I worked at a San Francisco-based company that moved its headquarters to a suburb of the Salt Lake City area. At the time, the SF office was packed wall-to-wall with engineers, while the new SLC location had enough space to house 6 times as many people.
The company wanted its key developers to leave the SF area and relocate to the SLC area.
A few did.
Many others refused.
And, when college recuiting season rolled by, many prospective employees accepted our job offers on the condition that they work in the SF. The space problem became so bad that we had to open another office in SF, and also open a new office much closer to the San Jose area.
I've been to SLC. It's nice for a brief visit, but I would never live there.
Besides, I was too freaked out by the 80%+ homogenous population. I felt oddly out of place.
I imagine a day when everyone will get a free OEL-wall in their living room... The catch? You'll have to sign up for MSN/WebTV. When you're not using the WebTV, the OEL wall will display targeted advertising.
My sister is currently going to shool in Japan. Her apartment is essentially a mini studio. The bathroom is so small and compactly designed that there is one faucet shared between the sink and the bath/shower.
Space *is* a premium in Japan. (Although, I must say it's the same with places like New York City and San Francisco.)
This is why consumer electronics from Japan focuses on being small. "Executive stereos"? Heck, it's only call that way to add "prestige" to a product that would be overlooked by most U.S. consumers... In the U.S., most Americans want big-big-big!
You think Honda Civic's are small? Hah - most middle-class family would be rather pleased if they can own such a decent sized car. (It's not the money -- it's where to park it.)
They think we're weird for buying 24 rolls of paper towel at a time... That would take up half of the total closet space at home!
Oh yeah, on the way out I'd probably tell the IT Manager & the GM's bosses (the owners) what the GM was trying to do.
And open yourself up to liability?
I think, sadly, the wisest thing to do is to quitely decline the job. Or, take the job, and then work to improve the GM-ITM relationship somehow...
A big chunk of a consultant's job is non-technical. I think successful consultants are the ones that make the customers feel happy and secure with the delievered results, even if it's not necessarily the cutting edge or the most optimal solution.
At $200 for the computer and say $10 per month for Internet access, the computer is still too expensive for "the poor" families.
Heck, they probably don't even have a telephone to connect the PC. (Either because of cost, or lack of infrastructure.)
Local small-businesses and public-service organizations will benefit, though. Perhaps these machines will make it possible to put together public-access Internet kiosks at the libraries and schools.
I just hope people don't buy these only to find a way to "iOpener-ize" the machine and sell them on eBay...
I take it that this topic is a result of MSNBC's program on the Challenger failure. IMO, it was a fairly well done piece, and it brought tears back to my eyes.
On that tragic morning, our whole school was shocked by the principal's un-scheduled, rushed, and awkwardly worded announcement that "The Space Shuttle blew up." We were particularly affected because my H.S. Calculus teacher was one of the semi-finalist for the Teachers-in-space program. If the failure had not happened, she probably would have gone up in a later shuttle flight.
Edward Tufte (in his excellecnt book, Visual Explanations ) has an interesting section on the Challenger Disaster -- Basically, NASA didn't understand the urgency of the objections from Thiokol engineers because they (NASA) didn't clearly understand the o-ring failure probability. Thiokol engineers gave NASA the tabular data of o-ring failure rates (the data collected from post-flight analyses of past spent SRB's). Had they graphed the data, Tufte claims, NASA would have clearly understood that the SRB's were in an unusable temperature range.
Some people believe that science and technology has advanced to StarTrek-like perfection: a car should tell you that there's a problem with its right front tire, a chemical plant's safety system is multiply redundant and will never fail, a computer will instantly solve your problems if you ask the right questions, and common devices are instantly and infinitely reconfigurable to work in any environment. These are worthy ideal goals to have; but, of course, reality falls far short of these StarTrek dreams. Time and money, limits of practicality, and social and political dynamics combine to form trade-offs that sometimes don't work out.
