> it's a matter of the power level. the most powerful consumer wi-fi access point I've seen puts out 500 milliwatts. the local FM radio station puts out about 100,000 Megawatts. that's a scale difference of 2,000,000,000,000 to 1.
Of course you don't sit a few yards away to your local FM radio station. There are healthy and safety limits imposed on exposure to these and also high-powered radars.
btw related: there have been papers done on effects of very strong magnetic fields on biological organisms. Check Scientific American: articles on long distance space travel since they were considering magnetic fields as a way to cut down cosmic radiation. There are effects, but when I last looked no definitive conclusions about long term health.
A good book by Richard Dawkins who wrote 'The Selfish Gene'. Here's a summary:
Richard Dawkins on why religion sticks: "There is no such thing as a Muslim Child. There is a child of Muslim Parents. There is no such thing as a Christian Child. There is a child of Christian Parents.
My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule for a child. But, as with the moths, it can go wrong.
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs."
Remember the old consistency thing. People are loathe to change their mind:
"It would be a severe disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep changing one's mind, so under some circumstances, it is better to persist in an irrational belief than to vacillate, even if new evidence or ratiocination favors a change."
Douglas Adams: "Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'.
Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe ... no, that's holy? ... We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it!
Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be."
Andrew Mueller: "Pledging yourself to any particular religion 'is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith'."
Sam Harris: "We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional' . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers."
Richard Dawkins: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodth
If I was created by a God, that God has no dominion over me. I won't bow, grovel or worship him. He is no more or less equal than any other creature in the Universe.
Al Gore should be offered a position in the administration: It would be a shame to waste all those PowerPoint and 3DSMAX skills. Plus the guy can take out a rowdy student with a laser pointer at 500 yards.
Bill Gates? Nay Bill. His first act would be to make all schools buy Microsoft, and recast the 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer' errors on all Government web sites. Then NASA would be forced to rewrite all their software in.NET. And we'd have to listen to him say "Cool" a lot. "Cool" is a cool word, but every time I hear Bill Gates use it the word dies a little.
Out of every language there is today, C and Assembler will be around the longest. Why? Because there's not a programming task alive you can't tackle with this pair. Sure, there are faster ways (and Assembler is these days just a low level and embedded thing), but those faster ways come and go. If you want to write an application that will last, use C++. For performance, it can't be beaten. If you're doing high-performance graphics, VR, games, databases, your a brave soul not to use C++. Conversely, it makes more sense to whip out Ruby or Perl for a website. They'll be around for a bit. (Beware of using flavor of the month languages: Ever noticed how every 2 years MS tries to get everyone onto their 'next big thing'). Anyway: C has it's niche and it's not going anywhere.
C vs C++? A silly distinction given the class the author compared it with: They're the same bloody thing: C++ is a superset of C, and a natural path for any C programmer. Why the hell wouldn't you use it? It makes as much sense to point the finger at C and squeal 'burn her', as it does to point at Perl 5.7 and laugh at how it has totally been done in by Perl 5.8: "I searched on Monster and Perl 5.7 is a dead language! It's over. Bobby Willzammit on Gartner says 'It's history. There are no Perl 5.7 projects. The technology world has moved on. Those programmers better pick something else and learn it fast'"
Ahhhh, yeah. Those who can program do. Those who can't, become technology writers. Think we have to resist these "Top 10" lists for Slashdot. We read them because 10 points promises "Hey, no guff and blather, I'll cut straight to the point", but they're invariably inane.
> This guy found a way to make sick money. Good for him. And poo on you, jealous hater.
So anyone who makes money through any means is to be admired? "Good for them"?
Squatters and Spammers make sick money. Halliburton, your local drug dealer found a way to make sick money too. So did Rheineisen Chemical Products who sold chemical weapons Saddam used to gas Kurds. IBM didn't turn down the Nazis when they wanted data equipment to track those Jews, Gays and Gypsies.
