WinXP is no longer for sale Not true, system builder packs are still availible until january (and both retail and system builder packs can be stockpiled so they will remain availible even after MS stops selling them though probablly at wildly fluctuating prices) and the OEMs got some concessions about very small/cheap machines.
But what this article is about is windows vista buisness OEM licenses. MS counts them as vista sales but they allow the OEM to ship and the customer to use either vista buisness or XP pro (vista ultimate licenses can also be used in this way) and HP is saying it uses more of them to ship machines with XP than it does to ship machines with vista.
OEMs using the "royalty OEM" system (that is in my experiance everyone except small local whitebox vendors) can no longer ship XP licenses but they can ship machines with vista buisness or ultimate licenses and XP preinstalled (and they can even ship the machine with media for XP if they desire).
They could ship XP machines using "system builder" packs but that is a PITA because you have to activate every machine either online or over the phone and it is more expensive too (at least for equivilent editions, I dunno whether getting XP home under system builder is cheaper than getting vista buisness as a royalty OEM).
Vista is slower than XP on the same hardware, is incompatible with a lot of existing software and offers little that people want (especailly buisness users).
Plus XP is what people have known for the past 5 years or so (XP came out in 2001 but took a year or so to become the dominiant version of windows). Buying a new machine with XP means buying a machine that works just like your last one except it is faster (XP flies on current low end hardware).
Dell went from selling Windows XP systems 6 months ago to now selling Windows Vista with downgrade to Windows XP. It wasn't as though they had much choice (they could have used system builder packs but those would have been more expensive, a logistical nightmare, and bought them less than a year of time).
What I do think is mean of dell is that theier uk division at least has dropped XP support on most of thier consumer lines completely and on the ones where they do offer it they force you to buy a vista ultimate license to get it.
Also a dell I speced out and set up recently for someone which came downgraded to XP did not come with XP media which I thought was rather mean of them (it doesn't really to them since it was being bought for use at the uni and the uni has volume license media for everything but to other people it could be a PITA).
Not sure where I should buy my next WindowsXP laptop from. That depends on the type of machine you want. But unless you get one of the supercheap supersmall laptops that MS is panicing about the license will almost certainly be vista buisness or ultimate downgraded to XP pro.
You cant use an Dell cd on an HP box without having to call Microsoft and explaining and manually activating the machine. How easy going do you find MS are about activating machines that were reinstalled with the wrong media?
IMO the signed drivers only requirement for vista 64 was a stupid mistake on microsofts part. Afaict all it will do is further discourage porting of drivers (particualrlly for more specialist equipment to 64 bit) and also prevent hobbyists from filling in where manufacturers won't provide drivers.
But even without that stupid requirement I think there would still be a problem. There are a huge number of 32 bit windows kernel mode drivers both for hardware and as support for useland software. Nearly all of them are closed source and in many cases their authors are either not competent enough to port them or simply don't care. Afaict experianced windows driver developers don't come cheap.
In my experiance 64 bit windows does a much better job of supporting 32 bit propietry software than 64 bit linux does. Some apps do break but most just run fine with no hassle.
The real problem is of course that on windows most drivers and applications are closed source and supplied by third parties. On linux most drivers and applications are open source and if they don't work on 64 bit the distros make them work on 64 bit.
People with little or no computer experience might actually be better candidates for Linux than experienced Windows users, because they aren't already used to doing things differently. Probablly, the people however who are IMO likely to be most resistant to switching are those who have learnt thier current software by rote after having either followed step by step instructions from a course or been shown by a friend/coworker.
and that means most people who have been in any kind of educational institution (other than one explicitly teaching a geeky course) or office environment in the last decade or so.
OTOH MS has royally pissed off this type of user recently with office 2007 and vista.
My new HP all-in-one prints and scans great with my Ubuntu box, and required minimal, easy setup. OTOH, the several XP boxes on my home network were a pain to connect to the HP, and have constant problems with the darned thing, despite it being specifically designed for working in a Windows home network environment.
