Me!

Centos is my distro of choice atm. It is relaible, mature, and well tested and supported. I do not have to worry about an update hosing a system because of a new abi or radical change somewhere. Only federa and centos kernels work with my laptop and wrkstation.

When you print money to pay off debts the currency devalues and it is a no brainer. THe exchange rates are going downhill as the house wants to debate whether to default or not eveyr 3 months.

Therefore, the Bank of Australia wants a higher percentage to avoid the risk as the dollar is the worlds worst currency right now with the highest risk. ... Well Japan might be tieing the US in this area if the government improves more printing of money.

So MS responds with the 30% premium to convert dollars to Australias currency by passing it on to the consumer.

IT also explains why healthcare costs are skyrocketing up with insurnace, food, housing and student loans while incomes decline. All this free money given to rich by low interest rates inflates the money supply.

The issue is the stupid shareholders and investors. The CEO will loose his or her job if they want to hire Americans who wont steal instead.

Have you ever watched Shark Tank? Mark Cuban is on that show and basically unless you are willing to move to China they wont even talk to you! One lady went on and said she did just that and her supply copied her design and went around her and sold it at the major retailers for less cost and practically put her under. The investors with the exception of Cuban still didn't get it and just blamed her for not being innovative enough.

Not hey perhaps giving away IP to China is not smart unless you can hire an army of patent lawyers first and grease the palms of government officials first. Idiots.

You are wrong Osgeld. You need to see IE in action.

It pretty much has. Not even microsoft's website works properly in it anymore and if MS abandons it you can consider it effectively dead for all but specialized internal apps.

With VMWare and Citrix as well as WIndows Server 2003 you can virtualize and run your crappy app inside a modern browser. There is no good business case to use it on a desktop anymore as it is in the realms of legacy x3270 terminal programs now. May it RIP.

That is why it is modded down.The last place I seen it used was in 2011 on a desktop. IE 8 on the otherhand will be the next big challenge as corps use only that version because it is a stopover between XP and WIndows 7 and yuo can prey IE 8 off their cold dead heands.

Or salary in this case if they hire 3 more people instead of 1 because a 15 minute job takes 4+ hours. Penny wise, but dollar dumb. His boss obviously does not care but his bosses boss or beancounter would. ... unless of course the beancounter is just as incompetent as his IT guy and focus just on the cost of the workstation and says well we are still in business so why change. Lets save $800 instead and hire 2 more guys at $120,000 so I can get my bonus for saving the company money etc.

Got to love corps who view IT as simply a cost.

Sounds like your IT guy needs to have his walking papers signed by HR.

Make a business case and document and report it. I am sure the beancounters will shit their pants when they see you wasted $30,000 in lost salary to save $3,000 on a workstation. My above example is for office users with 4,000+ computers where it is simply not possible to upgrade. Only a major refresh signed by the CIO all at once will get the dinosaurs out. IN that scenario 512 megs of ram is very slow but can work for light office work fine if you stick with Office 2k3, adobe 8, and IE 6.

Many of these systems are common for home users too. In this economy $11/hr is the new norm for college students. Simply pitching a perfectly working computer does not make economic sense more than replacing a video card if you saved money for awhile to do so if you are a gamer making that wage.

But you are more valuable than working off the click demonstrate it to your bosses boss with your boss around and casually mention how you can do half your days job in 15 minutes on a modern computer and see what he says?

Such backward thinking IT people who do not want to do their job are incomptentent and need to go.

Most corporations only have 512 - 1024 megs of ram. The ones who finished moving to Windows 7 have more sane amounts but many still have 512 and only have 5 tabs or less in Firefox or IE when browsing and that is perfectly fine for general use.

Not everyone is a slashdot geek with 8 gigs of ram, SSD, and decent video cards with their modded desktops.

At least not reliably.

The issue is PCI express 1.0 and 1.1 performance on 2.0 cards and later. Geforces have been known to crash using an earlier slot technology or on lower end systems. Maybe that has changed since the 9600GTX, but I switched to ATI for this reason. Even many Radeons are only tested with later hardware and instability and other bottlenecks happen as many games as Windows swaps video ram to the system ram even when there is plenty of ram available.