You think I'm jealous of these guys? Are you? You can make money and make a worthwhile contribution to humanity. Lam the Squatter adds nothing.
On the Karmic scale this guy is marginally above Nigerian Investment scammers, and about par with spammers, which I guess makes him like people reselling essays to students. The good news is he's definitely above cigarette companies and pedophiles. Way to go Kevin! And for all his 'I'm a devout Christian' PR, what a waste of a life. This guy adds nothing to life on this planet. If he disappeared tomorrow, life for everyone else would be the same or better.
The people who used to sell used cars or deal drugs have all moved onto the Internet.
DX10 runs only on Vista. I'm sure this article will be of great interest to the three Vista gamers out there.
Re:Microsoft already sells a Pirated Edition
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 1
> licensed only for noncommercial use by households. Which is, of course, pretty much unenforceable.
I don't think there is a single household in the U.S. that someone isn't running a business out of!:-)
> I don't understand this... Call center? Arrogant operator? Local guy?
Your (good) experiences are with Dell. I was talking about HP. Dell did try and move their call centers to India a few years ago, but it was a complete disaster so to their credit they pulled out. Support needs to be "culturally sensitive."
> I would never put my trust in a local computer guy. > The small computer stores usually don't last more than a few years. > Also, most often, their service deals are actually more expensive than say Dell.
I don't know the scene in Norway, but I'm in Australia and my two 'local guys' have been around for 15 years. They have a good reputation and both do a roaring trade and their service is top notch. Both have multiple branches now (but they never went overboard in expansion either).
I'm a little surprised at the hostility some posters have expressed towards local operators. After all, you're a small business so your customers might come to the same conclusion about dealing with you. Language like 'key account manager' and 'business partner' are only euphemisms to make small businesses feel like they're someone important.
You say you have good experiences with Dell; that's good to hear and good for you: No one can fault you for sticking with someone who has met your expectations. If HP and IBM had done the same, I'd still be with them. It's lame that the only PCs I've bought that have been complete lemons have been from these guys, and worse because of their poor service. Once they used 'minimum dead pixel test' as an excuse not to fix... a CRT(!!!) This is why I use the local guy.
LOL. Not sure if you're laughing with me or at me:-), but the misspelling was intentional, for the reasons you give!
Microsoft already sells a Pirated Edition
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Piracy Economics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
These are the "Educational Editions" of Office, XP and now Vista. You are supposed to show a valid student Id when you make the purchase, but shops are hectic, busy places and luckily most households have a couple of students lying around anyway. Conveniently some of these allow the software to be installed on multiple machines. So when Joe frowns that some Microsoft software is too expensive, he has a way around it. Microsoft get their money. Not as much as they would have liked, but they get it anyway.
Microsoft _have_ to know this goes on: If they wanted to they could make their educational program so draconian no one would use it, but households shrugging and installing Ubuntu on their machine is Microsoft's worst nightmare.
Mickey Mouse as a trademark has expired. He's now in the public domain.
No wait... Disney called in a favor from their brown-paper-bag-shills at Congress, who promptly introduced this legislation which kept Mickey from entering the public domain. AFAIAC Disney used Congress to steal it. No wonder Disney grew old and stale: They have no incentive to come up with anything new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_ Term_Extension_Act The "Copyright Extension Act" is unofficially known as the "Mickey Mouse Act". How is that for 'corporate sponsorship' gone mad?
Who were the Congressional Shills? Despite the name it wasn't Congressman Sonny Bono, but I can't tell you who did it. This is what sucks about Congress. We get nasty bills passed that take away our rights, but Congressmen are shy to stick their name on it. So while grumbling about this, the DMCA, the Parrot Act, you could be voting for a shill who sponsored it.
How about someone do a web site showing who is a shill and who isn't. Wikipedia doesn't carry this sort of info.
If the bug can string together a sentence like "Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator of the content prohibit playback of the program on this computer" I'd suggest it's a sentient bug!!!
