I use DeCSS to watch Blueray's purchased to play on my Windows 7 media Centre machine running the copy of PowerDVD that came with my drive! Why because last year I found that without paying for an upgrade to the latest version of PowerDVD I would only be able to watch approximately half of my purchased Bluerays!!
In the end I spent a quarter of the money on a perpetual license for AnyDVD HD, that fixed the issue with PowerDVD. Problem solved.
The cloud is not about Gmail and Hotmail, heck thats 20 year old tech! It's about tools to do the same things better, which is all any enterprise company be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP or whoever has been trying to sell forever, today however it's just a new platform for the same thing. Ask anyone who uses the aforementioned salesforce.com which I think is a great example of how the cloud is not something that we're all going to be using in the next 10 years, but that it's something that most of us have been using in one way or another already for the past ten years!
You're correct it is about the data however what is being outsourced is the tools used to access that data and incidentally the location that data is stored. There is nothing much new there IMO, ever heard of offsite or online backup?
People seem to insist that "the cloud" means Google Apps. It doesn't.
Or maybe she needs to connect on something faster than dial-up.
Err, just so you know it is a 10mbit broadband.
In other words it's not the downloading of the patches that is the slow part it's the 15 different apps attempting to update when they are first used or actually a program that depends on a program that depends on a program that depends on them is used.
If you use the computer every day it is not, however if you only turn it on every week or two (like my mother) then expect 30minutes of prompts for different updates!
Last year I bought for my mother a new computer, she is quite computer literate but I was shocked to find 3 months after purchasing that she has gotten into the habit of turning it on once a week just to give it an hour to "update itself". That was to allow her to spend 30mins every other week doing her online stuff..
I literally couldn't or didn't believe it, but then I actually was there one day and watched as all the mostly default installed apps when through their motions of requesting updates. It literally took about half an hour before to computer was usable without something prompting "Do you want to install this update..."!
In the end I removed some of the crap like Java and the HP printer updater, and told her to turn it on only ever other week for the updates!
Definitely there is some need to consolidate updates into one program..
Hang on, um I'm no expert on the topic but don't millions of teenagers each year dye their hair with peroxide to make it a lighter colour?
That would make it a perfectly reasonable question as undoubtedly some of that would end up in your ear and any reasonable person would want to know if there are any adverse affects??
I have to agree with all the other posts; Super Talent, Transcend? Who? I bought an Intel X-25, and after 4 months it's still going strong, though we'll see how it holds up in the next year.
Regardless I was not at all surprised by your statistic, and considering the relatively new age of SSD drive technology not at all surprised by your failure rate! I remember back in my days (many many days ago) of being a PC builder we would be surprised if we got less than a quarter of the IDE drives back within the first three months of sale! And these were not all the cheapest drives, we were using; Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu and the like (standard consumer drives).
You may find it also surprising that in my later years as a server engineer we expected roughly similar statistics from our server drives! To get a HP or Dell server with a 4-8 drives and not have at least one or two failures in the first few months was a BIG surprise!
SSD doesn't have to go very far to improve on those stats..
I mean seriously compare your average westerner's eco-print to those figures quoted here for our loved ones. I for one believe we find far better places to "make savings" when it comes to our combined foot print!
You have stated very well the real and often unstated issue that Vista faced, nobody understood it!
I remember waiting in the customer service line of a big computer shop a few months back, and there was this lady at the counter screaming about getting a refund for her new HP laptop, why? Because she didn't understand this "Vista" thing? She wanted "Windows" and "Office" and nothing else.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that most people don't know or care a bit about operating systems and interfaces, they likely believe that frankly if they had to go through how many boring hours of Windows and Office training back in the day, who's going to be paying them to do it all again!?
Personally I think any steps towards a more intuitive and usable OS (in particular the IU) is a good thing, so go Microsoft, go Apple, keep up the good work. But change like this is not going to sell new computers by itself. Fortunately however for Microsoft and Apple, the previous versions of Vista and OSX have now been out for long enough that a good number (20% according to Vista stats) of people have been exposed to it, this can only help ease that learning curve. So one could argue that on that point alone Windows7 will have a better time that Vista ever could have!
