Welcome to the club friend, coffee and donuts are in the back. your story is sadly what I've seen more and more the past decade, damned good IT guys that know their stuff that the PHBs just shit all over until they become so fucking stressed and burned out they look like walking corpses and hate their lives.
Like I said my family actually pulled an intervention on me, i was looking so bad from the constant stress and being told to constantly do more with less, and while I don't make near what I did I'm happy, I have color in my face and don't dread going to work, I even met a really nice gal who needed her PC fixed and we've been together more than 5 years now.
so while I can't advise you to take the path i took, I'd STRONGLY urge you to get out now while you can. remember you only get one shot at life and I know too many guys who have been worked to the point of failing health by PHBs that just don't give a shit. life is short, don't throw it away man. i just wish i could go back and tell myself that before i used up nearly a decade of mine in corporate, I probably wouldn't have a head of grey hair now.
Ouch, they are stickin it to ya huh? But I don't think you are looking at this the right way friend, see you can just save the instruction booklet and the old HSF and then move the new cooler to whatever unit you get later, as the new coolers will fit pretty much ALL Intel and AMD chips. So you see you can get this now and when you go Trinity or Ivy down the road you can just take that cooler with you, no need to replace it when you replace the chip. I have a customer with one of the Zalman coolers, he's changed chips 3 times, still on the same cooler.
And if you need something a little lower cost this unit works pretty well, about 5-7F hotter than the N520 but its also half the price so with your import taxes it might save you a pretty penny. As you see here its also a heatpipe but with the added advantage of this baby will fit ANYTHING, from Socket 754 on the AMD side to LGA 775 on the Intel, so it really doesn't matter what system you get down the road, just keep the adapters and instruction booklet and take the cooler with you.
The problem is look at the prices, last I checked the only way that BD/PD beat the Phenom II Hexacore was with the Octocore, the BD/PD Hexacore being beaten by a few percent. so you have to buy the Octocore to beat the Phenom II hexacore, and you have to buy at least the BD/PD hexacore to beat the quad, again because of lower per core performance.
What's the problem with that? because with the higher cost to make the BD/PD chips frankly they have to sell them at too high a price. You can get the Athlon II triple for $60, quad for $80, Phenom II quad BE for $90 and the Hexacores for any but the BE are selling for $110. Meanwhile the FX8350, which as you noted is ONLY winning by a couple of percent, is $195, and the Hexa and quads are $132, $122. so you have to spend $195 to beat a $110 Phenom II, $132 to beat a $90 BE quad, and frankly they don't really have anything that competes with the Athlon price points anymore.
One of the reasons I've been sticking with AMD, besides the fact that the Intel bribery and compiler rigging left a bad taste in my mouth, is I have a LOT more normal customers than I do gamers. We are talking office workers, home users, small business, even some using their PCs in home theater setups, and in all those areas frankly even the Athlon triples give more performance than they are ever gonna really need, with the quads and hexas being super overkill.
The real bitch, one that is seriously hurting AMD, is they are reportedly having serious issues with the yields on the top end chips, yet all the benches show you really need those top end chips to beat the previous Phenom II. You see the bitch i bet you don't know is because they had so much time to refine the Phenom series that they were looking at near 100% yields and thanks to the way they had the SKUs set up they were having pretty much ZERO wasted chips. Phenom X6 have a bad core or two? Make it an X4. Three bad cores? An X3, bad cache? An Athlon. But because they were getting such good yields from the chips frankly most of their lower SKUs weren't bad chips, they just had them turned off to meet a quota, so guys like me were seeing 70%+ when it came to turning on disabled cores! It made the bang for the buck just insane.
So while I hope that AMD is able to fix the chips and right the ship ATM there is really no reason for me to switch from Phenom II and Athlon II to BD/PD chips, it just doesn't give any advantages to my customers. To beat the Phenom IIs you have to have more cores than my users will ever need, and frankly most of them won't even be able to stress that $60 Athlon triple, much less that $110 X6. Heck my youngest is gaming on my hand me down 4 year old 925 Phenom II and it spends more time idling than anything, and that is with him playing those large MMOs.
We just have more power than we know what to do with now, throwing more cores at it just doesn't change that.
Personally I prefer the Hyper N520 for both AMD and Intel builds, why? Its quiet, fits into the mATX towers, unlike many of the heatpipe coolers, and with a little arctic silver (although to be fair it comes with coolermaster heat paste in a tube and its only around 5f difference between the two) it keeps even the hexacores nice and cool without being loud.
The problem with those like the ninja, and having a couple of gamer customers that love having me build them crazy gamer rigs I've gotten to play with most of the high scoring coolers, is they are fricking HUGE and will have trouble fitting into anything but the really large gamer cases. Since the vast majority of PCs come with the mATX mini-towers its nice to have a cooler that will do the job without having to toss the case and the N520 fits that description perfectly. In fact with most of my customers (as well as myself) that go for the N520 I don't even bother with an exhaust fan, the N520 will push enough air that frankly it isn't needed. We are talking 85-105F light load on the Hexacores, with 128F seeming to be the highest they'll hit after hours of heavy loads, and you can knock 5-12F for the quads and triples, just depending on the model.
Truly a great little aftermarket cooler at a great price, i highly recommend and like it so much not only is my own Hexacore running it but so is my dad's quad, and my boys quad and hexacore. All of us are quite happy with how low it keeps the temps and how quiet it is, just great.
That is actually quite easy and cheap to fix friend. I would recommend the same thing my family and I use, the Hyper N520 which is small enough to fit in most mATX mini-towers, and paired with a little arctic silver will keep even the hottest chips under control without the whole "jet engine" problem.
My 1035T which is naturally a hotter chip than yours, having 6 cores and Turbocore, idles around 85F-95F, depending on how hot i have it in my apt at the time, and after hours of video transcoding it maxes out around 128F, which is really good for just a $30 cooler and a $5 tube of arctic silver, especially since i removed the exhaust fan as I saw no point with the temps i was getting. I tried using the tube of paste that comes with it on my nephew's quad and it only adds 5f-7F so its up to you if you want to buy the arctic for that little difference, but I figured if i was gonna have the cooler changed out having some arctic around would probably be nice to have and it was on sale.
But once installed frankly you can't hear it unless you just lay your ear next to the case, in fact when i installed the N520 into my youngest boy's 1045t gamer PC he called me back in there before I could pack up my tools saying 'I think the fans are busted!" and I had to pop the side off to show him yes, the fans are working just fine, because it was so quiet he was sure there had to be something stopping the fans from turning. like you he had an AMD stock cooler and that thing was a noisy little beast,that is why I urge folks on my new builds just to spend the extra money and get the N520, the drop in noise and temps is well worth it.
