I don't like Windows 8, but I wouldn't mind it so much if they just made a classic mode setting in it that allowed you to go straight to the desktop without having to jump through hoops (or hacks).
We were doing work at a Sheriff's office and the PC they purchased for us to use had Windows 8 on it. No problem, I thought. It is just Windows 7 underneath. Yeah, it was a problem. They ended up using the PC for something else, and we had to have someone drive us a Windows 7 machine from three hours away.
So what happens in the business world when you can't get Windows 7 machines anymore. Ahhhhhhhhhh.
Microsoft has *got* to come out with a "business edition" of Windows that doesn't change as rapidly as the consumer versions.
> And yet people were still getting colds by the dozens
I've been a vegetarian off and on over my life. Right now, I have just been trying to eat better, exercise a little more, and I consider myself to be a flextarian (I eat meat, just way less of it than typical Americans).
During times of eating right, I get sick a fraction of what my friends and family do, but if I eat the Standard American Diet, I get sick every time someone sneezes around me.
Right now, almost every single co-worker I have at work has been deathly ill this winter...I've had the sniffles a couple of times. I'm not saying I'm bulletproof, but I know very well from first-hand anecdotal evidence that Americans bring a lot of pain and suffering upon themselves due to diet/lifestyle factors.
On Dish Network, Link TV has shown the Al Jazeera English World News program as part of its Global News Hour for as long as I've had Dish Network. It's very hard to get me to part with money for a non-profit TV station, but I've actually donated money to Link TV before. Not much, but I did.
Though certainly more liberal, they aren't just Democrats or Republicans, and have aired some great documentaries that none of the big players would have ever touched. And if you think they were all bleeding heart lefties, I have seen speeches where bleeding heart lefties made a good case for supporting Ron Paul.
Al Jazeera English? Clips from it on some of the good documentaries, but I never just sat down and watched it. So yeah, tough market there.
I recently got a Nexus 7. My kids fight over it. A new one will be found under the tree this morning to alleviate some of that.
While I agree with you -- I'm typing this from a pc running Ubuntu -- here is one example where the Nexus 7 beats my pc. On this pc I have Kindle for PC (installed on a virtual XP). I think I have used it once. On the Nexus 7, I have the Kindle app on it. I read an entire book on it.
Still, I agree with you. If you have to input data, a PC is far superior. If you just consume information, a tablet is great.
It would have been more interesting if the "Who do you want to win the US Presidential Election?" question had allowed for *any* candidate to be entered. I didn't want either of the two running to win. In fact, it is kind of a rip that only a handful of states actually count write-in votes.
This is part of the reason that the one-party system has a stranglehold on America because it craftily marginalizes decenters.
Yes this is true for WISPs, however, you have to use the proprietary protocol at the AP and the Client side (subscriber unit). This is something if it helps with just the AP and the clients don't need to upgrade.
Also, the AP running slow at the airport is not just because it uses one channel. If someone is hammering WiFi, it tends to let that person use more bandwidth then they should, but your AP at your home out in the middle of the country does OK with one channel and multiple people using it.
The issue in an airport is that there are only 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 Ghz band. Go to an airport and do a scan. There is often an AP on almost every channel, 1 - 11. The non-overlapping channels are 1, 6, 11. That person that set their AP to 3 is interfering with channel 1 and channel 6.
WiFi has collision avoidance. I bet the new protocol will help in the airport for a while because if it just pushes out data, the other APs in the area will back off. But when everyone has this new AP...I really have doubts that it can plow through RF interference and keep the 700% speed boost.
WiFi was designed poorly from the start. There should have been 11, 5 Mhz channels that didn't overlap. This would have made it slower, but an AP at an airport would have worked a lot better with 11 true channels to use. If people needed more speed at home, they could have logged in and combined channels to make them 10 or 20 Mhz.
With security out of the way, it looks like they can knock out a new version about every 18 months now. Lucky us. Especially if you happen to be in the business world and they screw you over and say they are not even going to offer more service packs for an operating system a lot of businesses just installed.
