Direct From TechProGuild

I am not even going to start with how rediculious this post was, and how all these people that know nothing of how the software industry works, feel the need to make thier predictions known.  I am telling you, being a person that is both in college (Computer Science/Network Security; Major Business Minor) and working in sales, Macs are here for the long run, and your going to start seeing alot more of them.  I have had over 50 mac mini systems leave the store for one government facility, and many others are following suit for thier workstations.  The big advantage that Winodws running on mac does for these places is that there are programs, that were written for Windows, that will not work on mac OS, either cause the user used a Windows only language, thus not leaving an option for mac support, or the company just saw no reason to provide support for the mac OS.  Also, what I am seeing as a trend in the mac sales in my store at least is that, people will buy the mac version of a software over staying with the PC version, either due to thier version being older, or they just simply love that fact that when they are working if something crashes or hangs, it is far less likely to take thier work taken with it.  Home that want to run Windows, tend to be gamers, and what is funny is the 20" IMac handles games better out of the box then ANY of my desktop PCs in store.  And thats with the standard graphics card and the standard 512mb of ram. Anyway I got off on a side tangent, but the point still remains, the Mac OS is not going away. One more thing, the current Macs are "Vista Ready". When ever Vista is released.

My own system is as follows.

 
 
What I did was move my information off the last Hard drive
Maxtor 20, formatted it and the installed the Vista.
Man what a night's work.
Once installed, I can now say the following.
Althoug it got a Nice Framing, I loath the menus.
I particularly resent the way I cannot hit my Windows Explorer as I do in my XPPro and see the entire computer, drives and all.
In Vista you can't make a move withought it asking your permission, verifying and then letting your through.
What a PAIN.

Especially when you consider that I'm the only Admin listed.
There is no question  that is has beautiful scenery, but the usual Microsoft "Screw ups are still there.
As you read my specs, you will note that I have the very latest in the NVidia line of AGP VGA Cards and "All" I was allowed to do is put in the Drivers, just barely.
It refuses to recognize my SB live value 5.1,    I can't even get it to load the drivers.
It doesn't even recognize that the Card is there.
So I have no sound.
With the Mother board, you get a Disk with all the Drivers.
Well It need USB Ports and when I tried to get it to seek them on the CD it wouldn't do it.
It won't even recognize my own built in USB ports.
And I've only just begun.
It wouldn't allow me to put in my Norton,2005.
You get the feeling that they have designed it to lock everybody non-Microsoft, out.

 
But what I hate the most,if you try to use the Windows Explorer the way we do in XP. [I use it to clean out the system before Defrag} It won't let you.
Which bring's up another point. I like to see things being done.
So when I Defrag, I want a little more than a little blue circle telling me that it may take from a few minutes to a few HRS to Defrag.
I am not alt all happy with the menu Structure at all. From the Menus I should be able to go anywhere, see everything.Especially as an Admin.
In VISTA, you are relegated to your own little corner and allowed nothing else.
If I want to see my Hard Drives, I have to hit My Computer where upon they show the drives and then double click to see what is on the individual drive.
These are only a few of the problem, I was too busy trying to find my way around the Microsoft Loop.
So I must admit, for all it Panoramic View,so far, I'm not impressed at all.

Well, I like the taskbar and the Panorama. 

 
PS Not to mention 9 1/2 hrs to download it, then turn it into an NRG file and Burn it.
I even bought a DVD R/W for the occasion, now I'm glad about the DVD R/W 
 
I can only say that it seem to be a ix of both sides of the cong of good and bad.
Right now, the bad outweighs al the good, at least for me.
Thank God that XPPro is going to be around for a long time yet.
It may not be as pretty, but it works the way I want it to {Most of the time} Hee.hee.
That's just the beginning.
I have not yet begun to dig.
Let's see what else we can come up with.
But still love the View

Warmest Regards
Aaron

The PC is superior to
the Mac in every way because of the wide support base and well-funded research and
while lovers of the Mac have their place in the sun if you deviate from the
herd the predators get you.  

Apple overpriced the
Mac from day one and have only themselves to blame that it never became a mainstream
option for the average computer user. 
All you Macophiles, drink your cool aid that you?ve been handing out all
the years and throw your hammers at the nearest PC screen so that the rest of
us can compute in peace knowing that Microsoft is looking after us. 

