problem was most likely due to a faulty flux-capacitor. Kind of mean, I know, but still funny as hell.
Funny as hell! While not without some element of truth either. Many mobo manufactures did have electrolytic capacitor troubles about 2000-2003 when there were a lot of defective parts being made. Not mentioning names, but some were big.
Turning one screw................. $1
Knowing what screw to turn..$999,999
So true. But if you know which screw to turn, your not going to be paid $20/hr charging $80 and over pricing to run around in a silly looking vehicle.
And those problems were trivial. Not one idiot looked or heard the beeps? Come on, they were frauds!
And that is the problem, people believe that it is so easy and, of course it is easy if you KNOW what you are doing... And that will of course cost more, whether it is reflexed int he price of the item or in the price of the visit.
To really know this inside out, takes 1000's of hours of personal time, it isn't a course you can take formally.
If you advertise yourself as a geek, pro, hacker, "professor" - then your probably following a cult for profit. Real "mechanics" don't advertise. They come to you (after screwing with the cheaper alternatives that don't work).
It's just as hard to find a good, read competent and honest, IT tech as it is to find a good car mechanic.
It is sad, 95% of the people in this business are "want-a-be" slugs and shouldn't be in this business at all. Those problems were trivial. A sad state in computer repair, the bottom of the bucket.
One hint here is if the person is actually good, they are not going to be running around in a silly looking car, working on selling stuff. Real "geeks" and I hate the word, don't advertise and work at jobs paying a lot more than any chain is willing to pay. Don't usually call themselves "geeks", "hackers" or "pros".
The good part is PCs are getting so cheap, you just toss it out if it breaks. The only thing a user should really worry about is making backups of data to a USB drive or CD/DVD. And if one brand breaks prematurely, buy a different one next time.
And that twit coping data, he should be charged with data theft.
There is no substitute for a good engineering team on a project like this. Perhaps a challenge for a local university of engineering students to help out.
But environmental concerns are that a PC isn't going to cut it. Imagine what salt water mist does when it gets sucked in.... My guess is you need ingenuity like you find on many of the devices on http://linuxdevices.com./
An SBC computer that is of low power and can be sealed from the elements. Many have no special needs for fans. You going to need the power to drive servos and motors so generating power from the sun and the boats motion including electricity storage is paramount. GPS and compass interfaces as well, possibly weather too. Maybe 2 SBC, one to control the boat and another to plan and guide the boat simple cross over Ethernet to communicate. You want a small computer(s) for space, weight and power consumption.
For software development, keep it simple. KISS rule applies. Don't get Java fancy, use straight up and simple C/C++ structures. Follow basic concepts of good embedded software design like avoiding memory allocation and associated leaks at run time. Modularize all the components. Find a good programmer(s) in embedded design and a good technical sailor and marry them if you have to. Having a good mechanical aptitude will help to. I am not sure how many servo systems you will need but they are needed and are the fingers of the system.
Design nothing of the hardware except plugging it in and sealing it from the elements, favoring COTs (common off the shelf) parts if available. Use a USB to a GPS for example. Or get the servos from an industrial shop. Your going to be under a time crunch to get that software working so leave as much time as you can to testing it. If it isn't tested, assume it does not work.
Seriously, I don't want to break the law nor do I want to infect my systems. So I don't buy CDs dates this century (root kits). I do buy them second hand if they are dated last century.
I don't know what goes on in the heads of these idiots, buy you buy a CD so you can upload it into something. You have to to use it. For if you can't upload it it is just a coaster. Yea, I am going to carry a home stereo system with me while I take a walk.
Sony, RIAA, your going out of business because your product is over encumbered with dumb assed laws, stupid root kits, a bad business model and over priced.
Sounds good. So then let's take a situation some years in the future where it's law. What happens when you are watching TV, and all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering. You call your cable company angry. They explain that TV is now delivered over IP, like everything else. Currently you have some neighbours hitting the P2P really heavy and it is using up enough of the segment that it is interfering with video traffic. They'd love to have video have a higher QoS, but alas the law says they can't. The "contents of your packets are none of their business."
