Slashdot Mirror

Because there are two or three manufacturers of 3.5" floppy disks - there aren't any more manufacturers entering the market, so it is a slow decline. You can still buy 3.25" disk drives as a option for a new PC (+$10) just in case.

It's strange to think that back in the 1990's, we used to think 1.44 Megabytes of storage was extremely generous. Just about every student would have at least one or two solid plastic disk boxes (ten disks each). The most exotic disks would be multi-colored

Now the disk themselves are being recycled into bags and other useful objects

I'm busy because I'm the only IT guy in our organization

I know what you're talking about.

After I got a full time job doing admin/helpdesk work for a larger company with a more proper (though terribly underpaid) IT Dept., I learned that not only is cutting corners hazardous (because it makes you look bad), it often eats up more cash, via your time, than just buying whatever the fully supported and proper solution is for what you need.

If you're flying solo in systems administration, and your boss says, "We need on our network/server/desktop," and you find a couple of products that do what you need, get the cost of closed source product A with a support contract and open source product B's support contract, particularly if said product's failure interrupts line of business, and present them as options to your boss and as the cost thereof.

Having someone to call in the event of a nightmare that knows more about a product than you ever will is quite the life and time saver. Furthermore, assuming that you being on your own for this business is indicative of the amount of equipment you're responsible for, paying even $5k for support contracts annually or even less often is a hell of a lot cheaper than you troubleshooting problems on your own or hiring a second admin or a contractor to fix what you can't or don't have the time for.

Lastly, get yourself a sales rep with an ISV. Personally, I've used PC Connection and Insight, and even though I go to Newegg for my personal purchases, having someone you literally call to ask about products and price quotes is a godsend. It's rather beneficial to have a relationship with a good sales rep, even if you only call them once or twice a year. That ability to pick up the phone, say, "My boss wants me to do X, what do you guys have that'll get X done, and what's the cost/feature difference between the varying products?" and get a comprehensive answer immediately or in a few hours via email while you're doing other work sure beats the hell out of researching it for hours or days, coming up with the same or inferior answer, and having to bill the company for hours where it looks like you've gotten nothing done.

Solo administration isn't always necessarily about what you can do or how much administration knowledge or experience you have---though if you've got no idea how to set up a basic Windows SBS you might want to consider classes or a career change---it's really more about the resources you can exploit to get the job done as quickly, efficiently, and most importantly as correctly as possible.

And remember, if you tell your boss how much something costs, you explain why, and he tells you to GTFO, then just do it. It's not worth your time, and ironically, it's generally not worth the company's time either. The only person who'll give him a lower price quote is someone who's going to struggle with things as much as you will without taking advantage of the things he could and should to get the job done.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I thought I'd point out that you can apparently get an external port replicator, but it's a) honkin' ugly and b) expensive.

...If you consider some poor sucker is paying $655.52 for the whole office package. I'd rather pay $98 for an xml editor than $557.52 for MS Office sans editor. Not that the xml editor is that important but I'd rather throw away $98 than throw away ~$600.

Perhaps this is a little poetic justice for MS's fleecing of their own customers.

"Do you have any idea how much of a bitch it is to keep backups of gigabytes or terabytes of data constantly preserved and updated? How much time it takes to make an image and put it on tapes?"

Use a tape carousel ...

Looks like it is $80 (including CPU?!) in the US:

945GC Mobo + Atom 230

this place has it for $81. Don't quote a UK site if you want to show of a low price :) Poor Brits have to pay way more than Yanks do for electronics.

I still need to own a computer, have Internet access, and pay for the electricity to hear it.

On the other hand we are off to a fantastic start. The software to do pro level recording is free. The hardware interfaces to do high quality multi-track recording are down in price. The Behringer U-Control series is quality at a bargain basement price if you only need CD or 48KHZ 16 bit quality.

http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Detail.htm?sku=7866464 CD quality for under $50! Works out of the box in Ubuntu Studio.