I'm very interested in this Kindle because I live in Australia where we are so lucky to have a thriving protectionist policy that results in ALL books costing 50-60% more! If I can buy them even at 40% more via Amazon on a Kindle then I'm winning!
But I too am trying to understand the 40% book markup comment? I can't see any different prices on Kindle titles on Amazon.com, but I can see the fine print which says all books are priced in US dollars, which actually suits me find.
Currently I often use Amazon.com and pay the $20-$30 shipping to get my books, and even including that cost it's cheaper than sourcing them locally!
Anyone can "install" any system, but do you think anyone can do it properly? If you got your 15 year old "techie" nephew to install SAP for your mid-sized company do you think you'd get the best result?
Some of the best MOSS deployments I've worked on are the ones that most people don't know that they are working on SharePoint at all! Of course in order to do that you cut out a good portion of the functionality, but how is that new, does ibm.com have a wiki on the front page letting anyone who comes by make changes? Why would they? And why would you enable such features on a corporate intranet page that is designed with a well defined purpose (that usually is not to give everyone a website they can "play" with).
Why not Intel, AMD, Reaktek? You know company's who actually make ethernet chips?
Sure many of them wouldn't based in the US, such as Realtek, but seriously how many consumer boards out there these days don't use integrated Intel or VIA (AMD) chips?
Maybe I just don't pay too much attention to these patent-trolls and so don't understand their "blatantly" obvious tactics involved?
Wish i saw your post before posting my own in iproute2, this howto was the bomb a few years back when I had to solve this exact problem, our custom iproute2 based solution beat a number of commercial options when we had to get a working load balanced connection solution that needed to support 150+ IPSEC vpn's with full seam-less failover between 3 ADSL connections!
Ahhhh, the memories, all this iproute / ipf talk takes me back to my NetBSD / Linux ipchains days..:)
A few years back I did this with a colleague, we actually investigated 3 solutions; 2 commercial and one linux script based, in the end the one that won easily was the Linux script.
Basically using iproute2 and some nice scripts gives you the ability to load balance your outbound packets and then using some relatively simple scripts to monitor each remote peer for automatic failover.
Unfortunately I can't remember the commercial solutions we tested (this was 4-5 years ago!), but although they did exactly what you wanted perfectly, our problem was that we were doing this for a managed services company who ran 150+ IPSEC VPN's over those (at the time) 3 bonded ADSL connections, needless to say the commercial solutions had never imagined anyone trying to statefully balance that many VPNs! However with some tweaking (to be honest a LOT of tweaking) we got the Linux solution working a treat, even with nearly seamless failover.
Email is easy enough to offer but shared address books and calendaring may give Exchange the edge. No harm in deploying Exchange on the back-end and using Evolution or Thunderbird or web based Exchange on the front-end.
Wow, I almost thought you were joking there with that one, I mean about the bit on address books and calendaring..
Did you notice how you sounded exactly like a 1998 Microsoft Exchange add?
Or did I completely miss the bus? Something I missed?
Nope you missed nothing, "cloud" computing is not for you, Software as a Service (SaaS) which is this whole 'cloud computing' gimmick really is about, is not targeted at Joe Carpenter down the road.
SaaS is about outsourcing IT, increasing efficiency and downsizing IT in-house requirements. Yes that's right it's about taking your job and mine! (Although I work in the outsourcing market so I guess I'm the one taking your job - meh) No wonder it is something that provokes such interesting discussion here and in any forum where the topic comes up, we're human after all most of us understand what it means to outsource IT, it means no more BOFH!
Perhaps we should all form a union? Fight this Cloud - err SaaS thing in the good old fashioned way? Perhaps picket lines in front of Google's HQ would send the right message?
This argument always crops up when/. talks about "cloud computing", I don't buy it at all. Probably because I've spent the best part of the last 10 years working in outsourced IT support of some kind. The fact is that *a lot* (wish I could find statistics on this) of companies already fully outsource their IT support, what does that mean? When there Exchange server goes down they rely on the SLA in place to get it fixed by the support provider.
How is that any different to what we now call "cloud computing"?
