"Not to mention the fact that there's almost no upgrades you can do, besides maybe memory and the hard drive. Need a new computer? Gotta buy a whole new one! My old Thinkpad is nice, but for home use I'll stick to my desktop. MUCH cheaper that way."
Yeah, but's it's much easier to sell and old and crappy laptop than it is an old and crappy desktop. When I had this old 486 laptop to sell, I posted a little low profile one line ad in the university newspaper and I got maybe 15 enquiries about it in 1 week. People wanted it to carry around for powerpoint presentations and to use for basic word processing.
Sure, it's cheaper to keep upgrading the PC but it's easier to sell the old laptop so you can use the money to get a better one. In the end, I'd say it all balances out.
"Why anyone would ever bother with a CRT again is beyond me, it's just insanity. For a slight increase in price you have a massive boost in clarity, stunning resolutions, and brilliant bright displays. Lower energy use, less desk space and less room heating in the middle of summer than a CRT."
Yeah, but that LCD screen which is designed to run at 1280x1024 will do 1024x768 badly. And if your computer is not powerful enough to run the latest 3D game at 1280x1024, you'll have to choose between a badly scaled image at a resolution non-native to the LCD or a picture perefct slide show.
Also, some people WANT big hot CRT monitors. I mean, some colleges have the dorm thermostats set far too low;-)
"Personally, while I prefer Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird as browsers, I wouldn't touch Mozilla as an e-mail client...If you're looking for decent e-mail clients, I'd recommend Pegasus Mail or The Bat! for Windows..."
I agree fully with this sentiment. Pegasus mail is my client of choice on win32. It's very fast, non-bloated and has tonnes of intelligent options and supports profiles. The design is smart from the ground up. The BEST part about pmail is its HTML rendering. You never have to worry about HTML or activex baddies - they are all netutralised. Even those ones where spam tries to load an image from a remote site which indicates that you opened the e-mail. Additionally, you can turn off the stupid outlook RTF formatting and just get the e-mail's text without stupid colours and huge fonts.
The latest version (4.1) has new (bayesian?) filtering. (Not that I get any spam in my main account. I manage it properly to avoid that.)
If I did some hardcore vector re-tracing, I'm sure I could make a submission that forces Rob to look at the goatse image and judge it for, uh, artistic merit?
"How many people do you know who are quite capable of running Linux but gave up due to their inability to install succesfully."
Actually, my dad has the opposite problem. He partitions his laptop and installs Mandrake quite easily. (Well, I learned about partitioning from *him* when I was 12 or something) but whenever he has to change something simple like a network gateway setting, he reinstalls the OS and enters it during the installation wizard instead of changing the config file. I try to convince him otherwise, but he finds that that's faster than learning where everything is to configure it. Go figure!
Bleeding edge spammer techniques and the best ways of countering them.
Electronic surveillance of citizens and of foriegn locations. The IEEE Spectrum magazine had a big article on this in a recent issue.
Computer Vision and Graphic analysis.. I have heard of faculty at various canadian universities creating computer vision programs to analyze traffic and spot abberant patterns (i.e. drunk drivers.) I have also seen demos of 3D models of sunken ships created using videos shot by divers who swimming over it in specific formations.
Leading edge microprocessor design. Some of my own engineering profs are doing research into creating processors with a dynamically changing ASM language(!!!).
"Cases are like $35 now, including power supply. That's too cheap to care about."
Until the cheap-ass power supply shorts on the DC side and cooks your hard drives. That 1337 RAID array won't save your butt because both drives will be cooked. Or worse, wait till your drives die a slow, horrible death from weak, out-of-spec voltages.
For my next upgrade, I am looking seriously at the Nexus NL-3000 power supply which is super-quiet and was well-received by many reviewers. A PSU is *not* something you skimp on for serious computers.
"Jam a quiet (Panaflo, etc) case fan in it."
So you are circumventing the airflow characteristics for which the PSU was designed by removing the manufacturer's fan and adding a different one. That's a good idea. Have fun when your PSU dies from overheating.
"And a company that ignores its customers, or fails to create new customers, will fail, as has happened time again throughout business history. It's a chicken-and-egg argument in some ways, but fundamentally a businesses wouldn't exist if not for a specific social function and task."
Assuming it's not a monopoly, of course;-) We all know that MSFT has been ingoring its customers for years but they still remain quite profitable.
What I'm saying is that since the PC Market is pretty much homogeneous among manufacturere, it's just a monopoly among a few big companies who satisified to sit on their business models.
On the other hand, in a market where normal competitive forces are allowed to run free without stupid or illegal tinkering, then I agree with what you have said.
" 10 pounds, montrous dimensions, and they could fit a FLOPPY DRIVE in there?"
