Its a shame you posted AC as i'd say your idea is the clear winner and would only add that if you are doing this for a church you should talk to your local mom & pop PC shop. Not only are we packrats and tend to have boxes full of NICs but if its a church or other non profit we'll often work with you to get you something thrown together as close to cost as possible. Since its a non profit I'd not want some big old power sucking P4 blasting through power, i'd use an underclocked Celeron or Sempron, maybe something in the sub 2Ghz range since he won't need that much power for that job, and build it into a nice cheap old Dell or Emachine mini tower and there you are, a dirt cheap CP box. hell if you are lucky they may even have an older SFF office box just sitting in the back they can let you have dirt cheap that would be perfect for the job and if you ask nicely i bet the guy would even be willing to help you set it up.
I'll probably end up having to dump them on the shop down the street that will just put "Win 7 Pirate Edition" and enjoy the extra profits. And yes Virginia I've seen machines MUCH older keep being used, in fact I was nice enough to Frankenstein an off lease office box together for the apt buildings handyman who has always been good about picking up machines that were gonna be tossed by the local college or the office building he also supports. Know how old his PC was that the "new" 2.9Ghz P4 with HT was replacing? 1997, no shit, I swear to God, 1997 and it was STILL running his little bookkeeping software and some card games.
Hell the reason I use "Suzy the checkout girl" as my typical user is because she is based on a real person. The checkout girl at a local minimart said "Hey I heard that you fixed a machine for one of the girls here, could you please look at the one in my car and tell me if you can fix it?" So I go out there and start busting a gut until I see the poor little thing start to cry. i tell her "Hon I'm not laughing at you dear, i'm laughing because I built that machine over a decade ago and never thought I'd see her again!" I then flipped it over and showed her where I had wrote "Frankenputer" in felt marker on the bottom. it was a 1.2Ghz Celeron and that thing had been passed through no less than FOUR families before it ended up coming to her. since she didn't have much money i gave her a deal on a 2.6Ghz P4 with mobo and RAM and just dropped it in old Frankenputer with a spare 200w PSU I had laying around. Last I heard her 3 kids do their school work on it and she is using it to learn basic office skills so hopefully she can move into a night manager position.
So just because it is something You or I would think is junk does NOT mean that a poor working Joe or Jane might not find that machine valuable. I probably go through 30 of my "$100 special" towers for every new build and since i often get them sub $30 and have most of the work automated its quite profitable to refurb them, same as i go through a good dozen "$150 special" laptops for every new one i sell. When you live in a rural state and the economy is a corpse you'd be surprised how many simply can't afford anything nicer. And I'd LIKE to do the same with a FOSS OS because the "great XP dieoff' is underway and XP has just 2 years before DOA, but I HAVE to have something "Suzy the checkout girl" can use, ya know? Why its soo damned hard for FOSS geeks to get it through their head that Suzy can't use Bash, will NEVER get the hang of CLI anything, and that what they consider easy is about as practical to teach Suzy as trying to teach quantum mechanics to third graders? Hell if I didn't actually care about selling quality goods i'd just run pirate like every other damned shop, you'd think FOSS would want to make a product good enough to kill that market as every pirated Windows is a future Windows customer, but since all I ever get is insults I guess they are happy being stuck in last place forever. damned shame though, there is a lot of nice decent working poor that FOSS could actually help if it wasn't all run by elitist who refuse to accept anyone that isn't like them.
Actually he's been at it for over a year, although he stopped the following me around across the entire Internet at 6 months. BTW he posted an insult in this very thread, see if you can find him. And how would YOU describe someone whom the ONLY answer allowed is "Linux is perfect and ZOMG M$ burns babies", hmmm? Remember this is a person soooo paranoid he actually believes, I swear to fucking Christ, that I've got a "profile" on him and I'm a "sekret M$ Ninja" employed at Redmond to "keep tabs" on him and "to destroy the freedom of FOSS'. no shit. Hell look up some of old APK's posts, the guy and I have NEVER agreed on jack shit yet when he dared to disagree with the loonie on a linux security matter he accused HIM of being me and started stalking APK across sites as well! Hell APK and I went back and forth arguing for over a month here before we finally just agreed to disagree (BTW I STILL think a recursive DNS server is a better solution than a HOSTS file, but if it works for APK more power to him).
And my WHOLE argument is we do NOT have to accept the "shit sandwich" just because its free! We USED to have a good thing here because the admins actually GAVE A FUCK. Now they frankly don't give a shit, haven't given a shit in at least 3 years, wasn't that around the time they sold the site? And there are other sites that don't put up with this kind of shit, take OSNews, I've had some long heated technical arguments about OS designs on that site yet nearly all that made a good point as WELL as those that made a good point against were modded UP.
In the end friend a site becomes filled with trolls because the admins LET THE TROLLS WIN and if you look at the numbers/. readership has been in solid decline for over 2 years. Do we REALLY want this site to become another Kuroshin, a dead site where nothing but trolls and crazies hang out? And what would YOU call it when the groupthink is parroted back and forth for a karma whoring palloza, the only term i can think of to adequately describe that constant wanking is well...wanking or a circle jerk, whichever term you find more appealing i'll be happy to use. In the end things NEVER get better if nobody complains they ALWAYS get worse and that is what we have seen here. The whoring is getting worse, the flag waving, the "treat corps as ballclubs to cheer' mentality which I think fanboi describes pretty well, but if you can suggest a better shorter term again I'm all ears. And frankly I don't give a wet fart about crazy stalker boy but what I DO care about is having a site that actual tech guys can go to talk about actual tech topics in an informal setting instead of some technet or workshop which is what/. USED to be.
But if you want to find out for yourself how deep the rabbit hole goes just try speaking against groupthink one time too many on any FOSS article and you'll see. Don't be surprised if you find every place you post under your UID having every post followed by "Die you fat fucker die". Then you too can enjoy your very own loonie!
Have you forgotten that in many places a single pot bust when you were 19 pretty much condemns you to the lowest manual labor which is now done by Jose for $4 an hour? I've known guys that have become drug dealers simply because there wasn't a single legal honest job they could get, any employer would run a background check and that was it.
The sad part is for this to actually be effective the thieves have to be smart enough to know the difference and when you are talking copper thieves you are usually talking methheads....not the brightest bulbs on the best of days. All they are gonna get is a shitload of cut lines followed by finding the line half melted in a ditch somewhere when brainiac figures out it isn't worth scrapping.
Oh you missed the fun part of the/. mod system...what happens when you have a loonie. I have one that will wait until the article is off the front page (so no one can undo him) and mods down every. single. post. on anything I say regarding anything FOSS. Doesn't matter what the FOSS project is, doesn't matter if I say "hey its nice" he will zero out anything i post on FOSS even if it takes him 2 days worth of mod points to do so. I give him credit to dedication to his batshittiness, it took him 3 days on the Firefox article because I had 3 plus 4 posts but last I checked he managed to zero all of them out.
The problem is/. has become infected with rabid fanbois which its no wonder the numbers are dropping. look at how on ANY article about MSFT, I don't care if its about...say some book on sharepoint server management, you'll see someone get a plus 5 for typing "use Linux" like that is some magic answer that has fuck all to do with the topic, a post that says "Google is great" or "they do no evil" will also get modded waay up, even if it has fuck all to do with the topic.
So I agree we need to try something else, hell ANYTHING else, because too many discussions here become giant fanboi circle jerks with everyone that parrots groupthink going up, everybody that doesn't toe the line getting buried. personally I'd like it if I didn't have to wade through a bunch of "nigger faggot cocksucker" posts but I have to browse at the lowest level just to read the posts that don't follow groupthink. I'd say its worth a shot to try different ways of doing it if for no other reason so we might trip over the right way. i miss the days that we could have a 100+ comment back and forth about something like filesystems and OS designs without it quickly becoming fanboi central, but now its all militant flag waving and it doesn't really matter WHAT anybody says, just that they fall on the right side of the mod's belief system. Currently from what I've been able to gather the current "rules" are Google yay, MSFT boo, Apple yay unless its apple VS FOSS then it is Apple boo,Oracle boo, and Canonical is yay unless its unity then boo. We've ALL seen it, just as we've seen a dozen posts below them going "WTF? Who is modding this crap up?" which of course gets modded down by whomever is modding that crap up, its fanboi central here now and it didn't use to be and I hope it can not be that way again but as long as the current mod system is in place i doubt we'll see the groupthink and karma whoring go away.
You are falling for what I call "the PPT lie" which is "if the PPT says I made X last year than by our numbers we should get X+Y this year" which is total bullshit. A good example of this lie is Vista. MSFT made it a PITA to pirate Vista, what happened? Did their numbers shoot through the roof? No because at the price point they set nobody bought so stores ended up with shelves full of unsold Vista discs. hell the shelves at my local Walmart are fricking full of 'em.