Its not just the UI changes, I have to support users on older systems as well as some netbook owners and as a netbook owner myself I can tell you that FF performance on low power systems frankly has been going downhill pretty badly. As an example the nettop I use in the shop, which with a Sempron 1.8GHz is frankly more powerful than any of the single core Atom netbooks, can play SD flash just fine and do multiple tabs...under any of the Chrome varaints. With FF the CPU slams to 100% on launch, slams to 100% when opening a new tab, even slams to 100% when scrolling through my bookmarks! And I lose about an hour on my E350 netbook if I use FF over one of the Chrome variants, again monitoring the CPU it seems FF just slams the hell out of these low power chips, in fact anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT seems to be slammed pretty hard in my tests around the shop. the whole UI becomes sluggish, FF itself feels like its in slow mo, its just not a pleasant browsing experience with the newer versions.
So while I agree that the UI changes are irritating frankly you could always learn where they put what this week, but the battery sucking and CPU hogging is a show stopper, at least for me and my customers. I've switched them all to Comodo Dragon but frankly testing any of the Chrome variants and it was pretty much the same, no CPU hogging or causing the whole UI to become unresponsive. if I had to guess I'd say they have bolted too much onto the gecko engine trying to keep up with Chrome's features and its just not cutting it, because I've tried all the forks and its the same story in Waterfox and Pale Moon and IceDragon, and frankly it wasn't doing this, at least for me, pre 5.0 which is where they really started to heavily keep up with Chrome feature wise.
Finally as for Seamonkey? Can't really say as I haven't used it in years, but as it has the same Gecko as FF I doubt it will be much different than using Waterfox or IceDragon, just a different wrapper on the same overworked engine. Frankly the only Gecko engine I've seen that still sails is Kmeleon, but that is so stripped down and isn't compatible with much so the disadvantages usually outweigh the advantages. that said if you have seriously old hardware that needs a modern browser Kmeleon really cooks, I stuck it on a 1.4Ghz first gen P4 for an older customer and she is quite happy with it, it does what she needs it to do and feels snappy.
It just amazed me that the whole thread broke into 2 camps, one saying "use sneakernet" and the other saying "have it hooked to the net so they can get their work done" when the solution is networking 101, just keep it isolated to the LAN without access to the WAN.
I guess they just ain't teaching these kids networking 101 anymore...so tell 'em to get off my lawn!
Because a digital frame makes sense? I mean who uses analog cameras and film day to day anymore? With the digital frame they are filling a need, the fact that modern users are taking their pictures with digital cameras and smartphones, and fills the niche that was once filled by Polaroid instamatics in that you can take a picture and have it on a frame on your desk in mere moments, shorter for the wireless ones.
But trying to stuff weather onto these just doesn't make sense, because the weather is one of those tasks EVERYTHING has, your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, TV, its everywhere! Spending a whole bunch of time and effort to replicate data that he probably has in his pocket this very moment simply makes no sense.
The problem, and as someone that has been selling AMD exclusively since I found out about Intel bribery and compiler rigging really hurts, is they are going ass backwards when it comes to design. they are betting everything on having as many cores as they can, even when the cores are weak, when most people frankly aren't even slamming a dual or triple, much less a hexacore.
You see the problem is this: When we had the MHz wars it was easy for programs to take advantage of better single core performance but now that we've (IMHO) gone off the rails with number of cores what we are seeing is frankly a LOT of the software people use every day? Really doesn't spawn that many threads. Heck even games have trouble using more than a couple without running into sync issues.
Frankly a better choice would have been less cores but give those cores crazy single threaded IPC, in fact I would argue the "perfect CPU" but be one with one or two insanely powerful cores and then 4 to 6 lesser cores to handle background tasks and an OS who understood the layout so it could schedule appropriately.
Instead what AMD did with Bulldozer was to give us a huge number of really weak underperforming cores, in fact it reminded me of Intel's Larrabee GPU in that sticking a whole bunch of weak CPUs was supposed to be "good enough". So while I'm glad AMD seems to be pulling back from the weak cores somewhat I find it telling that on the 2 links I picked at random it looks like nobody is testing it against Phenom II anymore because i have a feeling full cores will still do good compared to the half core designed used in BD/PD.
So while I do hope AMD rights the ship until i can say across the board "This chip is in every way better than Phenom II" I'll be sticking with the AM3+ Phenom IIs in my builds. The prices are better, Frankly the Athlon quads have been going for $80 and the Phenom Hexacores for $110 so the bang for the buck is there, and they give the average user more cores than they can use at a great price. While its good that PD isn't using more power than BD frankly BD was a hot chip to begin with so that's not saying much, and frankly even heavy multitaskers like myself have trouble keeping a 6 core fed, even a lot of video encoding software don't support 6 cores yet. Until software catches up 8 cores, heck probably 6 cores like mine, will be total overkill and when the software does catch up the changes in CPUs will make the 6 and 8 cores released today just not good. I just don't see a selling point for the BD/PD arch AMD, sorry but I don't.
Not to mention it ignores the reality of today's society, which we are playing musical chairs based on brains and more and more don't have a seat when the music stops.
This is why, even if they get a breakthrough with something like this, i think capitalism is gonna die just like every other ism throughout history, why? because in the end you are only gonna need a handful of truly gifted people and the rest will be replaced by the machines.
And the reason why capitalism must fall is the breakthrough of technology finally making the man worthless like in the tale of John Henry leaves a few at the very top, those with the means to buy the machines of production, with wealth the likes of which kings never saw before while large masses of the populace will be left with nothing. What good is a system based on trading your labor for capital if your labor is no longer required?
Unless you want to start going to dark places like eugenics and forced sterilization the simple fact is we could wipe out half the people on this planet tomorrow and not only would the standard of living not go down, it would go up quite a lot for those left because they might actually have a demand for their labor.
As it is now, what do you do with those large masses of people with 100 IQs or less? Pay them to do nothing? Make up jobs that aren't truly needed, as we do now? Get a job at Walmart and one of the training videos they show you is how to apply for federal aid, because your labor is only worth having if the feds subsidize you. think they couldn't replace most of their workers with machines? heck you could replace the majority of Mickey D's employees with an automated assembly line and it would work just as well, only thanks to government subsidies of the workers its cheaper to hire the poor.
So I really can't blame a kid for taking this, the entire world has become IQ musical chairs and if you fail to get a seat your life will be dead end jobs and grinding poverty. Of course the flip side of this is just as you know how college educated are living with their parents because they can't find a decent job, imagine what would happen if the IQ of the general pop suddenly went to 150 as the baseline? It certainly wouldn't create any more jobs, it would most likely mean the corps would just start looking for people with even higher IQs, again its just IQ musical chairs for the shrinking number of jobs that aren't done by the machines and eventually we'll probably all lose.
Sadly it was made before Jack Valenti could get his "forever minus a single day" copyright laws passed. Won't someone think of the corporations? Why people are actually READING without writing them a check!
