This seems ridiculous on the surface: a smartphone is $200 and a car is at least $12k. But if you look at the monthly cost of a cell phone( + data +plus more GB's + a tablet) vs a car payment, then you are looking at $150/month for a cell phone vs $180/month for a car. When they can't afford both, the younglings I know choose the cell plan.
Where I work every single one of our printers has it's own public IP. I accidentally printed my tax return on the work printer from home because I forgot to change the default printer.
What I find disturbing, is how the selection process works. Just dump a bunch of these things in the soup and see what they kill. Imagine if the tubes that kill staf bacteria also happen to chew into nerve cells? Or even more disturbing...what if these things were specifically selected to damage healthy host cells? They would make an excellent, and likely hard to detect, chemical weapon.
I have a 64" HDTV with a vga-to-component video converter, so computer images look pretty darn good. This has encouraged me to find a way to opperate the machine from a decent distance away. For keyboard I am using your basic IR keyboard w/IR-RF transmitter. This has two advantages: 1) the keyboard is designed to be used in your lap, not a desk. 2) The Infrared Remote Extender from smarthome.com, allows the keyboard to be held at any angle, which is really nice in a recliner. You can also order extra transmitters to attach to your remotes. I have one attached to my Pronto as well.
As for Joysticks, I just haven't found any IR or RF versions worth a damn. I have a 15ft analog joystick cable and a 15ft USB extention cable runnig into a hub which allows for a whole bucketload of high quality game devices. I also use Joystick-to-mouse translation software so that I can use a joystick to control the cursor. This is much slower but it is easy on the RSI:)
I recently went looking for a cheap laser for my Linux based network. I found the Brother HL-1040 for about $270. It is a hardware PCL4 laser printer with 2 MB of memory. Under linux it runs just fine at 300 dpi using the HP laserjet II drivers. I share the printer over a Samba network, which allows the windows machines to print at 600dpi using the PCL5 software emulation. The toner carts are good for 2000 pages and cost about $25. Paper feeds though the top, and there is a single-sheet feeder built into the front (great for envelopes). My favorite feature is the fact it prints on the bottom of the page...so the first page printed is always on top. Overall I have been very pleased with this printer.
I've owned the Philips Pronto for about 3 months. I don't have an extraordinary home theater system, but it is complex enough that I have never found a universal remote up to the task until now. Learning remotes are good, but they never have the right buttons on them, but they always have a bunch of buttons I'll never use cluttering up the remote. Sony's RM-AV2000 remote is nice, but it still limits you to their pre-defined button names. AFAIK, the only remotes that allow you to create dynamic button names are the Harmon-Kardon Take Control and the Philips Pronto/Marantz RC5000. Between those two, only the Pronto allows you to actually design the GUI. This feature alone wins me. It allows me to replicate the button look of the original remote, or more often, use a completely different layout that is more appropriate to my usage style. The unit comes with the Pronto Edit (win95) software and a serial cable, which allow you to edit all the graphic panels, learn and assign IR codes, save and load device files, import BMP graphics, etc. If you decide to go with the Pronto, make sure to check out the files section of http://www.remotecentral.com They have device files for many components, as well as alternate button graphics, etc.
Philips' propaganda is available at: http://www.pronto.philips.com/
You didn't mention what size case you were looking for. However, one popular model and my personal favorite, is the SuperMicro 750A. It features a removable front bezel, hinged, and removable right and left side panels, and a removable top panel. It comes with 80mm mounting brackets for 4 hard drive fans, 3 front fans one rear fan and one fan mounted over the CPU. Ars Technica did a great review on it:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1298/sc750a.html
I bought mine at www.mwave.com and it has been the best case I've ever owned.
I have been an investor in Amazon.com since mid '98. To investors, and to those journalists that would listen, Jeff Bezos has firmly stated that he NEVER wanted Amazon.com to be "just an Internet book store". Bezos always wanted to have the best Internet shopping experience. He believes that an e-commerce business is vastly more efficient than a "brick and mortar" business. This means that inventory can be sold at lower prices, and lower profit margins, while still turning over fast enough to be profitable. In order for this to work you need to have a LOT sales. This means building a strong brand FAST. Books just turned out to be the fastest way to start a very large e-commerce operation for amazon.com. Now that have many customers and many return buyers (67%), they are in a perfect position to expand into more difficult markets. Also notice that the same infrastructure makes their book sales so efficient works equally well for their other endeavors. Their customers do not have to re-learn a new interface, enter in their personal information for the 10000th time, or figure out how to contact the company. It's all the same.