You think that if you were to magically wipe out piracy ALL of those people, or even a significant portion, would then buy the product but that isn't true. In every. single. case. where they have put in DRM nasty enough to stop piracy you simply had people ignore the product unless the price point was low enough to get them to buy, full stop. Its not like people say "Oh well I can't pirate so I'll hand them $60" instead they go "Oh well its not worth $60 so I'll pass" and with it there goes your modding community, there goes most of those that host servers which help sell your MP, there goes most of the buzz once you quit paying the media to plug it.
As Valve learned with their experiments there is a sweet spot to EVERY product that will make people buy, call it the "WTH I'll take it price". The media corps think they can charge assrape prices by killing piracy but all they will do is have even less people that will touch their product. Again look at Steam, I bet my last dollar ALL of the titles that hit over 100,000 sales were under $20, and ALL of the products that hit the 500,000 mark during the sales were under $12. Hell I bought games I wasn't really interested in because at less than $10 they reached my "WTH I'll take it" price. But if you think because the pirates downloaded X that if you remove piracy you'll get X is simply delusional friend, ask any pirate. They MIGHT buy 5% of what they download MAYBE. The rest? they'd simply walk on by. Just look at how many AAA titles are sitting in piles at your average Walmart because their price point is too high, or how Gamestop makes a killing by allowing trade ins thus dropping the prices by a good $30 a title.
What I need is a machine that can walk out of my shop with a free OS and will STILL be running in 7 years WITH updates. Can BSD do that? The average lifetime for a PC in this area is 7 years so THAT is what I'm looking for, the "great XP dieoff" is already under way and the offlease office machines are starting to pile up. If I could buy Win 7 Starter OEM I wouldn't even be asking but I can't find a source that will sell me that at less than 10,000 units so that's right out, and Win 7 HP costs more than the machines are worth. So I need a FOSS OS that will still be functional on a 3.2Ghz P4 with 1gb of RAM in 7 years, so far no Linux has passed muster, hence the question about BSD.
What's the support like? How many years will this be updated without having to wipe and reinstall? One thing that drives me mad about Linux is you are supposed to wipe and reinstall every 6 damned months or plan your life around LTS releases which as a retailer is right out. Despite all the "Linux is ready for the desktop" BS the support situation is quite bad. Corporations may throw out their desktops every 3 years so they are always under hardware support but home users? Keep a system for an average of 6-8 years before it is finally tossed or given away.
So how many years does this version get for support? Can it do an in place upgrade using GUI ONLY without puking on its own drivers and dying hard which is what Linux seems to do anymore? I thought for sure when I started messing with Linux in 04 my shelves would have Linux boxes right next to the Windows machines by 2010 tops but the whole mess with PulseAudio and the DEs getting trashed means it'll probably be 5 years before anything is really stable back in Linux land again, so how is PC-BSD? Does it work on laptops? How is its wireless support? I have limited bandwidth here so I hate to give it my "Is it safe" test and waste 20Gb+ if it is simply gonna puke. "IS it safe" simulates what would happen to a customer who bought the machine from me and kept it for 3 years by taking the version from 3 years ago and updating/upgrading it to current. What are the odds BSD will pass? Good, poor? Remember that home users do NOT buy support contracts and they are not gonna pay more than Windows for a strange OS so once it leaves the shop it has to KEEP running with minimal user skill.
I would also point out it is the bootloader on x86/x64 that allowed Windows 7 to be pirated trivially thus illustrating that no matter what you have higher in the stack if the bootloader is vulnerable you are fucked. If anyone doesn't believe me just download and try "Windows 7 SP1 all versions pre-activated' off of PTB or the P2P of you choice, on first boot it announces "Applying bootloader hack" and after that the thing even passes WGA! it does this from what i understand by faking an OEM BIOS signature and since they based the signature on one of the biggest OEMs MSFT would have to disable the OEM keys to their entire line thus causing massive shitfits across the board. hell thanks to the bootloader hack Win 7 is easier to pirate than even XP Corp because you don't even need a key, the OEM bootloader hack takes care of that FOR you!
At the end of the day MSFT knows that making it easier for app developers to make profits without worrying about piracy is pretty much the ONLY selling point they have on ARM because otherwise there is no point in going with WinARM when Android has the momentum and Apple has the top end locked up tight. i'm willing to bet my last buck what they are gonna try to do is create "a mobile X360" where you have this huge market where developers can make plenty of money. look at the music games like Rock Band for example, I read not too long ago that more than 80% of the songs downloaded for those games went through the X360 market. That is a hell of a lot of money and after seeing Win 7 get so easily pwned thanks to bootloader hacks you can understand why they wouldn't want that crucial piece of the chain easily bypassed.
I'll give an even better example...Steam. Steam DRM is trivial to bypass for anyone but the simplest Billy Joe Bob (which is what the original DRM like CD checks was for, to get rid of casual piracy) and hacked Steam games are all over P2P yet Gabe from Valve is singing "Merry Xmas to me" while swimming in a giant pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck, why? Because he learned the way to turn pirates into customers isn't pile on the DRM and hoop jumps but to make it easy, simple, and cheap. We humans are lazy creatures by nature and if you make something simple enough and cheap enough it becomes more of a PITA to pirate than it does to simply buy it and Valve seems to get that.
Take my own case for example, I probably spent a good $200 this Steam Xmas sale between me and my two boys. Now was there a SINGLE game, even one, that I couldn't have pirated trivially? Nope in fact I could have simply used the listings on Steam and went and downloaded every single one if i desired, so why didn't I? Because Valve has made it as simple as "whip out CC, push button, get game" and their download speeds are insanely fast compared to most P2P, most of the games i bought were bundle packs where I got a pile of games in a series for one low price (such as FEAR 1 & 2 & the DLC extras for $5)or a game with ALL the DLC (which the pirated version never has, such as Just Cause II with all the DLC included for $7) and unlike the pirated version I can enjoy full MP support, I get the game automatically updated to current, I get Valve's excellent long tail game support (Such as their throwing in HL:DM when I bought the complete HL2 series which is STILL highly populated after all these years) and it even keeps my graphics drivers updated without me having to bother.
The way you kill piracy isn't with a stick but with a cookie, and by finding the sweet spot on price that gives you maximum sales. look at how just as an experiment the sold L4D for $2 and ended up making over 1700% PROFIT on the title simply by having everyone buy the thing while not having to pay for advertising or making copies. Even at that ultra low price because of the massive economies of scale they got they not only made such huge profits but now everyone of those people will see the DLC for sale as well as the news of the latest L4D games thus making it easier to sell even more content.
So if companies would just accept the mantra of keep it simple, easy, and cheap, put in the most simple of DRM, just to keep Billy Joe Bob from passing around copies to all his buddies, they could be making mad piles o' cash instead or trying to assrape the entire Internet with SOPA and the like. For an example of a company that didn't "get it" look at MSFT, for about 7 months I saw NOTHING but legit versions of Windows and in a small shop that's unheard of, so why did it happen? At $50 a copy the win 7 HP upgrade made it cheaper and less hassle to buy Windows than it was to pirate and $50 appears to be the sweet spot for Windows Home. Sure enough Ballmer kills the program and not 30 days later I start seeing Win 7 Ultimate everywhere because folks simply weren't willing to pay $100 for home and if they are gonna pirate why not get the biggest SKU? Make it simple, easy, and cheap, find the sweet spot on price and people WILL buy simply because its the easiest route. Throw in a couple of bonuses that pirates don't get like DLC and MP and it becomes a no brainer. I mean when I get both Max Paynes for $2.75, Butcher Bay remade in HD AND Dark Athena for $5, and JC II with over a pages worth of DLC for $7 why would I bother to pirate?
Name one, because I'd set up sandisk and Cowon and Rio and just about every kind of MP3 and PMP known to man and I have NEVER actually seen on that preferred NFS, not saying that one couldn't exist but if it does you are talking a teeeny tiny niche of a niche friend. And as for NAS? that's what those cheapo HP WHS boxes are for. Its a HELL of a lot cheaper and unlike some jury rigged homebuilt it will actually be efficient and is actually BUILT for that job, its also great for media and file serving since it has a...drumroll...server OS!
And XP PRO had it, which has been replaced by Enterprise. Win 7 Pro is for workstations which is what pro originally was back in the days of WinNT and Win2k but MSFT had to get WinXP out the door quick after WinME went down in flames so they didn't bother separating the workstation and enterprise builds like they did with WinNT and Win2K. So complaining about that is like complaining that you built support around a glitch and get pissed when the glitch is removed. look up the versions of NT/2K and you'll see they had Enterprise and Data Center for the jobs you listed and NT/2K pro was for workstation.
In the end it comes down to the fact you simply don't want to pay for the correct version that you require but in a capitalist system they are free to set the price and you are free to use something else. For the jobs you have it would frankly be insane to use a desktop because its not designed to support the connections you require and there is already a perfectly affordable version that is DESIGNED to do the tasks you want. Now if you say that $48 is too damned much for a server OS then we'll know you are just trolling. If not may I suggest you buy a cheap AM2+ board along with this chip along with a cheap case from Geeks and for less than $250 all told you can have your very own low power high performance media server. i've actually built a couple using that chip and Asrock boards and its easy peasy to make a whisper quiet media server using the above.
