Posts by Davidoff

ProCurve switches are crap anyway.

No, they aren't, at least not in my experience (my former workplace used them in the 1000's).

ProCurve's are much more reliable than their counterparts from a certain 5 letter vendor.

Symbian must still have some life in it if they have supporters this vitriolic.

Don't forget that only until recently Symbian was the dominating global smartphone platform, and has been for a decade. It may surprise you but things like proper multitasking and copy'n'paste have been in Symbian long before even the first versions of Andoid, iOS or WP7 appeared on the scene.

And even today some still prefer to use a smartphone with a reliable OS that has been developed with low ressource usage in mind and which doesn't spy on its owner and also outlasts any of the other smartphones in battery runtime for the price of not having the choice of a few hundred fart apps.

Re: Win7 User Access Control

"..is still an Pain In The Ass. So, a strong reason to stick with XP."

Yeah, right, because the switch to disable it is so difficult to find.

before the Iphone when did apple ever release a massive product

Ever heard of iMacs? Or iPods?

Human-powered flight is physically impossible.

Of course it's possible:

http://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/aijf197/suhpa/index.html

There are many more examples available.

You don't own software, you have a licence to use it.

Nonsense. That may be the case in the US of A, but here in Europe most software sales to consumers (i.e. buying a game in a shop) are sales of goods, You own the box, you own the medium, and you own this copy of the software that comes with it (you don't 'own' the copyright of course). And with that copy of the software you can do what you want (as long as it doesn't violate other laws and regulations, for example copyright laws).

Of course the industry does a lot to make people believe that all they get is a license. Don't get fooled so easily.

Re: Tendberg?

"I have a few of the old 1.2GB SLRs at home. They served so faithfully for so many years that I didn't have the heart to throw them out with the servers... Bulletproof!"

Can't say this about the later variants with motorized eject. All of the ones we had died because some flimsy plastics parts in the mechanics disintegrated after relatively low operating hours.

Apple in the enterprise

"Over 30% of my clients base have made firm commitments to Apple desktops for thier next enterprise refresh,"

Who in its right mind woul decide to buy premium-priced home computers (which is what Macs are, unless they are buying Mac Pros) which zero remote management capabilities, from a vendor that has zero enterprise-class support offerings and which is known for high price levels and an astonishing inflexibility when it comes recitifing one of the many flaws in its many products?

Today's Macs are home computers. The only exception might be the Mac Pro, but especially the single processor variant is so overpriced that it's beyond insane (the dual processor version isn't that badly priced, but lacks the capabilities and the expandability which can be found in workstations from other vendors which cost around the same).

Mac OS X (sorry, 'OS X' as it's now called) is clearly aimed at consumers and their iOS toys and not at businesses. The short product cycles and Apple stinkin attitude towards security are a nightmare in every enterprise environment.

Seriously, unless applications which are only available for Mac are actually required then buying a Mac for an enterprise is plain stupid. Aside from the issue that it easily can be interpreted as your company being wasteful and overpaid by your clients.

Says someone who is a Mac user since 1993.

Re: "old-fashioned, heavy-duty, desktop machines that are still called workstations"

The point that is often ignored is that workstations are more than just ordinary PCs with a higher price tag. Workstations are usually built much more robust and reliable, made for 24/7 operation without a fuzz. They also come with a shit-load of certifications for various applications and can be put under server-class maintenance contracts.

Typed on a HP z800.

Re: What about servers shipped with no OS?

"I'm certain that a lot of Linux server installs are done on server hardware that didn't ship with any OS, but these machines just fall down the cracks - we can "guess" that they will mostly have a non-Windows OS on them (mainly because OEM Windows is cheaper than retail Windows, even in the server market)"

Not really. In the server world it's mostly very small companies that buy Windows with their servers. Probably the majority of server sales is done without OS, as customers get Windows Server via Microsoft's volume licensing schemes, which makes it much cheaper than buying an OEM version together with the server hardware.

UAC

"I have a nice copy of Windows (Vista Ultimate) slightly used ( just once) because as the primary user/administrator the frikking thing would not let me manage my own damn printer and fax scanner. It got wiped off and reverted to XP Pro that evening. I don't want to upgrade because of UAC crap I have experienced with "Fista"."

Really, if turning off UAC under Vista (a simple checkbox) is too complicated for you then maybe you should refrain from using computers at all? With UAC switched off Vista behaves like XP and runs everything which the current user privileges allow.

