Article seems to be specifically addressing supercomputer type parallel applications used in narrow industry niches. Not much new there unless you're the guy writing compilers for nuclear weapons simulations. Clearly general purpose business computing is not going to be rendered any more obsolete than the MVS based apps you have running on your Z/OS mainframes today. And clearly, customers are not going to junk big multiCPU PowerPC based AIX systems so quickly. Hell We BARELY have our Databases running right today. You think we're going to tear them down? Nope.
But in terms of special vertical systems, hell yes they're always looking for cheaper faster ways to run them. Anytime you can remove hardware and make it cheaper, faster, cooler and more reliable is a plus. Is a Quad-core CPU roughly equal to a pair of dual processor single cores running in a cluster? I hope so. and now I can remove a lot of network complexity. Problem is rewring that special application to do that.
They are reporting that Vista is incompatible with virtually every online game out there. They go on to add that for the most part all in-pace device drivers today will not run on Vista either nor do working drivers exist nor will ever exist for most 'older' hardware. They conclude that much 'older' software will never be made to work or work right either.
Now you have to understand that CNBC has been a MS corporate cheerleader from way back. Now I understand why Bill Himself has been pimping this out on TV personally. This looks like it could be a hellacious scary train crash.
Bill Gates has been on The Daily Show, the talk shows, and anywhere else it seems. MSNBC stripped off its clothes a week ago to wallow in an orgy of MS group sex. Now there's a 'study' that says "Gee Whiz Vista is the greatest thing since Louis Pasteur, yo."
And of course the Cmdr Taconistas report it as news.
The few of us left here are made to work at home on our fully depreciated laptops. Everyone else has been replaced by someone in India, China or Brazil. What do they do there? I'm guessing they have greybox minitower PCs that are built with a minimum of hardware.
And why does/. try to resurrect the whole thin client debacle again? Because the whores at Gartner and WSJ say so? What's their agenda? Because there IS one, you just have to look for it.
They should have a husband and wife pair of computers. The fat stupid lazy self absorbed PC husband with a drinking problem. And the hot slim sexy smart mouthed infinitely capable yet gentle harpy of a Mac wife.
They have a lot of balls pers/prosecuting people for what is usually weak bookeeping. If MS wants us to keep track of things THEIR WAY then they have to provide THEIR WAY of doing that that doesn't add a lot of overhead to me.
How is Globeco Space Dynamics a wholly owned subsidiary of Pepsico-Halliburton-Virgin Atlantic-ELF Aquitane going to worry about some damn space telescope for a bunch of scientists who don't have any money? Are you guys high? Seriously
Are you really saying that there is no quality assurance for call centers? In my previous position I listened to these recordings and live calls in order to give the agent feedback; I was the man behind the curtain. Then I guess the standard sample size is very very very small. Extremely small. Quantum sized small.
But the idea that I would be duped into spending more than I want to is a difficult thing to accept. I suppose if I arbitrarily set in my mind a max price of '~x' and the auction was 'x-k' with k getting progressively smaller until ->=~0 then I would still not feel cheated. I can't imagine bidding on something over and above what I wanted to spend for it. Ok maybe a shade more but not enough to worry about it. I'm sure whatever you want on eBay, if not this time, is bound to around in a few minutes anyway. Or, if it's not then one-off items maybe aren't the things you should look for on eBay. eBay is like the world's garage sale, not flea market. So when you go to a garage sale, how badly are you going to want that one piece of junk? Oh well I guess people insist on being protected from themselves.
It's called the molten fumes of hell when I try to send an SMS message or call customer support - neither of which actually work. All I hear is Satan chortling at me.
All a more durable phone means to me is I kill more reps with it when I throw it at them.
Like hearing your call is very important and is being recorded for quality purposes, which of course are both ridiculous lies, the notion that there is a man behind the curtain making sure your experience is good, is a quaint silly anachronism. No one cares if their website runs better than a C- average at best. Fewer care if your browser is compatible.
Remember when Oprah gave away cars on her show to impress the world with her Mother Theresa-like saintliness? Those people had to pay taxes, fees, licensing and of course insurance on their own as well. But when you can't afford a working car you probably can't afford the ancillary costs of a new car either. Yeah, other people's ego is a bitter pill for you to swallow.
