When you deal with a company environment of 5 or 10 thousand workstations on a constant rotation process for upgrades, new ones start coming preloaded with newer versions of office. Newer Outlook clients require newer exchange servers. Newer exchange servers require newer server platforms. Older outlook or office users start finding it hard to read stuff from the newer ones. Customers send word documents in latest version formats and you can't read them.
From an I.T. management perspective, what's easily handled if its just some guy working at home because a big problem at a scale of many thousand guys working at home and in the office.
....Office is just one example and mostly stands alone. When you starting thinking in terms of integration among versions of office, outlook (not express), exchange server, win32 workstation & server platforms, all together it gets very very ugly.
With your local hifi, you know that if you skip the deal, you won't be forced later to buy the product at all, or fail in your mission critical business deliverables.
Suppose MS comes out with a new version of office and you, as an IT director don't want to spend millions of dollars on it today. Because of the interdependancy of what Microsoft actually calls "The Microsoft Stack" you can't be sure that you won't be required to buy it a year from now. In fact, you probably will be. Past performance shows that your users will be shipped new PC's with newer Operating Systems that don't support the old office version, or the email system won't run on the old operating system, or the new office files won't be readable to be users without the new version of office, etc, etc, etc.
Microsoft's mistake was making it more obvious than it had to be that Microsoft's decision on what to release actually controls a large portion of the budget in big corporate IT shops. The move they attempted would have grabbed control not just of the expense then, but also the time in which the expense would have to be budgeted and paid for. By holding off on purchase and not bending to the whim of the Microsoft release schedule and revenue stream, you were being threatened with paying twice the budget later.
All this would be fine if you had more choice, but if you've bought into the Microsoft stack from end to end, you really don't. The move woke up more shops to this problem and many (obviously not the majority,yet) starting worrying more about this single source issue.
As if I needed another reason to avoid T-Mobile, bang, one appears.
I love my Verizon EV:DO card. Its only downside is upstream data (like almost every consumer grade service) is too slow. Downstream is generally faster than most hotel dsl connections.
...where MS tried to force IT shops to upgrade sooner? They declared that upgrade pricing would be valid for six months only, after which shops that hadn't upgraded would pay full boat. IT managers pretty much told them to go to hell. It was the best thing to happen for Linux as a server platform in corporations all at once since the 2.6 kernel release. I recall a quote from on manager saying, "This would give the control over millions of dollars of my budget -- to be spent within a few months of whenever they demand it. That's just not going to happen."
As I recall, Microsoft backed off that stance almost immedately but it was a bit late. They woke up a large number of shops to their "single source vulnerability".
The point of cards like this from the standpoint of the cell companies, is to enable business workers. They won't get away with outlawing VPN connections, and thus my own use of VoIP would simply transit the VPN. FOK THEM.
Just get slower, and slower to respond to people you think are abusing the privilege. By responding so quickly, you're training them to come to you. Take more time. Rarely will they complain, as they're well aware they're getting something for nothing and are abusing that favor.
Of course, it depends on the kind of work you're doing. Much of my work involves multiple threads dealing with the same data objects, so suppose a shared L2 cache would have a big impact. I'm not sure its going to help the game players as much. Specialty chips for physics and calc combined with ever faster video processing is their goal I guess. At some point, graphics processors will need to manage whole objects in virtual physics environments entirely outside the scope of the processor without ever even using the fsb.
those penny stock spams are about the hardest to catch because they don't have any call to action link. Every other spam you get has some call to action -- click here to _____________. Ultimately, after you decode the crap out of it, that link has to work. Follow the links and you find out what's spam. Crawlers are good for that. The penny stock scams though, have no link. The call to action is for you to call your broker. Try picking stock ticker symbols out of email some time. gack.
It makes more sense to shoot down sats from the ground where you have plenty of power and guys who can fix things than trying to shoot down on the ground from space where you can only hit things if they're not covered up.
sure, what the hell. At worst it will start a high tech arms race and that's good for business.
....this will be helpful. It may end up being crap, but it will be crap that will get your machine running on a late sunday afternoon when nobody else is open.
I don't mean for direct-tv or a big dish, or broadcast. When can I realistically get my network tv shows, discovery channel, sci-fi channel, and HBO shows via some reasonably friendly interface and get the quality of broadcast sound and video to replace what I'm paying Time Warner for now via this set top shitbox?
iTunes sells a few shows. Yahoo may be doing something. NBC, ABC, and CBS are making some shows available. The quality, picture limitations, speed, and pain in the ass are all still prohibitive for this being workable. iTunes at two bucks a show is at least twice the price it should be, and the other avenues still basically stink.
When I can just buy my network pipe for connectivity and shop for my own content providers for video, music, phone, and whatever else....then I'll be happy.
