Well, I don't know about most of you, but I'm backing up data for a number of reasons:
1) I'll never get another six weeks of vacation all at once to replace my digital pictures of Europe.
2) Sure, I still have all the CDs I made.mp3s of, but it'd take me months to re-rip and encode 'em all.
Some of it can't be replaced, some of it isn't worth my time and effort to replace it when a hundred bucks solves the problem.
I've been working with the Addonics ExDrive stuff. PCMCIA, USB 2.0, or Firewire enclosures for normal hard disks. I don't know about Linux support; I went this route since I know it works on my Windows laptop and on my iPaq... It does kind of take a different mindset from what I had been using (read: "It's disk! Install it in something!") but it does make sure I've got redundant copies of, say, digital pictures that aren't on-line.
...or at least at the one here in Atlanta. Konami has released two such games, one called, IIRC, "MoCap Boxing", where you pick up a pair of gloves and actually beat up your on-screen opponent (don't swing too hard, you'll throw your arm out. You don't actually hit anything.) Sensors above you and in the floorpad note when you move to the side or duck. The other one is a gun-game in the style of Time Crisis where the same sorts of sensors note whether you've ducked, or leaned to the left or right, and the image on screen acts accordingly (you duck behind a table, lean out around a corner to shoot the bad guy.)
Great fun, and the boxing game can get to being a workout...
It looks like they've either gone with the "PDA too large to be a PDA" market or the "Slow laptop with no keyboard" market. I'm sure they'll corner both.
In the Cold War, mankind went from nothing in space to men walking on the moon in a dozen years-- the Russians put up a satellite, and the Americans were scared.
Now that we're all _friends_, it's taking us longer than that to put up a space station. We probably _can't_ go back to the moon today.
I suspect you're joking, but seriously, I recently moved and threw away a dumpsterload of hardware because it wasn't worth moving and gave everything else to a friend of mine who builds systems for non-computer-people for fun.
And the other day, I ran across four 486-class machines stacked in front of the dumpster at the apartment I'm staying at temporarily.
486es don't have enough processor power to justify the electrical cost of powering them on anymore. I didn't even think it was worth the five minutes it would have taken to filch out the floppy drives just in case they worked. And a mere gig of disk also isn't worth the power it takes to spin it up-- and a gig was huge in these machines.
The chassis are obsolete, the memory's probably 30 pin (remember that!)
...and at present, I own no walls to hang 'em on. Sadly, these beasts were in the right place; at the dumpster.
On the other hand, had they been P2 class or Athlon machines of any flavor, I'd've snatched 'em up, four years old or no. Some machines, on the other hand, are just disposable...
I doubt the power use thing-- compare the battery life of a portable device using compactflash against the battery life of the same device with an IBM Microdrive.
I begin to wonder if battery-backed-up RAM isn't a good idea. With SDRAM down to fifty bucks for a quarter-gig at Crucial (and I suspect you can find it cheaper), if you gotta have _really_ fast storage, a kilobuck gets you a five gig of solid state. Sure, that's a drop in the bucket compared to that 80GB IDE (or bigger!) but it's damned fast in the same comparison.
On the other hand, it doesn't work well in the state most of my machines are in at the moment-- powered down in a storage facility...
I can see the point of small, portable computers, but if this has to be plugged into a power socket somewhere, what makes this better to own or use than a laptop, palmtop or even a desktop PC?
The fact that it's physically small makes it ideal for embedded PC use by those of us who are looking for embedded PCs to do things that generic PC/104 units don't do well or do well too expensively. This wasn't necessarily cheap, but it was small, all-in-one, and takes DC power in.
When I'd heard about it, I thought that it'd make an excellent MP3 player for my truck-- I don't have much interior space, being a pickup truck, and anything I build in takes interior cargo space from things like ratchet straps and the flashlight and the squeegie.
Unfortunately, if they went cheap on the sound output, it doesn't do that well, and if they went cheap there, who knows what else they did cheaply? It won't solve the problem I hoped it would solve, and now I wonder about its suitability for other problems.
Too bad you posted as an AC. If I knew who you were, I'd be more than happy to give you a 2400 bps modem. It's much faster than the 300 bps one you're using now, and I suspect it'll even work on your PDP-8.
