Close but no cigar there. Evolutionists don't even attempt to explain how life began, they state simply that life has evolved and this is fact as we've seen it even in our lifetimes. Evolution is very real and quite observable. Think babies born with tails even to this day. Other theories of how we evolved are up for debate and further study.
Science only attempts to explain what has been observed. Religion as I've seen it attempts to explain a possibility but it isn't based on reality or what has been observed and measured. It attempts to address what we haven't discovered yet but it is often used as a scapegoat. God will cure my fever because I have faith when in reality evolution has given you a great deal of adaptive responses to your environment. Combine that with other knowledge of fever reducing agents either herbal or with synthetic drugs and you take your life into your own hands.
Religion has it's benefits as well as its downsides. A lot of sciences are the same way as well since a lot of technology has both good and bad uses. Still, I wonder what would be inherently superior about the mind of a God as opposed to us. I haven't seen any limit to what the brain can or cannot understand with the proper context and if that is the case then why should we worship someone who can do the same thing as us? It is only nature as you look at celebrities and how they are also worshipped. People want to believe they are part of something bigger and for the people that need this there is religion.
Wasn't talking about Israel, they also don't have a problem with water, at the expense of their neighbors. We have the same problem here in Arizona with Nevada cloud seeding. Ironically 50 years ago AZ got sued by Nevada for that very same practice. Funny how we resolved the dispute without any violence that wasn't alcohol related up in Vegas.
Why should you have to prove you are who you say you are? It matters not who I am, it matters that I am unarmed and just bringing my friends a beer. When did we have to start identifying everybody to get things done? People are going way overboard and this system is just going to get royally abused much like the social security system.
Very nice reply, I personally wouldn't have been thinking in that direction but crop production and water management are two key issues in the middle east as well and science has a huge role to play there. It is interesting how many people think science is around to solve technical issues alone and ignore the impact it has had on our lives personally, emotionally, and geographically. Traveling from one end of the U.S. to the other and back again for Christmas has done a lot to keep my close with my family who is on the east coast. I guess most people just don't take the time to think about how knowledge and research has directly effected their lives along with everyone they know.
haha, you're not suggesting feed a cold, starve a fever is inaccurate are you?
It is funny how the parent assumes that everyone came from a sane upbringing where reason was taught rather than irrational hatred or any of the myriad of other attributes that make up this diverse world we live in.
Much of what we know as common sense now wasn't so common 200 years ago though and everything does need to get examined as you said, either through disastrous policy where thousands are injured or dead like Katrina or through scientific study before hand saving lives at the cost of money. Sounds like a no-brainer to me but I'm crazy like that.
What experience is it that tells you throughput for a gigabit link would be that low? Even 100meg with a PCI bus can net you 70meg throughput depending on contents. My experience with gigabit links on my desktop are significantly higher than that. A gigabit link with a PCI bus tops out around 400megabit last I recall. When you move up to PCI-E and PCI-X then you can hit around 800megabit on a fiber connection losing the end with regular tcp/ip overhead. I can do 136megabit using my laptop hard drive to transfer a large web log to my server. That's a crappy laptop with a slow hard drive let alone a modern SATA 150 or SATA 300 hard drive.
Wow, what the hell equipment are you running? My laptop is 2.4ghz Pentium M and I can transfer a gig in a minute. That's ~17megabytes/sec. Sounds to me like your network is either congested or your file server is sorely lacking. Hell, with my 14drive SATA array I break 550megabytes/sec of effective throughput on my file-servers. My SAN boasts even more performance so I see this stuff as becoming very useful. I can't utilize 100gbit but 10gbit I could certainly saturate pretty easily. Think VMWare images pushed to the desktop to provide users with a consistent clean work environment.
Another use for me at least would be transport of raw video so other machines could do the encoding so then I don't have to worry about having hardware do the whole thing in real-time on one box. Fortunately dual Opterons with dual cores provides enough for me to encode 4 streams in real-time but eventually I'll probably want more than 4 streams and a faster network connection would certainly help with that.
Last I checked with a 1gz processor and 512megs of ram you can indeed run Vista. That puts your computer a little over 4 years old. What's cracked out about that? I used an obvious example because the parent didn't state where the line was between a computer being obsolete and still being included in the supported hardware.
WGA doesn't apply to me or most of corporate America as all updates are performed through SMS and not Windows Updates. Same goes with Product Activation since everything is volume license.
What you see here is Microsoft trying to push the same product for Home as they do for corporate customers. That is a problem and I imagine after Vista MS will correct this realizing just how different the computing requirements are especially given that volume license versions of their products are readily available for download so WGA and Activation are pointless to prevent piracy.
Also, last I checked Play for Sure was an attempt to legitimize downloading content online and so the AAs were indeed involved in it's creation since MS saw a huge potential liability. Of course it was a failure and this is just a history lesson at this point.
