MS is never inclined to give anything away for free. Their business model leaves them addicted to feature creep. Features that few of us ever use or even know about. Anyway think of the Google approach as 1.0. Later on they can add features like pivots and whatnot. I'm sure they're smart enough to do that.
Look at MS Works - its spreadsheet will handle 85% of common usage. And then they turn around and make the file format incompatible with Excel just so that if you use Excel somewhere else like work or school you're forced to use it in place of Works as well. It's a shill. But functionally Works spreadsheet is entirely suitable for most applications. Google can fill this niche and if they allow you to archive and manage multiple versions then it would be fine.
At work we use SMS and IM increasingly to communicate. For larger objects we point people to places to pick or leave large files. We increasingly use webconferences/netmeetings where the material is shared but not sent at all. Because I for one am sick of being on the receiving end of a threaded series of emails that consist of "Read This!" or "Me Too!!!" and at the bottom is giant 10Mb blob of something. I really don't need 10 copies of that, thanks.
At home, most email is garbage anyway. Moreover most of the younger people I know (under 25, say) don't read their email often or often enough to be useful. It's like voicemail to them - but less so. (Yes young people don't use voicemail, don't bother leaving a message they never check it). So already the next generation is abandoning email. They use it because it's the defacto ID of the internet - please give us your email address so we can confirm our transaction....etc. but for the most part email is unimportant to them. If you sent confirmations to SMS it would do as much.
I can't explain that. If I had to guess I'd say that high end drives sacrifice reliability for performance and/or the usage patterns pushes them far beyond their designed parameters. After all if you're using a RAID array one could guess that the array is being very heavility utilized and that each drive is probably being pushed much harder than the requirements of having only one drive on a system - so they're just wearing out faster because of much harder use. Why do they fail at the same time? Good engineering tolerances for drives in the same production run that fail at precisely the same projected design limits.
I wasn't claiming it is or isn't. They're just examples for numerical purposes. I tend to think that some people seem to have much worse experience than others, for whatever reason. I can tell you that in 15 years of home computing and 20 years of at-work PC's I've never lost a drive completely. I've had some bad sectors but I've never crashed a drive. I've blown out CPU's and motherboards and had several CDRW's crash and burn but never a hard drive. Maybe it's that I don't use particularly high performance drives ever - I always go for cheap.
Step 1: Just go down to your local Tigerdirect, or whatever refurb shop is near you, and take a look at the cases that don't appear damaged, can be easily opened without bending or breaking something and have all the right connectors, hopefully a nice powersupply included.
Step 2: Put it all together and check it for heat and any obvious problems. If it tends to run a little hot, chuck in a second fan where the cutout you already ignored is. Hopefully you can stand the noise.
Step 3: Now that it's running cool enough or at least as cool as it's going to w/o some fancy schmancy heatpipe watercooler system. You're done.
Step 4: If not then pick up one of those PCI slot fans, plug it in and off ya go.
Maybe yes maybe no. If the likelihood of disk failure is.01%, just an example, then the risk of a failure in any of your 7 disks is.07% so instead of a 99.9% reliability you have 99.3%.
I have 5 machines in my house and everyone one of them has legitimate licences or freeware-open source code for 100% of everything and they are all Windows XP machines. If they want to burn me on the price there is ALWAYS a legitimate way around them.
These are the kinds of statistics that are pretty meaningless. Anyway aren't they talking about pirated CD's for sale on the street as opposed to downloads? You really don't see too many guys with trenchcoats with 50 CDs inside, for sale like cheap Rolex's. At leat not in the western world. So it's pretty hard to know how many people have downloaded Windows or MS Office or whatnot.
I wouldn't mind except that I've been a target of serial modding and remodding here which has resulted in my being banned from commenting more than once.
Ok everything is a happy puppy and unicorns on the big rock candy mountain thing. OK? It's alllllll wonderful. It's great - MS is the fucking savior. Have at it.
This is why I spend almost zero time at slashdot anymore - anyone who expresses any thought at all is criticized.
I don't. I have to worry about the migration effort of hundreds of thousands of machines. Is the coolness factor worth that? Is it going to be 10% cheaper to administer? Is it 30% more stable? Will I have to rewrite 7% of my apps and/or patch 5-7% of my vendor apps?
And all of that could in fact be worth it if indeed the differences were that dramatic. But I don't see that. All I see is a 1337ness factor for home computing and gamers.
The UI is more or less the same except sexier, borrowing widgets from Linux.
The file system is the same except harder to use. And there's a new file search box.
Security is a lot harder to use and may or may not improve what has been MS's Achilles heel for decades.
