The only annoying thing with the macbook hard drive swap was you needed a very small torx screwdriver to get the caddy off the old drive and onto the new drive.
Or did you somehow manage to source a drive that came with the caddy already attached?
Macs are generally *very* cost-competitive Only if your requirements happen to line up with what apple offers.Otherwise apples very limited range often means you need to buy loads of hardware you don't really need.
For example if you want a machine with more than one drive bay or a machine with expansion slots or support for more than one external monitor (all features that are either standard or availible for a small extra cost in the PC world) then you have to pay over £1000 even at education discount prices.
The thing is YOU DO NOT NEED ADMIN PRIVILAGES to do to the stuff most modern virus writers are after.
If the system has user crontabs (most *nix systems do) you can start up soon after boot. Even if not you can start up immediately after login which is sufficiant for a single user machine.
If you are feeling malicous you can also destroy the users data (which on a single user machine is probablly the most important thing on there).
Sending spam and hitting vulnerable services do not generally require any special privilages.
and if they really want root privs they can just edit the menu items so when the user selects that root terminal option and enters thier password the malware gets launched with root privilages as well.
But does the ISP provide a SLA for thier connection to google, I can see a suitation where the ISP blames google and google blames the ISP and both claim they are keeping to thier SLA.
What they DO care about is availibility of drivers for XP from a single conviniant location.
If the vendor offers a machine preinstalled with XP then I can be pretty sure I will be able to get XP drivers as easilly as I can get vista drivers.
This applies regardless of whether I buy the machine with XP preinstalled or whether I get the cheapest version of windows the OEM offers (which after the cutoff will mean vista home basic) because the place using the machine has a site license for windows upgrade/downgrades.
Also don't forget about small buisnesses. While vista buisness OEM comes with downgrade rights if you don't have access to legit VLK media and your OEM doesn't want to help you and you don't have previous machines from the same OEM then you are likely to have to telephone activate every machine.
Also for non technical home users who don't want vista being able to get a fully supported and legit copy of XP preinstalled is going to be a boon
Does google let you host google calender internally?
If not does google offer service level agreements, and are there ISPs that will offer a service level agreement gauranteeing the uptime of thier connection to google. And how much will all that cost?
background virus scanners do sap a bit of performance but you can find ones that don't get in the way too much. Virusscan enterprise has always seemed pretty nice, so has AVG free though I hear AVG 8 is shit (haven't upgraded any machines to it yet and am reluctant to do so). Norton is a bloated peice of shit.
If your machine is BSODing (or spontaniously rebooting which I belive is now the default instead of a BSOD) regualarlly enough for you to notice then you probablly have a hardware problem.
And whereas in the 9x days I had to reinstall on a fairly regular basis since moving to XP I have only had to do one reinstall.
That bit doesn't concern me to much. I probablly wouldn't ever bother calling dell support unless I was pretty sure there was a hardware problem and dell provide a hardware diagnostic tool that is independent of the machines normal OS.
What matters more is the ability to go to dells website, select the model and find a set of drivers for XP. If they are still shipping XP on a particular model they are almost certain to still be providing that.
Exchange comes to mind. What else? Specialist applications. Many of theese aren't availible on platforms other than windows and even when they are sometimes you have to re-buy a license (and the licenses for some specialist software make retail copies of windows look like a bargin).
Internal buisness applications written in VB or similar.
While each individual app doesn't have a particularlly big userbase the number of applications is massive and I would imagine that most buisnesses are dependent on at least one of them.
Also if you are going to persuade users to switch to a new soloution then your apps have to offer considerablly compelling advantages over the current market leaders.
Windows XP has been pretty damn stable in my experiance. Crashes are far more likely to be caused by flaky hardware or drivers than the OS itself.
I haven't had a chance to try aero but the vista basic theme struck me as just being the same old windows GUI with everything made bigger so it wastes more space.
Vista in my experiance was noticablly slower than XP on the same hardware.
All in all vista offers little to nothing in the way of compelling reasons to upgrade. Furthermore it is slower, has a more bloated GUI (I wonder why the hell MS implemented the classic windows 2000 style GUI in vista but not the XP style one that most users are currently familiar with) and breaks a fair bit of software.