> Sure, the connectors are the same, but I don't want, 3 years down the road, to have every > computer existing with a different patchwork of replacement parts and the driver hell that can go with that.
If you were building a PC five years ago, that would have been true.
The Motherboard *is* the computer. Changing a power supply, HDD or even memory won't make a scrap of difference. Add-ons won't bother you, since these days most peripherals go through USB rather than needing a card. There isn't that much variation between PCs these days either: The system board is built around a particular chipset, and particularly with the biz models your graphics, sound, etc is built into the chipset. Choose something nice and standard: the Intel 9xx chipset series for example. One other poster said (I didn't confirm) that the Multinats were sourcing ASUS MBs anyway. (Although I wouldn't recommend it in a commercial setting, I've seen HDDs moved between different OEM PCs *with different processors* without any trouble: The benefits of standard hardware.)
So the same argument re: Standardizing applies whether or not you buy from a Multinat or a local. Multinats change their system boards just as often as OEMs do. ASUS for example manufactures on such a scale I'd reckon you have a better chance of getting one of their boards as a replacement than you would a Multinat with a model 2 years old. And at $70 a pop, system boards are cheap enough you can (and should) have spares on hand anyway: particular for a 100 machine install. Obviously you're doing a big enough order you'd contract with your supplier that you'd want to source parts (probably at an agreed price). Do be warned: If you're buying 2 year old system boards from your favorite multinat, you'll pay a premium. This happened to me once and IBM service wanted to charge me more than a new PC for a replacement board.
Whatever you do you'll be buying 100 or so PCs and it'd make sense to choose (depending on your users' requirements) a standard config for all.
BTW not trying to cram this down your throat. You need to choose a solution you're comfortable with, and before you did the post you probably already had your heart set on HP or Dell. Your boss will probably get a (false) warm comfortable feeling from being a 'Dell Business Partner' anyway: a.k.a. "No one ever got fired for buying...". You can always say "Hey, who would have known...?" Just giving my perspective that there is another way, and that Multinats have really gone to crap.
>... Dell's once great quality and support is now, according to consumer sources... no better than anyone else's. > How does an IT department reliably evaluate the big vendors to determine who's going to go the necessary distance > and be a good business partner, especially for a smaller customer?
Exactly! Multinationals are focused on the next balance sheet. Once they have the money and you've signed for the boxes, you're a liability. Sure in theory if you like them you might buy something in the future... but that's 3 or 4 years away, waaay beyond the next balance sheet. You're not a 'business partner'.
> This doesn't rule out the smaller, local sources, but there can be a longevity issue there, as well as priority.
> Who says he can be there tomorrow with a replacement part in hand to get you back up and running?
Here I have some wonderful news for you, my friend. Desktops these days are very standard. All the plugs, connectors, memory and cards are interchangable. I have a lovely desktop sitting under my desk. If it dies tomorrow, I can call up my local guy and get a new motherboard for like $70. You can also change suppliers at any time, and we're talking about easy-to-source, mass-produced components. In the bad old days, manufacturers did make keyed connectors that only worked on their machines. IBM even made their HDD cables incompatible with everyone else(!!!) FAIK those days are gone. Certainly hasn't bothered me since I stopped buying IBM brand and went generic.
> Yes, we're trying to save money, but staff time is more expensive than any single technology decision, > so Linux and used computers are really not the way to go. Of course for an upgrade to an existing shop, you need to keep all your software talking. If you were setting up from scratch, Ubuntu may well be the way to go.
> paying an extra $50-$100 per computer can be worth it if you know you will get reliable, timely, > and quality support for a quality product in return. This is the misnomer with Multinats, and you basically contradict that above. You note Dell no longer offers the best of anything, so why pay more for it. Same for HP. Pay more, get less. If you think buying a hundred PCs from these guys will give you piece of mind and make you a 'business partner', well, that term was only ever a euphemism. They may be big, but they don't care where you buy your next PC from.