Many stock analysts insulted Amazon investors for running up the price of an "internet bookstore" that wasn't making any money, and in fact publicly stated that they were going to spend MORE. Now it should be clear why.
First off, if you're having problems resolving a site in the AOL client, it's not because the cache is old, slow, or not responding.... What will prevent you from resolving the addresses properly is a DNS failure.
True. And indeed that appears to be what happened in this case.
Yes, most people don't know that you can run any browser on top of AOL. But you don't get better performance by doing it.
This is true when everything is working properly. Recently not everything has. When the cache works life is good. When it doesn't your web sites never come up.
The reason AOL wants people using the internal browser and doesn't tell people about using external browsers is two-fold. One, it would jeopardize their contract with MS for placement on the Win95 desktop. Two, because it makes the web go faster for the users to go through the cache complex.
True again, excepting when it doesn't work.
Marketing information is not collected regarding what web sites people visit....That's a lot of log data, and it makes it impractical to try and correlate web sessions and even make any sense out of it.
Partially true. You are right about the volume. When I was there (only 10 million users) it was over 1GB per hour of compressed bitmapped data. One hell of a lot of data to make any sense out of. For the most part the data is only archived. But it is also used to identify those areas of AOL that are most visited. This data could be joined to the information in the billing database to create really neat demographic information, but that is really difficult to do (different databases on different hardware platforms), so AFAIK that isn't happening.
The cache servers at AOL exist because they make the experience better for the users.
True.
If AOL wanted marketing information, they can get it from the client itself.
They do.
And if they wanted to track where people are webbing, they'd sniff their networks internally, so using an external browser wouldn't matter. But that's just far too impractical to be doing, and the information just isn't that useful because of the sheer amount of it.
AFAIK they don't do this. Way too much work and the same data is already being archived
And if you were better informed, you would know that AOL has numerous call centers throughout the country that handle tech support calls. The call centers are part of AOL, and the people that work there are AOL employees. A tiny bit of research reveals that AOL does not out-source most of their tech support, or even any of it, it seems.
I never claimed AOL didn't have call centers, or provide any of their own tech support. This fact is generally irrelevant as these calls centers have no more access to the admins than the third party tech support.
And the best bet is NOT to bypass tech support completely and write to stevecase@aol.com. Sure, he doesn't read that personally, but if you send tech support requests there, you're going to get redirected to the call centers and tech support email addresses... But they have the resources to help you and get an answer to your problem. They can get the next people up the line. They can put you in touch with the NOC if it's that serious. They can get the admins on the phone if it really warrants it.
This is just not true. You will NEVER get operations staff on the phone by calling tech support. AOL internal communications just doesn't work that way. The cold business reality is that the majority of tech support calls are user error, and the majority of phone monkeys are not qualified to determine what problems warrant an admin's attention (apologies to those in tech support who have a clue, you know who you are). Thus, there is NO official line of communication from a phone monkey to an admin. Contrary to popular belief, being rude on the phone will not get you better service.
If you start harassing the admins and upper management with inane tech support questions, the service will only degrade, because they'll be distracted from their core responsibilities by support issues. The call centers exist for a reason. Use them. And help the people working there to help you by being intelligent and not flying off the handle when they can't answer your question immediately. Be patient, and your problems will get solved.
Absolutely true. Just be aware of the limitations phone support.
As a former AOL employee I can tell you that this sort of thing happens often, but is not as sinister as it seems. This is usually due to proxy problems. The easiest way to confirm this is to minimize AOL (assuming you are using the 32-bit version) and launch IE/Netscape/etc and try to reach the site. This bypasses one of AOL's proxy services. If that works then AOL's proxy cache is probably old, slow or not responding. In fact, most people don't know that you can run any browser you like on top of AOL and get better performance. Unfortunately for AOL, they don't get any marketing information (what web sites are visited for how long, etc) when you do this.
Regarding calling tech support, I'm not surprised they didn't know. Like most big corporations, AOL considers tech support to be an expensive, non-income producing liability. Consequently, this is where the most aggressive budget slimming occurs. Most of AOL's tech support is out-sourced to other companies. This is fine if you're new to computers and need someone to hold your hand while you install, on need a local access number, etc. If you have a problem that isn't listed in the tech support database, and especially if it requires information from actual Admins, you're SOL. In that case, your best bet is to bypass tech support completely, and write to stevecase@aol.com. The CEO isn't going to read your message  However, those that do are the most likely to be able escalate these types of issues to someone with a clue.