The period of time involved here is too short for a large number of users to have different IP's each time. I'd have to do more complete analysis to know for sure, for example if the IP's are in similar address groups or not.
Its never going to be close to perfect, but it clearly refutes the 10:1 statement in the article.
And it gets worse! If users also use an RSS reader, it has its own useragent signature. If you assign cookies, plus use useragent, plus use the ip, you start to get close I suppose, but there really is no good way to make valid measurements.
I hate being in a position to defend microsoft, because I find them just as terrible in these practices as everyone else. I just don't see Apple in some kind of squeaky clean white hat in comparison. Apple has sued people where possible to protect what they consider their models, practices, or hardware business. Apple resellers have very strict rules about what can and can't be discounted from retail. Hell, its against license to make compatible hardware to run their OS if you wanted to.
Microsoft was WRONG to use its leverage to control its resellers. So would Apple be.
I did a quick analysis of a 250,000 line entry server log. I counted unique ip addresses, unique useragent cgi values, and then the number of unique combinations.
A useragent value looks like this: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98;.NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Although even this is hardly reliable since useragent can be faked, and useragent isn't unique enough to be a client fingerprint -- its still helpful in this context.
One can make the assumption that a given user's "useragent" value isn't going to to change much on a day to day basis, though it will not stay the same over time as vesions get updated. GENERALLY speaking, the same IP address but different USERAGENT values would indicate different people from behind the same NAT firewall, or different users assigned the same DHCP address.
Here's what I got for results -- it looked like counting only unique IP's gave you only about 85% of the unique hits.
Lots of folks in New Jersey and Las Vegas do it all the time. Its called book-making or handicapping. Tony Soprano types -- if there is such a thing that's even remotely close to what HBO portrays -- could probably rattle off such a process pretty quickly.
...protective. They just saw it from a hardware perspective. How many people do you know (I know many) who got stuck with dead-end apple gear when they decided to go another way. They got left with hardware you couldn't upgrade. How much has iTunes pushed to be proprietary to iPods? Apple is just as anticompetitive as microsoft, they're just not as good at it and don't have the market leverage they could have had they been as good at it. They bet the hardware was more important than the software and LOST in the 80's. Its great that they're back, but give me a break, these are corporations not people. They have no soul, for good or evil.
If Apple builds a BT client into the OS and declares it "Part of the Operating System" because it uses that to obtain its patches, how is that different from Microsoft doing it with IE?
If you consider asking a pointed question to be flame bait, then I suppose I'm guilty.
The truth is, if Microsoft enters a niche currently served by freeware/shareware/open source, the assumption is that it is the evil empire out to squash all the little perfect peace-loving Linux and OSX people.
Frankly, I just want to see the same scrutiny applied universally.
Look for a second at Apple. The only reason they're not Microsoft is that they didn't do it well enough 20 years ago. The failed, they didn't "take the high road". Apple is pushed DRM down our throats more successfully than Microsoft. They also found a way to make downloading music workable for the record companies and for most of the customer base (at least for now). Apple's proprietary hardware and planned obsolecense has made upgrading their equipment nearly impossible for decades.
Hell, I had a ][+, a IIe, and a//c, a Mac SE, and own an eMac G4. I'm not anti-Apple. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from my Apple machines to that damn Mitsubishi built "Leading Edge" clone (the first one, not the Tandy 1000 clone they made later). Today, I have several Linux boxes -- and prefer them for server work hands down, but for workstation work, XP does what I need it to do.
If Apple builds a BT client into the OS and declares it "Part of the Operating System" because it uses that to obtain its patches, how is that different from Microsoft doing it with IE?
...I.T. projects I've reviewed as a consultant its scary. The spent huge sums figuring out how to do something which is inherently difficult and provides little real world benefit in anything but the longest possible range projections -- which invariably become useless once that amount of time comes to pass.
Its like building a website out of "Pure J2EE" (whatever the hell that means) -- or building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. It can be done. That's terrific. But why?
...could screw up your chip forever. Its not like you can roto-rooter the thing. The puritity and perfection of the fluid to flow through channels like this would itself be prohibitive for now.
The sweet spot for plug in like this, IMO, would be similar to what you see a few board manufacturers doing now -- digital signal processing routines like Fourier transforms and other general calculus functions that are used in all kinds of data analysis where raw data comes in as analog variations, or where the moment by moment changes in state need to be modeled for engineering applications like fluid dynamics and harmonics.
I'd imagine you'll need to have the application compiled in such a way that it is aware of the additional processing capability, so its not likely to be a plug-n-pray solution to your general game player's graphical wet dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
...care about.
When you deal with a company environment of 5 or 10 thousand workstations on a constant rotation process for upgrades, new ones start coming preloaded with newer versions of office. Newer Outlook clients require newer exchange servers. Newer exchange servers require newer server platforms. Older outlook or office users start finding it hard to read stuff from the newer ones. Customers send word documents in latest version formats and you can't read them.