Well then I hope you agree with me that "free trade" should be banned in favor of fair trade, because as it is ALL the countries are fucking rigging the playing field! You wanna see that same shit in other countries look at how Japan screws the shit out of AR rice with tariffs so their home grown rice, which is frankly inferior, gets the lion's share of the market, or how China controls the Yen and won't allow American imports without high tariffs, instead forcing any American corp that wants to sell to China to open a factory there so they can get around the tariffs!
So as much as I agree with you that trade with Cuba should be opened and all the corn lobbyists should be told to fuck off, frankly we are getting royally fucked in the global markets and have such a huge trade deficit precisely because the other countries are rigging the field worse than we are! This is why I tell everyone that whenever a politician says they are for "free trade" they should call them out on it, because with all the market rigging its a total lie that only benefits a handful while fucking millions. Then what REALLY pisses me off is they call countries like China and India "nationalist" for rigging their markets...and still trade with them! Well duh, its called "being smarter than stupid greedy Americans" and maybe we should do the fucking same until they agree to a level playing field!
Man...that must be a hell of a nice place to work Crosshair, congrats.
The reason i got out of corporate IT, even though it paid better and wasn't the "feast or famine" that is running a small shop is my two nephews had a kind of intervention on me. they just kept piling on the work, never giving me the resources that I needed, frankly i was looking like shit from being run so hard. One day I came in and with tears practically in their eyes they said "We done lost our mom last year and our dad abandoned us. All we have is you and grandma and you look like you are a ghost, you're so pale. We can do without the fancy stuff, we can't do without you" and needless to say I tried to give my notice the next day. Of course being the ungrateful pricks that they were they said "Don't bother, just get your stuff and pick up your check"..yeah, fuck you too.
Now as I said the pay ain't as good and its feast or famine but GOD, what a difference! When I say things they actually LISTEN TO ME! When I say they need this or that I'm not treated like I'm fucking trying to rob them, in fact I'm often asked "Are you sure that's all we need? better to spend it now than need it down the road and not have it" needless to say the first time that happened I damned near choked, talk about a difference!
Frankly if you want to know what is wrong with this country the way the corps treat IT is a perfect "canary in the coalmine" as far as I'm concerned. All they give a shit about is the quarter, never think ahead, they will pinch the fuck out of that penny while blowing pounds later on when the chickens come home to roost, but since all those PHB and MBAs...which I call Masters of Being Assholes play musical chairs they'll be gone before the shit really hits the fan so they don't give a fuck. Corp America is just one big pile of uber paychecks and golden parachutes at the top and crumbling infrastructure and braindead decisions below. Its no wonder this country is in bad shape Crosshair, its run by Masters of Being Assholes!
Dude don't be fucking silly. yes I know the sonicwalls aren't Cisco but you sure as fuck can't say that those shitty $30 blue dlink specials are the same as a 24 port sonicwall, there is NO comparison. Like I said it wasn't because this moron thought the Dlink was just as good, it was because he had never done jack shit but home installs and didn't know his ass from a 7/11 when it came to pro gear.
And look I got NO problem with "Tigerdirect specials" as i make my bread and butter off the boxes..but I would NEVER EVER try to set up a business on those, not unless they gave me enough to set up the whole office AND have some spares in case one goes down...why? Its the drivers dude, trying to support a mish mashed mess of hardware where no damned driver matches is a royal PITA to admin, and this guy had dribbed and drabbed the place. The worst part? He built them fucking OCed from the factory "gamer specials!", my guess is because he wanted one for himself and just added it to the bill, but fuck! You wanna talk about some seriously fucked up issues! Why don't YOU try dealing with over 30 OCed from the factory unstable messes, where even the RAM timings are aggressively OCed! And this was for a fricking law firm, not some gaming place, yet every damned system had gamer cards!
Sure even if you don't like the sonicwalls you can see that situation was a clusterfuck from hell. Frankly they only gave a shit about his lowball price and never once stopped to ask "Why is he cheaper than the other guys?" and the reason he was cheaper was he didn't know shit, he was some "gamer guy" pretending like he knew enough to do corporate. I mean picture trying to track down a networking issue only to open up the closet and find more than a dozen of those damned blue dlink 4 port jobs with half a dozen ISPs and not a damned thing labeled? We had to shitcan the whole place and start over, it was just too big a mess to untangle and fix.
And not to rain on YOUR parade but unless you live in one of the major metro areas Apple sucks big hairy balls. I get to deal with a doctor tomorrow who has been to Apple's genius bar more than a dozen times with networking issues, all they do is reload the OS and apply the patches and hand it back, needless to say that don't fix shit. At least if he had Dell or HP under contract he could get an actual tech out there to work on the problem on site, but since Apple don't do that I'm gonna have to try to fumble my way around an OS I've avoided like an STD because frankly nobody else will even try, he says Apple and they say "fuck that proprietary crap, we won't touch it" and then they try to sell him a new system. I'm at least willing to try, which is more than he's gotten from Apple.
The "moral" of the story is Assange is right, Sweden is the USA's bitch and they jump through the hoops like a good doggie. Think actual Swedish content was even one half of one percent of TPB? Nope but he pissed off the media cartels which along with the other megacorps own the USA so they just told their pitbulls at the state dept "Make sure they fuck him hard" and wadda ya know? that's what they are doing.
Sigh...I remember when extradition was actually a big deal, when only murderers and organized criminals had to worry about it, but now every. country. on. the. planet. has to follow the USA's rules and jump through the hoops, because God fucking forbid our media cartels have to get with the 21st century and use new models of business, why God that would be horrible!
Just think, if the cartels would have been in place at the turn of the 20th century you'd be forced to this very day to buy a saddle and buggywhip for every person riding in a vehicle. I mean how dare they have to change when they could just buy the laws?
Frankly there needs to be a "+10 Truth" mod because you sir should have one! I mean what is this complete obsession with putting every damned thing on everything else? I gave my GF a photoframe that...gasp! Just shows photos a couple of years back and she still loves and treasures it, it sets in the middle of the TV shelf right above the set so anybody who sits down in her home has their eyes drawn to its constantly changing pictures and with the 8Gb SD card and reader she can just slap pics straight off her phone onto the card and have them instantly ready for viewing which she loves.
You already get news and weather on your PC, your laptop, your phone, why can't a picture frame just be a picture frame?
Yeah only unlike the janitors when IT goes wrong they are gonna be a lot of businesses that find out the hard way they are fucked, may even go under. I've seen first hand what happens when you let some guy lowball and outsource IT, the place ended up with a bunch of hand built "TigerDirect specials" with ZERO related drivers or parts so support was a nightmare, we opened up the networking closet and found the guy had sold the Sonicwalls we had put in and replaced EVERYTHING with those cheap shitty Dlink home routers, the network itself was a bunch of shitty home lines from a half a dozen different companies because the bozo didn't know shit about dealing with a T-Line, it was a fucking mess.