2) WinXP will have "support" long past the cut off date. The end of support date for Windows XP was announced before the end of sale date, I can't rememnber what it is right now, but I believe its in 2010 sometime. I think it leaves mainstream support sometime in 2009.
After that it will be in extended support (no new features, no free support calls, paid support still availible, pay $$$ for non-security hotfixes, security hotfixes still free).
Most people just use the copy thier OEM bought at considerable discount and bundled.
What is most significant here is that by keeping XP as an option (even though it is licensed through downgrade rights) they are effectively saying they will continue to support it.
I remember someone trying to get XP set up on a sony vaio that had come with vista and for which sony didn't provide XP drivers. Eventually he got everything working except the modem and the fingerprint scanner but it involved a lot of searching.
because for better or worse many of us have to use or support windows.
So with vista generally considered to suck the details and timespan of XPs death are quite important to us.
This announcement from dell is good news for those who want to continue using XP. The fact they will be shipping XP downgrade media with thier vista buisness/ultimate machines means two things. 1: Some customers will save the need to telephone activate to excercise thier downgrade rights. 2: Dell will still be providing drivers for XP.
drivers generally come from the hardware vendors. They will presumablly keep supporting XP as long as there is demand for it.
and as you say security updates still have a long time to run (5 years from the end of mainstream support or 2 years from the release of windows 7, whichever comes later).
You ever actually tried to call Microsoft for Tech Support? The first words out of the Indian tech's mouth will be "Is this an OEM machine?" and then "Call Dell, we don't support you. *click*" Right, one of the reasons that OEM copies of windows are so much cheaper than retail is that the OEM takes over the support role.
note: a little backdoor, if you buy more than a certain (relatively small) number of system builder packs you can register as a system builder and get support that way.
XP still has quite a few years of support left on it though it will soon be moving into the extended support phase (which means: no new features, non-security hotfixes cost $$$ and you always have to pay for support calls)
I remember reading that google study and being less than impressed.
They said that temperature made little difference but they trusted the smart data. For example if there was a brand of drive in there that underreported temperature (or simply ran cool) and was rather unreliable that could easilly skew thier results.
Also they had very little data at the higher end of the temperature range. Hard drives in crappy desktop cases or crappy USB enclosures often end up running far hotter than a drive in a server in a datacenter.
A big difference could be the conditions. In your data center you are presumablly running drives in well cooled server cases in a temperature controlled environment.
What is the failure rate like for the drives that you put in desktops/laptops?
So has it happend? The bulk of the code is released but there are still a number of encumbered components. For each encumbered component either the copyright holders need to be negotiated with or the code has to be replaced with a cleanroom implementation.
Third parties have hacked together a rough but usable version based on the code sun has released and bits from gnu classpath but getting high quality replacements and replacements for less popular parts and getting them integrated into suns tree (sun insists that authors of code in thier tree sign a contributor agreement which gives sun certain rights to use the code in propietry stuff) takes time.
For most of it's life the openjdk project was releasing stuff based on java 7 alphas. Recently they have released stuff from the java 6 code tree as well.
I think the long term plan is that the openjdk tree will become the main java source tree that the public releases of JAVA SE are built off but that is some way off yet.
no it won't, firstly microsofts code is based on a very old version of java, forward porting it and making sure it was clean of encumbered sun code would be a nightmare. Secondly MS would have to release code under the GPL to do that which I very much doubt they would want to do.
If you are installing the MSJVM without a very good reason then IMO you should be fired. If you absoloutely have to install it you should be very carefull to make sure untrusted code isn't run on it as it no longer gets security support.
I don't think this article really means anything significant.
Status right now is that the bulk of the JDK is released under GPL+classpath exception but there are some bits missing (icedtea has hacked together replacements for some of them and stubbed out the rest to give a free buildable version). I don't see any indications that they plan to change that license.
Sun is slowly working to get the complete JDK free by a mixture of negotiating with copyright holders and replacing code. How long it will take them to finish that work (and whether they lose interest in opensource before finishing it) is anyones guess.
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The only annoying thing with the macbook hard drive swap was you needed a very small torx screwdriver to get the caddy off the old drive and onto the new drive.
Or did you somehow manage to source a drive that came with the caddy already attached?
