On average it takes Win32 about 3 years of average-user neglect and outright abuse to get to the point where it's nonfunctional, and even then it's recoverable with simple maintenance procedures.
I'd have to agree.
Nah, reinstalling is just a sign of incompetence at dealing with Windows. And I mean that seriously.
On this I have to disagree. Given the price of equipment and software today, it's frequently less expensive to replace a PC running Windows and Office and transfer data than it is to correct some of these same problems. Granted, I can still repair OS problems, restart performance, etc., but frequently it's not worth it.
Alternatively, if you have store all data off of the machine and maintain a generic image for the OS pre-driver install plus an image with applications and patches and the like, than you can restore the machine to operation pretty quickly too.
People and businesses tend to be pretty cost aware these days. With new computers from Dell starting at $399 and new computers being substantially more powerful in all respects to several year old hardware, 4-8 hours of tech time can buy them out of the jam too. While I'd like that money in my pocket, I have an obligation not to soak them. If it's $1000 to fix an old and substantially damaged operating system or $750-1000 to replace and transfer data (including patching the new machines with updates), clients tend to go with the later. The exceptions tends to be anal ecentrics who are afraid of any differences or those that can't wait a week for shipping and scheduling of time.
My Windows systems tend to be like the previous posters: A strong mix of older operating systems and hardware that stay around for years. And that's with being software testbeds as well as everday desktops. Hardware testbed don't survive as long probably because of ESD and frequent power cycling.
I used to feel the same way about recoving versus reinstalling. But these days, people sweat the dollars more. Especially with the mindset that the value of the hardware establishes in their minds the value of the system which of course is incorrect thinking. It's the value of the data and productivity. But that's a touch mindset to shake.
I too have long experience doing small business consulting and in some other areas. One thing you could do is use RAID-1 with a spare drive. That way if you lose one, you aren't screwed. You also could have a couple spare drives in hot-swap carriers. Pull a drive every night and have a duplicate of your server. Fire up the duplicate server and pop in your known good pull and boot if you server fails.
OS dependent, you don't even have to have exactly the same hardware if you use a more generic kernel build and you can list a different NIC for the spare server in the conf file for modules assuming you aren't compiling them into the kernel.
Continue with good backups made to another machine, to tape/CD/hard drive, or off-site. This way, even if your good pulled drive is a little out of date, you can bring to data current in short order.
You don't mention the OS of the server or budget, but I'll assume that since you've got 2 machines per desk time 15, you can afford a spare server. You don't mention OS and that affects cost, but still, if you are doubling up on hardware on desktops, you can afford to do this or most any of the other solutions offered.
Of course, you get what you pay for and if the experience is lacking in house, hire a knowledgeable consultant or company you trust to do it for you.
I was at a dive resort in a very out of the way destination about 5 years ago. They had some real computer issues which I straightened out and in return, I got to go on a fishing charter by myself (all alone in the boat with the captain) and then later got to take a date horse back riding. The resort owned the boat. The horses belonged to a small ranch on the other side of the island. No bad for a non-dive before fly day!
About a month ago, I received a similar email from a trojaned Earthlink account. I contacted Earthink abuse first and they basically said not our problem, not our customer doing it. They maintained that since someone else was controlling the account, not the customer, they weren't interested. I responded saying that it was their IP address and they should alert their customer but got no response. Likely, it was a low level support person answering the email but you'd think that they'd forward it on to someone in authority.
I got no response from the credit card companies that I contacted or a nice remark about "if _your_ card is affected...". I didn't even bother with the feds since in the past they've only been interested in large dollar amounts affecting large companies. And local cops are not the answer to an internations credit card number theft ring.
I'm usually too busy to deal with this sort of crap and I let it drop since I'd too much to do (yea, yea, I know). Didn't remember until this came up.