Microsoft needs a new business model that doesn't involve forced, non-needed upgrades. Don't know what that exactly is, but the current method is not working.
More devices, but also less efficient use of the spectrum. In order to have "Super Duper Turbo" modes, routers combined channels, taking up 40 Mhz channels in order to reach 300 Mpbs. While a minority actually need this speed, the rest of everyone purchased these routers because they thought it would make their Internet run faster....Only as fast as the weakest link...blah, blah, blah.
Yeah. Just change it to channel 2 and interfere with everyone using channels 1 and 6, BECAUSE THE ONLY NON-OVERLAPPING CHANNELS on 2.4 Ghz ARE 1, 6, and 11.
I'm not an electrical/radio engineer, but I could have designed a better standard...blindfolded.
It is obvious the corporations don't want to buy new versions as fast as MS would like, and that is how Microsoft has always made its money. Sell a subscription to the OS and just keep the damn thing the same. Obviously, people don't like change. Why not have a Microsoft Business Edition, based off of XP, that only got bug fixes and security fixes, but otherwise JUST STAYED THE SAME FOREVER. Right now, I can guarantee that there are businesses that would fork over money for that OS...every year. Especially if MS didn't go bat shit crazy on the price.
XP has a "corporate" install disk that didn't need product activation in both 32 and 64-bit, and passed genuine advantage. Vista and 7 do not. If Microsoft *really* wants Windows 8 to take off, don't be surprised if a Windows 8 corporate install version doesn't get released for *cough* corporations.
Really, because of the 'ol corporate install version of XP, it is going to running in virtual machines for an eternity.
Part of it is just a coincidence, but notice the decline of Microsoft right about the same time they came up with product activation that works fairly well and didn't release a corporate install disk. Apple, Linux, etc., all doing pretty good now.
Alan Watt covered this on his show and we have covered it on DeathRattleSports.com. Stanfords 'Anti-Organic' study does not address the real concerns of non-organic plants, which of course include GMO.
I kind of wish there were two paths to get Linux on the desktop. A cutting edge path, tailored to the distro, and a Standard Desktop for Linux (SDL) that was included with most distros (voluntarily) that was designed for minimal change over the years (bug fixes and minor improvements, but otherwise stay the same).
During the install, you could just select the desktop environment you wanted.
I think having a standard desktop that didn't change with every update or vary across distros would actually be business friendly.
Just for the sake of argument, how much ill-will has Windows 8 generated and it isn't even out yet? Yet, Ubuntu has radical changes across versions and its just one of those things. Well hey, if a business doesn't want to use Windows 8 because it changed too much, a business is not going to want to use Ubuntu because it changed too much, either.
And for the record, I've used Linux on the desktop for years. This is being posted from Lucid Lynx. I have a system with 12.04 LTS on it, and yeah, I kind of like Unity and I kind of don't.
Just putting Bitcoin and Ponzi scheme together in the same news article could have resulted in a large sell off, thus the price drop. I had to go back and read the summary a little closer to understand it was a Ponzi scheme done with bit coins, not that bit coins are a Ponzi scheme.
Something really negative about what I'm holding as a commodity/money might make me want to get rid of it before it loses all it's value.
I think there is still quite a market for the general purpose PC...you know, getting real work done. The deal is, PC makers have had a one-two punch for long time that made people upgrade. Either a new version of Windows came out, or a really faster processor came out, and everyone upgraded. It's just to the point that even cheap PCs do what *most* people need, and on top of that Windows upgrades have sucked and made people not want to upgrade.
I think people have confused this funk with the release of the iPad. I guess there is only so much money to go around, but I highly doubt it is just the iPad that has done the industry in.
I used to read a lot and then I quit because I didn't have time. I got a subscription to audible and I get more enjoyment out of it than I do television and movies, at 1/4th the cost. For one, you can listen to a good book while doing something else, like walking. You can also listen to one while driving. I get stuck driving a lot where I work, and it sure makes for a good use of time. Now if you are doing something that takes a lot of concentration, audiobooks don't work so well.
