A MTBF is only meaningfull when combined with an operating lifespan over which is was measured and after which it is advised that customers needing high reliability replace thier drives.
Also the manufacturer needs to specify the conditions of the test, temperature, humidity etc and customers requiring reliability need to ensure they run near those conditions.
If you do a 1000 hour test and all your drives have a design fault that cause a large proportion of them to fail after about 5000 hours usage you probablly won't notice the fault but 7 months down the line customers who run the drive 24/7 will.
The problem is of course that by the time you have done proper testing (= running the drives for thier expected lifespan under realistic operating conditions and seeing what proportion fail during that time and when) for a device with an expected lifetime in years the device is obsolete.
You also have to worry about things that kill everything in the PC, In particular if a high voltage somehow gets on the machines power rails.
Sure you may be able to get the data back with a controller board swap but finding the exact right boards may be a PITA and the high voltages may have fried parts that aren't on the controller board requiring proffessional recovery.
Further if you use multiple identical drives in your array (lots of people do this because it means better performance and more efficiant use of disk space) there is a very real risk of multiple failures close together.
many people when building arrays use identical drives, this is good for performance but bad for data protection. Identical drives (particularlly if bought from the same vendor at the same time and therefore likely from the same batch) subjected to almost identical loading (being in an array together) is a recipie for multiple drives failing in the same manner at about the same time.
according to microsofts current policy XP will be supported until 5 years after it moves from mainstream to extended support (which hasn't happened yet) or two years after the release of windows 7, whichever comes later.
and if pressured enough they may keep support beyond that.
XP vlk versions don't require activation anyway. In any case the last version of XP will be fully cracked by the pirates and with no more updates MS won't be able to break those cracks anymore.
My guess is though that MS will either issue a final patch to disable activation and WGA or keep the windows activation server up near indefinately.
It is not just data in propietry formats you lose it is also experiance. A different application may have similar functionality but will often do things very differently. The same goes for configuring the os to be the way you like (BTW does anyone know how to make the taskbar on gnome have more than one row and stop it folding together windows from the same program when it gets moderately crowded)
Worse things vary a lot between linux distros, the configuration tools provided are often completely different.
The config files are a bit more consistant but even there sometimes things differ and then there is this whole network manager shit which seems to run roughshod over the conventional configuation options (including the ones in the menus on my debian systemt that had it installed by default) making it almost impossible to fix my network configuration.
on the other hand vming windows gets arround the problem of hardware support for old versions of windows nicely. Afaict the likes of vmware support any version of windows down to 95 and probablly earlier.
most companies big enough to care about the differences between home and pro on such a machine are big enough to have volume license deals that come with generous downgrade rights.
as for bundling of works that is common across PCs of all sizes. Office is just too expensive for most manufacturers to bundle it by default.
The shareholders are the owners of the company. They are the ones who are ultimiately in charge.
For a shareholder who bought yahoo just as an investment the MS deal is a very good one. The value of thier investment will more than double overnight. If they don't want to hold MS stock they will be able to easilly sell it off.
A shareholder who actually cares about the company and thier products would probablly want them to remain independent.
The former category probablly make up the majority of shareholders but the current board is more sympathetic to the latter kind.
When you sell the majority of your company to people who only care about the money this is the risk you take.
right, I was just saying that even for those without specail software needs OS-X going to be a reasonable option for many people unless apple either expand the low end of thier range or license thier OS to other PC vendors.
when you can make a really fast computer for a couple hundred dollars. You can already make computers that are fast by the standards of only five years ago for not much more than that. Look at the low end of dell UKs small buisness range sometime (strangely thier bottom end UK price is considerablly lower than thier bottom end US price, the reverse of normal).
The problem is both expectations and software bloat rise in a way that cancels out much of the impovements in technology.
You realize that could be half a decade, right? So what? As long as XP continues to do what they want, suitable hardware for running XP remains available (I bet this is what will push places to migrate in the end) and XP continues to get security updates (MS has said they will provide theese for XP until five years after XP leaves mainstream support or two years after the release of windows 7 whichever comes later) and they can continue to get licenses (not a problem for big buisnesses due to the generous downgrade provisions in volume licenses) why shoudn't they stick with XP.
There is an old saying: if it aint broke don't fix it.
With WinXP Prof EOL this year June, what's the alternative to Vista? Please clarify what you mean by EOL.