From an I.T. management perspective, what's easily handled if its just some guy working at home because a big problem at a scale of many thousand guys working at home and in the office.
....Office is just one example and mostly stands alone. When you starting thinking in terms of integration among versions of office, outlook (not express), exchange server, win32 workstation & server platforms, all together it gets very very ugly.
With your local hifi, you know that if you skip the deal, you won't be forced later to buy the product at all, or fail in your mission critical business deliverables.
Suppose MS comes out with a new version of office and you, as an IT director don't want to spend millions of dollars on it today. Because of the interdependancy of what Microsoft actually calls "The Microsoft Stack" you can't be sure that you won't be required to buy it a year from now. In fact, you probably will be. Past performance shows that your users will be shipped new PC's with newer Operating Systems that don't support the old office version, or the email system won't run on the old operating system, or the new office files won't be readable to be users without the new version of office, etc, etc, etc.
Microsoft's mistake was making it more obvious than it had to be that Microsoft's decision on what to release actually controls a large portion of the budget in big corporate IT shops. The move they attempted would have grabbed control not just of the expense then, but also the time in which the expense would have to be budgeted and paid for. By holding off on purchase and not bending to the whim of the Microsoft release schedule and revenue stream, you were being threatened with paying twice the budget later.
All this would be fine if you had more choice, but if you've bought into the Microsoft stack from end to end, you really don't. The move woke up more shops to this problem and many (obviously not the majority,yet) starting worrying more about this single source issue.
As if I needed another reason to avoid T-Mobile, bang, one appears.
I love my Verizon EV:DO card. Its only downside is upstream data (like almost every consumer grade service) is too slow. Downstream is generally faster than most hotel dsl connections.
...where MS tried to force IT shops to upgrade sooner? They declared that upgrade pricing would be valid for six months only, after which shops that hadn't upgraded would pay full boat. IT managers pretty much told them to go to hell. It was the best thing to happen for Linux as a server platform in corporations all at once since the 2.6 kernel release. I recall a quote from on manager saying, "This would give the control over millions of dollars of my budget -- to be spent within a few months of whenever they demand it. That's just not going to happen."
As I recall, Microsoft backed off that stance almost immedately but it was a bit late. They woke up a large number of shops to their "single source vulnerability".
The point of cards like this from the standpoint of the cell companies, is to enable business workers. They won't get away with outlawing VPN connections, and thus my own use of VoIP would simply transit the VPN. FOK THEM.
Just get slower, and slower to respond to people you think are abusing the privilege. By responding so quickly, you're training them to come to you. Take more time. Rarely will they complain, as they're well aware they're getting something for nothing and are abusing that favor.
Of course, it depends on the kind of work you're doing. Much of my work involves multiple threads dealing with the same data objects, so suppose a shared L2 cache would have a big impact. I'm not sure its going to help the game players as much. Specialty chips for physics and calc combined with ever faster video processing is their goal I guess. At some point, graphics processors will need to manage whole objects in virtual physics environments entirely outside the scope of the processor without ever even using the fsb.
..I'd love to understand what Intel is doing to one-up the hypertransport that AMD has been so wildly successful with.
those penny stock spams are about the hardest to catch because they don't have any call to action link. Every other spam you get has some call to action -- click here to _____________. Ultimately, after you decode the crap out of it, that link has to work. Follow the links and you find out what's spam. Crawlers are good for that. The penny stock scams though, have no link. The call to action is for you to call your broker. Try picking stock ticker symbols out of email some time. gack.
It makes more sense to shoot down sats from the ground where you have plenty of power and guys who can fix things than trying to shoot down on the ground from space where you can only hit things if they're not covered up.
sure, what the hell. At worst it will start a high tech arms race and that's good for business.
....this will be helpful. It may end up being crap, but it will be crap that will get your machine running on a late sunday afternoon when nobody else is open.
I don't mean for direct-tv or a big dish, or broadcast. When can I realistically get my network tv shows, discovery channel, sci-fi channel, and HBO shows via some reasonably friendly interface and get the quality of broadcast sound and video to replace what I'm paying Time Warner for now via this set top shitbox?
iTunes sells a few shows. Yahoo may be doing something. NBC, ABC, and CBS are making some shows available. The quality, picture limitations, speed, and pain in the ass are all still prohibitive for this being workable. iTunes at two bucks a show is at least twice the price it should be, and the other avenues still basically stink.
When I can just buy my network pipe for connectivity and shop for my own content providers for video, music, phone, and whatever else....then I'll be happy.
The period of time involved here is too short for a large number of users to have different IP's each time. I'd have to do more complete analysis to know for sure, for example if the IP's are in similar address groups or not.