> We have adequate funding to get what we need, but we have to spend that funding wisely. > When trying to standardize the products one uses, for ease of ordering, support, and > keeping consumables in stock, making a bad decision can really set back the entire institution. > And for that matter, when ordering 100 - 120 computers every 4 year cycle,
Obviously you have to plan this carefully, risk management and all, but you should be doing that regardless of who you're ordering from: big, medium or small enterprise. If you're fully funded and you're looking for an external support contract, in which case talk to a medium size integrator. They can do it all for you. If you want to do it in house, competent tech guys and a smaller supplier will be fine.
I used to be a big fan of the HP brand, but their quality really seems to be in a downward spiral: Google for "hp laptops suck" and meet your neighbors.
I've had good experience with ASUS Motherboards in Desktops. Don't know what's inside HP laptops, but my last HP laptop broke shortly after I got it. It was under warranty so I thought "Hey, no problem!", only to find service consists of arguing with Indian Call Center workers who have been trained to think customers are cockroaches, and then fixed by a 'HP Authorized Service Center' who is some guy working out of an apartment. I didn't speak to anyone from HP who remotely sounded like they gave a damn. They don't care what you buy.
Now contrast that to the 'local guys' who do.
O.P. wanted desktops are easy to build, so no problem there. For laptops you have to buy from someone, but I can't imagine you doing any worse than this. BTW Acer and IBM aren't (weren't) good either. But there are plenty of other fish in the sea.
It makes a lot of sense to provide customer support in the country of purchase, or at least one that understands the cultural nuances of the customer. In Australia support is run out of India. The customer service is plain obnoxious. Expect to get snapped at and lied too, and watch them violate local consumer law.
Dell learned the folly of this few years ago, and to their credit pulled out, only to have HP blunder on and make the same mistakes a few years later.
I buy from two 'local guys': one is a shop of 4 people, the other of 10 people. Neither would have problems handling that sort of order. PCs are very easy to put together these days. The days of non-standard connectors and razor-sharp cases are gone. I don't build PCs very often, but last time I did got it done in under an hour. Never timed those guys, but I'm sure they can do it in much less.
Of course you need to check them out before you buy them, have a trusted referral or ideally have been buying from them for several years. Their service is light years ahead of the Multinationals. These guys need customers. 'Chandler' who wants 'to provide you with Excellent Service' from some outsourced HP call center on the other hand doesn't care if you live or die.
If you're talking very large orders, say a few thousand PCs, there's are medium-sized businesses who can integrate it for you on a contract. I'd trust an ASUS Motherboard far more than whatever the hell is inside a HP or Dell this week.
Once upon a time you'd buy from the biggest companies for service and reliability, and avoid small operators because of the hard time they'd give you.
That's all changed. HP are now heavily outsourced with increased breakdowns from PC's made in China (which, lets face it, never understood 'Quality'). HP have outsourced customer support to India. If you do have a problem, you'll have to argue with an arrogant call center operator who has been told he holds all the cards and that you are at his mercy. The company doesn't give a damn about quality or customer support.
Another poster suggested the local guy. I'd concur. The most important part of the PC is the motherboard (ASUS have a good name as a Taiwanese supplier who 'got' quality), HDD from Seagate or another reputable HDD manufacturer (fortunately most of the bad ones like IBM have been driven out of the business). Using a local guy you can get your own PCs built that'll be far better than any of the cost-cut, outsourced crap you'll get from the Multinationals. These days smaller companies have a much better grasp on quality and reputation. You'll also be supporting your community and country.
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> it's a matter of the power level. the most powerful consumer wi-fi access point I've seen puts out 500 milliwatts. the local FM radio station puts out about 100,000 Megawatts. that's a scale difference of 2,000,000,000,000 to 1.