It seems like you are reffering to the end of retail and big brand OEM availibility. This is mostly irrelevent to big companies as they will have volume licenses with downgrade rights.
What does matter is whether the hardware vendor will supply XP drivers. This is already a problem with some laptop vendors but there are also plenty who still support XP.
wonder what they will do, if the only notebooks available will no longer work with XP due to new hardware and no XP-drivers. If they really need XP and can't find suitable hardware they will use virtualisation. The likes of vmware tend to pride themselves on continued support for old operating systems.
the thing with apple is there are many markets in which they just don't participate.
At uk prices the cheapest macs are arround twice the price of the cheapest PCs (this applies to both desktops and laptops) and if you want a machine with expansion slots or more than one internal hard drive get ready to pay through the nose.
I hear that in poorer countries the price discrepancy between PCs and MACs is even greater.
maybe i've been lucky but i've generally found that even when the manufacturer says install first plug in later you can usually plug in first and install later then just unplug and plug back in the device so it re-enumerates.
I'm sure theese problems do happen but i'm more inclined to blame the device manfuacturer/driver writer than microsoft for theese kinds of problems given the number of devices that don't suffer from them.
IMO it's not so much about the cost of making reproductions as about the cost difference between making reproductions in bulk VS making them yourself.
The governement grants (supposedly temporary though in the case of copyrights that has become rather a farce) monopolies to those who bear the upfront cost. Some industries use the copyright system, some use the patent system, some unfortunately some industries like software get to double dip and use both systems.
Theese monopolies encourage people to bear the high upfront costs costs of creating new stuff by letting them spread that cost over many units. They could not effectively do this if competitors who dodged the upfront costs were allowed in the market immediately (they could try to keep thier methods secret but I dout it would be very effetive for most modern industries).
The monopolies are enforced through legal action. This is very effecive when the only people who can copy your product at an acceptable price are large companies. However it really doesn't work when anyone at home can cheaply and easilly copy your product.
IMO if your app you wrote for XP doesn't just work on vista you are probablly tying yourself in far too tightly to the murkier parts of the API.
Installers are a bit of an issue but that is the sort of problem that generally you solve once and forget about or even just let your installer vendor solve for you.
Can you say remote desktop? Afaict XP home can act as a remote desktop client, it is only the server side which is pro only.
I suspect most buisnesses big enough to care about the difference between home and pro will have acess to volume licenses which come with downgrade rights.
I would imagine most people who really need to join a domain are in a buisness that is big enough to get volume licenses with downgrade rights and I don't see many people sharing files off theese machines since they won't be on the network all the time.
I didn't mention it because I didn't want to start an argument on whether the program manager/file manager to explorer switch was a usefull feature or just eye candy.
32 bit vista is availible on both CD and DVD (though they don't include the CDs in the box by default you have to send off for them), 64 bit vista is DVD only.
When you include the different versions of Vista that you can get then don't you have to count like 5 DVDs? So it uses less rescources on machines where rescouces are abundant but more on machines where they are relatively scare. Doesn't sound too good to me.
When you include the different versions of Vista that you can get then don't you have to count like 5 DVDs? That figure is probablly off by an order of magnitude at least
Afaict vista has 6 DVDs for each language (retail/OEM, VLK buisness and VLK enterprise each in both x86 and x64 versions) and loads of languages (I don't have access to MSDN subscriber downloads anymore to check exactly how many but I remember it being a lot).
Debian and ubuntu at least manage to fit enough for thier default desktop install (including things like an office suite which isn't standard on windows) on a single CD (ubuntu even manages to make that CD a livecd as well).
Sure if you want the full debian archive you are talking several DVDs per architecture but very few people really need that.
In terms of the normal isntallation media fedora seemed a lot more bloated, core 6 required several CDs to install (again the default desktop install) and core 7 doesn't seem to offer CDs at all.
I haven't tried mandrake or suse recently so I don't know how they compare.
Massive corporate requests for the continuance of XP Afaict the way volume license products have worked for some time is you by the latest version and get downgrade rights to let you install earlier versions if you want. If this continues (and I don't see any reason why it won't) volume license customers will be able to use XP for as long as they like.
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A MTBF is only meaningfull when combined with an operating lifespan over which is was measured and after which it is advised that customers needing high reliability replace thier drives.