Problems like above, while possible is 100% the issue of provisioning, or under provisioning. It has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Simply put native private services on an independent channel. Just like they do with VoIP. Don't mix private services with open internet services.
What net neutrality is supposed to stop is Telus, Bell, Rogers or Shaw would rather you pay per view using their open to the internet IP feed, and to artificially notch down YouTube or Google in their favor. Maybe even get a little payola from MSN to keep their QoS up while throttling Yahoo and Google. Or just as bad, get some Google payola to outright block MSN and Yahoo. These practices already occur, a mild form of censorship has been observed on my providors Internet access.
Net neutrality is about providing assurance of fair access to the bandwidth. It is about preventing anti-competitive practices creaping into your Internet viewing pleasure.
That is what I thought when I saw it on firehose yesterday and marked it binspam. We do need to get the moderators to research this a little before posting self indulgence stories. As I suspect the posters of such crap are using firehost to notch up their stories.
And you only tipped the edge. What if I sent 5000 messages to 5000 domains with the same senders address... oh the fun.
And more, but I will not bore the/. users with the lengthly list of flaws. He got his moment of fame past the./ moderators.
Would very much like to see a headline like, "IBM replaces CEO with Muniyandi Appannakaruppandi Joshi, a graduate of Aiyyappa Institute of Mangagement Sciences (second class, registered with Govt of India), for one tenth of the salary."
I too would like to see this. Would have big bang for the buck. For just one CEO @ 12M USD you could have 120 North Americas finest, or 1200 overseas help desk people. Do the CFO and other VPs and you could have an army of talent. And if you actually hire real technical talent and focus on the products value it would not be so hard and expensive to sell the product.
For an anonymous post you hit the nail on the head. And HD like Seagate are not sitting on their butts.
When Sandisk (or others) can come out with a 2TB billion times rewritable MTBF replacement AT THE SAME PRICE for my soon to be 4TB Seagate drive I will listen. I am not saying this tech is not inevitable, I just think it is 12-30 years out for mainstream. And there is always a possibility some new tech will plant them both in the ground.
Not a chance. Maybe in time. But don't count the days or wait for it. The HD is tried, true, cheap and is not going outdated any time soon. The time will come, but you could become very old waiting.
That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with/dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?
Not as many as you would think nor as many as the manufacturers would have you believe. Those devices, while handy as all can be to copy a DVD sized image between two distrusting hosts is handy, it is not a substitute for a HD. I have seen them go in 200 writes. But usually much more is usual. And not all brands are the same.
But they are getting to a size and with a little cost reduction compete with CD/DVD-ROMs, send out the tunes in a ultra small package, and re-usable. Quick, patent it so the patent trolls don't screw up the idea!
At some future, perhaps 10-20 years we will see solid state drives, but it isn't going to happen sooner without some pain and cost. 640GB of the stuff can't be cheap. And the rewrite issue has to be solved. And Seagate and others are looking towards 2TB and up in future developments. While the gap is closing, HD shipments are safe for at least a decade.
But one interesting idea posted I saw was, put a normally read only OS in the device, write little, load like lightening and use RAM there after except for the occasional patching. Get a worm, reboot to the static image. Use HD for user storage only.
Go with Microsoft. They actually have a privacy policy.
Yep, we own you. You cannot sue us. We reserver the right to change policy any time we want and you have no rights. Your privacy is as good as public, as we don't guarantee nor warranty anything.
Not that I trust Google much more, but realize everything does not have to be Microsoft to be good.
Opening a wiki for creating laws is insane. It would just invite vandalism, and instead of leading to formation of new laws, it would waste money and manpower involved in maintanence and moderation.
Do you mean like our partisan bickering elected officials?
I think this is great. Not as open as I would like it but sure better than "government knows best".
Yep, there will be some hard up loser that will deface the pages, but there will also be the insightful post and ideas come forth.