Beyond that how does your comment about Palladium relate to my post? The MPAA dictated to Microsoft the conditions that would be required to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. This is of course in concert with the hardware manufacturers but Microsoft played no part at least that we know of. This is a bit like me disabling the ability edit notes in our in-house app so they can be used should a lawsuit ever occur and the notes would explain our actions. Yeah, everyone hated the change because their mistakes could be seen and they couldn't correct them but my boss handed me this requirement for our application and I implemented it. What should Microsoft have done? Declared they wouldn't play HD content on Vista? That would make great business sense.
That's an interesting view of reality you have there. You believe Microsoft invented the hardware restrictions that the MPAA and RIAA are trying to force down our throats? Sounds to me like you've missed your mark completely. Microsoft is a software company and if they want to play encrypted content it is good business for them to support it. There are no restrictions whatsoever on non-encrypted content so I still don't see what your gripe is.
Backwards compatibility is not a feature, if you're going to complain about it then let's have a discussion about computers unable to run SUSE 10.1. Why can't I run it on my 386? or my 486? Why oh why did they remove that feature they are evil. Get over it, Microsoft saw that newer machines were largely going to waste with CPU usage below even 1% so they decided that they could utilize more of it and make the user experience more enjoyable. Their level of success is up for debate but calling backwards compatibility a feature is just not right. Sure it could play into your decision process to buy or not but it's not a feature of the product. I can buy my nice new THX speakers and they will sound great, oh, now they are 30% off? That feature puts it over the top for me, I'll buy em!
If your employees are losing an entire day to an upgrade then you need to fire your IT staff and hire some people capable of deploying software in general.
With a basic RIS setup and SMS you can have the machines upgraded including the new office and whatever custom apps you have in an hour completely unattended in the middle of the night. So your employees don't lose any work time and immediately can enjoy the advanced search capabilities so finding files is much much faster which saves your workers a measurable amount of time. In addition to this you have one search interface for email/files/music/web so they become familiar with one tool instead of trying to learn 4 different tools.
I wouldn't drop $2000 on a new desktop either unless I'm doing some video editing with it. You're right though, if you don't see a clear benefit then there is absolutely no need to upgrade. The new features won't help everyone but at least in my organization the advanced remote management and diagnostic tools will save me tons of man hours and the granular group policy changes will help me make sure systems are locked down properly saving me tons of time during my next security audit.
Of course I haven't deployed Vista yet and I won't until it's hardware refresh time but there are very real reasons some may do so. For now I'm focusing on growing the network infrastructure since the company is small enough that I can put a certain level of trust in my users. When the next refresh comes around I will remove the chance and move on to my next project relying on the content management system to ease the file search nightmare.
That's all well and good, but what features exactly were taken away in Vista that were found in XP? How is playback of encrypted content a bad thing? Is there some magic mechanism which disables your ability to play unencrypted content?
You may very well be right in that MS wants people to buy new hardware although this makes very little sense given that Microsoft is not primarily a hardware company. This type of move would make sense if Apple did it given that they provide both but in your context I just see one logical leap after the next.
Of course I could be the one that's way off base, I'll leave it to you to decide that.
Thank you for providing sanity to the completely insane idea that the real world is black and white or binary. Most people recognize the real world as analog with limitless options. Every time someone uses the world liberal or conservative to describe a group of people I almost immediately stop listening as this categorization is completely pointless since most "neo-conservatives" are actually incredibly liberal with their spending while "liberals" are calling for oversight in all the spending. Everything is backwards so I throw out the democrat, republican, conservative, liberal stuff and instead focus on individual hypocrisy.
I wish more people understood that the reason America got ahead was because we fought better than everybody else. We stood for what was good and true and abandoning the principles of which we were founded upon is both not necessary and incredibly counter-productive. How can we say we're right when we're using the same universally condemned tactics. To use a cheesy quote from Top Gun,; "You need to be doing it better, and cleaner than the other guy." There is no reason we need to resort to torture and other tactics we've cast off as immoral over the years. Sure there were cases in the past where torture occurred, pretty much under every president there were cases. In the end it was never considered acceptable or a preferred method of treatment since it is very ineffective is most scenarios. Of course all that has changed.
Why would Bill Gates need a political party affiliation to win? He doesn't need their money and he certainly doesn't need them to help promote his name. Everyone in America likely knows who Bill Gates is already and most of them know him as a very successful businessman who gives billions to charity. Sounds to me like he would survive just fine without a political party and might be inclined to get this whole political party non-sense fixed for good.
I'm obviously being optimistic, perhaps overly so. I just don't want this next election to just be more of the same utterly pointless political party against political party bullshit. It's bad for everyone except the media companies.
He'd be a far from perfect president but still I'd see it a step up from what we currently have but I have no trouble picturing him as a very powerful candidate right out of the box. I guess we'd have to wait and see his stance on his issues before we can decide if he'd be a good candidate or not but I certainly see a potential there. Although I think John Stewart for President would be interesting too... of course I'm joking but it goes to show that few people like the political environment as it is. Currently it is a no-win situation so it seems we should push for a change in the landscape so that we can get some real improvement and hopefully stop repeating mistakes of the past.