For starters, I recommend Ubuntu Studio. It is based on the Real Time kernel for low latency capture with no buffer over/under runs (when set up properly) a good USB capture board. M-Audio USB and PCI stuff work well. Avoid firewire on Ubuntu at this time. It still has issues. For software use either Audacity directly with the hardware or use Ardour GTK2 with Jack. Ardor is a little harder to get going with Jack, but the patch bay for effects can't be beat. Industry standard 24 bit 48KHZ sample rates is directly supported as well as CD standard 16 bit 44.1KHZ and 32bit floating point 96KHZ for serious mastering.

Depending on your choice of hardware, recording masters at 2-8 tracks isn't difficult. (I have both 2 channel 16 bit 48KHZ, and 4 channel recording hardware with support up to 96 KHZ samples in true 24 bit glory.) Getting a drum 4 track recording is easy ready for post production EQ and mix-down. After the drum track is down and edited adding compression, limiting and EQ, adding the lead and bass guitar is next, followed by lead and backup vocals. Then the vocals are ready for stereo FX on another track and stereo guitar FX on another track then final post production. Audacity handles 4 drum tracks, 2 guitar tracks 2 stereo guitar FX tracks and 4 stereo vocal FX tracks just fine. It's fun to watch playback of all 18 tracks and have control over each while you tweak it for 2 track mix-down for the master tape at 48KHZ 24 bit and master CD at 44.1KHZ 16 bit. Real-time low latency playback of the drum and guitar tracks is needed for adding the vocals. Sequenced or real keyboard is optional. Vista is not suited for this.

What to avoid...

1 Windows Vista. It is not real-time. To get it to work requires large buffers placing a high latency on your capture. This makes recording a track while playing a track (adding the vocal to the background track) almost impossible without lots of post production to time sync the tracks.

2 Anything SoundBlaster. SB compatibility is another name for re sample. They have no direct capture at 24bit 44.1, 48, and 96KHZ. They are OK for VOIP telephone, podcasting, and speech recording, but will mangle serious music mastering. Your software may chose other same/bit rates, but remember, it is re-sampled, not captured at that rate.

What to get.. Pro sound mixer. Some have the audio capture board built-in. Remember the limitations on fire wire. They are OK on Windows XP. Audacity is free and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some fire ware mixers have 8 track capture! Awesome.. But it is Windows only at this time.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Ardour if fantastic if you want to step up. You have to get jack working to use it. It has a much steeper learning curve to route all the patch cords and you can overload the processor and get glitches. This is for advanced users with hot CPU's.

http://ardour.org/

So if you have a laptop with a USB port, a USB capture device, and a source of quality sound such as a mixing board or guitar amp with line out, you are ready to make CD quality recordings.

Oh, I forgot the other requirement.. Talent.

PC Connection has an excellent selection of computers (both desktops and laptops) that are bundled with XP Pro without too much of a price hit. In fact, at a quick glance at their site, I don't see any Vista-loaded systems at all. I have been purchasing from them at work because of this.

Crap. I forgot to preview, and I blew the link. The link to the $799 player is as follows:

http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=7235 241

They are still there and still taking orders until 2AM for next-day shipment. At least most of the ones I remember.

What's changed is the shipping prices have gone up. With sites like Pricewatch etc., it is harder to subsidize the shipping cost by burying it in the cost of the product. Pricing is just too competitive these days. If anything, it's the opposite now, lots of places appear charge inflated shipping to subsidize the costs of the goods.

Back when you bought your Newton, these catalog places were selling things at or close to list price. They could easily afford a $3 shipping gimmick.

The original poster asks "Who do Slashdot readers turn to when technology goes wrong? Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?" My answers are "PC Connection"and "yes". I've been dealing with them for well over a decade, and they've never disappointed. Overnight shipping for a Saturday delivery will cost you, but if they have it in stock and you order it before 3am ET it will be there the next day.

Disclaimer: I'm just a customer, not affiliated with them in any other way. And yes, I realize this sounds like a blatant plug, but they've been really good for me and I figure that they might be just as good for someone else.

They have never let me down ...

http://www.pcconnection.com/

http://www.macconnection.com/

I was a Windows guy until I bought a used iBook G3 that was running Mac OS X 10.1.

Then 10.2 came out and I was in your exact same position.

I've discovered that upgrading Mac OS X is absolutely nothing like upgrading Windows.