Its never going to be close to perfect, but it clearly refutes the 10:1 statement in the article.
And it gets worse! If users also use an RSS reader, it has its own useragent signature. If you assign cookies, plus use useragent, plus use the ip, you start to get close I suppose, but there really is no good way to make valid measurements.
I hate being in a position to defend microsoft, because I find them just as terrible in these practices as everyone else. I just don't see Apple in some kind of squeaky clean white hat in comparison. Apple has sued people where possible to protect what they consider their models, practices, or hardware business. Apple resellers have very strict rules about what can and can't be discounted from retail. Hell, its against license to make compatible hardware to run their OS if you wanted to.
Microsoft was WRONG to use its leverage to control its resellers. So would Apple be.
I did a quick analysis of a 250,000 line entry server log. I counted unique ip addresses, unique useragent cgi values, and then the number of unique combinations.
A useragent value looks like this: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98;
Although even this is hardly reliable since useragent can be faked, and useragent isn't unique enough to be a client fingerprint -- its still helpful in this context.
One can make the assumption that a given user's "useragent" value isn't going to to change much on a day to day basis, though it will not stay the same over time as vesions get updated. GENERALLY speaking, the same IP address but different USERAGENT values would indicate different people from behind the same NAT firewall, or different users assigned the same DHCP address.
Here's what I got for results -- it looked like counting only unique IP's gave you only about 85% of the unique hits.
Total Hits Looked At: 249861
Unique IPs: 10309
Unique UAs: 1578
Unique Combos: 12232
Lots of folks in New Jersey and Las Vegas do it all the time. Its called book-making or handicapping. Tony Soprano types -- if there is such a thing that's even remotely close to what HBO portrays -- could probably rattle off such a process pretty quickly.
I'm responding as if TFA is accurate. Probably that is a mistake right away.
...protective. They just saw it from a hardware perspective. How many people do you know (I know many) who got stuck with dead-end apple gear when they decided to go another way. They got left with hardware you couldn't upgrade. How much has iTunes pushed to be proprietary to iPods? Apple is just as anticompetitive as microsoft, they're just not as good at it and don't have the market leverage they could have had they been as good at it. They bet the hardware was more important than the software and LOST in the 80's. Its great that they're back, but give me a break, these are corporations not people. They have no soul, for good or evil.
If Apple builds a BT client into the OS and declares it "Part of the Operating System" because it uses that to obtain its patches, how is that different from Microsoft doing it with IE?
If you consider asking a pointed question to be flame bait, then I suppose I'm guilty.
//c, a Mac SE, and own an eMac G4. I'm not anti-Apple. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from my Apple machines to that damn Mitsubishi built "Leading Edge" clone (the first one, not the Tandy 1000 clone they made later). Today, I have several Linux boxes -- and prefer them for server work hands down, but for workstation work, XP does what I need it to do.
The truth is, if Microsoft enters a niche currently served by freeware/shareware/open source, the assumption is that it is the evil empire out to squash all the little perfect peace-loving Linux and OSX people.
Frankly, I just want to see the same scrutiny applied universally.
Look for a second at Apple. The only reason they're not Microsoft is that they didn't do it well enough 20 years ago. The failed, they didn't "take the high road". Apple is pushed DRM down our throats more successfully than Microsoft. They also found a way to make downloading music workable for the record companies and for most of the customer base (at least for now). Apple's proprietary hardware and planned obsolecense has made upgrading their equipment nearly impossible for decades.
Hell, I had a ][+, a IIe, and a
If Apple builds a BT client into the OS and declares it "Part of the Operating System" because it uses that to obtain its patches, how is that different from Microsoft doing it with IE?
How is it that OSX gets the pass on this? I M$ built it into Windows Vista (and if it worked) you'd scream foul over anticompetitive bullying.
...I.T. projects I've reviewed as a consultant its scary. The spent huge sums figuring out how to do something which is inherently difficult and provides little real world benefit in anything but the longest possible range projections -- which invariably become useless once that amount of time comes to pass.
Its like building a website out of "Pure J2EE" (whatever the hell that means) -- or building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. It can be done. That's terrific. But why?
...could screw up your chip forever. Its not like you can roto-rooter the thing. The puritity and perfection of the fluid to flow through channels like this would itself be prohibitive for now.
The sweet spot for plug in like this, IMO, would be similar to what you see a few board manufacturers doing now -- digital signal processing routines like Fourier transforms and other general calculus functions that are used in all kinds of data analysis where raw data comes in as analog variations, or where the moment by moment changes in state need to be modeled for engineering applications like fluid dynamics and harmonics.
I'd imagine you'll need to have the application compiled in such a way that it is aware of the additional processing capability, so its not likely to be a plug-n-pray solution to your general game player's graphical wet dreams.