Software as a Service (SaaS - what cloud computing really is) is a model that is growing massively today, ever heard of Sales Force? Can you explain how Sales Force is able to compete against Oracle and SAP so effectively? Is it because all that "useless" customer data in the CRM and ERP systems of any company are nowhere near as critical as email?
Ah but that is my point entirely. That whole stacked start bar ala-win2000 (? I think when it was first introduced), is so very poorly designed!Hence the usual workaround of disabling it and increasing the size of the task bar, something that I too have done before.
My point before is how good it is too see that they have *fixed* that design! It is no nothing at all like that hopelessly poorly designed method of task switching.
Try it, I mean really try it for a month, i.e. unlearn your old habits, I think you might just see it is so much better than before.
I for one welcome any new UI advancements, thank you Apple for showing the way on this one!
I have to say, being one of those closet users who has always admired the OSX Dock (and chosen to emulate it as close as possible whenever using Linux), I have to say after using Win7 for a couple of months I love the new start-bar! Finally almost 15 years (roughly since Win95) of pretty poor UI design when you consider the the Start-Menu and task bar, finally Windows has a task bar that *works*!
All it needs in the next version is to cut off the unused part (up to the sys-tray) then it will truely be a Dock! Seriously for those of you who have tested Win7, how many of you have found that your applications almost never fill up the entire bar? With everything stacked (properly stacked that is not like in previous Windows's) even with my usual 5-10 apps running the icons at most take 2/3 of the task bar, it's great.
Although it has to be said it is a personal thing, some people will of course choose to ungroup their start bar icons, and make it all more like the old versions, those are probably the same people who have 50+ program icons (not documents) on their desktops.:)
One little tidbit that you may find interesting is that all MS employees are required by the terms of their employment contracts to disclose their employer whenever posting anywhere online! The terms are actually quite specific too, mentioning newsgroups, blogs and all..
Not sure how that fits in your theory but hey, I'll throw it in there.
Ps, I am not an MS employee, but on this topic I'm happy to say I like Win7!:)
Try spending a week driving in Italy with a broken sat-nav with a van full of in-laws flown in from all corners of the world, in particular try it when your *not* italian like me! The funny thing was that I never needed the thing, I mean seriously how many signs pointing to Rome do you need to see on the Motorway to know your on the right track?
Well having said that, on my previous trips to Italy when using a sat-nav on no less than two occasions the sat nav directed us onto a half constructed road! And I kid you not, one of those occasions the sat nav insisted that my fiancee and I drive off the edge of a half constructed bridge!!! It was the on-ramp to the motorway under construction!
This was Italy so that kind of thing apparently happens often, oh and before you ask there were none of the usually expected signs indicating that the road you are turning onto doesn't actually expect prior to the half built bridge!
The moral of the story is the usual rule of thumb with any system - garbage in garbage out, don't put all your faith in a machine!
I don't know what both you and the original question asker are talking about.
I just went onto Dell's website and looked at the first range of laptops that I would ever consider for myself and NONE of the models have webcams? Why?
Because I selected 'Enterprise / Corporate' on the first page and not 'Home - give-me-all-your-crap-that-only-the-children-would-use'.:)
Come to think of it, I've only ever owned one laptop with a webcam, that that was back in the day (>5 years ago) when the only way to get a decent 3d card in a laptop was to go for the home models, since then none of my laptops have them simply because when I buy a laptop I want one designed to work, not look good, etc.
I was actually very surprised the very first time I bought one of those Logitech (non-bluetooth) RF mice for my other pc (media centre box so only used on the TV), it occurred to me about 18 months after buying it that I had NEVER changed it's 2xAA batteries, so I did anyway just incase they decided to spring a little acid leak!
Slashdot Mirror
How about what has already been found out there:
Most Distant Water in the Universe Found
and
Evidence of Water in Atmospheres of Planets Orbiting Distant Stars
And I hear we've only been doing this planet finding stuff successfully for a little while.
I use DeCSS to watch Blueray's purchased to play on my Windows 7 media Centre machine running the copy of PowerDVD that came with my drive! Why because last year I found that without paying for an upgrade to the latest version of PowerDVD I would only be able to watch approximately half of my purchased Bluerays!!
In the end I spent a quarter of the money on a perpetual license for AnyDVD HD, that fixed the issue with PowerDVD. Problem solved.