Of course the sad part is the retard that approved this moron had already made his bonuses for "saving money on the budget" and moved on to another company, leaving the next poor bastard to get stuck with the mess. but it really don't take more than one or two "WTF?" moments to bring a company to its knees and the costs to fix the problems this short term thinking causes may end up bankrupting the corp, again I've seen it happen, lots of places where no net means no work getting done and it don't take too many days of your entire workforce sitting on ass because they can't do their jobs thanks to IT issues to kill a corp.
But then in their case they wouldn't be stuck on XP, now would they? the guy even mentioned the software uses those damned dongles for antipiracy measures, I've never heard of a Linux software that uses dongles as GPL frowns on adding proprietary stacks to Linux.
You ran into the thrash of death too? I had that damned OS kill a brand new hard drive it thrashed so fucking much! I wonder if anybody figured out WTF it was doing, because even killing indexing and doing every tweak and trick on the net never got Vista to quit thrashing for me.
Frankly I'd say Win 7 is a HELL of a lot more than an SP for Vista, they changed a LOT of stuff at the kernel level and it shows. Whereas Vista beat the hell out of my drives and its I/O was frankly Win98 levels of bad now with Win 7 most of the time my drives spin down, there is so little being written that they can stay spun down for quite a long time and simply use the RAM cache to load my programs...nice.
I'm sorry but you OBVIOUSLY never used Vista in a business environment, here I'll sing my little Vista poem for you..
Vista...oh Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...Networking: Losing network shares and then refusing to see them until a reboot, who do you think you are, Windows 98? Networking: Playing any kind of media, even as simple as a song, can cause network file transfers to grind to slower than dialup speeds, what's a matter, two tasks at once too much for you? Operating environment: Having little "senior moments" where the entire system just freezes, not enough to cause a hard lock up, just enough to really piss me off, hey are you a new OS or are you my grandpa? File I/O...why u thrash Vista? I went through every God damned tweak and trick on the net and you STILL thrashed so damned much it killed a brand new hard drive. WTF were you doing Vista? Writing a fricking fan fic?
Now the system i had at the time? NO slouch, in fact it was more powerful than what many were running in 07 when Vista came out...Pentium 4 3.6GHz with HT, 3Gb of RAM, Geforce 7600GS, and dual 400Gb hard drives. Now this system flew on XP X64, in fact last I heard its still running great under that OS for its new owner, but on Vista? It felt like a 386DX trying to run Win98. there is NO excuse on why a system that powerful should run like a dog with an OS that "claimed" it could run on a 1GHz with a gb of RAM.
compare that with the fact I've had Win 7 running quite well on a 1.8GHz Sempron from 2004 with 2gb of RAM, just no Aero but I can remedy that with the 1650 Pro AGP card I have sitting in the parts box and I'm sorry, but Vista failed for a reason..it was full of fail.
It just amazes me how much money is shit down the drain when that could be easily avoided by just talking to the grunts down in the trenches. I've said it before and I'll say it again...Put ME in charge of MSFT and in less than 5 years, hell i could probably do it in under 3, I'd turn that ship around and be labeled another Steve Jobs.
All you have to do is simply LISTEN, that's all, listen to the grunts in the field and they'll be happy to help you get the ship back on course. For mobile? Build it cheap, build it simple, do NOT tie the Windows branding to it as that is just confusing, instead make damned sure that "it just works" is the mantra and that your grandma could share photos between her MS Phone, the X360, and the desktop.
For the desktop? Add little features that are "must have" while leaving the core experience ALONE, we've had 30+ years of WIMP and it frankly is the best design for a keyboard and mouse. Here I'll even give you a feature that would sell like crazy MY new Windows 9, aka "Win 7 with more coolness"...anywhere connection. This would take the guts of remote assistance and extend it so that even your grandma could remote into her system, imagine all those users that are at the office and go "Damn, I forgot to bring file XYZ from home I was working on last night" no problem! you just log into the MSFT server using your username and password along with your USB key (giving you two factor auth) and voila! The MSFT server sends a wake on LAN signal to your home system and you grab the file, easy peasy.
The ONLY reason MSFT is in bad shape right now is the clueless PHB at the top named Steve Ballmer, if you brought in someone that would LISTEN to the grunts and users and give them "more of the same, just better" and price it competitively, say $50 for Home, $100 for Pro or a family pack? they'd be raking in the cash instead of throwing the Hail Mary that is Windows 8, which I personally think is gonna fail.
BTW I don't know if its still true or not but that blog used to be run by Allchin,one of the guys that bailed after Vista because the PHBs wouldn't listen. He and others said the marketing group had taken control away from the designers and with Win 8 you can really tell, its a "designed by committee" mess of an OS.../facepalm/.
The problem is the way corps shit all over IT they'll just go "Hey, one more job we can dump on them without raising their pay!" and that will be that.
Lets face it folks, we are gonna end up with critical shortages of IT and infrastructure workers because between the offshoring, the H1-Bs, and the PHBs treating IT as this money pit that doesn't give them any profits? IT has been shat upon for the good part of the last decade.
I know myself and most of the old guard guys I knew ended up getting out of corporate IT for just this reason, piling more and more work upon us while expecting everything to be done with less help and a shrinking budget...now you want to add coding to the requirements? You gonna add a pay raise and pay for the classes? Yeah, thought not.
Man hasn't everyone figured out "new coke" was the scam of the century? Old coke was made with sugar, they knew people would have a shitfit when they switched to HFCS because it would taste different, so they came out with "new coke" which was made with HFCS. if it sold? Fine and dandy, if it didn't? Put out old coke made with HFCS and say "My bad" and everyone will be so happy not to be drinking new coke that they won't notice they been had.
I have to wonder if MSFT isn't pulling the same scam with Win 8, if it sells? Fine and dandy, if it don't? they say "My bad, here's Win 7" and people will be so happy to not have Win 8 they won't nopticed MSFT still got them to upgrade from XP...its a win/win for MSFT, just as it was for the Coca Cola co.
Yeah no shit, just built a brand new Athlon triple for a customer and guess what was on the driver disc along with Vista and 7? XP drivers.
So if I can buy brand new gear today with XP drivers i doubt finding NOS will be hard after 2014, hell I had a customer that hung onto Win2K until last year simply because he had mission critical software that wouldn't run on XP. Its really not hard to find the hardware if you need it, I can go to someplace like Starmicro and get CPUs going back to the Slot A and Pentium 3, really not hard to build a NOS system these days.
Vista was garbage and everybody knew it. I advised my customers to avoid Vista like an STD because it was obvious it was gonna be another ME and be replaced quickly, and waddayaknow, here came Win 7 and now finding Vista machines is nearly impossible.