Although I agree, under the hood Linux is much more trustworthy as their is no mystery involved.
People in general do like the interface that Microsoft provides and after working with Office 2007 on my XP box I'm quite pleased with the shift, everything is up front and easy to find. The only problems I tend to have are not recognizing the plain English words that cover the functions I wish to perform. I'm so trained in having to hunt for the Microsoft query tool that I don't notice it's right in front of me for my Excel sheets.
Vista is the same way in that everything is incredibly easy to find and in many ways it's a consolidation of a lot of tools Microsoft has had available for some time. Keep in mind that although your Linux box has 6 months uptime my Windows box has been running for almost a year, all it does is run Webtrends crunching my web logs so mileage varies, all my Linux and Windows boxen have uptime until my regularly scheduled maintenance times. The Webtrends box is the only box I'm not concerned about since it's heavily filtered but the fact remains that Microsoft has been working very hard on stability so please move past this issue as Linux, OS X, and Windows are all perfectly stable platforms these days.
Security is a valid gripe but I think your prediction for their demise completely misses the mark. With OS X providing versioning in the OS, a feature Windows has had for 6 years now with Shadow Copies, things are moving back and forth and Windows today is a hell of a lot more secure than Windows of even 3 years ago. People are quite unhappy at the pace of the progress and the pace at which Microsoft adapts will determine if they live or die over the next 15 years. I tend to think they will survive as I've seen no reason to see otherwise.
The recent stories describing 22 programmers working on the shutdown screen is an example of where Microsoft is going wrong and I only see it as a matter of time before they figure out that 22 people are not a replacement for 2 talented people. When that happens I see the company becoming more agile and becoming much more responsive. As is, Microsoft does indeed listen to their customers. At some point they will also realize that large customers want different features from home customers so the two shouldn't be running the same OS.
I agree with your post here and we do indeed need to get away from this republican vs democrat crap since it isn't getting anyone anywhere. At what point do we get rid of political parties and force representatives to, oh, I don't know, represent? If they can't use their own money for ads and have to rely on public events specifically targeted at educating the voting populous then we would see a dramatic improvement in the quality of choices. Since there is no money to be gained during the campaign you then only have to worry about corruption from lobbyists which have a basic right to exist so it's a simple matter of oversight.
2008 does look to be a bad choice buffet but a better discussion I think would be, who would make a good choice? If anyone were to run for office who do you think would be the best choice? I don't see too many people in the public eye that are champions of democracy or freedom. I have a narrow view of the world so there may very well be people that would actually be good for the country. I don't know who, I only hope that once my generation gets old enough to control the country that there will be a country left to control. As it is the baby boomers seem to be killing America with some help from their fathers and mothers of course. It is hard to keep everything in perspective though, history is hard to learn because people traditionally learn best by doing.
I'm not up on my licensing yet for SQL 2005 but replication and interoperability is much improved. Clustering SQL is now on par with Oracle 9i although 10g has much better management over the process while being harder to setup. That's always been the trade-off for me when it comes to Oracle or MS SQL. MS SQL is easy and fast to deploy, but Oracle scales better and performs a hell of a lot better with the same hardware. It's also harder to setup. Oracle took a backwards steps with 10g. It is much harder to setup than 9i was but it's still quite manageable with the documentation readily available.
I've found when it comes to Oracle, be prepared to read. When it comes to MS SQL, you can usually get by just looking around the UI until you find what you're looking for. It is a much more friendly environment. Firsthand, I have a SQL distributor talking to an Oracle database and 2005 makes it easy as pie. I like them both a lot although they both have their faults. Oracle seems to have come to their senses with licensing which is still the major roadblock for Microsoft.
Per Processor for the enterprise edition of SQL 2005 vs what you get with the Standard edition from Oracle which didn't require us to go per processor. With Oracle we could have a small number of named users and have access to all the 64bit addressing and processors we can shake a stick at. Plus we can cluster them which was the big fault for MS SQL. We caught Oracle at a good time, they came down a lot over the initial price quote they gave us.
The only expensive part was paying for access to the metabase. Part of me thinks I could get by with just my experts-exchange account but that support is really nice when you need it.
What kind of administrative overhead does Oracle require for you? I set it up, takes about 20 minutes. Apply my scripts to size the server resources and I'm away. Sometimes it'll take about an hour to copy a TB of data but that's pretty damned fast. Once that is done the server is up and running and I never need to touch it. The only reason I even ever login to my Oracle boxes is to check and make sure backups are running properly and to ensure there are no sudden changes in disk space usage. Haven't had any so far but it's always good to check.
Of course now I monitoring software in place so I don't even need to login to the box to know it's okay.
Not going to say it's no overhead, if you run into a quirk of the system is can take a little while to solve the problem. It is usually a case of having to think like an Oracle developer.
