A device that costs $180 subsidized with a 2-year contract and has only a 3.25" screen would translate to "cost far more than normal users will be willing to pay" on a 17", non-subsidized monitor.
The best bet, then, is a pre-built PC of decent specs (dual or quad core CPU) with room for plenty of SATA drives.
You don't care about RAM installed, only about the maximum the system supports, because you can then go and buy RAM to fill the machine for far less than Dell, HP, etc., charge.
The theory is the same for hard disks. You just need 6-8 SATA ports on the motherboard, and then you can add as many drives as you want, and use software RAID (or ZFS) to set up the storage.
If the system doesn't have a decent Ethernet card, a server-class dual-port PCIe x4 card will set you back less than $140.
Going with a low-end server-class system might be slightly better, but a quality workstation PC with 2-3 year warranty would almost certainly be good enough.
I've built systems exactly like the story poster wants using inexpensive parts. My storage server has four 1000Mbit Ethernet ports bonded (using Linux bond driver) and can sustain about 300MB/sec from the various systems that acesss it regularly (two ESX servers and a Windows 2003 server) via iSCSI. Plus, it's still got a lot of room to grow (only 2GB of RAM out of 8GB max, and 500GB drives instead of the 1.5TB you can buy now), which this is another advantage to a true server. Generally, you can upgrade it when your needs increase, while a NAS device will probably require you to buy a new one.
This works with all pen-based interfaces, because the pen is part of the touch system. All the tablet PCs I have seen are the same way.
You just can't do this with a touch screen.
Despite the other reply, you can't "hover" close to a screen with any real accuracy without having the system cost far more than normal users will be willing to pay.
I'd pay $50 (this doesn't seem hilariously low given 5 years and a reasonable size) for a thin screen that I could set on my desk and use as an input device. I'm not sure I would use it for anything in the long run, but I would pay $50 just to try it.
There's no doubt that a monitor that also has touch screen features for only a small premium in price would have decent sales.
If you don't lose what you have now, but can also have an alternate input, it would be quite useful. If it was a more powerful touch screen, it would be quite nice for emulating cell phones (including multi-touch) so that you can test your programs (and web sites) in a realistic manner.
How many companies adopted Flat Screens well before they were the norm for home computing, simply because they were "new"? I know the company I worked for did.
On the other hand, there are the companies the rest of worked for, where unless your CRT monitor was on fire or otherwise completely unusable you wouldn't get a new monitor.
This means that despite the image being doubled, the green gun dead, and random shrinking and snapping back to full size, you had a "working" monitor and were SOL.
Then, once your monitor was declared "dead", you didn't get an LCD until everyone above you (including the various CxO types who didn't even use their computer because they had a secretary) had one. So, when your monitor died, somebody above you in the chain got an LCD, and you got a hand-me-down CRT.
All those mortgages that have giant, scheduled jumps in the rate and are being called adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) are giving real ARMs a black eye they don't deserve.
I bought my house with a "normal" ARM at 5.25%. It can adjust up to 1%/year in either direction (every June), with limits of 0.25% and 10.25%. Every year, I look at refinancing, and every year I see that I can only do about 0.5% better than my current rate, and only if I pay a lot of closing fees.
Going with an ARM allowed me to purchase a house when I had less money...at the time I purchased, it was about 2% more for a fixed rate mortgage.
Since my house is now worth about 3x what I have left to pay, I really can't see any downside to this type of ARM, at least if you still don't overextend yourself.
Secondly, desktop composition in Vista also vastly improves the windows switcher by providing live previews of the windows instead of undescriptive application icons.
OK, I'll bite...when exactly does this help?
When does seeing that Microsoft Word has some text that is centered help you in deciding if you want to switch to it or not?
How does seeing a thumbnail of an open e-mail titled "Staff Meeting" (which displays in the old task switcher) help you decide that's the one you want?
As far as I can tell, the only time a live preview on task switch would help is:
You have a lot of created but unsaved (i.e., untitled) documents open.
Every app with these documents shows the documents as individual windows in the task bar (so they appear as "applications" as far as the task switcher is concerned).
DHT or the like might seed your files outside the company. Ok, I'm too lazy to work out if that really is a threat, but I'm not sure that bitorrent is appropriate for data that you don't want to end up in the public domain.
Every BitTorrent client that supports DHT also has the ability to disable it.
