Optical cables are expesive because retailers know the consumer doesn't know any better. Wholesale wise I can buy a TOS cable for the same price as a good quality coax RCA cable. Hell, cost of sending a 30 ft. TOS cable from asia to the US is less than the wholesale on a 3 ft monster brand TOS cable.
The real issue for TOS isn't the medium the digital streams travels, it's how it's sent. Jitter is an issue because TOS spec uses very cheap LED's to transmit the stream. If they had used a laser diode it wouldn't be much of an issue.
If you look at computer networking the optical connections are all Laser driven. And for very good reason, data corruption isn't an option.
JVC is actually making a good bet. The way the market is going it's obvious that firewire will be the only transport any HD digital recording device will use or be allowed to use. With firewire content producers will be able to flag programs that cannot be recorded at all. Hence, the end of comsumer time shifting. And since we have the DMCA, there isn't anything we can do about this. Any attempt to remove the "do not record" flag from the encrypted stream will be a violation.
Last year Panasonic released a non-firewire HD recording product. (PV-HD1000) It was very aburptly pulled from the market. Many people think the reason was based solely on presures from the MPAA. The Panasonic product would record anything you wanted.
If you were actually at the show JVC was boasting how they had support for HDCP from all the major movie companies. Fox even said they would use HDCP for OTA movies.
The real this at issue is twofold. One, HDCP is totally dependant on Firewire interconnects and some decoder ring from Intel. No current HDTV display has said decoder, and very few displays have the ability to be upgraded. Two, your ability to record programs in HD and watch them at a later date never going to see the light of day.
To be honest I'm leary here. When I look at the officers for the T13 (Maxim/Quantum personel), and add that to the locations the meetings take place: Microsoft, Dell, Seagate, Western Digital, etc. I can't help but to think that the end result is going to be business interests ahead of consumer interests.
What is the mood of the T13 on the issue? Are you part of a minority, or part of the majority on this issue? Do you think you will win on this issue?
If memory serves, wasn't FNMA (And other large lenders) having a very public spat with HUD and the FTC because they wouldn't disclose to the gov't exactly how they determined credit scores?
There is some pretty interesting evidence souronding Monsanto (which has since gotten out of the chemical business and moved into genetic engineered seed) dumping PCB's into water supplies over the course of several decades and how much the exectutives of the company knew in the 70's but didn't change policy until the 80's.
Now you could say that they didn't know PCB's caused cancer, and they are sorry about skyrocketing cancer rates, birth defects, and deaths in the communities around their plants.
It's like global warming and other trendy causes. The jury is out about the hard data and what causes it, but it doesn't take a Ph.d to know that what's comming out of the tail pipe isn't something you want to be breating. It's just a good idea to reduce the emmisions and scrub the toxics. We shouldn't have to say the sky is falling in order to effect change, it should be a no brainer.
In that regaurd they knew drinking PCBs directly weren't a "good thing"(tm). I don't think it's a big leap of logic to say "Hey, maybe that's a bad idea if we dump this into the river where people get their water."
No body went to jail. From plant manager to CEO, no one was held criminally responcible. In fact recent press reports show that the gov't turned a blind eye to complaints about the plants. So, now you go to a civil system, in which a very large company can hold off basically a group of low income small towns folk for years.
To contrast that, as a person, if I had been drinking and got into an accident that someone died in, there is a very good chance I would have to face criminal charges. Of course I never had any intent to hurt anyone, but I don't have any articles of incorporation to hide behind.
It's an interesting question. I think this may be more of a case of how the laws are applied to the common man vs. a corporation. It almost gets down to a Ralph Nader style speech. I as the common person could do something reckless. Someone could get hurt or killed, there is a good chance that I would face criminal charges and probally civil too. A corporation on the other hand would usually only face civil charges. If you add up all the people who die because of "typical" crime (Guns, Drunk Driving, assult, etc.) it doesn't come anywhere near to that of corporate crime. To date I know of no CEO's who are sitting in jail for poising a towns water supply?