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This seems ridiculous on the surface: a smartphone is $200 and a car is at least $12k. But if you look at the monthly cost of a cell phone( + data +plus more GB's + a tablet) vs a car payment, then you are looking at $150/month for a cell phone vs $180/month for a car. When they can't afford both, the younglings I know choose the cell plan.
Where I work every single one of our printers has it's own public IP. I accidentally printed my tax return on the work printer from home because I forgot to change the default printer.
What I find disturbing, is how the selection process works. Just dump a bunch of these things in the soup and see what they kill. Imagine if the tubes that kill staf bacteria also happen to chew into nerve cells? Or even more disturbing...what if these things were specifically selected to damage healthy host cells? They would make an excellent, and likely hard to detect, chemical weapon.
As for Joysticks, I just haven't found any IR or RF versions worth a damn. I have a 15ft analog joystick cable and a 15ft USB extention cable runnig into a hub which allows for a whole bucketload of high quality game devices. I also use Joystick-to-mouse translation software so that I can use a joystick to control the cursor. This is much slower but it is easy on the RSI :)
I recently went looking for a cheap laser for my Linux based network. I found the Brother HL-1040 for about $270. It is a hardware PCL4 laser printer with 2 MB of memory. Under linux it runs just fine at 300 dpi using the HP laserjet II drivers. I share the printer over a Samba network, which allows the windows machines to print at 600dpi using the PCL5 software emulation. The toner carts are good for 2000 pages and cost about $25. Paper feeds though the top, and there is a single-sheet feeder built into the front (great for envelopes). My favorite feature is the fact it prints on the bottom of the page...so the first page printed is always on top. Overall I have been very pleased with this printer.
I've owned the Philips Pronto for about 3 months. I don't have an extraordinary home theater system, but it is complex enough that I have never found a universal remote up to the task until now. Learning remotes are good, but they never have the right buttons on them, but they always have a bunch of buttons I'll never use cluttering up the remote. Sony's RM-AV2000 remote is nice, but it still limits you to their pre-defined button names. AFAIK, the only remotes that allow you to create dynamic button names are the Harmon-Kardon Take Control and the Philips Pronto/Marantz RC5000. Between those two, only the Pronto allows you to actually design the GUI. This feature alone wins me. It allows me to replicate the button look of the original remote, or more often, use a completely different layout that is more appropriate to my usage style. The unit comes with the Pronto Edit (win95) software and a serial cable, which allow you to edit all the graphic panels, learn and assign IR codes, save and load device files, import BMP graphics, etc. If you decide to go with the Pronto, make sure to check out the files section of http://www.remotecentral.com They have device files for many components, as well as alternate button graphics, etc.
Philips' propaganda is available at:
http://www.pronto.philips.com/
You didn't mention what size case you were looking for. However, one popular model and my personal favorite, is the SuperMicro 750A. It features a removable front bezel, hinged, and removable right and left side panels, and a removable top panel. It comes with 80mm mounting brackets for 4 hard drive fans, 3 front fans one rear fan and one fan mounted over the CPU. Ars Technica did a great review on it:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1298/sc750a.html
I bought mine at www.mwave.com and it has been the best case I've ever owned.
Aramis
I have been an investor in Amazon.com since mid '98. To investors, and to those journalists that would listen, Jeff Bezos has firmly stated that he NEVER wanted Amazon.com to be "just an Internet book store". Bezos always wanted to have the best Internet shopping experience. He believes that an e-commerce business is vastly more efficient than a "brick and mortar" business. This means that inventory can be sold at lower prices, and lower profit margins, while still turning over fast enough to be profitable. In order for this to work you need to have a LOT sales. This means building a strong brand FAST. Books just turned out to be the fastest way to start a very large e-commerce operation for amazon.com. Now that have many customers and many return buyers (67%), they are in a perfect position to expand into more difficult markets. Also notice that the same infrastructure makes their book sales so efficient works equally well for their other endeavors. Their customers do not have to re-learn a new interface, enter in their personal information for the 10000th time, or figure out how to contact the company. It's all the same.
Many stock analysts insulted Amazon investors for running up the price of an "internet bookstore" that wasn't making any money, and in fact publicly stated that they were going to spend MORE. Now it should be clear why.
My humble opinion..