That is why I got a USB dongle drive for my iBook. I have 256 MB in something that won't breed bad sectors like rabbits and take up hordes of space in my laptop bag. And that 6 MByte/s read is very nice as well.
"Now with 50% greater weenie roasting surface area."
Seriously, computers are good for heating food;-) I disabled the power saving on my monitor at work so I could put my lunch bag on it 15 minutes in advance so I would have a nice warm lunch instead of going to the microwave and waiting in line.
My iBook's hard drive gets quite hot when I've got a bunch of (bit)torrents downloading. Actually due to animesuki, my laptop is basically a 24/7 bittorrent station;-) In the winter, it was pretty cold at my place so the laptop kept my hands warm.
Also I remember hearing stories from my dad (an old unix guy with the beard and everything) about how he had power supply that got unusually hot and he did the same thing. That is, until there was a power surge and the PSU died.
So with this toshiba laptop, maybe there's enough space to warm both hands at once!
"My guess is that it would appeal to the same type that buys a 21" CRT and then sets the resolution to 640x480 (I have heard of old people doing this)."
Some people who have very poor sight have been known to do this. I once worked with a woman who was set up like that, and she still needed screen magnifying software to zoom to the point where one letter was as tall as 2/3 of the screen.
One day she was hysterical because her windows screen suddently turned blue and something about an illegal abortion appeared on it...
"I don't know if I buy that. I mean, companies are all about providing what people want. If they weren't... well, their competitors would do it and they'd be sunk."
Uh, I don't know where you got that idea. Companies are about MAKING MONEY. Period.
Customer satisfaction is not necessarily part of the equation unless the product is new and differnet and you've got to woo consumers into buying it. All the big PC makers have pretty similar offerings. Even if they are not providing what people want and they're making money and keeping the shareholders happy, they'll happily continue doing it. The market is quite homogeneous except for the diamond in the rough that is Apple. The current business model of providing the 'latest' comptuers and hyping them with adversiting has worked for many years. It's tried, tested and true. And it's quite unlikely that one of the big PC makers will have the balls to break out of a pattern that is known to make money, even if it would increase customer satisfaction. Their boad of directors would eat them alive.
Remember, it's 'raising shareholder value,' Not products or customers.
"In the spring of 2003 Apple's laptop sales made it to 40% of all the Macs sold. In 2001 it was 30%."
Correction: The number of laptops sold increased relative to desktop sales.
Ratios don't tell you whether the number of units shipped wetn up or down. Do you know how many units where shipped in total? Maybe laptops are a higher percentage of all machines, but the overall number of desktops increased in volume from 2001 to 2002 as well.
" Does SLIMP3 support ogg? I didn't see any mention of it at their website. I did see that it loads it's kernel from a server, and it's open source, so ogg support could be added but I don't know if any programmer has done so."
Check out the faq: "The SLIMP3 supports MPEG 1/2, layers 2/3, for both VBR and fixed data rates up to 320Kbps (the maximum for MP3). The SLIMP3 server software will soon support automatic encoding/transcoding from other formats, but the player will still speak MPEG."
So basically: No, ogg is not supported. It's sad because most of my music is in ogg.
I agree that the SLIMP3 is a good idea for this application, but I don't think you explained it very well. So let me elaborate:
The SLIMP3 is a device that will stream mp3 files from your already existing file server. No extra hard drive is necessary. The code for it is open sourced and there are quite a few user-made hacks for it. The SLIMP3 just outputs to normal RCA connections which can act as an input into your normal stereo receiver. It even has a nice looking screen to show the song ID3 data.
This way, you have as much storage as you want and you can use your normal stereo receiver to control the speaker outputs to each speaker installation. It's a lovely solution!
"You want to run Linux on a $200 device? Buy an e-Machine and shut the fuck up. Linux on the Xbox serves no purpose except for "huh huh, Linux on a Microsoft machine, huh huh huhuhuhuh, I'm a super l33t geex0r!""
Linux on the X-Box is better than linux on an e-machines device because the x-box has some relatively powerful computational hardware in it. So if you had linux on an x-box, you could hook a bunch of them up together and have a cheap cluster that takes up very little space. You could also use a bunch of them as a cheap server farm. Thus it does have legal applications. Those suggestions would not work as well with cheap e-machines boxes.
So basically... imagone a Beowulf cluster of those!
"Both Audacity and Ardour are quite powerful, but in different ways. Ardour supports MIDI control, powerful muting/soloing, and realtime effects. Audacity has only non-realtime effects, but some of these are quite powerful in a different way, like our Noise Removal."
Amen to that. The noise control on Audacity is my favourite feature. It works wonders on tracks I captured from an analogue source (LP, VHS or Hi8). For major skips I just use an FFT filter to clean it up. Audacity may not be nearly as powerful as Ardour but it is more useful to me since I'm not into pro studio quality multichannel audio recording with realtime effects.
