Infonet Services Corp (now BTInfonet) used to offer a product that did this some 10 years ago. The application resided on your PC but enabled calls to analog telephones pretty much anywhere. Infonet is a global network provider and their networks covered Asia, Europe, the Americas and who knows what all. This enabled them to use their private data networks for a variety of services that were immune from the Internet.
thursdays update killed my system. every window scrolls up and down at 1000 mph. you can't click anything at all. so who cares about an animated cursor -- i need to stop the animated window. oh, i'd like to get my shift keys working again too. they are now backup to previous window keys. thanks microsoft
The problem is that nobody knows how many innocent people the RIAA has extorted money from. What about those who don't own computers? What about the 10 year old girl they just attacked? What about the dead woman?...
The only reason the college kids are paying up is because they can't afford to defend themselves. It is a lot like the protection racket used by organized crime and gangs today. Pay us or we'll really hurt you.
There was a deposition on Groklaw that pretty much sums up the fact that the RIAA identification techniques probably wouldn't stand a chance in court. There is a LOT of Doubt about the accuracy of the RIAA tactics. More than reasonable too.
I had Adelphia which was purchased by ComTrash. With Adelphia I had 6Mbit cable downloads and they were fast. After the acquisition by ComTrash, I was down with no service for 10 days. When the service came back, I was throttled down to 1 Mbit. Techs came and went - service remained at 1 Mbit. Customer [no] service was beyond worthless. They had no answers why the rate was so slow and they were unable to remedy the problem. They did want a rate hike though!!!
I finally cancelled both the net and the TV service. Now I use two different services (network and TV) and the cost is half as much for better service.
If you use ComTrash I recommend you consider your options.
Possible I suppose. I work primarily in the Insurance industries where a significant number of my clients are still at Windows 2000. While I live primarily in a "Solaris/Sun Enterprise - Oracle" environment, I do need to use a wide variety of Windows based 3rd party tools (Business Objects, Brio, Crystal Reports, Cisco tools, Informatica, etc.) As such, about 90% of my life is with Unix based stuff -- not M$.
The point is that this patch does a simple function -- it updates the registry to reflect the fix offered by M$. Does the registry, after the update, show the EXACT same data as the M$ Knowledge Base article says it should? Yes, it does. Was anything else changed? No. Did the patch work as advertised? Yes it did. When clocks changed forward by either network or manual setting, did the time yield what was expected? Yes it did? Did the mission critical applications function properly with the new times? Yes, they did?
So, why would I need more than 7 days to test this? It is a simple fix. Now, a big fix such as a new OS version, new network layer, new ODBC or such may require more than 7 days to properly evaluate but, this isn't one of those situations.
Because this is a very simple fix that could even be done manually per M$ instructions, $4,000 per license is pure highway robbery on the part of greedy M$. So, in this case, Microsoft is M$ for the Mega $ they're going to make on the enterprise. With my clients, we'll spend that money on something we need.
Why not? The enterprise uses many 3rd party software products for productivity. Some products are even home-grown. I've used 3rd party fixes many times in the enterprise. You thoroughly test them in the lab and if they solve the business problem, you roll them out. This vendor has been around a while and has an excellent reputation. Just because it isn't a M$ solution doesn't mean it is a bad solution.
I would think that a decent pilot using only a magnetic compass and a rough altimeter should be able to navigate to Japan. Especially if the pilot is in radio contact with anybody. The Sprit of St. Louis flew across the Atlantic without all the fancy instruments that we have today. You need a map, clock/wrist watch, compass and you should be able to get where you want to be.
I've spent a ton of time in various fighter simulators practicing on what you do if various systems fail. That's what the simulators are for - to teach you HOW to manage when all hell breaks loose.
Now if the F-22 doesn't even have a magnetic compass, I would seriously consider buying a magnetic compass or a Garmin GPS to carry with me if I were to be flying one of those.
You know that M$ is totally ripping you off when you can go to www.IntelliAdmin.com and get a FREE patch. I've used their patches in the past and often times they are a LOT cleaner and easier to use than those from the GREEDY M$.
