I own a Nest thermostat and while it's a great and innovative device I don't see the company being worth $3.2B.
With the way valuations seem to be done nowadays, a bloody lemonade stand made from a sheet of plywood and a few 2x4s is probably going to be worth a few million bucks.
Yes, stability problems have been replaced by a UI designed for three year olds and so deficient that it makes Windows 3.1 look like a great leap forward.
I have two Server 2012 servers at work; a domain controller and another running Exchange 2010. I don't really mind them because most of the time I'm using the domain admin and Exchange tools on my Windows 7 desktop. Every once in a while I drop into the servers directly, mainly to install updates but sometimes, particularly on the Exchange server, to do tweaking, but I don't add users, create mailboxes, muck about with the DNS, work with the GPOs or any of that mundane stuff on those servers at all.
Compared to the Android devices I had to work with even a year or two ago, I'm seeing new versions becoming much more uniform. Whether this is just all the Android manufacturers moving towards a certain standard of usability, or Google is putting pressure on manufacturers to stick more closely to the reference implementations on the Nexus devices, I don't know.
I don't know how big sales were, but there was a Windows 2000 business edition, and I'll say this about it, it was probably one of the snappiest operating systems I've ever seen. I ended up running Windows 2000 server on my home PC for a few years, and it remains probably my favorite Windows version.
There are still places selling Windows 7 machines. I mentioned that in one of my other posts. I'm in Canada so I use Softchoice, and they quite happily sell boxes with Windows 7 installed. In fact, their question to me when I ordered some new computers was "These laptops come with Windows 7 Pro installed, but if you like we can throw in the Windows 8 install media." I'm certain there are many suppliers in the States and Europe doing the same thing.
I do a lot of contract work for government, and a lot of involves live meetings with desktop sharing, and half the time I'm seeing Vista desktops and the other half Windows 7. I have yet to see a Windows 8 desktop, and I'm pretty suspicious that at least my provincial government has not purchased any. I suspect they, like I, are having their suppliers simply selling Windows 7 machines. In other words, the government and enterprise markets, which are a huge part of Microsoft's overall market due to the sales of Office, have absolutely no desire to start making the move to Metro, and so long as there are Windows 7 OEM and bulk licenses to be had (and I can buy both without difficulty) Windows 8 will be a home PC operating system forced on to people who don't or can't do any better.
Vista's problems, by and large, were under the hood. It was still the old Windows 95 desktop paradigm with some new bells and whistles. The suckage came from poor driver support and suboptimal systems having "Windows Vista Ready" stickers be stuck on them. We have a bunch of Windows Vista SP2 workstations in our organization, and they work perfectly fine.
In fact, by and large the suckage of Windows versions has been under the hood. Windows 95 was slaughtered by stability issues, as was ME. The suckage in Windows 8 is of a different variety. For the first time since Windows 95 they've made major alterations to the GUI. Heck, let's be blunt, Metro is an entirely different GUI based on a pretty different paradigm, and switching between the "classic" desktop, which has been with us since Windows 95 and the Metro UI is jarring and incoherent. Worse, once you're in Metro, it's just a gawdawful UI that makes one pine for the days of Windows 3.1. Even if you look to the transition between 3.1 and 95, by and large the Windows 95 GUI is an extrapolation and enlargement of the older Windows 3.1/Presentation Manager model that had been around since OS/2. Metro is just plain alien.
They shouldn't have two GUI modes based on entirely different paradigms. It's absolute madness. Trying to make a desktop operating system behave like a smartphone operating system is just idiotic. I get the MS was trying to plant the psychological seeds to make the Surface and desktop offerings a unified target, but Surface and Surface RT just aren't selling and, in a time of shrinking PC sales, they've shot themselves in the foot. Whatever master plan they had with the Metro interface, it's been a failure on all fronts.
To show you how bad it is, I ordered some laptops from one of our main suppliers a few weeks ago. I didn't even have a chance to request downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro when my rep simply said "And these come with Windows 7 Pro installed, but we can install the upgrade media if you want it." This is one of the biggest hardware and software providers for enterprise and government in Canada, and they're selling new hardware with Windows 7 out of the box simply because no one in enterprise or government wants anything to do with Windows 8.