The laws in this country are designed to protect corporations. Corporations far outspeed citizens for campain funding. Over 85% of the time the canidate with more money will win the election. Whos interests do you think really are served in gov't? I don't think it's a matter of the gov't explicitly giving the power to corps. I do think corps are protected by a series of laws that make it very difficult for a single citizen to stand up for their rights.
If you look at the downfall of infocom piece that was covered a couple days ago you can see the connection. Gambling your entire company future on having a few choice things going your way is tricky. Although, I personally think 3dfx killed it self the minute it decided to go into the video card business for itself. In general, when you have a large chuck of market share you don't have to make risky decisions. Throw some change at R&D to keep the FPS crown and don't make any business desision that would tank your company if it went drastically wrong. In fact you should set it up so that the company would still survive even if you totally horked three or four deals.
But that's just my $.02, and I'm sure the upper end of 3dfx are making out like bandits on the deal. The real losers are going to be the people who owned older 3dfx cards and now are going to find that the video drivers are never going to get updated.
It's an interesting point you make. And certainly a fair ammount of it has merit. But, I think you're too focused on the sysadmin portion of the equation. Yes, there are many people out there with years of experience in sys admin who have gotten dropped by the way side. Sometimes unfairly because of their age, other people, because they didn't change with the times, and weren't willing to use new technology in the job. It's great is you can find a good sys admin, but it that last system you used was a PDP-10 or a DG-UX box you're not a lot of help to me with my Sun boxes.
As harsh as that sounds it's been the case in my experience with sysadmins. Some people dwell on the old days and just aren't technically proficient with all the new tech. But like I said that's still just a small piece of the high salary technical Pie.
You've got networking people, programmers, project admins, etc, etc. With supply and demand it's not the lamb skin that counts, it's what you know. Bad in 1992 if you were a CNE you were golden. Now, who cares. Back in 1996 if you were a MCSE you got to name your price. Now, they are a dime a dozen.
Also a dime a dozen, cobol, RPG, and ADA. Sure there's some demand right now for legacy systems, but it's not going to be around forever. It's obvious that Java, Perl, PHP, Coldfussion are the languages and systems that are hot these days.
I firmly believe that there are people in IT who "Get it" and those who just don't. The ones who "Get it" have a natural talent. They are likey to have a CNE, MSCE, MSCD etc. years before everyone else does. They tend to expand their education, and always are on the cutting edge demanding an inflated price. Then their are those that just don't get it. They aren't doing IT because it's fun for them. They are doing it because they heard their was some cash. Nine times out of ten it's this person who says "Look I know what I'm doing, I'm a MSCE/CNE/Whatever!" As douglas Adams would say, they'll be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes..
Those who have a true love for the technology will always do well. They will ALWAYS be in demand. The other will find temporary sucess...until the market goes sour.
I'm suprised no one has brought this up. The geek appeal of a full combo unit is one thing. But if you're really looking at a DVD player with outstanding video quality we should be talking about progressive scan DVD players.
You can trumpet apex and others all you want for it's macrovision disable, but the compoent video output (interlaced or progressive) does not encode any macrovision crap onto the signal.
The biggest consideration is the televisions getting bigger. LCD and DLP projectors are getting cheaping. Someone can set up a poor persons projection system that can do HDTV for under $3000. For $7000 you can put together a very high quality HDTV projection system complete with motorized screen (45X80 or about 92" diag.), broadcast and satilite HDTV decoder, and a good quality Progressive scan DVD player.
Even if you don't go the true HDTV route, many direct view TV's shipped with compoent video inputs (Most with Interlaced, but a fair number with progressive.) And most new models of Rear Projection TV's shiped with compoent video as well.
If you're going to toss money at a DVD player I would suggest looking at a progressive model. With HDTV becoming the standard in 2006, I believe it's a wise investment.
Models to look at:
JVC's XVD723GD Street Price ~$469 USD
Toshiba SD5109 Street Price ~$463 USD
Toshiba SD6200 Street Price ~$549 USD - HDCD
If you like really high end stuff:
Onkyo DVS939 Has RS-232, Firewire Port, is firmware upgradible, and weighs 24 lbs.