Amazon seems to have a lot of problems with their pricing. Too many, in fact. Are we sure that they didn't do this intentionally to increase sales? It wouldn't be the first time a company pulled a stunt like this.
As I read the report, the first thing that hit me was using The Weather Channel as an accurate reference foundation to base all the other services against. I don't know about his geographic region but where I live, along the front range of the rockies, TWC is frequently wrong often reporting rain when the skies are clear and clear skies when it's snowing and 25 ft visibility.
Weather guessers here are rarely, if ever accurate as the mountains and Palmer Ridge play havoc with the weather. This caused me to ask, If his reference is flawed, then would the entire report be flawed?
The Weather Underground has numerous (4) weather stations in my zip code and they are usually right on top of each other regarding wind, temperature, barometrics, humidity and such. While the Weather Underground may not have the future down pat, their current readings are usually the most accurate I've found since these are weather stations where I live that are on line and reporting in near-real-time.
I would have liked to see the same report using other services as the reference to achieve some sort of correlation to his report. Maybe NWS, NOAA, Unisys or at least one more.
Another thing I do is bring up the NOAA maps in loop mode so I can see the direction of cloud travel, density and other things that may give an indication for short-term weather changes.
We get tons of lightning around here in the summer so this kind of accuracy is important around here. One source for lightning probability:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tdl/radar/SW_probltg.gif. There are other lightning sources that can show current and recent past (1 hour) lightning strikes by type and frequency and on a map (see Strike Star network. Some individuals even have Boltek lightning monitors running with StormVue software on the net.
I remember going to Win95 - a lot of excitement. 98 was a lot of fixes. 2000 Pro was the ultimate and XP was interesting.
The problem is that Vista doesn't have anything in it that interests me. It has a lot that doesn't. There has been nothing I've read that would cause me to spend days backing up, cleaning the drives, installing a new OS and then days installing all the software and peripheral devices all over again so that I can continue to do what I'm doing now.
If there is a reason other than having the latest bells and whistles, DRM, CRM and bloat, Microsoft has been ineffective in marketing it.
DRM is plagued with problems that were never really thought out. The implementations in use today are to solve an immediate need. In most cases, they are failing badly.
I work with some Indie record labels and none of them employ DRM except for what they sell on iTunes. Their CDs are all clean. They have recently come under fire for CMT videos not playing in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc. To counter this Microsoft PC only issue, they have now started posting the music videos on YouTube.com also. They had to as nearly 30% of their audience couldn't watch the videos.
But, we come to an even bigger problem. Obsolesence. Labels get bought and sold. Media changes (cylinder - 78 - 45 - LP - EP - CD - SACD - Digital.....) So, it is quite likely that any mechanism employed today won't work in the future and, at the rate of technology evolution, that won't take too long. At some point, the music becomes unaccessible. You paid for it. You licensed it. But you can't listen to it.
We also have copyright issues. Lets say in 50 years the copyright expires and the music becomes public domain. How to you remove the DRM? How does one make the music available to the general public once it is in the public domain? Under DMCA you can't - even if it is for legitimate use.
Finally for historical and archive purposes one would need to keep the playback mechanisms current, licensed and capable for playing old DRM'd content. In 100 years if somebody wanted to do research and study 1990-2010 music of a particular genre, it would probably be much more difficult due to DRM'd media getting in the way. How do you play, restore and repackage the DRM's oldies?
The DRM people haven't seriously looked at the cultural and social long-term impact of DRM. They don't really care as that doesn't bring revenue to their pockets but society does care but society doesn't have a voice or lobby power that RIAA/MPAA/BMI/ASCAP and the other Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) do.
Thanks for all the comments. It was refreshing to see a couple of/. readers that have used pro AV tools for HD creation with Dolby sound. A lot of the comments fell into the platform/os preference bucket and some accused me of FUD or Trolling which, was not my intent at all. We will evaluate a Mac for speed since it takes a lot of horsepower to do HD-DVD quality production. The other option will be to stick with what we have for a while and not go the Vista route at this time.