For a desktop, I recently started using a combination of an ergomoue and a touchpad, in almost an ambidextrous manner. I've always been right handed, but I have started to use the touchpad with my left hand and only fall back to the ergomouse when I need to copy and paste things or need better control than the touchpad will give me. My right arm and shoulder had really been bothering me and this has helped in just a few weeks of use.
The vertical mouse is a much more natural position than a normal mouse for your arm and wrist. The touchpad rocks on verticle scrolling, working actually better than a scroll-wheel on a mouse.
What you want is something like an Evoluent VM4 Vertical Mouse (there are several brands) and an Easycat two button Touchpad. Easycat works fine with Linux right out of the box.
Yeah, I've spent too much time behind a computer. Don't judge me.
Is that if the shipper required a customer signature? I had a horrible experience with FedEx over this, to the point I cussed at them over the phone...and I *never* do that. First attempt they couldn't find my house. I called and gave directions. Second time, they left a card saying they couldn't leave the item because it required a signature (they didn't mention this when I talked to them on the phone the day before!). The item was a cheap barebones PC and you would think was stuffed full of diamonds.
FedEx office is an hour away. They would not reroute to my work because it required my signature and there is no rerouting in that case, but I could pick it up at the FedEx office...over an hour away. Told them to just call me when they got close to my house, and I would have someone meet them there. Oh, they can't do that, either because their drivers don't have phones. So I'm supposed to have someone sit around all day to get a package?
If someone only ships FedEx, I just figure I didn't need that product that bad.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and whispered in our ears... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
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I don't like Windows 8, but I wouldn't mind it so much if they just made a classic mode setting in it that allowed you to go straight to the desktop without having to jump through hoops (or hacks).
We were doing work at a Sheriff's office and the PC they purchased for us to use had Windows 8 on it. No problem, I thought. It is just Windows 7 underneath. Yeah, it was a problem. They ended up using the PC for something else, and we had to have someone drive us a Windows 7 machine from three hours away.
So what happens in the business world when you can't get Windows 7 machines anymore. Ahhhhhhhhhh.
Microsoft has *got* to come out with a "business edition" of Windows that doesn't change as rapidly as the consumer versions.
> And yet people were still getting colds by the dozens
I've been a vegetarian off and on over my life. Right now, I have just been trying to eat better, exercise a little more, and I consider myself to be a flextarian (I eat meat, just way less of it than typical Americans).
During times of eating right, I get sick a fraction of what my friends and family do, but if I eat the Standard American Diet, I get sick every time someone sneezes around me.
Right now, almost every single co-worker I have at work has been deathly ill this winter...I've had the sniffles a couple of times. I'm not saying I'm bulletproof, but I know very well from first-hand anecdotal evidence that Americans bring a lot of pain and suffering upon themselves due to diet/lifestyle factors.
See:
http://consumer.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=666526
see:
http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20090223/low-vitamin-d-levels-linked-to-colds
The virus is around year round. However, in the winter you stay inside and get less sunlight...thus less vitamin D.
On Dish Network, Link TV has shown the Al Jazeera English World News program as part of its Global News Hour for as long as I've had Dish Network. It's very hard to get me to part with money for a non-profit TV station, but I've actually donated money to Link TV before. Not much, but I did.
Though certainly more liberal, they aren't just Democrats or Republicans, and have aired some great documentaries that none of the big players would have ever touched. And if you think they were all bleeding heart lefties, I have seen speeches where bleeding heart lefties made a good case for supporting Ron Paul.
Al Jazeera English? Clips from it on some of the good documentaries, but I never just sat down and watched it. So yeah, tough market there.
I recently got a Nexus 7. My kids fight over it. A new one will be found under the tree this morning to alleviate some of that.