I think any package that wants to be of production quality should do both. There are some people that just want the binary. And they should be catered to. There are admins out there who are just okay. That's the fact of life for any IT job. If you have an elitist view about who should be a box admin then you don't have any right to complain about more companies not using linux. You can't have it both ways. It's not like making a binary is a big task in the grand scheme of the development cycle.
However, that being said, source is also a good thing. For one, some applications may work better if they are complied certain ways. When it comes to squeezing every ounce of speed out of an app having the ability to compile for a certain CPU, or using static libs is generally a good thing.
Re:It's just like etoy, they don't have the mark
on
Fandom vs. Fandom.com
·
· Score: 2
Both etoys.com and fandom.com claim in their cease and desist letters that they own the trademark. Neither actually do.
Just like the etoys V etoy case they don't actually have the trademark. Fandom.com doesn't actually own the trademark. They applied to the trademark but according to the office it's a "dead" application. Read: The patent and trademark office sent it back probally wondering why they were laying claim to it when Star Log has been using the team years before the WWW was a Wet Dream in a Swiss research lab.
You're missing the big picture. It's not that anyone would actually make the games on the Dreamcast. It's that the games you'd create would run on the Dreamcast. Like it or not Linux is not easy for a lot of people to deal with on the PC. A console takes care of these problems. Since the OS is only memory resident you can have is directly boot into the game.
Yeah it's neat and everything, but the protocol it runs on is like NetBEUI for Home Automation. I think slashdot should have a round up on home automation that covers some of the non-X-10 stuff.
Well, the largest benifit would be people could actually port software over to the dream cast with out paying any fees. Sega sells the dream cast at cost or less than cost in order to get people to buy the system. The games in turn, which probally cost 3 dollars in materials, and maybe 10 dollars in RD also pay sega a percentage. Just to get your hands on the development information costs you an arm and a leg. Now if you're activision, or capcom this really doesn't matter.
If you're joe shmoe user then this is a big deal. You could actually make your own shareware dreamcast game. People could download it over the internet. We go back to the days of the Apple II and C64 where big game makers started out of someones basement.
From a business stand point this is also a "Good Thing" (TM). If a number of game systems run Linux (Dreamcast, PS2, etc.) then the cost of porting could become cheaper. A company like Loki would do one main port of a game, then a could mini ports to tweak the games. The plus side to the linux comunity is games could be avalible on Linux x86 before the windows version is complete.
Well, yes and no. At the time everyone was pushing the 19.95 mark an ISP was lucky to get 3 bucks of profit out of the account. If someonw used more than 15 minutes of Tech support time a month you've lost money.
But times have changed. T1 prices are down. Now you can make about $10/account at $19 bucks. I can't think of a good excuse for poor tech support at the $19 price point anymore.
HP is an american company. As you know the product is produced in the Pinewood England office. Openmail enjoys far more popularity in the EU/UK area than the US.
You probally did Openmail Internals just like I did.
This boils down to the following. Before outlook came out MS had there crappy exchange and MS mail clients/servers. At that point HP was years ahead of MS. HP released a NT version of Openmail. The word directly from HP was MS hit the fucking ceiling. They told HP that if Openmail wasn't pulled from the NT platform that they'd drop them from the NT VAR/OEM program. They would no longer get advanced releases. This would screw HP because they need to write drivers for NT for the custom hardware they make.
Openmail NT was pulled from the product lineup and is a footnote in history.
HP was really hoping that OS/2 would take a better hold of the market. At one point IBM sold a branded version of Openmail. When OS/2 crapped out that left HP out of the intel platform. And thus could never hold the costs down.
As far as cost reductions I can chip in the following. It was never the software it self that created the high cost for us as a HP Openmail customer. It was the cost of hardware and Unix support. Implimenting UNIX upgrades cost far more than NT service packs. Buying K series servers sucks big time.
This is where Linux comes in. If Linux becomes workable to the high end business customer this opens the door for large scale Intel boxes that would run openmail. Hardware costs would be reduced greatly, and the OS would be free.