My old Epson printer? Works like a charm on the Ubuntu box. All the digital cameras in the house work with Ubuntu, including a couple acquired this year. Can I connect a camcorder via firewire? Check. Again, it works, and does so with little or no screwing around. Ditto for using an old DLink wireless networking card I had laying around. Configuring it under Windows is slightly annoying, but it works. Under Linux? No kludge. Just works. Linux hardware support has definately improved but afaict you still have to do carefull research before you buy. And this research is made harder by the huge proliferation of distros and versions of distros.
And since MS is cutting off support and sales of XP, this means these people have nothing from the Windows line to switch to in a few years Afaict the vista buisness and vista ultimate downgrade options will remain availible until vista itself stops being sold and of course there is always the pirate bay. More of an issue is how long OEMs will be prepared to continue providing XP drivers (right now dell provides them for almost all thier buisness machines but very few of thier consumer machines).
As for support most end users never got much support from the anyway. So all that really matters there is security updates which according to MS will continue for over 5 years and even longer if windows 7 is badly delayed.
After that some may just choose to continue running XP without security updates. If you are the only user of a machine, are on a trusted network with incoming connections tightly controlled and you don't use MS web browsers or email clients how important are security updates release.
Finding the right drivers is often a big issue for those who want to downgrade or help others downgrade
here in the electrical engineering department at the university of manchester most new machines get set up by the IT guys with XP before they are allowed on the network. Unfortunately while they try to encourage people to buy standard machines for which they have drivers and images ready they can't force them to do so. Worse some of them buy machines that the vendor doesn't support XP on (most notablly machines from dells home lines).
Usually they manage to find the drivers in the end at least for the important hardware but even for experianced IT staff who do it day in day out it is time consuming. Most ordinary users wouldn't stand a chance.
Well to get XP pre installed now (other than the exception MS made for very very low end machines due to the EEE panic) you have to get a vista buisness or ultimate licenses. In my experiance where multiple vista editions are offered ultimate costs more than buisness, buisness costs more than home premium and home premium costs more than home basic. I presume this reflects what MS are charging the OEM
On dell UK where XP is availible it is either the same price as the vista edition you are downgrading from or a small £10 extra charge. Unfortunately on some machines where they offer the XP downgrade they don't offer vista buisness forcing you to buy ultimate if you want XP on the machine. It seems to be a similar situation in the US though the extra charge is higher over there (which is unusual, usually stuff is more expensive on this side of the pond)
It looks like your $150 figure includes the upgrade to vista buisness as well as the downgrade fee. $100 of that figure is the upgrade to vista buisness and $50 is the downgrade to XP pro.
With HP it is much harder to compare as afaict they don't sell direct and it is difficult to find the same model from the same supplier with both XP pro and vista buisness.
The thing about C++ is that it allows a huge variety of coding styles. At one end of the scale you have C (well more or less, there are a few things that are legal C but not legal C++), at the other end you have template metaprogramming with comparison methods specified as tempate parameters and so on.
Mastering the higher levels of template metaprogramming in C++ is probablly hard (I tried and failed to understand it but I wasn't trying very hard as I really didn't need it for what I was doing at the time) but IMO there is usually very little need for that. BUT you don't need to reach that level to productively write C++ code.
Syntax can be deciphered with a reference manual. It can but if you have to decipher everything with a referecnce manual than unless you are extremely good at multitasking or you translate the code first and then try to understand the translation (which would probablly work but would be extremely tedious and error prone) you are going to have trouble focusing on truing to understand what the program is doing.
IMO what getting fluent in any language whether human or computer is about is getting to the point where the translation from words and syntax to ideas in your head becomes unconcious. Then in the case of a computer language you can focus on what the code is doing. In the case of a human language you can focus on what the person is trying to tell you/explain to you.
We haven't even got fusion to work (in the sense of actually generating power rather than being a load on the power grid) down here on earth yet. Let alone up in space.
Stillsuits have never struck me as the most brilliant of ideas. Sweating is how the body gets rid of heat, if you want to recycle the sweat then you need to get rid of the heat in some other way.
But if you have another way to get rid of heat it is probablly simpler just to keep the body cool enough that it doesn't sweat much.
Once you do that then it will mainly be breath and pee that you have to worry about.