The products that we use are Windows platform applications -- mostly from Adobe Systems. With that being the case, we will need to run on Windows platforms until such a time that these products run on other hardware/software.
Actually, XP is faster on faster boxes but Win2K is faster on a comparable box. The newer systems have XP simply because we can't purchase 2K anymore. The limiting factor for text processing and transaction processing is the human factor - not the computer. People who type at 70 WPM are still a LOT slower than the box.
Some of the in-house programs written by folks no longer around also do not run on XP. These are being rewritten and recompiled but, this takes time and resources (dollars) too so the cost of upgrades isn't just hardware and software but also includes consulting, programming, testing and other aspects.
So, migration will happen by the slow pace of upgrades as required but I don't see it happening in a big way in the domain which I work in.
And honestly, people can argue until theyre blue in the face about how XP is fine, but the reality is that its five years old, technology has changed and a new OS is necessary."
Really? Why?
The companies I consult for have thousands of PCs that they depreciate over either a 5 year (desktop) or 9 year (server) period. In order to run Vista, these companies would need to upgrade all their PCs too. That just isn't in their budgets.
And what does Vista have that the business world really needs? The business doesn't need media player, the ability to make videos, eye-candy, fancy graphics, etc. The systems spend almost their entire lives doing siimple text based functions, data entry and reporting, Intranet now and then and some development work. They don't need DRM, that's for sure. They don't need 95% of what Vista brings to the party. So, why go to the expense to upgrade?
So what does the company use? Almost all the systems in the call-center, operations and such are still at Windows 2000. They didn't do the upgrade to XP because there was no justification other than M$ marketing noise. In reality, there wasn't an adequate return on the investment and the risk was too high. These are factors that the author of the article and M$ continue to ignore.
Doing work in the financial, insurance and pension domain, I have seen many companies still using NT and Win 2K. The only XP systems I've seen have been on some execs desks and the greeter's desk in the lobby. Once you're past the gate, XP is very rare and Vista is non-existant.
Business environments don't require anti-phishing since the systems can't even get to the Internet. They don't require media stuff, sound cards and such since the users are prohibited form enjoying music on the systems. Very few boxes even have CD drive much less a DVD drive for installation. All that is done over the internal networks.
So, based on that environment, what does Vista bring to the party? Why would my clients want to go to the time, expense and added support issues of upgrading? These are questions M$ has never answered in a business perspective.
I winterize my mountain cabin every year and since the late '60s have not had a problem. Considering that it gets to -40 or colder every winter in the mountains where it is, I know that things would freeze if I let them. The frost line is at least 2 feet below the surface too.
Turn off all the water at the mains. If you use a well, drain the lines, tank and pump. (You'll need to bring water when you return to prime the system but usually only 5 gallons or less is needed.) Usually a valve in or near your front yard will control the water to your home. Just turn it off. If you can't find it, there is also a valve in your home that does the same thing but, it is exposed.
Then drain everything that has water in it -- don't forget the hot water heater, toilet tanks, etc.
Pour a half bottle of antifreeze down the sinks, into the dishwasher, toilets, and other plumbing that can't be drained. If you are on Septic system, make sure you use an antifreeze product that won't kill your tank!!! Leave all the doors under sinks and such open to allow residual heat to get to the pipes.
Have a nice trip! Bring priming water with you or get some near by when you return. Turn on the power. If you're on a well, prime the pump and turn it on. Run the water for about 5 minutes on every faucet to flush the antifreeze away and clean the pipes and you're back to normal.
I do consulting around the Denter Tech Center for major Fortune 1000 corporations and there are so many that are still on Windows 2000, NT4, Windows 98!! and what have you. Very Few have XP employed anywhere except for secretarial functions. The work horses are not XP and they won't be going to Vista either.