Sales Force
Oh and .com, not really a word.
The cloud is not about Gmail and Hotmail, heck thats 20 year old tech! It's about tools to do the same things better, which is all any enterprise company be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP or whoever has been trying to sell forever, today however it's just a new platform for the same thing. Ask anyone who uses the aforementioned salesforce.com which I think is a great example of how the cloud is not something that we're all going to be using in the next 10 years, but that it's something that most of us have been using in one way or another already for the past ten years!
You're correct it is about the data however what is being outsourced is the tools used to access that data and incidentally the location that data is stored. There is nothing much new there IMO, ever heard of offsite or online backup?
People seem to insist that "the cloud" means Google Apps. It doesn't.
It means SalesForce.com, etc.
Or maybe she needs to connect on something faster than dial-up.
Err, just so you know it is a 10mbit broadband.
In other words it's not the downloading of the patches that is the slow part it's the 15 different apps attempting to update when they are first used or actually a program that depends on a program that depends on a program that depends on them is used.
If you use the computer every day it is not, however if you only turn it on every week or two (like my mother) then expect 30minutes of prompts for different updates!
Last year I bought for my mother a new computer, she is quite computer literate but I was shocked to find 3 months after purchasing that she has gotten into the habit of turning it on once a week just to give it an hour to "update itself". That was to allow her to spend 30mins every other week doing her online stuff..
I literally couldn't or didn't believe it, but then I actually was there one day and watched as all the mostly default installed apps when through their motions of requesting updates. It literally took about half an hour before to computer was usable without something prompting "Do you want to install this update..."!
In the end I removed some of the crap like Java and the HP printer updater, and told her to turn it on only ever other week for the updates!
Definitely there is some need to consolidate updates into one program..
Hang on, um I'm no expert on the topic but don't millions of teenagers each year dye their hair with peroxide to make it a lighter colour?
That would make it a perfectly reasonable question as undoubtedly some of that would end up in your ear and any reasonable person would want to know if there are any adverse affects??
I have to agree with all the other posts; Super Talent, Transcend? Who? I bought an Intel X-25, and after 4 months it's still going strong, though we'll see how it holds up in the next year.
Regardless I was not at all surprised by your statistic, and considering the relatively new age of SSD drive technology not at all surprised by your failure rate! I remember back in my days (many many days ago) of being a PC builder we would be surprised if we got less than a quarter of the IDE drives back within the first three months of sale! And these were not all the cheapest drives, we were using; Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu and the like (standard consumer drives).
You may find it also surprising that in my later years as a server engineer we expected roughly similar statistics from our server drives! To get a HP or Dell server with a 4-8 drives and not have at least one or two failures in the first few months was a BIG surprise!
SSD doesn't have to go very far to improve on those stats..
I mean seriously compare your average westerner's eco-print to those figures quoted here for our loved ones. I for one believe we find far better places to "make savings" when it comes to our combined foot print!
And yes, this is sarcasm. (maybe)
You have stated very well the real and often unstated issue that Vista faced, nobody understood it!
I remember waiting in the customer service line of a big computer shop a few months back, and there was this lady at the counter screaming about getting a refund for her new HP laptop, why? Because she didn't understand this "Vista" thing? She wanted "Windows" and "Office" and nothing else.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that most people don't know or care a bit about operating systems and interfaces, they likely believe that frankly if they had to go through how many boring hours of Windows and Office training back in the day, who's going to be paying them to do it all again!?
Personally I think any steps towards a more intuitive and usable OS (in particular the IU) is a good thing, so go Microsoft, go Apple, keep up the good work. But change like this is not going to sell new computers by itself. Fortunately however for Microsoft and Apple, the previous versions of Vista and OSX have now been out for long enough that a good number (20% according to Vista stats) of people have been exposed to it, this can only help ease that learning curve. So one could argue that on that point alone Windows7 will have a better time that Vista ever could have!
I'm very interested in this Kindle because I live in Australia where we are so lucky to have a thriving protectionist policy that results in ALL books costing 50-60% more! If I can buy them even at 40% more via Amazon on a Kindle then I'm winning!