Macs are generally *very* cost-competitive
Only if your requirements happen to line up with what apple offers.Otherwise apples very limited range often means you need to buy loads of hardware you don't really need.
For example if you want a machine with more than one drive bay or a machine with expansion slots or support for more than one external monitor (all features that are either standard or availible for a small extra cost in the PC world) then you have to pay over £1000 even at education discount prices.
note: server 2003 SP2 (which also applies to the misleadingly named windows XP professional x64 edition) is far more recent than XP service pack 2.
The thing is YOU DO NOT NEED ADMIN PRIVILAGES to do to the stuff most modern virus writers are after.
If the system has user crontabs (most *nix systems do) you can start up soon after boot. Even if not you can start up immediately after login which is sufficiant for a single user machine.
If you are feeling malicous you can also destroy the users data (which on a single user machine is probablly the most important thing on there).
Sending spam and hitting vulnerable services do not generally require any special privilages.
and if they really want root privs they can just edit the menu items so when the user selects that root terminal option and enters thier password the malware gets launched with root privilages as well.
But does the ISP provide a SLA for thier connection to google, I can see a suitation where the ISP blames google and google blames the ISP and both claim they are keeping to thier SLA.
What they DO care about is availibility of drivers for XP from a single conviniant location.
If the vendor offers a machine preinstalled with XP then I can be pretty sure I will be able to get XP drivers as easilly as I can get vista drivers.
This applies regardless of whether I buy the machine with XP preinstalled or whether I get the cheapest version of windows the OEM offers (which after the cutoff will mean vista home basic) because the place using the machine has a site license for windows upgrade/downgrades.
Also don't forget about small buisnesses. While vista buisness OEM comes with downgrade rights if you don't have access to legit VLK media and your OEM doesn't want to help you and you don't have previous machines from the same OEM then you are likely to have to telephone activate every machine.
Also for non technical home users who don't want vista being able to get a fully supported and legit copy of XP preinstalled is going to be a boon
Does google let you host google calender internally?
If not does google offer service level agreements, and are there ISPs that will offer a service level agreement gauranteeing the uptime of thier connection to google. And how much will all that cost?
I call bullshit
background virus scanners do sap a bit of performance but you can find ones that don't get in the way too much. Virusscan enterprise has always seemed pretty nice, so has AVG free though I hear AVG 8 is shit (haven't upgraded any machines to it yet and am reluctant to do so). Norton is a bloated peice of shit.
If your machine is BSODing (or spontaniously rebooting which I belive is now the default instead of a BSOD) regualarlly enough for you to notice then you probablly have a hardware problem.
And whereas in the 9x days I had to reinstall on a fairly regular basis since moving to XP I have only had to do one reinstall.
That bit doesn't concern me to much. I probablly wouldn't ever bother calling dell support unless I was pretty sure there was a hardware problem and dell provide a hardware diagnostic tool that is independent of the machines normal OS.
What matters more is the ability to go to dells website, select the model and find a set of drivers for XP. If they are still shipping XP on a particular model they are almost certain to still be providing that.
No it's one license with downgrade rights. Dell just happens to be shipping the downgrade media to make your life easier.
The media you will get will be bios locked big brand OEM media. so not much use for piracy purposes.
Exchange comes to mind. What else?
Specialist applications. Many of theese aren't availible on platforms other than windows and even when they are sometimes you have to re-buy a license (and the licenses for some specialist software make retail copies of windows look like a bargin).
Internal buisness applications written in VB or similar.
While each individual app doesn't have a particularlly big userbase the number of applications is massive and I would imagine that most buisnesses are dependent on at least one of them.
Also if you are going to persuade users to switch to a new soloution then your apps have to offer considerablly compelling advantages over the current market leaders.
Windows XP has been pretty damn stable in my experiance. Crashes are far more likely to be caused by flaky hardware or drivers than the OS itself.
I haven't had a chance to try aero but the vista basic theme struck me as just being the same old windows GUI with everything made bigger so it wastes more space.
Vista in my experiance was noticablly slower than XP on the same hardware.
All in all vista offers little to nothing in the way of compelling reasons to upgrade. Furthermore it is slower, has a more bloated GUI (I wonder why the hell MS implemented the classic windows 2000 style GUI in vista but not the XP style one that most users are currently familiar with) and breaks a fair bit of software.