The reason is simple - some of their legacy and custom apps don't run on XP. Some of their PDF web forms don't function properly with IE7. The problems and the costs associated with addressing this are not in balance with the return on investment to do so.
Looking at what the systems are being used for, a Windows 3.1 box would probably be sufficient. Many are used for data input, call center operations, manufacturig, program management (MS Project, Accell, etc.) and such. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by upgrading the software and, with vista, the hardware too. If it works, don't fix it.
IT dollars are short and can be better spent on expanding the infrastructure, network, Sun servers, mainframes, etc. The PCs are on every desk but the multi-media is disabled. games are removed, many Windows fluff is gone. These boxes, for the most part, can't even access the Internet as they are blocked by company policy. The intranet is usable but doesn't require anything fancy. Even corporate reporting using Business Objects and Crystal Reports are only used by a select few in senior management.
"Where is the need?" is what we're always talking about. There is nothing in XP or Vista that is necessary for the offices to function. There is nothing that will make them more efficient or cost effective. When you are talking thousands of PCs to upgrade and software re-writes and testing, the justification isn't there to make the switch.
Maybe it is time to get some real entrepreneural CEOs back on board - somebody with the insights of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Carly screwed things up and now Dunn isn't doing much better.
Remember their great test equipment? Their calculators? Other advanced technology? Those days passed on. The women want their PCs and servers and can't seem to see beyond that. Oh, ripping off the consumer for ink is another female created advancement.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were just ahead of their time and were ethical, inventive and made the name a world-wide recognized leader.
Between myself, my wife and... We have several computers in the home. We also have a lot of music and videos on computer.
So, we bought a used 1.2 GHz computer. Loaded it up with disk drives, linux and samba. Added a Gigabit ethernet and some memory but kept it pretty simple. We plugged it into our network switch and away we go.
We backup all of the computers in the house to the server every night over the 1-Gbit network to the server.
The server is a RAID configuration of four 300GB drives so if we lose a drive, we're still OK (we lose two at once, we're screwed).
Then, we just burn incremental DVDs every night and full backups once a week. It's a scheduled task so we just put the DVD blank in at night and go to bed. In the morning, we remove it, put it away and go on our merry way.
We keep the DVDs locked up in our fire vault. You could use a bank safety deposit box or a relative's home or whatever. You want the media secure from theft but readily available.
With low cost used computers and low cost HDD media today, it's a simple solution. No fancy sound cards, video cards and such - just a basic file server with enough capacity to handle the network demands.
I worked for a major life insurance company a few years back and all of the desktops were X-Terminals. Windows ran on a bunch of Citrix boxes. File storage was on the Sun enterprise servers. It was great! In IT, I was always running around between buildings and such. Where ever I was, I'd just login and there was my desktop and all it's tools. Users weren't losing data due to disk crashes and such. It made the IT job a lot simpler.
Admin was also easier with only a few installations to be maintained rather than 2000+ desktop machines.
With over 500 printers scattered throughout the company, it was also very easy for any user to print to any printer with a minimum of effort. Everything from simple HP printers to Xerox DocuTechs were available. Again, all the printers could be restricted by users and groups. Another nice benefit.
Various groups had access to their mainframe and application suites while other group users would not. Thus any user in Pensions could sit at any desk and do their Pension work. This was great as they were always moving people around in the buildings and doing some sort of construction.
Costs were lower, admin was easier and productivity was higher.
Is this the right solution for everybody? Probably not. For the huge enterprise, it was a winning configuration. For the small and medium enterprise, it may not be.
According to various articles scattered around the net, the Unix flavors included Solaris, HP-UX, etc. But, I have seen no references to NetBSD or FreeBSD as a Unix that was evaluated.
While boxes are boxes and OSs are OSs, the application that the server is running needs to be factored in. There are many cases where a BSD server may be a better choice than Linux or Windows just as there are cases where Linux or Windows may be the better choice. I found it interesting that I can find no reference to a BSD Unix in any of the links to the study.
So, since this study has so many unanswered questions relating to function, measurement criteria (what is considered downtime?), application, hardware, etc., the survey is pretty much worthless.