The biggest thing is that their is no "Upgrade version" vs. "Full version". Just drop your money at the counter for the OS and take it home.

The second biggest thing is that upgrades just work. It's still prudent to backup your disk [See Note: below]. But after the upgrade all of your "just-so" preferences are still there, all of your apps still run, and your operating system is running the latest major version with zero problems and 30 minutes of time invested.

I bought a used iBook G3 with 10.1, then 10.2 came out. I had the exact same worries you have, but the upgrade was not only flawless, with my preferences carried along, but it actually made the computer faster.

Just last week I bought a new 12" PowerBook. During the initial setup it asks if you have an old Mac. If you say yes, it walks you through the three steps required to copy your old settings over to the new Mac. When you finally log into your new Mac, you find your environment just like your old one.

Note: The easiest way to back up your Mac is the spend $50 as PC Connection for a Firewire 3.5" hard drive enclosure. Backup to a disk you already have, unhook your backup, then upgrade. If anything goes wrong you just restore your disk.
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?sku=5435 505&SourceID=k22350

As soon as I can afford a USB keychain thingy
You haven't been checking the prices lately. Skip a few lunches times and get 64 MB for under $15. Or schmooze around a trade show; they are cheap enough now for marketing freebies (preloaded with marketing literature, of course).

My Siemens SX 66 (HTC Blue Angel) does cell/SIP/Skype/etc. now via 802.11/bluetooth/etc. A number of other phones (other incarnations of the HTC Blue Angel as well as the HP 6315) can do all this stuff, too.

And, if you're looking for this sort of thing without the cell phone, there are existing products for that, including the KW2000 IP Connection WiFi Netphone.

Q

I have to say after reading the rumors, I was suspect that the Mac Mini would be underpowered, but after completing a web-app dev project on a 1Ghz iMac with 768MB ram, I find the possibility of developing with this 1.25 Ghz sub-$650 workstation (when you factor in a good KVM from the likes of Belkin and some more Ram) to be awesome.

1.25 Ghz Mac Mini - $499
Belkin 2 port KVM - $38
512 MB Ram (for 1.25 iMac) - $93

What blows my mind even more is that the $650 our company would spend just on Office and Visual Studio _licensing_ gets all the software (Xcode) for developing as well as OS X and, oh yeah, the computer!

Frankly, I'm looking for the opposite: an Athlon 64 laptop with nVidia video, and they're incredibly bloody rare.

There are only three such laptops I know of: the Acer Aspire 1520 series, the Asus L5000D series, and the Compaq R3000Z (identical to the HP zv5000z).

Right now, the Acer is looking like my best bet. The Compaq/HP is out because I really can't stand how horribly ugly HP's case designs are--I'd rather not have a laptop that makes me ill to look at. The Asus is out because of the insane price--both the Acer and the Compaq/HP come out to around $1200 or so, but the Asus is around $3000. Only problem is that I have no idea how well the Acer works with Linux--there's literally no information on it and Linux out there. It's also primarily sold in the UK--I've only found one American company selling it.

Oh, well--maybe in a few months there'll be more AMD64+nVidia laptops out there...

$40 wirelss router. A single computer on the back end running NoCat/Squid/Etc. to handle authentication/filtering/etc.

Which is better? Saving $10 to use an 8-year-old computer with an 8-year-old power supply that consumes 10x the power and takes 5+ times the space, or a small, silent, cool device that is UNDER WARRANTY and has no moving parts?

And in case you missed the "but I can't redirect the initial connect to a different page!", I can do exactly that ON THE BACK END! Why would I put that page on 100 different access points where a single change has to be made 100 times? YOU PUT IT ON THE BACK END!!!

Jeez. Soon you'll be telling me that I shouldn't pay $75 for a print server, I should drag out an old 486 and pay a penny an hour for the electricity to make my own print server that takes up twice the room of the printer itself?

$1000 for one seat? What version are you getting and where are you buying it? You can get Visual C++, which is all you need to compile most open source stuff, for $100 so or from places like PC Connection. If you look hard enough you may find it cheaper elsewhere.

I tend to agree that MS is on the way out, but...