Actually the answer is YES, yes it can, with the free converter pack. And I can testify that it works because my oldest always sends me DocX files from his Office 2K10 (He ALWAYS forgets to send as doc) and they open and display just fine. Now granted he's only a junior so his DocX files are just basic header and footer, no embedded tables or anything yet so I can't tell you how it will do with something fancy, but I CAN tell you that it opened a 15Mb business proposal I did with 4 other guys that had headers, footer, embedded tables, and frankly that amazed the hell out of me because I had 2K, one had 2K3, one had 2K7 and one had (2K6?) whatever the number for Office for Mac was around 2007.
So I can say that honestly I've never had a problem with Office since i started using it regularly with office 2K. Now maybe i just haven't tripped over the edge cases, who knows, but sharing both doc and DocX in 2K has not been a problem with the Office converter pack.
Uhhh...maybe because businesses would have a royal stinking shitfit if they couldn't use those software assurance licenses they paid out the ass for? Hell I had a couple of business that up until recently were using Win2K and just now migrated those last machines and there are still a LOT of companies running XP thanks to legacy software. Can you imagine the screaming shitfits if they bought new hardware and found they couldn't run older versions of Windows? With ARM MSFT doesn't have to support FOUR different OSes (XP/Vista/7/8) so they don't have to leave such an obvious hole open. BTW did you know the bootloader is how Windows 7 is pirated? it fakes an OEM boot signature and it even passes WGA. Hell the thing is easier to snatch than XP, it don't even need a key thanks to the cracked bootloader!
But in the end frankly it just doesn't matter, except to laugh as the "ZOMFG M$!" trolls wet themselves, because if MSFT manages to even reach 4% when it comes to Win 8 on ARM I'll die of shock. Its just stupid, pointless, and a complete waste of time and resources because without the third party apps that are all written for x86 who the fuck is gonna pay the extra cost of the Windows license? this is just another chapter in the continuing saga that is Steve "OMG I want to be Apple so bad!" Ballmer's totally horrid leadership at MSFT. I mean look at his track record folks, rushing X360 out with a fatal flaw which cost billions, Zune, killing the successful playsforsure and pissing off all those that had signed on by replacing it with the Zune market, All the money they blew on WinMo, Kin, and now WinPhone 7, and now this, screwing with Windows in the vain hope that users will buy something just because it says Windows even though it won't run WINDOWS PROGRAMS. I swear if I didn't know better I'd think the guy was trying to torpedo the company on purpose, hell maybe he's shorting the stock, who knows. I'm willing to bet my last buck though that Win 8 will make Vista look like Win95 and i'll get to spend a year wiping it for 7 just like i did Vista for XP.
But if someone says 12 is 6 of one and a half a dozen of the other does it make it wrong if you don't like the company?
Lets be honest and cut the bullshit folks, we're all geeks and adults, yes? There are TWO VERY LEGITIMATE REASONS for doing this that even the blind would be able to see. 1.- After seeing how badly Google has been getting pwned with Android malware the LAST thing MSFT wants is to be the easily pwned OS in this new market, and 2.- the REAL reason I'm willing to bet my last buck they are doing this....ready? PIRACY. Not only is MSFT Windows most likely the most highly pirated software on the entire planet but we've already seen pirated phone apps all over the web. by locking down their OS and hardware this gives them a better platform for those that want to sell phone apps, think X360. yes we all know there are pirate X360s out there but it means you have to have two systems, the cracked and the legit and most folks simply aren't gonna go through that much bullshit. I'm sure MSFT will have special keys which will be tied to the OS and hardware so that those selling apps on windows market know they aren't gonna get pirated without them doing some serious hardware hacking which the vast majority won't do for fear of bricking.
Finally the most important thing which will probably piss off the fanbois but seriously, who gives a flying fuck? Its not like MSFT is gonna sell jack shit when it comes to Windows 8 on ARM anyway because the whole damned selling point of Windows is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which are all x86. Has everyone forgotten WinNT on Alpha and MIPS? Remember how quick and how hard that shit bombed? Why would you want Windows if you can't run Windows programs? Its not like you can just recompile those 300,000+ programs for Windows to run on ARM now can you? Apple can change arches because the programs people buy Apple devices for, your iMovie and iDVD and Garageband and iTunes are all written by guess who? The ONLY thing MSFT has besides the OS is Office, big whoop. Everything else is by some third party and most won't bother because there are literally a billion Windows boxes they can sell for that run x86 and they don't have to change a line of code, so why waste the money on a niche platform MSFT has already struck out on not once, not twice, but THREE times now, first WinMo then Kin followed by WinPhone...see a pattern?
Personally they can have it written that you can't use Win 8 for ARM unless you watch Ballmer do his monkey dance for all that its gonna matter, its gonna bomb, YOU know it, I know it, hell everybody knows it! Everyone will stick with iShiny and those cute little dancing droids. There is ONE nice thing though, after this shit bombs we'll be getting Win 8 pads at Touchpad prices and if you end up with a $500 winPad for the firesale prices the touchpad went for are you REALLY gonna give a shit what it runs?
Actually it was a whole $350 with 8Gb from Newegg and a carrying case from Tigerdirect, so nope, not expensive at all. of course i lucked out as i ordered mine 2 weeks before the Thailand flood, now the same unit is a whole....let me look...$415, not really that big a difference, but of course you'll have to add the $30 for 2 4Gb sticks like i got.
Anyway here is the link and if you'll check the comments below the first poster links to the 8Gb RAM upgrade. I can't say enough good things about this netbook, it gets 6 hours plus playing 720p video, gets a hair over 8 in Expressgate surfing and listening to music, has enough GPU to play L4D and GTA:VC, and has enough CPU muscle i'm using it to edit multitracks and even as a custom drum machine using hydrogen and running it into the mixer, great for having more realistic drums when laying down scratch tracks. Its got plenty of space, doesn't get hot, only weighs 3 pounds, and if you want even longer battery life there is a 10 cell you can pick up but personally 6 hours plus is plenty.. Oh and it comes with Win 7 HP X64 ready to go and swapping out the RAM is easy peasy. After I sold the 2Gb stick that came with it for $20 the RAM boost was a grand total of $14 and it was only $6 difference between 6Gb and 8Gb so I figured WTF ya know? Having that much RAM means that Superfetch has ALL my apps preloaded into RAM, its sweeet.
so if you or anyone you know wants a netbook I'd say go for it, its a great lightweight unit that kicks ass on the road. It even has a USB 3 port with charging capability so if your phone dies you can use the EEE to give it a quick charge. Nice.
The problem friend is only 2K10 has support for ODT IIRC and you have NO way of knowing which version of MS Office the person you are sending that ODT to will have. Just in my family I have Office 2K on my netbook, 2K3 on my desktop and my oldest has 2K7 on his desktop and a copy of 2K10 his school gave him on his laptop. I have known businesses that have hung onto machines for lower positions like secretaries until literally the thing is about to die and often the software will be just as creaky, and with schools you have NO clue what the teacher will have.
So while your theory would be sound if you could easily know what the other guy is running you don't and THAT is a serious problem when you have business or grades depending on it.
Oh please! That many eyes bullshit was proven to be just that, bullshit, or did you forget the KDELook bug? That one lasted 6 months. The Quake 3 malware? Lasted on the repo for a YEAR AND A HALF. The ONLY way the "many eye" theory would work is if you had many eyes of the appropriate skill level but as those and many other examples prove you do NOT have eyes of the appropriate skill actually looking at the majority of the code. Hell I'd bet my last dollar that at least a quarter of the code that makes up ANY average distro is ONLY looked at by the ones who wrote the thing in the first place. Now if the NSA went to one of them with a big fat check you don't think they'd take it? those guys at NETSEC were working with OpenBSD for FOUR YEARS and nobody caught on, if the one hadn't talked after his NDA ran out they'd have probably never known!
Remember friends just because you HAVE the ability does NOT mean that the ability has been used. How many here have looked at the code in your distro of choice networking stack? how many here have the skill to explain what each line is calling and what EXACTLY its doing? thought so, just because someone CAN doesn't mean someone HAS.
And THIS gets modded "informative"? Did someone give the trolls extra mod points this week? Did I miss a memo? Because I'm sitting here with not one but TWO Win 7 X64 machines running, one an AMD EEE netbook with 8Gb, the other my AMD 6 core Thuban desktop, also with 8Gb, and I'm using less than 600Mb with the basic theme on the netbook and just a hair under 980Mb on the desktop and that's with Aero and all the bling cranked. You are probably using an old tool that counts cache as "used" memory but since Windows dumps the cache if ANY program requests the memory that simply isn't useful anymore. BTW your old XP box uses so little RAM because it'll dump to paging even if there is plenty of memory free which is just fricking stupid, the RAM is using the same voltage regardless so why not use it to speed things up?