Box+OS is a tool and I use the right tool for the job. One size does not fit all solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Infonet Services Corp (now BTInfonet) used to offer a product that did this some 10 years ago. The application resided on your PC but enabled calls to analog telephones pretty much anywhere. Infonet is a global network provider and their networks covered Asia, Europe, the Americas and who knows what all. This enabled them to use their private data networks for a variety of services that were immune from the Internet.
thursdays update killed my system. every window scrolls up and down at 1000 mph. you can't click anything at all. so who cares about an animated cursor -- i need to stop the animated window. oh, i'd like to get my shift keys working again too. they are now backup to previous window keys. thanks microsoft
The problem is that nobody knows how many innocent people the RIAA has extorted money from. What about those who don't own computers? What about the 10 year old girl they just attacked? What about the dead woman? ...
The only reason the college kids are paying up is because they can't afford to defend themselves. It is a lot like the protection racket used by organized crime and gangs today. Pay us or we'll really hurt you.
There was a deposition on Groklaw that pretty much sums up the fact that the RIAA identification techniques probably wouldn't stand a chance in court. There is a LOT of Doubt about the accuracy of the RIAA tactics. More than reasonable too.
I had Adelphia which was purchased by ComTrash. With Adelphia I had 6Mbit cable downloads and they were fast. After the acquisition by ComTrash, I was down with no service for 10 days. When the service came back, I was throttled down to 1 Mbit. Techs came and went - service remained at 1 Mbit. Customer [no] service was beyond worthless. They had no answers why the rate was so slow and they were unable to remedy the problem. They did want a rate hike though!!!
I finally cancelled both the net and the TV service. Now I use two different services (network and TV) and the cost is half as much for better service.
If you use ComTrash I recommend you consider your options.
Possible I suppose. I work primarily in the Insurance industries where a significant number of my clients are still at Windows 2000. While I live primarily in a "Solaris/Sun Enterprise - Oracle" environment, I do need to use a wide variety of Windows based 3rd party tools (Business Objects, Brio, Crystal Reports, Cisco tools, Informatica, etc.) As such, about 90% of my life is with Unix based stuff -- not M$.
The point is that this patch does a simple function -- it updates the registry to reflect the fix offered by M$. Does the registry, after the update, show the EXACT same data as the M$ Knowledge Base article says it should? Yes, it does. Was anything else changed? No. Did the patch work as advertised? Yes it did. When clocks changed forward by either network or manual setting, did the time yield what was expected? Yes it did? Did the mission critical applications function properly with the new times? Yes, they did?
So, why would I need more than 7 days to test this? It is a simple fix. Now, a big fix such as a new OS version, new network layer, new ODBC or such may require more than 7 days to properly evaluate but, this isn't one of those situations.
Because this is a very simple fix that could even be done manually per M$ instructions, $4,000 per license is pure highway robbery on the part of greedy M$. So, in this case, Microsoft is M$ for the Mega $ they're going to make on the enterprise. With my clients, we'll spend that money on something we need.
Why not? The enterprise uses many 3rd party software products for productivity. Some products are even home-grown. I've used 3rd party fixes many times in the enterprise. You thoroughly test them in the lab and if they solve the business problem, you roll them out. This vendor has been around a while and has an excellent reputation. Just because it isn't a M$ solution doesn't mean it is a bad solution.
I would think that a decent pilot using only a magnetic compass and a rough altimeter should be able to navigate to Japan. Especially if the pilot is in radio contact with anybody. The Sprit of St. Louis flew across the Atlantic without all the fancy instruments that we have today. You need a map, clock/wrist watch, compass and you should be able to get where you want to be.
I've spent a ton of time in various fighter simulators practicing on what you do if various systems fail. That's what the simulators are for - to teach you HOW to manage when all hell breaks loose.
Now if the F-22 doesn't even have a magnetic compass, I would seriously consider buying a magnetic compass or a Garmin GPS to carry with me if I were to be flying one of those.