It might be in somewhat poor taste, but I own a stock-certificate of the Thiokol Corporation as a reminder of the lesson that I learned from the disaster. My fellow engineers will occasionally hear me say "Go with Throttle up" when I feel that a (software) project has been rushed, inadequately designed, and poorly tested. Of these 'doomed projects', 3/5-th of those project 'launches' without significant problems, the next 1/5th has significant problems after launch, and the last 1/5th end up with critical failures which we then have to scramble to contain.
Of course, failures are best understood in hindsight. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes.
As soon as I saw your name, I recalled the story that made the rounds several years ago about ksh compatibility by MKS's Korn shell and Windows (see end of post)...
My question:
As I see it, one of the big problems that continue to affect the Unix community today is that each OS vendor customize Unix in some peculiar/exclusive way.
I can't recall anymore, but I think I ran into the problem with ksh being significantly different from Solaris with Dynix/ptx.
Certainly, there's a lot of shell-scripting out where where platform-specific behavior is written in each script. And the shell-command tests to identify the platform were rather yucky.
How, then, do shell's compete against PERL or Java where part of the goal is to hide almost all of the OS-specific quirks behind a layer of abstraction? And, (assuming my memory of ksh being "framgented" across platforms is correct) has ksh "defragmented" with the newer versions?
The lead article says that ksh now is so complete that you don't need PERL anymore. But do these ksh script still have to have OS-dependent sections?
Thanks.
Here is the story from William Birch (which I grabbed out of the Google Cache:
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation
Systems
Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week. One of
those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought
that
I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in
geekdom
(particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding
forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting
and
shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise
that
moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise
Kern
Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies
like
awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other
products
(like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enou
gh
integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and
asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn
shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible
with
existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able
to
run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible
and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language
spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should
work
quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when
another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the
questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs.
(David
Korn is the author of the Korn shell)
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the
only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words
or
momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.
So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone
elses? Next topic for demonstration, please...
I can just see it now... As soon as you make your selection for President, the rest of the ballot form auto-completes with that candidate-party's plank.
1st Visor phone + Millionth Visor (prism) = $4550
on
Visor Phone Released
·
· Score: 2
The editors ignored my original mention of this (oh well), but Handspring auctioned the first "official production" model Visor phone with the one-millionth Visor (Prism) on eBay starting about two weeks ago.
Well, the AP tests are for "advanced placement". Most schools that accept AP credits probably aren't interested in the student's proficiency of any non-mainstream language.
I have sensitive ears, and yet work with lots of machines, so I understand your plight. I once had a job where the idiot manager almost forced me to have my "office" in the machine room.
Well, the best solution is to avoid being in the machine room as much as possible. You can usually get by with "remote control software" like VNC or PCAnywhere. If you have to do a lot of pre-boot activity on PC's, a KVM extender might be in order.
Buy high-noise-reduction foam earplugs. You can buy them easily at any drugstore (the foamy ones kinds with NRR of 27 or higher are best). Better yet, by them in bulk-buy them from medical and/or construction supply stores.
Finally, if you expect to be "on the phone" while being in the machine room, a regular noise-cancelling headphone won't help you. You'll get much of the machine room noise fed back to you because telephones have "sidetone" (which feeds back what you say into the mouthpiece back into your earpiece -- it helps to regulate the speech volume of the telephone user). (BTW, if you're at an airport/concert/etc. and have a hard time hearing the other party, just cover your mouthpiece with your hand. It helps a lot.)
A telephone with noise-cancelling mic might help. I dunno.
By the way, an active-noise-cancellation headset helps cut out the low-frequency noise, but it doesn't help you much with the high-frequency noise. So, you're still better off avoiding the noise in the first place.
