You love these, and we love these. So let's just jump in. Our good friend,
Doug, who has been a big help to both
RCP
the magazine and RCPU in the
past, gets us started:
"When I started my company, I bought a Dell Latitude D820 with a
dual core Intel processor, 2GB RAM and a 256MB Nvidia video controller. The
laptop only registered a 3.1 on the 'Vista experience' meter and was slow
from the start. However, since I need to know Vista in order to support my
customers, I kept it and learned to live with it. I considered wiping the
system and downgrading to XP Pro from Vista Ultimate (which isn't ultimate
but a waste). Recently, I've had some physical issues with the system, and
as a result of troubleshooting with Dell, I decided to delete the system partition
and install XP Pro.
"Do I still need to support customers using Vista? In a word, no.
Out of all the systems I've sold and supported over the last year, I can count
the Vista systems on one hand. Heck, I can count the Vista systems on one
finger. My two main vertical markets are health care and financial services.
The software vendors for both of those markets still either require or highly
recommend XP. So, I'm swearing off Vista. My business customers (99 percent
of my customers) will continue to buy XP Pro preinstalled from Dell. If Microsoft
doesn't extend the end-of-life again next July, then I'll probably buy software
assurance licenses for them and manually install XP Pro on new systems until
Windows 7 becomes the new standard..."
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20082 comments
The Chinese
aren't
such big fans
of Windows Genuine Advantage. We're all for fighting piracy,
but is WGA really the best way to do it? Then again, with piracy rates at something
like 90 percent in China (according to the article, anyway), it's hard to blame
Microsoft for trying to fight fire with fire -- even if everybody ends up getting
singed a bit.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments
One of the perils of putting together RCPU the way we do is that we rely a
fair amount on other people's reporting. Our general approach here is to take
the biggest or most interesting news stories of the week and add some commentary
and perspective to them -- hopefully with a touch of flair and maybe a few
pop-cultural references that the over-30 crowd will understand.
What we don't often do, though, is go and get stories ourselves. That's mainly
because your editor's responsibilities -- now more than ever -- range
well beyond just writing RCPU three times a week. So, from time to time, you'll
see us quote somebody from a first-hand interview, and we're quite specific
about the fact that we're doing that when it does happen. But, most of the time,
we're trusting that we're using credible sources for our base-level facts, and
that the folks who write the stories we link to know what they're doing. And,
most of the time, that works just fine.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20083 comments
HP's got a new line of Blade workstations and thin clients out. There are loads
of details about the new lineup
here
.
A major target for HP's Blade business is financial traders -- you know, like
the ones who used to work on Wall Street. Ha ha. Actually, though, there are
still some traders out there, and according to HP folks they might very well
be using Blade workstations in the near future. The financial downturn, HP officials
told RCPU in a phone chat this week (see -- original reporting!) has led to
an increase in interest in HP's wares.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments
We've been saying for a while now on RCPmag.com that the economic downturn
that is wrecking finance, insurance, real estate and a bunch of other industries
seems to have only dealt a glancing blow to technology. And with Microsoft announcing
earnings today, we got an idea of just how hard tech's getting hit.
It seems as though we've pretty much been right thus far. If Microsoft is any
indication -- and we feel safe in saying that it is -- the current economic
storm is knocking over a few trees in tech but not ripping roofs off of businesses
or tossing cars around. Microsoft's numbers for its first fiscal quarter of
2009 beat Wall
Street's expectations and reflected a solid trend upward, generally speaking.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 23, 20080 comments
Pirate-themed humor isn't as funny as it used to be, what with
real
pirates
making news now in fairly gruesome ways.
So, on Microsoft's Anti-Piracy Day -- which was Tuesday,
in case it wasn't pre-programmed into your Outlook calendar -- we were already
planning to eschew the walk-the-plank, peg-leg-and-eye-patch theme. Then we
noticed that somebody -- from your editor's hometown newspaper (well, Web site,
anyway), no less -- had done
it for us. So, we thank you, The Dallas Morning News, for spicing
up RCPU this week. Yarr and all that to you.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20081 comments
OK, somebody at MS (MBD President Stephen Elop, actually) says that OCS 2007
R2
could KO
PBX
.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 22, 20080 comments
No,
really
. Here's what he said: "We're not going to have products that
are much more successful than Vista has been."
A financial success, maybe -- but, really, Steve, give this one up. Just
do better with Windows 7, continue to embrace the cloud and let Vista go down
as an unfortunate footnote in Microsoft history. Please.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20088 comments
No longer raging quite so much at open source, Microsoft is now all about
"mixed-source"
ventures
. Here's a long and fairly useful Q&A about the whole thing.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20080 comments
Lasting fame is rare in our YouTube culture. Gone are the days when
Jaws
or
Star Wars
would dominate at the box office for months. Movies come
and go, make millions and then fade off into cultural oblivion.
TV, once the home of massively popular sitcoms that nearly everybody seemed
to watch, is now one bad reality show after another. The "characters"
quickly fade from memory. Music? Well, we wouldn't know much about that here
at RCPU, but it strikes us that today's stars will probably only be famous tomorrow
if their lives go completely off the rails.
More
Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20082 comments
Its stock price might have tumbled (with everybody else's) during the recent
market freak-outs, but the fundamentals of Google's economy are
still
very sound
.
Posted by Lee Pender on October 21, 20080 comments