What a long winded way to say the Windows update is such a horrible mess it isn't funny.
Me, I like rolled up file based updates. Download it and save it off. When the beta testers say it is OK, I apply. I have earned with over 20 OSes behind me that you patch to point in time from proven groups of patches. This idea of "auto" update is so fundamentally flawed...
Can anybody explain this huge difference? Is the cost of living in the US just so much higher than in Europe? Or does IT just pay a lot more in the US?
The US is an open market and it includes employment. Business will compete for employees that add value. When I was in Europe, it cost more to live there. Those that bash the US are either ignorant, envious or increasingly more so running Linux. If your skills are sharp, well worth the trip. If your a chair mushroom you might want to stay.
Up here in Canada, you're lucky to get 4% raise/Yr in IT.
Go virtually or physically to the US. Seriously. It is true, wages up and taxes low. I went down there for a few years on a TN-1. Had a gas. US I/T makes a lot more money than anywhere in Canada. The Canadian I/T market is apathetic and stagnant. Part of this is due to American companies are 50% of the market, and I/T is sourced to the US to scale.
Me, I do it virtually every working day. VPN in and do stuff. US paying customer of course. That is, you don't have to work for a Canadian company wage rate if you make your skills 100% virtual and keep your clients impressed.
If virtual, deduct your expenses too. And you can cut/have that Cuban cigar in the back yard 1 minute after work and spend no money on gas or patience on traffic. Me, I spend the traffic time I save on learning the next hot new skill my customers will want.
So what if they outpace the offical inflation rates? typically i've found inflation rates never reflect the true increase in the cost of living for most people.
I concur with you, government posted inflation rates are cooked. HR likes using this to temper the expected increases. Would any employer peg their employees wages to beer, gasoline, car prices, home prices? Doubtful.
The other blindingly obvious problem with IT is it's a thankless job.
I can see where your coming from in making this statement, I/T is often the whipping boy in corporations with far bigger problems not of I/Ts making. Few I/T shops are actually allowed to participate in technology choices are in fact slaves to the business leaders whom most often don't listen and don't know squat. In fact, if your average business manager was judged with the same scrutiny as a I/T technical person, they would have to fire most of them.
That being said, I find making computers go and do stuff; and a thrill of having thousands use my work. I build up a reputation of knowledgeable can-do and fix it good. I love doing this and do work the perception of being a professional and personable. So when a brain dead business manager who had a bad night with his wife is looking for trouble I ask them to leave my office, and get away with it. If you work it right, your power can be astounding.
but I wonder if there would be a market for a "legitimate" company to start offering such support after Microsoft abandons XP users?
Corporations might want to take a serious look at Linux, a real good look. Linux can now add that it's UI takes less time to learn and adapt to than Vista! It runs a lot less malware, yet runs anything your business needs. No lock-in. No DRM issues. Includes all the missing stuff like terminal services and office tools. Biggest one of all, your don't have to refit your corp with dual processors and memory to run it. Save your company a bundle. Pick a distro, does not take that long to evaluate.
But there is the unwillingness to lead...or do we pay the executives just to show up to push what Microsoft says we should do?
Microsoft claims they have sold 60M copies. I bet they will not disclose the fall out, downgrade and never seen powered up rates. 60M are not running Vista.
However, M$ fights unbundling tooth and nail (just look at the astroturfers here!) because the know damn well they have an unfair advantage because of it and they want to maintain their advantage and monopoly.
You hit the nail on the head with this one. The day Microsoft is held to the law and forced to unbundle it's OS from the system is the day their market share will plummet. As more people try Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora and others with Open Office the landscape will correct itself quickly.
...With the earlier system, the nagivation could rapidly be performed using just the keyboard. Some of the more experienced users were apparently so efficient with the older system that their productivity was reduced to 25% of what it was before the switch.
Going thought the pains of this ourselves. Were those.NET people off base on server estimates, almost 3 times as many servers as was pessimistically predicted and the users are just p'ssed. DBA are in a snit rightfully so that the SQL queries are not efficient at all.