Is the money that I make forcing people to buy things that they don't need (for example, an entire office license if all they need is Outlook) worth the money that I lose when people start flocking to free alternatives when they don't like I'm offering?

Geez, I get tired of hearing about how you can't get Office components independently. You just want Outlook? Then just go buy Outlook! If you want to argue for OO.o as opposed to MS Office, just point out that it's free to acquire, and it works enough like MS Office that retraining costs are cheaper than Office licensing. This argument would have the additional advantage of being true!

Sean

It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage.

Like this?

Or this

Yeah, the prices are ludicrous, but you can buy them.

I'm a happy OpenOffice.org user, but I think we should keep our criticisms of MS accurate.

Sean

It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage.

Like this?

Or this

Yeah, the prices are ludicrous, but you can buy them.

I'm a happy OpenOffice.org user, but I think we should keep our criticisms of MS accurate.

Sean

Shittiest is subjective, but you might take a look at QIC tapes. They never quite seemed to hold enough, and back in the early 90's the drives seemed to change capacities and thus the exact type of tape needed about every 6 months. Plus, the drives run off of the floppy controller and the software usually sucked pretty bad. They're supported by Linux with ftape though.

;)

New Hampshire is also a nice Sales-Tax-Free place to shop... or mail order outlets located in NH.

FYI Sony makes a PCMCIA 802.11g card w/ an acceptably small antenna

AFAIK, Metrowerks was mostly used for as a remote debugger rather than as a compiler. Other compilers for embedded chips were used.

Don't even get me started on this!

At these prices, the damn things better make me breakfast, you follow?

Maybe I should just pick them up for 11.95 US$ here?

I just thought I would throw in my two cents and also vote for the Thinkpad. I've administered well over 25 of them and continue to recommend them over just about any other laptop on the market. They are simply more well-built than pretty much every other laptop out there.

For the people who are saying Thinkpads are too expensive, I just got word of a deal today on the Thinkpad T40. This is from PC Connection, which is an IBM reseller. (I don't work there, but my friend has a business account with them.) This deal just came in today: Thinkpad T40 for $1149

If you do order from PC Connection, call and ask for Terri and she may be able to get you a little better of a deal than what is on the website. I tell you, if I had the money, I'd be buying a Thinkpad from them right now... but I don't, so I leave this gem of a deal for the rest of you to fight over. ;)

To add to my last post, here is a Thinkpad T-series for $999. There are several others around that price range.

We have bought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from PC Connection (corporate account) and have never had any problems. HTH.

PC Connection has a ton of used Thinkpads for that price. Check out the T-series and X-series. They are going to be much nicer laptops than some piece-of-crap no-name laptop, too. Thinkpads last for YEARS.

BTW, if you call PC Connection, you can usually get a better price than what is shown on their website.

It seems that a lot of people replying to this thread haven't checked out color laser prices in the past couple of years. It used to be that the HP 4500 series was over $2000. However, that's no longer the case.

I picked up an HP Color Laserjet 4500 about a year ago for $600. This awesome printer had less than 10,000 pages on it. One $89 JetDirect 10bT Ethernet card later, I have a fantastic network printer that will last me for many years. I do a lot of prepress, brochures, etc. and the thing has already paid for itself just in printing out work for my clients (I charge them about half of what the local printer charges, and I've made plenty of money from that.)

I admit that $600 for a printer with less than 10,000 pages is a great deal, but there are some on eBay that are coming down under $800. (Note: Don't have one shipped... buy locally if at ALL possible. These things are HEAVY.)

If you're interested in a new color laser, the little Laserjet 1500L printers offer great bang for the buck. They're more unobtrusive than the giant 4500 series, but they have the same great laser quality starting at around $800. PC Connection has good prices for these as well, especially if you open an account with them.

If you want a brand-new giant color laser, try the Color Laserjet 4600. Yes, these are in the $2000 range, but if you're printing hundreds of pages per day, they are a good value.

I would never buy an inkjet again for a business. Yes, you can get an inkjet printer for $100, but those cartridges are a killer ($30 and they last perhaps 150 pages.) My color toner cartridges are $125, but they last for six thousand pages. The black toner cartridges are cheaper and go for 10,000 pages or more. At 11,000 pages, I've only ever had to replace one cyan cartridge, and I routinely do runs of a few hundred pages each. I'll never go back to the treadmill of inkjet cartridge upgrades.