If you are in the last mile there is a broadband option for you, it sucks, but its a hell of alot better than dial-up. There are a couple companies that will offer you a connection via small dish sat link and AFAIK you should be able to get coverage pretty much anywhere in the US. Sure but this discussion is about people on the move. Most people would not want to lug a satalite dish arround (only practical if travelling by road) and align it every time they need internet access. Not to mention the high subscription costs
So that leaves the cellphone networks and whatever is provided locally at the place you are going. In some places it may leave no practical connectivity option at all.
As for the rest of the world, well for all intents and purposes they don't exist anyway. This is a US forum. I think you will find there are quite a lot of people from other countries here. Even if there weren't people do travel out of thier home countries.
Just truecrypt the saved data. The problem is that data gets stored places other than where the user explicitly saves it. Swap space and the temp directory are the most obvious, but if the app is badly behaved there could easilly be other locations too.
On *nix you can mount partitions with apps on read only and have all read-write areas encrypted but that isn't an option under windows. I guess you could use file permissions to a similar affect but you would have to be very carefull.
There really are folks stuck on connections that slow or even slower.
Conventional GSM dialup for example is only 9.6kbps. Sure there is HSCSD and GRPS but I don't think they are universally supported.
and I don't think I've ever seen a 56K dialup connection. In my experiance called 56K modems connect at fourty something at best and on crappy lines much much slower.
And of course there are people stuck with no connection (or no affordable connection) at all.
I bought a Lenovo with Suse on it because I have an MSDN subscription and didn't want to pay for a license I already have. You might want to read that MSDN license sometime, For most of the software (including windows) it only covers for development and testing purposes.
What I don't get is why dell wont sell you XP on most of thier consumer machines and on those where they will they force you to downgrade from ultimate rather than buisness pushing the price through the roof.
Slashdot Mirror
WinXP is no longer for sale
Not true, system builder packs are still availible until january (and both retail and system builder packs can be stockpiled so they will remain availible even after MS stops selling them though probablly at wildly fluctuating prices) and the OEMs got some concessions about very small/cheap machines.
But what this article is about is windows vista buisness OEM licenses. MS counts them as vista sales but they allow the OEM to ship and the customer to use either vista buisness or XP pro (vista ultimate licenses can also be used in this way) and HP is saying it uses more of them to ship machines with XP than it does to ship machines with vista.
A small company
How small?
OEMs using the "royalty OEM" system (that is in my experiance everyone except small local whitebox vendors) can no longer ship XP licenses but they can ship machines with vista buisness or ultimate licenses and XP preinstalled (and they can even ship the machine with media for XP if they desire).
They could ship XP machines using "system builder" packs but that is a PITA because you have to activate every machine either online or over the phone and it is more expensive too (at least for equivilent editions, I dunno whether getting XP home under system builder is cheaper than getting vista buisness as a royalty OEM).
What model is it and what hardware are you having trouble finding drivers for.
Just because dell won't supply the drivers doesn't mean they don't exist.
Vista is slower than XP on the same hardware, is incompatible with a lot of existing software and offers little that people want (especailly buisness users).
Plus XP is what people have known for the past 5 years or so (XP came out in 2001 but took a year or so to become the dominiant version of windows). Buying a new machine with XP means buying a machine that works just like your last one except it is faster (XP flies on current low end hardware).
Dell went from selling Windows XP systems 6 months ago to now selling Windows Vista with downgrade to Windows XP.
It wasn't as though they had much choice (they could have used system builder packs but those would have been more expensive, a logistical nightmare, and bought them less than a year of time).
What I do think is mean of dell is that theier uk division at least has dropped XP support on most of thier consumer lines completely and on the ones where they do offer it they force you to buy a vista ultimate license to get it.
Also a dell I speced out and set up recently for someone which came downgraded to XP did not come with XP media which I thought was rather mean of them (it doesn't really to them since it was being bought for use at the uni and the uni has volume license media for everything but to other people it could be a PITA).
Not sure where I should buy my next WindowsXP laptop from.
That depends on the type of machine you want. But unless you get one of the supercheap supersmall laptops that MS is panicing about the license will almost certainly be vista buisness or ultimate downgraded to XP pro.
You cant use an Dell cd on an HP box without having to call Microsoft and explaining and manually activating the machine.
How easy going do you find MS are about activating machines that were reinstalled with the wrong media?
