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About me

My posting summary

1 to 10 of 5107

My comments

• Let us call you both what you are: blinkered zealots who blindly worship the ground that your respective masters walk on.
  
  Larry's article is dead-on... these will be interesting times. In my own IS department, we're stuck with a conundrum of sorts. We don't want to blindly jump to Windows 7, yet XP is losing support and Vista quite frankly sucks (seriously, who wants to shell out huge sums of capital expenditure just to bring desktops up to speed for Vista?)
  
  To Larry: A large caveat I'm seeing with Windows 7 (and Server 2008) is the Key Management Services. Now you have to have a separate server just to serve CALs and licenses. My question is why? Why do we have to waste resources (and more importantly, money) on what is essentially DRM? If we don't erect a KMS, we have to waste bandwidth on activations and phone-homes. None of this is cheap (even with virtual machinery). Now throw in VDI/VMWare View (or similar virtual desktop technologies), and it becomes a large and ugly (and did I mention expensive?) mess.
  
  Little wonder that IT/IS departments are looking hard at alternatives. Count me among them. In reply to: "Parsing the nuances of Windows 7 decisions"

  April 13, 2009

  0 replies

• ...so if they offered a licensing agreement for the sun total of $1.00?
  
  I'm guessing that won't happen. In reply to: "Microsoft sues TomTom for alleged patent infringement"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• Thx muchly...
  
  I find it funny though that MSFT somehow managed to wrangle a patent on "Open Platform Architecture"... ***?
  
  Also, prior art damned sure exists for the 2nd one (which was granted in 2006), which seems to describe nothing but a basic in-car GPS appliance.
  
  ...but get a load of these:
  
  "Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Connectivity"
  "Portable Computing Device-Integrated Appliance"
  "Common NameSpace for Long and Short Filenames"
  
  W.T.F. ?
  
  Is Microsoft just begging to lose, or are they hoping that attrition will eke them out a settlement? In reply to: "Microsoft sues TomTom for alleged patent infringement"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• Ah, but there is no such thing as longevity if all you're doing is copying. We can start with the Unix epoch, IPv4 address exhaustion, localization, customization (or do you think that the likes of Cuba and such actually want P2P and anonymizing tech in their copies?), etc etc. In reply to: "Sorry, socialists: Open source is a capitalist's game"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• @kojacked:
  
  Consider yourself pwned... by Steve Ballmer, no less: http://osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple
  
  @ Dan:
  
  Considering that everyone uses the same open protocols and standards in the FOSS world, *** are you talking about? In reply to: "Behind Microsoft's open-source jitters"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• Any idea exactly what patents were involved? In reply to: "Microsoft sues TomTom for alleged patent infringement"

  February 25, 2009

  8 replies

• Revenue is not "installs", since prices differ (Linux prices begin at $0.00, and with OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, so does UNIX).
  
  I'd kind of like to see a credible measurement of how many Linux installs occurred during this period as compared to last. In reply to: "As server sales tank, IBM still leads pack"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• "That doesn't mean we gotta like it. "
  
  ...in which case you cease to do business in Europe (or at least the EU portions of it).
  
  It's pretty simple, really. If you're going to sell your product to people in a (to you) foreign sovereignty, they you get to eat the rules they set. The best you can do is appeal to the citizens of that sovereignty... if they'll bother listening, and if they can actually do anything about it. In reply to: "Google wants to join EU case against Microsoft"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• "If you are doing 3D rendering and you really cared about the render times (as a professional) you'd use a render farm"
  
  So in other words you've just amplified my argument. In a still image, let's say that the render takes 5 minutes for the frame in Linux. with Vista's hit, you can in most cases increase that to 5:30 minutes. Doesn't sound too awful bad now, does it? 30 seconds? Why so impatient?
  
  Well... let's say you want to render a 30-minute animation (exact 30:00 time) @ 24 frames per second with the same settings as the still frame we just mentioned earlier. That performance hit in Vista only compounds itself with each frame. Using the same numbers (call it 5 minutes per frame in Linux vs. 5.5 on Vista), you have (give or take) 43,200 frames to render. Instead of 216,000 aggregate minutes on Linux time (spread over the farm, naturally), you now have to pay for 237,600 minutes of aggregate render time to do it in Vista. That's a diff of 360 hours, or 15 days' difference. 'course, unless you're a movie studio you're obviously not going to pack in enough scene complexity, though for 1080p resolution with heavily involved scenes and pure CGI that looks about right for an average with a moderately industrial render engine.
  
  Render farms are good for animations, but unless you own one, you get to pay for time on an existing one. A 15-day aggregate diff would mean a mofo of a difference to your budget... even if you were building your own farm.
  
  /P In reply to: "Mac OS X Snow Leopard screenshots leaked"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies

• @goodspeed:
  
  You mean like the majority of Windows users being so tired of XP, to the point of ditching vista and installing XP instead?
  
  /P In reply to: "Mac OS X Snow Leopard screenshots leaked"

  February 25, 2009

  0 replies