A card of mine was one of the million plus stolen from the old onsale.com database breakin several years ago. I noticed a $10 charge by a "Moscow Telecom" and notified my bank. They responded that their had been a theft and they were immediately replacing cards (via ground mail) that showed activity like this and that my card was one of the affected cards. They actually said that they had a list of all of their cards that were affected but were only replacing cards showing suspicious activity! I was floored. They also said that small transactions were being posted against the cards because most people failed to check their statements or if the did figured that since it was small, it must be right and they didn't remember. $10 times 1 million plus cards is a lot of scratch every month.
"World's Largest Credit Union" indeed. Acted more like a big bank not wanting to get stuck with a big expense.
Maybe next time, I'll forward it to Interpol first but they are also a bureacracy too.
That's what the "Teddy Bears of Doom" are/were all about. They were the people that beat up the programmers for buggy code. They were immortalized as one of the four random faces in the Windows 3.1 Easter Egg (I believe Gates, Ballmer, I forget but I think it was the project manager who left after 1 year cycling sabatical, and the Teddy Bear).
I was a huge fan of the Spot back in '95 and '96. Got really tired of it by the time it was killed off. Loved the dog, but not the too sexy for the dot com bubble silly Cyberian adjective.
If memory serves, when it was thankfully put to sleep, it was because the production company was bought out by AOL which consolidated staff. AOL was heading in an entirely different direction.
The Spot is probably why I can't abide shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, etc. I burned out hard on this stuff.
I checked out the new site/same as the old site, with all new faces but one. They still take themselves far too seriously. It was a great concept 10 years ago. Now it's just lame. Please, God, make it go away.
Maybe I'm just old, in relative terms. I'm 40 now.
I've found the the people that get the most done get the most additional assignments. A Navy chief once told me "if you want something done, find the busiest person and give it to them". The point being that most everyone else is a slacker. I found myself doing most of my division's work on the submariness I was on. It shouldn't be any wonder that I wasn't very happy and had a lot of stress.
Perhaps it's ironic and perhaps not that the people that slack off seem to be the happiest. So now that I've been out of the Navy for nearly 12 years (6 in), and working 80 hour weeks on average during that time, I can tell you my current recipe for coping: twice the normal daily prescribed dosage of Prilosec (doctor says to) in an attempt to heal an esophagus damaged by stress induced esophagitis. And antacid at least once every day or two on top of it and about 20 hours less per week. In large doses, this kind of work related stress is terribly unhealthy. Other people I know that are about 40 as well in IT have developed stress related problems dealing with their stomachs and colons. I'm sure it doesn't help that I come from a largely unemotional waspy family and live with an emotional woman of Italian decent.
It's not worth it. Frequently, the fuck ups when they do something right get rewarded because it's so unexpected. The people that crank out huge volumes of work go unrecognized because it's normal.
The paradox isn't unlike what used to happen when smoking in the work place was much more common. Smokers got their hourly or every couple of hours smoke break while the non-smokers toiled away. If a non-smoker stopped for the same break, they were ordered back to work because they were slacking off. The smoker continued to be rewarded for what essential was behavior that took time away from work and (and caused health problems).
Perhaps doing RAID over network block devices would solve your reliability problem. NBD is designed for RAID, you distribute over partitions that are physically separate from each other on different machines and segments, you can do heartbeat, etc. Don't assume that this is necessarily the "cheap way out with cheap hardware". You can do this with fast hardware that's backed by hardware RAID too and use it in a network RAID 0, 1, or 5 scenario for example.
I think the strongest argument for the validity of the release of waste is the fact that one of the "conspirators" was an officer.
Absolutely.
But even an officer can act without authorization, so this is not an airtight argument.
So can a board member. I'm on the board of a company where we had the situation of a board member acting independantly and then expecting compensation. Of course, this individual was voted off the board the following year but the damage was done. It was also cheaper to settle than litigate. This can happen with officers too and probably does more frequently.