Of course you don't sit a few yards away to your local FM radio station. There are healthy and safety limits imposed on exposure to these and also high-powered radars.
btw related: there have been papers done on effects of very strong magnetic fields on biological organisms. Check Scientific American: articles on long distance space travel since they were considering magnetic fields as a way to cut down cosmic radiation. There are effects, but when I last looked no definitive conclusions about long term health.
A good book by Richard Dawkins who wrote 'The Selfish Gene'. Here's a summary:
.. no, that's holy? . .. We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how
Richard Dawkins on why religion sticks: "There is no such thing as a Muslim Child. There is a child of Muslim Parents. There is no such thing as a Christian Child. There is a child of Christian Parents.
My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous
generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule for a child. But, as with the moths, it can go wrong.
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them.
Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs."
Remember the old consistency thing. People are loathe to change their mind:
"It would be a severe disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep changing one's mind, so under some circumstances, it is better to persist in an irrational belief than to vacillate, even if new evidence or ratiocination favors a change."
Douglas Adams: "Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'I respect that'.
Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe .
much of a furore Richard creates when he does it!
Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be."
Andrew Mueller: "Pledging yourself to any particular religion 'is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith'."
Sam Harris: "We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional' . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers."
Richard Dawkins: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodth
For want of a better word, "Amen!" :-)
If I was created by a God, that God has no dominion over me. I won't bow, grovel or worship him. He is no more or less equal than any other creature in the Universe.
Mitch Kapor, I choose you! http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/006 .html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor
.NET. And we'd have to listen to him say "Cool" a lot. "Cool" is a cool word, but every time I hear Bill Gates use it the word dies a little.
Al Gore should be offered a position in the administration: It would be a shame to waste all those PowerPoint and 3DSMAX skills. Plus the guy can take out a rowdy student with a laser pointer at 500 yards.
Bill Gates? Nay Bill. His first act would be to make all schools buy Microsoft, and recast the 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer' errors on all Government web sites. Then NASA would be forced to rewrite all their software in
Out of every language there is today, C and Assembler will be around the longest. Why? Because there's not a programming task alive you can't tackle with this pair. Sure, there are faster ways (and Assembler is these days just a low level and embedded thing), but those faster ways come and go. If you want to write an application that will last, use C++. For performance, it can't be beaten. If you're doing high-performance graphics, VR, games, databases, your a brave soul not to use C++. Conversely, it makes more sense to whip out Ruby or Perl for a website. They'll be around for a bit. (Beware of using flavor of the month languages: Ever noticed how every 2 years MS tries to get everyone onto their 'next big thing'). Anyway: C has it's niche and it's not going anywhere.
C vs C++? A silly distinction given the class the author compared it with: They're the same bloody thing: C++ is a superset of C, and a natural path for any C programmer. Why the hell wouldn't you use it? It makes as much sense to point the finger at C and squeal 'burn her', as it does to point at Perl 5.7 and laugh at how it has totally been done in by Perl 5.8: "I searched on Monster and Perl 5.7 is a dead language! It's over. Bobby Willzammit on Gartner says 'It's history. There are no Perl 5.7 projects. The technology world has moved on. Those programmers better pick something else and learn it fast'"
Ahhhh, yeah. Those who can program do. Those who can't, become technology writers. Think we have to resist these "Top 10" lists for Slashdot. We read them because 10 points promises "Hey, no guff and blather, I'll cut straight to the point", but they're invariably inane.
Anyway: last word ---> C
> This guy found a way to make sick money. Good for him. And poo on you, jealous hater.
So anyone who makes money through any means is to be admired? "Good for them"?
Squatters and Spammers make sick money. Halliburton, your local drug dealer found a way to make sick money too. So did Rheineisen Chemical Products who sold chemical weapons Saddam used to gas Kurds. IBM didn't turn down the Nazis when they wanted data equipment to track those Jews, Gays and Gypsies.
You think I'm jealous of these guys? Are you? You can make money and make a worthwhile contribution to humanity. Lam the Squatter adds nothing.
