You can read even more into this than Ford is saying. Not only is Ford making a statement that they can't afford to give PC's to their employees, they're also implying a couple of other things.
First, giving your staff free PC's isn't enough of a benefit to impress most of your staff. Let's face it, if you're working for a union-driven company like Ford, you're not living on Ramen Noodles, and you can probably afford any one of the dozens of el cheapo PC's being served up for the masses. Most of us would rather be given a credit at Best Buy to purchase the PC we really want, or maybe even peripherals if we already own a PC.
Second, in this economy, employee perks are the last thing from anybody's mind. Ford started this when employees were hard to find. Fast forward to today: due to massive layoffs everywhere, people are much easier to come by, and you don't have to go flashing perks in order to get people on board. Giving stuff away to your staff is an increasingly hard sell to the shareholders.
Third, the shareholders just got informed that they're getting decreased dividends for the first time that I can remember. Ford's always been a dividend-heavy company, and I'm sure it's hard for them to rationalize giving away PCs to their staff when their investors are getting less returns. Giveaways are associated with a dotcom, and typically the giveaways are cut just before the jobs are cut. Look out...
Before I finalized the order, I thought I'd check on what the T-Birds were going for. 900 MHz T-Bird: $59. I thought it was screwy, but I didn't complain.
Not as screwy as you might think. The 900mhz Durons are based on the newer core, which works much better with multiprocessing. The 900mhz Athlons are based on the older core, and the Duron part actually smokes them. If you read the article I posted, it explains that as well.
Thresh's Firing Squad has a review of the Tyan Tiger with dual AMD Duron MPs, which is probably of equal or more interest to us geeks. For those of you who weren't aware, AMD Durons work in multiprocessor mode as well, and they're very, very close to Athlons in terms of performance (and obviously cheaper.)
Haha! I wish these people would learn how to code, people in my freshmen CS courses have written better OS's than this! I mean, really, was there no testing done on this? How many bugs don't we know about? What? This happened in Linux, not Windows? Oh, well you know, everyone does make mistakes. Look at the power of open source. Within days, service pack...I mean, a patch was out.
Funny! On the flip side, look how many patches and service packs come out for Windows, but they don't make the Slashdot home page. Good to see we're covering the bad as well as the good.
I'm a full-time telecommuter in Houston, with my main office in Dallas, both cities in MobileStar's Starbucks coverage area. I love getting out of the house, and with Ricochet gone, this was the best cheap alternative that let me work somewhere other than the house for a couple of days a week. I used the service yesterday, and I'm packing up my laptop again this morning to meet the Starbucks staff at the door at 5:30. They know me by name - I can't imagine a more perfect target user for this product. (Well, not that I'm perfect, but that too.)
I've signed up for MobileStar twice. The first time was an incredibly bad experience, so bad I started e-mailing their corporate staff by guessing their names (first initial, full last name @mobilestar.com). It worked, and I got a couple of suits to listen to my stories, and they even made some changes to their web site to reflect reality. They said it would work with any 802.11b card (but it didn't), they had router problems (couldn't pull up my Webtrends or other reports on 8000-9000 port range), the tech support staff would forget about your issue and not call you back. (On a side note, their tech support was extremely qualified, friendly, and easy to reach.)
What made me cancel was that it wasn't bulletproof reliable. They had a couple of days during my first month where I couldn't log on, and I had to call their customer service. In both cases, they couldn't fix the problem within a few minutes, and at that point, why should I bother to continue to burn my cell phone minutes, hanging around in Starbucks? I've got work to do, and faced with the prospect of either packing up my gear and going to another Starbucks (where the connection might not work) or going home to my DSL, I would just go home. You don't pay $30-$60 a month for that kind of reliability.
The access itself was awesome: I rarely saw anybody else in Starbucks using it, and so I had a full T1 to myself. My bosses loved it because I was always reachable, and I could do any diagnostic work remotely.
But again, the whole time I was using it, I only met two other people who used it. People just won't pay $30 a month to get wireless access in a coffee house, not when their home DSL or cable modem isn't much more than that. And one, two, or three users a month don't pay for a T1, at least not at those prices.
Separately, embattled PC maker Gateway (GTW: down $0.10 to $6.07, Research, Estimates) said Tuesday it will phase out all of its systems based on AMD processors as part of its broader cost-cutting efforts.
It's cheaper for them to just source Intel CPU's and motherboards than to run two product lines, basically. I'm stunned that the price difference in the CPU alone wouldn't be enough to keep Gateway using AMD, but there you have it. For once, Intel is a cheaper decision.
My girlfriend works for Continental, so I fly for pretty much free, and ordinarily I'd jump at the chance. However, there seems to be a bit of a transportation problem these days.:-P
It's impossible to stare at the TV and not think of the horrific convergence between technology, politics, and information.