Also the manufacturer needs to specify the conditions of the test, temperature, humidity etc and customers requiring reliability need to ensure they run near those conditions.
If you do a 1000 hour test and all your drives have a design fault that cause a large proportion of them to fail after about 5000 hours usage you probablly won't notice the fault but 7 months down the line customers who run the drive 24/7 will.
The problem is of course that by the time you have done proper testing (= running the drives for thier expected lifespan under realistic operating conditions and seeing what proportion fail during that time and when) for a device with an expected lifetime in years the device is obsolete.
You also have to worry about things that kill everything in the PC, In particular if a high voltage somehow gets on the machines power rails.
Sure you may be able to get the data back with a controller board swap but finding the exact right boards may be a PITA and the high voltages may have fried parts that aren't on the controller board requiring proffessional recovery.
Further if you use multiple identical drives in your array (lots of people do this because it means better performance and more efficiant use of disk space) there is a very real risk of multiple failures close together.
many people when building arrays use identical drives, this is good for performance but bad for data protection. Identical drives (particularlly if bought from the same vendor at the same time and therefore likely from the same batch) subjected to almost identical loading (being in an array together) is a recipie for multiple drives failing in the same manner at about the same time.
according to microsofts current policy XP will be supported until 5 years after it moves from mainstream to extended support (which hasn't happened yet) or two years after the release of windows 7, whichever comes later.
and if pressured enough they may keep support beyond that.
XP vlk versions don't require activation anyway. In any case the last version of XP will be fully cracked by the pirates and with no more updates MS won't be able to break those cracks anymore.
My guess is though that MS will either issue a final patch to disable activation and WGA or keep the windows activation server up near indefinately.
It is not just data in propietry formats you lose it is also experiance. A different application may have similar functionality but will often do things very differently. The same goes for configuring the os to be the way you like (BTW does anyone know how to make the taskbar on gnome have more than one row and stop it folding together windows from the same program when it gets moderately crowded)
Worse things vary a lot between linux distros, the configuration tools provided are often completely different.
The config files are a bit more consistant but even there sometimes things differ and then there is this whole network manager shit which seems to run roughshod over the conventional configuation options (including the ones in the menus on my debian systemt that had it installed by default) making it almost impossible to fix my network configuration.
on the other hand vming windows gets arround the problem of hardware support for old versions of windows nicely. Afaict the likes of vmware support any version of windows down to 95 and probablly earlier.
most companies big enough to care about the differences between home and pro on such a machine are big enough to have volume license deals that come with generous downgrade rights.
as for bundling of works that is common across PCs of all sizes. Office is just too expensive for most manufacturers to bundle it by default.
"enterprise" customers buy volume licenses with generous downgrade rights anyway so they really aren't affected much by this end of availibility.
Still I bet there will be a BIG surge in PC sales come may/june as home/small buisness uses rush out to get XP while they cab.
not really.
The shareholders are the owners of the company. They are the ones who are ultimiately in charge.
For a shareholder who bought yahoo just as an investment the MS deal is a very good one. The value of thier investment will more than double overnight. If they don't want to hold MS stock they will be able to easilly sell it off.
A shareholder who actually cares about the company and thier products would probablly want them to remain independent.
The former category probablly make up the majority of shareholders but the current board is more sympathetic to the latter kind.
When you sell the majority of your company to people who only care about the money this is the risk you take.
right, I was just saying that even for those without specail software needs OS-X going to be a reasonable option for many people unless apple either expand the low end of thier range or license thier OS to other PC vendors.
when you can make a really fast computer for a couple hundred dollars.
You can already make computers that are fast by the standards of only five years ago for not much more than that. Look at the low end of dell UKs small buisness range sometime (strangely thier bottom end UK price is considerablly lower than thier bottom end US price, the reverse of normal).
The problem is both expectations and software bloat rise in a way that cancels out much of the impovements in technology.
You realize that could be half a decade, right?
So what?
As long as XP continues to do what they want, suitable hardware for running XP remains available (I bet this is what will push places to migrate in the end) and XP continues to get security updates (MS has said they will provide theese for XP until five years after XP leaves mainstream support or two years after the release of windows 7 whichever comes later) and they can continue to get licenses (not a problem for big buisnesses due to the generous downgrade provisions in volume licenses) why shoudn't they stick with XP.