And let me add without rancor or rhetoric that XP will in fact be the last MS OS I install and use, for my own use. My employer is of course free to load whatever they like on the machine they give me to use. But for my own use, and, given I am a miser who still keeps one machine at home running Win95OSR2 I will keep my installation of XP Home machines running long past the day MS cuts support, such as it is. And by the time Vista is mainstream MS support of older OS's will be irrelevant anyhow given how their support is mostly in the form of security patches which will largely be unnecessary for a now 'abandoned' OS. Application compatibility may suffer as it always does in the long run, but by that time I will be able to run desktop Linux which is at least as capable as XP Home is now.
Ok people, we need to draw an arbitrary line in the sand in order to call this what it is. We are no longer purchasing or even licensing MS products. We are merely renting them under any and all provisions and restrictions MS feels like imposing unilaterally.
Can timed rentals be far behind? Will the next turn of the crank impose annual licensing fees, I mean rental agreements? You know I wouldn't mind if MS actually stood up for any kind of SLA or commitment that THEIR software, which you are only RENTING had some basic functional warranty.
I can't really add to the comments here except to reiterate that these things are absurdly overpriced. It seems to me at least that one could take a Freescale or similar based Mobo, throw in a DIMM expansion slot and be done with it. While not terribly fast it would serve as a good general purpose compute appliance. I suppose if you wanted to get fancy you could include headers for things like DVI, VGA, mini PCI and so on. It is patently crazy that mini/nano ITX fanless boards costs hundreds of dollars. The demand is there and supply is being arbitrarily restricted or worse, doesn't exist at all, in order to keep prices inflated.
One could buy an old laptop, like a Thinkpad T40, refurbished for $450 and be ahead of the game vs. a fanless ITX based system. Hell, if you got one with a broken screen & a dead battery you could save another $250. And at an inch thick and fanless for the most part except when under high load, it's as unobtrusive as anything else.
So it's a toss up between craven theft and indifference, and their general inability to figure out what the fuck they are doing on any given day. As a TW customer in NC I can attest that there are two divisions inside TW that fight neck and neck for supremacy in the company. One is the We Don't Give a Shit division and the other is the We Don't Have a Fucking Clue division.
So all those EU built phones will be open?
on
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What's good for the goose? Let's make it illegal to have closed Siemens and Nokia phones so that any phone will work with each carriers network. Seems reasonable.
That's not really the point. After all the internals aren't much different from a full blown machine. And you'd be surprised at the actual size of the market for embedded computers that run RTOS's or Linux one-off's. Everything from cable modems, to routers, to phones and whatnot. The claim that the market for embedded systems on small form factor computers that are ALSO hardware expandable is simply not the case. You HAVE heard of PC-104 embedded systems, haven't you? You have heard of z80 based MP3 players, haven't you? All I'm suggesting is that mini ITX and similar small FF equipment is price gouging. A NAS already has a Freescale CPU, RAM, ROM, and Ethernet and USB drive interface. I'm looking for a DIMM slot, a mini PCI interface, an IDE header and a removable CPU. Seems to me given the existing architecture that shouldn't command a 100% price premium.
Around age 40 or so there's a spike in contacts with people you haven't thought about since high school. I remember one particular email from a guy who in HS was a midlevel asshole in a group of likeminded young men who devoted their redneck lives to making mine suck. Anyway - flash forward a few decades and apparently these people crawl out of the woodwork, maybe it's part of their 12 step program. Who knows. He wants to be all cheery and shit and ask me to call and that happy nonsense. My response started with "I hope you fucking come home and find your whole family chopped up with power tools and stuffed in garbage bags you worthless piece of shit. I hope you drown in your own children's blood, just send me your address and I'll come by to make it happen." And went on for a few pages after that, closing with, "bone cancer isn't bad enough for for you, so go suck your daddy's cock in hell."
I hope that got the message across - I didn't want him to confuse me with someone who didn't want him burned alive while I laughed hysterically, drinking wine out his wife's severed skull.
BTW I am 100% ok with making credible, anonymous untraceable death threats against the people who torment my kids. If they want terrorism, bring it on. I'm crazier and meaner than all of them.
One would think that the PHB's in Redmond would have considered the ramifications of being sooooo special that it disconnects a whole high tech country from your product. I'm am so glad I dumped all my MS stock 3 weeks ago.