In addition, since this is a VPN network, the client IP addresses are likely to be non-routable, so even if you did leak the torrent through DHT, it's pretty unlikely that anyone outside the company would be able to connect to a client running at 192.168.1.1.
The point is that the machine failed at identifying the ballots, not just identifying votes.
I can see that optical scanning might have issues, but then the counting machine needs to spit out the "bad" ballot into a different pile so that it can be manually checked. The machine failed to do this.
Mostly, it's TV shows that I can't record. Either I don't have enough simultaneous tuners, I can't record that particular channel on a PC, or that channel simply isn't available here (I'm in the US, so most UK channels fit that category).
It's also some TV shows that I have missed recording for whatever reason, and some that I just won't purchase DVDs ever, since the show is a one-time watch at best. Some don't have DVDs at all, and probably never will.
You can do the following to lower some heat production:
Buy an LCD monitor. Whether you do this or not, make sure your systems are set to power down the monitor as much as possible.
Set the laser printer to power down when not in use (it's the default for most, but you can disable it). If yours doesn't have this feature, buy a newer one and sell the old one...it will probably cost you less than a nice dinner out in the end.
Put the power bricks for various devices on a power strip (one with individual switches would be best) so you can completely kill power to them when you don't need the device.
Me, I'm outside of Washington, DC, it's about 35F outside, and I have the window open in my computer room, and it's just perfect in the room. In summer...well, it's pretty miserable. It would take too long to go into details, but to give you an idea, I have 30 total hard drives that are all active doing real work right now.
Hybrid systems consisting of both hd's and ssd's could be what we see first.
Unless flash price/GB really drops soon, I suspect we will be seeing hybrid drives really be the winner.
A 1TB spinning platter drive with 64GB of flash as a cache could be a good compromise. Using just 8MB of the flash, you could have a 32-bit hit count for every sector on the spinning disk, and keep lifetime records of which sectors were most requested. Using that to build a MRU cache in the flash memory would likely give you very good performance on everything that really matters.
One advantage to this is that you don't have to copy from disk to flash on every access...just update the hit count and when the disk is idle do a lazy fill of flash with the appropriate sectors. This would prevent you from filling up the flash with the movie you just watched, unless you had watched it a lot of times before that.
You can still have a 1.5 TB HD for slow storage and an SSD for the OS and the soft.
This is a nice theory, but the reality is that if you have a decent amount of RAM, you end up needing your fastest storage for the things that don't fit in RAM very well, which generally is your data.
Although flash could help for swap, you don't need much (8GG or so should keep everybody happy right now). And, flash can help the first-time load of executables, but if you tend to keep your workspace open for a long time, the few seconds saved don't mean much.
But, I do have data that needs to be worked with. Right now I have 50GB of HD video that I need to edit, and I need a really fast drive to do that. Flash can certainly help, but since this is just this week's data, I would either need to copy the "working set" to flash from another drive, or have a really big flash drive.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not faster.
Yes, the relative amount of space on a single flash drive is increasing more quickly than that of spinning metal platters.
But, that will likely slow down, just as traditional hard drives have. This is primarily because when 250GB drives were "bleeding edge", it wasn't unusual for somebody to fill it up quickly...just 41 movie DVDs ripped (but not re-compressed) would do that. When you were talking about $200 for another 250GB (and putting more than 3-5 hard drives in many systems wasn't possible), there was a lot of consumer pressure for larger drives. Now, it takes 150+ DVDs to fill up a terabyte drive that costs $100, and even very small cases can handle two drives for a total of 2TB.
Also, the relative cost for flash drives isn't dropping quite as quickly (at least not for the same type of flash memory). The first smaller flash drives used very fast flash memory, and were very expensive. The current $700 250GB flash drives are using much slower parts (and it shows...some of these drives don't have as good a performance as a 300GB 15K drive that only costs $350). You need to use the current bleeding edge of ultra-fast flash drives to compare to the older drives to get a real feel for the rate of change in price and size.
Last, lower power usage has long been one of the rallying cries for flash drives in laptops, yet it turns out that the savings aren't as much as would be expected.
When I was in high school things like cell phones,
cameras, pagers, and especially laptops were considered contraband!
When I was in high school, cell phones and laptops were basically science-fiction.
One way pagers did exist, and so did cameras, but they required this non-digital stuff called "film" in order to store the images (and few cameras could store even 40 images at a time).
Despite all this, I'm nowhere near ancient. It's amazing how fast technology moves.