Silly joke? A scam? Or is there something to this? I dunno, but doing a little web-searching on "Bernard Hobson" (which subsequently leads to GENETIX, Bloor Research, SoftwareReview.com, www.turing.org.uk, and King's College London, and more) shows that this guy has been around for quite a while, and apparently have been working with the theoretical foundations of this Turing-based-JVM for quite some time... Of course, I researched everything on the web... And, since I read from several different websites, it must be true, right?
LED's are terrific. Increased reliability, higher efficiency, lower power consumption, higher peak output, and better heat dissipation.
BUT, one 'negative' side effect of greater LED usage is the NTSB will have less forensic evidence after aircrashes (at least with smaller private planes without a flight data recorder)...
At moment-of-impact, the filament from a lit bulb breaks apart differently from an already-burned out bulb or from an operable-but-not-lit bulb.
Bigger/longer tapes have lousier yields. Just like IC's and LCD's, as the surface area increases, the cost of testing and the probability of excess defects increase until it's no longer cost effective to manufacture and sell.
Next, your bigger tape will wear out faster than its smaller brothers because there's a lot more tension in the spools. Sure, the manufacturers find thinner substrate to fit more "linear meter/feet" of tape in the cassette... But this only exacerbates the tension problem even more.
Making wider tapes? Well, now you're talking about increased head size and higher cost (because the head is bigger, or requires more sophisticated control of head-travel geometry).
Besides, do you really want to store all your eggs in one (Terabyte-sized) basket?
First, a big thank you for making Plex86 possible.
Now the question...
One thing that I find cumbersome with VMWare and Win4Lin (and the plex86 screenshot that I saw) is that you have to display the entire Windows9x desktop to run even a single application.
Even back in the days of OS/2 2.1, they had a way of displaying Windows application along with OS/2 applications in the same (OS/2) desktop. They did this with a special Windows video-driver which would "burn a hole" in the OS/2 desktop to reveal applications running on the Windows desktop "running behind" the OS/2 desktop.
What I'm talking about is (IMO) different than running a Windows application through WINE, because (with plex86) the Windows application is running inside a (logically separate) virtualized machine.
Would you consider offering such a feature, or at least an I/O hook in plex86 so that it could happen?
Well, yes, if you want spiffy looking/small-form-factor POS terminals with integrated swipe readers and touch-screen LCD, they are not cheap... And you'd certainly want to use such a machine in high-end retail locations...
But inside a HomeDepot? I think they can use a low-cost desktop to run their POS station.
Probably around $800 for the PC and $2,200 for the remaining equipment...
From the article about 90,000 POS terminals at Home Depot.
Why hang on to a cash register for so long? One big reason is cost. A typical department store might have as many as 150 point-of-sale units that cost about $5,000 apiece, says Buzek. Replacing every cash register could cost a single store upwards of $750,000.
Granted, I may have been overly optimistic about the cost saving... So, let's say they save only $20/machine on licensing, and $280/machine on hardware... That's still $10M/yr...
90,000 POS terminals that can run on generic hardware, with hardware+licensing savings on the order of about $3,000 per cash register ~= $100M/yr in savings over a 3-year equipment life...
I think they can afford to pay for qualified staff out of that!
Support cost would be very low, too. Unlike a corporate LAN with individual desktops configured to the tastes and whims of each user, cash registers are "black boxes". They can make their own "HD Linux" distro, do a broadcast-push to each store using DirectPC, and mass-install/upgrgrade all registers over the LAN using kickstart (or just boot the register off the server using network-IPL).
And, because the cash registers are doing relatively simple stuff, there's no need for sophisticated high-end support for the end-station. 99% of the problems in the field will be hardware. (This assumes, I think safely, that HD will rigorously test their software and OS configuration before sending it out to the entire company...)
Of course, I'd still want a Sun Enterprise server with 24x7 Gold support in my datacenters, and one workgroup server with Silver support in each of my store. But the cash registers? Eh, they're almost a dime-a-dozen.