No, Jon, it's actually quite easy. I'm thinking of the thousands of people who lost their lives today at the hands of heartless terrorists. I don't think about technology, and I can't believe that you could. I thought you were just an idiot before, but you're not just brainless, you're heartless.
You can make your Windows desktop and website touchy feely using the logitech i-feel mouse. I have one and it actually works okay.
Got one myself, but there's a drawback: no matter what settings I put it on, it makes my wrists hurt within minutes. I've got the onset symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, and it's really getting better, but I had to turn off the iFeel feedback. Weird.
quite, but then where else are you going to find a review at all, let alone impartial, other than at www.transmetazone.com
Well, let's see, a quick Google search gives me ZDNN and ITReviews, plus a few more that I won't bother linking. Never underestimate the power of Google.
Oh, yes, that's a 'real impartial review'... it reads more like some oil-haired watchdripping toothshiner trying to sell you a car.
You're totally right. They completely gloss over the fact that this thing uses dongles for the VGA port and for the ethernet port. In a laptop that's aimed at the frequent traveler, carrying around not just one but two dongles is completely unacceptable. There's plenty of space on that thing for the full-sized ports, and that alone would score huge negative points in any review done by experienced laptop users.
"As the blurb at the end of the article says, it takes 3500 volts for a human to feel a shock, but only 200 to potentially scramble a microchip."
You can say the same thing about water - it takes quite a few drops for humans to notice that it's raining, but just one well-placed droplet will fry your motherboard. Do you see me suing Toshiba because I can't use my laptop by the pool?
So let me get this straight: at launch time, the Sony one will still be $299, the Microsoft one will be $299, and the Nintendo one will be $199?!? That's got to be the first time in history that the box with the IBM logo had the lowest price.
And on another note, I think this'll change that old slogan, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." I think if I expensed one of these, I'd have a hard time passing it off as an IBM part.
This can only mean one of two things: their marketing staff is too lazy to get real support letters, or they don't have enough supporters to write letters. The answer is obviously number one - any company with millions of products in the hands of consumers can find at least a hundred people willing to write in their favor. Even Ma Bell had customers that were against their breakup. I'm dumbfounded that their staff could be that short-sighted to fake letters, though. The time spent faking could have been spent simply talking to customers and getting the real opinions - no matter which way the opinions go.
the below Xwpen pen from Microsoft Research
is real (see video on url), and records handwriting on paper and transmits writing via radio link.
With all due respect, seeing a video of something from any company, let alone vaporware specialists like Microsoft, is a long, long way from having it actually exist and be available to the public.
The only reason that infrared did not catch on is because Microsoft products do not support the IRDA Standard [irda.org] "out of the box".
Hmmmm, you think the lack of IRDA peripherals might have had something to do with it, though? I loaded the drivers the instant I got my first IR-equipped laptop, but I could walk around all day and not find anything to interact with. (Hey, lay off my personal life!) There just wasn't anything useful to do unless you had an infrared printer. PDAs had crummy synchronization tools back then, let alone infrared.
but with Windows 2000, Mircosoft has dropped support altogether.
Huh? I just printed to an HP printer over infrared with my Win2k laptop all the time. Works great - it's the best infrared support they've had yet.
Wow! I had no idea! All the articles I can find suggest it's a bare minimum of $10, and closer to $20-$30. Check out http://www.dabs.com/news/news-article.asp?atype=ne wsfeed&article=89 for example.
Hmmm, how many bluetooth devices have hit the market so far? Zero? One? Two? I haven't seen any. I love people that claim a market is failing when it hasn't even started yet. You probably think Internet Appliances are dead, too, right?
I was at Comdex two years ago, and had the privilege of playing with not one or two, but six different Bluetooth devices. Not a single one has hit the market - and this wasn't even last year, it was the show before that! I love it when people who admit to not having even seen a single product yet can talk about the markets. And yeah, when I can't name a single company that's in the black from making internet appliances, that's a dead market.
You could have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard without anything sitting on your desk to accept the IR, since the range of bluetooth could easily reach your PC if it's near your desk.
Oh, you mean like Logitech's? Or like Intel's? Yep, those exist. Nope, they're not worth the money to most of us.
You could have a bluetooth pen that sends what it is writing to your PDA or laptop, for archival.
That technology doesn't even exist without wires, let alone wireless.
Which one do I use if I have a medium sized device with a middlin' amount of power and want to communicate a moderate distance. Do I need both?
It gets worse. Even if you have a high-powered device like a laptop, the industry expects you to have both. You'll need Bluetooth to talk to your cell phone and PDA, and 802.11 to talk to your wireless lan. Forget that! Laptops are pricey enough as it is.
