To: Mr. Bill Gates, Microsoft
Re: Vista
Dear Mr. Gates,
Please set aside an afternoon next week to visit with Th’ Gaussling regarding the new Vista operating system. Also, please bring along a cheque for $150.00 as compensation for brain damage associated with Word document compatibility problems with XP. Oh, we’ll need 2 forms of ID.
Golly, Mr. Wizard. As planned obsolescence schemes go, this one is a whopper. It’s an upgrade storm that will eventually rain on everyone. You Microsoft guys are really clever.
Kindest regards,
Th’ Gaussling
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Cough… there are alternatives… cough…
Why, oh why have you gone to the ‘dark side’? I thought you knew better…
Yeah, I know. But being married brings all sorts of complications to life.
Dear Gaussling:
Is the problem the same as described as in the following link?
http://forums.windowsvistamagazine.com/forums/4298/ShowThread.aspx
I’m a bit interested in hearing a bit more of a description. Egon – I’ve been using OS X for several years now and here too there can be problems, that can be quite interesting.
Is openoffice an option? Anybody out there using it and sharing documents with users from the dark side?
Hi Bill,
Using sneakernet (flash memory), I transferred a Word document from Office 2007/Vista to Word in XP. When I tried to open the Word 2007 document in XP, the application was not recognized because of the .docx extension. When I opened from Word, the Office 2007 Word 7 page document gave 143 pages of gibberish.
The link was somewhat useful but not comprehensive. I’m going to have to dive into the deep end on this one.
Cheers,
Th’ Gaussling
We should all march shoulder to shoulder upon Redmond, storm the Microcrap barricades, rip out every one of the 50,000 Linux installs, and substitute Vista. Give it to those bastards good and hard.
Uncle Al has a number crunching app that runs for weeks at a time. C++ source code compiled for WinXP (hard drive boot) and Linux (Knoppix, DvD boot). Run in Linux, in the same hardware, it runs 40% faster than in WinXP. 40% faster in Linux! Hello…
Can you say what kind of number crunching you do? You’re not doing thermonuclear hydrodynamics again, are you? \;-)
Grow a suitable chiral crystal volume. Trim to a solid sphere of given radius. Calculate the moments of inertia of the sphere atom by atom. Calculate the normalized parity divergence, CHI. Repeat with a slightly larger radius. Do it 60-100,000 times. It gets kinda tough around 10^16 atoms. The slope should be -2, the intercept is the diagnostic. Smaller is better. That’s not noise – those are real fluctuations.
quartz, 9 atoms
benzil; not including hydrogens, 48 atoms
Calculation time varies as the number of atoms in the unit cell and the radius^2. Around four hrs/pont a PC becomes mostly worthless. Quartz ate 500 hrs in 16 Opterons plus 250 hrs in 168 Xeons and more – about 80,000 CPU-hrs total.. We’d like to do full benzil, 78 atoms/unit cell.
If any volunteer speaks C++ and Sun Solaris 10, we need you. 60,000 Opteron grid CPU-hrs are available gratis, but none of my folks speak Solaris 10 or parallel grid computation.
Mr Gates claims he doesn’t have enough workers on tech visas to churn out a high enough quality product. Given they are awash in cash and a monopoly to boot perhaps his recent comments on American inferiority are to be given some merit.
Or maybe Microsoft is like a long in tooth blind stripper have drunk on yester-years accomplishments.
Yow!! Well put.