Vista is more comparable to Win2k. When Win2k came out, most people were running on Win98. There were even benchmarks that showed games running faster on Win98. Win2k also had a different driver model than Win9x so most drivers did not work with older hardware. But as newer hardware only supported Win2k and WinME flopped, people were eventually forced into Win2k. A good portion of people, however, skipped Win2k and went straight to XP. There were not even very significant changes between WinXP and Win2k. If you had Win2k there was little reason to upgrade other than the faster boot times and the blue theme.
If MS takes the same path (fix bugs, make it go faster) with Vista+1, then most people will probably be running on Vista or Vista+1 Windows in the future.
Why don't we push the bar further and start working on a manned mission to Mars? If not that then perhaps other big and useful things like a space elevator.
Nowhere have you made a good argument for firing marketing. Rather, your argument supports the fact that marketing should not design the product. Instead they should only provide feedback and research to how well the product will be accepted.
For your sake, I'll agree and assume WGA is bad in all aspects, but why does one component of the OS package automatically make the entire OS bad? I could use the same argument and say that iTunes uses DRM therefore it is bad software or that linux does not support my ATI graphics card features therefore it is a bad kernel. But that is not a good measure of the goodness/badness of a product. Everything is not black and white.
APM is a technology that adaptively adjusts the power saving feature of New Hitachi and Legacy IBM
hard disk drives to suit your working style. Power is saved by idling the actuator arm, additional power
is saved by unloading the actuator arm and heads from the disk to the off-ramp. The technology actively
adjusts the trade-off between disk delay and power consumption. This program allows you to change
the aggressiveness of the power saving.
I have a few old (2005) Hitachi Deskstars and I tried out this utility. What happens is when the disk determines it has been idle, the disk will (on it's own, no BIOS or OS intervention) lock the head and spin down the disk but not stop the disk completely. You can actually hear the head lock itself with a "click" sound and the drive noise lowers since the disk doesn't rotate as quickly. When you start reading from the disk again, it spins up quickly and reads/writes in about a second or two. When measuring total system power, when the disk went into a low power state, the system power went down 3 to 5 watts.
I don't know enough about hard drives to know why they don't have variable read speeds and why the head needs to be moved off of the platter when the disk spins down
It's amazing how hyped up all these new technologies are, and yet in the long run the best way to save energy is behavioral modification, not necessarily technological innovation(though that isn't bad either).
I agree with that part.
It's amazing how many people in the states still refuse to do this little thing called carpool. 6 people in a gas guzzling SUV is still more efficient than if they all took their own Priuses(or however you make that plural).
True, but the problem with carpooling is it is not consistent, dependable, or convenient. There are too many weaknesses to carpooling that prevent it from being used more often. It isn't uncommon to have a change in schedule, or a change in work places to completely throw carpooling out of the window. I've seen many people try and it never seems to last because someone changes jobs or schedules.
Not to mention the fact that in the US, something like over 80% of all car trips are less than 2 miles and yet bikers are looked down upon as if they are worthless pieces of trash(and respected accordingly). It still seems that in the states if you aren't driving, you are defective and your life isn't worth the effort of giving you your legal space on the road.
Partially agree. Part of the problem is how the US has built itself with suburbs rather than compact cities. This creates a need for massive road infrastructure and limits the viability of alternative public transportation and cheap transportation (bicycles, walking, trains, buses). So many people are forced into driving due to the structure of the US not just through social pressure.
Not to mention technologies like motor scooters that can get over 100 miles/gallon(depending on how you drive them) that many people refuse to use, probably for the same reason as noted above.
There's a number of problems with scooters and motorcycles. One is safety: most people have long commutes and most people have big cars. One mistake either by you or the people around you and you're toast. A longer commute just increases your chances of that happening. The other problem is in many cases you're required to own both the scooter/motorcycle in addition to a car because of the weather. If it is raining or snowing you're probably not going to want to take the scooter/motorcycle but a car. So why would most people pay an additional sum of money for an additional vehicle that is only useful part of the time?
