as to the motherboards, yes they use btx mobo's quite a lot. so do many OEM's. And their PSU's have been, for the most part, standard ATX PSU's for many years.
As to a floppy drive not fitting into a case, never personally run into this, and i've spent my fair share of time inside Dell computers as I've purchased over $400,000.00 worth of them.
all of their hdd's and cd/dvd drives are standard units with standard mounting, and utilizing standard ide or sata connectors.
The RAM that comes in the Apple products is the SAME RAM that comes in the Dell products.
its made in the same country and in the same plant, on the same assembly line, and purchased through the same distribution channel.
It's a commodity.
Or are you goingto tell me that Micron makes a special "Apple only" ram that they rigorously test to make sure is the very best stuff out there and then only offer it to Apple while at the same time taking the reject ram and selling it to their other oem customers?
not likely. They'd be down to selling ram to apple only pretty quickly if their failure rate was that bad for the others.
I'll also point out this holds the same for Seagate and hitachi for hard drives.
1. It's not difficult, but if you add the time, and the time to PROPERLY dispose of the used oil, it's a pain and probably a wash since most oil changes are about $30.
2. Most dealers will do a VERY cursory examination (tire pressure, air filter (maybe), visual undercar inspection) when they do an undercar service like an oil change. However, they rarely go out of their way to look for something.
Having said that, I get my oil changed every other time at the dealer. I also get my tires rotated there at the same time. I do this becuase it keeps me qualified for free tires for the life of my vehicle from my dealer. The $7.00 per oil change premium over me doing it myself is worth it to me. Of course I also drive past my dealer twice a week and they are open till 9pm as well.
if you live in an area that has high heat lod in summer, simply updating your a/c system to a higher seer rating (or simply updating period if its 10+ years old) and changing your furnace to run on a variable speed dc blower motor (assuming forced air circulation) you will save more per month than the computer requires.
of course the costs to do this are not factored into this, but will affect you for the life of the two units as well.
most compressors (scroll type included) will slowly lose efficiency over their life (all in a/c units im aware of) and the same can be said for blower motors in furnaces.
these are two of the single largest electric users in the average american home.
dad always told me, fix the big stuff first then worry about the little shit.
the single biggest reason to use more than the EXACT amount you need is to prevent excessive running of the compressor in an outdoor condensing unit. This saves wear and tear on the most expensive component. this is not to say to have a 4 ton unit instead of a 2ton unit but having a 2 ton instead of a 1.5 ton isnt a bad idea
also the higher the seer rating, the overall better efficiency the unit has, and the lower your power bill will be over the life of the unit. and since, just like a furnace, the efficiency drops with age, starting out with a higher seer to begin with actually gives you a longer operational window.
throw in that in many places, electric companies give out HUGE rebates to people who put in high seer (14-18) units, and you nearly pay for the actual difference in cost between the high and low seer unit, and immediately start saving money on the power side without needing to recoup the initial investment.
(This also holds true for furnaces using Natural gas in many places)
my local electric is supplied by the city i live in (they own the power plant too) so we dont have any rebates on electric appliances.
thus we have a ton of new houses with 10 or 12 seer a/c and 93% furnaces because the natgas is supplied by a different utility that does give rebates.
I'd like to point out that many of the ratings on a dell PSU, I've found, to be much "truer" than,many of the lesser priced aftermarket PSU's.
meaning i replaced a 300w Dell PSU, with a $50 apevia psu from newegg that was rated at 400w and was having problems with the psu not supplying enough power.
this is ESPECIALLY true on anything the classify as a "server" (the old 400SC comes immediately to mind since iirc it had a 225w PSU).
you do understand that the companies refining the oil are purchasing on the futures market right?
no refinery in the world gives a shit about the oil price today. they have already bought all the oil they need to have in their facility today many months in advance.
you cant just not run a refinery for a day. They take weeks to shut down and weeks to bring back online.
therefore the oil going into their production pipeline is being purchased months in advance and as such, they are simply competing with speculators who are buying these futures at the same time and removing these futures from the board. This causes the price of the futures to potentially rise if the refineries are trying to purchase as well.
the drop in futures prices is caused by the speculators (and anyone purchasing that isnt a true user is a speculator) selling more shares than needed by the refineries (and other users).
if speculators are able to drive the price up, they do not have to wait for the market to drop to sell, they can be slowly pushing the price up by buying the available futures, and when their are none to be had for purchase by users who cant afford to not have it, they are willing to pay the higher price to get it.