Always worth a try!
I thought they were still on Windows Server 2003 running MS SQL Server.
Now, had they been running Linux and MySQL on an IBM monster box things would have probably been different
Amazon seems to have a lot of problems with their pricing. Too many, in fact. Are we sure that they didn't do this intentionally to increase sales? It wouldn't be the first time a company pulled a stunt like this.
Weather guessers here are rarely, if ever accurate as the mountains and Palmer Ridge play havoc with the weather. This caused me to ask, If his reference is flawed, then would the entire report be flawed?
The Weather Underground has numerous (4) weather stations in my zip code and they are usually right on top of each other regarding wind, temperature, barometrics, humidity and such. While the Weather Underground may not have the future down pat, their current readings are usually the most accurate I've found since these are weather stations where I live that are on line and reporting in near-real-time.
I would have liked to see the same report using other services as the reference to achieve some sort of correlation to his report. Maybe NWS, NOAA, Unisys or at least one more.
Another thing I do is bring up the NOAA maps in loop mode so I can see the direction of cloud travel, density and other things that may give an indication for short-term weather changes.
We get tons of lightning around here in the summer so this kind of accuracy is important around here. One source for lightning probability: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tdl/radar/SW_probltg.gif. There are other lightning sources that can show current and recent past (1 hour) lightning strikes by type and frequency and on a map (see Strike Star network. Some individuals even have Boltek lightning monitors running with StormVue software on the net.
Interesting report. Questions still exist.
Dell just released a statement that they were dropping AMD in favor of Intel again. So, money does buy happiness (for intel).
I remember going to Win95 - a lot of excitement. 98 was a lot of fixes. 2000 Pro was the ultimate and XP was interesting.
The problem is that Vista doesn't have anything in it that interests me. It has a lot that doesn't. There has been nothing I've read that would cause me to spend days backing up, cleaning the drives, installing a new OS and then days installing all the software and peripheral devices all over again so that I can continue to do what I'm doing now.
If there is a reason other than having the latest bells and whistles, DRM, CRM and bloat, Microsoft has been ineffective in marketing it.
DRM is plagued with problems that were never really thought out. The implementations in use today are to solve an immediate need. In most cases, they are failing badly.
I work with some Indie record labels and none of them employ DRM except for what they sell on iTunes. Their CDs are all clean. They have recently come under fire for CMT videos not playing in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc. To counter this Microsoft PC only issue, they have now started posting the music videos on YouTube.com also. They had to as nearly 30% of their audience couldn't watch the videos.
But, we come to an even bigger problem. Obsolesence. Labels get bought and sold. Media changes (cylinder - 78 - 45 - LP - EP - CD - SACD - Digital.....) So, it is quite likely that any mechanism employed today won't work in the future and, at the rate of technology evolution, that won't take too long. At some point, the music becomes unaccessible. You paid for it. You licensed it. But you can't listen to it.
We also have copyright issues. Lets say in 50 years the copyright expires and the music becomes public domain. How to you remove the DRM? How does one make the music available to the general public once it is in the public domain? Under DMCA you can't - even if it is for legitimate use.
Finally for historical and archive purposes one would need to keep the playback mechanisms current, licensed and capable for playing old DRM'd content. In 100 years if somebody wanted to do research and study 1990-2010 music of a particular genre, it would probably be much more difficult due to DRM'd media getting in the way. How do you play, restore and repackage the DRM's oldies?
The DRM people haven't seriously looked at the cultural and social long-term impact of DRM. They don't really care as that doesn't bring revenue to their pockets but society does care but society doesn't have a voice or lobby power that RIAA/MPAA/BMI/ASCAP and the other Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) do.
Thanks for all the comments. It was refreshing to see a couple of /. readers that have used pro AV tools for HD creation with Dolby sound. A lot of the comments fell into the platform/os preference bucket and some accused me of FUD or Trolling which, was not my intent at all. We will evaluate a Mac for speed since it takes a lot of horsepower to do HD-DVD quality production. The other option will be to stick with what we have for a while and not go the Vista route at this time.