The Redmond cool aid looks way tastier than the old
stuff from Apple anyway, cheers.

CyLex

It's not just the string length and "th", because 'this man will show' doesn't produce the same results.

As far as quirks.. try making a new folder called 'con'

Well, as the old saying goes, ?All good things must come to
an end.?  Such as it is with my Lenovo
ThinkPad Tablet PC.  Today I packed up
the trusty little Tablet PC and shipped it back to Lenovo.

Ever since I saw Lenovo debut it at TechEd 2005 last year, I was
looking forward to seeing an actual unit go through its paces. Initially, I was
disappointed with the unit?s performance, but after
overcoming those problems, the machine worked like a charm.

Compared to some other Tablet PCs we?ve had come through the
office so far, the Lenovo was the best of the bunch. It?s just the right size with
all of the right features. By putting the traditional solid ThinkPad quality
into a Tablet PC form factor the X41 Tablet PC was a winner.

If you?ve never used a Tablet PC before, it?s easy to dismiss
the concept as being kind of silly. However, now that I?ve been kicking one
around for several months, it?s going to be hard to go back to a regular
laptop.  One thing I?ll have to learn not
to do is to reflexively twist the screen and lay it back as soon as I lift the
lid.  That will take a little bit of
retraining for sure, but I doubt I?ll try to do it more than once.  

I tried the Notepad quirk above, but did not get boxes, I got Chinese text below:

桴獩愠灰挠湡戠敲歡

When I opened the file using MS Word, the original text was restored.

One of the folks in my department tried this and got chinese characters instead.

I tried. That is interesting and weird.

I got ?桴獩愠灰挠湡戠敲歡? instead of a string of boxes.

in the Polish Notepad(Notatnik) under win98 it seems that it does not  work.

jul

Like George said, It was absolutely intentional. That, my friends, is called an easter egg. How fun!

Well, I think this is most intresting:

1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.

Intresting!  isn?t it?

The Babelfish translation of the Chinese "this app can break" phrase comes to : 桴 □the worried thoughts ash 挠 □□knocks □ (simplified Chinese)

In traditional Chinese: 桴 獩 □the ash □湡戠 knocks happy

"Bush hid the facts" came back as : □□□touches □□reflects picks □

Maybe it's hidden poetry, like the Mac hacker poetry :)

Out of curiousity I tried it using Notebook on a WIn98SE machine I have
here - it doesn't break at all for either "this app can break" or "Bush
hid the facts" so it appears to be specific to the newer version.

I?ve been kicking around Beta 2 of Vista for a few weeks now.
Now that this beta includes video drivers that support the workstation in the
TechRepublic Test Lab, it?s been a much more enjoyable experience.  It still
leaves much to be desired, but Microsoft still has a few months left before
it pushes the shipping date back again?. Er ah? 
I mean work the bugs out.

I came very close to writing another blog complaining about
disappointment I?ve had with Vista?s performance on that PC.  The computer is lightning fast when running
XP, but is a dog under Vista.  And I?ve
been able to get many
Vista features running under XP by using third party and Microsoft tools.

So what made me decide to NOT go on a Vista Performance
Rant?  Ed Bott.  Specifically a blog that Ed Bott posted on
ZDNet a few months ago that pointed out, quite rightly, that every version of Windows has been a
bloated pig.

It?s not Microsoft bashing by any means. Think about any
version of Windows ? Windows 1.0 thru XP. Whenever the operating system first
shipped, you would hear major complaints about what a dog it was. A couple of
hardware generations later, and then the operating system would become
tolerable. It was just a matter of waiting until Intel caught up with Microsoft.

Naturally, this relationship always created the appearance of
collusion. The moniker ?Wintel? has long been associated with the
Microsoft/Intel relationship because the apparent symbiotic relationship between
the two.

So? What do we do? One of two things as far as I can tell. First,
we can wait until we finally get Quad Core CPUs from Intel and AMD. Secondly,
we can lobby Microsoft that when they?re creating new operating systems that
they allow programmers to only use 486-based PCs. Then maybe we?d get something
tolerable.  

