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Yeah, it's 50% thicker, and .3 lbs heaver with the "Dell TravelLiteTM module" module (which means no CD-ROM, right?), only has one USB port, no FireWire, a smaller screen 1024x768, maximum ram is 512MB, and Ethernet doesn't seem to be a standard option. Dell spec.

In contrast, the TiBook (original) is 5.3lbs with battery and DVD, has two USB ports, FireWire, 1152x768 resolution, up to 1GB RAM, has 100Mbit Ethernet standard, and can use a wireless network without sacrificing your PCMCIA slot. Apple Spec.

And it's not bug ugly. "Zealot fanboy" my ass, it's simply a better product.

not to mention the fact that it is environmentally friendly. Why did I brought up this point?

Well, because I've seen some poor form of advertising from a rising star of the PC industry . Why do I call it poor? Because they think that it is a good idea to include a pamphlet of their latest offering on every issue of free daily newspapers in Singapore. Basically it's an ad sleeve covering the paper.

Most of the time people simply pull it out and throw it into the bin. Which is OK in my opinion except that 1/2 an hour later, almost all the bins in the MRT (mass rapid transit) station gets filled to the brim and adverts are flying everywhere. And those marketing guys from that company doesn't seem to bother, or perhaps they are all so bloody rich and never use public transport anyway.

Before you mod my rant as offtopic, think of the essence of this post which is about advertising (what MS and hyperlinked company are doing) and it's implication on people and the environment.

P/S: I do not work for neither company, and all opinions expressed are my own.

The Serial ATA architecture replaces the wide Parallel ATA ribbon cable with a thin, flexible cable that can be up to 1 meter in length. The serial cable is smaller and easier to route inside the chassis (see Figure 2). The small-diameter cable can help improve air flow inside the PC system chassis and will facilitate future designs of smaller PC systems.

As from here

I'm not familiar with this at all, but my department just got a rack from dell for our cluster. It has a really nice pull out LCD and keyboard. The monitor can lay flat and the whole thing slide in when not in use. If you could install something like this at the right height, with a computer hidden in a cabinent underneath, it may work well.

Monitor image

Why not just get a notebook with the same features? It won't be that much more expensive and would be a whole lot more useful than a portable DVD drive without a screen.

1702FP user's guide

The Dell 1702FP is manufactured by Samsung. So is the 1900fp which I've been lusting for. Go figure.

[2000fp is by Acer.]

Dell Documents - Battery Charger Note this page is from their Asia Pacific site.

Dell Introduces Thinnest, Lightest Latitude Notebook Ever

Dell Documents - Battery Charger Note this page is from their Asia Pacific site.

Dell Introduces Thinnest, Lightest Latitude Notebook Ever

As such, this sort of logging will give a good idea of your activities online and when you consider that the UK government has not only leaked copious amounts of personal data in the past (it was possible to buy the name and address for any given National Insurance number for just £10 at one point) but that all this information is now held and maintained by EDS.

There is a solution to this - use software that encrypts your web traffic and URLs and routes them via a proxy server outside the UK. One I have used and can recommend (outside of peak times) is the Java Anonymising Proxy described here. Currently free...

* I prefer SCSI over IDE

* RedHat is a pain to strip down to a bare minimum web server, I prefer OpenBSD. Sleek and elegant like the early days of Linux distros.

* I've used Dell PowerEdge 2650 rackmount servers and they're VERY well made and easy to use. Redundant power supplies, SCSI removable drives, good physical security (lots of locks).

Yes, Dell did the same. You can save $100 on a low end machine by getting Corel Office instead of MSOffice. However, the higher end units are bundled (can I still use that word?) with MSOffice.

The interesting part? Open Office would be more $$$. Why? Because if you select the 'no office suite' option the machine is $50 more than if you take the 'Corel suite'.

Mmmm....

