OK, I know that there's hot-plug disks and even PCI on x86 hardware. But who makes stuff that let's you swap out CPUs and memory? I thought that was Sun territory only.
They can't be that stupid...?
on
$1200 Cheap!
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· Score: 1
But I guess they can be that arrogant.
I look at it this way - someone goes into the store to buy an Xbox, hits the bundle price, walks out with a PS/2 or GameCube instead.
If Xbox was the only game in town, literally, I could see Microsoft doing this. But with the caliber of competition, they'd be insane to try this. Or arrogant.
I was working as the IT department for a smallish publisher in Albany, NY. We had surge suppressors for all of the desktops, and UPS's for all of the servers. Many computers were hooked up via serial to a proprietary job tracking system, while all of them were on the company LAN. Some where hooked up to an ancient print-sharing device. The company took a major lightening strike one day.
About half the desktop computers and printers started to smoke. After the panic was over, I found machines that had charred serial ports, and/or charred parallel ports, and/or smoked Ethernet cards. Some of the motherboards were burned up, too. Laser printers took an awful beating, lost several (which made for good dumpster diving later:)
What I learned is that:
Surge suppressors are useless, basically.
You can't protect every device unless you can afford to put everything on a UPS. They're all attached, and all it takes is one thing hooked up to your lan/printer/print sharing device (remember, this was the 80's) to get zapped.
As others have stated, have a good back up and disaster recovery plan.
And of course, you could always find a way to purposely get hit by lightening, and get it over with. Lightening never strikes the same place twice, right?
Um, there is no ethernet adapter for the DirecTV combo boxen - apparently no space to put one in. Or there aren't enough of them to make it worthwhile.
I have an Audrey. Overall, its a pretty cool device for its intended function. But it did deserve to fail.
It was a consumer experience idiot-savant. For example, my unit arrived in a Catch-22 state... you can't access any software until you calibrate the touch screen. You can't see the calibration target because the contrast is set too high. You can't change the contrast because its controlled by a piece of software.
What else? Well, its too slow, too expensive, and it does too many things - making it difficult to explain what it is to the intended audience.
That being said, it does work really well. The browser is probably the most compatible I've seen on any non-PC. The email is easy to use (but too hard to configure for Grandma). It resurrects Push (remember Push?) via Marimba to delivery personalized content so you can just flip it on to get the weather, sports, news, etc. It provides just about the only way that end-consumers can group-sync their Palms.
I think that IAs are a useful product class waiting to happen. I hate it when the failures of one product are seized upon by pundits to damn the entire classifcation (PDAs were considered dead until Palm came along). I just don't understand why no one can make one that works, simply and cheaply.
Let's look at this from a different point of view...
Dude is totally within his rights to post his opinion about his old company. Let's not get into whether these opinions are well founded or not, because there is no such thing as a "truthful" opinion.
Old company is totally within their rights to audit his postings.
Old company is totally with their rights to communicate the fact that dude posted negative opinions about his old company to dude's current employer. Something along the lines of: "Our former employer posted opinions about us at this URL..." They are simply communicating a fact, and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
Dude's current employer might not really appreciate the fact that they have an employee with a track record of voicing public negative opinions about a former employer. As an employer, I would have the same concerns. I mean, all employers at least believe that they do the right thing, right?
His current employer, depending on the state laws, probably has the right to terminate his employment for any reason, at any time.
So, without talking about ethics, and morals, there is no LEGAL reason why his old employer couldn't indirectly cause him to lose his job. Right?
I think that this comes under the classification of not burning bridges.
I figured that I'd start out cheap before taking a big plunge, and see if cheap worked well enough.
I found the Midiland S4-8400, and it works great. Cost is about $350 from most mail order sources.
It does pretty much all of what you're looking for, but it will not shake the walls of a large room. It is definitely not the last work in audiophile technology, but I think it sounds great, and the surround stuff is terrific. I'd give it a go and see if it meets your needs. If not, ebay it and move on to the expensive suggestions.
I don't think that this link mentions that, if you're so inclined, can clone your old hard drive to the new hard drive using dd or similar utility, but there's a lot of information in the PJB100 group at egroups. The Toshiba is the only hard drive bigger than 6 gigs that will work.
Give 'em hardware - the latest stuff, put them on hardware beta tests, etc. Don't worry if they'll agree upfront to do anything with it - my guess is that if they've done it before, they'll do it again. Low risk, high reward investment.