It's been a few years since I've played with Postgre and mySQL so I won't really comment on the administrative overhead they require. I had a terrible first experience with mySQL and an even worse second experience. This time around I thought I'd give it one more shot since it finally support multi-master replication but when it came to having to support 20 servers and every workstation in the company by myself I start to look at Oracle support and their metabase and I feel better about the decision we went it. Oracle streams became the defining reason we chose since it provided a very convenient method for us to offload data to various parties that need access to a subset of data. These kinds of features are sorely lacking in the OSS DBs I've seen. Although that could have changed. I last evaluated over a year ago. Not sure I would rely on something that new though even if it were released since then.
I might add that Oracle for us was at least cheaper than MS SQL and provided better/more refined features. Administrative overhead is incredibly low to the point where my database is the least of my worries and it is indeed mission critical.
Who said it wasn't a problem on Windows? ATI is infamous for their terrible drivers on both Linux and Windows and it provides the same amount of pain in the ass on both system.
As for blaming the OS there are two schools of thought, either the OS should protect itself and prevent drivers from being able to damage the performance of the system or you open up and let driver manufacturers make their own drivers which will take full advantage of the card on the particular kernel they are developing with. First school is safe, reliable, and always slower. The second isn't as, isn't as reliable, but a lot faster. For some instances like with my servers I'll take the performance hit for reliability but a gamer probably doesn't care if their machine hangs for a few seconds every couple of days. At this point both methods seems to work okay because processing power has increased enough to accommodate both.
Blue screens really are a problem of the past though along with bad magic numbers and kernel panics. Yes both can still be induced but generally you have to do something pretty funky to the software to cause this otherwise you have a hardware failure scenario.
I'm not even close to 36, I'm 23 but 5 years goes by pretty quickly for me. I still have and use the same computer I built 7 years ago and it runs Windows. It is the common computer for the house. It currently runs Windows XP and often acts as our communal stereo since all our music is on it. It's hard drives have been upgraded so it has mirrored 300gig drives in addition to the much smaller OS drive.
Yes, it probably won't be able to run Vista but it ran, 98, ME, 2000, and XP so I think it did alright. I'm not sure where you get your ideas on Windows obsolescence. An entry level machine right now is perfectly capable of running Windows Vista and Vista isn't even released yet. So you'll easily get another 6 or 7 years out of it depending on what you expect from it.
In my experience most Linux distros will support more legacy hardware but you are not usually talking about using its desktop actions like video editing at that point. If you're anything like me you convert the old linux boxen to servers and/or routers so that they can continue to drum on. Of course I wouldn't do that in the business world as old hardware never goes anywhere mission critical.
Of course with all that said your first argument makes no sense. Why would someone financially want to spend $2000 on a computer today to last them another year when they can spend $800 now and another $800 later when they need something better? They don't lose the first $800 they spend; they now have an additional machine which can be used as a learning computer or an entertainment system or some kind of server. It makes no sense to me to spend $2000 on a computer these days unless the machine is being used in a scenario where time is money like in graphics rendering or compiling. Of course a modern gaming rig will certainly last for 5 years assuming the hardware doesn't go on you in the meantime. Seems like hard drives have a short shelf life these days but I think that is more because of the fact that there are a lot more hard drives in my life now than there were 7 years ago. Much like cars today are built and will last much longer than cars 30 and especially cars 60 years older.
That is true, I was being a little unfair to the situation but the war never ended and the conflict was never resolved. The military solution has not worked thus far. The world has changed quite a bit in that time so it might be more successful now.
I totally agree, as I said, revolution in NK is not possible. The problem is that you have to retaliate in some form otherwise NK will spin even further out of control. So far the only solution I think that is even remotely sustainable is for China to annex NK but that brings a whole host of problems too. I'm not sure how that would pressure South Korea either.
Something needs to be done. Targeted sanctions could work but are nearly impossible to enforce.
Ignore the BS of sparing a couple hundred thousand lives at the expense of a couple hundred thousand lives argument and stick with the reality that the world including the U.S. did not know the horror dropping such a weapon would cause and how long it's effects would linger. Yes, you can argue they knew a little about radiation but at the time radiation poisoning will still a new condition and they didn't know much about it. Now they know it will affect the children and their children's children.
I agree the U.S. is trustworthy with nuke tech; we made a mistake and we will not make it again unless our back is to the wall and we have no further options. We maintain an arsenal to ensure that anyone who attacks us with such horrific weaponry will be assured their own destruction. It works but we can't expect it to always work. NK is in dangerous territory and there appears to be no proper solution beyond china annexing the country.
The six party talks make sense as the U.S. is an ally with South Korea and technically still at war with NK. The rest of the countries all have specific concerns that need to be addressed.