Yes, Dell did the same. You can save $100 on a low end machine by getting Corel Office instead of MSOffice. However, the higher end units are bundled (can I still use that word?) with MSOffice.

The interesting part? Open Office would be more $$$. Why? Because if you select the 'no office suite' option the machine is $50 more than if you take the 'Corel suite'.

Mmmm....

Yeah and if you order upgrades or replacement hardware from Compaq, sorry HP, Gateway, or Dell. It is marked up just as much if not more than Apple's genuine parts. As an example a 1.5 GHz processor was $250 from Dell.

Many laptops already have the floppy/cdrom seperate, and then you walk around with the screen/keyboard/hd

Take the Dell Latitude X200 for instance. 2.8lbs, 0.8" thick. I'm sure that's small enough.

If they hard drive was wireless/seperate, it'd probably be too slow.

There are many, and there have been many ways to utilize fiber for years. As I indicated above, a NIC is not a NIC, I have found the Tigon 3 to be most effective at keeping utilization low under load. If you think a D-Link is going to perform, you would be mistaken, I would venture to guess that in the right situation, with the right packet size, and the right amount of ingress, a more capable 100 mbit controller from 3COM or Intel would outperform a D-Link (which uses a national semiconductor ASIC I believe, that's a guess, but I wont bother to find out because I don't care about D-Link).

I also touched on ingress traffic and live lock in interrupt driven kernels. It's a real problem. Also, speed is relative to packet size (jumbo packets), interrupts coalescence and tcp checksumming offload.

I find that fiber's performance does not denigrate at all as you approach maximum limit in length. I find that Copper is sensitive to RF, and, while gigabit does not have this notion of crossover because it uses all 4 pairs, I hate the idea of crossovers at all (most GE cards now do auto MDX for 10/100).

As I also indicated, there are usually fiber uplinks on switches, as seen here. It has 48 ports, and two fiber ports. [$1300 bucks]. This is a typical use, as is suggested by the design. Clearly it is wise to use the 10/100 to connect to got to workstations, and here, we see a switch with 24 10/100/1000 ports (Cu), and uplink ports, which can be SM or MM fiber. [$2300]

I would say one would use fiber to connect switches to one another, basically deprecating "spanning" style switches, where one must get proprietary cables and whatnot. This gives the flexibility of moving switches far away, and these switches above have options for single mode which can drastically increase range, making cross-corporate-campus communications as trivial as laying the fiber down and very cheap compared to the days of old when repeaters were used.

I work with a 10/100/1000 combo copper fiber switch, and Alteon 180, and we use that to aggregate switches that span out copper to the lab of machines we use to test various things. I find fiber a joy to work with, and tapping fiber connections is far easier. The aforementioned switch would cost in and about $15,000 new, but on Ebay who knows. Clearly fiber to the desktop is not the intent of using fiber, but not using for backbones is the right choice. Flexible transceivers, cables which are priced right when you want to go far distances, and it isn't subject to RF noise, and is easy to tap - and cheap. The taps for tapping single or multimode fiber [70/30 split] are about $600. The taps for gigabit copper are way over that price (this just came out - its neat, and cutting edge, but according to hearsay not at all easy to do because of the 4 channel system GigE Cu uses).

So fiber switches are expensive. But they are good, the can aggregate lots of things from far away, and they are generally newer, always managed. The cheapest 100% fiber switches are in the $4000 range, usually starting at 8 ports.

So is fiber for gamers? No. Is fiber a cheap way to hook up your client machines or low bandwidth servers? No. Is it useful to span switches distances near and far, and to allow certain high volume servers excellent access to bandwidth, and be tappable easily and cheaply, yes! I have been very pleased with both the original AceNIC and the Tigon 3 controllers, and the Alteon switches.