But if you are seriously looking at 2gb and aren't trolling you need to have that thing checked, because either you have more bugs than a Bangkok Whore or one of your apps is leaking memory like a sieve.
If you are a MSFT admin you are gonna be in for a BIG shock friend. Just go ask them on any Linux forum for a drop in replacement for GPO/AD/Exchange/Sharepoint and see what you get because i have and i'll tell you, what you'll get is a bunch of little projects that were NEVER designed to integrate or work together and a couple of which will most likely be abandoned or only work with old kernels because they aren't being kept up anymore.
Like it or not MSFT has shelled out a metric fuckload of money making sure their business apps all "just work' in a tightly integrated environment which is completely the opposite of the UNIX mantra of "Little programs doing little jobs" and everything being piped between. Don't believe me, go ask and see what you get. Linux has had the money invested by big corps in SPECIFIC jobs like HPC and Webserver but NOT for the kind of jobs WinServer has been designed for so naturally the code just isn't there. Believe me MSFT wouldn't be making the kind of money they are on WinServer if there was anything close in Linux land but there isn't, the closest there was recently was Xandros XMC with groupwise but they are DOA now so unless you want to shell out for 5 year old code and try to upkeep it yourself you're gonna be in for a shock.
You DO realize that every. single. thing. you bitched about are SERVER and ENTERPRISE technologies and you are bitching because you have to gasp! Shock! Actually use a server or enterprise software for server or enterprise features? How many home users need NFS? How many are running a home built NAS? i'd say damned close to zero. BTW IIRC Win 7 Pro has most if not all those features so you can run that, or just buy the right tool for the right job instead of bitching that home systems aren't designed for enterprise work. if you want a NAS buy a fricking NAS or get one of the bazillion cheapo HP boxes with Windows Home Server, those make excellent low power NAS and Home Server boxes.
But what you are bitching about has been the way MSFT has done things since waaay back with WinNT. You have Home, Workstation, Enterprise, Server, each tailored to a different job. the only fuckup i see in their current business model is Ultimate, I mean WTF are they thinking when the MOST expensive has the LEAST length of support? if you didn't know while pro and Enterprise gets 10 years Ultimate only gets 5 like Home which is just stupid. But if you are wanting all those features for cheap you shouldn't even be in a discussion about Windows in the first place, you should be over on LinuxInsider learning how to turn an off lease into a badass headless server. different tools for different jobs friend, and not having SOFTWARE RAID is as SMART idea because that is the LAST thing you'd want home users to have. I've dealt with enough gamers who royally fucked their entire setup by going with software RAID to know that if you give a shit about your data you do NOT fuck with it, you get a decent RAID controller and let IT handle the RAID, PERIOD.
Actually I've found LO/MS Office to be pretty much mutually exclusive when it comes to any complexity of formatting. This is why i give it to home users that don't have kids or who just has young kids but not those with HS or college kids because if the teacher is using MS Office anything they give to you will be word salad in LO and anything you give to them will be word salad in MS office. And why does so many LO users find that hard to accept? they are trying to reverse engineer a binary format without jack shit for source code to look at, the fact they can open up as many as they can is a miracle and they should be applauded for it. But you take a complex doc with headers, footers, tables, etc and while i've had no problem opening that in any version of MS Office I have from 2k-2K7 that same doc will take a big old shit in LO. by the same token i make the same doc in LO with the same headers, footers, and tables and MS office will either crash or output gibberish. Does that make one better than the other? noooo, it just makes them incompatible.
That is why I give away LO to home users like I said but don't even mention it to SOHOs and SMBs because if you are having to share with MS Office users it can quickly become a mess. So I'd say it is just using the right tool for the job, LO when its home users who'll mainly be printing or not sharing with businesses, MS office for business and HS or above education.
How did this get marked insightful? Boy the geeks treating corps like ballclubs just gets worse by the quarter, don't it?
As for how Win 7 is better, as someone who has been working on the things since before there even was a Windows let me count the ways. 1.-ASLR makes it damn hard to use buffer overflows. 2.-DEP keeps software from writing in non executable locations, again helping kill buffer overflows dead. the fact that before 7 I'd see a hell of a lot of buffer overflow exploits and now its all social engineering tells me a lot. 3.- Both IE and Chromium based browsers by default are in low rights mode, which is even lower than a *nix standard user, this helps kill drivebys dead and is why I no longer recommend Firefox because it doesn't support this security feature even after being introduced FIVE years ago. 4.-Action center which creates a "one stop shop" for security and by default reminds the user they need to have a scheduled backup plan which brings me to 5.- Windows backup being image based now makes it MUCH easier for the user to have a solid backup plan in place that will actually restore the machine even on drive failure. It also by default includes the folders most used by people to store their important data like My Docs, pictures, and their music folders.
Now as for the non security features we have 1.-Jumplists, how in the hell did we live without these? these are the best damned thing since the DVD burner as far as I'm concerned, when I want to get back to what I was working on yesterday just right click on Explorer and BAM! my folders are back up, right click on Dragon and BAM! all my websites are back up, its just too damned quick. 2.-Breadcrumbs, man i love the breadcrumbs because when you have a file and folder setup several level deep breadcrumbs make navigation fast fast fast. 3.-Superfetch, with RAM so cheap Superfetch can really give Windows a hell of a speed boost along with ALL your apps. the longer you run the system the smarter it gets thanks to its DB of usage patterns so it knows for example that between 9-5 I'm gonna be running Dragon and after 5 I'm firing up WMP to play my music so BAM! Its already loaded into RAM and ready. With 8Gb of RAM I even have the core files of my current favorite games loaded into cache so when I fire up Just Cause II BAM! there it is, that's damned nice. 4.- Readyboost when combined with Superfetch gives a hell of a speedboost to mobile devices like laptops and netbooks. not so much desktops as you have fast RPM drives there and fatter caches but on a netbook you can pop a fast cheap SD card into the card reader and just leave it there and it really makes you apps load quick.
Now I could probably name off a good two dozen more of each but do I really have to AC? There are plenty of things to bitch at MSFT about, like Vista being rushed with serious bugs, their mobile strategy is pretty much "Ape Apple" but Windows 7 ain't one of them. I've converted just about all my customers to Win 7 and to a man I've not had a single complaint about 7, in fact most ended up buying the family packs later just so they could get rid of XP completely. Once you've used the new features in 7 going back to XP feels like Win98, its THAT backwards.
But you sir are falling for the same bullshit that every man CAN be educated to a level high enough to constantly earn a seat in a game of IQ musical chairs and I'm arguing that is not the case. What do you do with those that simply can't be educated beyond a D level position when you've outsourced or brought in illegals for everything lower than a B class job? Put them in camps? Before you could put them to work in a factory or in construction where if they had a strong back they could feed their family, not anymore. And i'd argue that unlike previous technological advances, which created more jobs than it cost the machines and third world labor simply make most of these people useless to society as a whole.
So what do you do? A man isn't gonna just go crawl off into a corner and die you know, what you'll get is a rampant increase in crime as the legal ways to stay afloat simply won't exist. look at IT where you have 300 guys going out for the same job simply because you can get an Indian with a half a dozen degrees for under $20k a year. Our throwaway society is soon gonna be overloaded with throwaway people simply because they don't have the mental capacity to become doctors and lawyers and most of the low skilled jobs are either overseas or are being done by illegals making a couple of bucks an hour under the table, so what do you do? you DO realize if the fed broadcast the ACTUAL numbers, the ones where you count those that have run out of benefits, we are talking 30% unemployment is some places? Do we build shantytowns like the third world countries? What?
Because I'd argue you have MAYBE 30% that can be educated to a C level MAYBE half of those can be educated to B level and MAYBE one tenth of those can go up to A level, and then you have to factor in the rampant inflation of education making it so many will NEVER be able to pay back their loans or get out of debt. Mark my words the next bubble to pop WILL be the education bubble, with millions defaulting simply because there weren't any jobs that would pay well enough to eat AND pay off their massive loans. Hell you have doctors filing for bankruptcy at never before heard of numbers simply because the cost of insurance and the hundreds of thousands in student loans means they simply can't dig their way out of the red.