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Article seems to be specifically addressing supercomputer type parallel applications used in narrow industry niches. Not much new there unless you're the guy writing compilers for nuclear weapons simulations. Clearly general purpose business computing is not going to be rendered any more obsolete than the MVS based apps you have running on your Z/OS mainframes today. And clearly, customers are not going to junk big multiCPU PowerPC based AIX systems so quickly. Hell We BARELY have our Databases running right today. You think we're going to tear them down? Nope.
But in terms of special vertical systems, hell yes they're always looking for cheaper faster ways to run them. Anytime you can remove hardware and make it cheaper, faster, cooler and more reliable is a plus. Is a Quad-core CPU roughly equal to a pair of dual processor single cores running in a cluster? I hope so. and now I can remove a lot of network complexity. Problem is rewring that special application to do that.
They are reporting that Vista is incompatible with virtually every online game out there. They go on to add that for the most part all in-pace device drivers today will not run on Vista either nor do working drivers exist nor will ever exist for most 'older' hardware. They conclude that much 'older' software will never be made to work or work right either.
Now you have to understand that CNBC has been a MS corporate cheerleader from way back. Now I understand why Bill Himself has been pimping this out on TV personally. This looks like it could be a hellacious scary train crash.
Sure it does. As I said, we all work from home. Thin clients don't make any sense for that.
Bill Gates has been on The Daily Show, the talk shows, and anywhere else it seems. MSNBC stripped off its clothes a week ago to wallow in an orgy of MS group sex. Now there's a 'study' that says "Gee Whiz Vista is the greatest thing since Louis Pasteur, yo."
And of course the Cmdr Taconistas report it as news.
The few of us left here are made to work at home on our fully depreciated laptops. Everyone else has been replaced by someone in India, China or Brazil. What do they do there? I'm guessing they have greybox minitower PCs that are built with a minimum of hardware.
/. try to resurrect the whole thin client debacle again? Because the whores at Gartner and WSJ say so? What's their agenda? Because there IS one, you just have to look for it.
And why does
They should have a husband and wife pair of computers. The fat stupid lazy self absorbed PC husband with a drinking problem. And the hot slim sexy smart mouthed infinitely capable yet gentle harpy of a Mac wife.
And all the Romanians in the world
They have a lot of balls pers/prosecuting people for what is usually weak bookeeping. If MS wants us to keep track of things THEIR WAY then they have to provide THEIR WAY of doing that that doesn't add a lot of overhead to me.
How is Globeco Space Dynamics a wholly owned subsidiary of Pepsico-Halliburton-Virgin Atlantic-ELF Aquitane going to worry about some damn space telescope for a bunch of scientists who don't have any money? Are you guys high? Seriously
What with being a child molester. I'm sure all my new 'friends' will go for it.
But the idea that I would be duped into spending more than I want to is a difficult thing to accept. I suppose if I arbitrarily set in my mind a max price of '~x' and the auction was 'x-k' with k getting progressively smaller until ->=~0 then I would still not feel cheated. I can't imagine bidding on something over and above what I wanted to spend for it. Ok maybe a shade more but not enough to worry about it. I'm sure whatever you want on eBay, if not this time, is bound to around in a few minutes anyway. Or, if it's not then one-off items maybe aren't the things you should look for on eBay. eBay is like the world's garage sale, not flea market. So when you go to a garage sale, how badly are you going to want that one piece of junk? Oh well I guess people insist on being protected from themselves.
It's called the molten fumes of hell when I try to send an SMS message or call customer support - neither of which actually work. All I hear is Satan chortling at me.
All a more durable phone means to me is I kill more reps with it when I throw it at them.
Like hearing your call is very important and is being recorded for quality purposes, which of course are both ridiculous lies, the notion that there is a man behind the curtain making sure your experience is good, is a quaint silly anachronism. No one cares if their website runs better than a C- average at best. Fewer care if your browser is compatible.
Remember when Oprah gave away cars on her show to impress the world with her Mother Theresa-like saintliness? Those people had to pay taxes, fees, licensing and of course insurance on their own as well. But when you can't afford a working car you probably can't afford the ancillary costs of a new car either. Yeah, other people's ego is a bitter pill for you to swallow.