Fiber is essentially a distance giver, and most of the NIC I pointed out in my original post have the same ASIC for both the GigE Cu and the Fiber rendition of the card, but I have found that fiber is more reliable, easier to push to the theoretical maximum speeds for a given packet size. I would probably buy going forward Cu 10/100/1000 switches, and span them with fiber uplinks and aggregate them into a fiber switch and give critical routers and servers access to that aggregate switch.

Another thing to pay attention to when buying switches, is the switching fabric. A lot of cheaper switches out there cant handle every single port going full duplex and 1000 mbit. This is where the fabric becomes the theoretical limiter. Be careful of garbage brands, stick to Intel, 3Com, Sun, Cisco, Extreme, Juniper, Foundry and beefy vendors. Intel and 3COM may be seen as cheesy and cheap to hang with the more scaleable vendors, but they build decent stuff for basic use.

Since SlashDot doesn't automatically generate HREF's from URLs (wtf?), here's a nice link to the Dell website.

The deal was with Dell Japan, and I would imagine this is only going to happen with Dell's Japanese computers. Here is a relevant link at Dell's page, and another story in English.

You know that I am talking about commonly available multi-CPU systems, and not exotic (and insanely expensive) systems with redundant CPUs and memory.

Dell PowerEdge 4600. Supports Chipkill and 2 CPUs. $3k.

Or is this still too expensive?

You're getting a Dell!
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/topics/segtopic_stev en_home.htm

Here's the link: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.a sp?customer_id=19&sku=320-4105

ccg

on the website here it seems fairly compact... :) and dell makes a nice presentation...they presented at work the other day for us their server line (they'll do that when you want to order lots of hardware [20 servers in a few months] from them...) the other day...they had a really cute little projector hooked up to their laptop with a (laptop)vga->dvi(proj) cable...it was p1mp =D so yeah...they cool ;) except the install...I hate their automated installs...pain in my A$$! give me an HP, which just gives me a raid driver and lets me install =D anyway....

It just takes time and re-examination of existing designs. For instance, the Dell PowerEdge 2650 has no internal cabling. The drive backplans pugs directly into the mainboard, which has a PERC3 RAID controller built right into the PCB. Opening the case, all you see is sea of green circuitboards.

Of course, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome with a design like this is properly laying down those circuit traces. Your average ATX board is already pretty cramped and the addition of traces and other major design changes just to do away with cables is currently cost prohibitive for most applications.

However, when you're talking server systems that already cost as much as most people's cars, it becomes easier to justisfy changes like these as they allow for quicker service and higher reliability: cables tangle and can be broken. It takes longer to build and repair systems where cabling must be routed. But when I can just flip a couple of levers and slide a couple of boards around to bring a critical server back online, then my company will be more likely to spend the extra dollars for the feature. It's easily recovered from the shorter periods of downtime.

Like most technology, it will take a while to trickle down from the high end to the consumers.

You don't need to "hack the insides." Just go to Dell's website and access the documentation for your i8K. It contains the pinouts plain as day. You will need to register or you may not be able to see the link, but I don't see what the fuss is all about. Unless you don't want to register, but you gotta give something to get something. Pinouts

For most retailers, you can't even configure a machine that matches a low-end iMac. The closest I could find is this an $1120 Dell vs this a $1433 Apple iMac. Even then, its not a fair comparison because the Dell is using an UltraSharp flat panel (vs the regular flat panel in the iMac, which has more ghosting and less contrast) hooked to a GeForce4 MX (vs the GeForce2 MX in the iMac) and with a vastly superior 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 (vs the 700 MHz G4 in the iMac). That's $200, and at the low end, thats a huge chunk of change. At the high end, I can configure a Dell Precision Workstation with dual 2.4 Ghz P4 Xeon procs, Quadro4 graphics, 2GB of RAM, 120 GB of disk, DVD-RW, 20" flat panel, etc, to compete with Apple top of the line machine with comparable features, but vastly slower procs, a non-workstation graphics card (regular GeForce4) and a 23" flat panel display.

Now if only my iBook had a right mouse button.