Exactly you aren't gonna even save a single watt as most servers have the ancient ATI Rage chipset which thanks to die shrinks and its very limited functionality is using MAYBE a quarter of a watt. its not like these things have stream processors or support for hardware decoding, we are talking 10+ year old chips that have gone through a good dozen die shrinks.
in the end I'm betting its to give the sales guys a check in the checkbox, because if its one thing MSFT hates its someone having something they don't. This gives the sales guys an ability to counter the "Linux is better/faster/has electrolytes because its CLI" by saying "We can do that too". of course I doubt many will actually RUN it that way, but PHBs love PPTs with lots of bullet points and this just added a bullet.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a shame you posted AC as i'd say your idea is the clear winner and would only add that if you are doing this for a church you should talk to your local mom & pop PC shop. Not only are we packrats and tend to have boxes full of NICs but if its a church or other non profit we'll often work with you to get you something thrown together as close to cost as possible. Since its a non profit I'd not want some big old power sucking P4 blasting through power, i'd use an underclocked Celeron or Sempron, maybe something in the sub 2Ghz range since he won't need that much power for that job, and build it into a nice cheap old Dell or Emachine mini tower and there you are, a dirt cheap CP box. hell if you are lucky they may even have an older SFF office box just sitting in the back they can let you have dirt cheap that would be perfect for the job and if you ask nicely i bet the guy would even be willing to help you set it up.
I'll probably end up having to dump them on the shop down the street that will just put "Win 7 Pirate Edition" and enjoy the extra profits. And yes Virginia I've seen machines MUCH older keep being used, in fact I was nice enough to Frankenstein an off lease office box together for the apt buildings handyman who has always been good about picking up machines that were gonna be tossed by the local college or the office building he also supports. Know how old his PC was that the "new" 2.9Ghz P4 with HT was replacing? 1997, no shit, I swear to God, 1997 and it was STILL running his little bookkeeping software and some card games.
Hell the reason I use "Suzy the checkout girl" as my typical user is because she is based on a real person. The checkout girl at a local minimart said "Hey I heard that you fixed a machine for one of the girls here, could you please look at the one in my car and tell me if you can fix it?" So I go out there and start busting a gut until I see the poor little thing start to cry. i tell her "Hon I'm not laughing at you dear, i'm laughing because I built that machine over a decade ago and never thought I'd see her again!" I then flipped it over and showed her where I had wrote "Frankenputer" in felt marker on the bottom. it was a 1.2Ghz Celeron and that thing had been passed through no less than FOUR families before it ended up coming to her. since she didn't have much money i gave her a deal on a 2.6Ghz P4 with mobo and RAM and just dropped it in old Frankenputer with a spare 200w PSU I had laying around. Last I heard her 3 kids do their school work on it and she is using it to learn basic office skills so hopefully she can move into a night manager position.
So just because it is something You or I would think is junk does NOT mean that a poor working Joe or Jane might not find that machine valuable. I probably go through 30 of my "$100 special" towers for every new build and since i often get them sub $30 and have most of the work automated its quite profitable to refurb them, same as i go through a good dozen "$150 special" laptops for every new one i sell. When you live in a rural state and the economy is a corpse you'd be surprised how many simply can't afford anything nicer. And I'd LIKE to do the same with a FOSS OS because the "great XP dieoff' is underway and XP has just 2 years before DOA, but I HAVE to have something "Suzy the checkout girl" can use, ya know? Why its soo damned hard for FOSS geeks to get it through their head that Suzy can't use Bash, will NEVER get the hang of CLI anything, and that what they consider easy is about as practical to teach Suzy as trying to teach quantum mechanics to third graders? Hell if I didn't actually care about selling quality goods i'd just run pirate like every other damned shop, you'd think FOSS would want to make a product good enough to kill that market as every pirated Windows is a future Windows customer, but since all I ever get is insults I guess they are happy being stuck in last place forever. damned shame though, there is a lot of nice decent working poor that FOSS could actually help if it wasn't all run by elitist who refuse to accept anyone that isn't like them.
Actually he's been at it for over a year, although he stopped the following me around across the entire Internet at 6 months. BTW he posted an insult in this very thread, see if you can find him. And how would YOU describe someone whom the ONLY answer allowed is "Linux is perfect and ZOMG M$ burns babies", hmmm? Remember this is a person soooo paranoid he actually believes, I swear to fucking Christ, that I've got a "profile" on him and I'm a "sekret M$ Ninja" employed at Redmond to "keep tabs" on him and "to destroy the freedom of FOSS'. no shit. Hell look up some of old APK's posts, the guy and I have NEVER agreed on jack shit yet when he dared to disagree with the loonie on a linux security matter he accused HIM of being me and started stalking APK across sites as well! Hell APK and I went back and forth arguing for over a month here before we finally just agreed to disagree (BTW I STILL think a recursive DNS server is a better solution than a HOSTS file, but if it works for APK more power to him).
And my WHOLE argument is we do NOT have to accept the "shit sandwich" just because its free! We USED to have a good thing here because the admins actually GAVE A FUCK. Now they frankly don't give a shit, haven't given a shit in at least 3 years, wasn't that around the time they sold the site? And there are other sites that don't put up with this kind of shit, take OSNews, I've had some long heated technical arguments about OS designs on that site yet nearly all that made a good point as WELL as those that made a good point against were modded UP.
In the end friend a site becomes filled with trolls because the admins LET THE TROLLS WIN and if you look at the numbers /. readership has been in solid decline for over 2 years. Do we REALLY want this site to become another Kuroshin, a dead site where nothing but trolls and crazies hang out? And what would YOU call it when the groupthink is parroted back and forth for a karma whoring palloza, the only term i can think of to adequately describe that constant wanking is well...wanking or a circle jerk, whichever term you find more appealing i'll be happy to use. In the end things NEVER get better if nobody complains they ALWAYS get worse and that is what we have seen here. The whoring is getting worse, the flag waving, the "treat corps as ballclubs to cheer' mentality which I think fanboi describes pretty well, but if you can suggest a better shorter term again I'm all ears. And frankly I don't give a wet fart about crazy stalker boy but what I DO care about is having a site that actual tech guys can go to talk about actual tech topics in an informal setting instead of some technet or workshop which is what /. USED to be.
But if you want to find out for yourself how deep the rabbit hole goes just try speaking against groupthink one time too many on any FOSS article and you'll see. Don't be surprised if you find every place you post under your UID having every post followed by "Die you fat fucker die". Then you too can enjoy your very own loonie!
Have you forgotten that in many places a single pot bust when you were 19 pretty much condemns you to the lowest manual labor which is now done by Jose for $4 an hour? I've known guys that have become drug dealers simply because there wasn't a single legal honest job they could get, any employer would run a background check and that was it.
The sad part is for this to actually be effective the thieves have to be smart enough to know the difference and when you are talking copper thieves you are usually talking methheads....not the brightest bulbs on the best of days. All they are gonna get is a shitload of cut lines followed by finding the line half melted in a ditch somewhere when brainiac figures out it isn't worth scrapping.
Oh you missed the fun part of the /. mod system...what happens when you have a loonie. I have one that will wait until the article is off the front page (so no one can undo him) and mods down every. single. post. on anything I say regarding anything FOSS. Doesn't matter what the FOSS project is, doesn't matter if I say "hey its nice" he will zero out anything i post on FOSS even if it takes him 2 days worth of mod points to do so. I give him credit to dedication to his batshittiness, it took him 3 days on the Firefox article because I had 3 plus 4 posts but last I checked he managed to zero all of them out.
The problem is /. has become infected with rabid fanbois which its no wonder the numbers are dropping. look at how on ANY article about MSFT, I don't care if its about...say some book on sharepoint server management, you'll see someone get a plus 5 for typing "use Linux" like that is some magic answer that has fuck all to do with the topic, a post that says "Google is great" or "they do no evil" will also get modded waay up, even if it has fuck all to do with the topic.
So I agree we need to try something else, hell ANYTHING else, because too many discussions here become giant fanboi circle jerks with everyone that parrots groupthink going up, everybody that doesn't toe the line getting buried. personally I'd like it if I didn't have to wade through a bunch of "nigger faggot cocksucker" posts but I have to browse at the lowest level just to read the posts that don't follow groupthink. I'd say its worth a shot to try different ways of doing it if for no other reason so we might trip over the right way. i miss the days that we could have a 100+ comment back and forth about something like filesystems and OS designs without it quickly becoming fanboi central, but now its all militant flag waving and it doesn't really matter WHAT anybody says, just that they fall on the right side of the mod's belief system. Currently from what I've been able to gather the current "rules" are Google yay, MSFT boo, Apple yay unless its apple VS FOSS then it is Apple boo,Oracle boo, and Canonical is yay unless its unity then boo. We've ALL seen it, just as we've seen a dozen posts below them going "WTF? Who is modding this crap up?" which of course gets modded down by whomever is modding that crap up, its fanboi central here now and it didn't use to be and I hope it can not be that way again but as long as the current mod system is in place i doubt we'll see the groupthink and karma whoring go away.
You are falling for what I call "the PPT lie" which is "if the PPT says I made X last year than by our numbers we should get X+Y this year" which is total bullshit. A good example of this lie is Vista. MSFT made it a PITA to pirate Vista, what happened? Did their numbers shoot through the roof? No because at the price point they set nobody bought so stores ended up with shelves full of unsold Vista discs. hell the shelves at my local Walmart are fricking full of 'em.
