The headline read: “Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd.”
I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and read it again.
The headline still read: “Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd.”
It wasn’t the Onion. This was too weird to be the Onion. Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, and certainly one of the most well known, decided that in order to make a point about empathy, he would release a jar of mosquitoes at a talk he gave at the TED conference on malaria in developing nations.
Now, I’m all for Bill’s charity work; and you have to admire a guy who uses the money he’s made towards good deeds. But I’m a little bit worried that Bill Gates may have finally decided to make the full-fledged leap from eccentric billionaire to evil genius.
Speaking of Microsoft and full-fledged leaps, IT Business edge reported that while users of Windows XP will be eligible to upgrade to Windows 7, it only means that Microsoft will sell you Windows 7 for a reduced price. XP users will have to reformat their hard drives to use Windows 7.
This is major.
For various reasons, Vista has not been a popular operating system compared to it’s older brother, XP; in fact, by last summer, Vista had a grand total of 8.8 percent of the market. XP is at 87.1% of the market.
Though it’s easy to blame Microsoft, there has to be a technical reason why there’s no upgrade path from XP to Windows 7. You don’t last long as a company if you make things harder for 87.1% of your customer base to upgrade.
If your company is in the 87.1% – and statistically speaking, that’s more than half – this will probably have a huge impact on companies IT, as companies repeat the processes of reformatting, installing Windows 7, reinstating data, and reinstalling apps for every XP computer. Perhaps even network engineers may have to put projects on hold as they get drafted when the enterprise decides to upgrade.
Second – backing up the data on all those computers before the reformat – especially in the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley record keeping era – will be crucial and easy to screw up. Additionally, backing up all that data to “the network” will increase the amount of traffic on the LAN.
So network engineers are going to have to answer some hard questions: Can the hard drives be backed up via the LAN without impacting application performance? In what ways can we use scheduling and packet prioritization to minimize the impact on application performance? How much money will the company lose due to degraded performance; would it be cheaper to simply buy external hard drives for everyone in the company?
(And if you don’t know the answers to these questions, shouldn’t you?)
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