Let's see. Nullsoft's employee posted it who has had the authority to post in the past. It appeared for how long (?) on their site listed as GPL. Their statement mentions nothing about infringement on others copyrights or patents.
IANAL. To me, it seems me, however, that Nullsoft did in fact make this GPL software. If I were to use it, say, for remote encryption key generation linked to openSSL or openSSH or whatever, I'd consult my lawyer first but it looks like they've got no recourse. The post by AC I'm responding to claims that Nullsoft discovered a license violation which it doesn't, other than to now claim that it's copyrighted software. I think they might be able to claim that if you got it after that date, they've changed the license but if someone got it prior to that and reshared it with ANY mods, the GPL stands.
This strikes me as akin to a company doing unauthorized work, billing for it and then hoping that you'll pay just because they sent you an invoice. Or better yet, you recieve an unsolicited radio in the mail in the mail from me. You turn it on and I attempt to bill you. In the US, it's a gift. No contract existed, I didn't ask for it and you sent me something with no legal strings attached. It's not a misshipped package. It doesn't matter if it's a $5 radio and you billed me $5 or a $5 radio and you tried billing me $5000.
You don't provide system characteristics orther than "lots of memory and hard drive space". So I'll assume that performance doesn't have to be earth shattering.
Since you are talking about home, space, noise and electricity *should* be concerns since your employer won't compensate you for those, even if you are the employer. Two Travla 147 cases and your choice of 3 different mini-ITX backplanes can be married to 4 mini-itx motherboards. That means in 2 rack units, you can have 4 quiet systems that don't use huge amounts of electricity with up to 1GB of RAM and a single IDE hard drive in the chassis. Travla 146 has 4 internal 3.5" bays. You won't kill yourself with expenses or noise.
A sling pump doesn't use electricity to pump, rather the stored energy of the moving water. So use that to fill a tank at higher elevation feeding a small turbine. With a sling pump you just have to moor it (or tie it off to a dock) on a body of moving water. Check out Rife Ram for an example. I suppose if you were really industrious, you could use the runoff from the turbine to feed a hydraulic ram pump to fill the tank back up or another tank to, say, water the garden and lawn.
Allende was a S*o*c*i*a*l*i*s*t* not a facist that the CIA replaced with a facist dictator. I suppose the military dictatorship following the assasination and coup was better.
The US was terribly involved in Ethiopia leading up to the coup. Mengustu became a Soviet client whereas the Emperor was a US client.
The main thing wrong, Mr. A. Coward, is that the US caused or supported multiple coups thereby weakening successive governments further. It doesn't help that we lied the Ho Chi Minh either. We supported and resupplied him in WWII fighting the Japanese. We promised that we'd support Vietnamese independence from France. And they we supported France reestablishing it's Indo-Chinese colonies which was a complete and utter disaster for the French.
The licence that 802.11, A, B, G, etc. falls under says that if you inferfere (and you are discovered to be the culprit), you can't use it. I'm paraphrasing but I suspect that if you saturate the bandwidth available in the frequency and you get outed, then you'd have to stop using at least all the frequencies or the offending radios.
No, we're not a facist dictatorship. But we've done some other bad things like:
(1916-1917) Invasion of Mexico chasing Poncho Villa
(1973) Assasination of Allende during CIA supported coup
(195?-1977) Probably CIA involvement and support of the Emperor in Ethiopia leading up to the coup overthrowing Haile Sellasie, violation of international law regarding Eritrean self-determination, and mass starvation.
....this is still the IRS of Richard Nixon (audits to punish people on different sides of political issues); FBI of J. Edgar Hoover (illegal wiretaps, illegal search and seizures, illegal survellience, and blackmail or important figures); FBI of Ruby Ridge, et al; and FISA courts of G. W. Bush (use of "national security" courts in violation of the laws surrounding their creation against US citizens in order to avoid producing evidence or allowing the defendent to confront the acuccuser). Oh, yes, and the Justice Department of the Bush Administration that likes suspending portions of the Bill of Rights because due process interferes with with the outcome (Patriot Act, etc.).
