I'm not foolish enough to predict the end of Microsoft but perhaps, Lord willing, it will shrink back to a more fitting approximation of its name. I have been a Micro-phobe for decades so my previous laptop, purchased four years ago, initially arrived with no operating system... plus the promise of the vendor to help me load Linux onto it. Though that project was a moderate success, many of the accessories, like the DVD player and cam could not be activated. I caved and purchased WinXP and have been relatively pleased with it.
Having learned my lesson, 6 months ago I purchased a shiny new ThinkPad with Win7 64 bit installed. Much to my surprise, since this is my second Win7, little of my legacy work software worked. Repeated efforts to install virtual machines and dual boot XP failed. My shiny machine was basically worthless for actual work. Scanning the usual sources of help, I found many many people in similar straights. (Now in defense of MS, my most important software is an old statistics package from SPSS that runs on 16bit Windows.) So first take-a-way - your key software may not run on Win7.
After successfully hosing up my system, I unpacked the recovery disks - yes ThinkPads still include disks. I installed the Win7 operating system - but this time, it happened the disks were for 32bit. I wouldn't think that mattered, but now everything works.
My point... Microsoft is not interested in supporting your legacy software and they are moving away from it. Make plans...
Just for fun I tried running my SPSS on Linux... and even without any Windows software, it runs just fine. So, if you are interested in preserving your legacy Windows environment, you probably want to look into Linux.
Next time, The Cloud... :)
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
2010 News
Wow! It has been quite a while since I've posted. We've been busy reinventing cement (http://recocement.com) and beating modeling tests (two of the top modeling companies in the past 3 years) plus several others. A Ph.D. statistician told me this past week that we have a 'modified bayesian system'. He also said, "that happens to be what the consensus now admits achieves the most successful results... lucky you stumbled onto it." Well, I like to think it was more than a stumble... we just kept trying to make it better and better and now its the best. People ask me if it is better than RFM... please :). We had one client that retested and re-tuned their RFM system for 18 months, incorporating what we were teaching them. Nevertheless, when we would meet at the DMA in New York, they would buy dinner. "Why are you buying dinner?" "I'm the vendor!"
"Well, every time we use your system, we find about 20% more names than we would find without it... and they make money."
One of the tests which we contested recently, we generated twice the unique names of the competition. Now often, if you have more names, they aren't as good, but in this case, even the worst segments of ours beat the best of theirs. What this means is that our system is finding the good names in the bad spots and ignoring the bad names in the high segments - that incidentally is the best that modeling can do for you.
John <><
"Well, every time we use your system, we find about 20% more names than we would find without it... and they make money."
One of the tests which we contested recently, we generated twice the unique names of the competition. Now often, if you have more names, they aren't as good, but in this case, even the worst segments of ours beat the best of theirs. What this means is that our system is finding the good names in the bad spots and ignoring the bad names in the high segments - that incidentally is the best that modeling can do for you.
John <><
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