Well 15 minutes of power on and power off is a bit exaggerated (unless you really misconfigure linux). Normally for most business PC it takes about 1 minute to power on and power off doesn't need to be counted as you can perform this action without you actually there you hit shutdown and it does its thing.
I need to do the following to get my work PC up to "usable" from powered off:
Press power button
Wait for BIOS hardware check
Wait for Windows XP to load, including background services
Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and enter username and password
Wait for login to local system and domain login
Wait for all login tasks to run
Start Outlook and log in to e-mail server
Start Firefox and log in to admin web sites for various systems
Start VMware Workstation and start VPN VM (which allows me to VPN to various other systems without cutting off network connectivity for my "real" PC)
Log in to VPN VM, open VPN connection, and log in to various systems for admin
This can quite easily take 15 minutes. Shutdown isn't as bad, but I still have to make sure the VM is shut down cleanly before I can just "shutdown" and walk away.
And, unfortunately, I can't use any power-saving features, as all of them will kill various network connections, so I'd still have to do most of my list.
If it's freezing outside, try opening the window and just using a fan.
As for cool running, a computer with a slower clock speed and fewer hard drives will run cooler. Also, don't go for the über-graphics card. And, arrange to have the machine go into hibernation when it isn't actively working.
If you really do have a lot of machines, then you can also try virtualization. A quad-core system with 8GB of RAM will generally run pretty cool at idle, but can easily handle 4-5 reasonable VMs with little performance hit.
Sony is a bad example, they sued a company into bankrupcy for selling genuine Sony products, just to a different region. They actually claimed trademark violations.
This is what makes Sony a perfect example of what's wrong with the system.
Since they have deeper pockets, they could "win" without a judgment ever being entered, even though trademark law probably wasn't on their side.
I've had several Ebay auctions yanked, and there was nothing wrong with them, except some "netenforcer" felt like it (using Ebay's VERO program).
Apparently, you missed the part where I said: "Because eBay is so stupid about such things, your listing will get yanked, but it's not because there is any law behind Sony on this."
If you really had the money, you could fight and likely win so that eBay would have to let your auction remain. But, unless you are selling something for a lot of money, it's just not worth the effort.
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A device that costs $180 subsidized with a 2-year contract and has only a 3.25" screen would translate to "cost far more than normal users will be willing to pay" on a 17", non-subsidized monitor.
The best bet, then, is a pre-built PC of decent specs (dual or quad core CPU) with room for plenty of SATA drives.
You don't care about RAM installed, only about the maximum the system supports, because you can then go and buy RAM to fill the machine for far less than Dell, HP, etc., charge.
The theory is the same for hard disks. You just need 6-8 SATA ports on the motherboard, and then you can add as many drives as you want, and use software RAID (or ZFS) to set up the storage.
If the system doesn't have a decent Ethernet card, a server-class dual-port PCIe x4 card will set you back less than $140.
Going with a low-end server-class system might be slightly better, but a quality workstation PC with 2-3 year warranty would almost certainly be good enough.
I've built systems exactly like the story poster wants using inexpensive parts. My storage server has four 1000Mbit Ethernet ports bonded (using Linux bond driver) and can sustain about 300MB/sec from the various systems that acesss it regularly (two ESX servers and a Windows 2003 server) via iSCSI. Plus, it's still got a lot of room to grow (only 2GB of RAM out of 8GB max, and 500GB drives instead of the 1.5TB you can buy now), which this is another advantage to a true server. Generally, you can upgrade it when your needs increase, while a NAS device will probably require you to buy a new one.
This works with all pen-based interfaces, because the pen is part of the touch system. All the tablet PCs I have seen are the same way.
You just can't do this with a touch screen.
Despite the other reply, you can't "hover" close to a screen with any real accuracy without having the system cost far more than normal users will be willing to pay.
Touching at a coordinate and knowing that it is fully equivalent to a mouse-click sounds like a nice proposition.
Unfortunately, there is no touchscreen equivalent to just moving the mouse pointer without clicking.
I'd pay $50 (this doesn't seem hilariously low given 5 years and a reasonable size) for a thin screen that I could set on my desk and use as an input device. I'm not sure I would use it for anything in the long run, but I would pay $50 just to try it.
There's no doubt that a monitor that also has touch screen features for only a small premium in price would have decent sales.