Hopefully we can all learn from these lessons made obvious by this situation. Although given my years of experience, somehow I think that won't be the case.
You are far more optimistic than I am. Few companies today "engineer" their software. It is more often a brute force programming effort without architectural and performance guide lines. Front end unstable web interfaces on old back end code because newer programmers don't understand pointers and curses.
Poor quality programmers. Commodity is more important than quality. Sort of why I left 12 years of programming C/C++/DB as it was clear you were the underpaid grunt. Companies pay more for sales and hype than getting a real slick product that sells itself. Much of the complexity in todays apps is their own downfall.
My university is on the list. What slash/.ers want to give advice for what I can do about it?
Organize a protest.
Get everyone to pick a nice day and download something illegal and free. They are not going to go after 5000 students. Maybe even load up the profs computer with a few gigs of stuff.
Set the RIAA up. You download off of someone else's machine. Once they are about to convict has 20 students say they did it as a prank (maybe even true).
Lots of ways, your in college/university -- be creative.
The fact is that Intuit is ignoring Canadian's right to privacy of information. Therefore I call upon the will of the Canadian people to ignore Intuit's right to intellectual property.
I go one better. I haven't used them for 7 years and unload it every time I buy a new PC or Windows re-install. I even do this before my data moves on.
FOSS is where it is at. Less Spyware and no DRM (unless it is decoding/striping it out).
I understand the plight. After setting up Vista for the first time the other night I could not believe the amount of GUI changes in Vista. Especially when it came up on a cable modem PPPoE. Took me an hour to figure it out, it though we had a DSL dial up. Don't look for properties any more in the OS, they are now calling it "Settings" and is where the help used to be on many screens.
People would have less learning UI if they loaded Fedora 7 or RHat.
Sure glad I bought my last PC when I did. Still had XP on it with a promise of a free upgrade. Have the new disks. Just never applied the upgrade. Will not be applying any time soon either.
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problem was most likely due to a faulty flux-capacitor. Kind of mean, I know, but still funny as hell.
Funny as hell! While not without some element of truth either. Many mobo manufactures did have electrolytic capacitor troubles about 2000-2003 when there were a lot of defective parts being made. Not mentioning names, but some were big.
So true. But if you know which screw to turn, your not going to be paid $20/hr charging $80 and over pricing to run around in a silly looking vehicle.
And those problems were trivial. Not one idiot looked or heard the beeps? Come on, they were frauds!
To really know this inside out, takes 1000's of hours of personal time, it isn't a course you can take formally.
If you advertise yourself as a geek, pro, hacker, "professor" - then your probably following a cult for profit. Real "mechanics" don't advertise. They come to you (after screwing with the cheaper alternatives that don't work).
It's just as hard to find a good, read competent and honest, IT tech as it is to find a good car mechanic.
It is sad, 95% of the people in this business are "want-a-be" slugs and shouldn't be in this business at all. Those problems were trivial. A sad state in computer repair, the bottom of the bucket.
One hint here is if the person is actually good, they are not going to be running around in a silly looking car, working on selling stuff. Real "geeks" and I hate the word, don't advertise and work at jobs paying a lot more than any chain is willing to pay. Don't usually call themselves "geeks", "hackers" or "pros".
The good part is PCs are getting so cheap, you just toss it out if it breaks. The only thing a user should really worry about is making backups of data to a USB drive or CD/DVD. And if one brand breaks prematurely, buy a different one next time.
And that twit coping data, he should be charged with data theft.
There is no substitute for a good engineering team on a project like this. Perhaps a challenge for a local university of engineering students to help out.