Except, of course, that almost every climatologist out there says AGW is real, and even those few who go around taking cash from the Koch Brothers seem oddly reticent when it comes to publishing their opposition.
But hey, if denying reality to prop up your childish incapacity to deal with the universe at is makes you feel better, who am I to judge? Maybe someday you'll be adult enough to put on your big boy pants.
Latency is high enough, in any of these paths that you will not be using IP. DECnet protocol would be sufficient. Worst case path from Mars to MarsT1/2, to Earth in opposition to Mars would be on the close order of 600 million kilometers one way, 1,200 million kilometers round trip. Divide that by 300,000 km and we get a round trip light speed time of roughly 4000 seconds, or a little over an hour and 6 min., not including signal regeneration time.
Heh! I'm just imagining Martian colonists using UUCP. I'd love to see some Martian bang paths.
Let's see. Other than the case, a Mac is nothing but OEM components. Sure, they may be to some degree at the middle or higher tier of OEM components, but they're just off-the-shelf parts.
A Porsche, on the other hand, isn't just a collection of generic components. Certainly there are some, but the engines, transmissions, suspension and the like are all unique to the Porsche. A Porsche is not just a Toyota Corolla in a different case.
So yes, there is very much a thing called the Apple Tax. Call it what you will, but you pay a premium for the logo. The very existence of Hackintoshes shows you that a Mac is just a PC with some special custom ROMs to facilitate easy installation of OS-X.
Using a quad core Pentium that's about four years old now. Upgraded the RAM, threw a faster HD in it. Runs Windows 7 just fine. I have no difficulties with hogs like Eclipse, even when running a VM in Virtualbox. I suppose at some point it's going to mushroom cloud, or necessity will force my hand, but for everything I do right now, it's more than adequate and I can't see buying a new machine any time in the foreseeable future. Last "tech" purchases I made was a Nexus 7 spring of last year and a Nexus 5 phone around Christmas time (gave my old iPhone 4 to one of my kids). I have a Windows 7 laptop at home that I rarely turn on, and an old Acer netbook running XP that I take with my on trips. With XP set to become abandonware, I'll probably throw Mint on it. I mainly use it to remote desktop into work anyways when I'm out and about, and don't even do that as much with RDP on it, and just use the Nexus 7.
All things being equal, I doubt I'll have a new work or home PC or notebook for quite a while.
WTF does native access to share folders have to do with anything? Whether you use an app or explorer.exe, at the end of the day you can browse network shares with an Android. And email is email and word processing and spreadsheet work sucks on an tablet anyways.
One would hope that the point of Gates' recounting of his problems with two Administrations and Congress is to tell the electorate "You elect the President and Congress, and this is how annoying, counterproductive and pig headed all these people are."
Still, he has a rather unique perspective, having been a senior member of both a Republican and a Democrat administration. I'm pretty keen to see his observations
I have a hard time believing anybody who needs high end networking gear is going to be buying a WRT54G, new version or older ones, anyways. If you're looking for high end performance, you're going up the price ladder a helluva lot more than $300. For me, building my own routers based on Mini or Micro-ITX hardware delivers a pretty damned powerful router that can, if I want it, become a web server or mail server if I want it to.
I'm not sure the analogy was ever meant to be a rigorous and exact model, but more of a kind of way of visualizing space-time. All analogies break down if you try to map them exactly to the phenomenon you're trying to explain. After all, it's an analogy, not a model.
For not much more than three hundred bucks I can put together a MicroATX router with dual NICs and a WiFi card that will have a lot more RAM, a lot more CPU power and even a reasonable bit of storage.
I have three of them, sans the WiFi, that are fanless with 60gb SSDs, that are the gateway/VPN routers running full Debian installs for our three offices. Admittedly they are el-cheapo chipsets, all of them running VIA x86 CPUs and 512mb of RAM, but for the kind of load we have, they do just fine.
And if the NSA could keep its hands off of domestic data, that wouldn't be an issue, but seeing as it uses existing tools to spy without warrant on US citizens on US territory, there is no reason to believe they won't apply new technologies in the same way.
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With the way valuations seem to be done nowadays, a bloody lemonade stand made from a sheet of plywood and a few 2x4s is probably going to be worth a few million bucks.