If you don't lose what you have now, but can also have an alternate input, it would be quite useful. If it was a more powerful touch screen, it would be quite nice for emulating cell phones (including multi-touch) so that you can test your programs (and web sites) in a realistic manner.
I've had a PDA for a few years and could never use effectively the stylus because of that. There's no way to right-click and open an options sub-menu.
I have some Palm apps that use "tap-hold" to open the context menu.
How many companies adopted Flat Screens well before they were the norm for home computing, simply because they were "new"? I know the company I worked for did.
On the other hand, there are the companies the rest of worked for, where unless your CRT monitor was on fire or otherwise completely unusable you wouldn't get a new monitor.
This means that despite the image being doubled, the green gun dead, and random shrinking and snapping back to full size, you had a "working" monitor and were SOL.
Then, once your monitor was declared "dead", you didn't get an LCD until everyone above you (including the various CxO types who didn't even use their computer because they had a secretary) had one. So, when your monitor died, somebody above you in the chain got an LCD, and you got a hand-me-down CRT.
You can use Password Exporter for Firefox to transport your passwords to another machine.
All those mortgages that have giant, scheduled jumps in the rate and are being called adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) are giving real ARMs a black eye they don't deserve.
I bought my house with a "normal" ARM at 5.25%. It can adjust up to 1%/year in either direction (every June), with limits of 0.25% and 10.25%. Every year, I look at refinancing, and every year I see that I can only do about 0.5% better than my current rate, and only if I pay a lot of closing fees.
Going with an ARM allowed me to purchase a house when I had less money...at the time I purchased, it was about 2% more for a fixed rate mortgage.
Since my house is now worth about 3x what I have left to pay, I really can't see any downside to this type of ARM, at least if you still don't overextend yourself.
Secondly, desktop composition in Vista also vastly improves the windows switcher by providing live previews of the windows instead of undescriptive application icons.
OK, I'll bite...when exactly does this help?
When does seeing that Microsoft Word has some text that is centered help you in deciding if you want to switch to it or not?
How does seeing a thumbnail of an open e-mail titled "Staff Meeting" (which displays in the old task switcher) help you decide that's the one you want?
As far as I can tell, the only time a live preview on task switch would help is:
DHT or the like might seed your files outside the company. Ok, I'm too lazy to work out if that really is a threat, but I'm not sure that bitorrent is appropriate for data that you don't want to end up in the public domain.
Every BitTorrent client that supports DHT also has the ability to disable it.
In addition, since this is a VPN network, the client IP addresses are likely to be non-routable, so even if you did leak the torrent through DHT, it's pretty unlikely that anyone outside the company would be able to connect to a client running at 192.168.1.1.
For Blizzard, updates to World of Warcraft are very much a "business critical function".
At least he's not charging extra for shipping.
Really, if this were a typical eBay auction, it'd be $1.98 for the meteorite and $15M for shipping.
The point is that the machine failed at identifying the ballots, not just identifying votes.
I can see that optical scanning might have issues, but then the counting machine needs to spit out the "bad" ballot into a different pile so that it can be manually checked. The machine failed to do this.
Yes, yes, it would be.
Mostly, it's TV shows that I can't record. Either I don't have enough simultaneous tuners, I can't record that particular channel on a PC, or that channel simply isn't available here (I'm in the US, so most UK channels fit that category).
It's also some TV shows that I have missed recording for whatever reason, and some that I just won't purchase DVDs ever, since the show is a one-time watch at best. Some don't have DVDs at all, and probably never will.
You can do the following to lower some heat production:
Me, I'm outside of Washington, DC, it's about 35F outside, and I have the window open in my computer room, and it's just perfect in the room. In summer...well, it's pretty miserable. It would take too long to go into details, but to give you an idea, I have 30 total hard drives that are all active doing real work right now.
Hybrid systems consisting of both hd's and ssd's could be what we see first.
Unless flash price/GB really drops soon, I suspect we will be seeing hybrid drives really be the winner.
A 1TB spinning platter drive with 64GB of flash as a cache could be a good compromise. Using just 8MB of the flash, you could have a 32-bit hit count for every sector on the spinning disk, and keep lifetime records of which sectors were most requested. Using that to build a MRU cache in the flash memory would likely give you very good performance on everything that really matters.
One advantage to this is that you don't have to copy from disk to flash on every access...just update the hit count and when the disk is idle do a lazy fill of flash with the appropriate sectors. This would prevent you from filling up the flash with the movie you just watched, unless you had watched it a lot of times before that.