Aside from the fact that Solaris x86 still has woeful software support (no major RDBMS support, last I checked), there's a lot of good that would come from making the cobalt run on Solaris:
Consistency of server management procedures.
In-house tools (scripts) written for Solaris SPARC would run (mostly) unaltered on Solaris x86.
In-house applications (binaries) written for Solaris SPARC would run (mostly) unaltered on Solaris x86 after a quick recompile.
CDE/Motif (Yeah, large corporate organizations use it instead of GNOME or KDE. Live with it.)
Excellent support from Sun (as long as you pay the $upport Contract)
Of course, Sun has it's own interest at the core:
Entry-level Solaris-on-RaQ customers would eventually graduate to Solaris-on-SPARC
Revenue from support fees.
Larger installed based - bigger mind share.
Easier to manage support/service organization when dealing with one OS. A more controlled-development OS, for that matter.
When your $5,000-per-hour revenue stream stops because of a subtle server problem at 3am, do you think a linux support organization is going to call the author of the broken code and make him fix the problem? You are mistaken.
Saying 19" at 30" away sounds a lot more impressive than the equivalent "crappy 14" that will only do 800x600 at 22" away". Maybe they should have gone with claiming a 60" monitor just under 8 feet away.
Almost. My eyes would be a lot happier with the 19" monitor at 30" away....
Actually, it is. (Though running 1024x768, not 800x600.)
It's not just the angle-of-view. The focal distance makes a big difference in eye comfort. Farsighted that I am, I get headaches if the monitor is less than 18" away.
I used to own a pair of Virtual Reality i-glasses, but they were too bulky and low-res to bother with after the novelty wore off. Still, it was fun playing FPS's with the head motion-tracker.
Alas, even in this era of disposable technology, VR-gears are still way too expensive for the average Joe!
Well, there's always putting the image back onto film. Digital film recorders have been out quite a while. Lasergraphics makes one.
At the high-end models, these film recorders have higher pixel/color resolution that a normal 35mm film.... Which means you can make negatives that are hard to identify as being computer-generated. (Oh the blackmail possibilities!)
Slashdot Mirror
I worked at a San Francisco-based company that moved its headquarters to a suburb of the Salt Lake City area. At the time, the SF office was packed wall-to-wall with engineers, while the new SLC location had enough space to house 6 times as many people.
The company wanted its key developers to leave the SF area and relocate to the SLC area.
A few did.
Many others refused.
And, when college recuiting season rolled by, many prospective employees accepted our job offers on the condition that they work in the SF. The space problem became so bad that we had to open another office in SF, and also open a new office much closer to the San Jose area.
I've been to SLC. It's nice for a brief visit, but I would never live there.
Besides, I was too freaked out by the 80%+ homogenous population. I felt oddly out of place.
I imagine a day when everyone will get a free OEL-wall in their living room... The catch? You'll have to sign up for MSN/WebTV. When you're not using the WebTV, the OEL wall will display targeted advertising.
My sister is currently going to shool in Japan. Her apartment is essentially a mini studio. The bathroom is so small and compactly designed that there is one faucet shared between the sink and the bath/shower. Space *is* a premium in Japan. (Although, I must say it's the same with places like New York City and San Francisco.) This is why consumer electronics from Japan focuses on being small. "Executive stereos"? Heck, it's only call that way to add "prestige" to a product that would be overlooked by most U.S. consumers... In the U.S., most Americans want big-big-big! You think Honda Civic's are small? Hah - most middle-class family would be rather pleased if they can own such a decent sized car. (It's not the money -- it's where to park it.) They think we're weird for buying 24 rolls of paper towel at a time... That would take up half of the total closet space at home!
And open yourself up to liability?
I think, sadly, the wisest thing to do is to quitely decline the job. Or, take the job, and then work to improve the GM-ITM relationship somehow...
A big chunk of a consultant's job is non-technical. I think successful consultants are the ones that make the customers feel happy and secure with the delievered results, even if it's not necessarily the cutting edge or the most optimal solution.