"Anyone else besides me ever see the DHCP Microsoft server when it used to say "Dynamic Hose Configuration Protocol" in an unpatched NT 4 box??"
I actually had to think about that one for a while before I realised what it should have read. The annoying thing about that one is that it's not a typographical error -- it's one where the programmer actually did not know the correct spelling. Things like that make me very angry when they make it into a production product.
It would be interesting to know how many of them are 'critical' and how many are lower priority. For example if 90% of those defects were spelling errors, cosmetic errors, errors with really obscure hardware and so on, I would not be frantic about it.
"It's rumored that some people actually turn off the whole computer when they're not using it."
That's what sleep mode is for. Too bad it doesn't work correctly half the time. Often, machines fail to come out of sleep, or USB devices don't work after waking up, etc. On the bright side, by far the most reliable 'sleep' in machines is on macs - they sleep when you tell them to and wake up virtually instantly. The only time I ever reboot my iBook is when there's a system update that requires rebooting. Otherwise, I usually get several weeks of uptime.
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It's called a docking station ;-)
Yeah, but's it's much easier to sell and old and crappy laptop than it is an old and crappy desktop. When I had this old 486 laptop to sell, I posted a little low profile one line ad in the university newspaper and I got maybe 15 enquiries about it in 1 week. People wanted it to carry around for powerpoint presentations and to use for basic word processing.
Sure, it's cheaper to keep upgrading the PC but it's easier to sell the old laptop so you can use the money to get a better one. In the end, I'd say it all balances out.
Yeah, but that LCD screen which is designed to run at 1280x1024 will do 1024x768 badly. And if your computer is not powerful enough to run the latest 3D game at 1280x1024, you'll have to choose between a badly scaled image at a resolution non-native to the LCD or a picture perefct slide show.
Also, some people WANT big hot CRT monitors. I mean, some colleges have the dorm thermostats set far too low ;-)
I was not aware of that. (IMAP is not something I use.) Thank you for the information.
I'm not gonna click that until I get home from work ;-)
I agree fully with this sentiment. Pegasus mail is my client of choice on win32. It's very fast, non-bloated and has tonnes of intelligent options and supports profiles. The design is smart from the ground up. The BEST part about pmail is its HTML rendering. You never have to worry about HTML or activex baddies - they are all netutralised. Even those ones where spam tries to load an image from a remote site which indicates that you opened the e-mail. Additionally, you can turn off the stupid outlook RTF formatting and just get the e-mail's text without stupid colours and huge fonts.
The latest version (4.1) has new (bayesian?) filtering. (Not that I get any spam in my main account. I manage it properly to avoid that.)
If I did some hardcore vector re-tracing, I'm sure I could make a submission that forces Rob to look at the goatse image and judge it for, uh, artistic merit?
Actually, my dad has the opposite problem. He partitions his laptop and installs Mandrake quite easily. (Well, I learned about partitioning from *him* when I was 12 or something) but whenever he has to change something simple like a network gateway setting, he reinstalls the OS and enters it during the installation wizard instead of changing the config file. I try to convince him otherwise, but he finds that that's faster than learning where everything is to configure it. Go figure!
Bleeding edge spammer techniques and the best ways of countering them.
Electronic surveillance of citizens and of foriegn locations. The IEEE Spectrum magazine had a big article on this in a recent issue.
Computer Vision and Graphic analysis.. I have heard of faculty at various canadian universities creating computer vision programs to analyze traffic and spot abberant patterns (i.e. drunk drivers.) I have also seen demos of 3D models of sunken ships created using videos shot by divers who swimming over it in specific formations.
Leading edge microprocessor design. Some of my own engineering profs are doing research into creating processors with a dynamically changing ASM language(!!!).
So sites try to use computers to deliver information set up such that computers can't recognise it? Somehow that idea seems inherently flawed...
Until the cheap-ass power supply shorts on the DC side and cooks your hard drives. That 1337 RAID array won't save your butt because both drives will be cooked. Or worse, wait till your drives die a slow, horrible death from weak, out-of-spec voltages.
For my next upgrade, I am looking seriously at the Nexus NL-3000 power supply which is super-quiet and was well-received by many reviewers. A PSU is *not* something you skimp on for serious computers.
"Jam a quiet (Panaflo, etc) case fan in it."
So you are circumventing the airflow characteristics for which the PSU was designed by removing the manufacturer's fan and adding a different one. That's a good idea. Have fun when your PSU dies from overheating.
Assuming it's not a monopoly, of course ;-) We all know that MSFT has been ingoring its customers for years but they still remain quite profitable.
What I'm saying is that since the PC Market is pretty much homogeneous among manufacturere, it's just a monopoly among a few big companies who satisified to sit on their business models.