So while I agree they should have been switching to Win 7 by now saying they should have switched because of Vista is just retarded, hell even the OEMs didn't switch to Vista, they just sold XP with a Vista DVD in the bottom of the box nobody used. I think I still have a pile of those POS discs in the shop somewhere, like a bad fruitcake nobody wanted it.
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Welcome to the club friend, coffee and donuts are in the back. your story is sadly what I've seen more and more the past decade, damned good IT guys that know their stuff that the PHBs just shit all over until they become so fucking stressed and burned out they look like walking corpses and hate their lives.
Like I said my family actually pulled an intervention on me, i was looking so bad from the constant stress and being told to constantly do more with less, and while I don't make near what I did I'm happy, I have color in my face and don't dread going to work, I even met a really nice gal who needed her PC fixed and we've been together more than 5 years now.
so while I can't advise you to take the path i took, I'd STRONGLY urge you to get out now while you can. remember you only get one shot at life and I know too many guys who have been worked to the point of failing health by PHBs that just don't give a shit. life is short, don't throw it away man. i just wish i could go back and tell myself that before i used up nearly a decade of mine in corporate, I probably wouldn't have a head of grey hair now.
Ouch, they are stickin it to ya huh? But I don't think you are looking at this the right way friend, see you can just save the instruction booklet and the old HSF and then move the new cooler to whatever unit you get later, as the new coolers will fit pretty much ALL Intel and AMD chips. So you see you can get this now and when you go Trinity or Ivy down the road you can just take that cooler with you, no need to replace it when you replace the chip. I have a customer with one of the Zalman coolers, he's changed chips 3 times, still on the same cooler.
And if you need something a little lower cost this unit works pretty well, about 5-7F hotter than the N520 but its also half the price so with your import taxes it might save you a pretty penny. As you see here its also a heatpipe but with the added advantage of this baby will fit ANYTHING, from Socket 754 on the AMD side to LGA 775 on the Intel, so it really doesn't matter what system you get down the road, just keep the adapters and instruction booklet and take the cooler with you.
The problem is look at the prices, last I checked the only way that BD/PD beat the Phenom II Hexacore was with the Octocore, the BD/PD Hexacore being beaten by a few percent. so you have to buy the Octocore to beat the Phenom II hexacore, and you have to buy at least the BD/PD hexacore to beat the quad, again because of lower per core performance.
What's the problem with that? because with the higher cost to make the BD/PD chips frankly they have to sell them at too high a price. You can get the Athlon II triple for $60, quad for $80, Phenom II quad BE for $90 and the Hexacores for any but the BE are selling for $110. Meanwhile the FX8350, which as you noted is ONLY winning by a couple of percent, is $195, and the Hexa and quads are $132, $122. so you have to spend $195 to beat a $110 Phenom II, $132 to beat a $90 BE quad, and frankly they don't really have anything that competes with the Athlon price points anymore.
One of the reasons I've been sticking with AMD, besides the fact that the Intel bribery and compiler rigging left a bad taste in my mouth, is I have a LOT more normal customers than I do gamers. We are talking office workers, home users, small business, even some using their PCs in home theater setups, and in all those areas frankly even the Athlon triples give more performance than they are ever gonna really need, with the quads and hexas being super overkill.
The real bitch, one that is seriously hurting AMD, is they are reportedly having serious issues with the yields on the top end chips, yet all the benches show you really need those top end chips to beat the previous Phenom II. You see the bitch i bet you don't know is because they had so much time to refine the Phenom series that they were looking at near 100% yields and thanks to the way they had the SKUs set up they were having pretty much ZERO wasted chips. Phenom X6 have a bad core or two? Make it an X4. Three bad cores? An X3, bad cache? An Athlon. But because they were getting such good yields from the chips frankly most of their lower SKUs weren't bad chips, they just had them turned off to meet a quota, so guys like me were seeing 70%+ when it came to turning on disabled cores! It made the bang for the buck just insane.
So while I hope that AMD is able to fix the chips and right the ship ATM there is really no reason for me to switch from Phenom II and Athlon II to BD/PD chips, it just doesn't give any advantages to my customers. To beat the Phenom IIs you have to have more cores than my users will ever need, and frankly most of them won't even be able to stress that $60 Athlon triple, much less that $110 X6. Heck my youngest is gaming on my hand me down 4 year old 925 Phenom II and it spends more time idling than anything, and that is with him playing those large MMOs.
We just have more power than we know what to do with now, throwing more cores at it just doesn't change that.
Personally I prefer the Hyper N520 for both AMD and Intel builds, why? Its quiet, fits into the mATX towers, unlike many of the heatpipe coolers, and with a little arctic silver (although to be fair it comes with coolermaster heat paste in a tube and its only around 5f difference between the two) it keeps even the hexacores nice and cool without being loud.
The problem with those like the ninja, and having a couple of gamer customers that love having me build them crazy gamer rigs I've gotten to play with most of the high scoring coolers, is they are fricking HUGE and will have trouble fitting into anything but the really large gamer cases. Since the vast majority of PCs come with the mATX mini-towers its nice to have a cooler that will do the job without having to toss the case and the N520 fits that description perfectly. In fact with most of my customers (as well as myself) that go for the N520 I don't even bother with an exhaust fan, the N520 will push enough air that frankly it isn't needed. We are talking 85-105F light load on the Hexacores, with 128F seeming to be the highest they'll hit after hours of heavy loads, and you can knock 5-12F for the quads and triples, just depending on the model.
Truly a great little aftermarket cooler at a great price, i highly recommend and like it so much not only is my own Hexacore running it but so is my dad's quad, and my boys quad and hexacore. All of us are quite happy with how low it keeps the temps and how quiet it is, just great.
That is actually quite easy and cheap to fix friend. I would recommend the same thing my family and I use, the Hyper N520 which is small enough to fit in most mATX mini-towers, and paired with a little arctic silver will keep even the hottest chips under control without the whole "jet engine" problem.
My 1035T which is naturally a hotter chip than yours, having 6 cores and Turbocore, idles around 85F-95F, depending on how hot i have it in my apt at the time, and after hours of video transcoding it maxes out around 128F, which is really good for just a $30 cooler and a $5 tube of arctic silver, especially since i removed the exhaust fan as I saw no point with the temps i was getting. I tried using the tube of paste that comes with it on my nephew's quad and it only adds 5f-7F so its up to you if you want to buy the arctic for that little difference, but I figured if i was gonna have the cooler changed out having some arctic around would probably be nice to have and it was on sale.
But once installed frankly you can't hear it unless you just lay your ear next to the case, in fact when i installed the N520 into my youngest boy's 1045t gamer PC he called me back in there before I could pack up my tools saying 'I think the fans are busted!" and I had to pop the side off to show him yes, the fans are working just fine, because it was so quiet he was sure there had to be something stopping the fans from turning. like you he had an AMD stock cooler and that thing was a noisy little beast,that is why I urge folks on my new builds just to spend the extra money and get the N520, the drop in noise and temps is well worth it.