At a guess, I'd say that what's probably going on is this: Notepad is translating the text "this app can break" into a message in Chinese Unicode, whether intentionally or as an Easter egg (I can imagine some conditions under which it might misinterpret something as intended to be Chinese using Unicode). The reason it shows up as boxes on some systems would have something to do with missing support for Chinese Unicode in the font and/or on the system you're using for Notepad (probably related to the font package version on your Windows system, which might in turn be related to the minor release version of the Windows OS itself).

Since I don't have a bunch of Windows systems lying around to test it, however, that's all just idle speculation.

As I mentioned in a recent
post, I was excited when I saw that Novell had finally turned a profit for
the previous quarter. Sadly it looks like not everyone was happy about it.

Novell?s board of directors recently
decided to replace
both the CEO, Jack Messman, and the CFO of the company. Jack Messman took over
from Dr. Eric Schmidt, who took over the reigns at Google a few years ago.

Messman had his work cut out for him.
While trying to milk the last dime out of the NetWare cash cow, he had to
quickly get the SuSe Chameleon producing money by attempting to build a
services company out of a free operating system. Clearly, it was a huge
challenge. Now, Novell?s new CEO Ron Hovsepian has those duties.

Of course, Novell?s not alone in the
C-level Shuffle. Microsoft has gone through the
same thing, and has the 2-year Long Goodbye from Bill Gates to contend
with.  

When a company changes a CEO,
major changes occur shortly thereafter. Maybe Novell will place added emphasis
on Linux. Maybe it will put itself up for sale. I guess we?ll just have to wait
and see.

Aaron - as I understand it, most of the security features lauded by
pundits will be pretty much redundant if you run as administrator...
That's the point - you shouldn't have total "nuke-the-hard-disk"
control of a machine when you're doing simple things like browsing the
web...

I think it may be a case where "Windows Vista is not Windows XP" - but then perhaps that's when it's time to make the change...

I don't know - I haven't loaded up the new beta, because I've pretty
much come to the conclusion that all the benefits in security are
already there in Linux and *BSD - and they aren't frustrating, they're
how you use the OS - and so embedded that it works well.

Plus - I can have the latest applications running on a PII-233 at a
pretty adequate rate... Seems like it's the way to go to me...

Jx

Aaron - as I understand it, most of the security features lauded by
pundits will be pretty much redundant if you run as administrator...
That's the point - you shouldn't have total "nuke-the-hard-disk"
control of a machine when you're doing simple things like browsing the
web...

I think it may be a case where "Windows Vista is not Windows XP" - but then perhaps that's when it's time to make the change...

I don't know - I haven't loaded up the new beta, because I've pretty
much come to the conclusion that all the benefits in security are
already there in Linux and *BSD - and they aren't frustrating, they're
how you use the OS - and so embedded that it works well.

Plus - I can have the latest applications running on a PII-233 at a
pretty adequate rate... Seems like it's the way to go to me...

Jx

Aaron - as I understand it, most of the security features lauded by
pundits will be pretty much redundant if you run as administrator...
That's the point - you shouldn't have total "nuke-the-hard-disk"
control of a machine when you're doing simple things like browsing the
web...

I think it may be a case where "Windows Vista is not Windows XP" - but then perhaps that's when it's time to make the change...

I don't know - I haven't loaded up the new beta, because I've pretty
much come to the conclusion that all the benefits in security are
already there in Linux and *BSD - and they aren't frustrating, they're
how you use the OS - and so embedded that it works well.

Plus - I can have the latest applications running on a PII-233 at a
pretty adequate rate... Seems like it's the way to go to me...

Jx

Never fear: Notepad saves all the original bytes in the file.  When Notepad opens such a file, even one created by some other program, it automatically interprets them using a Unicode encoding instead of the default ANSI encoding.  The resulting characters may or may not be displayable depending on what fonts are available on the particular PC where this is done; hence, boxes or Chinese or whatever.

It does not seem to matter how the bytes get into the file.  To see this for yourself, create such a document, open it in Notepad, and select "File > Open...".  At the bottom of the Open dialog box you will notice that the Encoding is Unicode.  Change it to ANSI and click the Open button.  Voila!  Your original text reappears.

Shorter strings and other patterns exhibit the same problem.  For example, try "as asd asd a".