Most companies that seriously mix outlook in a Unix eviroment use HP Openmail. As I noted in a previous post it also will work for Lotus clients, POP, IMAP, WAP, SMS, etc, etc.
I will note, problems related to the client will not go away. Outlook is a message based scheduling program. This get's me into my whole rant about how MS Support ane Engineering sucks. There are hundreds of bugs in Outlook. But they won't do regular service pack upgrades. In fact most bugs are fixed in security patches, but MS does not document what actually is fixed in the security patch.
I would suggest looking at HP Openmail. It scales far better than Exchange, and supports MAPI (as well as cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, POP, IMAP, etc.) The only got'cha to this is: Openmail will only be as good as the people who administer it. As a Unix based system if you throw MS based person into the mix you'll have trouble. If you have good UNIX people you'll do well.
www.ice.hp.com
Runs on HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, and now Linux. I'd recommend the HP/UX and Linux versions. They are the most up to date.
In most states it's up to the county to pay for the voting system. In many places, large counties are able to afford real time electronic election systems. But there systems cost millions of dollars. And it's money from the county that pays for it. That's great if you're a large urban center. But for small counties 100K that's a lot of hard cash.
If you want to get this done you'll have to have a billion dollars come from a federal level to buy the stuff.
I think a better question is if you could hack out a NFS volume to store MPG in, or even better, figure out a way of networking several Tivo's together to share movies and recording times. I wouldn't mind having a stack of Dish recievers and Tivo's in the A/V rack all networked with video distribution.
The most irritating thing our friend will find out is that his computer is now evidence. He's not going to get it back any time in the near, or not so near future. See Steve Jackson Games.
Warrents are about the only thing that's actually fairly close to reality in TV crime shows. They aren't hard for the cops to get. Judges don't know any better and take the DOJ/DA's word for it as far as if it's needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget Snell and Maggies for the speakers, and odd as it sounds JVC actually struck gold with thier 700 series progressive scan DVD player.
Optical cables are expesive because retailers know the consumer doesn't know any better. Wholesale wise I can buy a TOS cable for the same price as a good quality coax RCA cable. Hell, cost of sending a 30 ft. TOS cable from asia to the US is less than the wholesale on a 3 ft monster brand TOS cable.
The real issue for TOS isn't the medium the digital streams travels, it's how it's sent. Jitter is an issue because TOS spec uses very cheap LED's to transmit the stream. If they had used a laser diode it wouldn't be much of an issue.
If you look at computer networking the optical connections are all Laser driven. And for very good reason, data corruption isn't an option.
JVC is actually making a good bet. The way the market is going it's obvious that firewire will be the only transport any HD digital recording device will use or be allowed to use. With firewire content producers will be able to flag programs that cannot be recorded at all. Hence, the end of comsumer time shifting. And since we have the DMCA, there isn't anything we can do about this. Any attempt to remove the "do not record" flag from the encrypted stream will be a violation.
Last year Panasonic released a non-firewire HD recording product. (PV-HD1000) It was very aburptly pulled from the market. Many people think the reason was based solely on presures from the MPAA. The Panasonic product would record anything you wanted.
If you were actually at the show JVC was boasting how they had support for HDCP from all the major movie companies. Fox even said they would use HDCP for OTA movies.
The real this at issue is twofold. One, HDCP is totally dependant on Firewire interconnects and some decoder ring from Intel. No current HDTV display has said decoder, and very few displays have the ability to be upgraded. Two, your ability to record programs in HD and watch them at a later date never going to see the light of day.
To be honest I'm leary here. When I look at the officers for the T13 (Maxim/Quantum personel), and add that to the locations the meetings take place: Microsoft, Dell, Seagate, Western Digital, etc. I can't help but to think that the end result is going to be business interests ahead of consumer interests.
What is the mood of the T13 on the issue? Are you part of a minority, or part of the majority on this issue? Do you think you will win on this issue?