I hope you get paid by the character by Redmond, and not based on cognitive ability, spelling and grammar.
I just have to ask, if you have sufficient wit to answer, do you think your brain-dead post would convince anyone Metro is useful?
Yes, stability problems have been replaced by a UI designed for three year olds and so deficient that it makes Windows 3.1 look like a great leap forward.
Dockable media players have been available for Windows for many years now. Why is Metro superior?
Feature differences between versions is horrifying. I also find, compared to bash, Powershell is obscenely slow.
I have two Server 2012 servers at work; a domain controller and another running Exchange 2010. I don't really mind them because most of the time I'm using the domain admin and Exchange tools on my Windows 7 desktop. Every once in a while I drop into the servers directly, mainly to install updates but sometimes, particularly on the Exchange server, to do tweaking, but I don't add users, create mailboxes, muck about with the DNS, work with the GPOs or any of that mundane stuff on those servers at all.
Compared to the Android devices I had to work with even a year or two ago, I'm seeing new versions becoming much more uniform. Whether this is just all the Android manufacturers moving towards a certain standard of usability, or Google is putting pressure on manufacturers to stick more closely to the reference implementations on the Nexus devices, I don't know.
I don't know how big sales were, but there was a Windows 2000 business edition, and I'll say this about it, it was probably one of the snappiest operating systems I've ever seen. I ended up running Windows 2000 server on my home PC for a few years, and it remains probably my favorite Windows version.
There are still places selling Windows 7 machines. I mentioned that in one of my other posts. I'm in Canada so I use Softchoice, and they quite happily sell boxes with Windows 7 installed. In fact, their question to me when I ordered some new computers was "These laptops come with Windows 7 Pro installed, but if you like we can throw in the Windows 8 install media." I'm certain there are many suppliers in the States and Europe doing the same thing.
I do a lot of contract work for government, and a lot of involves live meetings with desktop sharing, and half the time I'm seeing Vista desktops and the other half Windows 7. I have yet to see a Windows 8 desktop, and I'm pretty suspicious that at least my provincial government has not purchased any. I suspect they, like I, are having their suppliers simply selling Windows 7 machines. In other words, the government and enterprise markets, which are a huge part of Microsoft's overall market due to the sales of Office, have absolutely no desire to start making the move to Metro, and so long as there are Windows 7 OEM and bulk licenses to be had (and I can buy both without difficulty) Windows 8 will be a home PC operating system forced on to people who don't or can't do any better.
Vista's problems, by and large, were under the hood. It was still the old Windows 95 desktop paradigm with some new bells and whistles. The suckage came from poor driver support and suboptimal systems having "Windows Vista Ready" stickers be stuck on them. We have a bunch of Windows Vista SP2 workstations in our organization, and they work perfectly fine.
In fact, by and large the suckage of Windows versions has been under the hood. Windows 95 was slaughtered by stability issues, as was ME. The suckage in Windows 8 is of a different variety. For the first time since Windows 95 they've made major alterations to the GUI. Heck, let's be blunt, Metro is an entirely different GUI based on a pretty different paradigm, and switching between the "classic" desktop, which has been with us since Windows 95 and the Metro UI is jarring and incoherent. Worse, once you're in Metro, it's just a gawdawful UI that makes one pine for the days of Windows 3.1. Even if you look to the transition between 3.1 and 95, by and large the Windows 95 GUI is an extrapolation and enlargement of the older Windows 3.1/Presentation Manager model that had been around since OS/2. Metro is just plain alien.
They shouldn't have two GUI modes based on entirely different paradigms. It's absolute madness. Trying to make a desktop operating system behave like a smartphone operating system is just idiotic. I get the MS was trying to plant the psychological seeds to make the Surface and desktop offerings a unified target, but Surface and Surface RT just aren't selling and, in a time of shrinking PC sales, they've shot themselves in the foot. Whatever master plan they had with the Metro interface, it's been a failure on all fronts.
To show you how bad it is, I ordered some laptops from one of our main suppliers a few weeks ago. I didn't even have a chance to request downgrade rights to Windows 7 Pro when my rep simply said "And these come with Windows 7 Pro installed, but we can install the upgrade media if you want it." This is one of the biggest hardware and software providers for enterprise and government in Canada, and they're selling new hardware with Windows 7 out of the box simply because no one in enterprise or government wants anything to do with Windows 8.