"There should be a way to reliably provide the user of his/her own computer the ability to do what they want with their property without all of these stupid, complicated permissions malarkey."

Well, we went there, and the majority of users have proven to be too moronic to handle their own PCs and prevent it from becoming members of a botnet.

"I am not a Linux user but it's even sadder to see that MS UAC is infecting Linux."

It isn't. In fact, this was first seen on Apple's Mac OS X.

@Sean Timarco Baggaley

You don't drive much, do you (rhetoric question!)? Believing that paper maps and route planner printouts are less distractive than a SatNav can only come from someone who doesn't do long distance trips to foreign areas.

There are quite a few problems with the Google Maps approach. For a start, try entering some address and see where it points you. More often than not it's pointing at the wrong building at the opposite end of the road, and sometimes even the road is wrong. And that is if the map is actually current and doesn't just show a huge field where now is a busy industrial development. Getting to your destination with the notes and printout can be equally difficult because quite often Google's enroute information (for example the name of a certain town you should head to) is not listed on road signs, which means you have to pull over to search in a paper map where this unlisted town actually is.

It's silly to think a mixture of paper sheets and post-it notes would be less distractiive and more safe than using a SatNav. People blindly following their SatNavs or watching moves or texting are a PITA for sure but as someone who grew up in a very busy tourist area in mainland Europe I can tell you that in the old days where people fiddled with maps while driving it wasn't that much better. Reading paper printouts when driving may not be demanding in rural Wales but good luck with your paper notes in a foreign country or in large cities like London, Munich or Prague.

A (good!) SatNav removes a lot of these worries, which at the end of the day are distractions from other tasks of driving (like looking out for other traffic). With a SatNav, I can focus much more on the traffic, and arrive at the destination much more relaxed (less stress = safer).

But I guess you were equally dismissive when your village got running water, electricity and a phone line.

It is censorship

Well, maybe if some of the authors actually did what a proper journalist is supposed to do (research) instead of making things up then the feedback wouldn't be so negative?

Or in short: don't play with fire if you can't stand the heat.

I agree that blatantly offending posts should be removed, but it seems everything which is critical regarding a certain author is just censored. That *IS* censorship, and it's cowardice.

"Nonsense. They do no such thing. At best they may have one or two options that are not terribly appealing." Dell is great at this approach."

That may be your impression, but then I say if you can't find any Windows-less computers then you're showing that you're just lazy. *All* big brands sell PCs and laptops without Windows. Dell for example, but of course not everything is listed on their website so you have to pick up the phone. Same with HP and Lenovo, which for every computer model have a multitude of different variants (with and without OS), aside from their BTO/CTO builds (build to customer order) which lets you spec a system according to your requirements, and that can of course exclude Windows.

""Now claiming that the market isn't effectively dominated by one player because you can "build your own" is just absurd. That represents a vanishingly small part of the market and isn't even valid for certain classes of hardware (like laptops)."

Learn to read. I didn't say you have to build your own PC, and already pointed out that there is an uncountable number of assemblers who will gladly build any PC according to your specs and without Windows.

And yes, this is also possible for laptops, which like desktop PCs are available as barebones which can be spec'd according to your requirements, and which don't include an OS if you don't want one. BTDT this regularly for nearly 15 years.

Really, one has to be really lazy or ignorant to not see the wide variety of computers available without Windows. Of course that means doing some research and make some phone calls, as very little is advertised in the consumer area. Of course if you buy your hardware from PC World and such only then yes, you will have a hard time finding anything without Windows.

The Windows OEMs cannot make an Apple quality PC

"The Windows OEMs cannot make an Apple quality PC because their margins are close to zero."

That's complete nonsense. Of course they can, and some of them do. You pay as much as you'd have to pay for a comparable Mac but quality is available.

"If they tried to make an Air quality PC at Windows PC prices, they would lose $200 on each unit sold because of the Microsoft royalties. "

More nonsense. Big OEMs pay less than $30 per unit for a Windows license, usually just a fraction of that. Just because your local Best Buys charges you laughable $200 for a Windows copy doesn't mean world and dog has to pay the same.

A bit more nitpicking

"Even a not so advanced computer should have no big problems with being left turned on. In fact; in many cases its actually more healthy because it doesn't have to deal with power surges (even though most of it gets handled by your power supply unit) and more importantly your hard disks won't have to cope with drastic physical changes."