Aramis
client, it's not because the cache is old, slow, or not responding.... What
will prevent you from resolving the addresses properly is a DNS failure.
True. And indeed that appears to be what happened in this case.
Yes, most people don't know that you can run any browser on top
of AOL. But you don't get better performance by doing it.
This is true when everything is working properly. Recently not everything
has. When the cache works life is good. When it doesn't your web sites
never come up.
The reason AOL wants people using the internal browser and doesn't
tell people about using external browsers is two-fold. One, it would jeopardize
their contract with MS for placement on the Win95 desktop. Two, because
it makes the web go faster for the users to go through the cache complex.
True again, excepting when it doesn't work.
Marketing information is not collected regarding what web sites
people visit....That's a lot of log data, and it makes it impractical to
try and correlate web sessions and even make any sense out of it.
Partially true. You are right about the volume. When I was there
(only 10 million users) it was over 1GB per hour of compressed bitmapped
data. One hell of a lot of data to make any sense out of. For the most
part the data is only archived. But it is also used to identify those areas
of AOL that are most visited. This data could be joined to the information
in the billing database to create really neat demographic information,
but that is really difficult to do (different databases on different hardware
platforms), so AFAIK that isn't happening.
The cache servers at AOL exist because they make the experience
better for the users.
True.
If AOL wanted marketing information, they can get it from the
client itself.
They do.
And if they wanted to track where people are webbing, they'd sniff
their networks internally, so using an external browser wouldn't matter.
But that's just far too impractical to be doing, and the information just
isn't that useful because of the sheer amount of it.
AFAIK they don't do this. Way too much work and the same data is already
being archived
And if you were better informed, you would know that AOL has numerous
call centers throughout the country that handle tech support calls. The
call centers are part of AOL, and the people that work there are AOL employees.
A tiny bit of research reveals that AOL does not out-source most of their
tech support, or even any of it, it seems.
I never claimed AOL didn't have call centers, or provide any of their
own tech support. This fact is generally irrelevant as these calls centers
have no more access to the admins than the third party tech support.
And the best bet is NOT to bypass tech support completely and
write to stevecase@aol.com. Sure, he doesn't read that personally, but
if you send tech support requests there, you're going to get redirected
to the call centers and tech support email addresses... But they have the
resources to help you and get an answer to your problem. They can get the
next people up the line. They can put you in touch with the NOC if it's
that serious. They can get the admins on the phone if it really warrants
it.
This is just not true. You will NEVER get operations staff on the phone
by calling tech support. AOL internal communications just doesn't work
that way. The cold business reality is that the majority of tech support
calls are user error, and the majority of phone monkeys are not qualified
to determine what problems warrant an admin's attention (apologies to those
in tech support who have a clue, you know who you are). Thus, there is
NO official line of communication from a phone monkey to an admin. Contrary
to popular belief, being rude on the phone will not get you better service.
If you start harassing the admins and upper management with inane
tech support questions, the service will only degrade, because they'll
be distracted from their core responsibilities by support issues. The call
centers exist for a reason. Use them. And help the people working there
to help you by being intelligent and not flying off the handle when they
can't answer your question immediately. Be patient, and your problems will
get solved.
Absolutely true. Just be aware of the limitations phone support.
Aramis
FWIW, I can get to that site on AOL.
As a former AOL employee I can tell you that this sort of thing happens often, but is not as sinister as it seems. This is usually due to proxy problems. The easiest way to confirm this is to minimize AOL (assuming you are using the 32-bit version) and launch IE/Netscape/etc and try to reach the site. This bypasses one of AOL's proxy services. If that works then AOL's proxy cache is probably old, slow or not responding. In fact, most people don't know that you can run any browser you like on top of AOL and get better performance. Unfortunately for AOL, they don't get any marketing information (what web sites are visited for how long, etc) when you do this.
Regarding calling tech support, I'm not surprised they didn't know. Like most big corporations, AOL considers tech support to be an expensive, non-income producing liability. Consequently, this is where the most aggressive budget slimming occurs. Most of AOL's tech support is out-sourced to other companies. This is fine if you're new to computers and need someone to hold your hand while you install, on need a local access number, etc. If you have a problem that isn't listed in the tech support database, and especially if it requires information from actual Admins, you're SOL. In that case, your best bet is to bypass tech support completely, and write to stevecase@aol.com. The CEO isn't going to read your message  However, those that do are the most likely to be able escalate these types of issues to someone with a clue.
Aramis