And in case you couldn't tell, this was intended to be flamebait just like Rush Limbaugh, Jay Severin, Sean Hannity, and that ex-one term Republican congressman from Florida "Sleepy" on MSNBC who looks like he needs some strong coffee and is asleep. Now, if I could only get some liberal flamebaiter like Al Franken on the radio, the noice would be a little more even.
Distribution channels at retail without a lot of work. Large retail outlets like Costco. I suspect that Costco sells a lot of PCs. I don't know what E-Machines profitibility of late, but they started with a very lean infrastructure. Few people --the ceo/founder, a secretary and about 17 sales people-- and contract builds by KDS and ??? in Korea with drop shipping to the retail outlet directly.
Gateway could use some cash management skills and a method of being profitable. Retail is likely the only way in the near future they are going to get it since Dell, Tiger, IBM and HP aren't going way any time soon and seem much better run. The E-Machines model gives them that.
I'd say this is a hell of a lot better move than when NEC mergered with Packard Bell. That still makes me shudder.
How many musicians are wannabes? How many are working or touring musicians? How many make a desent living at it?
A lot for the first question, few for the second and very few for the third. I know a fair number of musicians and the one's who took the risk are the happiest, whether or not the make a lot of money at it. The wannabes want to be working as musicians and tend to be unhappy.
So live lean, hit the road, feel tired and streched, wake up in a town or country you aren't sure the name of, relax, enjoy. And take pride that we're all envious!
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Most likely after degausing first.
On average it takes Win32 about 3 years of average-user neglect and outright abuse to get to the point where it's nonfunctional, and even then it's recoverable with simple maintenance procedures.
I'd have to agree.
Nah, reinstalling is just a sign of incompetence at dealing with Windows. And I mean that seriously.
On this I have to disagree. Given the price of equipment and software today, it's frequently less expensive to replace a PC running Windows and Office and transfer data than it is to correct some of these same problems. Granted, I can still repair OS problems, restart performance, etc., but frequently it's not worth it.Alternatively, if you have store all data off of the machine and maintain a generic image for the OS pre-driver install plus an image with applications and patches and the like, than you can restore the machine to operation pretty quickly too.
People and businesses tend to be pretty cost aware these days. With new computers from Dell starting at $399 and new computers being substantially more powerful in all respects to several year old hardware, 4-8 hours of tech time can buy them out of the jam too. While I'd like that money in my pocket, I have an obligation not to soak them. If it's $1000 to fix an old and substantially damaged operating system or $750-1000 to replace and transfer data (including patching the new machines with updates), clients tend to go with the later. The exceptions tends to be anal ecentrics who are afraid of any differences or those that can't wait a week for shipping and scheduling of time.
My Windows systems tend to be like the previous posters: A strong mix of older operating systems and hardware that stay around for years. And that's with being software testbeds as well as everday desktops. Hardware testbed don't survive as long probably because of ESD and frequent power cycling.
I used to feel the same way about recoving versus reinstalling. But these days, people sweat the dollars more. Especially with the mindset that the value of the hardware establishes in their minds the value of the system which of course is incorrect thinking. It's the value of the data and productivity. But that's a touch mindset to shake.
OSR 2.1 had USB support. It also reported as Win95B. OSR 2.5 reported as Win95C. I worked in distribution. I also have OSR 2.0, 2.1 and 2.5 CDs.
I too have long experience doing small business consulting and in some other areas. One thing you could do is use RAID-1 with a spare drive. That way if you lose one, you aren't screwed. You also could have a couple spare drives in hot-swap carriers. Pull a drive every night and have a duplicate of your server. Fire up the duplicate server and pop in your known good pull and boot if you server fails.