If memory serves, wasn't FNMA (And other large lenders) having a very public spat with HUD and the FTC because they wouldn't disclose to the gov't exactly how they determined credit scores?
There is some pretty interesting evidence souronding Monsanto (which has since gotten out of the chemical business and moved into genetic engineered seed) dumping PCB's into water supplies over the course of several decades and how much the exectutives of the company knew in the 70's but didn't change policy until the 80's.
Now you could say that they didn't know PCB's caused cancer, and they are sorry about skyrocketing cancer rates, birth defects, and deaths in the communities around their plants.
It's like global warming and other trendy causes. The jury is out about the hard data and what causes it, but it doesn't take a Ph.d to know that what's comming out of the tail pipe isn't something you want to be breating. It's just a good idea to reduce the emmisions and scrub the toxics. We shouldn't have to say the sky is falling in order to effect change, it should be a no brainer.
In that regaurd they knew drinking PCBs directly weren't a "good thing"(tm). I don't think it's a big leap of logic to say "Hey, maybe that's a bad idea if we dump this into the river where people get their water."
No body went to jail. From plant manager to CEO, no one was held criminally responcible. In fact recent press reports show that the gov't turned a blind eye to complaints about the plants. So, now you go to a civil system, in which a very large company can hold off basically a group of low income small towns folk for years.
To contrast that, as a person, if I had been drinking and got into an accident that someone died in, there is a very good chance I would have to face criminal charges. Of course I never had any intent to hurt anyone, but I don't have any articles of incorporation to hide behind.
It's an interesting question. I think this may be more of a case of how the laws are applied to the common man vs. a corporation. It almost gets down to a Ralph Nader style speech. I as the common person could do something reckless. Someone could get hurt or killed, there is a good chance that I would face criminal charges and probally civil too. A corporation on the other hand would usually only face civil charges. If you add up all the people who die because of "typical" crime (Guns, Drunk Driving, assult, etc.) it doesn't come anywhere near to that of corporate crime. To date I know of no CEO's who are sitting in jail for poising a towns water supply?
The laws in this country are designed to protect corporations. Corporations far outspeed citizens for campain funding. Over 85% of the time the canidate with more money will win the election. Whos interests do you think really are served in gov't? I don't think it's a matter of the gov't explicitly giving the power to corps. I do think corps are protected by a series of laws that make it very difficult for a single citizen to stand up for their rights.
I would have said 7th guest and 11th hour where influenced by myth. At least the puzzle solving with some flashy graphics.
If you look at the downfall of infocom piece that was covered a couple days ago you can see the connection. Gambling your entire company future on having a few choice things going your way is tricky. Although, I personally think 3dfx killed it self the minute it decided to go into the video card business for itself. In general, when you have a large chuck of market share you don't have to make risky decisions. Throw some change at R&D to keep the FPS crown and don't make any business desision that would tank your company if it went drastically wrong. In fact you should set it up so that the company would still survive even if you totally horked three or four deals.
But that's just my $.02, and I'm sure the upper end of 3dfx are making out like bandits on the deal. The real losers are going to be the people who owned older 3dfx cards and now are going to find that the video drivers are never going to get updated.
It's an interesting point you make. And certainly a fair ammount of it has merit. But, I think you're too focused on the sysadmin portion of the equation. Yes, there are many people out there with years of experience in sys admin who have gotten dropped by the way side. Sometimes unfairly because of their age, other people, because they didn't change with the times, and weren't willing to use new technology in the job. It's great is you can find a good sys admin, but it that last system you used was a PDP-10 or a DG-UX box you're not a lot of help to me with my Sun boxes.
As harsh as that sounds it's been the case in my experience with sysadmins. Some people dwell on the old days and just aren't technically proficient with all the new tech. But like I said that's still just a small piece of the high salary technical Pie.
You've got networking people, programmers, project admins, etc, etc. With supply and demand it's not the lamb skin that counts, it's what you know. Bad in 1992 if you were a CNE you were golden. Now, who cares. Back in 1996 if you were a MCSE you got to name your price. Now, they are a dime a dozen.