Not quite. The reason why leaving computers running is usually much healthier for them is simply the abundance of mechanical stress that occurs when components heat up and cool down. It has nothing to do with power surges (which btw also do occur when computers are running). Switching computers on and off means a lot of heating up and cooling down, and thus a lot of mechanical stress.

For hard drives an additional problem is that the spin-up phase is the one that stresses components most, which (depending on the designed-in margins) may lead to overstressing and therefore life reduction of electrical components on the PCB. However, with modern (aka less than 10 years old) hard drives this isn't a issue any more, but it has been for older fast-rotating SCSI drives and 5.25" and full height 3.5" drives of the past.

"If on the other hand you're referring to the OS and as such uptime then I think its a very bad indicator. To me very high uptimes only make me think of insecure or maybe even unmaintained computer environments. Which by itself is no problem, but it gets a bit shakey when we're talking about stuff hooked onto the Internet."

I agree 100%. Long uptime is key for certain areas like production control systems and similar stuff, but for general purpose computers it's just a sign that the system hasn't been properly updated for a long time.

I think a better factor than uptime to look at is how much unwanted downtime (which doesn't include updates) a system has accumulated.

"I'll take low uptimes with recent kernels and software (Linux, Windows, BSD*) over high uptimes any day of the week."

Dito.

Where are the Germans going to get their power from...

"Where are the Germans going to get their power from, now that they've dumped their nuclear programme?"

Well, despite claims from the nuclear industry the switch-off of several nuclear power plants in Germany has shown that Germany is still producing excess power.

"I hope the French put a tasty 'up yours' premium on the price."

Hardly, as they are way too busy a**-ra***g their own people.

"VMware ESXi is fast and they have a free version."

So does MS (the Hyper-V Server is completely free, and not crippled as free ESXi), and according to our own real-world testing, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beats ESXi 5.0 in many scenarios performance-wise.

It's really unfortunate that VMWare for some reason sees the need to strictly regulate the publication of benchmark test results for their own products.

"VMware ESXi is simple compared to this complicated mess from MS."

Yeah, sure. Simple like the mess that is required to hanlde large local storage because ESXi up to 4.x is unable to deal with LUNs >2TB (2TB minus 512bytes to be precise), something which is just a snap in Hyper-V Server. They finally fixed it in 5.0, though.

ESXi is only easy if you don't do much with it, and has it's own share of problems of which many can be really annoying. Hyper-V Server is not much different, it's easy if you have some basic Windows Server knowledge, but at the end of the day, both platform require a certain knowledge level to be used adequately.

"VMware ESXi is fast and stable."

As is Hyper-V Server.

"We have VMware in the Enterprise and are happy with it"

Great for you. We use both but increasingly use Hyper-V Server over ESXi.

"and the cost is manageable. Why switch?"

Well, one reason might be VMWare's creative pricing which only seems to go one way and that is up. The second set might be features, while the current Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (based on Hyper-V 2.0) lacks some of the neat features that ESXi offers, Hyper-V 3.0 will very likely change the game quite a bit.

"Why should we change? If I am happy with the iPhone why try a Windows Phone?"

Yeah, why extend one's own intellectual horizon? One needs to be really careful or one might actually learn something new when looking over the fence.

Such an attitude is very disappointing, especially for someone who (my guess) works in the IT sector.

"The reason we ditch products is because they suck, MS-DOS, Win9x? This is very clear in that Windows XP still is a viable OS for many users...."

Yeah, well, you might have a second thought about how relevant your 'knowledge' about a >15 year old DOS based Windows variant is when it comes to modern Windows Server variants, Hyper-V or even just WindowsNT (which is what all newer Windows versions are dreived from) really is. And since with your own words "why cnage" it's pretty clear that while you may know ESXi very well that apparently you probably don't know much about Hyper-V.

ESXi's strength is its wide support of various guest operating systems, which is great if you're using a heterogenous environment. If most of your stuff is on Windows, though, Hyper-V becomes a viable alternative.

My netbook (Lenovo Thinkpad X100e) plays Full HD videos just fine, no matter what codec or bitrate. But then it does have an AMD Athlon Neo processor and Radeon HD 3200 graphics and not just an Atom with GMA500.