Apparently, Notepad applies a heuristic to the first few bytes of a file to determine the file encoding.  With the right bytes, it sometimes comes up with the wrong answer.

I like the idea of this but the download site seems quite shady. I don't like having anything to do with shady websites especially ones that warn you about phishing activity on their own site and constantly try to con you into buying something to get something free. I think you should screen sites like this before you invite innocent people to come to such sites as victims. Shame on you, this is too unprofessional to be on a Tech Republic site/article.

Today, Microsoft finally dropped support for Windows 98. Although most technical support for Windows 98 dried up years ago, Microsoft has at least still been supplying updates for security issues that have cropped up with the operating system. Not anymore.

Microsoft actually continued support for Windows 98 much longer than it originally planned. Microsoft traditionally abandoned support for products about 5 years after their follow up version shipped. That means that support for Windows 98 should have stopped after 2004 ? 5 years after Windows ME shipped. Windows 98 proved to be such a popular operating system however, that Microsoft was forced to hang onto Windows 98 until now.

By definition, Windows 98 is an 8 year old operating system. In Internet Years, that's more like 80 years ? archaic and long obsolete. The problem is of course that an estimated 50 million people still use Windows 98. W3Counter Global Statistics, a tracking site made up of reports from over 1300 websites, shows that Windows 98 is still as popular as the Mac.

Windows 98SE was arguably the most popular version of Windows until Windows XP shipped. It even took Windows XP several years to exclipse Windows 98 in popularity. Many businesses sat out Windows 2000 Professional completely and stuck with Windows 98. Windows 98SE was probably also the best DOS-based version of Windows, being more solid and reliable than any version, including the ill-fated Windows ME. Even as little as 2 years ago, I wrote an article giving reasons why sticking with Windows 98 was still a good idea.

Of course, there are probably still lots of unpatched bugs inside of Windows 98. Security holes have appeared as recently as the last few months. More are bound to be discovered. The only difference is now, 50 million plus users can't rely on Microsoft to fix them.

Microsoft is expecting users to upgrade to Windows XP, and hopefully ultimately with Windows Vista. You can't really expect Microsoft to support an 8 year old operating system, and they should probably be praised for hanging in there so long. At the same time, Microsoft can't really think people will upgrade directly from Windows 98 to Vista or XP. Most 98-class machines can't run XP let alone ever hope to run Windows Vista. Most Windows 98 users will continue to run Windows 98 and just be vulnerable to whatever comes along.

Over the July 4th holiday, we went to Philadelphia to see
Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and all of the other historical things in
the area. Being someone who?s steeped in technology, it?s fascinating to stop
and think how much people at the time of the Revolution were able to accomplish
without the assistance of the technology we have today.

We take for granted such things as computers, printers, web
sites, cell phones and so forth that it?s difficult to remember how things were
done before these things existed. A while back ago, I posted a blog that asked what
we did before computers and got some interesting responses.

But in that day and age, they fomented a revolution that
defeated the most powerful empire in the world. It took 8 years to do, but even
so they were able to accomplish it. Communication between major cities like
Boston and Philly could take a week one way, and communicating across the ocean
could take months. Pamphlets and newspapers were printed using a printing
press, but by hand in a slow process. And they weren?t easily distributed.

Even though communication was slow and difficult, I think
that helped the Revolution more than it hurt it. Because not only did poor
communications slow down the patriots, it also slowed down the British.  The British didn?t know what was going on in
a timely manner in order to be able to react quickly enough to either diffuse
the situation or crush it. Having the home court advantage, the soon-to-be
Americans could use the time-delay to help spread their word faster.

What do you think? With 21st Century technology,
how would 1776 have turned out?    

Last week, I mentioned that Microsoft was finally dropping
support for Windows 98 and posed the question about whether or not
Microsoft really intended organizations to make the jump to Windows XP as a
result. Apparently it does ? at least partially. Microsoft wants to turn
Windows 9x-class workstations into dumb terminals.

Microsoft is releasing a new program called "Windows
Fundamentals for Legacy PCs". Microsoft understands that many Windows
9x workstations are still in use in business. It?s also aware that these
workstations are underpowered to run XP full blown and that many organizations
don?t want to spend the money necessary to replace this equipment. At the same
time, by abandoning support for Windows 9x, businesses are now left vulnerable
to attacks that may appear in 9x. WFLPC is meant to address all of those needs.