It has a bunch of new diagnostic tools that are going to tell you there's no known reason your machine crashes and there's no identfied fix for it. In either case it's probably your non MS application that's the problem. And it won't be able to tell you anything about that.
And the networking controls, which few people ever have a need to address, are completely new.
Call me a cynic but NEW VERSIONS of something are supposed to be worthwhile, they are supposed to be dramatic. Everything else is just a dot release, a bug fix or a minor tweak. I just don't see the upside to transitioning thousands of machines to this. I don't see the PURE advantages of it.
Given that even with all the bells and whistles and Thai happy ending massage features they've piled on it's STILL a Goddamn desktop OS. We can all pooh pooh the excruciating complexity of this but it's still just a desktop OS. Installation to a desktop machine should be one of the three highest priorities and by priorities it has to be a critical fundamental design feature. Either revamp the entire Hardware abstraction layer and driver model or not. And if not then just tell us it's not a desktop OS.
Because if MS touted this as a server OS and couldn't figure out how to install the OS to SCSI or SATA drives or couldn't install quotas or couldn't do any of the things that are important for server hardware then we'd be pretty damn angry about it, wouldn't we?
So let's just say that MS has a long inglorious history of not paying attention to what's important. They didn't just screw this one up, they've been screwing it up for 20 years.
It's a desktop OS, a DESKTOP. Make it installable to desktop machines as the #1, 2 or 3 priority.
I was told I had malignant cancer on my 30th birthday. And here I am about 300 years later still running round the front yard in my underwear scaring all the kids.
If code really really well they can beat you like a mule for 3-4 years before they send your job where the Tigers eat you. Or, you wind up another 'manager'.
After all, where are all the high paying IT coding jobs? Working for a consulting shop throwing together shitty script code to get some ERP or CRM project off the ground for the second or third time.
Hollywood is always one step ahead. We had invisible cars years ago. Just wait until we have time travel - slight time travel mind you maybe +/- 60 seconds.
Or are you too young and innocent to have never worked for clinically insane toxic assholes yet? Yeah boo hoo, people are sick. Now take your leave of absence and stop fucking over all the people who's jobs depend on you.
And please please shut the white liberal guilt fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is never inclined to give anything away for free. Their business model leaves them addicted to feature creep. Features that few of us ever use or even know about. Anyway think of the Google approach as 1.0. Later on they can add features like pivots and whatnot. I'm sure they're smart enough to do that.
Look at MS Works - its spreadsheet will handle 85% of common usage. And then they turn around and make the file format incompatible with Excel just so that if you use Excel somewhere else like work or school you're forced to use it in place of Works as well. It's a shill. But functionally Works spreadsheet is entirely suitable for most applications. Google can fill this niche and if they allow you to archive and manage multiple versions then it would be fine.
At work we use SMS and IM increasingly to communicate. For larger objects we point people to places to pick or leave large files. We increasingly use webconferences/netmeetings where the material is shared but not sent at all. Because I for one am sick of being on the receiving end of a threaded series of emails that consist of "Read This!" or "Me Too!!!" and at the bottom is giant 10Mb blob of something. I really don't need 10 copies of that, thanks.
At home, most email is garbage anyway. Moreover most of the younger people I know (under 25, say) don't read their email often or often enough to be useful. It's like voicemail to them - but less so. (Yes young people don't use voicemail, don't bother leaving a message they never check it). So already the next generation is abandoning email. They use it because it's the defacto ID of the internet - please give us your email address so we can confirm our transaction....etc. but for the most part email is unimportant to them. If you sent confirmations to SMS it would do as much.
Might be worth it. Seriously.
I can't explain that. If I had to guess I'd say that high end drives sacrifice reliability for performance and/or the usage patterns pushes them far beyond their designed parameters. After all if you're using a RAID array one could guess that the array is being very heavility utilized and that each drive is probably being pushed much harder than the requirements of having only one drive on a system - so they're just wearing out faster because of much harder use. Why do they fail at the same time? Good engineering tolerances for drives in the same production run that fail at precisely the same projected design limits.
I wasn't claiming it is or isn't. They're just examples for numerical purposes. I tend to think that some people seem to have much worse experience than others, for whatever reason. I can tell you that in 15 years of home computing and 20 years of at-work PC's I've never lost a drive completely. I've had some bad sectors but I've never crashed a drive. I've blown out CPU's and motherboards and had several CDRW's crash and burn but never a hard drive. Maybe it's that I don't use particularly high performance drives ever - I always go for cheap.
Step 1: Just go down to your local Tigerdirect, or whatever refurb shop is near you, and take a look at the cases that don't appear damaged, can be easily opened without bending or breaking something and have all the right connectors, hopefully a nice powersupply included.