its a fairly volatile market, and you can be bitten REALLY bad by it, but good futures traders will ALWAYS make money and will generally make very good money in their business dealings.
btw the same holds true for my locaql crop market of corn and the ethanol production plants, which is what has caused the recent surges in corn pricing per bushel. You cant turn off an ethanol plant either, and farmers are a lot smarter than people want to give them credit for, and the coops are now very well controlled by very good businessmen who know how to work the futures market for the best price/time ratio.
when OOo does everything that people need it to do that they already have from MS Office, it becomes a viable alternative.
for home users, this is'nt a very hard level to reach. In fact, i use OOo at home on all computers I own.
for corporate customers who use Exchange and Outlook, integrated with mail merges through Access and Outlook or Word Access and Outlook, among other things, its not even close.
OOo works in many situations, but is not an exact replacement for Office in many situations.
and many organizations have built their infrastructure around Office, so having to change to another program (or several) doenst make sense for them. Now throw communicator into the mix and OOo isnt even a blip for these type companies.
funny. ive got both nvidia and ati cards running on several VU computers x series ati's hd series ati's 8600 series nvidia's quadro nvidia's 88 series nvidia's
funny that i dont have a lot of problems with the ATI drivers, yet have had this very workstation im currently on fail to even display images on bootup after loading new nvidia drivers for the quadro card on 4 separate occasions.....
except that the low end system running vista home basic work just fine. it's only when you load them up with Vista Home Premium or Ultimate that you start to have problems.
And these problems are pretty over rated as far as performance goes.
most can be easily remedied with slightly more ram or slightly faster proc.
aero uses ram, and so does superfetch. one to give you the "oh cool" effect that users WANT, and one to keep preloaded common files for commonly used programs.
more memory means better performance of these two items especially.
most of the people i've dealt with that are complaining of "slowness" with vista are actually having other problems, such as background processes running and consuming HUGE amounts of proc and memory (i'm looking at you Norton...) or are running a virus scan, indexing, and some other proc intensive app on a very low end processor.
as a fedora user for a while, i agree. in fact when it was turned on by default in previous versions of fedora, the very first thing i did for my home stuff was disable it.
and what if people who are extremely healthy engage in outdoor activities which tend to cause injuries and death.
For example, I am an amateur motorcycle road and motocross racer. I am on a company insurance program, so my involvement with these sports has no bearing on our total health care costs since it is based upon demographics of age and sex.
since i routinely have small accidents and small injuries (hence my amateur and not pro status), should i also be penalized?
what if a i was a fat bastard on the couch who didn't get injured, because i didn't do anything?
should i be targeted then?
this is not a good plan.
next we should have different insurance rates for someone who uses a seat belt and someone who doesn't, and fines if you are caught saying you do but don't.
then we should have different places for people of one type of health from another, after all, we wouldn't want to possibly infect someone.
then we should have a master race which is the ideal of all of this and anybody who doesn't fit this master race we can just get rid of...............
People are tired of being linked to a page that has crappy layout, crappy embedded video or music that plays automatically, is full of lolspeak and/or textype, and is so random that it makes a schizophrenic feel confused.
The cost of a properly installed high efficiency propane furnace with DC blower motor, plus the cost of the in ground (or above ground if you prefer) holding tank would be quickly realized back as a net gain at the current heating oil prices.
their costs to operate a high efficiency unit over their current low efficiency oil furnace alone would probably do it in 10 years or less.
Oil fired furnaces are some of the most maintenance intensive beasts in the heating world. They lose efficiency faster than any other single form of home heating equipment and in order to keep them running correctly and at near peak (for their age) efficiency thye require costly yearly maintenance.
Oil fired took off because it was cheap. period not because it was efficient, not becuase it was easier, not because it was better.
I grew up in the HVAC world and spent 15 years of my life working on everything from ground source heat pumps to oil fired behemoths. even homes that had as many as 8 furnaces in them.
oil fired is not the answer at all, and simply upgrading will be a huge money saver in the very near term.
same reason as why its big in the middle east? servicepeople? you know "AHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRMY MEN SIR!" (obligatory Stripes reference for you young bastards)
While the poster you replied too was close to the mark, they missed by a bit. However your response fall right in line with what corporate America expects.
Corporate America doesn't fully trust Open Source. There are many reasons and they ARE slowly coming around. However, Firefox is a flagship open source project. Meaning it is high profile, highly visible to EVERYONE (not just the back end staff running things like PostGres or MySQL, or even Apache), and expected to be a "polished finished product".