Conservation is still the best form of alternative energy, and yet I wonder how long it is going to take before Americans realize that!
No, it's the best form of reducing our energy dependency and needs. We would still need to do something about future energy requirements and environmental effects. Ideally we would want all of our energy needs supplied within the nation or diversified so that we can switch between sources.
I'm all for alternatives especially better public transportation systems like light rail and denser cities with fewer suburbs. Unfortunately most other Americans don't agree especially the older generations. On the discussion of whether or not a train would be useful one comment I often hear from a much older people (late 50s) is they hate trains because it forces them to deal with "weird people" like "strangers."
Americans are living a very wasteful and isolated lifestyle (a lot of people don't even know who their neighbors are) at the expense of the rest of the world (both the physical resources and people). It has to change, but it won't happen overnight. I think something big like a economic recession is necessary in order to convince the entire American population that the US that it has become lazy and is falling behind.
That's funny. At work I had thought we were going to stick with Windows 2000 because XP at the time did not offer much except the fancy blue theme. Yet here I am at work with Windows XP.
I've used both webmail (squirrel, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and even older ones) and clients (outlook, outlook express, pine).
I've found that for personal applications (non-work environment), webmail is king. But for work Outlook is king.
There's a few major things about webmail that make it good for personal use: client/service is usually free, client is ubiquitous, and all data is maintained on the server. The bad parts are composition generally isn't as good, integration with other services is also poor, and there are certain compatibility issues (the email won't come up as expected).
Now for the clients, there are some good things as well: composition is generally consistent and better, integration (especially on outlook) is great, and the client (exchange) can be left on and receive/send emails almost like IMs. The bad things are the data tends to get shoved to the client and deleted from the server (except imap) and you have to reinstall and configure the client on every new computer. Most workplaces allievate the later by either giving you a laptop or having the corporate email service configure itself along with the user account. But you're rarely going to find that outside of work.
The interesting thing is that I've actually found that pine was probably my favorite of everything depsite it's text interface. What I liked about pine was it had qualities of both webmail and the client. Like webmail it ran on a server so you could get to it from almost anywhere that had telnet. But like the clients, it was setup to manage email and other services like a client rather than a server or service loaded with ads and other unnecessary things.
Nearly all Windows XP computers are configured incorrectly where every user runs as admin. The only places I see Windows XP configured correctly was at my old lab in college where everyone ran as a normal user and not admin and in certain work places. In addition to that, certain pieces of software require you to be running as admin rather than just a regular user making running as a regular user in windows XP a pain in the ass.
Vista changes that through UAC and the "admin" account not really being admin. That's because there's a conflict of interest: people coming from windows XP expect to be admins and have complete control of their computer but people from the nix world see it as you should never run as admin and if you do only do so for the task needed (sudo). So now the default vista setup puts people into a weird admin mode where everytime you want to do something that actually requires admin rights, UAC pops up. You can actually configure vista closer to the unix style where everyone runs as a normal user and anytime admin privileges are required, they need to type in the admin password. I like this a lot better because now when friends/family ask for computer help I can configure their vista computers closer to a unix model and prevent them from screwing over their system.
Where I work we never used the 9x series. It was always a version of NT like Windows NT 4.0. It was not until Windows 2000 and Windows ME that the consumer market switched to NT (Windows NT 5.0 aka Windows 2000).
Or lots of really cheap disks. There's already RAID which takes multiple disks and combines them to improve performance and redundancy. There's also ZFS which does the same thing but in software, and it makes managing large sets of disks simpler. At a larger scale you can start exploiting P2P methods where every peer contributes a small amount but when you put together the pieces it adds up big time.
The economics of running an online service will also change. As bandwidth costs on the backbones are lowered, it will become more feasable for smaller companies to provide bigger data services. This means things like youtube could easily go high definition, setting up your own audio stream service might actually be really cheap, and personal online storage of gigabytes of data transfers could also be possible and cheap.