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Close but no cigar there. Evolutionists don't even attempt to explain how life began, they state simply that life has evolved and this is fact as we've seen it even in our lifetimes. Evolution is very real and quite observable. Think babies born with tails even to this day. Other theories of how we evolved are up for debate and further study.
Science only attempts to explain what has been observed. Religion as I've seen it attempts to explain a possibility but it isn't based on reality or what has been observed and measured. It attempts to address what we haven't discovered yet but it is often used as a scapegoat. God will cure my fever because I have faith when in reality evolution has given you a great deal of adaptive responses to your environment. Combine that with other knowledge of fever reducing agents either herbal or with synthetic drugs and you take your life into your own hands.
Religion has it's benefits as well as its downsides. A lot of sciences are the same way as well since a lot of technology has both good and bad uses. Still, I wonder what would be inherently superior about the mind of a God as opposed to us. I haven't seen any limit to what the brain can or cannot understand with the proper context and if that is the case then why should we worship someone who can do the same thing as us? It is only nature as you look at celebrities and how they are also worshipped. People want to believe they are part of something bigger and for the people that need this there is religion.
Wasn't talking about Israel, they also don't have a problem with water, at the expense of their neighbors. We have the same problem here in Arizona with Nevada cloud seeding. Ironically 50 years ago AZ got sued by Nevada for that very same practice. Funny how we resolved the dispute without any violence that wasn't alcohol related up in Vegas.
In any case, the point is still valid.
Why should you have to prove you are who you say you are? It matters not who I am, it matters that I am unarmed and just bringing my friends a beer. When did we have to start identifying everybody to get things done? People are going way overboard and this system is just going to get royally abused much like the social security system.
Very nice reply, I personally wouldn't have been thinking in that direction but crop production and water management are two key issues in the middle east as well and science has a huge role to play there. It is interesting how many people think science is around to solve technical issues alone and ignore the impact it has had on our lives personally, emotionally, and geographically. Traveling from one end of the U.S. to the other and back again for Christmas has done a lot to keep my close with my family who is on the east coast. I guess most people just don't take the time to think about how knowledge and research has directly effected their lives along with everyone they know.
haha, you're not suggesting feed a cold, starve a fever is inaccurate are you?
It is funny how the parent assumes that everyone came from a sane upbringing where reason was taught rather than irrational hatred or any of the myriad of other attributes that make up this diverse world we live in.
Much of what we know as common sense now wasn't so common 200 years ago though and everything does need to get examined as you said, either through disastrous policy where thousands are injured or dead like Katrina or through scientific study before hand saving lives at the cost of money. Sounds like a no-brainer to me but I'm crazy like that.
I think you're right all around there, nice post.
What experience is it that tells you throughput for a gigabit link would be that low? Even 100meg with a PCI bus can net you 70meg throughput depending on contents. My experience with gigabit links on my desktop are significantly higher than that. A gigabit link with a PCI bus tops out around 400megabit last I recall. When you move up to PCI-E and PCI-X then you can hit around 800megabit on a fiber connection losing the end with regular tcp/ip overhead. I can do 136megabit using my laptop hard drive to transfer a large web log to my server. That's a crappy laptop with a slow hard drive let alone a modern SATA 150 or SATA 300 hard drive.
Ahhh, Dell D800 here with integrated gigabit NIC. Single transfers of large web logs so it's very easy to transport.
Wow, what the hell equipment are you running? My laptop is 2.4ghz Pentium M and I can transfer a gig in a minute. That's ~17megabytes/sec. Sounds to me like your network is either congested or your file server is sorely lacking. Hell, with my 14drive SATA array I break 550megabytes/sec of effective throughput on my file-servers. My SAN boasts even more performance so I see this stuff as becoming very useful. I can't utilize 100gbit but 10gbit I could certainly saturate pretty easily. Think VMWare images pushed to the desktop to provide users with a consistent clean work environment.
Another use for me at least would be transport of raw video so other machines could do the encoding so then I don't have to worry about having hardware do the whole thing in real-time on one box. Fortunately dual Opterons with dual cores provides enough for me to encode 4 streams in real-time but eventually I'll probably want more than 4 streams and a faster network connection would certainly help with that.
Last I checked with a 1gz processor and 512megs of ram you can indeed run Vista. That puts your computer a little over 4 years old. What's cracked out about that? I used an obvious example because the parent didn't state where the line was between a computer being obsolete and still being included in the supported hardware.
WGA doesn't apply to me or most of corporate America as all updates are performed through SMS and not Windows Updates. Same goes with Product Activation since everything is volume license.
What you see here is Microsoft trying to push the same product for Home as they do for corporate customers. That is a problem and I imagine after Vista MS will correct this realizing just how different the computing requirements are especially given that volume license versions of their products are readily available for download so WGA and Activation are pointless to prevent piracy.
Also, last I checked Play for Sure was an attempt to legitimize downloading content online and so the AAs were indeed involved in it's creation since MS saw a huge potential liability. Of course it was a failure and this is just a history lesson at this point.