Logitech had what sounds like the beginnings of this a while ago, but it was pretty annoying. I'm sure PieMenus is much nicer.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp? customer_id=555&order_code=X200PAD - $2057 in base config (you can take out some of the ram or something...). 2.9 pounds. Begone, troll.

I've noticed that Dell seems to be shifting away from customizability and towards mass production of more standardized models. Their most "value" -priced desktop model is all but unconfigureable.

I've noticed that Dell seems to be shifting away from customizability and towards mass production of more standardized models. Their most "value" -priced desktop model is all but unconfigureable.

Every major OEM still sells computers without an AGP slot. HPQ, Dell, Gateway, Sony. A significant proportion of computer users are forced to use PCI cards because of this. I was at Dell's website the other day and saw that they were selling a Pentium 4 with onboard video and no AGP slot. A Pentium 4!! So your elitist comments not only apply to the southern, white Wal-Mart shopper, but also to many suburbanites and sophisticated city dwellers.

Wal-Mart is a good choice for high-quality, low-priced tech products. Their website is selling Mandrake Linux PCs. I thought you OSS advocates have dreamed for years of a major retailer offering a Linux computer? Shouldn't you be praising Wal-Mart rather than mocking them and their customers? What a way to support the Free software community!

Dell has a list of video cards that they shipped with the system and still currently sell.

I also own a Inspiron 8100, and was very happy when I found that Dell has docs telling you exactly how to take it apart. They must consider it user serviceable.

It doesn't look that way to me.

Dale $Amon from vnl dot com$

People have been doing this since last year. The 8x00 series systems all share the same video card interface. No you don't void your warranty (the delltalk moderators have confirmed this) however it is strongly advised that you replace your old card if you have to send it in for service. One guy reported his GF4GO card disappeared after it being serviced.

To order the card call Dell's spare parts line. More information is available in the Delltalk forums at http://delltalk.us.dell.com Please be smart and use the search function before asking a question that is answered 9000 times already. We'd appreciate it. I'm known as Stonent in the delltalk forums.

Dell ( here for instance) offers Linux as a less expensive option than Windows on at least this server. And as for their competitors, here 's an example of IBM doing the same, but with a greater variety of Linux options.
I'll bookmark these and mark my calendar to see the change on the 26th, since a unidentified source on Slashdot is such a reliable way to get information.

That's what I'm buying for my clients.

Here's a link to one of their server config menus.

On the menu is Win2k, Netware and no OS. So MS doesn't have the strength to do this on servers as they do on desktops. That would be my conclusion, as they'll only do whatever they can for their own profit - consumers be damned.

...until this changes:

Dell and Linux

jason

Well, here's a quick back-of-the envelope:
Dell sells servers. You can get a variety of OS's installed on them. They'll install RedHat for $169. They'll install Win2k Server (5 clients) for $799. So, Linux's 1% revenue share would work out to about 5%. So, say half of Linux sales are actually replacing OEM copies of XP home edition or whatever, that still works out to 3% of the seats of Windows. That's quite a lot.

So Apple is exaggerating, their system is only 47% faster... at burning a hole in your wallet.

How many servers do you see selling with P4s? None as far as I know

That's because P4's are not meant for servers. You probably should look for the Xeon processors up to 2.4Ghz at this point. Here are a few for you to look at :

Dell PowerEdge 2650 - With Dual 2.4 Ghz, 2GB Ram, and 90GB - $7,000

I give up - the Compaq website is just really badly designed. You can look for yourself. Trust me - they are there.

It would have to be software raid, but you can run two hard drives with newer dell laptops. Dell has a $30 carrier that allows you to use a hard drive in the media bay. For my inspiron 8200 the part number is 29MFN for a 9.5mm drive. For a drive, look at the IBM 40GNX with 8mb of cache. There are lots of discussions on this at dell's forums at delltalk.us.dell.com in the inspiron hard drive forum.