It will be interesting to see the progression of data technologies. Long ago we used floppies to store our documents. Just ten years ago we had decent sized hard drives and cdroms/dvds. Today we now use flash memory and portable hard disks. If backbone tech keeps increasing in capacity we'll eventually just forget physical mediums and throw everything onto a server somewhere and reconnect to the internet (probably from some wireless connection) to retrieve and store most of our data. Software distributions and installations could go totally disk-less (boot off the network somehow?) and you might just start streaming your music collection off of an internet storage server. Many different technologies are required to get there but as the barriers keep dropping it will quickly become a reality.
It's not really a question. The answer is whether you pay or not, as long as they get within 480p quality, it will almost certainly mean the beginning of the death of things like network/cable TV and TIVO. With the possibility of higher quality video, why would I need cable TV service or a TIVO when I can just download and view the content on demand?
If you want a case study look no further than anime fansubs and bittorrent--some anime reaches the rest of the world fully subtitled within 24 hours of the initial airing with all commercials editted out.
It isn't current assets, it is cash + short term investments that total to 13 billion. Though their current assets isn't much larger since they are mostly a software company (15 billion).
According to Google Finance that figure is current assets which is cash + short term investments. Short term investments is usually very liquid and can be turned into cash within a year. However, their cash alone is still 5.1 billion.
There's plenty of land out in the desert and you don't need to rely on photovoltaics. There power plants that use mirrors to direct sunlight to heat fluids which then drive generators. The only downside to these power plants is that they're still more expensive than coal but they do the job just fine. They operate using common materials and we're pretty safe to say that as long as we have the sun we won't be out of an energy source. Why not start making the investment to get this type of solar technology cheaper and more efficient to solve these energy problems forever? Or do we just want to keep depleting our energy rich resources so future generations will have even more problems advancing?
You deserve an award. Every post up until now has not gotten it. It has only been rehashes of "they deserve what they pay for" or "ask for more time". But in the real world, sometimes neither of those are options, and you, sir, actually understand that aspect of the issue.
Their problem is the software does not do something or does not do something critical correctly. The business in need may be losing money ever since the issue came up, or even so critical that it can cause them lost business. So the correct question in this situation is: do the costs (short turn around time) justify the risk? Sometimes it may be that there actually is no risk to having a short turn around time with little to no testing because it may be the case that the software doesn't work to begin with! Therefore any solution (even a partially working one) is probably better than where they are at right now.
But it is up to you the software support provider to understand if that is the case or not and determine if the needs are justified. If they're simply doing it just to beat you up, from a business perspective, you then have every right to delay their request or charge them more money. But if they're not, and this may cost you your business (either by your customer going out of business or them turning to another competitor), you may have to think otherwise about your decision.
I'm not against convergence. But I am against voice/sound quality of phones today being absolute crap compared to what our technology is capable of. Why do cell phones still sound like crap even if I pay $600 or more for a phone?
They're referring to the electronics standby not computer OS standby. Nearly all electronic devices (TVs, monitors, computers, etc) are on standby unless they're unplugged. This allows you to turn on the device with an electronic switch or a remote rather than a physical switch because part of the electronics are still "on". The surprising thing is some electronics are incredibly inefficient at standby. I tested some PSUs which would use 4 watts while the computer was "off". If you start adding up the number of electronic gadgets in your home, the watts start adding up all while your stuff is doing absolutely nothing.
American living philosophy: suburbs far away from work with freeways and highways.
European living philosophy: compact cities with medium to good public transportation.
Gas prices are not the only factor if you have alternatives to the automobile.
I think the suggestion is removing the move command (there's a joke somewhere in there) and forcing people to use time machine. You know, it's like those pesky extra buttons on mice and all... we don't need those silly extra features.