Perhaps if you released your movies on DVD like the Wachowski brothers, people would remember them well enough to give you Oscars for their technical merit.
2) X-Box WON'T wipe Sony out... what a joke. That's like saying "Yamaha's making a new motorbike that goes 20mph faster than any other bike - all the other bike companies will go out of business!".
Is it?
Or is it like saying that Nintendo will never wipe Atari out?
Not if I'm the service provider. See, I can cheap-like set you up with wireless now. Then, when the mobile applications need wireless, I can sell them my chunk of the spectrum and use that money to pay for fiber.
Sure, it's a hassle and a half to the end user and the mobile application provider, but I get to get in the door for cheap and when I need to go fiber, somebody else pays for it!
Of course, in all seriousness, when you get down to it, _we_ pay it, we being the consumers. If they can start offering broadband cheap over wireless, then that's good for us, too. We only wind up paying for fiber later, instead of now _and_ later.
A little box that plugs into the Internet and gives me my radio. A little box that plugs into the TV and lets me play games. A little box that plugs into the cable line and watches my TV for me.
They say the PC is going the way of the dinosaur-- after all, these little boxes are so much cheaper!
Cool, it runs Linux. Cool, it uncrunches streaming MP3. But I've got a PC that does that.
And funny, that very same PC plays games, too. And it can watch TV for me. And it keeps track of my finances and my recipes. You know, all those things I'd've had to buy a $200-300 little consumer-grade box to do. But somehow, those little single-purpose boxes sell.
A hundred bucks gets you into a low-end webtv. Another three hundred gets you into a cheap set-top DVD player. Toss in a hundred for a Playstation, a hundred for a VCR, at least a hundred for this gadget. That's $700-- and we're using last generation's game box, an analog system for watching our TV for us... Switching to a Dreamcast and a Tivo turns that $700 into closer to $1000. And I still can't do my finances, can't do word processing (and I don't have a place to plug a printer in even if I could!) and I can't store my recipes, $1000 later.
And then what we don't get are HDTV cards for our PCs that already have monitors with sufficient resolution to display HDTV.
I don't get it. Why is it these little single-use boxes sell? Is the general public really _that_ afraid of a general purpose personal computer?
...actually, the score on "The game" was 23-16. But that's beside the point.
Does it really surprise anyone that e-* and *.com are all you see in the Super Bowl ads? I envision a hundred CEOs of dot-com startups sitting at the heads of their individual board meetings saying, "Well, it worked for Apple... File an IPO to pay for it."
...since I own two 1.6m Hewlett-Packard racks. I got the racks for free (well, I got mine for the price of using my truck to move the other four), but I've never come up with a decent solution for rackmounting machines in them-- always too expensive. However, from what I have been able to do, I found a few things you need to think about:
1) Cooling. If you come across a cheap rack and it's enclosed, it ought to have some sort of power supply and fan. And if it does, make sure it handles the kind of power you've got-- I've run across a couple that expect 220v power. This is a solvable problem, more of an annoyance.
2) Sides. Sides look nice, but get in the way. I'm currently using one of my racks as a stereo cabinet (funny, all my stereo gear is, oh, about 19" wide...) This looks cool, and has plenty of space-- in fact, it has enough space that I can climb in underneath the equipment and connect cables from the other side. I would not have to fight that fight if a) the rack was sideless, or b) I had longer speaker wires. I really ought to solve that latter problem-- once again, in most cases, this is also merely an annoyance.
3) Space. I suspect this is not a problem for most of us-- the rack would probably take fewer square feet than the current solution we've got for our entirely-too-many machines.
4) Is the rack really going to help? I've found at the office that for normal hardware (workstation-sized machines), a good set of shelves works better than a rack could ever hope to. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is that you can get into the machine without having to unplug everything and un-rack the machine. If you're like me, and find yourself swapping components around willy-nilly, this is a huge plus.
Having gone through all this, I've found that at least for my home-use purposes, a rack is the wrong answer. I use one for stereo equipment. The height allows for much extra storage-- I've got the cosmetic front panels for it, so I have a pair of copy-paper boxes full of stuff below the shelves with the equipment hiden behind the panels. They can be easily removed should I need to climb inside the rack to swap cables around. The other that has a front door is being used as a sports equipment cabinet-- it's tall enough for a hockey stick!-- and the computers live on desks and shelves instead of in racks. I don't seem to swap out components so much from my stereo gear than I do from my computers...