On the other hand, in a market where normal competitive forces are allowed to run free without stupid or illegal tinkering, then I agree with what you have said.
That is why I got a USB dongle drive for my iBook. I have 256 MB in something that won't breed bad sectors like rabbits and take up hordes of space in my laptop bag. And that 6 MByte/s read is very nice as well.
Seriously, computers are good for heating food ;-) I disabled the power saving on my monitor at work so I could put my lunch bag on it 15 minutes in advance so I would have a nice warm lunch instead of going to the microwave and waiting in line.
My iBook's hard drive gets quite hot when I've got a bunch of (bit)torrents downloading. Actually due to animesuki, my laptop is basically a 24/7 bittorrent station ;-) In the winter, it was pretty cold at my place so the laptop kept my hands warm.
Also I remember hearing stories from my dad (an old unix guy with the beard and everything) about how he had power supply that got unusually hot and he did the same thing. That is, until there was a power surge and the PSU died.
So with this toshiba laptop, maybe there's enough space to warm both hands at once!
Some people who have very poor sight have been known to do this. I once worked with a woman who was set up like that, and she still needed screen magnifying software to zoom to the point where one letter was as tall as 2/3 of the screen.
One day she was hysterical because her windows screen suddently turned blue and something about an illegal abortion appeared on it ...
Uh, I don't know where you got that idea. Companies are about MAKING MONEY. Period.
Customer satisfaction is not necessarily part of the equation unless the product is new and differnet and you've got to woo consumers into buying it. All the big PC makers have pretty similar offerings. Even if they are not providing what people want and they're making money and keeping the shareholders happy, they'll happily continue doing it. The market is quite homogeneous except for the diamond in the rough that is Apple. The current business model of providing the 'latest' comptuers and hyping them with adversiting has worked for many years. It's tried, tested and true. And it's quite unlikely that one of the big PC makers will have the balls to break out of a pattern that is known to make money, even if it would increase customer satisfaction. Their boad of directors would eat them alive.
Remember, it's 'raising shareholder value,' Not products or customers.
Correction: The number of laptops sold increased relative to desktop sales.
Ratios don't tell you whether the number of units shipped wetn up or down. Do you know how many units where shipped in total? Maybe laptops are a higher percentage of all machines, but the overall number of desktops increased in volume from 2001 to 2002 as well.
Check out the faq: "The SLIMP3 supports MPEG 1/2, layers 2/3, for both VBR and fixed data rates up to 320Kbps (the maximum for MP3). The SLIMP3 server software will soon support automatic encoding/transcoding from other formats, but the player will still speak MPEG."
So basically: No, ogg is not supported. It's sad because most of my music is in ogg.
The SLIMP3 is a device that will stream mp3 files from your already existing file server. No extra hard drive is necessary. The code for it is open sourced and there are quite a few user-made hacks for it. The SLIMP3 just outputs to normal RCA connections which can act as an input into your normal stereo receiver. It even has a nice looking screen to show the song ID3 data.
This way, you have as much storage as you want and you can use your normal stereo receiver to control the speaker outputs to each speaker installation. It's a lovely solution!
The next time you attempt to insult someone's intelligence, please use correct grammar.
Linux on the X-Box is better than linux on an e-machines device because the x-box has some relatively powerful computational hardware in it. So if you had linux on an x-box, you could hook a bunch of them up together and have a cheap cluster that takes up very little space. You could also use a bunch of them as a cheap server farm. Thus it does have legal applications. Those suggestions would not work as well with cheap e-machines boxes.
So basically ... imagone a Beowulf cluster of those!
Amen to that. The noise control on Audacity is my favourite feature. It works wonders on tracks I captured from an analogue source (LP, VHS or Hi8). For major skips I just use an FFT filter to clean it up. Audacity may not be nearly as powerful as Ardour but it is more useful to me since I'm not into pro studio quality multichannel audio recording with realtime effects.
I actually had to think about that one for a while before I realised what it should have read. The annoying thing about that one is that it's not a typographical error -- it's one where the programmer actually did not know the correct spelling. Things like that make me very angry when they make it into a production product.
But no, I have not seen that error in the wild.
It would be interesting to know how many of them are 'critical' and how many are lower priority. For example if 90% of those defects were spelling errors, cosmetic errors, errors with really obscure hardware and so on, I would not be frantic about it.
That's what sleep mode is for. Too bad it doesn't work correctly half the time. Often, machines fail to come out of sleep, or USB devices don't work after waking up, etc. On the bright side, by far the most reliable 'sleep' in machines is on macs - they sleep when you tell them to and wake up virtually instantly. The only time I ever reboot my iBook is when there's a system update that requires rebooting. Otherwise, I usually get several weeks of uptime.