Posts by Craig Cruden 20 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
They are going the way of TSG (SCO) which turned itself from a business into a patent troll in a matter of a year or so. IBM's normal business line is quickly shrinking, and they are turning themselves into going after companies for dubious at best patents.
I have seen a slew of stories about Satya's first year as helm at Microsoft, giving kudo's to Steve Balmer and saying Satya had nothing to do with that. It just feels to me that there is a coordinated (possibly funded) campaign to rewrite the history of Steve Balmer's Microsoft. Steve managed to run Microsoft up on a reef, hull the boat, force good sailers into the boat while keeping the ones that navigated them onto that reef.... over how many years??? and the first year that things seem to have turned after more than a decade of malaise is all his doing and not Satya's? It just does not feel right.
I have an iPhone 4S - although it is the lowest of the phones that will run it - it reportedly runs 2x slower. I am not willing to cripple my phone, and I don't plan on buying a new one for a while (years). If it were to run well on 4, and 4S the upgrade rate would probably be MUCH higher. Apple is the author of the slower uptake....
They purchaser paid $1490 for the Chromebook and 2 (or 3) years of data (100MB per month). How much of that $1490 was data and how much was hardware is unknown, but selling something with no plans to fulfil it is fraud. There are really two options - turn on the data or you will end up in court (and if it were my way - prison).
I have an early 2008 Mac Pro (10GB upgraded memory, disk bays full etc, 2 graphics cards) which I am still using -- and will not likely see the need to replace for another 3 years (9 years old at that point). If it were not for the multiple VMWare images that I run, I probably would not use the memory that is currently installed. In fact if you look at the typical consumer, I would be surprised if they used more than 4GB of ram on a Mac 99% of the time. No, I do not like soldered in memory, and I would not be an iMac buyer generally speaking..... but get real.... 8GB of memory would likely NEVER be upgraded in a consumer machine.
As far as landfill, as I have Windows, Linux and my Mac Pro machines..... (my oldest the Mac Pro is still the one I use most of the time).... Never bothered keeping a Windows machine (primary usage) more than 3 years.... so that comment is pretty gratuitous -- since macs tend to stay in use longer than Windows machines.
Now, the reason why I would not be an iMac user -- is simple.... I want as much display real estate as I can get. Right now I usually have 4 monitors hooked up. If I am going to upgrade my main computer it better give me the ability to hook up at least 3 monitors (preferably all UHD large size monitors -- 40"+). But for pretty much 98% of consumers -- the new consumer grade mac is more than sufficient.... though I would recommend they get a Macbook air and have an external monitor.... but to each their own.
Thunderbolt is already a PCIe interconnect using cabling which runs at 10Gbps in the first generation and 20Gbs in the second -- with the next being 40Gbps. I can connect up two local computers on a local network using Thunderbolt and it far exceeds the speed of consumer grade ethernet. Thunderbolt is going to have much lower head latency-wise than ethernet or USB x because it is basically PCIe over a cable.
By the time Elop took over the helm of Nokia the damage was already done. Symbian was junk, it would have taken years to do an internal replacement - there were only Android and Windows Phone as replacements.... Android was already overcrowded with companies that would have been hard to compete against (Samsung), Windows Phone looked like it could be promising and if not (first in if successful they would have been the market leaders in that niche) - they could divest themselves to Microsoft. He did as well as was possible with what he had to work with - and the shareholders should be thankful for what he was able to rescue for them. Elop's willingness to cut things that are sacred cows might actually be what Microsoft needs. They might have been better companies if Microsoft was forced to break itself up a decade ago.
They need someone who is not afraid to crush internal empires and who is not afraid to divest the company of trying to be everything to everyone. They have lost out on many trends because they are killed off internally by fiefdoms like the Windows division which thinks any underlying technology should be Windows - which is why Windows 8 is not focused as a desktop operating system or a tablet operating system. They need someone who will protect budding projects and defend them against other divisions until they have a chance to mature and come to market -- not get knocked off because some other division thinks that is their sole domain. Microsoft's R&D budget dwarfs Apples, and yet Apple has been succeeding where Microsoft has been failing. There are very few Jobs in the world and they tend to be empire builders that eventually hand off companies to mature management then go back and build something new..... Looking for a Jobs is a futile task.
Oh my god - things have changed - the sky has fallen in....
Lets compare my current Mac Pro (early 2008) with the current. I have a Mac Pro with all the slots and drive bays full.