On the Karmic scale this guy is marginally above Nigerian Investment scammers, and about par with spammers, which I guess makes him like people reselling essays to students. The good news is he's definitely above cigarette companies and pedophiles. Way to go Kevin! And for all his 'I'm a devout Christian' PR, what a waste of a life. This guy adds nothing to life on this planet. If he disappeared tomorrow, life for everyone else would be the same or better.
The people who used to sell used cars or deal drugs have all moved onto the Internet.
DX10 runs only on Vista. I'm sure this article will be of great interest to the three Vista gamers out there.
> licensed only for noncommercial use by households. Which is, of course, pretty much unenforceable. I don't think there is a single household in the U.S. that someone isn't running a business out of! :-)
> I don't understand this... Call center? Arrogant operator? Local guy?
Your (good) experiences are with Dell. I was talking about HP. Dell did try and move their call centers to India a few years ago, but it was a complete disaster so to their credit they pulled out. Support needs to be "culturally sensitive."
> I would never put my trust in a local computer guy.
> The small computer stores usually don't last more than a few years.
> Also, most often, their service deals are actually more expensive than say Dell.
I don't know the scene in Norway, but I'm in Australia and my two 'local guys' have been around for 15 years. They have a good reputation and both do a roaring trade and their service is top notch. Both have multiple branches now (but they never went overboard in expansion either).
I'm a little surprised at the hostility some posters have expressed towards local operators. After all, you're a small business so your customers might come to the same conclusion about dealing with you. Language like 'key account manager' and 'business partner' are only euphemisms to make small businesses feel like they're someone important.
You say you have good experiences with Dell; that's good to hear and good for you: No one can fault you for sticking with someone who has met your expectations. If HP and IBM had done the same, I'd still be with them. It's lame that the only PCs I've bought that have been complete lemons have been from these guys, and worse because of their poor service. Once they used 'minimum dead pixel test' as an excuse not to fix... a CRT(!!!) This is why I use the local guy.
Thanks! That's a great link. Looked up the record companies and they donate a lot to several ahem "congressional charities."
LOL. Not sure if you're laughing with me or at me :-), but the misspelling was intentional, for the reasons you give!
These are the "Educational Editions" of Office, XP and now Vista. You are supposed to show a valid student Id when you make the purchase, but shops are hectic, busy places and luckily most households have a couple of students lying around anyway. Conveniently some of these allow the software to be installed on multiple machines. So when Joe frowns that some Microsoft software is too expensive, he has a way around it. Microsoft get their money. Not as much as they would have liked, but they get it anyway.
Microsoft _have_ to know this goes on: If they wanted to they could make their educational program so draconian no one would use it, but households shrugging and installing Ubuntu on their machine is Microsoft's worst nightmare.
Mickey Mouse as a trademark has expired. He's now in the public domain.
_ Term_Extension_Act The "Copyright Extension Act" is unofficially known as the "Mickey Mouse Act". How is that for 'corporate sponsorship' gone mad?
No wait... Disney called in a favor from their brown-paper-bag-shills at Congress, who promptly introduced this legislation which kept Mickey from entering the public domain. AFAIAC Disney used Congress to steal it. No wonder Disney grew old and stale: They have no incentive to come up with anything new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright
Who were the Congressional Shills? Despite the name it wasn't Congressman Sonny Bono, but I can't tell you who did it. This is what sucks about Congress. We get nasty bills passed that take away our rights, but Congressmen are shy to stick their name on it. So while grumbling about this, the DMCA, the Parrot Act, you could be voting for a shill who sponsored it.
How about someone do a web site showing who is a shill and who isn't. Wikipedia doesn't carry this sort of info.
If the bug can string together a sentence like "Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator of the content prohibit playback of the program on this computer" I'd suggest it's a sentient bug!!!
> Sure, the connectors are the same, but I don't want, 3 years down the road, to have every
> computer existing with a different patchwork of replacement parts and the driver hell that can go with that.