WFLPC is built on Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 code.
As such, it?s supposed to have the smaller footprint necessary to make it run
on older Windows 9x workstations. To use WFLPC, the workstation will need as
little as 64MB of RAM, a Pentium processor and 500MB of hard drive space. It
will also need a network card, because essentially what WFLPC does is turn the
workstation into a dumb terminal.

WFLPC gives businesses the ability to continue to use
Windows 9x-class machines while maintaining security on the system. Because of
the terminal aspect, the systems can be even more secure because you?ll be able
to centralize control over them in ways not possible in Windows 9x.

Unfortunately, your run of the mill small business or home
owner won?t the get the chance to use WFLPC. 
You can?t just buy if off the shelf. Instead, it?s included as part of
Microsoft?s Software
Assurance program. Plus, naturally you have to have Microsoft software
running on the back end for the WFLPC workstation to talk to.

So is Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs the
way to go with old workstations?  It?s
hard to tell. With Windows 9x remaining unpatched in the future, continuing to
use it will be a gamble. I?ve always thought terminal-based machines can make a
lot of sense from both a security and a management standpoint. What?s your
take?

About a month ago, I was talking about the performance of
Vista Beta 2. In that entry, I mentioned how even though Vista seems a little
sluggish right now, every
version of Windows was been slow when it first shipped and that eventually
hardware manufacturers created powerful enough CPUs and systems that the
operating systems worked smoothly. At the end, I quipped that perhaps all we
needed to do was to wait for AMD and Intel to ship quad-core CPUs in order for
Vista performance to be acceptable.

Well, lo and behold ? Intel just
announced that its quad-core CPUs, the Cloverton for servers and Kentsfield
for desktops, would appear in late 2006 rather than in the first half of 2007
as originally planned. This timing means that quad-core processors will be
available just in time for Vista?s final release.

By shipping quad-core processors this year, Intel also gets
the jump on AMD which won?t have its quad-core processors ready until next
year. This will be the first time in quite a while that Intel has beaten AMD to
market with an advanced chip.

Once interesting thing to Intel?s quad-core CPU is the fact that
the article notes that the CPUs are essentially dual-dual-core CPUs and not
true quad-cores. What Intel is doing is configuring two dual core CPUs in such
a manner as they fit into once CPU socket. AMD?s quad-core is supposed to be a ?true?
quad-core.

So what I originally wrote in jest turned out to be fact.
Quad-core CPUs were always coming. It was just a matter of time, but Vista was
supposed to beat them to the market. Now it looks like there will be at least a
few quad-core systems waiting to greet Vista when it ships. I guess I should
have just said something about needing octo-core CPUs or something like that
instead.

For a long time now, AMD has been a thorn in Intel?s side.
Just the other day, I mentioned how Intel has started to strike
back by shipping quad-core processors. It has also started to squeeze
AMD earnings by lowering prices on its CPUs. So if AMD is starting to have a hard time
beating Intel to market with faster processors and can be sent into the red
with a wave of Intel?s hand, how can it compete?

One good strategy is to hit em where they ain?t. Or at least where they ain?t as strong. To
that end, AMD recently decided
to buy ATI to put itself right in the middle of the graphics card market. Intel
markets some graphics chipsets, but usually they?re included on motherboards.
Usually Intel graphics chips aren?t found on separate cards. That?s where ATI
and nVidia currently rule.

ATI has been around for a very, very long time. While other
graphics makers like S3, Diamond, Trident, and others have crashed and burned
along the side the road, ATI has always been a reliable, if not always
top-performing, chip maker.

For AMD?s sake, buying ATI is a pretty cunning move. Beyond
the talk about the union being able to create a ?computer on a chip?, the
marriage seems pretty natural. AMD has been chasing the graphics market ever
since introducing the 3DNow technology into their K6 CPUs. ATI is a perfect
extension to those efforts. In addition, with the amount of graphics power
needed in Vista in order to get Aero Glass working properly, ATI and nVidia chipsets
are both only going to be more in demand in coming years.