How about the Dell Precision M50? Two HDD bays, the RAID would have to be software... expensive, yes - but it's an option.

Apple better be going after the market....

"Minority Report" Mobile Editing Studio Uses Dell

Excerpt:

Dell Precision Workstations and Other Dell Equipment Saved Production Crew Valuable Time and Money

Dell played a major role in creating "Minority Report," an action thriller directed by Steven Spielberg. It is set in Washington in the year 2054 and takes place in a world where the police have developed a psychic technology to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crimes. Detective John Anderton, head of this "pre-crime" unit, finds himself accused of a murder he hasn't yet committed.

The futuristic nature of the film, based on the story by famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, required the actors to interact with virtual objects. The crew needed a fast way to create these complex effects in real time to ensure they would fit precisely with what the actors were doing on screen.

Dell equipment used by the "Minority Report" production crew helped accomplish this difficult task. The solution was to rent a 47-foot trailer and equip it with the latest Dell computer hardware to capture, monitor and edit video in real-time on the set.

The production team installed six Dell PrecisionTM workstations and 10 Dell OptiPlexTM desktops, all with flat panel monitors to save valuable real estate inside the trailer. The systems were loaded with Adobe® Photoshop® , Adobe Premiere® and Macromedia® Director® Shockwave® Studio. Each Dell Precision workstation was configured with a dual 36GB SCSI RAID setup, an IEEE 1394 card and 512MB RDRAM to play back the uncompressed video in full motion as it was streaming in from the set.

The crew used Dell InspironTM laptops for real-time monitoring and for distributing pre-compressed digital information. They also built a complete communication system to stay in contact with the set. This enabled the crew to take this mobile editing setup to the different locations during production.

"Our goal on the set was to create the technical environment that gives maximum flexibility to the actors and the director; it was up to us to work to their rhythm, not the other way around," said Bonnie Curtis, producer, "Minority Report." "Set and talent time are very expensive and the last thing the director wants to hear is 'hold on.' Fortunately, we never had to say those words."

"We saved a 'man-month' of labor at each location because we didn't have to rebuild, reconfigure and rewire every time, not to mention how much we saved by choosing standards-based hardware," said Matthew Morrissey, the film's playback supervisor.

The hardware performed flawlessly," added Morrissey. We needed wicked-fast equipment, huge amounts of storage and great support. Dell delivered."

Dell's involvement with "Minority Report" is both an example of the value Dell delivers to the film industry and a demonstration of how Dell solutions can actually reduce a customer's cost of doing business by utilizing standards-based hardware.

The Dell Dimension 8200 is very similar to that. Push the release button, and you can open up the case just like the Apple cases.

I've had a VAIO for awhile and I can tell you firsthand that the support sux. Before you buy, bop around the support site. Don't worry, it wont take long (not much there). Dell OTOH has been wonderfull.

My brother's Dell has 1400x1050 resolution on a 14.1" screen! Now they're selling 1600x1200 on a 15" screen!

How much better resolution do you want? :-)

Who said that Linux didn't come pre configured? Dell will install Red Hat linux from the start, which they that they are the only major vendors to do so. They even say that Linux is everywhere

Who said that Linux didn't come pre configured? Dell will install Red Hat linux from the start, which they that they are the only major vendors to do so. They even say that Linux is everywhere

eMacs start at $1099, iMacs start at $1399, and PowerMacs start at $1599. Right now Dell has similarly featured Dimension 4500 starting at $899. $500 is not an insignificant price difference, but of course the Dell does have the downside of coming with Windows.

When is the last time you bought a server with an OS pre-installed?

Who me? Never, but SOME people must... I don't think Dell and Gateway offer it because no one buys it. If your next question is When is the last time you bought a server from Dell or Gateway? Well the answer to that question is never as well, but I'm sure some people do that too.

because PC makers (in our case, Dell), will not sell PCs without software