But environmental concerns are that a PC isn't going to cut it. Imagine what salt water mist does when it gets sucked in.... My guess is you need ingenuity like you find on many of the devices on http://linuxdevices.com./
An SBC computer that is of low power and can be sealed from the elements. Many have no special needs for fans. You going to need the power to drive servos and motors so generating power from the sun and the boats motion including electricity storage is paramount. GPS and compass interfaces as well, possibly weather too. Maybe 2 SBC, one to control the boat and another to plan and guide the boat simple cross over Ethernet to communicate. You want a small computer(s) for space, weight and power consumption.
For software development, keep it simple. KISS rule applies. Don't get Java fancy, use straight up and simple C/C++ structures. Follow basic concepts of good embedded software design like avoiding memory allocation and associated leaks at run time. Modularize all the components. Find a good programmer(s) in embedded design and a good technical sailor and marry them if you have to. Having a good mechanical aptitude will help to. I am not sure how many servo systems you will need but they are needed and are the fingers of the system.
Design nothing of the hardware except plugging it in and sealing it from the elements, favoring COTs (common off the shelf) parts if available. Use a USB to a GPS for example. Or get the servos from an industrial shop. Your going to be under a time crunch to get that software working so leave as much time as you can to testing it. If it isn't tested, assume it does not work.
It is why I don't buy their product.
Seriously, I don't want to break the law nor do I want to infect my systems. So I don't buy CDs dates this century (root kits). I do buy them second hand if they are dated last century.
I don't know what goes on in the heads of these idiots, buy you buy a CD so you can upload it into something. You have to to use it. For if you can't upload it it is just a coaster. Yea, I am going to carry a home stereo system with me while I take a walk.
Sony, RIAA, your going out of business because your product is over encumbered with dumb assed laws, stupid root kits, a bad business model and over priced.
Sounds good. So then let's take a situation some years in the future where it's law. What happens when you are watching TV, and all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering. You call your cable company angry. They explain that TV is now delivered over IP, like everything else. Currently you have some neighbours hitting the P2P really heavy and it is using up enough of the segment that it is interfering with video traffic. They'd love to have video have a higher QoS, but alas the law says they can't. The "contents of your packets are none of their business."
Problems like above, while possible is 100% the issue of provisioning, or under provisioning. It has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Simply put native private services on an independent channel. Just like they do with VoIP. Don't mix private services with open internet services.
What net neutrality is supposed to stop is Telus, Bell, Rogers or Shaw would rather you pay per view using their open to the internet IP feed, and to artificially notch down YouTube or Google in their favor. Maybe even get a little payola from MSN to keep their QoS up while throttling Yahoo and Google. Or just as bad, get some Google payola to outright block MSN and Yahoo. These practices already occur, a mild form of censorship has been observed on my providors Internet access.
Net neutrality is about providing assurance of fair access to the bandwidth. It is about preventing anti-competitive practices creaping into your Internet viewing pleasure.
No fucking way is this going to work.
That is what I thought when I saw it on firehose yesterday and marked it binspam. We do need to get the moderators to research this a little before posting self indulgence stories. As I suspect the posters of such crap are using firehost to notch up their stories.
And you only tipped the edge. What if I sent 5000 messages to 5000 domains with the same senders address... oh the fun.
And more, but I will not bore the /. users with the lengthly list of flaws. He got his moment of fame past the ./ moderators.
Would very much like to see a headline like, "IBM replaces CEO with Muniyandi Appannakaruppandi Joshi, a graduate of Aiyyappa Institute of Mangagement Sciences (second class, registered with Govt of India), for one tenth of the salary."
I too would like to see this. Would have big bang for the buck. For just one CEO @ 12M USD you could have 120 North Americas finest, or 1200 overseas help desk people. Do the CFO and other VPs and you could have an army of talent. And if you actually hire real technical talent and focus on the products value it would not be so hard and expensive to sell the product.
(see what happens in google, etc). These people think they have a team of very good programmers but it's a bunch of tired old-timers.
Google old timers are very rich.
$25 x 640 = $16,000
There's your problem.
For an anonymous post you hit the nail on the head. And HD like Seagate are not sitting on their butts.