OS dependent, you don't even have to have exactly the same hardware if you use a more generic kernel build and you can list a different NIC for the spare server in the conf file for modules assuming you aren't compiling them into the kernel.
Continue with good backups made to another machine, to tape/CD/hard drive, or off-site. This way, even if your good pulled drive is a little out of date, you can bring to data current in short order.
You don't mention the OS of the server or budget, but I'll assume that since you've got 2 machines per desk time 15, you can afford a spare server. You don't mention OS and that affects cost, but still, if you are doubling up on hardware on desktops, you can afford to do this or most any of the other solutions offered.
Of course, you get what you pay for and if the experience is lacking in house, hire a knowledgeable consultant or company you trust to do it for you.
Actually, Win95 OEM SR2 was the first to support USB without third party support. It's commonly called Win95B.
I was at a dive resort in a very out of the way destination about 5 years ago. They had some real computer issues which I straightened out and in return, I got to go on a fishing charter by myself (all alone in the boat with the captain) and then later got to take a date horse back riding. The resort owned the boat. The horses belonged to a small ranch on the other side of the island. No bad for a non-dive before fly day!
About a month ago, I received a similar email from a trojaned Earthlink account. I contacted Earthink abuse first and they basically said not our problem, not our customer doing it. They maintained that since someone else was controlling the account, not the customer, they weren't interested. I responded saying that it was their IP address and they should alert their customer but got no response. Likely, it was a low level support person answering the email but you'd think that they'd forward it on to someone in authority.
I got no response from the credit card companies that I contacted or a nice remark about "if _your_ card is affected...". I didn't even bother with the feds since in the past they've only been interested in large dollar amounts affecting large companies. And local cops are not the answer to an internations credit card number theft ring.
I'm usually too busy to deal with this sort of crap and I let it drop since I'd too much to do (yea, yea, I know). Didn't remember until this came up.
A card of mine was one of the million plus stolen from the old onsale.com database breakin several years ago. I noticed a $10 charge by a "Moscow Telecom" and notified my bank. They responded that their had been a theft and they were immediately replacing cards (via ground mail) that showed activity like this and that my card was one of the affected cards. They actually said that they had a list of all of their cards that were affected but were only replacing cards showing suspicious activity! I was floored. They also said that small transactions were being posted against the cards because most people failed to check their statements or if the did figured that since it was small, it must be right and they didn't remember. $10 times 1 million plus cards is a lot of scratch every month.
"World's Largest Credit Union" indeed. Acted more like a big bank not wanting to get stuck with a big expense.
Maybe next time, I'll forward it to Interpol first but they are also a bureacracy too.
That's what the "Teddy Bears of Doom" are/were all about. They were the people that beat up the programmers for buggy code. They were immortalized as one of the four random faces in the Windows 3.1 Easter Egg (I believe Gates, Ballmer, I forget but I think it was the project manager who left after 1 year cycling sabatical, and the Teddy Bear).
This is trivial compared to reproducing a document based on recording a telephone conversation.
I was a huge fan of the Spot back in '95 and '96. Got really tired of it by the time it was killed off. Loved the dog, but not the too sexy for the dot com bubble silly Cyberian adjective.
If memory serves, when it was thankfully put to sleep, it was because the production company was bought out by AOL which consolidated staff. AOL was heading in an entirely different direction.
The Spot is probably why I can't abide shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, etc. I burned out hard on this stuff.
I checked out the new site/same as the old site, with all new faces but one. They still take themselves far too seriously. It was a great concept 10 years ago. Now it's just lame. Please, God, make it go away.
Maybe I'm just old, in relative terms. I'm 40 now.
I've found the the people that get the most done get the most additional assignments. A Navy chief once told me "if you want something done, find the busiest person and give it to them". The point being that most everyone else is a slacker. I found myself doing most of my division's work on the submariness I was on. It shouldn't be any wonder that I wasn't very happy and had a lot of stress.