If you were building a PC five years ago, that would have been true.
The Motherboard *is* the computer. Changing a power supply, HDD or even memory won't make a scrap of difference. Add-ons won't bother you, since these days most peripherals go through USB rather than needing a card. There isn't that much variation between PCs these days either: The system board is built around a particular chipset, and particularly with the biz models your graphics, sound, etc is built into the chipset. Choose something nice and standard: the Intel 9xx chipset series for example. One other poster said (I didn't confirm) that the Multinats were sourcing ASUS MBs anyway. (Although I wouldn't recommend it in a commercial setting, I've seen HDDs moved between different OEM PCs *with different processors* without any trouble: The benefits of standard hardware.)
So the same argument re: Standardizing applies whether or not you buy from a Multinat or a local. Multinats change their system boards just as often as OEMs do. ASUS for example manufactures on such a scale I'd reckon you have a better chance of getting one of their boards as a replacement than you would a Multinat with a model 2 years old. And at $70 a pop, system boards are cheap enough you can (and should) have spares on hand anyway: particular for a 100 machine install. Obviously you're doing a big enough order you'd contract with your supplier that you'd want to source parts (probably at an agreed price). Do be warned: If you're buying 2 year old system boards from your favorite multinat, you'll pay a premium. This happened to me once and IBM service wanted to charge me more than a new PC for a replacement board.
Whatever you do you'll be buying 100 or so PCs and it'd make sense to choose (depending on your users' requirements) a standard config for all.
BTW not trying to cram this down your throat. You need to choose a solution you're comfortable with, and before you did the post you probably already had your heart set on HP or Dell. Your boss will probably get a (false) warm comfortable feeling from being a 'Dell Business Partner' anyway: a.k.a. "No one ever got fired for buying...". You can always say "Hey, who would have known...?"
Just giving my perspective that there is another way, and that Multinats have really gone to crap.
> Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project.
I believe the correct spelling is Poopfly.
> ... Dell's once great quality and support is now, according to consumer sources ... no better than anyone else's.
> How does an IT department reliably evaluate the big vendors to determine who's going to go the necessary distance
> and be a good business partner, especially for a smaller customer?
Exactly! Multinationals are focused on the next balance sheet. Once they have the money and you've signed for the boxes, you're a liability. Sure in theory if you like them you might buy something in the future... but that's 3 or 4 years away, waaay beyond the next balance sheet. You're not a 'business partner'.
> This doesn't rule out the smaller, local sources, but there can be a longevity issue there, as well as priority.
> Who says he can be there tomorrow with a replacement part in hand to get you back up and running?
Here I have some wonderful news for you, my friend. Desktops these days are very standard. All the plugs, connectors, memory and cards are interchangable. I have a lovely desktop sitting under my desk. If it dies tomorrow, I can call up my local guy and get a new motherboard for like $70. You can also change suppliers at any time, and we're talking about easy-to-source, mass-produced components. In the bad old days, manufacturers did make keyed connectors that only worked on their machines. IBM even made their HDD cables incompatible with everyone else(!!!) FAIK those days are gone. Certainly hasn't bothered me since I stopped buying IBM brand and went generic.
> Yes, we're trying to save money, but staff time is more expensive than any single technology decision,
> so Linux and used computers are really not the way to go.
Of course for an upgrade to an existing shop, you need to keep all your software talking.
If you were setting up from scratch, Ubuntu may well be the way to go.
> paying an extra $50-$100 per computer can be worth it if you know you will get reliable, timely,
> and quality support for a quality product in return.
This is the misnomer with Multinats, and you basically contradict that above. You note Dell no longer offers the best of anything, so why pay more for it. Same for HP. Pay more, get less. If you think buying a hundred PCs from these guys will give you piece of mind and make you a 'business partner', well, that term was only ever a euphemism. They may be big, but they don't care where you buy your next PC from.