For a church, I'd say the 1100 and 2500 series ($1200 or less) will work out great. Good luck on finding a printer that works well for you!

Damn. You beat me to the punch. I was just looking at one of their video conference the other day.

According to the sales literature it is a self contained unit with no need to connect to a computer (So sales guys might be able to set one up.) and costs about $270 per unit

I bet my money on this:Labtec Verse 504 I got it for only $8.88 at the local walmart and has really good noise cancelling technology. No headsets needed, voice comes out flawlessly, and easily THE best mic for its price range.

At $1600*, I don't see this being for "Joe Desktop" either. Maybe corporations will buy them for energy and space savings or your average home user will like the "green" aspect, but there a lot of other, cheaper options. Hopefully it does well, but it's the old "too expensive for the non-enthusiast, too limited for the power freak" problem.

* Price from PCConnection here.

Frequently when I check brick and mortar companies (we aren't even talking about Office Depot here, they're outrageously priced), the prices, (particularly including tax) aren't as good as I can get from a reputable online retailer (sometimes even with 2nd day air). A few sources I trust, one of which is also a catalog retailer:

Techstore - Reliable, not necesarily a bargain. Decent support, fast delivery (four warehouses in the US, widly separated for best delivery time). They don't trans-ship, but their RMA is reasonable.

PC COnnection - Reliable, good prices, decent delivery times, EXCELLENT RMA. I had a Linksys router go bad for no apparent reason and they trans-shipped one to me along with reimbursement for sending the old one back. They also do catalog.

Bunta - Decent prices, ok delivery time. Haven't had to send anything back yet.

Multiwave Direct - Speedy delivery, good prices, reliable service. If I can find it on Multiwave, I would buy from them first. Products ordered UPS ground from Multiwave tend to show up within 2-3 business days.

OK...caveat: if you want it right now you might as well find a brick and mortar. If you can wait a few days or a week, I find online to truly be cheaper.

The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.

The Transmeta ultralight noteboooks page also has "How to Buy" links for all the listed US-market notebooks.

(for the benefit of those browsing above the AC's...)

Hard disk space is NOT cheap. Have you seen the prices of hard disks recently?

Yeah, I got a 30GB drive several months ago for about $150, and prices have gone down since then. That's cheap. About 3 times as expensive as blank CDR's, megabyte for megabyte, but it is cheap.

But of course, I'm not the type to spout numbers without some kind of evidence. Check here, or if that's not big enough check here or here. Yeah, it's more than a few beers, but what were you expecting to pay for serious storage?

$150 buys a 30GB drive these days. Oh, wait, those all seem to be backordered, but you can settle for 40GB for $135 and have it tomorrow. Much more reliable than compressed filesystems, I'd imagine...

As an experiment, I looked for a low-end consumer PC from a known company. Something that could be found at a local store, included some software and that had a warranty and some semblance of support. I found this, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 6635, for $619. No monitor or Ethernet card included. Add $249 for the HP 15" monitor and $70 for a 3COM 3C905B-TX 100Base-T Ethernet card. That ups the price to $938. Rebates cut the price by $100, to $838.

So for fairly comparable systems, the iMac is $999 (MSRP of iMac/350) and the PC is $838. The PC is $161 cheaper, but the user has to install and configure the Ethernet card.

beyond.com has a keyboard that can switch between Dvorak and QWERTY, and comes with typing software to learn Dvorak.. for only $36

Another one for $49 at PC Connection

a pretty wild looking one.. "Comfort Keyboard System", which is available in dvorak, qwerty, sun and mac (Sun Qwerty? Wild!)

In addition to the phone-line networking products previously mentioned, Intelogis makes a power-line networking product, PassPort, which is promising because they've open-sourced their code and are working on Linux drivers. And, they're cheap! $109 for two PCs and a printer isn't shabby. Of course we're only talking about 350Kbps, but when you're sharing 56K or ISDN (128K) who cares. Plus, I don't know why, it appeals to me to be able to have only one thing to plug in. The brick IS the jack. cooool.