You can still have a 1.5 TB HD for slow storage and an SSD for the OS and the soft.
This is a nice theory, but the reality is that if you have a decent amount of RAM, you end up needing your fastest storage for the things that don't fit in RAM very well, which generally is your data.
Although flash could help for swap, you don't need much (8GG or so should keep everybody happy right now). And, flash can help the first-time load of executables, but if you tend to keep your workspace open for a long time, the few seconds saved don't mean much.
But, I do have data that needs to be worked with. Right now I have 50GB of HD video that I need to edit, and I need a really fast drive to do that. Flash can certainly help, but since this is just this week's data, I would either need to copy the "working set" to flash from another drive, or have a really big flash drive.
A 1.5x increase every 18 months sounds good until you consider that flash memory is currently increasing at a rate of at least 2.5x if not faster.
Yes, the relative amount of space on a single flash drive is increasing more quickly than that of spinning metal platters.
But, that will likely slow down, just as traditional hard drives have. This is primarily because when 250GB drives were "bleeding edge", it wasn't unusual for somebody to fill it up quickly...just 41 movie DVDs ripped (but not re-compressed) would do that. When you were talking about $200 for another 250GB (and putting more than 3-5 hard drives in many systems wasn't possible), there was a lot of consumer pressure for larger drives. Now, it takes 150+ DVDs to fill up a terabyte drive that costs $100, and even very small cases can handle two drives for a total of 2TB.
Also, the relative cost for flash drives isn't dropping quite as quickly (at least not for the same type of flash memory). The first smaller flash drives used very fast flash memory, and were very expensive. The current $700 250GB flash drives are using much slower parts (and it shows...some of these drives don't have as good a performance as a 300GB 15K drive that only costs $350). You need to use the current bleeding edge of ultra-fast flash drives to compare to the older drives to get a real feel for the rate of change in price and size.
Last, lower power usage has long been one of the rallying cries for flash drives in laptops, yet it turns out that the savings aren't as much as would be expected.
When I was in high school things like cell phones, cameras, pagers, and especially laptops were considered contraband!
When I was in high school, cell phones and laptops were basically science-fiction.
One way pagers did exist, and so did cameras, but they required this non-digital stuff called "film" in order to store the images (and few cameras could store even 40 images at a time).
Despite all this, I'm nowhere near ancient. It's amazing how fast technology moves.
Well 15 minutes of power on and power off is a bit exaggerated (unless you really misconfigure linux). Normally for most business PC it takes about 1 minute to power on and power off doesn't need to be counted as you can perform this action without you actually there you hit shutdown and it does its thing.
I need to do the following to get my work PC up to "usable" from powered off:
This can quite easily take 15 minutes. Shutdown isn't as bad, but I still have to make sure the VM is shut down cleanly before I can just "shutdown" and walk away.
And, unfortunately, I can't use any power-saving features, as all of them will kill various network connections, so I'd still have to do most of my list.
If it's freezing outside, try opening the window and just using a fan.
As for cool running, a computer with a slower clock speed and fewer hard drives will run cooler. Also, don't go for the über-graphics card. And, arrange to have the machine go into hibernation when it isn't actively working.
If you really do have a lot of machines, then you can also try virtualization. A quad-core system with 8GB of RAM will generally run pretty cool at idle, but can easily handle 4-5 reasonable VMs with little performance hit.
Verizon Wireless (cell phone) does have the "secret cap", but Verizon FIOS (fiber to the home) does not.
With my 15/15 FIOS connection, I've downloaded 375GB (8% utilization) and uploaded 1887GB (40% utilization) in the past month.
Sony is a bad example, they sued a company into bankrupcy for selling genuine Sony products, just to a different region. They actually claimed trademark violations.
This is what makes Sony a perfect example of what's wrong with the system.
Since they have deeper pockets, they could "win" without a judgment ever being entered, even though trademark law probably wasn't on their side.
I've had several Ebay auctions yanked, and there was nothing wrong with them, except some "netenforcer" felt like it (using Ebay's VERO program).
Apparently, you missed the part where I said: "Because eBay is so stupid about such things, your listing will get yanked, but it's not because there is any law behind Sony on this."
If you really had the money, you could fight and likely win so that eBay would have to let your auction remain. But, unless you are selling something for a lot of money, it's just not worth the effort.