The battlebots are cool, but expensive. I've been trying to get some folks together to do something a bit cheaper: Lego Mindstorm Battlebots. All the parts must be Lego (with the exception of the rubber bands. Many lego sets come with rubber bands, but they'll break and should be able to be replaced), and the winner is the battlebot that can still move under its own power. Battering rams to whack the legs out from under something, scooploaders to try to flip the bot...
And the great thing is, when your battlebot gets shredded, you can put it back together.:)
OSHA won't recommend rules for telecommuters' home offices. This is good!
Unfortunately, the cat's already out of the bag. "What a neat idea", you can almost hear people thinking. "I can now get my employer to buy me a new ergonomic chair for the home office and a keyboard tray and an ergo keyboard and..." And some of these many people work for a company that laughs at the request. And one of those people will develop some form of RSI while telecommuting from home in their non-ergonomic environment.
And that bastard's gonna sue.
Soon, his company will be paying out a huge settlement, some of which will be absorbed probably by insurance, being medically related. And the insurance companies will notice. And they'll declare higher rates for companies that allow telecommuting.
I don't think it will completely kill telecommuting, but once the problem enters the realms of the beancounters, nothing is safe...
The big difference between making fun of a kid learning to read and making fun of a clueless user is that the kid is _learning_ to read. When I did my time on the other end of the tech support phone, I had three sorts of calls:
a) Real, actual problems. This was the rarest of the bunch, even though the machines we were selling were often cheap clones.
b) Users with reasonable questions. Now, I've been known not to read the manual before trying something, and I don't expect anyone else to. But I do read it before I call tech support. These users did, too. Sometimes it didn't cover what they were trying to do. Sometimes the manual lost something in the translation from taiwanese. And sometimes they user didn't have enough of an idea of what was going on to be sufficiently "literate" to read the manual-- but every once in a while, I'd get a call saying something like, "I'm trying to do X. According to the manual on page 48, it says I need to do these three things, but I don't know what they mean by the second one!" I'll never make fun of someone like this, because this person _is_ like the child learning to read: He's learning to use his computer. He just threw $2000 at this thing and he'll be damned if he doesn't figure out how to use it, and he'll use every resource he's got to do so. This sort of call was slightly less rare than the real problem-- which implies to me that there are actually more people out there who _want_ to know how their computer works than there are faulty computers...
c) The people User Friendly makes fun of-- which, oddly enough, are the very same people that Dilbert makes fun of. These are the people who just threw $2000 at this thing and they'll be damned if it doesn't just automatically do what they want. These are the people who refuse to learn how to use the equipment. They believe that tools work for us, not with us.
I often laugh at User Friendly. User Friendly makes fun of the third sort of call, which, annoyingly enough, is the most prevalent sort of call that a tech support person gets. Heck, we ex-tech-support people probably even believe that all users are clueless-- but I bet it's just that we only usually hear from the idiots.
To make an analogy:
There are people who drive a car for two or three years and get rid of it before it starts to fall apart.
There are people who buy a car and actually do all the preventative maintenance on it. They may not know exactly how an internal combustion engine works, but they know that it's not black magic and that certain things need to happen to make them work right. They may not do their own oil changes, but they could given a little instruction-- they're not afraid of what goes on under the hood. These are automobile users.
There are people who work on cars for a living as automotive technicians.
There are people who design cars for a living and understand every bit about a car, or at least a given aspect of a car.
(...as people begin to wonder what kind of an idiot makes an analogy away from computers on Slashdot...)
The way I see it, if you're in one category but you have only the knowledge of the category before it, and you have no intention of learning more to get into the category where you belong, then you're a fair target. So if you're in the second category (users), but you don't have that much knowledge of what's going on, there's a good chance that your ignorance will be truly funny.
The part I find amusing is that it works the other way-- we geeks will always be made fun of because we want to know more than we need! (and now we see why I make the analogy...) Many of us are automobile users-- but often, we geeks who are automobile users will know _more_ about our car than we really need to! We have some idea of how it does what it does-- we may not be in the "automotive technician" category of knowledge, but we refuse to have a magic black box sitting in our driveways.
The question is not "why do people think poking fun at clueless idiots is funny?" The question is, "Why do people think poking fun at people who aren't clueless idiots is funny?"