Its not just the UI changes, I have to support users on older systems as well as some netbook owners and as a netbook owner myself I can tell you that FF performance on low power systems frankly has been going downhill pretty badly. As an example the nettop I use in the shop, which with a Sempron 1.8GHz is frankly more powerful than any of the single core Atom netbooks, can play SD flash just fine and do multiple tabs...under any of the Chrome varaints. With FF the CPU slams to 100% on launch, slams to 100% when opening a new tab, even slams to 100% when scrolling through my bookmarks! And I lose about an hour on my E350 netbook if I use FF over one of the Chrome variants, again monitoring the CPU it seems FF just slams the hell out of these low power chips, in fact anything less than a 3GHz P4 with HT seems to be slammed pretty hard in my tests around the shop. the whole UI becomes sluggish, FF itself feels like its in slow mo, its just not a pleasant browsing experience with the newer versions.
So while I agree that the UI changes are irritating frankly you could always learn where they put what this week, but the battery sucking and CPU hogging is a show stopper, at least for me and my customers. I've switched them all to Comodo Dragon but frankly testing any of the Chrome variants and it was pretty much the same, no CPU hogging or causing the whole UI to become unresponsive. if I had to guess I'd say they have bolted too much onto the gecko engine trying to keep up with Chrome's features and its just not cutting it, because I've tried all the forks and its the same story in Waterfox and Pale Moon and IceDragon, and frankly it wasn't doing this, at least for me, pre 5.0 which is where they really started to heavily keep up with Chrome feature wise.
Finally as for Seamonkey? Can't really say as I haven't used it in years, but as it has the same Gecko as FF I doubt it will be much different than using Waterfox or IceDragon, just a different wrapper on the same overworked engine. Frankly the only Gecko engine I've seen that still sails is Kmeleon, but that is so stripped down and isn't compatible with much so the disadvantages usually outweigh the advantages. that said if you have seriously old hardware that needs a modern browser Kmeleon really cooks, I stuck it on a 1.4Ghz first gen P4 for an older customer and she is quite happy with it, it does what she needs it to do and feels snappy.
It just amazed me that the whole thread broke into 2 camps, one saying "use sneakernet" and the other saying "have it hooked to the net so they can get their work done" when the solution is networking 101, just keep it isolated to the LAN without access to the WAN.
I guess they just ain't teaching these kids networking 101 anymore...so tell 'em to get off my lawn!
Because a digital frame makes sense? I mean who uses analog cameras and film day to day anymore? With the digital frame they are filling a need, the fact that modern users are taking their pictures with digital cameras and smartphones, and fills the niche that was once filled by Polaroid instamatics in that you can take a picture and have it on a frame on your desk in mere moments, shorter for the wireless ones.
But trying to stuff weather onto these just doesn't make sense, because the weather is one of those tasks EVERYTHING has, your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, TV, its everywhere! Spending a whole bunch of time and effort to replicate data that he probably has in his pocket this very moment simply makes no sense.
The problem, and as someone that has been selling AMD exclusively since I found out about Intel bribery and compiler rigging really hurts, is they are going ass backwards when it comes to design. they are betting everything on having as many cores as they can, even when the cores are weak, when most people frankly aren't even slamming a dual or triple, much less a hexacore.
You see the problem is this: When we had the MHz wars it was easy for programs to take advantage of better single core performance but now that we've (IMHO) gone off the rails with number of cores what we are seeing is frankly a LOT of the software people use every day? Really doesn't spawn that many threads. Heck even games have trouble using more than a couple without running into sync issues.
Frankly a better choice would have been less cores but give those cores crazy single threaded IPC, in fact I would argue the "perfect CPU" but be one with one or two insanely powerful cores and then 4 to 6 lesser cores to handle background tasks and an OS who understood the layout so it could schedule appropriately.
Instead what AMD did with Bulldozer was to give us a huge number of really weak underperforming cores, in fact it reminded me of Intel's Larrabee GPU in that sticking a whole bunch of weak CPUs was supposed to be "good enough". So while I'm glad AMD seems to be pulling back from the weak cores somewhat I find it telling that on the 2 links I picked at random it looks like nobody is testing it against Phenom II anymore because i have a feeling full cores will still do good compared to the half core designed used in BD/PD.
So while I do hope AMD rights the ship until i can say across the board "This chip is in every way better than Phenom II" I'll be sticking with the AM3+ Phenom IIs in my builds. The prices are better, Frankly the Athlon quads have been going for $80 and the Phenom Hexacores for $110 so the bang for the buck is there, and they give the average user more cores than they can use at a great price. While its good that PD isn't using more power than BD frankly BD was a hot chip to begin with so that's not saying much, and frankly even heavy multitaskers like myself have trouble keeping a 6 core fed, even a lot of video encoding software don't support 6 cores yet. Until software catches up 8 cores, heck probably 6 cores like mine, will be total overkill and when the software does catch up the changes in CPUs will make the 6 and 8 cores released today just not good. I just don't see a selling point for the BD/PD arch AMD, sorry but I don't.
Not to mention it ignores the reality of today's society, which we are playing musical chairs based on brains and more and more don't have a seat when the music stops.
This is why, even if they get a breakthrough with something like this, i think capitalism is gonna die just like every other ism throughout history, why? because in the end you are only gonna need a handful of truly gifted people and the rest will be replaced by the machines.
And the reason why capitalism must fall is the breakthrough of technology finally making the man worthless like in the tale of John Henry leaves a few at the very top, those with the means to buy the machines of production, with wealth the likes of which kings never saw before while large masses of the populace will be left with nothing. What good is a system based on trading your labor for capital if your labor is no longer required?
Unless you want to start going to dark places like eugenics and forced sterilization the simple fact is we could wipe out half the people on this planet tomorrow and not only would the standard of living not go down, it would go up quite a lot for those left because they might actually have a demand for their labor.
As it is now, what do you do with those large masses of people with 100 IQs or less? Pay them to do nothing? Make up jobs that aren't truly needed, as we do now? Get a job at Walmart and one of the training videos they show you is how to apply for federal aid, because your labor is only worth having if the feds subsidize you. think they couldn't replace most of their workers with machines? heck you could replace the majority of Mickey D's employees with an automated assembly line and it would work just as well, only thanks to government subsidies of the workers its cheaper to hire the poor.
So I really can't blame a kid for taking this, the entire world has become IQ musical chairs and if you fail to get a seat your life will be dead end jobs and grinding poverty. Of course the flip side of this is just as you know how college educated are living with their parents because they can't find a decent job, imagine what would happen if the IQ of the general pop suddenly went to 150 as the baseline? It certainly wouldn't create any more jobs, it would most likely mean the corps would just start looking for people with even higher IQs, again its just IQ musical chairs for the shrinking number of jobs that aren't done by the machines and eventually we'll probably all lose.