There is an old saying: if it aint broke don't fix it.
With WinXP Prof EOL this year June, what's the alternative to Vista?
Please clarify what you mean by EOL.
It seems like you are reffering to the end of retail and big brand OEM availibility. This is mostly irrelevent to big companies as they will have volume licenses with downgrade rights.
What does matter is whether the hardware vendor will supply XP drivers. This is already a problem with some laptop vendors but there are also plenty who still support XP.
wonder what they will do, if the only notebooks available will no longer work with XP due to new hardware and no XP-drivers.
If they really need XP and can't find suitable hardware they will use virtualisation. The likes of vmware tend to pride themselves on continued support for old operating systems.
the thing with apple is there are many markets in which they just don't participate.
At uk prices the cheapest macs are arround twice the price of the cheapest PCs (this applies to both desktops and laptops) and if you want a machine with expansion slots or more than one internal hard drive get ready to pay through the nose.
I hear that in poorer countries the price discrepancy between PCs and MACs is even greater.
maybe i've been lucky but i've generally found that even when the manufacturer says install first plug in later you can usually plug in first and install later then just unplug and plug back in the device so it re-enumerates.
I'm sure theese problems do happen but i'm more inclined to blame the device manfuacturer/driver writer than microsoft for theese kinds of problems given the number of devices that don't suffer from them.
IMO it's not so much about the cost of making reproductions as about the cost difference between making reproductions in bulk VS making them yourself.
The governement grants (supposedly temporary though in the case of copyrights that has become rather a farce) monopolies to those who bear the upfront cost. Some industries use the copyright system, some use the patent system, some unfortunately some industries like software get to double dip and use both systems.
Theese monopolies encourage people to bear the high upfront costs costs of creating new stuff by letting them spread that cost over many units. They could not effectively do this if competitors who dodged the upfront costs were allowed in the market immediately (they could try to keep thier methods secret but I dout it would be very effetive for most modern industries).
The monopolies are enforced through legal action. This is very effecive when the only people who can copy your product at an acceptable price are large companies. However it really doesn't work when anyone at home can cheaply and easilly copy your product.
IMO if your app you wrote for XP doesn't just work on vista you are probablly tying yourself in far too tightly to the murkier parts of the API.
Installers are a bit of an issue but that is the sort of problem that generally you solve once and forget about or even just let your installer vendor solve for you.
Can you say remote desktop?
Afaict XP home can act as a remote desktop client, it is only the server side which is pro only.
I suspect most buisnesses big enough to care about the difference between home and pro will have acess to volume licenses which come with downgrade rights.
I would imagine most people who really need to join a domain are in a buisness that is big enough to get volume licenses with downgrade rights and I don't see many people sharing files off theese machines since they won't be on the network all the time.
I didn't mention it because I didn't want to start an argument on whether the program manager/file manager to explorer switch was a usefull feature or just eye candy.
32 bit vista is availible on both CD and DVD (though they don't include the CDs in the box by default you have to send off for them), 64 bit vista is DVD only.
When you include the different versions of Vista that you can get then don't you have to count like 5 DVDs?
So it uses less rescources on machines where rescouces are abundant but more on machines where they are relatively scare. Doesn't sound too good to me.
When you include the different versions of Vista that you can get then don't you have to count like 5 DVDs?
That figure is probablly off by an order of magnitude at least
Afaict vista has 6 DVDs for each language (retail/OEM, VLK buisness and VLK enterprise each in both x86 and x64 versions) and loads of languages (I don't have access to MSDN subscriber downloads anymore to check exactly how many but I remember it being a lot).
It depends what you count:
Debian and ubuntu at least manage to fit enough for thier default desktop install (including things like an office suite which isn't standard on windows) on a single CD (ubuntu even manages to make that CD a livecd as well).
Sure if you want the full debian archive you are talking several DVDs per architecture but very few people really need that.
In terms of the normal isntallation media fedora seemed a lot more bloated, core 6 required several CDs to install (again the default desktop install) and core 7 doesn't seem to offer CDs at all.
I haven't tried mandrake or suse recently so I don't know how they compare.
Massive corporate requests for the continuance of XP
Afaict the way volume license products have worked for some time is you by the latest version and get downgrade rights to let you install earlier versions if you want. If this continues (and I don't see any reason why it won't) volume license customers will be able to use XP for as long as they like.