Beyond that how does your comment about Palladium relate to my post? The MPAA dictated to Microsoft the conditions that would be required to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. This is of course in concert with the hardware manufacturers but Microsoft played no part at least that we know of. This is a bit like me disabling the ability edit notes in our in-house app so they can be used should a lawsuit ever occur and the notes would explain our actions. Yeah, everyone hated the change because their mistakes could be seen and they couldn't correct them but my boss handed me this requirement for our application and I implemented it. What should Microsoft have done? Declared they wouldn't play HD content on Vista? That would make great business sense.
That's an interesting view of reality you have there. You believe Microsoft invented the hardware restrictions that the MPAA and RIAA are trying to force down our throats? Sounds to me like you've missed your mark completely. Microsoft is a software company and if they want to play encrypted content it is good business for them to support it. There are no restrictions whatsoever on non-encrypted content so I still don't see what your gripe is.
Backwards compatibility is not a feature, if you're going to complain about it then let's have a discussion about computers unable to run SUSE 10.1. Why can't I run it on my 386? or my 486? Why oh why did they remove that feature they are evil. Get over it, Microsoft saw that newer machines were largely going to waste with CPU usage below even 1% so they decided that they could utilize more of it and make the user experience more enjoyable. Their level of success is up for debate but calling backwards compatibility a feature is just not right. Sure it could play into your decision process to buy or not but it's not a feature of the product. I can buy my nice new THX speakers and they will sound great, oh, now they are 30% off? That feature puts it over the top for me, I'll buy em!
If your employees are losing an entire day to an upgrade then you need to fire your IT staff and hire some people capable of deploying software in general.
With a basic RIS setup and SMS you can have the machines upgraded including the new office and whatever custom apps you have in an hour completely unattended in the middle of the night. So your employees don't lose any work time and immediately can enjoy the advanced search capabilities so finding files is much much faster which saves your workers a measurable amount of time. In addition to this you have one search interface for email/files/music/web so they become familiar with one tool instead of trying to learn 4 different tools.
I wouldn't drop $2000 on a new desktop either unless I'm doing some video editing with it. You're right though, if you don't see a clear benefit then there is absolutely no need to upgrade. The new features won't help everyone but at least in my organization the advanced remote management and diagnostic tools will save me tons of man hours and the granular group policy changes will help me make sure systems are locked down properly saving me tons of time during my next security audit.
Of course I haven't deployed Vista yet and I won't until it's hardware refresh time but there are very real reasons some may do so. For now I'm focusing on growing the network infrastructure since the company is small enough that I can put a certain level of trust in my users. When the next refresh comes around I will remove the chance and move on to my next project relying on the content management system to ease the file search nightmare.
The total cost is higher in your scenario but the cost per machine is much much lower.
That's all well and good, but what features exactly were taken away in Vista that were found in XP? How is playback of encrypted content a bad thing? Is there some magic mechanism which disables your ability to play unencrypted content?
You may very well be right in that MS wants people to buy new hardware although this makes very little sense given that Microsoft is not primarily a hardware company. This type of move would make sense if Apple did it given that they provide both but in your context I just see one logical leap after the next.
Of course I could be the one that's way off base, I'll leave it to you to decide that.
Thank you for providing sanity to the completely insane idea that the real world is black and white or binary. Most people recognize the real world as analog with limitless options. Every time someone uses the world liberal or conservative to describe a group of people I almost immediately stop listening as this categorization is completely pointless since most "neo-conservatives" are actually incredibly liberal with their spending while "liberals" are calling for oversight in all the spending. Everything is backwards so I throw out the democrat, republican, conservative, liberal stuff and instead focus on individual hypocrisy.
I wish more people understood that the reason America got ahead was because we fought better than everybody else. We stood for what was good and true and abandoning the principles of which we were founded upon is both not necessary and incredibly counter-productive. How can we say we're right when we're using the same universally condemned tactics. To use a cheesy quote from Top Gun,; "You need to be doing it better, and cleaner than the other guy." There is no reason we need to resort to torture and other tactics we've cast off as immoral over the years. Sure there were cases in the past where torture occurred, pretty much under every president there were cases. In the end it was never considered acceptable or a preferred method of treatment since it is very ineffective is most scenarios. Of course all that has changed.
Why would Bill Gates need a political party affiliation to win? He doesn't need their money and he certainly doesn't need them to help promote his name. Everyone in America likely knows who Bill Gates is already and most of them know him as a very successful businessman who gives billions to charity. Sounds to me like he would survive just fine without a political party and might be inclined to get this whole political party non-sense fixed for good.
I'm obviously being optimistic, perhaps overly so. I just don't want this next election to just be more of the same utterly pointless political party against political party bullshit. It's bad for everyone except the media companies.