I already upgraded to a 20GB drive; it was totally hassle free, and I can now hold a TON of stuff on my PJB. All my stuff now gets encoded at 256kbps, and it sounds GREAT.
Ditto the other comments on this thread - the thing is stable, light, small, runs forever on a charge, great sound quality, etc. etc. This changed the way the I listen to music, and I'm awful glad I *didn't* wait for the stinky Creative thing.
Problems - no backlighting, no remote control, no two-way MP3 transfer. Relatively minor problems.
The VisorPhone is going to fail in a big way, and for almost too many reasons to count.
First, the thing is going to be simply too difficult to use in everyday operation. It makes the Visor huge, both in height and thickness. The damned thing looks like a cartoon version of a cellphone after a steamroller went over it - not exactly "sexy" technology.
It cannot draw power from the Visor, and the Visor cannot draw power from it. In the case of the newer, rechargeable models, you'll have to deal with recharging each half of the combo.
Designing this thing to be used like a standard handset is insane. Um, I can't wait to have to clean my screen of facial sebum, and to enjoy the abrasion that beards and whiskers will put on the screen of my Visor. This thing should have been made to only support an earpiece/headset. This would have given them a size reduction bonus.
The pricing is also silly. Many have pointed out that going with GSM effectively forces users to pay a premium to use the least supported cell protocol. But even worse, if you are already a GSM customer, you pay nearly double to get a VisorPhone! In other words, the users most sold on GSM are the ones least likely to afford this thing - huh?
I expect them to sell about ten, and have most returned.
Can someone answer me a simple SAN related question?
One of NAS' greatest strengths is that you can share files and volumes easily between different types of servers - NetApp, for example, provides NFS and SMB, allowing Winders and *nix servers to read and right to the same data.
Can you even do this with SAN? Is there a "universal file system?"
There is quite a lot of specialized hardware out there, but you'll likely need to write your own drivers in most cases. Sigma does offer some kind of Linux compatibility - they have a workstation/reference design that claims to support Linux.
Giving AMD a license to the 286, along with microcode, allowed AMD to really wedge their way into the x86 market as early as they did.
Creating your own competition has got to be a pretty big slip up in anyone's book, especially when it could have been avoided pretty easily back in the day.
Re:The Best Goddamn Keyboard in the World, Ever
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to disagree, but the old Northgate keyboards were the best ever - at least from a clicky comfort point of view. They had heft - probably the only keyboard that you could kill someone with.
Of course, they're pretty much relics now, don't have PS/2 connectors (they still make adapters tho). The keyboard division lasted a lot longer than the parent company that once made computers, too.
The PJB-100, available from a variety of vendors (I think that thinkgeek advertises it on here) and the original seller here. WILL take a 20 GB hard drive. It also seems to be a better unit on the whole, certainly in terms of battery life.
I took out the old 4 gigger and dropped in a Toshiba 20. Once connected to its Windows application via USB, the thing formatted instantly and was ready for lots and lots of songs. Do keep in mind that the PJB-100 is not compatible with all IDE drives - just some IBM and Toshibas - without extensive modification.
I'd advise anyone looking for a truly useable portable music libary with lots and lots of capacity to check it out.
He usually hits it on the head, but I think that Sun is more likely to co-opt Open Source rather than aid it with the aquisition of Cobalt.
For example, take the entire Intel thing. The real dynamic is that Intel/Cobalt/MIPS/Linux perception of the unwashed masses is that Cobalt and/or Linux provide a cheaper, better alternative than the expensive stuff from Sun.
Now, what happens if Sun changes the chip to the new Ultrasparc IIe, and runs Solaris-Lite on it? Sun gets a new product line that is still, for all the reasons why Cobalt was successful, is going to allow them to serve a low-end audience without killing off their current higher-end offerings. They expand the pie. And this is likely to be the scenario that Sun follows.
The question is, at whose expense is this pie expanded? Linux/xBSD/etc. running on Intel, that's who. The "dumb" users will see the same experience as they're getting now. Savvier users won't see Solaris as being inferior to Linux, most likely, and the upgrade path "benefits" will not be lost on them.
I believe that this is going to be a bad thing, overall.
Slashdot Mirror
aye
Hot plug CPU? Hot plug memory? What?
OK, I know that there's hot-plug disks and even PCI on x86 hardware. But who makes stuff that let's you swap out CPUs and memory? I thought that was Sun territory only.
But I guess they can be that arrogant.