Perhaps it's ironic and perhaps not that the people that slack off seem to be the happiest. So now that I've been out of the Navy for nearly 12 years (6 in), and working 80 hour weeks on average during that time, I can tell you my current recipe for coping: twice the normal daily prescribed dosage of Prilosec (doctor says to) in an attempt to heal an esophagus damaged by stress induced esophagitis. And antacid at least once every day or two on top of it and about 20 hours less per week. In large doses, this kind of work related stress is terribly unhealthy. Other people I know that are about 40 as well in IT have developed stress related problems dealing with their stomachs and colons. I'm sure it doesn't help that I come from a largely unemotional waspy family and live with an emotional woman of Italian decent.
It's not worth it. Frequently, the fuck ups when they do something right get rewarded because it's so unexpected. The people that crank out huge volumes of work go unrecognized because it's normal.
The paradox isn't unlike what used to happen when smoking in the work place was much more common. Smokers got their hourly or every couple of hours smoke break while the non-smokers toiled away. If a non-smoker stopped for the same break, they were ordered back to work because they were slacking off. The smoker continued to be rewarded for what essential was behavior that took time away from work and (and caused health problems).
Perhaps doing RAID over network block devices would solve your reliability problem. NBD is designed for RAID, you distribute over partitions that are physically separate from each other on different machines and segments, you can do heartbeat, etc. Don't assume that this is necessarily the "cheap way out with cheap hardware". You can do this with fast hardware that's backed by hardware RAID too and use it in a network RAID 0, 1, or 5 scenario for example.
And you can buy enterprise grade drives now such as this drive.
I think the strongest argument for the validity of the release of waste is the fact that one of the "conspirators" was an officer.
Absolutely.
But even an officer can act without authorization, so this is not an airtight argument.
So can a board member. I'm on the board of a company where we had the situation of a board member acting independantly and then expecting compensation. Of course, this individual was voted off the board the following year but the damage was done. It was also cheaper to settle than litigate. This can happen with officers too and probably does more frequently.
It seems you are exactly right.
I don't think so.
Let's see. Nullsoft's employee posted it who has had the authority to post in the past. It appeared for how long (?) on their site listed as GPL. Their statement mentions nothing about infringement on others copyrights or patents.
IANAL. To me, it seems me, however, that Nullsoft did in fact make this GPL software. If I were to use it, say, for remote encryption key generation linked to openSSL or openSSH or whatever, I'd consult my lawyer first but it looks like they've got no recourse. The post by AC I'm responding to claims that Nullsoft discovered a license violation which it doesn't, other than to now claim that it's copyrighted software. I think they might be able to claim that if you got it after that date, they've changed the license but if someone got it prior to that and reshared it with ANY mods, the GPL stands.
This strikes me as akin to a company doing unauthorized work, billing for it and then hoping that you'll pay just because they sent you an invoice. Or better yet, you recieve an unsolicited radio in the mail in the mail from me. You turn it on and I attempt to bill you. In the US, it's a gift. No contract existed, I didn't ask for it and you sent me something with no legal strings attached. It's not a misshipped package. It doesn't matter if it's a $5 radio and you billed me $5 or a $5 radio and you tried billing me $5000.
You don't provide system characteristics orther than "lots of memory and hard drive space". So I'll assume that performance doesn't have to be earth shattering.
Since you are talking about home, space, noise and electricity *should* be concerns since your employer won't compensate you for those, even if you are the employer. Two Travla 147 cases and your choice of 3 different mini-ITX backplanes can be married to 4 mini-itx motherboards. That means in 2 rack units, you can have 4 quiet systems that don't use huge amounts of electricity with up to 1GB of RAM and a single IDE hard drive in the chassis. Travla 146 has 4 internal 3.5" bays. You won't kill yourself with expenses or noise.