The PDQ and the other unit someone mentioned both require a "wireless IP service"-- basically, Yet Another ISP. Most of us already have an ISP of one flavor or another, along with the requisite baggage of an email address there and all that rot-- so why hasn't anyone designed one of these wireless modems that's exactly that-- a modem? Is there some technical reason why nobody seems to build 'em such that I could just have it dial up Mindspring? Aside from god forbid, the company who sold it can't make money being an ISP, too?
Have you ever had a relative who laid on his deathbed for years and years and refused to just keel over and die?
That's Amiga.
So now they've filed a patent on hardware they're never going to sell. Add that to the OS revision for a machine that hasn't been built in about ten years. In a world where 500 MHz machines are becoming commonplace, how long can people limp along on machines designed around a 68040?
Amiga did cool stuff. But boy I wish they'd just roll over and die already...
Heck, I already do some of this with my PC. It's also my DVD drive, it reads and displays signals from cable (though it doesn't decode premium channels yet, hmmmm), outputs to monitor or television screen... Will digitize incoming CATV stuff and save to disk, not VHS tape (though with mediocre image quality, I admit...) My PC has wound up being an integral part of my "entertainment center".
...it plays games, too. S'pose I oughta get bleem working so it'll think it's a PSX, and blur the line between PC and console even further.
Why do I bring this up? Because PCs and consoles are different for a reason, and I expect they'll always be different. Why is this? PCs are more versatile. Will this versatility always exist? In some forms of PC, yes. The iMac is a step towards a less versatile, more-like-a-console PC. But I don't expect that _all_ computers will be iMac-ish in the future.
You will, of course, pay more for your versatility, just like you do now.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know about most of you, but I'm backing up data for a number of reasons:
.mp3s of, but it'd take me months to re-rip and encode 'em all.
1) I'll never get another six weeks of vacation all at once to replace my digital pictures of Europe.
2) Sure, I still have all the CDs I made
Some of it can't be replaced, some of it isn't worth my time and effort to replace it when a hundred bucks solves the problem.
I've been working with the Addonics ExDrive stuff. PCMCIA, USB 2.0, or Firewire enclosures for normal hard disks. I don't know about Linux support; I went this route since I know it works on my Windows laptop and on my iPaq... It does kind of take a different mindset from what I had been using (read: "It's disk! Install it in something!") but it does make sure I've got redundant copies of, say, digital pictures that aren't on-line.
-JDF
...or at least at the one here in Atlanta. Konami has released two such games, one called, IIRC, "MoCap Boxing", where you pick up a pair of gloves and actually beat up your on-screen opponent (don't swing too hard, you'll throw your arm out. You don't actually hit anything.) Sensors above you and in the floorpad note when you move to the side or duck. The other one is a gun-game in the style of Time Crisis where the same sorts of sensors note whether you've ducked, or leaned to the left or right, and the image on screen acts accordingly (you duck behind a table, lean out around a corner to shoot the bad guy.)
Great fun, and the boxing game can get to being a workout...
It looks like they've either gone with the "PDA too large to be a PDA" market or the "Slow laptop with no keyboard" market. I'm sure they'll corner both.
No, no, the politics are good!
In the Cold War, mankind went from nothing in space to men walking on the moon in a dozen years-- the Russians put up a satellite, and the Americans were scared.
Now that we're all _friends_, it's taking us longer than that to put up a space station. We probably _can't_ go back to the moon today.
Politics can be a good thing...
I suspect you're joking, but seriously, I recently moved and threw away a dumpsterload of hardware because it wasn't worth moving and gave everything else to a friend of mine who builds systems for non-computer-people for fun.
And the other day, I ran across four 486-class machines stacked in front of the dumpster at the apartment I'm staying at temporarily.
486es don't have enough processor power to justify the electrical cost of powering them on anymore. I didn't even think it was worth the five minutes it would have taken to filch out the floppy drives just in case they worked. And a mere gig of disk also isn't worth the power it takes to spin it up-- and a gig was huge in these machines.
The chassis are obsolete, the memory's probably 30 pin (remember that!)
...and at present, I own no walls to hang 'em on. Sadly, these beasts were in the right place; at the dumpster.