Sadly it was made before Jack Valenti could get his "forever minus a single day" copyright laws passed. Won't someone think of the corporations? Why people are actually READING without writing them a check!
Well then I hope you agree with me that "free trade" should be banned in favor of fair trade, because as it is ALL the countries are fucking rigging the playing field! You wanna see that same shit in other countries look at how Japan screws the shit out of AR rice with tariffs so their home grown rice, which is frankly inferior, gets the lion's share of the market, or how China controls the Yen and won't allow American imports without high tariffs, instead forcing any American corp that wants to sell to China to open a factory there so they can get around the tariffs!
So as much as I agree with you that trade with Cuba should be opened and all the corn lobbyists should be told to fuck off, frankly we are getting royally fucked in the global markets and have such a huge trade deficit precisely because the other countries are rigging the field worse than we are! This is why I tell everyone that whenever a politician says they are for "free trade" they should call them out on it, because with all the market rigging its a total lie that only benefits a handful while fucking millions. Then what REALLY pisses me off is they call countries like China and India "nationalist" for rigging their markets...and still trade with them! Well duh, its called "being smarter than stupid greedy Americans" and maybe we should do the fucking same until they agree to a level playing field!
Man...that must be a hell of a nice place to work Crosshair, congrats.
The reason i got out of corporate IT, even though it paid better and wasn't the "feast or famine" that is running a small shop is my two nephews had a kind of intervention on me. they just kept piling on the work, never giving me the resources that I needed, frankly i was looking like shit from being run so hard. One day I came in and with tears practically in their eyes they said "We done lost our mom last year and our dad abandoned us. All we have is you and grandma and you look like you are a ghost, you're so pale. We can do without the fancy stuff, we can't do without you" and needless to say I tried to give my notice the next day. Of course being the ungrateful pricks that they were they said "Don't bother, just get your stuff and pick up your check"..yeah, fuck you too.
Now as I said the pay ain't as good and its feast or famine but GOD, what a difference! When I say things they actually LISTEN TO ME! When I say they need this or that I'm not treated like I'm fucking trying to rob them, in fact I'm often asked "Are you sure that's all we need? better to spend it now than need it down the road and not have it" needless to say the first time that happened I damned near choked, talk about a difference!
Frankly if you want to know what is wrong with this country the way the corps treat IT is a perfect "canary in the coalmine" as far as I'm concerned. All they give a shit about is the quarter, never think ahead, they will pinch the fuck out of that penny while blowing pounds later on when the chickens come home to roost, but since all those PHB and MBAs...which I call Masters of Being Assholes play musical chairs they'll be gone before the shit really hits the fan so they don't give a fuck. Corp America is just one big pile of uber paychecks and golden parachutes at the top and crumbling infrastructure and braindead decisions below. Its no wonder this country is in bad shape Crosshair, its run by Masters of Being Assholes!
And look I got NO problem with "Tigerdirect specials" as i make my bread and butter off the boxes..but I would NEVER EVER try to set up a business on those, not unless they gave me enough to set up the whole office AND have some spares in case one goes down...why? Its the drivers dude, trying to support a mish mashed mess of hardware where no damned driver matches is a royal PITA to admin, and this guy had dribbed and drabbed the place. The worst part? He built them fucking OCed from the factory "gamer specials!", my guess is because he wanted one for himself and just added it to the bill, but fuck! You wanna talk about some seriously fucked up issues! Why don't YOU try dealing with over 30 OCed from the factory unstable messes, where even the RAM timings are aggressively OCed! And this was for a fricking law firm, not some gaming place, yet every damned system had gamer cards!
Sure even if you don't like the sonicwalls you can see that situation was a clusterfuck from hell. Frankly they only gave a shit about his lowball price and never once stopped to ask "Why is he cheaper than the other guys?" and the reason he was cheaper was he didn't know shit, he was some "gamer guy" pretending like he knew enough to do corporate. I mean picture trying to track down a networking issue only to open up the closet and find more than a dozen of those damned blue dlink 4 port jobs with half a dozen ISPs and not a damned thing labeled? We had to shitcan the whole place and start over, it was just too big a mess to untangle and fix.
And not to rain on YOUR parade but unless you live in one of the major metro areas Apple sucks big hairy balls. I get to deal with a doctor tomorrow who has been to Apple's genius bar more than a dozen times with networking issues, all they do is reload the OS and apply the patches and hand it back, needless to say that don't fix shit. At least if he had Dell or HP under contract he could get an actual tech out there to work on the problem on site, but since Apple don't do that I'm gonna have to try to fumble my way around an OS I've avoided like an STD because frankly nobody else will even try, he says Apple and they say "fuck that proprietary crap, we won't touch it" and then they try to sell him a new system. I'm at least willing to try, which is more than he's gotten from Apple.
The "moral" of the story is Assange is right, Sweden is the USA's bitch and they jump through the hoops like a good doggie. Think actual Swedish content was even one half of one percent of TPB? Nope but he pissed off the media cartels which along with the other megacorps own the USA so they just told their pitbulls at the state dept "Make sure they fuck him hard" and wadda ya know? that's what they are doing.
Sigh...I remember when extradition was actually a big deal, when only murderers and organized criminals had to worry about it, but now every. country. on. the. planet. has to follow the USA's rules and jump through the hoops, because God fucking forbid our media cartels have to get with the 21st century and use new models of business, why God that would be horrible!
Just think, if the cartels would have been in place at the turn of the 20th century you'd be forced to this very day to buy a saddle and buggywhip for every person riding in a vehicle. I mean how dare they have to change when they could just buy the laws?
Frankly there needs to be a "+10 Truth" mod because you sir should have one! I mean what is this complete obsession with putting every damned thing on everything else? I gave my GF a photoframe that...gasp! Just shows photos a couple of years back and she still loves and treasures it, it sets in the middle of the TV shelf right above the set so anybody who sits down in her home has their eyes drawn to its constantly changing pictures and with the 8Gb SD card and reader she can just slap pics straight off her phone onto the card and have them instantly ready for viewing which she loves.
You already get news and weather on your PC, your laptop, your phone, why can't a picture frame just be a picture frame?
Yeah only unlike the janitors when IT goes wrong they are gonna be a lot of businesses that find out the hard way they are fucked, may even go under. I've seen first hand what happens when you let some guy lowball and outsource IT, the place ended up with a bunch of hand built "TigerDirect specials" with ZERO related drivers or parts so support was a nightmare, we opened up the networking closet and found the guy had sold the Sonicwalls we had put in and replaced EVERYTHING with those cheap shitty Dlink home routers, the network itself was a bunch of shitty home lines from a half a dozen different companies because the bozo didn't know shit about dealing with a T-Line, it was a fucking mess.