A sling pump doesn't use electricity to pump, rather the stored energy of the moving water. So use that to fill a tank at higher elevation feeding a small turbine. With a sling pump you just have to moor it (or tie it off to a dock) on a body of moving water. Check out Rife Ram for an example. I suppose if you were really industrious, you could use the runoff from the turbine to feed a hydraulic ram pump to fill the tank back up or another tank to, say, water the garden and lawn.
Allende was a S*o*c*i*a*l*i*s*t* not a facist that the CIA replaced with a facist dictator. I suppose the military dictatorship following the assasination and coup was better.
The US was terribly involved in Ethiopia leading up to the coup. Mengustu became a Soviet client whereas the Emperor was a US client.
The main thing wrong, Mr. A. Coward, is that the US caused or supported multiple coups thereby weakening successive governments further. It doesn't help that we lied the Ho Chi Minh either. We supported and resupplied him in WWII fighting the Japanese. We promised that we'd support Vietnamese independence from France. And they we supported France reestablishing it's Indo-Chinese colonies which was a complete and utter disaster for the French.
The licence that 802.11, A, B, G, etc. falls under says that if you inferfere (and you are discovered to be the culprit), you can't use it. I'm paraphrasing but I suspect that if you saturate the bandwidth available in the frequency and you get outed, then you'd have to stop using at least all the frequencies or the offending radios.
No, we're not a facist dictatorship. But we've done some other bad things like:
(1916-1917) Invasion of Mexico chasing Poncho Villa
(1973) Assasination of Allende during CIA supported coup
(195?-1977) Probably CIA involvement and support of the Emperor in Ethiopia leading up to the coup overthrowing Haile Sellasie, violation of international law regarding Eritrean self-determination, and mass starvation.
Not to mention the whole Viet Nam thing.
....this is still the IRS of Richard Nixon (audits to punish people on different sides of political issues); FBI of J. Edgar Hoover (illegal wiretaps, illegal search and seizures, illegal survellience, and blackmail or important figures); FBI of Ruby Ridge, et al; and FISA courts of G. W. Bush (use of "national security" courts in violation of the laws surrounding their creation against US citizens in order to avoid producing evidence or allowing the defendent to confront the acuccuser). Oh, yes, and the Justice Department of the Bush Administration that likes suspending portions of the Bill of Rights because due process interferes with with the outcome (Patriot Act, etc.).
And in case you couldn't tell, this was intended to be flamebait just like Rush Limbaugh, Jay Severin, Sean Hannity, and that ex-one term Republican congressman from Florida "Sleepy" on MSNBC who looks like he needs some strong coffee and is asleep. Now, if I could only get some liberal flamebaiter like Al Franken on the radio, the noice would be a little more even.
Distribution channels at retail without a lot of work. Large retail outlets like Costco. I suspect that Costco sells a lot of PCs. I don't know what E-Machines profitibility of late, but they started with a very lean infrastructure. Few people --the ceo/founder, a secretary and about 17 sales people-- and contract builds by KDS and ??? in Korea with drop shipping to the retail outlet directly.
Gateway could use some cash management skills and a method of being profitable. Retail is likely the only way in the near future they are going to get it since Dell, Tiger, IBM and HP aren't going way any time soon and seem much better run. The E-Machines model gives them that.
I'd say this is a hell of a lot better move than when NEC mergered with Packard Bell. That still makes me shudder.
Anything with the Black Tiger Squadron or the Argo (Yamato). Check out the Star Blazers home page.
How many musicians are wannabes? How many are working or touring musicians? How many make a desent living at it?
A lot for the first question, few for the second and very few for the third. I know a fair number of musicians and the one's who took the risk are the happiest, whether or not the make a lot of money at it. The wannabes want to be working as musicians and tend to be unhappy.
So live lean, hit the road, feel tired and streched, wake up in a town or country you aren't sure the name of, relax, enjoy. And take pride that we're all envious!
what, you think this won't be included? Think clipper, DES, and the like. Remember the grief Phil Zimmerman went through?