But I too am trying to understand the 40% book markup comment? I can't see any different prices on Kindle titles on Amazon.com, but I can see the fine print which says all books are priced in US dollars, which actually suits me find.
Currently I often use Amazon.com and pay the $20-$30 shipping to get my books, and even including that cost it's cheaper than sourcing them locally!
Kindle / Nook - bring it on!
Sounds like you need some consulting love..
Anyone can "install" any system, but do you think anyone can do it properly? If you got your 15 year old "techie" nephew to install SAP for your mid-sized company do you think you'd get the best result?
Some of the best MOSS deployments I've worked on are the ones that most people don't know that they are working on SharePoint at all! Of course in order to do that you cut out a good portion of the functionality, but how is that new, does ibm.com have a wiki on the front page letting anyone who comes by make changes? Why would they? And why would you enable such features on a corporate intranet page that is designed with a well defined purpose (that usually is not to give everyone a website they can "play" with).
I was thinking just that!
Why Apple, Asus, Toshiba, etc?
Why not Intel, AMD, Reaktek? You know company's who actually make ethernet chips?
Sure many of them wouldn't based in the US, such as Realtek, but seriously how many consumer boards out there these days don't use integrated Intel or VIA (AMD) chips?
Maybe I just don't pay too much attention to these patent-trolls and so don't understand their "blatantly" obvious tactics involved?
Spot on!
Wish i saw your post before posting my own in iproute2, this howto was the bomb a few years back when I had to solve this exact problem, our custom iproute2 based solution beat a number of commercial options when we had to get a working load balanced connection solution that needed to support 150+ IPSEC vpn's with full seam-less failover between 3 ADSL connections!
Ahhhh, the memories, all this iproute / ipf talk takes me back to my NetBSD / Linux ipchains days.. :)
A few years back I did this with a colleague, we actually investigated 3 solutions; 2 commercial and one linux script based, in the end the one that won easily was the Linux script.
Basically using iproute2 and some nice scripts gives you the ability to load balance your outbound packets and then using some relatively simple scripts to monitor each remote peer for automatic failover.
A quick google turns up this blogger who sounds (from a quick skim) like he's doing the same thing: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-load-balancing-failover-with-dual-multi-wan-adsl-cable-connections-on-linux/
Unfortunately I can't remember the commercial solutions we tested (this was 4-5 years ago!), but although they did exactly what you wanted perfectly, our problem was that we were doing this for a managed services company who ran 150+ IPSEC VPN's over those (at the time) 3 bonded ADSL connections, needless to say the commercial solutions had never imagined anyone trying to statefully balance that many VPNs! However with some tweaking (to be honest a LOT of tweaking) we got the Linux solution working a treat, even with nearly seamless failover.
Google is your friend on this one.
Exchange
Email is easy enough to offer but shared address books and calendaring may give Exchange the edge. No harm in deploying Exchange on the back-end and using Evolution or Thunderbird or web based Exchange on the front-end.
Wow, I almost thought you were joking there with that one, I mean about the bit on address books and calendaring..
Did you notice how you sounded exactly like a 1998 Microsoft Exchange add?
Damn makes you think doesn't it?
Or did I completely miss the bus? Something I missed?
Nope you missed nothing, "cloud" computing is not for you, Software as a Service (SaaS) which is this whole 'cloud computing' gimmick really is about, is not targeted at Joe Carpenter down the road.
SaaS is about outsourcing IT, increasing efficiency and downsizing IT in-house requirements. Yes that's right it's about taking your job and mine! (Although I work in the outsourcing market so I guess I'm the one taking your job - meh) No wonder it is something that provokes such interesting discussion here and in any forum where the topic comes up, we're human after all most of us understand what it means to outsource IT, it means no more BOFH!
Perhaps we should all form a union? Fight this Cloud - err SaaS thing in the good old fashioned way? Perhaps picket lines in front of Google's HQ would send the right message?
Hah, sarcasm is great isn't it.
This argument always crops up when /. talks about "cloud computing", I don't buy it at all. Probably because I've spent the best part of the last 10 years working in outsourced IT support of some kind. The fact is that *a lot* (wish I could find statistics on this) of companies already fully outsource their IT support, what does that mean? When there Exchange server goes down they rely on the SLA in place to get it fixed by the support provider.