While I agree with you -- I'm typing this from a pc running Ubuntu -- here is one example where the Nexus 7 beats my pc. On this pc I have Kindle for PC (installed on a virtual XP). I think I have used it once. On the Nexus 7, I have the Kindle app on it. I read an entire book on it.
Still, I agree with you. If you have to input data, a PC is far superior. If you just consume information, a tablet is great.
A more workable plan would be to divide the country in half and pay one half to watch the other half. We would kill unemployment and crime overnight.
It would have been more interesting if the "Who do you want to win the US Presidential Election?" question had allowed for *any* candidate to be entered. I didn't want either of the two running to win. In fact, it is kind of a rip that only a handful of states actually count write-in votes.
This is part of the reason that the one-party system has a stranglehold on America because it craftily marginalizes decenters.
Yes this is true for WISPs, however, you have to use the proprietary protocol at the AP and the Client side (subscriber unit). This is something if it helps with just the AP and the clients don't need to upgrade.
Also, the AP running slow at the airport is not just because it uses one channel. If someone is hammering WiFi, it tends to let that person use more bandwidth then they should, but your AP at your home out in the middle of the country does OK with one channel and multiple people using it.
The issue in an airport is that there are only 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 Ghz band. Go to an airport and do a scan. There is often an AP on almost every channel, 1 - 11. The non-overlapping channels are 1, 6, 11. That person that set their AP to 3 is interfering with channel 1 and channel 6.
WiFi has collision avoidance. I bet the new protocol will help in the airport for a while because if it just pushes out data, the other APs in the area will back off. But when everyone has this new AP...I really have doubts that it can plow through RF interference and keep the 700% speed boost.
WiFi was designed poorly from the start. There should have been 11, 5 Mhz channels that didn't overlap. This would have made it slower, but an AP at an airport would have worked a lot better with 11 true channels to use. If people needed more speed at home, they could have logged in and combined channels to make them 10 or 20 Mhz.
With security out of the way, it looks like they can knock out a new version about every 18 months now. Lucky us. Especially if you happen to be in the business world and they screw you over and say they are not even going to offer more service packs for an operating system a lot of businesses just installed.
Microsoft needs a new business model that doesn't involve forced, non-needed upgrades. Don't know what that exactly is, but the current method is not working.
More devices, but also less efficient use of the spectrum. In order to have "Super Duper Turbo" modes, routers combined channels, taking up 40 Mhz channels in order to reach 300 Mpbs. While a minority actually need this speed, the rest of everyone purchased these routers because they thought it would make their Internet run faster. ...Only as fast as the weakest link...blah, blah, blah.
Yeah. Just change it to channel 2 and interfere with everyone using channels 1 and 6, BECAUSE THE ONLY NON-OVERLAPPING CHANNELS on 2.4 Ghz ARE 1, 6, and 11.
I'm not an electrical/radio engineer, but I could have designed a better standard...blindfolded.
It is obvious the corporations don't want to buy new versions as fast as MS would like, and that is how Microsoft has always made its money. Sell a subscription to the OS and just keep the damn thing the same. Obviously, people don't like change. Why not have a Microsoft Business Edition, based off of XP, that only got bug fixes and security fixes, but otherwise JUST STAYED THE SAME FOREVER. Right now, I can guarantee that there are businesses that would fork over money for that OS...every year. Especially if MS didn't go bat shit crazy on the price.
XP has a "corporate" install disk that didn't need product activation in both 32 and 64-bit, and passed genuine advantage. Vista and 7 do not. If Microsoft *really* wants Windows 8 to take off, don't be surprised if a Windows 8 corporate install version doesn't get released for *cough* corporations.
Really, because of the 'ol corporate install version of XP, it is going to running in virtual machines for an eternity.
Part of it is just a coincidence, but notice the decline of Microsoft right about the same time they came up with product activation that works fairly well and didn't release a corporate install disk. Apple, Linux, etc., all doing pretty good now.
Amazingly, I watched this video, linked from Google News, about 3 minutes before reading your question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vq8Klio60s
Alan Watt covered this on his show and we have covered it on DeathRattleSports.com. Stanfords 'Anti-Organic' study does not address the real concerns of non-organic plants, which of course include GMO.