At $200 for the computer and say $10 per month for Internet access, the computer is still too expensive for "the poor" families.
Heck, they probably don't even have a telephone to connect the PC. (Either because of cost, or lack of infrastructure.)
Local small-businesses and public-service organizations will benefit, though. Perhaps these machines will make it possible to put together public-access Internet kiosks at the libraries and schools.
I just hope people don't buy these only to find a way to "iOpener-ize" the machine and sell them on eBay...
I take it that this topic is a result of MSNBC's program on the Challenger failure. IMO, it was a fairly well done piece, and it brought tears back to my eyes.
On that tragic morning, our whole school was shocked by the principal's un-scheduled, rushed, and awkwardly worded announcement that "The Space Shuttle blew up." We were particularly affected because my H.S. Calculus teacher was one of the semi-finalist for the Teachers-in-space program. If the failure had not happened, she probably would have gone up in a later shuttle flight.
Edward Tufte (in his excellecnt book, Visual Explanations ) has an interesting section on the Challenger Disaster -- Basically, NASA didn't understand the urgency of the objections from Thiokol engineers because they (NASA) didn't clearly understand the o-ring failure probability. Thiokol engineers gave NASA the tabular data of o-ring failure rates (the data collected from post-flight analyses of past spent SRB's). Had they graphed the data, Tufte claims, NASA would have clearly understood that the SRB's were in an unusable temperature range.
Some people believe that science and technology has advanced to StarTrek-like perfection: a car should tell you that there's a problem with its right front tire, a chemical plant's safety system is multiply redundant and will never fail, a computer will instantly solve your problems if you ask the right questions, and common devices are instantly and infinitely reconfigurable to work in any environment. These are worthy ideal goals to have; but, of course, reality falls far short of these StarTrek dreams. Time and money, limits of practicality, and social and political dynamics combine to form trade-offs that sometimes don't work out.
It might be in somewhat poor taste, but I own a stock-certificate of the Thiokol Corporation as a reminder of the lesson that I learned from the disaster. My fellow engineers will occasionally hear me say "Go with Throttle up" when I feel that a (software) project has been rushed, inadequately designed, and poorly tested. Of these 'doomed projects', 3/5-th of those project 'launches' without significant problems, the next 1/5th has significant problems after launch, and the last 1/5th end up with critical failures which we then have to scramble to contain. Of course, failures are best understood in hindsight. The important thing is that we learn from our mistakes.
As soon as I saw your name, I recalled the story that made the rounds several years ago about ksh compatibility by MKS's Korn shell and Windows (see end of post)...
My question:
As I see it, one of the big problems that continue to affect the Unix community today is that each OS vendor customize Unix in some peculiar/exclusive way.
I can't recall anymore, but I think I ran into the problem with ksh being significantly different from Solaris with Dynix/ptx.
Certainly, there's a lot of shell-scripting out where where platform-specific behavior is written in each script. And the shell-command tests to identify the platform were rather yucky.
How, then, do shell's compete against PERL or Java where part of the goal is to hide almost all of the OS-specific quirks behind a layer of abstraction? And, (assuming my memory of ksh being "framgented" across platforms is correct) has ksh "defragmented" with the newer versions?
The lead article says that ksh now is so complete that you don't need PERL anymore. But do these ksh script still have to have OS-dependent sections?
Thanks.
Here is the story from William Birch (which I grabbed out of the Google Cache:
I can just see it now... As soon as you make your selection for President, the rest of the ballot form auto-completes with that candidate-party's plank.
You mean, there really are nuns wearing beepers!?
I wonder if they still run their servers on OS/2.
The editors ignored my original mention of this (oh well), but Handspring auctioned the first "official production" model Visor phone with the one-millionth Visor (Prism) on eBay starting about two weeks ago.
The auction finished last week. The product page itself is already off the system, but the auction ended at $4550.