Mergers are always difficult things to pull off however. AMD
will have to tread lightly in order not to mess ATI up in the short term while making sure that it gets the most out of its investment before Intel can react. That?s probably why they?re doing it before Vista ships.
Intel has also come close to putting AMD out of business several times by
cutting prices. So the timing of the merger is crucial to keep Intel?s price
pressure and more rapid innovation from permanently sidelining AMD while putting AMD in the position to really take off once Vista ships.

I?ve always liked AMD CPUs. Every computer I?ve built for
myself at home has used AMD chips. And I?ve always stuck to using ATI video
cards because you can always be assured that the company will be around to get drivers and support later. I?m
looking forward to see how AMD/ATI is going to fare against Intel in the
future.

My girl friend purchased two phones with $100.00 rebates
each from verizon. I am very familiar with the difficulty with rebates, so I
took it upon myself to make the copies and send them out myself. After not
receiving any rebates I decided to contact Young America to see where my rebate
was. The gentleman was very courteous to me and told me to send out the
original receipt for the phones and I would receive my rebates shortly after
their receipt. I did not want to do this as in order to get my insurance if my
phones were lost or damaged, I would need original receipts. I did send out the
original and waited. After one month I received my letter un-opened with the
words time has expired for this rebate. I called young America only to be told
that it was too late and I was out of luck. So I asked to contact a supervisor
and was told the same thing. This was after talking with a very courteous young
man who had said there would be no problem and just send in the original
receipt. Now I feel I was lied to and wasted all the time I invested to receive
this money promised to us. Very Disappointed and upset with the customer
service that I received. I will copy this letter to the President of Verizon
and to various consumer blogs (http://www.uspirg.org/consumer) (http://www.maryschmidt.com/2006/03/24/we-value-your-business/)

(http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/01/free_the_ad_scr_1.html#comments)

 and websites
until this problem is resolved.

Back in 1991, famed computer pundit
Stewart Alsop claimed that the last mainframe would be unplugged inside of 5
years. He wasn?t alone in that prediction. Many analysts and pundits looked at
the power of the mainframes back then and the rapid growth of PC-based networks
and wrote the epitaph for the mainframe. But it?s 15 years later and mainframes
are still happily humming along as if noone told them they?re not supposed to
be around anymore.

Computer?s based on the x86
architecture grow more and more powerful with each passing quarter. Just
forgetting for a second what?s in the server room, the computer that sits under
your desk is probably a lot more powerful than some mainframe computers that
were sold for millions of dollars 10 years ago.

When I was a PC Analyst for the local
county police department we had an IBM 4381 in our computer room. The county
had paid several million dollars for it on a county bond issue in the mid 80?s.
By 1991, when we moved to a new police headquarters, we had to pay someone to
come take it away for scrap. And the bond was still not paid off. The 486?s we were starting to roll out to officers
were more powerful than that machine. It seemed as if that was the way things
were going to go. Mainframe computers were the dinosaurs of the 90?s.

Yet today, they?re still around. Why?
In an age of dual and quad-core CPUs, blade servers, and the ongoing war
between Window, Linux, and Macs, why are people still paying huge bucks for
mainframes?

Because they work.

Well, let?s also not forget the fact
that IBM has gone out of its way to make sure that mainframes stay relevant. By
incorporating Linux virtual machines inside of mainframe systems among other
things, IBM has in effect created blade servers without the blades.

Beyond that however, mainframes are
solid and secure. They?re also designed in such a way that they?re optimized
for multiple transactions which is increasingly what blade servers and clusters
are being built for. Mainframes have already answered the question that these
new technologies are supposed to be.

IBM doesn?t break out mainframe
revenue anymore but according
to ZDNet, analysts estimate IBM takes in about $10 billion dollars from its
mainframe business. That?s hardware, software, and services together. Not to
mix apples and oranges, but Apple?s revenue last quarter was a little over $4
billion. The Mac business only made up about 55% of that. That
means that over the course of the year, IBM makes about as much money in
mainframes as Apple makes in Macs.

The mainframe is kind of like the old
man from the Monty Python And The Holy Grail ?Bring Out Your Dead?
skit. As much as analysts and pundits (not to mention PC Vendors) would love
for you to toss out your mainframe, if you listen closely enough you can
probably hear it saying ?But I?m not dead
yet!?