Of course the sad part is the retard that approved this moron had already made his bonuses for "saving money on the budget" and moved on to another company, leaving the next poor bastard to get stuck with the mess. but it really don't take more than one or two "WTF?" moments to bring a company to its knees and the costs to fix the problems this short term thinking causes may end up bankrupting the corp, again I've seen it happen, lots of places where no net means no work getting done and it don't take too many days of your entire workforce sitting on ass because they can't do their jobs thanks to IT issues to kill a corp.
But then in their case they wouldn't be stuck on XP, now would they? the guy even mentioned the software uses those damned dongles for antipiracy measures, I've never heard of a Linux software that uses dongles as GPL frowns on adding proprietary stacks to Linux.
You ran into the thrash of death too? I had that damned OS kill a brand new hard drive it thrashed so fucking much! I wonder if anybody figured out WTF it was doing, because even killing indexing and doing every tweak and trick on the net never got Vista to quit thrashing for me.
Frankly I'd say Win 7 is a HELL of a lot more than an SP for Vista, they changed a LOT of stuff at the kernel level and it shows. Whereas Vista beat the hell out of my drives and its I/O was frankly Win98 levels of bad now with Win 7 most of the time my drives spin down, there is so little being written that they can stay spun down for quite a long time and simply use the RAM cache to load my programs...nice.
I'm sorry but you OBVIOUSLY never used Vista in a business environment, here I'll sing my little Vista poem for you..
Vista...oh Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...Networking: Losing network shares and then refusing to see them until a reboot, who do you think you are, Windows 98? Networking: Playing any kind of media, even as simple as a song, can cause network file transfers to grind to slower than dialup speeds, what's a matter, two tasks at once too much for you? Operating environment: Having little "senior moments" where the entire system just freezes, not enough to cause a hard lock up, just enough to really piss me off, hey are you a new OS or are you my grandpa? File I/O...why u thrash Vista? I went through every God damned tweak and trick on the net and you STILL thrashed so damned much it killed a brand new hard drive. WTF were you doing Vista? Writing a fricking fan fic?
Now the system i had at the time? NO slouch, in fact it was more powerful than what many were running in 07 when Vista came out...Pentium 4 3.6GHz with HT, 3Gb of RAM, Geforce 7600GS, and dual 400Gb hard drives. Now this system flew on XP X64, in fact last I heard its still running great under that OS for its new owner, but on Vista? It felt like a 386DX trying to run Win98. there is NO excuse on why a system that powerful should run like a dog with an OS that "claimed" it could run on a 1GHz with a gb of RAM.
compare that with the fact I've had Win 7 running quite well on a 1.8GHz Sempron from 2004 with 2gb of RAM, just no Aero but I can remedy that with the 1650 Pro AGP card I have sitting in the parts box and I'm sorry, but Vista failed for a reason..it was full of fail.
It just amazes me how much money is shit down the drain when that could be easily avoided by just talking to the grunts down in the trenches. I've said it before and I'll say it again...Put ME in charge of MSFT and in less than 5 years, hell i could probably do it in under 3, I'd turn that ship around and be labeled another Steve Jobs.
All you have to do is simply LISTEN, that's all, listen to the grunts in the field and they'll be happy to help you get the ship back on course. For mobile? Build it cheap, build it simple, do NOT tie the Windows branding to it as that is just confusing, instead make damned sure that "it just works" is the mantra and that your grandma could share photos between her MS Phone, the X360, and the desktop.
For the desktop? Add little features that are "must have" while leaving the core experience ALONE, we've had 30+ years of WIMP and it frankly is the best design for a keyboard and mouse. Here I'll even give you a feature that would sell like crazy MY new Windows 9, aka "Win 7 with more coolness"...anywhere connection. This would take the guts of remote assistance and extend it so that even your grandma could remote into her system, imagine all those users that are at the office and go "Damn, I forgot to bring file XYZ from home I was working on last night" no problem! you just log into the MSFT server using your username and password along with your USB key (giving you two factor auth) and voila! The MSFT server sends a wake on LAN signal to your home system and you grab the file, easy peasy.
The ONLY reason MSFT is in bad shape right now is the clueless PHB at the top named Steve Ballmer, if you brought in someone that would LISTEN to the grunts and users and give them "more of the same, just better" and price it competitively, say $50 for Home, $100 for Pro or a family pack? they'd be raking in the cash instead of throwing the Hail Mary that is Windows 8, which I personally think is gonna fail.
BTW I don't know if its still true or not but that blog used to be run by Allchin,one of the guys that bailed after Vista because the PHBs wouldn't listen. He and others said the marketing group had taken control away from the designers and with Win 8 you can really tell, its a "designed by committee" mess of an OS.../facepalm/.
The problem is the way corps shit all over IT they'll just go "Hey, one more job we can dump on them without raising their pay!" and that will be that.
Lets face it folks, we are gonna end up with critical shortages of IT and infrastructure workers because between the offshoring, the H1-Bs, and the PHBs treating IT as this money pit that doesn't give them any profits? IT has been shat upon for the good part of the last decade.
I know myself and most of the old guard guys I knew ended up getting out of corporate IT for just this reason, piling more and more work upon us while expecting everything to be done with less help and a shrinking budget...now you want to add coding to the requirements? You gonna add a pay raise and pay for the classes? Yeah, thought not.
Man hasn't everyone figured out "new coke" was the scam of the century? Old coke was made with sugar, they knew people would have a shitfit when they switched to HFCS because it would taste different, so they came out with "new coke" which was made with HFCS. if it sold? Fine and dandy, if it didn't? Put out old coke made with HFCS and say "My bad" and everyone will be so happy not to be drinking new coke that they won't notice they been had.
I have to wonder if MSFT isn't pulling the same scam with Win 8, if it sells? Fine and dandy, if it don't? they say "My bad, here's Win 7" and people will be so happy to not have Win 8 they won't nopticed MSFT still got them to upgrade from XP...its a win/win for MSFT, just as it was for the Coca Cola co.
Yeah no shit, just built a brand new Athlon triple for a customer and guess what was on the driver disc along with Vista and 7? XP drivers.
So if I can buy brand new gear today with XP drivers i doubt finding NOS will be hard after 2014, hell I had a customer that hung onto Win2K until last year simply because he had mission critical software that wouldn't run on XP. Its really not hard to find the hardware if you need it, I can go to someplace like Starmicro and get CPUs going back to the Slot A and Pentium 3, really not hard to build a NOS system these days.
Vista was garbage and everybody knew it. I advised my customers to avoid Vista like an STD because it was obvious it was gonna be another ME and be replaced quickly, and waddayaknow, here came Win 7 and now finding Vista machines is nearly impossible.
So while I agree they should have been switching to Win 7 by now saying they should have switched because of Vista is just retarded, hell even the OEMs didn't switch to Vista, they just sold XP with a Vista DVD in the bottom of the box nobody used. I think I still have a pile of those POS discs in the shop somewhere, like a bad fruitcake nobody wanted it.