When Sandisk (or others) can come out with a 2TB billion times rewritable MTBF replacement AT THE SAME PRICE for my soon to be 4TB Seagate drive I will listen. I am not saying this tech is not inevitable, I just think it is 12-30 years out for mainstream. And there is always a possibility some new tech will plant them both in the ground.
Will it last as long as a standard hard drive?
Not a chance. Maybe in time. But don't count the days or wait for it. The HD is tried, true, cheap and is not going outdated any time soon. The time will come, but you could become very old waiting.
That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with /dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?
Not as many as you would think nor as many as the manufacturers would have you believe. Those devices, while handy as all can be to copy a DVD sized image between two distrusting hosts is handy, it is not a substitute for a HD. I have seen them go in 200 writes. But usually much more is usual. And not all brands are the same.
But they are getting to a size and with a little cost reduction compete with CD/DVD-ROMs, send out the tunes in a ultra small package, and re-usable. Quick, patent it so the patent trolls don't screw up the idea!
At some future, perhaps 10-20 years we will see solid state drives, but it isn't going to happen sooner without some pain and cost. 640GB of the stuff can't be cheap. And the rewrite issue has to be solved. And Seagate and others are looking towards 2TB and up in future developments. While the gap is closing, HD shipments are safe for at least a decade.
But one interesting idea posted I saw was, put a normally read only OS in the device, write little, load like lightening and use RAM there after except for the occasional patching. Get a worm, reboot to the static image. Use HD for user storage only.
Go with Microsoft. They actually have a privacy policy.
Yep, we own you. You cannot sue us. We reserver the right to change policy any time we want and you have no rights. Your privacy is as good as public, as we don't guarantee nor warranty anything.
Not that I trust Google much more, but realize everything does not have to be Microsoft to be good.
Opening a wiki for creating laws is insane. It would just invite vandalism, and instead of leading to formation of new laws, it would waste money and manpower involved in maintanence and moderation.
Do you mean like our partisan bickering elected officials?
I think this is great. Not as open as I would like it but sure better than "government knows best".
Yep, there will be some hard up loser that will deface the pages, but there will also be the insightful post and ideas come forth.
What a long winded way to say the Windows update is such a horrible mess it isn't funny.
Me, I like rolled up file based updates. Download it and save it off. When the beta testers say it is OK, I apply. I have earned with over 20 OSes behind me that you patch to point in time from proven groups of patches. This idea of "auto" update is so fundamentally flawed...
The Canadian government smells money, they make a grizzly look like a woosie.
--------------
Don't steal, the government hates competition.
Can anybody explain this huge difference? Is the cost of living in the US just so much higher than in Europe? Or does IT just pay a lot more in the US?
The US is an open market and it includes employment. Business will compete for employees that add value. When I was in Europe, it cost more to live there. Those that bash the US are either ignorant, envious or increasingly more so running Linux. If your skills are sharp, well worth the trip. If your a chair mushroom you might want to stay.
Up here in Canada, you're lucky to get 4% raise/Yr in IT.
Go virtually or physically to the US. Seriously. It is true, wages up and taxes low. I went down there for a few years on a TN-1. Had a gas. US I/T makes a lot more money than anywhere in Canada. The Canadian I/T market is apathetic and stagnant. Part of this is due to American companies are 50% of the market, and I/T is sourced to the US to scale.
Me, I do it virtually every working day. VPN in and do stuff. US paying customer of course. That is, you don't have to work for a Canadian company wage rate if you make your skills 100% virtual and keep your clients impressed.
If virtual, deduct your expenses too. And you can cut/have that Cuban cigar in the back yard 1 minute after work and spend no money on gas or patience on traffic. Me, I spend the traffic time I save on learning the next hot new skill my customers will want.
So what if they outpace the offical inflation rates? typically i've found inflation rates never reflect the true increase in the cost of living for most people.
I concur with you, government posted inflation rates are cooked. HR likes using this to temper the expected increases. Would any employer peg their employees wages to beer, gasoline, car prices, home prices? Doubtful.