Also a dime a dozen, cobol, RPG, and ADA. Sure there's some demand right now for legacy systems, but it's not going to be around forever. It's obvious that Java, Perl, PHP, Coldfussion are the languages and systems that are hot these days.
I firmly believe that there are people in IT who "Get it" and those who just don't. The ones who "Get it" have a natural talent. They are likey to have a CNE, MSCE, MSCD etc. years before everyone else does. They tend to expand their education, and always are on the cutting edge demanding an inflated price. Then their are those that just don't get it. They aren't doing IT because it's fun for them. They are doing it because they heard their was some cash. Nine times out of ten it's this person who says "Look I know what I'm doing, I'm a MSCE/CNE/Whatever!" As douglas Adams would say, they'll be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes..
Those who have a true love for the technology will always do well. They will ALWAYS be in demand. The other will find temporary sucess...until the market goes sour.
I'm suprised no one has brought this up. The geek appeal of a full combo unit is one thing. But if you're really looking at a DVD player with outstanding video quality we should be talking about progressive scan DVD players.
You can trumpet apex and others all you want for it's macrovision disable, but the compoent video output (interlaced or progressive) does not encode any macrovision crap onto the signal.
The biggest consideration is the televisions getting bigger. LCD and DLP projectors are getting cheaping. Someone can set up a poor persons projection system that can do HDTV for under $3000. For $7000 you can put together a very high quality HDTV projection system complete with motorized screen (45X80 or about 92" diag.), broadcast and satilite HDTV decoder, and a good quality Progressive scan DVD player.
Even if you don't go the true HDTV route, many direct view TV's shipped with compoent video inputs (Most with Interlaced, but a fair number with progressive.) And most new models of Rear Projection TV's shiped with compoent video as well.
If you're going to toss money at a DVD player I would suggest looking at a progressive model. With HDTV becoming the standard in 2006, I believe it's a wise investment.
Models to look at:
JVC's XVD723GD Street Price ~$469 USD
Toshiba SD5109 Street Price ~$463 USD
Toshiba SD6200 Street Price ~$549 USD - HDCD
If you like really high end stuff:
Onkyo DVS939 Has RS-232, Firewire Port, is firmware upgradible, and weighs 24 lbs.
I think any package that wants to be of production quality should do both. There are some people that just want the binary. And they should be catered to. There are admins out there who are just okay. That's the fact of life for any IT job. If you have an elitist view about who should be a box admin then you don't have any right to complain about more companies not using linux. You can't have it both ways. It's not like making a binary is a big task in the grand scheme of the development cycle.
However, that being said, source is also a good thing. For one, some applications may work better if they are complied certain ways. When it comes to squeezing every ounce of speed out of an app having the ability to compile for a certain CPU, or using static libs is generally a good thing.
Both etoys.com and fandom.com claim in their cease and desist letters that they own the trademark. Neither actually do.
I just want to hear Paul Vixie say: I've taken down bigger men than you Picard!
Just like the etoys V etoy case they don't actually have the trademark. Fandom.com doesn't actually own the trademark. They applied to the trademark but according to the office it's a "dead" application. Read: The patent and trademark office sent it back probally wondering why they were laying claim to it when Star Log has been using the team years before the WWW was a Wet Dream in a Swiss research lab.
You're missing the big picture. It's not that anyone would actually make the games on the Dreamcast. It's that the games you'd create would run on the Dreamcast. Like it or not Linux is not easy for a lot of people to deal with on the PC. A console takes care of these problems. Since the OS is only memory resident you can have is directly boot into the game.
Yeah it's neat and everything, but the protocol it runs on is like NetBEUI for Home Automation. I think slashdot should have a round up on home automation that covers some of the non-X-10 stuff.
Well, the largest benifit would be people could actually port software over to the dream cast with out paying any fees. Sega sells the dream cast at cost or less than cost in order to get people to buy the system. The games in turn, which probally cost 3 dollars in materials, and maybe 10 dollars in RD also pay sega a percentage. Just to get your hands on the development information costs you an arm and a leg. Now if you're activision, or capcom this really doesn't matter.