And let me add without rancor or rhetoric that XP will in fact be the last MS OS I install and use, for my own use. My employer is of course free to load whatever they like on the machine they give me to use. But for my own use, and, given I am a miser who still keeps one machine at home running Win95OSR2 I will keep my installation of XP Home machines running long past the day MS cuts support, such as it is. And by the time Vista is mainstream MS support of older OS's will be irrelevant anyhow given how their support is mostly in the form of security patches which will largely be unnecessary for a now 'abandoned' OS. Application compatibility may suffer as it always does in the long run, but by that time I will be able to run desktop Linux which is at least as capable as XP Home is now.
Ok people, we need to draw an arbitrary line in the sand in order to call this what it is. We are no longer purchasing or even licensing MS products. We are merely renting them under any and all provisions and restrictions MS feels like imposing unilaterally.
Can timed rentals be far behind? Will the next turn of the crank impose annual licensing fees, I mean rental agreements? You know I wouldn't mind if MS actually stood up for any kind of SLA or commitment that THEIR software, which you are only RENTING had some basic functional warranty.
I can't really add to the comments here except to reiterate that these things are absurdly overpriced. It seems to me at least that one could take a Freescale or similar based Mobo, throw in a DIMM expansion slot and be done with it. While not terribly fast it would serve as a good general purpose compute appliance. I suppose if you wanted to get fancy you could include headers for things like DVI, VGA, mini PCI and so on. It is patently crazy that mini/nano ITX fanless boards costs hundreds of dollars. The demand is there and supply is being arbitrarily restricted or worse, doesn't exist at all, in order to keep prices inflated.
One could buy an old laptop, like a Thinkpad T40, refurbished for $450 and be ahead of the game vs. a fanless ITX based system. Hell, if you got one with a broken screen & a dead battery you could save another $250. And at an inch thick and fanless for the most part except when under high load, it's as unobtrusive as anything else.
So it's a toss up between craven theft and indifference, and their general inability to figure out what the fuck they are doing on any given day. As a TW customer in NC I can attest that there are two divisions inside TW that fight neck and neck for supremacy in the company. One is the We Don't Give a Shit division and the other is the We Don't Have a Fucking Clue division.
What's good for the goose? Let's make it illegal to have closed Siemens and Nokia phones so that any phone will work with each carriers network. Seems reasonable.
For NC HS students. They cost $100.
That's not really the point. After all the internals aren't much different from a full blown machine. And you'd be surprised at the actual size of the market for embedded computers that run RTOS's or Linux one-off's. Everything from cable modems, to routers, to phones and whatnot. The claim that the market for embedded systems on small form factor computers that are ALSO hardware expandable is simply not the case. You HAVE heard of PC-104 embedded systems, haven't you? You have heard of z80 based MP3 players, haven't you? All I'm suggesting is that mini ITX and similar small FF equipment is price gouging. A NAS already has a Freescale CPU, RAM, ROM, and Ethernet and USB drive interface. I'm looking for a DIMM slot, a mini PCI interface, an IDE header and a removable CPU. Seems to me given the existing architecture that shouldn't command a 100% price premium.
Around age 40 or so there's a spike in contacts with people you haven't thought about since high school. I remember one particular email from a guy who in HS was a midlevel asshole in a group of likeminded young men who devoted their redneck lives to making mine suck. Anyway - flash forward a few decades and apparently these people crawl out of the woodwork, maybe it's part of their 12 step program. Who knows. He wants to be all cheery and shit and ask me to call and that happy nonsense. My response started with "I hope you fucking come home and find your whole family chopped up with power tools and stuffed in garbage bags you worthless piece of shit. I hope you drown in your own children's blood, just send me your address and I'll come by to make it happen." And went on for a few pages after that, closing with, "bone cancer isn't bad enough for for you, so go suck your daddy's cock in hell."
I hope that got the message across - I didn't want him to confuse me with someone who didn't want him burned alive while I laughed hysterically, drinking wine out his wife's severed skull.
BTW I am 100% ok with making credible, anonymous untraceable death threats against the people who torment my kids. If they want terrorism, bring it on. I'm crazier and meaner than all of them.
Yeah it's almost back to where it was in January 2002. Yippee!!!!
One would think that the PHB's in Redmond would have considered the ramifications of being sooooo special that it disconnects a whole high tech country from your product. I'm am so glad I dumped all my MS stock 3 weeks ago.