Stocks stumble on Microsoft Vista view

Reuters (excerpt) ^ | February 16, 2007 | Jennifer Coogan

[HAL9000]

Excerpt -

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Friday after Microsoft Corp. tempered revenue expectations for the Vista computer operating system.

~ snip ~

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Balmer said late on Thursday analysts' revenue forecasts for Vista were "overly aggressive." Shares of Microsoft were the top-weighted decliner on the Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100.

"Microsoft can't catch a break. We're at 20 million shares in volume already - that's not your grandmother trading," said Cummins Catherwood, managing director at Rutherford, Brown & Catherwood in Philadelphia. "Those hedge funds can't deal with disappointment. They can't afford to wait for the impact to dissipate."

~ snip ~

[antiRepublicrat]

On one of your posts you were talking about .NET. Just, curious, have you done any work with it on the Mono Project?

None. I've been following it, and I will test for it when I think it's mature enough. I just looked and they plan for .NET 2.0 with Windows.Forms to be complete at the end of this year, so I'll look again then.

[theFIRMbss]

>you're looking for something called thread processor affinity

Thanks for the key phrase. I googled around and found lots of good reading.

[VeniVidiVici]

Now the small business man may make the choice to switch to say Linux, then expend the money for high performance hardware just to run a flashy OS that provides no real benefits to running his business software.

Linux - just around the corner for 15 years!

[AFreeBird]

Linux - just around the corner for 15 years!

Running SuSE 10.2 on my IBM T30 laptop, that originally came with W2K Pro, as I type this. Works great! The only issue I had with it was the Linksys WPC54G card. Kernel level Broadcom (Linksys chip provider) support has not been great because Boadcom hasn't really released the specs so they had to try and reverse engineer support for it. But the NDISwrapper with the XP drivers works just fine.

W2K is still there, but I keep shrinking the partition and giving the space over to Linux. I haven't had the need to boot W2K in almost 2 years now. One of these days, I'll just delete the windows partition all together.

[Vinnie]

I didn't buy a Mac for price alone. T

I've felt the same way. But I'm rethinking the decision.

Between my wife and I we are spending $75/ yr. on premium anti-everything to keep the comps clean.
That means that over 4 yrs the cost is $300 just for anti- everythng.
Then add the time and aggravation of fixing and preventing attacks.

As I said, I'm rethinking buying a Mac.

[VeniVidiVici]

One of these days, I'll just delete the windows partition all together.

C'mon! What kind of AFreeBird are you? Not *chicken* I hope? ;-)

[Afronaut]

credible sources like Tom's Hardware

Now that is funny...American hating Tom Pabst is a sellout

I always love the REASON the market goes up and down. They need one every day. They run out of "reasons" all the time. More sellers than buyers is not going to fly.

I wish someone would copy the "reasons" each day and make a good 365 day list of the "reason" the market moved the way it did on a given day.

[Constantine XIII]

But that'd wear out a flash stick pretty quickly, wouldn't it?

I could be wrong, but I think those things only have a few thousand read/writes before they start wearing out. Good for portable longterm storage, not so much swap space.

[LibFreeOrDie]

It's called "ReadyBoost":

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/readyboost.mspx

I saw it demo'd twice at a Microsoft Launch Event yesterday. The first time, it didn't work; the presenter couldn't get the system to recognize the USB flash drive. The second demo later in the day worked OK on a different system. It only works with high-speed memory devices.

[AFreeBird]

Actually, flash memory MTBF has increased to millions of hours and getting better all the time.

From that standpoint; it's not an issue.

[ShadowAce]

It's true, you can, it's call "Speed Drive" and MAC and Linux don't have it.

..and they don't need it.

[HAL9000]

It wasn't a good day for Microsoft bulls. Check out those volumes at the session opening and closing. Everyone was dumping MSFT.

Tuesday may be a buying opportunity for traders - but not investors.

[HAL9000]

Several studies claim that, after the initial purchase, the total cost of ownership of a Mac is lower than Windows.

And this article may be of interest - Do Macs still hold their resale value?

[antiRepublicrat]

It's called "ReadyBoost":

I know what it is, but USB flash is too slow to make it worthwhile. I believe some mobo and hard drive makers looking to put some flash in their products for this, in which case it should work quite well. OTOH, flash products have a limited number of read-write cycles. One million read/writes may sound like a lot, but it can go very quickly if the cache algorithm changes the memory a lot.

[Constantine XIII]

Huh. Nifty!

I stand corrected. ;)