If you're joe shmoe user then this is a big deal. You could actually make your own shareware dreamcast game. People could download it over the internet. We go back to the days of the Apple II and C64 where big game makers started out of someones basement.
From a business stand point this is also a "Good Thing" (TM). If a number of game systems run Linux (Dreamcast, PS2, etc.) then the cost of porting could become cheaper. A company like Loki would do one main port of a game, then a could mini ports to tweak the games. The plus side to the linux comunity is games could be avalible on Linux x86 before the windows version is complete.
Just some stuff that should get you wondering.
Well, yes and no. At the time everyone was pushing the 19.95 mark an ISP was lucky to get 3 bucks of profit out of the account. If someonw used more than 15 minutes of Tech support time a month you've lost money.
But times have changed. T1 prices are down. Now you can make about $10/account at $19 bucks. I can't think of a good excuse for poor tech support at the $19 price point anymore.
HP is an american company. As you know the product is produced in the Pinewood England office. Openmail enjoys far more popularity in the EU/UK area than the US.
You probally did Openmail Internals just like I did.
This boils down to the following. Before outlook came out MS had there crappy exchange and MS mail clients/servers. At that point HP was years ahead of MS. HP released a NT version of Openmail. The word directly from HP was MS hit the fucking ceiling. They told HP that if Openmail wasn't pulled from the NT platform that they'd drop them from the NT VAR/OEM program. They would no longer get advanced releases. This would screw HP because they need to write drivers for NT for the custom hardware they make.
Openmail NT was pulled from the product lineup and is a footnote in history.
HP was really hoping that OS/2 would take a better hold of the market. At one point IBM sold a branded version of Openmail. When OS/2 crapped out that left HP out of the intel platform. And thus could never hold the costs down.
As far as cost reductions I can chip in the following. It was never the software it self that created the high cost for us as a HP Openmail customer. It was the cost of hardware and Unix support. Implimenting UNIX upgrades cost far more than NT service packs. Buying K series servers sucks big time.
This is where Linux comes in. If Linux becomes workable to the high end business customer this opens the door for large scale Intel boxes that would run openmail. Hardware costs would be reduced greatly, and the OS would be free.
That's my $.02
Most companies that seriously mix outlook in a Unix eviroment use HP Openmail. As I noted in a previous post it also will work for Lotus clients, POP, IMAP, WAP, SMS, etc, etc.
I will note, problems related to the client will not go away. Outlook is a message based scheduling program. This get's me into my whole rant about how MS Support ane Engineering sucks. There are hundreds of bugs in Outlook. But they won't do regular service pack upgrades. In fact most bugs are fixed in security patches, but MS does not document what actually is fixed in the security patch.
I would suggest looking at HP Openmail. It scales far better than Exchange, and supports MAPI (as well as cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, POP, IMAP, etc.) The only got'cha to this is: Openmail will only be as good as the people who administer it. As a Unix based system if you throw MS based person into the mix you'll have trouble. If you have good UNIX people you'll do well.
www.ice.hp.com
Runs on HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, and now Linux. I'd recommend the HP/UX and Linux versions. They are the most up to date.
In most states it's up to the county to pay for the voting system. In many places, large counties are able to afford real time electronic election systems. But there systems cost millions of dollars. And it's money from the county that pays for it. That's great if you're a large urban center. But for small counties 100K that's a lot of hard cash.
If you want to get this done you'll have to have a billion dollars come from a federal level to buy the stuff.
I think a better question is if you could hack out a NFS volume to store MPG in, or even better, figure out a way of networking several Tivo's together to share movies and recording times. I wouldn't mind having a stack of Dish recievers and Tivo's in the A/V rack all networked with video distribution.
The most irritating thing our friend will find out is that his computer is now evidence. He's not going to get it back any time in the near, or not so near future. See Steve Jackson Games.
Warrents are about the only thing that's actually fairly close to reality in TV crime shows. They aren't hard for the cops to get. Judges don't know any better and take the DOJ/DA's word for it as far as if it's needed.