Thanks again!
The products that we use are Windows platform applications -- mostly from Adobe Systems. With that being the case, we will need to run on Windows platforms until such a time that these products run on other hardware/software.
Actually, XP is faster on faster boxes but Win2K is faster on a comparable box. The newer systems have XP simply because we can't purchase 2K anymore. The limiting factor for text processing and transaction processing is the human factor - not the computer. People who type at 70 WPM are still a LOT slower than the box.
Some of the in-house programs written by folks no longer around also do not run on XP. These are being rewritten and recompiled but, this takes time and resources (dollars) too so the cost of upgrades isn't just hardware and software but also includes consulting, programming, testing and other aspects.
So, migration will happen by the slow pace of upgrades as required but I don't see it happening in a big way in the domain which I work in.
Really? Why?
The companies I consult for have thousands of PCs that they depreciate over either a 5 year (desktop) or 9 year (server) period. In order to run Vista, these companies would need to upgrade all their PCs too. That just isn't in their budgets.
And what does Vista have that the business world really needs? The business doesn't need media player, the ability to make videos, eye-candy, fancy graphics, etc. The systems spend almost their entire lives doing siimple text based functions, data entry and reporting, Intranet now and then and some development work. They don't need DRM, that's for sure. They don't need 95% of what Vista brings to the party. So, why go to the expense to upgrade?
So what does the company use? Almost all the systems in the call-center, operations and such are still at Windows 2000. They didn't do the upgrade to XP because there was no justification other than M$ marketing noise. In reality, there wasn't an adequate return on the investment and the risk was too high. These are factors that the author of the article and M$ continue to ignore.
Doing work in the financial, insurance and pension domain, I have seen many companies still using NT and Win 2K. The only XP systems I've seen have been on some execs desks and the greeter's desk in the lobby. Once you're past the gate, XP is very rare and Vista is non-existant.
Business environments don't require anti-phishing since the systems can't even get to the Internet. They don't require media stuff, sound cards and such since the users are prohibited form enjoying music on the systems. Very few boxes even have CD drive much less a DVD drive for installation. All that is done over the internal networks.
So, based on that environment, what does Vista bring to the party? Why would my clients want to go to the time, expense and added support issues of upgrading? These are questions M$ has never answered in a business perspective.
I winterize my mountain cabin every year and since the late '60s have not had a problem. Considering that it gets to -40 or colder every winter in the mountains where it is, I know that things would freeze if I let them. The frost line is at least 2 feet below the surface too.
Turn off all the water at the mains. If you use a well, drain the lines, tank and pump. (You'll need to bring water when you return to prime the system but usually only 5 gallons or less is needed.) Usually a valve in or near your front yard will control the water to your home. Just turn it off. If you can't find it, there is also a valve in your home that does the same thing but, it is exposed.
Then drain everything that has water in it -- don't forget the hot water heater, toilet tanks, etc.
Pour a half bottle of antifreeze down the sinks, into the dishwasher, toilets, and other plumbing that can't be drained. If you are on Septic system, make sure you use an antifreeze product that won't kill your tank!!! Leave all the doors under sinks and such open to allow residual heat to get to the pipes.
Have a nice trip! Bring priming water with you or get some near by when you return. Turn on the power. If you're on a well, prime the pump and turn it on. Run the water for about 5 minutes on every faucet to flush the antifreeze away and clean the pipes and you're back to normal.
I do consulting around the Denter Tech Center for major Fortune 1000 corporations and there are so many that are still on Windows 2000, NT4, Windows 98!! and what have you. Very Few have XP employed anywhere except for secretarial functions. The work horses are not XP and they won't be going to Vista either.
The reason is simple - some of their legacy and custom apps don't run on XP. Some of their PDF web forms don't function properly with IE7. The problems and the costs associated with addressing this are not in balance with the return on investment to do so.