The fact that Mozilla ADVERTISED their attempt at a download record and then had these types of what appear to most normal people to be comical and poorly planned errors, lends great credence to the average persons suspiciousness of open source programs.
the true fact of the matter is, if Microsoft had done something like this, or Apple, or god forbid somebody like Red Hat or Sun or Debian, the likelyhood is the errors would not have happened, and if they had for the first two, there would be much crowing and jeering from the FOSS idiots who think anytime something like this happens to the "Big bad corporate entities" it's a good thing.
Your response falls right in line with what the average PHB or average MM would expect from a zealot.
[whine]It's not Mozilla's fault, they are giving this away.... Let's see you do better..... They don't have the resources..... etc. [/whine]
here's an idea.....
SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING!!!!!
it just plain reeks of zealotism and makes the projects look bad.
Mozilla fucked up, plain and simple. They might have done something stupid like intentionally disallow the upgrading from within a current version of FF (I personally tried all day and all i got was the "Sorry, but here's a helpful link to direct download it" message on several computers.) just so they could better track the direct downloads to give a true figure for their record. They might have also just simply not expected as many as they got. It happens./. kills sites all the time, without even trying and they could have just been unprepared for the response they got.
However, going around and whining and bitching and being an ass while trying to defend something that does not need your defense merely plays right into the preconceived notions of many people, and actually does a great disservice to the project.
so please, support the project but don't be the expected "religious zealot" type and further push the corporate types away from this and other very good and very useful open source projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Well lets see here.....
Dell 400SC = micron ram
Dell precision 390s = micron ram
Dell xps m1330 = micron ram
Dell Inspiron 510 = micron ram
Dell Inspiron 521 = micron ram
yeap
they use no name cruddy components alright
as to the motherboards, yes they use btx mobo's quite a lot. so do many OEM's.
And their PSU's have been, for the most part, standard ATX PSU's for many years.
As to a floppy drive not fitting into a case, never personally run into this, and i've spent my fair share of time inside Dell computers as I've purchased over $400,000.00 worth of them.
all of their hdd's and cd/dvd drives are standard units with standard mounting, and utilizing standard ide or sata connectors.
kool aid stains are showing.
The RAM that comes in the Apple products is the SAME RAM that comes in the Dell products.
its made in the same country and in the same plant, on the same assembly line, and purchased through the same distribution channel.
It's a commodity.
Or are you goingto tell me that Micron makes a special "Apple only" ram that they rigorously test to make sure is the very best stuff out there and then only offer it to Apple while at the same time taking the reject ram and selling it to their other oem customers?
not likely.
They'd be down to selling ram to apple only pretty quickly if their failure rate was that bad for the others.
I'll also point out this holds the same for Seagate and hitachi for hard drives.
1. It's not difficult, but if you add the time, and the time to PROPERLY dispose of the used oil, it's a pain and probably a wash since most oil changes are about $30.
2. Most dealers will do a VERY cursory examination (tire pressure, air filter (maybe), visual undercar inspection) when they do an undercar service like an oil change. However, they rarely go out of their way to look for something.
Having said that, I get my oil changed every other time at the dealer. I also get my tires rotated there at the same time.
I do this becuase it keeps me qualified for free tires for the life of my vehicle from my dealer.
The $7.00 per oil change premium over me doing it myself is worth it to me.
Of course I also drive past my dealer twice a week and they are open till 9pm as well.
Most states do not tax food.
they do tax non food and sometimes this means paying tax on your soda.
but most FOOD isnt taxed
if you live in an area that has high heat lod in summer, simply updating your a/c system to a higher seer rating (or simply updating period if its 10+ years old) and changing your furnace to run on a variable speed dc blower motor (assuming forced air circulation) you will save more per month than the computer requires.
of course the costs to do this are not factored into this, but will affect you for the life of the two units as well.
most compressors (scroll type included) will slowly lose efficiency over their life (all in a/c units im aware of) and the same can be said for blower motors in furnaces.
these are two of the single largest electric users in the average american home.
dad always told me, fix the big stuff first then worry about the little shit.
try doing that when its 90-105 out with 85-95% humidity.
your electronic stuff wont last long if you do.
thats why i have a/c
not so much for me (it's nice to have though) but more to protect my expensive electronics from the heat AND humidity i see from may - august
the single biggest reason to use more than the EXACT amount you need is to prevent excessive running of the compressor in an outdoor condensing unit. This saves wear and tear on the most expensive component.
this is not to say to have a 4 ton unit instead of a 2ton unit
but having a 2 ton instead of a 1.5 ton isnt a bad idea
also the higher the seer rating, the overall better efficiency the unit has, and the lower your power bill will be over the life of the unit. and since, just like a furnace, the efficiency drops with age, starting out with a higher seer to begin with actually gives you a longer operational window.
throw in that in many places, electric companies give out HUGE rebates to people who put in high seer (14-18) units, and you nearly pay for the actual difference in cost between the high and low seer unit, and immediately start saving money on the power side without needing to recoup the initial investment.