Of course, that price didn't include service activation, which is required.
Well, the AP tests are for "advanced placement". Most schools that accept AP credits probably aren't interested in the student's proficiency of any non-mainstream language.
I have sensitive ears, and yet work with lots of machines, so I understand your plight. I once had a job where the idiot manager almost forced me to have my "office" in the machine room.
Well, the best solution is to avoid being in the machine room as much as possible. You can usually get by with "remote control software" like VNC or PCAnywhere. If you have to do a lot of pre-boot activity on PC's, a KVM extender might be in order.
Buy high-noise-reduction foam earplugs. You can buy them easily at any drugstore (the foamy ones kinds with NRR of 27 or higher are best). Better yet, by them in bulk-buy them from medical and/or construction supply stores.
Finally, if you expect to be "on the phone" while being in the machine room, a regular noise-cancelling headphone won't help you. You'll get much of the machine room noise fed back to you because telephones have "sidetone" (which feeds back what you say into the mouthpiece back into your earpiece -- it helps to regulate the speech volume of the telephone user). (BTW, if you're at an airport/concert/etc. and have a hard time hearing the other party, just cover your mouthpiece with your hand. It helps a lot.) A telephone with noise-cancelling mic might help. I dunno.
By the way, an active-noise-cancellation headset helps cut out the low-frequency noise, but it doesn't help you much with the high-frequency noise. So, you're still better off avoiding the noise in the first place.
Good luck.
Silly joke? A scam? Or is there something to this? I dunno, but doing a little web-searching on "Bernard Hobson" (which subsequently leads to GENETIX, Bloor Research, SoftwareReview.com, www.turing.org.uk, and King's College London, and more) shows that this guy has been around for quite a while, and apparently have been working with the theoretical foundations of this Turing-based-JVM for quite some time... Of course, I researched everything on the web... And, since I read from several different websites, it must be true, right?
Owww... My head hurts...
LED's are terrific. Increased reliability, higher efficiency, lower power consumption, higher peak output, and better heat dissipation.
BUT, one 'negative' side effect of greater LED usage is the NTSB will have less forensic evidence after aircrashes (at least with smaller private planes without a flight data recorder)...
At moment-of-impact, the filament from a lit bulb breaks apart differently from an already-burned out bulb or from an operable-but-not-lit bulb.
Here's an article that describes filament analysis. And two reports, one where LED's prevent filament analysis (search for "filament analysis") and another where analysis showed the status of indicators (search for "filament stretching")
Slightly off-topic, but interesting, I think.
Stories do a great job of introducing/teaching new ideas. But real learning comes from doing.
No matter how many times I watch McGyver or the A-team, I still can't build defensive weapons from stuff in my garage.
And, no matter how much porn I see, I still can't seem to do the Venus Butterfly with a starlett. ;->
Bigger/longer tapes have lousier yields. Just like IC's and LCD's, as the surface area increases, the cost of testing and the probability of excess defects increase until it's no longer cost effective to manufacture and sell.
Next, your bigger tape will wear out faster than its smaller brothers because there's a lot more tension in the spools. Sure, the manufacturers find thinner substrate to fit more "linear meter/feet" of tape in the cassette... But this only exacerbates the tension problem even more.
Making wider tapes? Well, now you're talking about increased head size and higher cost (because the head is bigger, or requires more sophisticated control of head-travel geometry).
Besides, do you really want to store all your eggs in one (Terabyte-sized) basket?
First, a big thank you for making Plex86 possible.
Now the question...
One thing that I find cumbersome with VMWare and Win4Lin (and the plex86 screenshot that I saw) is that you have to display the entire Windows9x desktop to run even a single application.
Even back in the days of OS/2 2.1, they had a way of displaying Windows application along with OS/2 applications in the same (OS/2) desktop. They did this with a special Windows video-driver which would "burn a hole" in the OS/2 desktop to reveal applications running on the Windows desktop "running behind" the OS/2 desktop.