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Vista is more comparable to Win2k. When Win2k came out, most people were running on Win98. There were even benchmarks that showed games running faster on Win98. Win2k also had a different driver model than Win9x so most drivers did not work with older hardware. But as newer hardware only supported Win2k and WinME flopped, people were eventually forced into Win2k. A good portion of people, however, skipped Win2k and went straight to XP. There were not even very significant changes between WinXP and Win2k. If you had Win2k there was little reason to upgrade other than the faster boot times and the blue theme. If MS takes the same path (fix bugs, make it go faster) with Vista+1, then most people will probably be running on Vista or Vista+1 Windows in the future.
Why don't we push the bar further and start working on a manned mission to Mars? If not that then perhaps other big and useful things like a space elevator.
So then what does Wine stand for?
Nowhere have you made a good argument for firing marketing. Rather, your argument supports the fact that marketing should not design the product. Instead they should only provide feedback and research to how well the product will be accepted.
For your sake, I'll agree and assume WGA is bad in all aspects, but why does one component of the OS package automatically make the entire OS bad? I could use the same argument and say that iTunes uses DRM therefore it is bad software or that linux does not support my ATI graphics card features therefore it is a bad kernel. But that is not a good measure of the goodness/badness of a product. Everything is not black and white.
Hitachi has already implemented the "incorrect" version for a number of years now:
From their Feature Tool User's Guide PDF:
I have a few old (2005) Hitachi Deskstars and I tried out this utility. What happens is when the disk determines it has been idle, the disk will (on it's own, no BIOS or OS intervention) lock the head and spin down the disk but not stop the disk completely. You can actually hear the head lock itself with a "click" sound and the drive noise lowers since the disk doesn't rotate as quickly. When you start reading from the disk again, it spins up quickly and reads/writes in about a second or two. When measuring total system power, when the disk went into a low power state, the system power went down 3 to 5 watts.
I don't know enough about hard drives to know why they don't have variable read speeds and why the head needs to be moved off of the platter when the disk spins down
It's amazing how hyped up all these new technologies are, and yet in the long run the best way to save energy is behavioral modification, not necessarily technological innovation(though that isn't bad either).
I agree with that part.
It's amazing how many people in the states still refuse to do this little thing called carpool. 6 people in a gas guzzling SUV is still more efficient than if they all took their own Priuses(or however you make that plural).
True, but the problem with carpooling is it is not consistent, dependable, or convenient. There are too many weaknesses to carpooling that prevent it from being used more often. It isn't uncommon to have a change in schedule, or a change in work places to completely throw carpooling out of the window. I've seen many people try and it never seems to last because someone changes jobs or schedules.
Not to mention the fact that in the US, something like over 80% of all car trips are less than 2 miles and yet bikers are looked down upon as if they are worthless pieces of trash(and respected accordingly). It still seems that in the states if you aren't driving, you are defective and your life isn't worth the effort of giving you your legal space on the road.
Partially agree. Part of the problem is how the US has built itself with suburbs rather than compact cities. This creates a need for massive road infrastructure and limits the viability of alternative public transportation and cheap transportation (bicycles, walking, trains, buses). So many people are forced into driving due to the structure of the US not just through social pressure.
Not to mention technologies like motor scooters that can get over 100 miles/gallon(depending on how you drive them) that many people refuse to use, probably for the same reason as noted above.
There's a number of problems with scooters and motorcycles. One is safety: most people have long commutes and most people have big cars. One mistake either by you or the people around you and you're toast. A longer commute just increases your chances of that happening. The other problem is in many cases you're required to own both the scooter/motorcycle in addition to a car because of the weather. If it is raining or snowing you're probably not going to want to take the scooter/motorcycle but a car. So why would most people pay an additional sum of money for an additional vehicle that is only useful part of the time?
Conservation is still the best form of alternative energy, and yet I wonder how long it is going to take before Americans realize that!