He'd be a far from perfect president but still I'd see it a step up from what we currently have but I have no trouble picturing him as a very powerful candidate right out of the box. I guess we'd have to wait and see his stance on his issues before we can decide if he'd be a good candidate or not but I certainly see a potential there. Although I think John Stewart for President would be interesting too... of course I'm joking but it goes to show that few people like the political environment as it is. Currently it is a no-win situation so it seems we should push for a change in the landscape so that we can get some real improvement and hopefully stop repeating mistakes of the past.
Although I agree, under the hood Linux is much more trustworthy as their is no mystery involved.
People in general do like the interface that Microsoft provides and after working with Office 2007 on my XP box I'm quite pleased with the shift, everything is up front and easy to find. The only problems I tend to have are not recognizing the plain English words that cover the functions I wish to perform. I'm so trained in having to hunt for the Microsoft query tool that I don't notice it's right in front of me for my Excel sheets.
Vista is the same way in that everything is incredibly easy to find and in many ways it's a consolidation of a lot of tools Microsoft has had available for some time. Keep in mind that although your Linux box has 6 months uptime my Windows box has been running for almost a year, all it does is run Webtrends crunching my web logs so mileage varies, all my Linux and Windows boxen have uptime until my regularly scheduled maintenance times. The Webtrends box is the only box I'm not concerned about since it's heavily filtered but the fact remains that Microsoft has been working very hard on stability so please move past this issue as Linux, OS X, and Windows are all perfectly stable platforms these days.
Security is a valid gripe but I think your prediction for their demise completely misses the mark. With OS X providing versioning in the OS, a feature Windows has had for 6 years now with Shadow Copies, things are moving back and forth and Windows today is a hell of a lot more secure than Windows of even 3 years ago. People are quite unhappy at the pace of the progress and the pace at which Microsoft adapts will determine if they live or die over the next 15 years. I tend to think they will survive as I've seen no reason to see otherwise.
The recent stories describing 22 programmers working on the shutdown screen is an example of where Microsoft is going wrong and I only see it as a matter of time before they figure out that 22 people are not a replacement for 2 talented people. When that happens I see the company becoming more agile and becoming much more responsive. As is, Microsoft does indeed listen to their customers. At some point they will also realize that large customers want different features from home customers so the two shouldn't be running the same OS.
I agree with your post here and we do indeed need to get away from this republican vs democrat crap since it isn't getting anyone anywhere. At what point do we get rid of political parties and force representatives to, oh, I don't know, represent? If they can't use their own money for ads and have to rely on public events specifically targeted at educating the voting populous then we would see a dramatic improvement in the quality of choices. Since there is no money to be gained during the campaign you then only have to worry about corruption from lobbyists which have a basic right to exist so it's a simple matter of oversight.
2008 does look to be a bad choice buffet but a better discussion I think would be, who would make a good choice? If anyone were to run for office who do you think would be the best choice? I don't see too many people in the public eye that are champions of democracy or freedom. I have a narrow view of the world so there may very well be people that would actually be good for the country. I don't know who, I only hope that once my generation gets old enough to control the country that there will be a country left to control. As it is the baby boomers seem to be killing America with some help from their fathers and mothers of course. It is hard to keep everything in perspective though, history is hard to learn because people traditionally learn best by doing.
I'm not up on my licensing yet for SQL 2005 but replication and interoperability is much improved. Clustering SQL is now on par with Oracle 9i although 10g has much better management over the process while being harder to setup. That's always been the trade-off for me when it comes to Oracle or MS SQL. MS SQL is easy and fast to deploy, but Oracle scales better and performs a hell of a lot better with the same hardware. It's also harder to setup. Oracle took a backwards steps with 10g. It is much harder to setup than 9i was but it's still quite manageable with the documentation readily available.
I've found when it comes to Oracle, be prepared to read. When it comes to MS SQL, you can usually get by just looking around the UI until you find what you're looking for. It is a much more friendly environment. Firsthand, I have a SQL distributor talking to an Oracle database and 2005 makes it easy as pie. I like them both a lot although they both have their faults. Oracle seems to have come to their senses with licensing which is still the major roadblock for Microsoft.
Per Processor for the enterprise edition of SQL 2005 vs what you get with the Standard edition from Oracle which didn't require us to go per processor. With Oracle we could have a small number of named users and have access to all the 64bit addressing and processors we can shake a stick at. Plus we can cluster them which was the big fault for MS SQL. We caught Oracle at a good time, they came down a lot over the initial price quote they gave us.
The only expensive part was paying for access to the metabase. Part of me thinks I could get by with just my experts-exchange account but that support is really nice when you need it.
What kind of administrative overhead does Oracle require for you? I set it up, takes about 20 minutes. Apply my scripts to size the server resources and I'm away. Sometimes it'll take about an hour to copy a TB of data but that's pretty damned fast. Once that is done the server is up and running and I never need to touch it. The only reason I even ever login to my Oracle boxes is to check and make sure backups are running properly and to ensure there are no sudden changes in disk space usage. Haven't had any so far but it's always good to check.