(This also holds true for furnaces using Natural gas in many places)
my local electric is supplied by the city i live in (they own the power plant too) so we dont have any rebates on electric appliances.
thus we have a ton of new houses with 10 or 12 seer a/c and 93% furnaces because the natgas is supplied by a different utility that does give rebates.
I'd like to point out that many of the ratings on a dell PSU, I've found, to be much "truer" than ,many of the lesser priced aftermarket PSU's.
meaning i replaced a 300w Dell PSU, with a $50 apevia psu from newegg that was rated at 400w and was having problems with the psu not supplying enough power.
this is ESPECIALLY true on anything the classify as a "server" (the old 400SC comes immediately to mind since iirc it had a 225w PSU).
living in the "great plains" i can see you've never done more than just fly on by have you......
you're missing a lot of really cool stuff.
you do understand that the companies refining the oil are purchasing on the futures market right?
no refinery in the world gives a shit about the oil price today. they have already bought all the oil they need to have in their facility today many months in advance.
you cant just not run a refinery for a day.
They take weeks to shut down and weeks to bring back online.
therefore the oil going into their production pipeline is being purchased months in advance and as such, they are simply competing with speculators who are buying these futures at the same time and removing these futures from the board. This causes the price of the futures to potentially rise if the refineries are trying to purchase as well.
the drop in futures prices is caused by the speculators (and anyone purchasing that isnt a true user is a speculator) selling more shares than needed by the refineries (and other users).
if speculators are able to drive the price up, they do not have to wait for the market to drop to sell, they can be slowly pushing the price up by buying the available futures, and when their are none to be had for purchase by users who cant afford to not have it, they are willing to pay the higher price to get it.
its a fairly volatile market, and you can be bitten REALLY bad by it, but good futures traders will ALWAYS make money and will generally make very good money in their business dealings.
btw the same holds true for my locaql crop market of corn and the ethanol production plants, which is what has caused the recent surges in corn pricing per bushel.
You cant turn off an ethanol plant either, and farmers are a lot smarter than people want to give them credit for, and the coops are now very well controlled by very good businessmen who know how to work the futures market for the best price/time ratio.
when OOo does everything that people need it to do that they already have from MS Office, it becomes a viable alternative.
for home users, this is'nt a very hard level to reach. In fact, i use OOo at home on all computers I own.
for corporate customers who use Exchange and Outlook, integrated with mail merges through Access and Outlook or Word Access and Outlook, among other things, its not even close.
OOo works in many situations, but is not an exact replacement for Office in many situations.
and many organizations have built their infrastructure around Office, so having to change to another program (or several) doenst make sense for them.
Now throw communicator into the mix and OOo isnt even a blip for these type companies.
funny.
ive got both nvidia and ati cards running on several VU computers
x series ati's
hd series ati's
8600 series nvidia's
quadro nvidia's
88 series nvidia's
funny that i dont have a lot of problems with the ATI drivers, yet have had this very workstation im currently on fail to even display images on bootup after loading new nvidia drivers for the quadro card on 4 separate occasions.....
wonder why that is.....
must be MS's fault.
dont forget anyone who actually purchases a computer in the interim.
most windows lisc are sold through OEM channels and they will get what the OEM has to offer.
Period.
except that the low end system running vista home basic work just fine.
it's only when you load them up with Vista Home Premium or Ultimate that you start to have problems.
And these problems are pretty over rated as far as performance goes.
most can be easily remedied with slightly more ram or slightly faster proc.
aero uses ram, and so does superfetch.
one to give you the "oh cool" effect that users WANT, and one to keep preloaded common files for commonly used programs.
more memory means better performance of these two items especially.
most of the people i've dealt with that are complaining of "slowness" with vista are actually having other problems, such as background processes running and consuming HUGE amounts of proc and memory (i'm looking at you Norton...) or are running a virus scan, indexing, and some other proc intensive app on a very low end processor.
yeap, that will slow it down.
sorry.
you do of course realize that winds had nothing to do with the levee breaks in new orleans right?
it was instead storm surge and flooding from rain waters which caused this.