On the other hand, had they been P2 class or Athlon machines of any flavor, I'd've snatched 'em up, four years old or no. Some machines, on the other hand, are just disposable...
-JDF
In my area, AT&T Broadband just took over Comcast's operations as of 15 June...
I doubt the power use thing-- compare the battery life of a portable device using compactflash against the battery life of the same device with an IBM Microdrive.
I begin to wonder if battery-backed-up RAM isn't a good idea. With SDRAM down to fifty bucks for a quarter-gig at Crucial (and I suspect you can find it cheaper), if you gotta have _really_ fast storage, a kilobuck gets you a five gig of solid state. Sure, that's a drop in the bucket compared to that 80GB IDE (or bigger!) but it's damned fast in the same comparison.
On the other hand, it doesn't work well in the state most of my machines are in at the moment-- powered down in a storage facility...
-JDF
...but I suspect I'll eventually want to type something other than "Screw you!" at a computer.
-JDF
I didn't, either.
I got the LETSJUSTBEFRIENDS virus.
-JDF
I can see the point of small, portable computers, but if this has to be plugged into a power socket somewhere, what makes this better to own or use than a laptop, palmtop or even a desktop PC?
The fact that it's physically small makes it ideal for embedded PC use by those of us who are looking for embedded PCs to do things that generic PC/104 units don't do well or do well too expensively. This wasn't necessarily cheap, but it was small, all-in-one, and takes DC power in.
When I'd heard about it, I thought that it'd make an excellent MP3 player for my truck-- I don't
have much interior space, being a pickup truck, and anything I build in takes interior cargo space from things like ratchet straps and the flashlight and the squeegie.
Unfortunately, if they went cheap on the sound output, it doesn't do that well, and if they went cheap there, who knows what else they did cheaply? It won't solve the problem I hoped it would solve, and now I wonder about its suitability for other problems.
Too bad you posted as an AC. If I knew who you were, I'd be more than happy to give you a 2400 bps modem. It's much faster than the 300 bps one you're using now, and I suspect it'll even work on your PDP-8.
-F
Perhaps if you released your movies on DVD like the Wachowski brothers, people would remember them well enough to give you Oscars for their technical merit.
--The Academy
2) X-Box WON'T wipe Sony out... what a joke. That's like saying "Yamaha's making a new motorbike that goes 20mph faster than any other bike - all the other bike companies will go out of business!".
Is it?
Or is it like saying that Nintendo will never wipe Atari out?
-JDF
It makes more sense to pull fiber?
Not if I'm the service provider. See, I can cheap-like set you up with wireless now. Then, when the mobile applications need wireless, I can sell them my chunk of the spectrum and use that money to pay for fiber.
Sure, it's a hassle and a half to the end user and the mobile application provider, but I get to get in the door for cheap and when I need to go fiber, somebody else pays for it!
Of course, in all seriousness, when you get down to it, _we_ pay it, we being the consumers. If they can start offering broadband cheap over wireless, then that's good for us, too. We only wind up paying for fiber later, instead of now _and_ later.
-JDF
A little box that plugs into the Internet and gives me my radio. A little box that plugs into the TV and lets me play games. A little box that plugs into the cable line and watches my TV for me.
They say the PC is going the way of the dinosaur-- after all, these little boxes are so much cheaper!
Cool, it runs Linux. Cool, it uncrunches streaming MP3. But I've got a PC that does that.
And funny, that very same PC plays games, too. And it can watch TV for me. And it keeps track of my finances and my recipes. You know, all those things I'd've had to buy a $200-300 little consumer-grade box to do. But somehow, those little single-purpose boxes sell.
A hundred bucks gets you into a low-end webtv. Another three hundred gets you into a cheap set-top DVD player. Toss in a hundred for a Playstation, a hundred for a VCR, at least a hundred for this gadget. That's $700-- and we're using last generation's game box, an analog system for watching our TV for us... Switching to a Dreamcast and a Tivo turns that $700 into closer to $1000. And I still can't do my finances, can't do word processing (and I don't have a place to plug a printer in even if I could!) and I can't store my recipes, $1000 later.
And then what we don't get are HDTV cards for our PCs that already have monitors with sufficient resolution to display HDTV.
I don't get it. Why is it these little single-use boxes sell? Is the general public really _that_ afraid of a general purpose personal computer?