Most big buisnesses don't care though, they will probablly reimage the machines anyway using an image they built from thier volume license media.
IMO the signed drivers only requirement for vista 64 was a stupid mistake on microsofts part. Afaict all it will do is further discourage porting of drivers (particualrlly for more specialist equipment to 64 bit) and also prevent hobbyists from filling in where manufacturers won't provide drivers.
But even without that stupid requirement I think there would still be a problem. There are a huge number of 32 bit windows kernel mode drivers both for hardware and as support for useland software. Nearly all of them are closed source and in many cases their authors are either not competent enough to port them or simply don't care. Afaict experianced windows driver developers don't come cheap.
In my experiance 64 bit windows does a much better job of supporting 32 bit propietry software than 64 bit linux does. Some apps do break but most just run fine with no hassle.
The real problem is of course that on windows most drivers and applications are closed source and supplied by third parties. On linux most drivers and applications are open source and if they don't work on 64 bit the distros make them work on 64 bit.
People with little or no computer experience might actually be better candidates for Linux than experienced Windows users, because they aren't already used to doing things differently.
Probablly, the people however who are IMO likely to be most resistant to switching are those who have learnt thier current software by rote after having either followed step by step instructions from a course or been shown by a friend/coworker.
and that means most people who have been in any kind of educational institution (other than one explicitly teaching a geeky course) or office environment in the last decade or so.
OTOH MS has royally pissed off this type of user recently with office 2007 and vista.
My new HP all-in-one prints and scans great with my Ubuntu box, and required minimal, easy setup. OTOH, the several XP boxes on my home network were a pain to connect to the HP, and have constant problems with the darned thing, despite it being specifically designed for working in a Windows home network environment.
My old Epson printer? Works like a charm on the Ubuntu box. All the digital cameras in the house work with Ubuntu, including a couple acquired this year. Can I connect a camcorder via firewire? Check. Again, it works, and does so with little or no screwing around. Ditto for using an old DLink wireless networking card I had laying around. Configuring it under Windows is slightly annoying, but it works. Under Linux? No kludge. Just works.
Linux hardware support has definately improved but afaict you still have to do carefull research before you buy. And this research is made harder by the huge proliferation of distros and versions of distros.
And since MS is cutting off support and sales of XP, this means these people have nothing from the Windows line to switch to in a few years
Afaict the vista buisness and vista ultimate downgrade options will remain availible until vista itself stops being sold and of course there is always the pirate bay. More of an issue is how long OEMs will be prepared to continue providing XP drivers (right now dell provides them for almost all thier buisness machines but very few of thier consumer machines).
As for support most end users never got much support from the anyway. So all that really matters there is security updates which according to MS will continue for over 5 years and even longer if windows 7 is badly delayed.
After that some may just choose to continue running XP without security updates. If you are the only user of a machine, are on a trusted network with incoming connections tightly controlled and you don't use MS web browsers or email clients how important are security updates release.
Finding the right drivers is often a big issue for those who want to downgrade or help others downgrade
here in the electrical engineering department at the university of manchester most new machines get set up by the IT guys with XP before they are allowed on the network. Unfortunately while they try to encourage people to buy standard machines for which they have drivers and images ready they can't force them to do so. Worse some of them buy machines that the vendor doesn't support XP on (most notablly machines from dells home lines).
Usually they manage to find the drivers in the end at least for the important hardware but even for experianced IT staff who do it day in day out it is time consuming. Most ordinary users wouldn't stand a chance.
Well to get XP pre installed now (other than the exception MS made for very very low end machines due to the EEE panic) you have to get a vista buisness or ultimate licenses. In my experiance where multiple vista editions are offered ultimate costs more than buisness, buisness costs more than home premium and home premium costs more than home basic. I presume this reflects what MS are charging the OEM
On dell UK where XP is availible it is either the same price as the vista edition you are downgrading from or a small £10 extra charge. Unfortunately on some machines where they offer the XP downgrade they don't offer vista buisness forcing you to buy ultimate if you want XP on the machine. It seems to be a similar situation in the US though the extra charge is higher over there (which is unusual, usually stuff is more expensive on this side of the pond)
It looks like your $150 figure includes the upgrade to vista buisness as well as the downgrade fee. $100 of that figure is the upgrade to vista buisness and $50 is the downgrade to XP pro.
