes when they first came out and then you discover that it's only slightly less expensive than a heroin habit. This is why airlines are winding down in flight phones - not because of cell phones or security but instead after the first few years of some yahoo calling "Woo Hoo guess what Cleetus I'm callin ya from tha plane!!!!!" the charm of a $40 phone call wears off.
You can get ruggedized laptops that are ideal for military, contractor, construction site, law enforcement work. They're heavy and expensive but, if you're concerned about durability they're a good bet.
Now what about thefts?
If it's a support issue that's one thing, but be aware that the cost per seat on the server side is QUITE high vis a vis something like Citrix. In other words you have to weigh the support costs versus the VERY large server you will need to run a large number of clients, per. Also keep in mind that one server crash = x clients versus one client in the 'traditional' environment. As otherse have noted, the thin client isn't entirely dead, yeat. Maybe some Wyse thin PC clients that load everything off the server each time?
I don't care. People should start shooting RIAA staffers in the streets. Someone needs to carbomb their offices and burning down the homes of their executives. These fuckers will not learn until a few hundred of their family members are lynched from lightpoles.
Didn't you realize that? Horders, clutterfreaks, the chronically disorganized are secretly in love with the power it gives them. It's a kind of narcissism.
a) they are the ONLY one who can find something because to everyone else it looks like a trash heap
b) they love the drama because everything has to go through them first
c) they get to make you stand there and watch them fumble through the clutter while they pretend to be doing you a favor
d) and if they can't find it, they just lash out at you for pressuring them
Gee whiz everyone knows that.
If the goal is to offload as much of the network processing, which btw is going upstream to a link MUCH slower than any NIC, assuming not everyone is in the same LAN, then why does it have such large host processing requirements?
Yeah that's good. We're sorry we shot your kids but our DB said they were dangerous criminals. We're not responsible we're just following orders.
I myself am living through the hell of a family member's minor criminal infraction being repeatedly mishandled and miscoded by the 2 courts and 3 police departments that have some jurisdiction. Now on a daily basis there are cops at my house with one kind of arrest warrant or another for a charge that was dropped months ago.
So yeah let's give the cops more power and more data to peer into and let's give them more of an excuse to wave a piece of paper in my face and tell me "I don't care what you say, this piece of paper says I'm right and you're going to jail.." Yeah let's do that.