Looking at what the systems are being used for, a Windows 3.1 box would probably be sufficient. Many are used for data input, call center operations, manufacturig, program management (MS Project, Accell, etc.) and such. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by upgrading the software and, with vista, the hardware too. If it works, don't fix it.
IT dollars are short and can be better spent on expanding the infrastructure, network, Sun servers, mainframes, etc. The PCs are on every desk but the multi-media is disabled. games are removed, many Windows fluff is gone. These boxes, for the most part, can't even access the Internet as they are blocked by company policy. The intranet is usable but doesn't require anything fancy. Even corporate reporting using Business Objects and Crystal Reports are only used by a select few in senior management.
"Where is the need?" is what we're always talking about. There is nothing in XP or Vista that is necessary for the offices to function. There is nothing that will make them more efficient or cost effective. When you are talking thousands of PCs to upgrade and software re-writes and testing, the justification isn't there to make the switch.
Maybe it is time to get some real entrepreneural CEOs back on board - somebody with the insights of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Carly screwed things up and now Dunn isn't doing much better.
Remember their great test equipment? Their calculators? Other advanced technology? Those days passed on. The women want their PCs and servers and can't seem to see beyond that. Oh, ripping off the consumer for ink is another female created advancement.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were just ahead of their time and were ethical, inventive and made the name a world-wide recognized leader.
Between myself, my wife and ... We have several computers in the home. We also have a lot of music and videos on computer.
So, we bought a used 1.2 GHz computer. Loaded it up with disk drives, linux and samba. Added a Gigabit ethernet and some memory but kept it pretty simple. We plugged it into our network switch and away we go.
We backup all of the computers in the house to the server every night over the 1-Gbit network to the server.
The server is a RAID configuration of four 300GB drives so if we lose a drive, we're still OK (we lose two at once, we're screwed).
Then, we just burn incremental DVDs every night and full backups once a week. It's a scheduled task so we just put the DVD blank in at night and go to bed. In the morning, we remove it, put it away and go on our merry way.
We keep the DVDs locked up in our fire vault. You could use a bank safety deposit box or a relative's home or whatever. You want the media secure from theft but readily available.
With low cost used computers and low cost HDD media today, it's a simple solution. No fancy sound cards, video cards and such - just a basic file server with enough capacity to handle the network demands.
I worked for a major life insurance company a few years back and all of the desktops were X-Terminals. Windows ran on a bunch of Citrix boxes. File storage was on the Sun enterprise servers. It was great! In IT, I was always running around between buildings and such. Where ever I was, I'd just login and there was my desktop and all it's tools. Users weren't losing data due to disk crashes and such. It made the IT job a lot simpler.
Admin was also easier with only a few installations to be maintained rather than 2000+ desktop machines.
With over 500 printers scattered throughout the company, it was also very easy for any user to print to any printer with a minimum of effort. Everything from simple HP printers to Xerox DocuTechs were available. Again, all the printers could be restricted by users and groups. Another nice benefit.
Various groups had access to their mainframe and application suites while other group users would not. Thus any user in Pensions could sit at any desk and do their Pension work. This was great as they were always moving people around in the buildings and doing some sort of construction.
Costs were lower, admin was easier and productivity was higher.
Is this the right solution for everybody? Probably not. For the huge enterprise, it was a winning configuration. For the small and medium enterprise, it may not be.
According to various articles scattered around the net, the Unix flavors included Solaris, HP-UX, etc. But, I have seen no references to NetBSD or FreeBSD as a Unix that was evaluated.
While boxes are boxes and OSs are OSs, the application that the server is running needs to be factored in. There are many cases where a BSD server may be a better choice than Linux or Windows just as there are cases where Linux or Windows may be the better choice. I found it interesting that I can find no reference to a BSD Unix in any of the links to the study.
So, since this study has so many unanswered questions relating to function, measurement criteria (what is considered downtime?), application, hardware, etc., the survey is pretty much worthless.
Box+OS is a tool and I use the right tool for the job. One size does not fit all solutions.
RIAA