How is that any different to what we now call "cloud computing"?
Software as a Service (SaaS - what cloud computing really is) is a model that is growing massively today, ever heard of Sales Force? Can you explain how Sales Force is able to compete against Oracle and SAP so effectively? Is it because all that "useless" customer data in the CRM and ERP systems of any company are nowhere near as critical as email?
Ah but that is my point entirely. That whole stacked start bar ala-win2000 (? I think when it was first introduced), is so very poorly designed!Hence the usual workaround of disabling it and increasing the size of the task bar, something that I too have done before.
My point before is how good it is too see that they have *fixed* that design! It is no nothing at all like that hopelessly poorly designed method of task switching.
Try it, I mean really try it for a month, i.e. unlearn your old habits, I think you might just see it is so much better than before.
I for one welcome any new UI advancements, thank you Apple for showing the way on this one!
2c.
I have to say, being one of those closet users who has always admired the OSX Dock (and chosen to emulate it as close as possible whenever using Linux), I have to say after using Win7 for a couple of months I love the new start-bar! Finally almost 15 years (roughly since Win95) of pretty poor UI design when you consider the the Start-Menu and task bar, finally Windows has a task bar that *works*!
All it needs in the next version is to cut off the unused part (up to the sys-tray) then it will truely be a Dock! Seriously for those of you who have tested Win7, how many of you have found that your applications almost never fill up the entire bar? With everything stacked (properly stacked that is not like in previous Windows's) even with my usual 5-10 apps running the icons at most take 2/3 of the task bar, it's great.
Although it has to be said it is a personal thing, some people will of course choose to ungroup their start bar icons, and make it all more like the old versions, those are probably the same people who have 50+ program icons (not documents) on their desktops. :)
One little tidbit that you may find interesting is that all MS employees are required by the terms of their employment contracts to disclose their employer whenever posting anywhere online! The terms are actually quite specific too, mentioning newsgroups, blogs and all..
Not sure how that fits in your theory but hey, I'll throw it in there.
Ps, I am not an MS employee, but on this topic I'm happy to say I like Win7! :)
Try spending a week driving in Italy with a broken sat-nav with a van full of in-laws flown in from all corners of the world, in particular try it when your *not* italian like me! The funny thing was that I never needed the thing, I mean seriously how many signs pointing to Rome do you need to see on the Motorway to know your on the right track?
Well having said that, on my previous trips to Italy when using a sat-nav on no less than two occasions the sat nav directed us onto a half constructed road! And I kid you not, one of those occasions the sat nav insisted that my fiancee and I drive off the edge of a half constructed bridge!!! It was the on-ramp to the motorway under construction!
This was Italy so that kind of thing apparently happens often, oh and before you ask there were none of the usually expected signs indicating that the road you are turning onto doesn't actually expect prior to the half built bridge!
The moral of the story is the usual rule of thumb with any system - garbage in garbage out, don't put all your faith in a machine!
I don't know what both you and the original question asker are talking about.
I just went onto Dell's website and looked at the first range of laptops that I would ever consider for myself and NONE of the models have webcams? Why?
Because I selected 'Enterprise / Corporate' on the first page and not 'Home - give-me-all-your-crap-that-only-the-children-would-use'. :)
Come to think of it, I've only ever owned one laptop with a webcam, that that was back in the day (>5 years ago) when the only way to get a decent 3d card in a laptop was to go for the home models, since then none of my laptops have them simply because when I buy a laptop I want one designed to work, not look good, etc.
See:
Dell Examples
HP Examples
BTW, pretty much any business model laptop will include a model without webcam, for the exact reason raised by the original questioner.
Wow, 2 months? I bought my Logitech wireless mouse for my new laptop last year in July (one of these: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices/5484&cl=au,en), I had to change the battery just two weeks ago! And that is for my primary laptop that I use 2-8 hours every day!
I was actually very surprised the very first time I bought one of those Logitech (non-bluetooth) RF mice for my other pc (media centre box so only used on the TV), it occurred to me about 18 months after buying it that I had NEVER changed it's 2xAA batteries, so I did anyway just incase they decided to spring a little acid leak!