No, it's the best form of reducing our energy dependency and needs. We would still need to do something about future energy requirements and environmental effects. Ideally we would want all of our energy needs supplied within the nation or diversified so that we can switch between sources.
I'm all for alternatives especially better public transportation systems like light rail and denser cities with fewer suburbs. Unfortunately most other Americans don't agree especially the older generations. On the discussion of whether or not a train would be useful one comment I often hear from a much older people (late 50s) is they hate trains because it forces them to deal with "weird people" like "strangers."
Americans are living a very wasteful and isolated lifestyle (a lot of people don't even know who their neighbors are) at the expense of the rest of the world (both the physical resources and people). It has to change, but it won't happen overnight. I think something big like a economic recession is necessary in order to convince the entire American population that the US that it has become lazy and is falling behind.
FreeBSD also has support for ZFS.
http://myportal.mozdev.org/
Though in practice I still don't use it.
Instead, you may just want to try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1722 which makes your address bar a bit more flexible (searches matching bookmark names in addition to URLs).
That's funny. At work I had thought we were going to stick with Windows 2000 because XP at the time did not offer much except the fancy blue theme. Yet here I am at work with Windows XP.
I've used both webmail (squirrel, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and even older ones) and clients (outlook, outlook express, pine).
I've found that for personal applications (non-work environment), webmail is king. But for work Outlook is king.
There's a few major things about webmail that make it good for personal use: client/service is usually free, client is ubiquitous, and all data is maintained on the server. The bad parts are composition generally isn't as good, integration with other services is also poor, and there are certain compatibility issues (the email won't come up as expected).
Now for the clients, there are some good things as well: composition is generally consistent and better, integration (especially on outlook) is great, and the client (exchange) can be left on and receive/send emails almost like IMs. The bad things are the data tends to get shoved to the client and deleted from the server (except imap) and you have to reinstall and configure the client on every new computer. Most workplaces allievate the later by either giving you a laptop or having the corporate email service configure itself along with the user account. But you're rarely going to find that outside of work.
The interesting thing is that I've actually found that pine was probably my favorite of everything depsite it's text interface. What I liked about pine was it had qualities of both webmail and the client. Like webmail it ran on a server so you could get to it from almost anywhere that had telnet. But like the clients, it was setup to manage email and other services like a client rather than a server or service loaded with ads and other unnecessary things.
Nearly all Windows XP computers are configured incorrectly where every user runs as admin. The only places I see Windows XP configured correctly was at my old lab in college where everyone ran as a normal user and not admin and in certain work places. In addition to that, certain pieces of software require you to be running as admin rather than just a regular user making running as a regular user in windows XP a pain in the ass.
Vista changes that through UAC and the "admin" account not really being admin. That's because there's a conflict of interest: people coming from windows XP expect to be admins and have complete control of their computer but people from the nix world see it as you should never run as admin and if you do only do so for the task needed (sudo). So now the default vista setup puts people into a weird admin mode where everytime you want to do something that actually requires admin rights, UAC pops up. You can actually configure vista closer to the unix style where everyone runs as a normal user and anytime admin privileges are required, they need to type in the admin password. I like this a lot better because now when friends/family ask for computer help I can configure their vista computers closer to a unix model and prevent them from screwing over their system.
Where I work we never used the 9x series. It was always a version of NT like Windows NT 4.0. It was not until Windows 2000 and Windows ME that the consumer market switched to NT (Windows NT 5.0 aka Windows 2000).
Or lots of really cheap disks. There's already RAID which takes multiple disks and combines them to improve performance and redundancy. There's also ZFS which does the same thing but in software, and it makes managing large sets of disks simpler. At a larger scale you can start exploiting P2P methods where every peer contributes a small amount but when you put together the pieces it adds up big time.
The economics of running an online service will also change. As bandwidth costs on the backbones are lowered, it will become more feasable for smaller companies to provide bigger data services. This means things like youtube could easily go high definition, setting up your own audio stream service might actually be really cheap, and personal online storage of gigabytes of data transfers could also be possible and cheap.