I look at it this way - someone goes into the store to buy an Xbox, hits the bundle price, walks out with a PS/2 or GameCube instead.
If Xbox was the only game in town, literally, I could see Microsoft doing this. But with the caliber of competition, they'd be insane to try this. Or arrogant.
About half the desktop computers and printers started to smoke. After the panic was over, I found machines that had charred serial ports, and/or charred parallel ports, and/or smoked Ethernet cards. Some of the motherboards were burned up, too. Laser printers took an awful beating, lost several (which made for good dumpster diving later
What I learned is that:
Um, there is no ethernet adapter for the DirecTV combo boxen - apparently no space to put one in. Or there aren't enough of them to make it worthwhile.
So this isn't a DirecTV issue...yet.
It seems that almost all of the IDE based RAID products out there use the controllers from Accusys. Here's one of their products:
8 drive controller
Tried the older, 6 driver version, and it worked pretty well, did about 40MB/sec sustained with 6 drives. Very sensitive to termination.
Is it just me, or has her voice gone down an octave or so since last season? I think that the Doctor needs to prescribe a hypospray of estrogen.
Even before the Compaq, there was the Momenta notebook that used a stylus or keyboard.
The Compaq was called the Concerto. Can't find a picture of one via google, but there are several fan groups for it plus a pen driver for X.
jonathan
I have an Audrey. Overall, its a pretty cool device for its intended function. But it did deserve to fail.
It was a consumer experience idiot-savant. For example, my unit arrived in a Catch-22 state... you can't access any software until you calibrate the touch screen. You can't see the calibration target because the contrast is set too high. You can't change the contrast because its controlled by a piece of software.
What else? Well, its too slow, too expensive, and it does too many things - making it difficult to explain what it is to the intended audience.
That being said, it does work really well. The browser is probably the most compatible I've seen on any non-PC. The email is easy to use (but too hard to configure for Grandma). It resurrects Push (remember Push?) via Marimba to delivery personalized content so you can just flip it on to get the weather, sports, news, etc. It provides just about the only way that end-consumers can group-sync their Palms.
I think that IAs are a useful product class waiting to happen. I hate it when the failures of one product are seized upon by pundits to damn the entire classifcation (PDAs were considered dead until Palm came along). I just don't understand why no one can make one that works, simply and cheaply.
A bit more expensive than the Japanese price mentioned in the article... never heard of the vendor before...
They list the old model, too.
Let's look at this from a different point of view...
Dude is totally within his rights to post his opinion about his old company. Let's not get into whether these opinions are well founded or not, because there is no such thing as a "truthful" opinion.
Old company is totally within their rights to audit his postings.
Old company is totally with their rights to communicate the fact that dude posted negative opinions about his old company to dude's current employer. Something along the lines of: "Our former employer posted opinions about us at this URL..." They are simply communicating a fact, and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
Dude's current employer might not really appreciate the fact that they have an employee with a track record of voicing public negative opinions about a former employer. As an employer, I would have the same concerns. I mean, all employers at least believe that they do the right thing, right?
His current employer, depending on the state laws, probably has the right to terminate his employment for any reason, at any time.
So, without talking about ethics, and morals, there is no LEGAL reason why his old employer couldn't indirectly cause him to lose his job. Right?
I think that this comes under the classification of not burning bridges.
Hmm, let's see. Sega was the first to enable CE powered games. Sega has "franchise" games, like Sonic. Sega denies that it'll be making PS2 games.
I wonder if one can buy Sega ADRs? I wonder what'll happen to Sega's share prices when this is finally announced.
I figured that I'd start out cheap before taking a big plunge, and see if cheap worked well enough.
I found the Midiland S4-8400, and it works great. Cost is about $350 from most mail order sources.
It does pretty much all of what you're looking for, but it will not shake the walls of a large room. It is definitely not the last work in audiophile technology, but I think it sounds great, and the surround stuff is terrific. I'd give it a go and see if it meets your needs. If not, ebay it and move on to the expensive suggestions.
http://www.mpython.com/pjb/upgrade.htm
I don't think that this link mentions that, if you're so inclined, can clone your old hard drive to the new hard drive using dd or similar utility, but there's a lot of information in the PJB100 group at egroups. The Toshiba is the only hard drive bigger than 6 gigs that will work.
Give 'em hardware - the latest stuff, put them on hardware beta tests, etc. Don't worry if they'll agree upfront to do anything with it - my guess is that if they've done it before, they'll do it again. Low risk, high reward investment.