I kind of wish there were two paths to get Linux on the desktop. A cutting edge path, tailored to the distro, and a Standard Desktop for Linux (SDL) that was included with most distros (voluntarily) that was designed for minimal change over the years (bug fixes and minor improvements, but otherwise stay the same).
During the install, you could just select the desktop environment you wanted.
I think having a standard desktop that didn't change with every update or vary across distros would actually be business friendly.
Just for the sake of argument, how much ill-will has Windows 8 generated and it isn't even out yet? Yet, Ubuntu has radical changes across versions and its just one of those things. Well hey, if a business doesn't want to use Windows 8 because it changed too much, a business is not going to want to use Ubuntu because it changed too much, either.
And for the record, I've used Linux on the desktop for years. This is being posted from Lucid Lynx. I have a system with 12.04 LTS on it, and yeah, I kind of like Unity and I kind of don't.
Just putting Bitcoin and Ponzi scheme together in the same news article could have resulted in a large sell off, thus the price drop. I had to go back and read the summary a little closer to understand it was a Ponzi scheme done with bit coins, not that bit coins are a Ponzi scheme.
Something really negative about what I'm holding as a commodity/money might make me want to get rid of it before it loses all it's value.
> Maybe this is a bit obvious
Oh, I see what you did there.
I think there is still quite a market for the general purpose PC...you know, getting real work done. The deal is, PC makers have had a one-two punch for long time that made people upgrade. Either a new version of Windows came out, or a really faster processor came out, and everyone upgraded. It's just to the point that even cheap PCs do what *most* people need, and on top of that Windows upgrades have sucked and made people not want to upgrade.
I think people have confused this funk with the release of the iPad. I guess there is only so much money to go around, but I highly doubt it is just the iPad that has done the industry in.
I used to read a lot and then I quit because I didn't have time. I got a subscription to audible and I get more enjoyment out of it than I do television and movies, at 1/4th the cost. For one, you can listen to a good book while doing something else, like walking. You can also listen to one while driving. I get stuck driving a lot where I work, and it sure makes for a good use of time. Now if you are doing something that takes a lot of concentration, audiobooks don't work so well.
For a desktop, I recently started using a combination of an ergomoue and a touchpad, in almost an ambidextrous manner. I've always been right handed, but I have started to use the touchpad with my left hand and only fall back to the ergomouse when I need to copy and paste things or need better control than the touchpad will give me. My right arm and shoulder had really been bothering me and this has helped in just a few weeks of use.
The vertical mouse is a much more natural position than a normal mouse for your arm and wrist. The touchpad rocks on verticle scrolling, working actually better than a scroll-wheel on a mouse.
What you want is something like an Evoluent VM4 Vertical Mouse (there are several brands) and an Easycat two button Touchpad. Easycat works fine with Linux right out of the box.
Yeah, I've spent too much time behind a computer. Don't judge me.
Is that if the shipper required a customer signature? I had a horrible experience with FedEx over this, to the point I cussed at them over the phone...and I *never* do that. First attempt they couldn't find my house. I called and gave directions. Second time, they left a card saying they couldn't leave the item because it required a signature (they didn't mention this when I talked to them on the phone the day before!). The item was a cheap barebones PC and you would think was stuffed full of diamonds.
FedEx office is an hour away. They would not reroute to my work because it required my signature and there is no rerouting in that case, but I could pick it up at the FedEx office...over an hour away. Told them to just call me when they got close to my house, and I would have someone meet them there. Oh, they can't do that, either because their drivers don't have phones. So I'm supposed to have someone sit around all day to get a package?
If someone only ships FedEx, I just figure I didn't need that product that bad.
People up to something will use a smaller, more secure system, perhaps even rolling their own communications (hey, it's not that hard).
So the people they really want to monitor is *us*.
I'm more amazed that someone used bing.com
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and whispered in our ears... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.