-JDF
...actually, the score on "The game" was 23-16. But that's beside the point.
Does it really surprise anyone that e-* and *.com
are all you see in the Super Bowl ads? I envision a hundred CEOs of dot-com startups sitting at the heads of their individual board meetings saying, "Well, it worked for Apple... File an IPO to pay for it."
-F
...since I own two 1.6m Hewlett-Packard racks. I got the racks for free (well, I got mine for the price of using my truck to move the other four), but I've never come up with a decent solution for rackmounting machines in them-- always too expensive. However, from what I have been able to do, I found a few things you need to think about:
1) Cooling. If you come across a cheap rack and it's enclosed, it ought to have some sort of power supply and fan. And if it does, make sure it handles the kind of power you've got-- I've run across a couple that expect 220v power. This is a solvable problem, more of an annoyance.
2) Sides. Sides look nice, but get in the way. I'm currently using one of my racks as a stereo cabinet (funny, all my stereo gear is, oh, about 19" wide...) This looks cool, and has plenty of space-- in fact, it has enough space that I can climb in underneath the equipment and connect cables from the other side. I would not have to fight that fight if a) the rack was sideless, or b) I had longer speaker wires. I really ought to solve that latter problem-- once again, in most cases, this is also merely an annoyance.
3) Space. I suspect this is not a problem for most of us-- the rack would probably take fewer square feet than the current solution we've got for our entirely-too-many machines.
4) Is the rack really going to help? I've found at the office that for normal hardware (workstation-sized machines), a good set of shelves works better than a rack could ever hope to. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest is that you can get into the machine without having to unplug everything and un-rack the machine. If you're like me, and find yourself swapping components around willy-nilly, this is a huge plus.
Having gone through all this, I've found that at least for my home-use purposes, a rack is the wrong answer. I use one for stereo equipment. The height allows for much extra storage-- I've got the cosmetic front panels for it, so I have a pair of copy-paper boxes full of stuff below the shelves with the equipment hiden behind the panels. They can be easily removed should I need to climb inside the rack to swap cables around. The other that has a front door is being used as a sports equipment cabinet-- it's tall enough for a hockey stick!-- and the computers live on desks and shelves instead of in racks. I don't seem to swap out components so much from my stereo gear than I do from my computers...
-F
The battlebots are cool, but expensive. I've been trying to get some folks together to do something a bit cheaper: Lego Mindstorm Battlebots. All the parts must be Lego (with the exception of the rubber bands. Many lego sets come with rubber bands, but they'll break and should be able to be replaced), and the winner is the battlebot that can still move under its own power. Battering rams to whack the legs out from under something, scooploaders to try to flip the bot...
:)
And the great thing is, when your battlebot gets shredded, you can put it back together.
-F
OSHA won't recommend rules for telecommuters' home offices. This is good!
Unfortunately, the cat's already out of the bag. "What a neat idea", you can almost hear people thinking. "I can now get my employer to buy me a new ergonomic chair for the home office and a keyboard tray and an ergo keyboard and..." And some of these many people work for a company that laughs at the request. And one of those people will develop some form of RSI while telecommuting from home in their non-ergonomic environment.
And that bastard's gonna sue.
Soon, his company will be paying out a huge settlement, some of which will be absorbed probably by insurance, being medically related. And the insurance companies will notice. And they'll declare higher rates for companies that allow telecommuting.
I don't think it will completely kill telecommuting, but once the problem enters the realms of the beancounters, nothing is safe...
The big difference between making fun of a kid learning to read and making fun of a clueless user is that the kid is _learning_ to read. When I did my time on the other end of the tech support phone, I had three sorts of calls:
a) Real, actual problems. This was the rarest of
the bunch, even though the machines we were selling were often cheap clones.
b) Users with reasonable questions. Now, I've been known not to read the manual before trying something, and I don't expect anyone else to. But I do read it before I call tech support. These users did, too. Sometimes it didn't cover what they were trying to do. Sometimes the manual lost something in the translation from taiwanese. And sometimes they user didn't have enough of an idea of what was going on to be sufficiently "literate" to read the manual-- but every once in a while, I'd get a call saying something like, "I'm trying to do X. According to the manual on page 48, it says I need to do these three things, but I don't know what they mean by the second one!" I'll never make fun of someone like this, because this person _is_ like the child learning to read: He's learning to use his computer. He just threw $2000 at this thing and he'll be damned if he doesn't figure out how to use it, and he'll use every resource he's got to do so. This sort of call was slightly less rare than the real problem-- which implies to me that there are actually more people out there who _want_ to know how their computer works than there are faulty computers...
c) The people User Friendly makes fun of-- which, oddly enough, are the very same people that Dilbert makes fun of. These are the people who just threw $2000 at this thing and they'll be damned if it doesn't just automatically do what they want. These are the people who refuse to learn how to use the equipment. They believe that tools work for us, not with us.