Step 2: Put it all together and check it for heat and any obvious problems. If it tends to run a little hot, chuck in a second fan where the cutout you already ignored is. Hopefully you can stand the noise.
Step 3: Now that it's running cool enough or at least as cool as it's going to w/o some fancy schmancy heatpipe watercooler system. You're done.
Step 4: If not then pick up one of those PCI slot fans, plug it in and off ya go.
Maybe yes maybe no. If the likelihood of disk failure is .01%, just an example, then the risk of a failure in any of your 7 disks is .07% so instead of a 99.9% reliability you have 99.3%.
I have 5 machines in my house and everyone one of them has legitimate licences or freeware-open source code for 100% of everything and they are all Windows XP machines. If they want to burn me on the price there is ALWAYS a legitimate way around them.
These are the kinds of statistics that are pretty meaningless. Anyway aren't they talking about pirated CD's for sale on the street as opposed to downloads? You really don't see too many guys with trenchcoats with 50 CDs inside, for sale like cheap Rolex's. At leat not in the western world. So it's pretty hard to know how many people have downloaded Windows or MS Office or whatnot.
I wouldn't mind except that I've been a target of serial modding and remodding here which has resulted in my being banned from commenting more than once.
C'mon I'm towing the /. line...where's my MSvisualcookie+(tm) ???
and all their products are dropped from heaven itself. There ya happy now /. modders? moo moo moo moo.
Ok everything is a happy puppy and unicorns on the big rock candy mountain thing. OK? It's alllllll wonderful. It's great - MS is the fucking savior. Have at it.
This is why I spend almost zero time at slashdot anymore - anyone who expresses any thought at all is criticized.
Stick to your games, kiddies.
I want to surrender all responsibility, rights, thought and action to the school district. Please run my life for me.
I don't. I have to worry about the migration effort of hundreds of thousands of machines. Is the coolness factor worth that? Is it going to be 10% cheaper to administer? Is it 30% more stable? Will I have to rewrite 7% of my apps and/or patch 5-7% of my vendor apps?
And all of that could in fact be worth it if indeed the differences were that dramatic. But I don't see that. All I see is a 1337ness factor for home computing and gamers.
The UI is more or less the same except sexier, borrowing widgets from Linux.
The file system is the same except harder to use. And there's a new file search box.
Security is a lot harder to use and may or may not improve what has been MS's Achilles heel for decades.
It has a bunch of new diagnostic tools that are going to tell you there's no known reason your machine crashes and there's no identfied fix for it. In either case it's probably your non MS application that's the problem. And it won't be able to tell you anything about that.
And the networking controls, which few people ever have a need to address, are completely new.
Call me a cynic but NEW VERSIONS of something are supposed to be worthwhile, they are supposed to be dramatic. Everything else is just a dot release, a bug fix or a minor tweak. I just don't see the upside to transitioning thousands of machines to this. I don't see the PURE advantages of it.
Given that even with all the bells and whistles and Thai happy ending massage features they've piled on it's STILL a Goddamn desktop OS. We can all pooh pooh the excruciating complexity of this but it's still just a desktop OS. Installation to a desktop machine should be one of the three highest priorities and by priorities it has to be a critical fundamental design feature. Either revamp the entire Hardware abstraction layer and driver model or not. And if not then just tell us it's not a desktop OS.
Because if MS touted this as a server OS and couldn't figure out how to install the OS to SCSI or SATA drives or couldn't install quotas or couldn't do any of the things that are important for server hardware then we'd be pretty damn angry about it, wouldn't we?
So let's just say that MS has a long inglorious history of not paying attention to what's important. They didn't just screw this one up, they've been screwing it up for 20 years.
It's a desktop OS, a DESKTOP. Make it installable to desktop machines as the #1, 2 or 3 priority.
I was told I had malignant cancer on my 30th birthday. And here I am about 300 years later still running round the front yard in my underwear scaring all the kids.
If code really really well they can beat you like a mule for 3-4 years before they send your job where the Tigers eat you. Or, you wind up another 'manager'.
After all, where are all the high paying IT coding jobs? Working for a consulting shop throwing together shitty script code to get some ERP or CRM project off the ground for the second or third time.
The Museum of Bad Ideas. Special Craptastic exhibit for a limited run.
Hollywood is always one step ahead. We had invisible cars years ago. Just wait until we have time travel - slight time travel mind you maybe +/- 60 seconds.
Or are you too young and innocent to have never worked for clinically insane toxic assholes yet? Yeah boo hoo, people are sick. Now take your leave of absence and stop fucking over all the people who's jobs depend on you.
And please please shut the white liberal guilt fuck up.
Where I could be a bipolar fuckup and they pay me hundreds of millions of dollars to act in a soap opera. That would be awesome.
for copywrite infringement.