Here is an example of a Win32 application running inside the OS/2 desktop, and another example. It's sorta like running Exceed (or WinXfree86) and having an X application display over your Windows desktop.
What I'm talking about is (IMO) different than running a Windows application through WINE, because (with plex86) the Windows application is running inside a (logically separate) virtualized machine.
Would you consider offering such a feature, or at least an I/O hook in plex86 so that it could happen?
Thanks
Well, yes, if you want spiffy looking/small-form-factor POS terminals with integrated swipe readers and touch-screen LCD, they are not cheap... And you'd certainly want to use such a machine in high-end retail locations...
But inside a HomeDepot? I think they can use a low-cost desktop to run their POS station. Probably around $800 for the PC and $2,200 for the remaining equipment...
Using standard prices from a POS equipment supplier that I just pulled out of Yahoo! POS-terminal equipment, totaling ~$2,200:
Granted, I may have been overly optimistic about the cost saving... So, let's say they save only $20/machine on licensing, and $280/machine on hardware... That's still $10M/yr...
90,000 POS terminals that can run on generic hardware, with hardware+licensing savings on the order of about $3,000 per cash register ~= $100M/yr in savings over a 3-year equipment life...
I think they can afford to pay for qualified staff out of that!
Support cost would be very low, too. Unlike a corporate LAN with individual desktops configured to the tastes and whims of each user, cash registers are "black boxes". They can make their own "HD Linux" distro, do a broadcast-push to each store using DirectPC, and mass-install/upgrgrade all registers over the LAN using kickstart (or just boot the register off the server using network-IPL).
And, because the cash registers are doing relatively simple stuff, there's no need for sophisticated high-end support for the end-station. 99% of the problems in the field will be hardware. (This assumes, I think safely, that HD will rigorously test their software and OS configuration before sending it out to the entire company...) Of course, I'd still want a Sun Enterprise server with 24x7 Gold support in my datacenters, and one workgroup server with Silver support in each of my store. But the cash registers? Eh, they're almost a dime-a-dozen.
Sun isn't interested in the hobbyist market.
They don't make money dealing in individual little-fish customers. When they talk about being "the dot in dot-com", they're not talking about pers ona l home page dot-com's. They're talking about businesses that make (want to make) money hands-over-fist on-line.
Aside from the fact that Solaris x86 still has woeful software support (no major RDBMS support, last I checked), there's a lot of good that would come from making the cobalt run on Solaris:- Excellent support from Sun (as long as you pay the $upport Contract)
Of course, Sun has it's own interest at the core:When your $5,000-per-hour revenue stream stops because of a subtle server problem at 3am, do you think a linux support organization is going to call the author of the broken code and make him fix the problem? You are mistaken.
Saying 19" at 30" away sounds a lot more impressive than the equivalent "crappy 14" that will only do 800x600 at 22" away". Maybe they should have gone with claiming a 60" monitor just under 8 feet away.
Almost. My eyes would be a lot happier with the 19" monitor at 30" away....
Actually, it is. (Though running 1024x768, not 800x600.)
It's not just the angle-of-view. The focal distance makes a big difference in eye comfort. Farsighted that I am, I get headaches if the monitor is less than 18" away.
If only they added asilicon micro-ring gyros for motion-tracking!
The inViso eShades looks to be a lot less bulky than earlier personal-display devices.
I used to own a pair of Virtual Reality i-glasses, but they were too bulky and low-res to bother with after the novelty wore off. Still, it was fun playing FPS's with the head motion-tracker.
Alas, even in this era of disposable technology, VR-gears are still way too expensive for the average Joe!
Well, there's always putting the image back onto film. Digital film recorders have been out quite a while. Lasergraphics makes one.
At the high-end models, these film recorders have higher pixel/color resolution that a normal 35mm film.... Which means you can make negatives that are hard to identify as being computer-generated. (Oh the blackmail possibilities!)