With HP it is much harder to compare as afaict they don't sell direct and it is difficult to find the same model from the same supplier with both XP pro and vista buisness.
I thought they were just tied to dell hardware, not to any particular dell machine.
The thing about C++ is that it allows a huge variety of coding styles. At one end of the scale you have C (well more or less, there are a few things that are legal C but not legal C++), at the other end you have template metaprogramming with comparison methods specified as tempate parameters and so on.
Mastering the higher levels of template metaprogramming in C++ is probablly hard (I tried and failed to understand it but I wasn't trying very hard as I really didn't need it for what I was doing at the time) but IMO there is usually very little need for that. BUT you don't need to reach that level to productively write C++ code.
Syntax can be deciphered with a reference manual.
It can but if you have to decipher everything with a referecnce manual than unless you are extremely good at multitasking or you translate the code first and then try to understand the translation (which would probablly work but would be extremely tedious and error prone) you are going to have trouble focusing on truing to understand what the program is doing.
IMO what getting fluent in any language whether human or computer is about is getting to the point where the translation from words and syntax to ideas in your head becomes unconcious. Then in the case of a computer language you can focus on what the code is doing. In the case of a human language you can focus on what the person is trying to tell you/explain to you.
sure, which means the sweat does not evaporate into the atnosphere which means it doesn't serve it's purpose which is keeping the body cool.
So you are going to need another system to keep the body cool.
Once you have such a system it seems stupid to me not to just keep the body cool enough that it does not sweat significantly.
We haven't even got fusion to work (in the sense of actually generating power rather than being a load on the power grid) down here on earth yet. Let alone up in space.
Stillsuits have never struck me as the most brilliant of ideas. Sweating is how the body gets rid of heat, if you want to recycle the sweat then you need to get rid of the heat in some other way.
But if you have another way to get rid of heat it is probablly simpler just to keep the body cool enough that it doesn't sweat much.
Once you do that then it will mainly be breath and pee that you have to worry about.
If you are in the last mile there is a broadband option for you, it sucks, but its a hell of alot better than dial-up. There are a couple companies that will offer you a connection via small dish sat link and AFAIK you should be able to get coverage pretty much anywhere in the US.
Sure but this discussion is about people on the move. Most people would not want to lug a satalite dish arround (only practical if travelling by road) and align it every time they need internet access. Not to mention the high subscription costs
So that leaves the cellphone networks and whatever is provided locally at the place you are going. In some places it may leave no practical connectivity option at all.
As for the rest of the world, well for all intents and purposes they don't exist anyway. This is a US forum.
I think you will find there are quite a lot of people from other countries here. Even if there weren't people do travel out of thier home countries.
in addition to the connectivity problem there is also the same problem as with the "encrypt just the data files" soloution. As I mention in my post at http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=638067&cid=24508489
Just truecrypt the saved data.
The problem is that data gets stored places other than where the user explicitly saves it. Swap space and the temp directory are the most obvious, but if the app is badly behaved there could easilly be other locations too.
On *nix you can mount partitions with apps on read only and have all read-write areas encrypted but that isn't an option under windows. I guess you could use file permissions to a similar affect but you would have to be very carefull.
Encrypting everything is the safest
There really are folks stuck on connections that slow or even slower.
Conventional GSM dialup for example is only 9.6kbps. Sure there is HSCSD and GRPS but I don't think they are universally supported.
and I don't think I've ever seen a 56K dialup connection. In my experiance called 56K modems connect at fourty something at best and on crappy lines much much slower.
And of course there are people stuck with no connection (or no affordable connection) at all.
wikipedia prefers "verifiability" over truth so I would be very suspicious of any comparison articles of thiers.
I bought a Lenovo with Suse on it because I have an MSDN subscription and didn't want to pay for a license I already have.
You might want to read that MSDN license sometime, For most of the software (including windows) it only covers for development and testing purposes.
What I don't get is why dell wont sell you XP on most of thier consumer machines and on those where they will they force you to downgrade from ultimate rather than buisness pushing the price through the roof.