2 ATI 5770 Graphics controllers take up all but one slot - and connects 4 monitors.
1 eSATA controller hooks up external HD drives.
(total of 5 cables).
New Mac Pro I will have the same configuration with 5 cables (no more cables unless I extend it further)
- 4 monitors hooked up through HDMI and Thunderbolt cables
- 1 external hard drive enclosure using a Thunderbolt cable.
While my current Mac Pro is maxed out, I could add another 31 more devices to the new Mac Pro. People arguing about loosing a slower internal bus for a faster external one.... are probably the same people that complained about the loss of their floppy drive, parallel port and serial port. Why are people arguing that they want to be more limited by the existing configuration?
What matters is not whether it is internal or external expandable - only that it is EXPANDABLE.
I have a fully loaded Mac Pro 3,1 (early 2008) and it is maxed out. I have 4 monitors, two graphics cards - which left one slot left over for a eSATA controller - no more slots left.
The new Mac Pro (as far as I can figure out) can still handle my four monitors, and has a lot more expansion options -- up to 36 external devices at the speed faster than my current bus operates. I gather from your tone that you would still be upset at the loss of the parallel port, the serial port, the 5 1/4 and 3 1/4 floppy drive..... as long as what replaces it is the same or better - I really don't care - I don't want my floppy back :o
Worked with a lot of H1B visaholders, and most were Masters - and some PHDs in the field of Computer Science. In fact a large number of them moved to that visa after graduating from Masters programs from reputable US Universities (after 1 year). H1B is one of the only dual-purpose visas where you can work towards permanent residency - while working on the 6 year H1B temporary visa.
The US system is stupid, if a high-tech worker is offered a job at or above the market rate salary - then just grant them a visa.....
They keep on telling me that if I want to use their products I must reformat my hard drive. I format all drives to conform to unix standards which is case sensitive.... and if you do that - many products they sell do not work. Never have with that formatting.... so as far as I can tell Adobe does not really try very hard to make sure their products work correctly - or efficiently.
And yet IF it stuck and transmitted -- that would catch the vast majority.
Most of the criminals are not really thinking other than to escape (usually with the brain disengaged).
I would gather 90%+ would not stop to scrape it off.
Add in intelligent software to direct the police officers to intercept at potentially opportune times -- and there would not be likely much time to think anyway.
The last few messages have tried to sell the mac for "gaming", this is obviously a stretch -- the mac is not the best machine for gaming. If you primarily are interested in games, a game console (PS3 or Xbox 360) is the best way to go. The next best is the Windows platform, then last is the mac. EA announcement was a sham, they won't be porting the games, they will be running them through an emulation layer (that is two layers of performance draining - emulation, and OpenGL which is not optimized for games).
If you use the computer for business, then the mac is the best way to go. If you use it for business, but also a little for gaming (and you don't want to shell out the money for a console -- which is a better investment than getting a high-end graphics card just for gaming) -- then probably an intel mac with a dual boot to windows.
As far as Vista? It took them 5 years to go from XP to Vista -- and that release reminds me of MS DOS 4.0 -- a failure in the worst way. The computers at work are primarily windows machines right now (working on resource management software off of windows -- which should allow development should be able to migrate off of windows completely. The company has refused to update to Vista. What is in-store for the next release, based on prior history -- they will try to fix Vista in Vienna in 2 years time, the next major revision will follow 2 or 3 years later.... that is five years from now..... That leads me to believe that the code base for windows is so bad, that it is currently strangling Microsoft -- which is why they feel the need to scare people from using Linux.
Microsoft would be better off doing what Apple did, take their windowing environment and replace the core with Unix.... that would allow them to focus on two areas -- graphics optimization for games, and the User environment (and quicker releases).
I went with my first mac 2 weeks ago. I have used windows (and linux) based computers for many years. Most of the software that I develop is in use at financial institutions (banking, insurance).
I have a computer farm at home (mostly linux, one windows) that I use to develop when I am working from home, but I needed a replacement for my 4 year old laptop -- so that I can work on the road easier. This time I chose the Macbook Pro for my portable development machine primarily because it ran a Unix variant as the core operating system (so it is closer to the environment that I deploy my server software on). I could have chosen to run Linux on the laptop, but it was just too much of a hassle making sure that all the drivers would be handled (more of a problem with newer laptops -- older one typically get supported).
I have my development environment up and running on my mac laptop (except for Oracle which I have to wait for 11g to come out) [I have an oracle server which I can access remotely]. Basically for development, it was not a very hard decision. The Macbook Pro was a better fit.
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