And those levees were well past their design point when they were breached.
try again.
as opposed to the whackjobs who think that every nuclear plant is going to meltdown.......
oh and ask Mr Ted Kennedy about windfarms......
as a fedora user for a while, i agree.
in fact when it was turned on by default in previous versions of fedora, the very first thing i did for my home stuff was disable it.
and what if people who are extremely healthy engage in outdoor activities which tend to cause injuries and death.
For example, I am an amateur motorcycle road and motocross racer.
I am on a company insurance program, so my involvement with these sports has no bearing on our total health care costs since it is based upon demographics of age and sex.
since i routinely have small accidents and small injuries (hence my amateur and not pro status), should i also be penalized?
what if a i was a fat bastard on the couch who didn't get injured, because i didn't do anything?
should i be targeted then?
this is not a good plan.
next we should have different insurance rates for someone who uses a seat belt and someone who doesn't, and fines if you are caught saying you do but don't.
then we should have different places for people of one type of health from another, after all, we wouldn't want to possibly infect someone.
then we should have a master race which is the ideal of all of this and anybody who doesn't fit this master race we can just get rid of...............
People are tired of being linked to a page that has crappy layout, crappy embedded video or music that plays automatically, is full of lolspeak and/or textype, and is so random that it makes a schizophrenic feel confused.
oh wait.......
they are as good or better than gas.
I have one.
The cost of a properly installed high efficiency propane furnace with DC blower motor, plus the cost of the in ground (or above ground if you prefer) holding tank would be quickly realized back as a net gain at the current heating oil prices.
their costs to operate a high efficiency unit over their current low efficiency oil furnace alone would probably do it in 10 years or less.
Oil fired furnaces are some of the most maintenance intensive beasts in the heating world.
They lose efficiency faster than any other single form of home heating equipment and in order to keep them running correctly and at near peak (for their age) efficiency thye require costly yearly maintenance.
Oil fired took off because it was cheap.
period
not because it was efficient, not becuase it was easier, not because it was better.
I grew up in the HVAC world and spent 15 years of my life working on everything from ground source heat pumps to oil fired behemoths.
even homes that had as many as 8 furnaces in them.
oil fired is not the answer at all, and simply upgrading will be a huge money saver in the very near term.
same reason as why its big in the middle east?
servicepeople?
you know
"AHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRMY MEN SIR!"
(obligatory Stripes reference for you young bastards)
Shhhh.....
:D
you must really be new here....
is that why they've killed the ability to update from within a previous version of FF while attempting to set the record?
While the poster you replied too was close to the mark, they missed by a bit.
/. kills sites all the time, without even trying and they could have just been unprepared for the response they got.
However your response fall right in line with what corporate America expects.
Corporate America doesn't fully trust Open Source.
There are many reasons and they ARE slowly coming around.
However, Firefox is a flagship open source project.
Meaning it is high profile, highly visible to EVERYONE (not just the back end staff running things like PostGres or MySQL, or even Apache), and expected to be a "polished finished product".
The fact that Mozilla ADVERTISED their attempt at a download record and then had these types of what appear to most normal people to be comical and poorly planned errors, lends great credence to the average persons suspiciousness of open source programs.
the true fact of the matter is, if Microsoft had done something like this, or Apple, or god forbid somebody like Red Hat or Sun or Debian, the likelyhood is the errors would not have happened, and if they had for the first two, there would be much crowing and jeering from the FOSS idiots who think anytime something like this happens to the "Big bad corporate entities" it's a good thing.
Your response falls right in line with what the average PHB or average MM would expect from a zealot.
[whine]It's not Mozilla's fault, they are giving this away....
Let's see you do better.....
They don't have the resources.....
etc.
[/whine]
here's an idea.....
SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING!!!!!
it just plain reeks of zealotism and makes the projects look bad.
Mozilla fucked up, plain and simple.
They might have done something stupid like intentionally disallow the upgrading from within a current version of FF (I personally tried all day and all i got was the "Sorry, but here's a helpful link to direct download it" message on several computers.) just so they could better track the direct downloads to give a true figure for their record. They might have also just simply not expected as many as they got.
It happens.
However, going around and whining and bitching and being an ass while trying to defend something that does not need your defense merely plays right into the preconceived notions of many people, and actually does a great disservice to the project.
so please, support the project but don't be the expected "religious zealot" type and further push the corporate types away from this and other very good and very useful open source projects.