It will be interesting to see the progression of data technologies. Long ago we used floppies to store our documents. Just ten years ago we had decent sized hard drives and cdroms/dvds. Today we now use flash memory and portable hard disks. If backbone tech keeps increasing in capacity we'll eventually just forget physical mediums and throw everything onto a server somewhere and reconnect to the internet (probably from some wireless connection) to retrieve and store most of our data. Software distributions and installations could go totally disk-less (boot off the network somehow?) and you might just start streaming your music collection off of an internet storage server. Many different technologies are required to get there but as the barriers keep dropping it will quickly become a reality.
It's not really a question. The answer is whether you pay or not, as long as they get within 480p quality, it will almost certainly mean the beginning of the death of things like network/cable TV and TIVO. With the possibility of higher quality video, why would I need cable TV service or a TIVO when I can just download and view the content on demand?
If you want a case study look no further than anime fansubs and bittorrent--some anime reaches the rest of the world fully subtitled within 24 hours of the initial airing with all commercials editted out.
It isn't current assets, it is cash + short term investments that total to 13 billion. Though their current assets isn't much larger since they are mostly a software company (15 billion).
According to Google Finance that figure is current assets which is cash + short term investments. Short term investments is usually very liquid and can be turned into cash within a year. However, their cash alone is still 5.1 billion.
There's plenty of land out in the desert and you don't need to rely on photovoltaics. There power plants that use mirrors to direct sunlight to heat fluids which then drive generators. The only downside to these power plants is that they're still more expensive than coal but they do the job just fine. They operate using common materials and we're pretty safe to say that as long as we have the sun we won't be out of an energy source. Why not start making the investment to get this type of solar technology cheaper and more efficient to solve these energy problems forever? Or do we just want to keep depleting our energy rich resources so future generations will have even more problems advancing?
You deserve an award. Every post up until now has not gotten it. It has only been rehashes of "they deserve what they pay for" or "ask for more time". But in the real world, sometimes neither of those are options, and you, sir, actually understand that aspect of the issue.
Their problem is the software does not do something or does not do something critical correctly. The business in need may be losing money ever since the issue came up, or even so critical that it can cause them lost business. So the correct question in this situation is: do the costs (short turn around time) justify the risk? Sometimes it may be that there actually is no risk to having a short turn around time with little to no testing because it may be the case that the software doesn't work to begin with! Therefore any solution (even a partially working one) is probably better than where they are at right now.
But it is up to you the software support provider to understand if that is the case or not and determine if the needs are justified. If they're simply doing it just to beat you up, from a business perspective, you then have every right to delay their request or charge them more money. But if they're not, and this may cost you your business (either by your customer going out of business or them turning to another competitor), you may have to think otherwise about your decision.
I'm not against convergence. But I am against voice/sound quality of phones today being absolute crap compared to what our technology is capable of. Why do cell phones still sound like crap even if I pay $600 or more for a phone?
They're referring to the electronics standby not computer OS standby. Nearly all electronic devices (TVs, monitors, computers, etc) are on standby unless they're unplugged. This allows you to turn on the device with an electronic switch or a remote rather than a physical switch because part of the electronics are still "on". The surprising thing is some electronics are incredibly inefficient at standby. I tested some PSUs which would use 4 watts while the computer was "off". If you start adding up the number of electronic gadgets in your home, the watts start adding up all while your stuff is doing absolutely nothing.
(In space, nobody can hear your sarcasm.)
Never underestimate the power of the Schwartz!
American living philosophy: suburbs far away from work with freeways and highways.
European living philosophy: compact cities with medium to good public transportation.
Gas prices are not the only factor if you have alternatives to the automobile.
I think the suggestion is removing the move command (there's a joke somewhere in there) and forcing people to use time machine. You know, it's like those pesky extra buttons on mice and all... we don't need those silly extra features.