I already upgraded to a 20GB drive; it was totally hassle free, and I can now hold a TON of stuff on my PJB. All my stuff now gets encoded at 256kbps, and it sounds GREAT.
Ditto the other comments on this thread - the thing is stable, light, small, runs forever on a charge, great sound quality, etc. etc. This changed the way the I listen to music, and I'm awful glad I *didn't* wait for the stinky Creative thing.
Problems - no backlighting, no remote control, no two-way MP3 transfer. Relatively minor problems.
The VisorPhone is going to fail in a big way, and for almost too many reasons to count.
First, the thing is going to be simply too difficult to use in everyday operation. It makes the Visor huge, both in height and thickness. The damned thing looks like a cartoon version of a cellphone after a steamroller went over it - not exactly "sexy" technology.
It cannot draw power from the Visor, and the Visor cannot draw power from it. In the case of the newer, rechargeable models, you'll have to deal with recharging each half of the combo.
Designing this thing to be used like a standard handset is insane. Um, I can't wait to have to clean my screen of facial sebum, and to enjoy the abrasion that beards and whiskers will put on the screen of my Visor. This thing should have been made to only support an earpiece/headset. This would have given them a size reduction bonus.
The pricing is also silly. Many have pointed out that going with GSM effectively forces users to pay a premium to use the least supported cell protocol. But even worse, if you are already a GSM customer, you pay nearly double to get a VisorPhone! In other words, the users most sold on GSM are the ones least likely to afford this thing - huh?
I expect them to sell about ten, and have most returned.
Can someone answer me a simple SAN related question?
One of NAS' greatest strengths is that you can share files and volumes easily between different types of servers - NetApp, for example, provides NFS and SMB, allowing Winders and *nix servers to read and right to the same data.
Can you even do this with SAN? Is there a "universal file system?"
There is quite a lot of specialized hardware out there, but you'll likely need to write your own drivers in most cases. Sigma does offer some kind of Linux compatibility - they have a workstation/reference design that claims to support Linux.
Sigma Designs
Darim
Optibase
Good luck.
Giving AMD a license to the 286, along with microcode, allowed AMD to really wedge their way into the x86 market as early as they did.
Creating your own competition has got to be a pretty big slip up in anyone's book, especially when it could have been avoided pretty easily back in the day.
Sorry to disagree, but the old Northgate keyboards were the best ever - at least from a clicky comfort point of view. They had heft - probably the only keyboard that you could kill someone with.
Of course, they're pretty much relics now, don't have PS/2 connectors (they still make adapters tho). The keyboard division lasted a lot longer than the parent company that once made computers, too.
Looks like something one of those dsgustingly cute Japanese cartoon characters would be carrying. Like, Hello Kitty, Badtz Maru, Pochacco, etc. Ecch.
The PJB-100, available from a variety of vendors (I think that thinkgeek advertises it on here) and the original seller here. WILL take a 20 GB hard drive. It also seems to be a better unit on the whole, certainly in terms of battery life.
I took out the old 4 gigger and dropped in a Toshiba 20. Once connected to its Windows application via USB, the thing formatted instantly and was ready for lots and lots of songs. Do keep in mind that the PJB-100 is not compatible with all IDE drives - just some IBM and Toshibas - without extensive modification.
I'd advise anyone looking for a truly useable portable music libary with lots and lots of capacity to check it out.
He usually hits it on the head, but I think that Sun is more likely to co-opt Open Source rather than aid it with the aquisition of Cobalt.
For example, take the entire Intel thing. The real dynamic is that Intel/Cobalt/MIPS/Linux perception of the unwashed masses is that Cobalt and/or Linux provide a cheaper, better alternative than the expensive stuff from Sun.
Now, what happens if Sun changes the chip to the new Ultrasparc IIe, and runs Solaris-Lite on it? Sun gets a new product line that is still, for all the reasons why Cobalt was successful, is going to allow them to serve a low-end audience without killing off their current higher-end offerings. They expand the pie. And this is likely to be the scenario that Sun follows.
The question is, at whose expense is this pie expanded? Linux/xBSD/etc. running on Intel, that's who. The "dumb" users will see the same experience as they're getting now. Savvier users won't see Solaris as being inferior to Linux, most likely, and the upgrade path "benefits" will not be lost on them.
I believe that this is going to be a bad thing, overall.
Since Cobalt is transitioning to x86 CPUs, running Solaris shouldn't be much of a problem at all.