> We have adequate funding to get what we need, but we have to spend that funding wisely.
> When trying to standardize the products one uses, for ease of ordering, support, and
> keeping consumables in stock, making a bad decision can really set back the entire institution.
> And for that matter, when ordering 100 - 120 computers every 4 year cycle,
Obviously you have to plan this carefully, risk management and all, but you should be doing that regardless of who you're ordering from: big, medium or small enterprise. If you're fully funded and you're looking for an external support contract, in which case talk to a medium size integrator. They can do it all for you. If you want to do it in house, competent tech guys and a smaller supplier will be fine.
I used to be a big fan of the HP brand, but their quality really seems to be in a downward spiral: Google for "hp laptops suck" and meet your neighbors.
I've had good experience with ASUS Motherboards in Desktops. Don't know what's inside HP laptops, but my last HP laptop broke shortly after I got it. It was under warranty so I thought "Hey, no problem!", only to find service consists of arguing with Indian Call Center workers who have been trained to think customers are cockroaches, and then fixed by a 'HP Authorized Service Center' who is some guy working out of an apartment. I didn't speak to anyone from HP who remotely sounded like they gave a damn. They don't care what you buy.
Now contrast that to the 'local guys' who do.
O.P. wanted desktops are easy to build, so no problem there. For laptops you have to buy from someone, but I can't imagine you doing any worse than this. BTW Acer and IBM aren't (weren't) good either. But there are plenty of other fish in the sea.
It makes a lot of sense to provide customer support in the country of purchase, or at least one that understands the cultural nuances of the customer. In Australia support is run out of India. The customer service is plain obnoxious. Expect to get snapped at and lied too, and watch them violate local consumer law.
Dell learned the folly of this few years ago, and to their credit pulled out, only to have HP blunder on and make the same mistakes a few years later.
Of course you need to check them out before you buy them, have a trusted referral or ideally have been buying from them for several years. Their service is light years ahead of the Multinationals. These guys need customers. 'Chandler' who wants 'to provide you with Excellent Service' from some outsourced HP call center on the other hand doesn't care if you live or die.
If you're talking very large orders, say a few thousand PCs, there's are medium-sized businesses who can integrate it for you on a contract. I'd trust an ASUS Motherboard far more than whatever the hell is inside a HP or Dell this week.
> data storm
Is that a nice way of saying they were downloading pr0n?
> US House of Representative's Committee on Homeland Security called further investigate
Boss: "So we don't have the backups for the first two weeks in April"
Employee: "Yes Boss. They were obviously misplaced by terrorists"
When Homeland Security is done, my refrigerator door was left ajar last night. I think it was terrorists too. Think I'll phone this one in.
Once upon a time you'd buy from the biggest companies for service and reliability, and avoid small operators because of the hard time they'd give you.
That's all changed. HP are now heavily outsourced with increased breakdowns from PC's made in China (which, lets face it, never understood 'Quality'). HP have outsourced customer support to India. If you do have a problem, you'll have to argue with an arrogant call center operator who has been told he holds all the cards and that you are at his mercy. The company doesn't give a damn about quality or customer support.
Another poster suggested the local guy. I'd concur. The most important part of the PC is the motherboard (ASUS have a good name as a Taiwanese supplier who 'got' quality), HDD from Seagate or another reputable HDD manufacturer (fortunately most of the bad ones like IBM have been driven out of the business). Using a local guy you can get your own PCs built that'll be far better than any of the cost-cut, outsourced crap you'll get from the Multinationals. These days smaller companies have a much better grasp on quality and reputation. You'll also be supporting your community and country.
Here the correct links are. Well, I hope. :-)
1 627037420070517
l /bc.usa.china.currency.reut/
Biden shills for MPAA. Maybe he'll follow that link on Hollywood Accounting.
http://www.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=USN
Oooohhh! Obligatory photo of pirated DVDs:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/18/news/internationa
Sorry. Freakin weird. I have no idea what happened.