I often laugh at User Friendly. User Friendly makes fun of the third sort of call, which, annoyingly enough, is the most prevalent sort of call that a tech support person gets. Heck, we ex-tech-support people probably even believe that all users are clueless-- but I bet it's just that we only usually hear from the idiots.
To make an analogy:
There are people who drive a car for two or three years and get rid of it before it starts to fall apart.
There are people who buy a car and actually do all the preventative maintenance on it. They may not know exactly how an internal combustion engine works, but they know that it's not black magic and that certain things need to happen to make them work right. They may not do their own oil changes, but they could given a little instruction-- they're not afraid of what goes on under the hood. These are automobile users.
There are people who work on cars for a living as automotive technicians.
There are people who design cars for a living and understand every bit about a car, or at least a given aspect of a car.
(...as people begin to wonder what kind of an idiot makes an analogy away from computers on Slashdot...)
The way I see it, if you're in one category but you have only the knowledge of the category before it, and you have no intention of learning more to get into the category where you belong, then you're a fair target. So if you're in the second category (users), but you don't have that much knowledge of what's going on, there's a good chance that your ignorance will be truly funny.
The part I find amusing is that it works the other way-- we geeks will always be made fun of because we want to know more than we need! (and now we see why I make the analogy...) Many of us are automobile users-- but often, we geeks who are automobile users will know _more_ about our car than we really need to! We have some idea of how it does what it does-- we may not be in the "automotive technician" category of knowledge, but we refuse to have a magic black box sitting in our driveways.
The question is not "why do people think poking fun at clueless idiots is funny?" The question is, "Why do people think poking fun at people who aren't clueless idiots is funny?"
The PDQ and the other unit someone mentioned both require a "wireless IP service"-- basically, Yet Another ISP. Most of us already have an ISP of one flavor or another, along with the requisite baggage of an email address there and all that rot-- so why hasn't anyone designed one of these wireless modems that's exactly that-- a modem? Is there some technical reason why nobody seems to build 'em such that I could just have it dial up Mindspring? Aside from god forbid, the company who sold it can't make money being an ISP, too?
-F
Have you ever had a relative who laid on his
deathbed for years and years and refused to just keel over and die?
That's Amiga.
So now they've filed a patent on hardware they're never going to sell. Add that to the OS revision for a machine that hasn't been built in about ten years. In a world where 500 MHz machines are becoming commonplace, how long can people limp along on machines designed around a 68040?
Amiga did cool stuff. But boy I wish they'd just roll over and die already...
-F
The big list from Dell isn't really from Dell. I contributed a couple to that list, and I've never worked for Dell. :)
Two weeks ago: "Hey, we've got a budget surplus! What will we spend it on?"
Last week: "Thirty years ago, in his greatest moment, man set foot on the moon"
This week: "Hey, let's take some money away from the guys who put a man on the moon."
Muh?!
-F
Heck, I already do some of this with my PC. It's also my DVD drive, it reads and displays signals from cable (though it doesn't decode premium channels yet, hmmmm), outputs to monitor or television screen... Will digitize incoming CATV stuff and save to disk, not VHS tape (though with mediocre image quality, I admit...) My PC has wound up being an integral part of my "entertainment center".
:)
...it plays games, too. S'pose I oughta get bleem working so it'll think it's a PSX, and blur the line between PC and console even further.
Why do I bring this up? Because PCs and consoles are different for a reason, and I expect they'll always be different. Why is this? PCs are more versatile. Will this versatility always exist? In some forms of PC, yes. The iMac is a step towards a less versatile, more-like-a-console PC. But I don't expect that _all_ computers will be iMac-ish in the future.
You will, of course, pay more for your versatility, just like you do now.
-F