Graphics-intensive applications have become more and more
the norm in computers today. Whether you?re talking about the graphics
necessary to create movies such as Cars, to render 3D objects in AutoCad, or
the emerging graphic requirements coming in Vista, computers have long gone
from text-only to basic GUIs to completely graphical in nature. Along with this
has come an increasing need for faster graphics cards and wider bandwidth to
process the millions of pixels being manipulated.

We?ve all seen the progression of graphics in a PC
environment. The first graphics card that was available for a PC-Compatible
could display 4 colors on the screen at a resolution of 320 x 240. You had
choice of a Cyan/Magenta/White palette or a Red/Green/Yellow palette. The first
cards cards were all 8-bit ISA based with a maximum bandwidth of about 8Mbps
(Mega Bits Per Second).

Today, a high-end video card can produce full 32-bit color
with millions of colors at a resolution exceeding 3480x2400.  AGP8 slots have a maximum bandwidth exceeding
2Gbps, and newer PCI-Express cards have a maximum bandwidth exceeding 4Gbps.

So, that raises the question, just how much bandwidth would
something as complicated as the human eye require? Apparently not much. 

According to a recent article in New
Scientist, human retinas operate with a bandwidth of about 8.75 Mbps. That
means you could easily run it on a 16-bit ISA slot or an old PCI slot. As with
most engineering projects, retina is actually theoretically capable of
processing about 4000 times as much data as it does in practice, but the extra
power needed to do so is too expensive. When you think about how much data that
is, it?s pretty impressive that the eye is designed in such a way to process
that much information and send it over a data line that today would be
considered obsolete.

A better analogy may be the amount of bandwidth consumed by
streaming media. In that case, it would take 5Mbps of data to transfer video at
DVD quality. HDTV quality is supposed to take about 15Mbps of bandwidth.  The human retina uses far less bandwidth, and
produces a much higher resolution picture.

In any case, whether you?re talking streaming media
bandwidth or the amount of bus bandwidth needed to process and display graphics
images, it would seem that man made technology still is pretty inefficient. Whether
you?re a fan of evolution or intelligent design, the human eye seems to get the
job pretty well done.    

As I?ve mentioned before, to keep my IT skills fresh I
maintain a small consulting business on the side of my regular day-job here at TechRepublic.
An increasingly worrisome trend I?ve noticed lately is just how many problems I?ve
had to fix as a result of problems arising from Symantec software. Whether it?s Norton Anti-Virus, Norton
Internet Security or (Lord Forbid) SystemWorks, it seems as soon as the user
says they?re having problems with their computer and you start asking
questions, the common denominator is often something Symantec residing on the
system.

I?ve always liked Symantec software. I used to think that
Norton AntiVirus was better than some others on the market like McAfee. And
back in the days of DOS, Norton Utilities were an absolute must have in your
software toolkit. Maybe it?s me, but recently it seems like today there?s just
something wrong with Symantec software.

For example, a recent customer was having problems with her
laptop running incredibly slowly. It would take 15 ? 20 minutes on start up before
she?d have control over her desktop. A quick trip into the Event Viewer showed
that LiveUpdate was having fits trying to access the update server. Even though
her Internet connection was otherwise good, the updating service would continually
try to access the servers, fail, and retry again. Endlessly. In the process,
the whole computer would slow to a crawl.

In another instance, an end user had installed SystemWorks on
their workstation in order to clean up some problems with the registry. Before,
the computer was running poorly, but afterwards the system was a doorstop. I
had no choice but to completely reinstall Windows XP in order to undo the
damage.

Plus, we won?t even go into the times where I?ve run into
customers that have had updated versions of Norton AntiVirus on their systems
and I?ve discovered undetected worms and Trojans lurking about.

In frustration, I?ve turned to recommending AVG for home
users and some of my smaller business customers. I also kind of like Trend?s
software as well. Trend?s online
scanner has been a life saver on several occasions. But with all of the
problems I?ve encountered lately, it?s becoming difficult to recommend Symantec
software.

If this is indeed a symptom of a larger trend, then Symantec
is in trouble. With Microsoft releasing OneCare on one hand, and then shoddy
software causing more problems than they solve on the other, it can?t bode well
for Symantec. I?d be eager to hear about
the experiences other TechRepublic members have had with Symantec stuff. Am I alone in becoming disillusioned with it?