The other blindingly obvious problem with IT is it's a thankless job.
I can see where your coming from in making this statement, I/T is often the whipping boy in corporations with far bigger problems not of I/Ts making. Few I/T shops are actually allowed to participate in technology choices are in fact slaves to the business leaders whom most often don't listen and don't know squat. In fact, if your average business manager was judged with the same scrutiny as a I/T technical person, they would have to fire most of them.
That being said, I find making computers go and do stuff; and a thrill of having thousands use my work. I build up a reputation of knowledgeable can-do and fix it good. I love doing this and do work the perception of being a professional and personable. So when a brain dead business manager who had a bad night with his wife is looking for trouble I ask them to leave my office, and get away with it. If you work it right, your power can be astounding.
but I wonder if there would be a market for a "legitimate" company to start offering such support after Microsoft abandons XP users?
Corporations might want to take a serious look at Linux, a real good look. Linux can now add that it's UI takes less time to learn and adapt to than Vista! It runs a lot less malware, yet runs anything your business needs. No lock-in. No DRM issues. Includes all the missing stuff like terminal services and office tools. Biggest one of all, your don't have to refit your corp with dual processors and memory to run it. Save your company a bundle. Pick a distro, does not take that long to evaluate.
But there is the unwillingness to lead...or do we pay the executives just to show up to push what Microsoft says we should do?
Microsoft claims they have sold 60M copies. I bet they will not disclose the fall out, downgrade and never seen powered up rates. 60M are not running Vista.
However, M$ fights unbundling tooth and nail (just look at the astroturfers here!) because the know damn well they have an unfair advantage because of it and they want to maintain their advantage and monopoly.
You hit the nail on the head with this one. The day Microsoft is held to the law and forced to unbundle it's OS from the system is the day their market share will plummet. As more people try Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora and others with Open Office the landscape will correct itself quickly.
Going thought the pains of this ourselves. Were those .NET people off base on server estimates, almost 3 times as many servers as was pessimistically predicted and the users are just p'ssed. DBA are in a snit rightfully so that the SQL queries are not efficient at all.
Hopefully we can all learn from these lessons made obvious by this situation. Although given my years of experience, somehow I think that won't be the case.
You are far more optimistic than I am. Few companies today "engineer" their software. It is more often a brute force programming effort without architectural and performance guide lines. Front end unstable web interfaces on old back end code because newer programmers don't understand pointers and curses.
Poor quality programmers. Commodity is more important than quality. Sort of why I left 12 years of programming C/C++/DB as it was clear you were the underpaid grunt. Companies pay more for sales and hype than getting a real slick product that sells itself. Much of the complexity in todays apps is their own downfall.
My university is on the list. What slash /.ers want to give advice for what I can do about it?
Organize a protest.
Get everyone to pick a nice day and download something illegal and free. They are not going to go after 5000 students. Maybe even load up the profs computer with a few gigs of stuff.
Set the RIAA up. You download off of someone else's machine. Once they are about to convict has 20 students say they did it as a prank (maybe even true).
Lots of ways, your in college/university -- be creative.
The fact is that Intuit is ignoring Canadian's right to privacy of information. Therefore I call upon the will of the Canadian people to ignore Intuit's right to intellectual property.
I go one better. I haven't used them for 7 years and unload it every time I buy a new PC or Windows re-install. I even do this before my data moves on.
FOSS is where it is at. Less Spyware and no DRM (unless it is decoding/striping it out).
I understand the plight. After setting up Vista for the first time the other night I could not believe the amount of GUI changes in Vista. Especially when it came up on a cable modem PPPoE. Took me an hour to figure it out, it though we had a DSL dial up. Don't look for properties any more in the OS, they are now calling it "Settings" and is where the help used to be on many screens.
People would have less learning UI if they loaded Fedora 7 or RHat.
Sure glad I bought my last PC when I did. Still had XP on it with a promise of a free upgrade. Have the new disks. Just never applied the upgrade. Will not be applying any time soon either.