Except, of course, that almost every climatologist out there says AGW is real, and even those few who go around taking cash from the Koch Brothers seem oddly reticent when it comes to publishing their opposition.
But hey, if denying reality to prop up your childish incapacity to deal with the universe at is makes you feel better, who am I to judge? Maybe someday you'll be adult enough to put on your big boy pants.
You realize the 1997 claim is bunk, right? It's a cherry picked date.
Maybe you should learn some science.
Heh! I'm just imagining Martian colonists using UUCP. I'd love to see some Martian bang paths.
Let's see. Other than the case, a Mac is nothing but OEM components. Sure, they may be to some degree at the middle or higher tier of OEM components, but they're just off-the-shelf parts.
A Porsche, on the other hand, isn't just a collection of generic components. Certainly there are some, but the engines, transmissions, suspension and the like are all unique to the Porsche. A Porsche is not just a Toyota Corolla in a different case.
So yes, there is very much a thing called the Apple Tax. Call it what you will, but you pay a premium for the logo. The very existence of Hackintoshes shows you that a Mac is just a PC with some special custom ROMs to facilitate easy installation of OS-X.
Using a quad core Pentium that's about four years old now. Upgraded the RAM, threw a faster HD in it. Runs Windows 7 just fine. I have no difficulties with hogs like Eclipse, even when running a VM in Virtualbox. I suppose at some point it's going to mushroom cloud, or necessity will force my hand, but for everything I do right now, it's more than adequate and I can't see buying a new machine any time in the foreseeable future. Last "tech" purchases I made was a Nexus 7 spring of last year and a Nexus 5 phone around Christmas time (gave my old iPhone 4 to one of my kids). I have a Windows 7 laptop at home that I rarely turn on, and an old Acer netbook running XP that I take with my on trips. With XP set to become abandonware, I'll probably throw Mint on it. I mainly use it to remote desktop into work anyways when I'm out and about, and don't even do that as much with RDP on it, and just use the Nexus 7.
All things being equal, I doubt I'll have a new work or home PC or notebook for quite a while.
WTF does native access to share folders have to do with anything? Whether you use an app or explorer.exe, at the end of the day you can browse network shares with an Android. And email is email and word processing and spreadsheet work sucks on an tablet anyways.
One would hope that the point of Gates' recounting of his problems with two Administrations and Congress is to tell the electorate "You elect the President and Congress, and this is how annoying, counterproductive and pig headed all these people are."
Still, he has a rather unique perspective, having been a senior member of both a Republican and a Democrat administration. I'm pretty keen to see his observations
Pointless cycles because of poor code and compiler optimizations is hardly what I would call "utilization".
I have a hard time believing anybody who needs high end networking gear is going to be buying a WRT54G, new version or older ones, anyways. If you're looking for high end performance, you're going up the price ladder a helluva lot more than $300. For me, building my own routers based on Mini or Micro-ITX hardware delivers a pretty damned powerful router that can, if I want it, become a web server or mail server if I want it to.
I'm not sure the analogy was ever meant to be a rigorous and exact model, but more of a kind of way of visualizing space-time. All analogies break down if you try to map them exactly to the phenomenon you're trying to explain. After all, it's an analogy, not a model.
For not much more than three hundred bucks I can put together a MicroATX router with dual NICs and a WiFi card that will have a lot more RAM, a lot more CPU power and even a reasonable bit of storage.
I have three of them, sans the WiFi, that are fanless with 60gb SSDs, that are the gateway/VPN routers running full Debian installs for our three offices. Admittedly they are el-cheapo chipsets, all of them running VIA x86 CPUs and 512mb of RAM, but for the kind of load we have, they do just fine.
And if the NSA could keep its hands off of domestic data, that wouldn't be an issue, but seeing as it uses existing tools to spy without warrant on US citizens on US territory, there is no reason to believe they won't apply new technologies in the same way.
Except that Ham and his ilk are not arguing on faith, they are making specific claims, virtually every one of which was debunked decades ago.