You think that if you were to magically wipe out piracy ALL of those people, or even a significant portion, would then buy the product but that isn't true. In every. single. case. where they have put in DRM nasty enough to stop piracy you simply had people ignore the product unless the price point was low enough to get them to buy, full stop. Its not like people say "Oh well I can't pirate so I'll hand them $60" instead they go "Oh well its not worth $60 so I'll pass" and with it there goes your modding community, there goes most of those that host servers which help sell your MP, there goes most of the buzz once you quit paying the media to plug it.
As Valve learned with their experiments there is a sweet spot to EVERY product that will make people buy, call it the "WTH I'll take it price". The media corps think they can charge assrape prices by killing piracy but all they will do is have even less people that will touch their product. Again look at Steam, I bet my last dollar ALL of the titles that hit over 100,000 sales were under $20, and ALL of the products that hit the 500,000 mark during the sales were under $12. Hell I bought games I wasn't really interested in because at less than $10 they reached my "WTH I'll take it" price. But if you think because the pirates downloaded X that if you remove piracy you'll get X is simply delusional friend, ask any pirate. They MIGHT buy 5% of what they download MAYBE. The rest? they'd simply walk on by. Just look at how many AAA titles are sitting in piles at your average Walmart because their price point is too high, or how Gamestop makes a killing by allowing trade ins thus dropping the prices by a good $30 a title.
What I need is a machine that can walk out of my shop with a free OS and will STILL be running in 7 years WITH updates. Can BSD do that? The average lifetime for a PC in this area is 7 years so THAT is what I'm looking for, the "great XP dieoff" is already under way and the offlease office machines are starting to pile up. If I could buy Win 7 Starter OEM I wouldn't even be asking but I can't find a source that will sell me that at less than 10,000 units so that's right out, and Win 7 HP costs more than the machines are worth. So I need a FOSS OS that will still be functional on a 3.2Ghz P4 with 1gb of RAM in 7 years, so far no Linux has passed muster, hence the question about BSD.
What's the support like? How many years will this be updated without having to wipe and reinstall? One thing that drives me mad about Linux is you are supposed to wipe and reinstall every 6 damned months or plan your life around LTS releases which as a retailer is right out. Despite all the "Linux is ready for the desktop" BS the support situation is quite bad. Corporations may throw out their desktops every 3 years so they are always under hardware support but home users? Keep a system for an average of 6-8 years before it is finally tossed or given away.
So how many years does this version get for support? Can it do an in place upgrade using GUI ONLY without puking on its own drivers and dying hard which is what Linux seems to do anymore? I thought for sure when I started messing with Linux in 04 my shelves would have Linux boxes right next to the Windows machines by 2010 tops but the whole mess with PulseAudio and the DEs getting trashed means it'll probably be 5 years before anything is really stable back in Linux land again, so how is PC-BSD? Does it work on laptops? How is its wireless support? I have limited bandwidth here so I hate to give it my "Is it safe" test and waste 20Gb+ if it is simply gonna puke. "IS it safe" simulates what would happen to a customer who bought the machine from me and kept it for 3 years by taking the version from 3 years ago and updating/upgrading it to current. What are the odds BSD will pass? Good, poor? Remember that home users do NOT buy support contracts and they are not gonna pay more than Windows for a strange OS so once it leaves the shop it has to KEEP running with minimal user skill.
I would also point out it is the bootloader on x86/x64 that allowed Windows 7 to be pirated trivially thus illustrating that no matter what you have higher in the stack if the bootloader is vulnerable you are fucked. If anyone doesn't believe me just download and try "Windows 7 SP1 all versions pre-activated' off of PTB or the P2P of you choice, on first boot it announces "Applying bootloader hack" and after that the thing even passes WGA! it does this from what i understand by faking an OEM BIOS signature and since they based the signature on one of the biggest OEMs MSFT would have to disable the OEM keys to their entire line thus causing massive shitfits across the board. hell thanks to the bootloader hack Win 7 is easier to pirate than even XP Corp because you don't even need a key, the OEM bootloader hack takes care of that FOR you!
At the end of the day MSFT knows that making it easier for app developers to make profits without worrying about piracy is pretty much the ONLY selling point they have on ARM because otherwise there is no point in going with WinARM when Android has the momentum and Apple has the top end locked up tight. i'm willing to bet my last buck what they are gonna try to do is create "a mobile X360" where you have this huge market where developers can make plenty of money. look at the music games like Rock Band for example, I read not too long ago that more than 80% of the songs downloaded for those games went through the X360 market. That is a hell of a lot of money and after seeing Win 7 get so easily pwned thanks to bootloader hacks you can understand why they wouldn't want that crucial piece of the chain easily bypassed.
I'll give an even better example...Steam. Steam DRM is trivial to bypass for anyone but the simplest Billy Joe Bob (which is what the original DRM like CD checks was for, to get rid of casual piracy) and hacked Steam games are all over P2P yet Gabe from Valve is singing "Merry Xmas to me" while swimming in a giant pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck, why? Because he learned the way to turn pirates into customers isn't pile on the DRM and hoop jumps but to make it easy, simple, and cheap. We humans are lazy creatures by nature and if you make something simple enough and cheap enough it becomes more of a PITA to pirate than it does to simply buy it and Valve seems to get that.
Take my own case for example, I probably spent a good $200 this Steam Xmas sale between me and my two boys. Now was there a SINGLE game, even one, that I couldn't have pirated trivially? Nope in fact I could have simply used the listings on Steam and went and downloaded every single one if i desired, so why didn't I? Because Valve has made it as simple as "whip out CC, push button, get game" and their download speeds are insanely fast compared to most P2P, most of the games i bought were bundle packs where I got a pile of games in a series for one low price (such as FEAR 1 & 2 & the DLC extras for $5)or a game with ALL the DLC (which the pirated version never has, such as Just Cause II with all the DLC included for $7) and unlike the pirated version I can enjoy full MP support, I get the game automatically updated to current, I get Valve's excellent long tail game support (Such as their throwing in HL:DM when I bought the complete HL2 series which is STILL highly populated after all these years) and it even keeps my graphics drivers updated without me having to bother.
The way you kill piracy isn't with a stick but with a cookie, and by finding the sweet spot on price that gives you maximum sales. look at how just as an experiment the sold L4D for $2 and ended up making over 1700% PROFIT on the title simply by having everyone buy the thing while not having to pay for advertising or making copies. Even at that ultra low price because of the massive economies of scale they got they not only made such huge profits but now everyone of those people will see the DLC for sale as well as the news of the latest L4D games thus making it easier to sell even more content.
So if companies would just accept the mantra of keep it simple, easy, and cheap, put in the most simple of DRM, just to keep Billy Joe Bob from passing around copies to all his buddies, they could be making mad piles o' cash instead or trying to assrape the entire Internet with SOPA and the like. For an example of a company that didn't "get it" look at MSFT, for about 7 months I saw NOTHING but legit versions of Windows and in a small shop that's unheard of, so why did it happen? At $50 a copy the win 7 HP upgrade made it cheaper and less hassle to buy Windows than it was to pirate and $50 appears to be the sweet spot for Windows Home. Sure enough Ballmer kills the program and not 30 days later I start seeing Win 7 Ultimate everywhere because folks simply weren't willing to pay $100 for home and if they are gonna pirate why not get the biggest SKU? Make it simple, easy, and cheap, find the sweet spot on price and people WILL buy simply because its the easiest route. Throw in a couple of bonuses that pirates don't get like DLC and MP and it becomes a no brainer. I mean when I get both Max Paynes for $2.75, Butcher Bay remade in HD AND Dark Athena for $5, and JC II with over a pages worth of DLC for $7 why would I bother to pirate?
Name one, because I'd set up sandisk and Cowon and Rio and just about every kind of MP3 and PMP known to man and I have NEVER actually seen on that preferred NFS, not saying that one couldn't exist but if it does you are talking a teeeny tiny niche of a niche friend. And as for NAS? that's what those cheapo HP WHS boxes are for. Its a HELL of a lot cheaper and unlike some jury rigged homebuilt it will actually be efficient and is actually BUILT for that job, its also great for media and file serving since it has a ...drumroll...server OS!
And XP PRO had it, which has been replaced by Enterprise. Win 7 Pro is for workstations which is what pro originally was back in the days of WinNT and Win2k but MSFT had to get WinXP out the door quick after WinME went down in flames so they didn't bother separating the workstation and enterprise builds like they did with WinNT and Win2K. So complaining about that is like complaining that you built support around a glitch and get pissed when the glitch is removed. look up the versions of NT/2K and you'll see they had Enterprise and Data Center for the jobs you listed and NT/2K pro was for workstation.
In the end it comes down to the fact you simply don't want to pay for the correct version that you require but in a capitalist system they are free to set the price and you are free to use something else. For the jobs you have it would frankly be insane to use a desktop because its not designed to support the connections you require and there is already a perfectly affordable version that is DESIGNED to do the tasks you want. Now if you say that $48 is too damned much for a server OS then we'll know you are just trolling. If not may I suggest you buy a cheap AM2+ board along with this chip along with a cheap case from Geeks and for less than $250 all told you can have your very own low power high performance media server. i've actually built a couple using that chip and Asrock boards and its easy peasy to make a whisper quiet media server using the above.