2) WinXP will have "support" long past the cut off date. The end of support date for Windows XP was announced before the end of sale date, I can't rememnber what it is right now, but I believe its in 2010 sometime.
I think it leaves mainstream support sometime in 2009.
After that it will be in extended support (no new features, no free support calls, paid support still availible, pay $$$ for non-security hotfixes, security hotfixes still free).
Most people just use the copy thier OEM bought at considerable discount and bundled.
What is most significant here is that by keeping XP as an option (even though it is licensed through downgrade rights) they are effectively saying they will continue to support it.
I remember someone trying to get XP set up on a sony vaio that had come with vista and for which sony didn't provide XP drivers. Eventually he got everything working except the modem and the fingerprint scanner but it involved a lot of searching.
because for better or worse many of us have to use or support windows.
So with vista generally considered to suck the details and timespan of XPs death are quite important to us.
This announcement from dell is good news for those who want to continue using XP. The fact they will be shipping XP downgrade media with thier vista buisness/ultimate machines means two things.
1: Some customers will save the need to telephone activate to excercise thier downgrade rights.
2: Dell will still be providing drivers for XP.
drivers generally come from the hardware vendors. They will presumablly keep supporting XP as long as there is demand for it.
and as you say security updates still have a long time to run (5 years from the end of mainstream support or 2 years from the release of windows 7, whichever comes later).
You ever actually tried to call Microsoft for Tech Support? The first words out of the Indian tech's mouth will be "Is this an OEM machine?" and then "Call Dell, we don't support you. *click*"
Right, one of the reasons that OEM copies of windows are so much cheaper than retail is that the OEM takes over the support role.
note: a little backdoor, if you buy more than a certain (relatively small) number of system builder packs you can register as a system builder and get support that way.
XP still has quite a few years of support left on it though it will soon be moving into the extended support phase (which means: no new features, non-security hotfixes cost $$$ and you always have to pay for support calls)
you can already replace loadable modules without a reboot as long as they aren't doing anything critical to your kernels operation.
I remember reading that google study and being less than impressed.
They said that temperature made little difference but they trusted the smart data. For example if there was a brand of drive in there that underreported temperature (or simply ran cool) and was rather unreliable that could easilly skew thier results.
Also they had very little data at the higher end of the temperature range. Hard drives in crappy desktop cases or crappy USB enclosures often end up running far hotter than a drive in a server in a datacenter.
A big difference could be the conditions. In your data center you are presumablly running drives in well cooled server cases in a temperature controlled environment.
What is the failure rate like for the drives that you put in desktops/laptops?
So has it happend?
The bulk of the code is released but there are still a number of encumbered components. For each encumbered component either the copyright holders need to be negotiated with or the code has to be replaced with a cleanroom implementation.
Third parties have hacked together a rough but usable version based on the code sun has released and bits from gnu classpath but getting high quality replacements and replacements for less popular parts and getting them integrated into suns tree (sun insists that authors of code in thier tree sign a contributor agreement which gives sun certain rights to use the code in propietry stuff) takes time.
This is a pretty shitty article.
For most of it's life the openjdk project was releasing stuff based on java 7 alphas. Recently they have released stuff from the java 6 code tree as well.
I think the long term plan is that the openjdk tree will become the main java source tree that the public releases of JAVA SE are built off but that is some way off yet.
no it won't, firstly microsofts code is based on a very old version of java, forward porting it and making sure it was clean of encumbered sun code would be a nightmare. Secondly MS would have to release code under the GPL to do that which I very much doubt they would want to do.
If you are installing the MSJVM without a very good reason then IMO you should be fired. If you absoloutely have to install it you should be very carefull to make sure untrusted code isn't run on it as it no longer gets security support.
I don't think this article really means anything significant.
Status right now is that the bulk of the JDK is released under GPL+classpath exception but there are some bits missing (icedtea has hacked together replacements for some of them and stubbed out the rest to give a free buildable version). I don't see any indications that they plan to change that license.
Sun is slowly working to get the complete JDK free by a mixture of negotiating with copyright holders and replacing code. How long it will take them to finish that work (and whether they lose interest in opensource before finishing it) is anyones guess.