Of course now I monitoring software in place so I don't even need to login to the box to know it's okay.
Not going to say it's no overhead, if you run into a quirk of the system is can take a little while to solve the problem. It is usually a case of having to think like an Oracle developer.
It's been a few years since I've played with Postgre and mySQL so I won't really comment on the administrative overhead they require. I had a terrible first experience with mySQL and an even worse second experience. This time around I thought I'd give it one more shot since it finally support multi-master replication but when it came to having to support 20 servers and every workstation in the company by myself I start to look at Oracle support and their metabase and I feel better about the decision we went it. Oracle streams became the defining reason we chose since it provided a very convenient method for us to offload data to various parties that need access to a subset of data. These kinds of features are sorely lacking in the OSS DBs I've seen. Although that could have changed. I last evaluated over a year ago. Not sure I would rely on something that new though even if it were released since then.
I might add that Oracle for us was at least cheaper than MS SQL and provided better/more refined features. Administrative overhead is incredibly low to the point where my database is the least of my worries and it is indeed mission critical.
Who said it wasn't a problem on Windows? ATI is infamous for their terrible drivers on both Linux and Windows and it provides the same amount of pain in the ass on both system.
As for blaming the OS there are two schools of thought, either the OS should protect itself and prevent drivers from being able to damage the performance of the system or you open up and let driver manufacturers make their own drivers which will take full advantage of the card on the particular kernel they are developing with. First school is safe, reliable, and always slower. The second isn't as, isn't as reliable, but a lot faster. For some instances like with my servers I'll take the performance hit for reliability but a gamer probably doesn't care if their machine hangs for a few seconds every couple of days. At this point both methods seems to work okay because processing power has increased enough to accommodate both.
Blue screens really are a problem of the past though along with bad magic numbers and kernel panics. Yes both can still be induced but generally you have to do something pretty funky to the software to cause this otherwise you have a hardware failure scenario.
I'm not even close to 36, I'm 23 but 5 years goes by pretty quickly for me. I still have and use the same computer I built 7 years ago and it runs Windows. It is the common computer for the house. It currently runs Windows XP and often acts as our communal stereo since all our music is on it. It's hard drives have been upgraded so it has mirrored 300gig drives in addition to the much smaller OS drive.
Yes, it probably won't be able to run Vista but it ran, 98, ME, 2000, and XP so I think it did alright. I'm not sure where you get your ideas on Windows obsolescence. An entry level machine right now is perfectly capable of running Windows Vista and Vista isn't even released yet. So you'll easily get another 6 or 7 years out of it depending on what you expect from it.
In my experience most Linux distros will support more legacy hardware but you are not usually talking about using its desktop actions like video editing at that point. If you're anything like me you convert the old linux boxen to servers and/or routers so that they can continue to drum on. Of course I wouldn't do that in the business world as old hardware never goes anywhere mission critical.
Of course with all that said your first argument makes no sense. Why would someone financially want to spend $2000 on a computer today to last them another year when they can spend $800 now and another $800 later when they need something better? They don't lose the first $800 they spend; they now have an additional machine which can be used as a learning computer or an entertainment system or some kind of server. It makes no sense to me to spend $2000 on a computer these days unless the machine is being used in a scenario where time is money like in graphics rendering or compiling. Of course a modern gaming rig will certainly last for 5 years assuming the hardware doesn't go on you in the meantime. Seems like hard drives have a short shelf life these days but I think that is more because of the fact that there are a lot more hard drives in my life now than there were 7 years ago. Much like cars today are built and will last much longer than cars 30 and especially cars 60 years older.
That is true, I was being a little unfair to the situation but the war never ended and the conflict was never resolved. The military solution has not worked thus far. The world has changed quite a bit in that time so it might be more successful now.
I totally agree, as I said, revolution in NK is not possible. The problem is that you have to retaliate in some form otherwise NK will spin even further out of control. So far the only solution I think that is even remotely sustainable is for China to annex NK but that brings a whole host of problems too. I'm not sure how that would pressure South Korea either.
Something needs to be done. Targeted sanctions could work but are nearly impossible to enforce.
Ignore the BS of sparing a couple hundred thousand lives at the expense of a couple hundred thousand lives argument and stick with the reality that the world including the U.S. did not know the horror dropping such a weapon would cause and how long it's effects would linger. Yes, you can argue they knew a little about radiation but at the time radiation poisoning will still a new condition and they didn't know much about it. Now they know it will affect the children and their children's children.
I agree the U.S. is trustworthy with nuke tech; we made a mistake and we will not make it again unless our back is to the wall and we have no further options. We maintain an arsenal to ensure that anyone who attacks us with such horrific weaponry will be assured their own destruction. It works but we can't expect it to always work. NK is in dangerous territory and there appears to be no proper solution beyond china annexing the country.
The six party talks make sense as the U.S. is an ally with South Korea and technically still at war with NK. The rest of the countries all have specific concerns that need to be addressed.