Actually the answer is YES, yes it can, with the free converter pack. And I can testify that it works because my oldest always sends me DocX files from his Office 2K10 (He ALWAYS forgets to send as doc) and they open and display just fine. Now granted he's only a junior so his DocX files are just basic header and footer, no embedded tables or anything yet so I can't tell you how it will do with something fancy, but I CAN tell you that it opened a 15Mb business proposal I did with 4 other guys that had headers, footer, embedded tables, and frankly that amazed the hell out of me because I had 2K, one had 2K3, one had 2K7 and one had (2K6?) whatever the number for Office for Mac was around 2007.
So I can say that honestly I've never had a problem with Office since i started using it regularly with office 2K. Now maybe i just haven't tripped over the edge cases, who knows, but sharing both doc and DocX in 2K has not been a problem with the Office converter pack.
Uhhh...maybe because businesses would have a royal stinking shitfit if they couldn't use those software assurance licenses they paid out the ass for? Hell I had a couple of business that up until recently were using Win2K and just now migrated those last machines and there are still a LOT of companies running XP thanks to legacy software. Can you imagine the screaming shitfits if they bought new hardware and found they couldn't run older versions of Windows? With ARM MSFT doesn't have to support FOUR different OSes (XP/Vista/7/8) so they don't have to leave such an obvious hole open. BTW did you know the bootloader is how Windows 7 is pirated? it fakes an OEM boot signature and it even passes WGA. Hell the thing is easier to snatch than XP, it don't even need a key thanks to the cracked bootloader!
But in the end frankly it just doesn't matter, except to laugh as the "ZOMFG M$!" trolls wet themselves, because if MSFT manages to even reach 4% when it comes to Win 8 on ARM I'll die of shock. Its just stupid, pointless, and a complete waste of time and resources because without the third party apps that are all written for x86 who the fuck is gonna pay the extra cost of the Windows license? this is just another chapter in the continuing saga that is Steve "OMG I want to be Apple so bad!" Ballmer's totally horrid leadership at MSFT. I mean look at his track record folks, rushing X360 out with a fatal flaw which cost billions, Zune, killing the successful playsforsure and pissing off all those that had signed on by replacing it with the Zune market, All the money they blew on WinMo, Kin, and now WinPhone 7, and now this, screwing with Windows in the vain hope that users will buy something just because it says Windows even though it won't run WINDOWS PROGRAMS. I swear if I didn't know better I'd think the guy was trying to torpedo the company on purpose, hell maybe he's shorting the stock, who knows. I'm willing to bet my last buck though that Win 8 will make Vista look like Win95 and i'll get to spend a year wiping it for 7 just like i did Vista for XP.
But if someone says 12 is 6 of one and a half a dozen of the other does it make it wrong if you don't like the company?
Lets be honest and cut the bullshit folks, we're all geeks and adults, yes? There are TWO VERY LEGITIMATE REASONS for doing this that even the blind would be able to see. 1.- After seeing how badly Google has been getting pwned with Android malware the LAST thing MSFT wants is to be the easily pwned OS in this new market, and 2.- the REAL reason I'm willing to bet my last buck they are doing this....ready? PIRACY. Not only is MSFT Windows most likely the most highly pirated software on the entire planet but we've already seen pirated phone apps all over the web. by locking down their OS and hardware this gives them a better platform for those that want to sell phone apps, think X360. yes we all know there are pirate X360s out there but it means you have to have two systems, the cracked and the legit and most folks simply aren't gonna go through that much bullshit. I'm sure MSFT will have special keys which will be tied to the OS and hardware so that those selling apps on windows market know they aren't gonna get pirated without them doing some serious hardware hacking which the vast majority won't do for fear of bricking.
Finally the most important thing which will probably piss off the fanbois but seriously, who gives a flying fuck? Its not like MSFT is gonna sell jack shit when it comes to Windows 8 on ARM anyway because the whole damned selling point of Windows is WINDOWS PROGRAMS which are all x86. Has everyone forgotten WinNT on Alpha and MIPS? Remember how quick and how hard that shit bombed? Why would you want Windows if you can't run Windows programs? Its not like you can just recompile those 300,000+ programs for Windows to run on ARM now can you? Apple can change arches because the programs people buy Apple devices for, your iMovie and iDVD and Garageband and iTunes are all written by guess who? The ONLY thing MSFT has besides the OS is Office, big whoop. Everything else is by some third party and most won't bother because there are literally a billion Windows boxes they can sell for that run x86 and they don't have to change a line of code, so why waste the money on a niche platform MSFT has already struck out on not once, not twice, but THREE times now, first WinMo then Kin followed by WinPhone...see a pattern?
Personally they can have it written that you can't use Win 8 for ARM unless you watch Ballmer do his monkey dance for all that its gonna matter, its gonna bomb, YOU know it, I know it, hell everybody knows it! Everyone will stick with iShiny and those cute little dancing droids. There is ONE nice thing though, after this shit bombs we'll be getting Win 8 pads at Touchpad prices and if you end up with a $500 winPad for the firesale prices the touchpad went for are you REALLY gonna give a shit what it runs?
Actually it was a whole $350 with 8Gb from Newegg and a carrying case from Tigerdirect, so nope, not expensive at all. of course i lucked out as i ordered mine 2 weeks before the Thailand flood, now the same unit is a whole....let me look...$415, not really that big a difference, but of course you'll have to add the $30 for 2 4Gb sticks like i got.
Anyway here is the link and if you'll check the comments below the first poster links to the 8Gb RAM upgrade. I can't say enough good things about this netbook, it gets 6 hours plus playing 720p video, gets a hair over 8 in Expressgate surfing and listening to music, has enough GPU to play L4D and GTA:VC, and has enough CPU muscle i'm using it to edit multitracks and even as a custom drum machine using hydrogen and running it into the mixer, great for having more realistic drums when laying down scratch tracks. Its got plenty of space, doesn't get hot, only weighs 3 pounds, and if you want even longer battery life there is a 10 cell you can pick up but personally 6 hours plus is plenty.. Oh and it comes with Win 7 HP X64 ready to go and swapping out the RAM is easy peasy. After I sold the 2Gb stick that came with it for $20 the RAM boost was a grand total of $14 and it was only $6 difference between 6Gb and 8Gb so I figured WTF ya know? Having that much RAM means that Superfetch has ALL my apps preloaded into RAM, its sweeet.
so if you or anyone you know wants a netbook I'd say go for it, its a great lightweight unit that kicks ass on the road. It even has a USB 3 port with charging capability so if your phone dies you can use the EEE to give it a quick charge. Nice.
The problem friend is only 2K10 has support for ODT IIRC and you have NO way of knowing which version of MS Office the person you are sending that ODT to will have. Just in my family I have Office 2K on my netbook, 2K3 on my desktop and my oldest has 2K7 on his desktop and a copy of 2K10 his school gave him on his laptop. I have known businesses that have hung onto machines for lower positions like secretaries until literally the thing is about to die and often the software will be just as creaky, and with schools you have NO clue what the teacher will have.
So while your theory would be sound if you could easily know what the other guy is running you don't and THAT is a serious problem when you have business or grades depending on it.
Oh please! That many eyes bullshit was proven to be just that, bullshit, or did you forget the KDELook bug? That one lasted 6 months. The Quake 3 malware? Lasted on the repo for a YEAR AND A HALF. The ONLY way the "many eye" theory would work is if you had many eyes of the appropriate skill level but as those and many other examples prove you do NOT have eyes of the appropriate skill actually looking at the majority of the code. Hell I'd bet my last dollar that at least a quarter of the code that makes up ANY average distro is ONLY looked at by the ones who wrote the thing in the first place. Now if the NSA went to one of them with a big fat check you don't think they'd take it? those guys at NETSEC were working with OpenBSD for FOUR YEARS and nobody caught on, if the one hadn't talked after his NDA ran out they'd have probably never known!
Remember friends just because you HAVE the ability does NOT mean that the ability has been used. How many here have looked at the code in your distro of choice networking stack? how many here have the skill to explain what each line is calling and what EXACTLY its doing? thought so, just because someone CAN doesn't mean someone HAS.
And THIS gets modded "informative"? Did someone give the trolls extra mod points this week? Did I miss a memo? Because I'm sitting here with not one but TWO Win 7 X64 machines running, one an AMD EEE netbook with 8Gb, the other my AMD 6 core Thuban desktop, also with 8Gb, and I'm using less than 600Mb with the basic theme on the netbook and just a hair under 980Mb on the desktop and that's with Aero and all the bling cranked. You are probably using an old tool that counts cache as "used" memory but since Windows dumps the cache if ANY program requests the memory that simply isn't useful anymore. BTW your old XP box uses so little RAM because it'll dump to paging even if there is plenty of memory free which is just fricking stupid, the RAM is using the same voltage regardless so why not use it to speed things up?
But if you are seriously looking at 2gb and aren't trolling you need to have that thing checked, because either you have more bugs than a Bangkok Whore or one of your apps is leaking memory like a sieve.
If you are a MSFT admin you are gonna be in for a BIG shock friend. Just go ask them on any Linux forum for a drop in replacement for GPO/AD/Exchange/Sharepoint and see what you get because i have and i'll tell you, what you'll get is a bunch of little projects that were NEVER designed to integrate or work together and a couple of which will most likely be abandoned or only work with old kernels because they aren't being kept up anymore.
Like it or not MSFT has shelled out a metric fuckload of money making sure their business apps all "just work' in a tightly integrated environment which is completely the opposite of the UNIX mantra of "Little programs doing little jobs" and everything being piped between. Don't believe me, go ask and see what you get. Linux has had the money invested by big corps in SPECIFIC jobs like HPC and Webserver but NOT for the kind of jobs WinServer has been designed for so naturally the code just isn't there. Believe me MSFT wouldn't be making the kind of money they are on WinServer if there was anything close in Linux land but there isn't, the closest there was recently was Xandros XMC with groupwise but they are DOA now so unless you want to shell out for 5 year old code and try to upkeep it yourself you're gonna be in for a shock.
You DO realize that every. single. thing. you bitched about are SERVER and ENTERPRISE technologies and you are bitching because you have to gasp! Shock! Actually use a server or enterprise software for server or enterprise features? How many home users need NFS? How many are running a home built NAS? i'd say damned close to zero. BTW IIRC Win 7 Pro has most if not all those features so you can run that, or just buy the right tool for the right job instead of bitching that home systems aren't designed for enterprise work. if you want a NAS buy a fricking NAS or get one of the bazillion cheapo HP boxes with Windows Home Server, those make excellent low power NAS and Home Server boxes.
But what you are bitching about has been the way MSFT has done things since waaay back with WinNT. You have Home, Workstation, Enterprise, Server, each tailored to a different job. the only fuckup i see in their current business model is Ultimate, I mean WTF are they thinking when the MOST expensive has the LEAST length of support? if you didn't know while pro and Enterprise gets 10 years Ultimate only gets 5 like Home which is just stupid. But if you are wanting all those features for cheap you shouldn't even be in a discussion about Windows in the first place, you should be over on LinuxInsider learning how to turn an off lease into a badass headless server. different tools for different jobs friend, and not having SOFTWARE RAID is as SMART idea because that is the LAST thing you'd want home users to have. I've dealt with enough gamers who royally fucked their entire setup by going with software RAID to know that if you give a shit about your data you do NOT fuck with it, you get a decent RAID controller and let IT handle the RAID, PERIOD.
Actually I've found LO/MS Office to be pretty much mutually exclusive when it comes to any complexity of formatting. This is why i give it to home users that don't have kids or who just has young kids but not those with HS or college kids because if the teacher is using MS Office anything they give to you will be word salad in LO and anything you give to them will be word salad in MS office. And why does so many LO users find that hard to accept? they are trying to reverse engineer a binary format without jack shit for source code to look at, the fact they can open up as many as they can is a miracle and they should be applauded for it. But you take a complex doc with headers, footers, tables, etc and while i've had no problem opening that in any version of MS Office I have from 2k-2K7 that same doc will take a big old shit in LO. by the same token i make the same doc in LO with the same headers, footers, and tables and MS office will either crash or output gibberish. Does that make one better than the other? noooo, it just makes them incompatible.
That is why I give away LO to home users like I said but don't even mention it to SOHOs and SMBs because if you are having to share with MS Office users it can quickly become a mess. So I'd say it is just using the right tool for the job, LO when its home users who'll mainly be printing or not sharing with businesses, MS office for business and HS or above education.
How did this get marked insightful? Boy the geeks treating corps like ballclubs just gets worse by the quarter, don't it?
As for how Win 7 is better, as someone who has been working on the things since before there even was a Windows let me count the ways. 1.-ASLR makes it damn hard to use buffer overflows. 2.-DEP keeps software from writing in non executable locations, again helping kill buffer overflows dead. the fact that before 7 I'd see a hell of a lot of buffer overflow exploits and now its all social engineering tells me a lot. 3.- Both IE and Chromium based browsers by default are in low rights mode, which is even lower than a *nix standard user, this helps kill drivebys dead and is why I no longer recommend Firefox because it doesn't support this security feature even after being introduced FIVE years ago. 4.-Action center which creates a "one stop shop" for security and by default reminds the user they need to have a scheduled backup plan which brings me to 5.- Windows backup being image based now makes it MUCH easier for the user to have a solid backup plan in place that will actually restore the machine even on drive failure. It also by default includes the folders most used by people to store their important data like My Docs, pictures, and their music folders.
Now as for the non security features we have 1.-Jumplists, how in the hell did we live without these? these are the best damned thing since the DVD burner as far as I'm concerned, when I want to get back to what I was working on yesterday just right click on Explorer and BAM! my folders are back up, right click on Dragon and BAM! all my websites are back up, its just too damned quick. 2.-Breadcrumbs, man i love the breadcrumbs because when you have a file and folder setup several level deep breadcrumbs make navigation fast fast fast. 3.-Superfetch, with RAM so cheap Superfetch can really give Windows a hell of a speed boost along with ALL your apps. the longer you run the system the smarter it gets thanks to its DB of usage patterns so it knows for example that between 9-5 I'm gonna be running Dragon and after 5 I'm firing up WMP to play my music so BAM! Its already loaded into RAM and ready. With 8Gb of RAM I even have the core files of my current favorite games loaded into cache so when I fire up Just Cause II BAM! there it is, that's damned nice. 4.- Readyboost when combined with Superfetch gives a hell of a speedboost to mobile devices like laptops and netbooks. not so much desktops as you have fast RPM drives there and fatter caches but on a netbook you can pop a fast cheap SD card into the card reader and just leave it there and it really makes you apps load quick.
Now I could probably name off a good two dozen more of each but do I really have to AC? There are plenty of things to bitch at MSFT about, like Vista being rushed with serious bugs, their mobile strategy is pretty much "Ape Apple" but Windows 7 ain't one of them. I've converted just about all my customers to Win 7 and to a man I've not had a single complaint about 7, in fact most ended up buying the family packs later just so they could get rid of XP completely. Once you've used the new features in 7 going back to XP feels like Win98, its THAT backwards.
But you sir are falling for the same bullshit that every man CAN be educated to a level high enough to constantly earn a seat in a game of IQ musical chairs and I'm arguing that is not the case. What do you do with those that simply can't be educated beyond a D level position when you've outsourced or brought in illegals for everything lower than a B class job? Put them in camps? Before you could put them to work in a factory or in construction where if they had a strong back they could feed their family, not anymore. And i'd argue that unlike previous technological advances, which created more jobs than it cost the machines and third world labor simply make most of these people useless to society as a whole.
So what do you do? A man isn't gonna just go crawl off into a corner and die you know, what you'll get is a rampant increase in crime as the legal ways to stay afloat simply won't exist. look at IT where you have 300 guys going out for the same job simply because you can get an Indian with a half a dozen degrees for under $20k a year. Our throwaway society is soon gonna be overloaded with throwaway people simply because they don't have the mental capacity to become doctors and lawyers and most of the low skilled jobs are either overseas or are being done by illegals making a couple of bucks an hour under the table, so what do you do? you DO realize if the fed broadcast the ACTUAL numbers, the ones where you count those that have run out of benefits, we are talking 30% unemployment is some places? Do we build shantytowns like the third world countries? What?
Because I'd argue you have MAYBE 30% that can be educated to a C level MAYBE half of those can be educated to B level and MAYBE one tenth of those can go up to A level, and then you have to factor in the rampant inflation of education making it so many will NEVER be able to pay back their loans or get out of debt. Mark my words the next bubble to pop WILL be the education bubble, with millions defaulting simply because there weren't any jobs that would pay well enough to eat AND pay off their massive loans. Hell you have doctors filing for bankruptcy at never before heard of numbers simply because the cost of insurance and the hundreds of thousands in student loans means they simply can't dig their way out of the red.
Exactly you aren't gonna even save a single watt as most servers have the ancient ATI Rage chipset which thanks to die shrinks and its very limited functionality is using MAYBE a quarter of a watt. its not like these things have stream processors or support for hardware decoding, we are talking 10+ year old chips that have gone through a good dozen die shrinks.
in the end I'm betting its to give the sales guys a check in the checkbox, because if its one thing MSFT hates its someone having something they don't. This gives the sales guys an ability to counter the "Linux is better/faster/has electrolytes because its CLI" by saying "We can do that too". of course I doubt many will actually RUN it that way, but PHBs love PPTs with lots of bullet points and this just added a bullet.