I think its a neat idea, but heck - USB was supposed to reduce the rats nest around my PC too and hasn't so far - I'm still waiting for monitors with USB ports that your keyboard and mouse connect to - I knwo they exist, but its not widely done (nor are keyboards and mice over USB)
Your wait will be even longer: Bluetooth is supposed to do *exactly the same thing*! One of Bluetooth's purposes is wireless mice/keyboards that work with each other, unlike the proprietary standards of today. If you think the wait for monitors with USB hubs was long, wait until you see the wait for monitors with Bluetooth receivers. The monitor industry's already been burned by this once with USB, they won't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon with yet another standard that doesn't really add value to the monitor.
The article, IMHO, misses the difference in uses - if you've got a small device that you want to conserve power on, and only communicate small distances, Bluetooth's ideal.
This sounds like the same arguments people were using for infrared ports a few years back, and that caught on like sandpaper pantyhose.
Bluetooth devices are failing for the same reasons infrared ports don't get used: they're just not that useful. Sure, when I want to print, it's awesome to be able to hold my PDA or laptop up to an HP printer and just fire away - but I have to hold it just so to maintain connectivity.
Bluetooth is the same way - you have to be so close that it's not really useful for much other than wireless keyboards and headphones. Don't even get me started about Bluetooth connections between a cell phone and a PDA: why shouldn't I just get out the cable and save even more battery power? No sense in burning extra power just to have the convenience of leaving my cell phone in my holster.
Am I wrong? Is there anything here that infrared didn't try to solve? Is there something that you would actually pay an extra $30 to add to your small battery-operated device, something that you wouldn't just use a cable or infrared for?
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Henry Ford is rolling over in his grave...
Evidently he was buried in an Explorer.
You can read even more into this than Ford is saying. Not only is Ford making a statement that they can't afford to give PC's to their employees, they're also implying a couple of other things.
First, giving your staff free PC's isn't enough of a benefit to impress most of your staff. Let's face it, if you're working for a union-driven company like Ford, you're not living on Ramen Noodles, and you can probably afford any one of the dozens of el cheapo PC's being served up for the masses. Most of us would rather be given a credit at Best Buy to purchase the PC we really want, or maybe even peripherals if we already own a PC.
Second, in this economy, employee perks are the last thing from anybody's mind. Ford started this when employees were hard to find. Fast forward to today: due to massive layoffs everywhere, people are much easier to come by, and you don't have to go flashing perks in order to get people on board. Giving stuff away to your staff is an increasingly hard sell to the shareholders.
Third, the shareholders just got informed that they're getting decreased dividends for the first time that I can remember. Ford's always been a dividend-heavy company, and I'm sure it's hard for them to rationalize giving away PCs to their staff when their investors are getting less returns. Giveaways are associated with a dotcom, and typically the giveaways are cut just before the jobs are cut. Look out...
Before I finalized the order, I thought I'd check on what the T-Birds were going for. 900 MHz T-Bird: $59. I thought it was screwy, but I didn't complain.
Not as screwy as you might think. The 900mhz Durons are based on the newer core, which works much better with multiprocessing. The 900mhz Athlons are based on the older core, and the Duron part actually smokes them. If you read the article I posted, it explains that as well.
Thresh's Firing Squad has a review of the Tyan Tiger with dual AMD Duron MPs, which is probably of equal or more interest to us geeks. For those of you who weren't aware, AMD Durons work in multiprocessor mode as well, and they're very, very close to Athlons in terms of performance (and obviously cheaper.)
Haha! I wish these people would learn how to code, people in my freshmen CS courses have written better OS's than this! I mean, really, was there no testing done on this? How many bugs don't we know about? What? This happened in Linux, not Windows? Oh, well you know, everyone does make mistakes. Look at the power of open source. Within days, service pack...I mean, a patch was out.
Funny! On the flip side, look how many patches and service packs come out for Windows, but they don't make the Slashdot home page. Good to see we're covering the bad as well as the good.
I'm a full-time telecommuter in Houston, with my main office in Dallas, both cities in MobileStar's Starbucks coverage area. I love getting out of the house, and with Ricochet gone, this was the best cheap alternative that let me work somewhere other than the house for a couple of days a week. I used the service yesterday, and I'm packing up my laptop again this morning to meet the Starbucks staff at the door at 5:30. They know me by name - I can't imagine a more perfect target user for this product. (Well, not that I'm perfect, but that too.)
I've signed up for MobileStar twice. The first time was an incredibly bad experience, so bad I started e-mailing their corporate staff by guessing their names (first initial, full last name @mobilestar.com). It worked, and I got a couple of suits to listen to my stories, and they even made some changes to their web site to reflect reality. They said it would work with any 802.11b card (but it didn't), they had router problems (couldn't pull up my Webtrends or other reports on 8000-9000 port range), the tech support staff would forget about your issue and not call you back. (On a side note, their tech support was extremely qualified, friendly, and easy to reach.)
What made me cancel was that it wasn't bulletproof reliable. They had a couple of days during my first month where I couldn't log on, and I had to call their customer service. In both cases, they couldn't fix the problem within a few minutes, and at that point, why should I bother to continue to burn my cell phone minutes, hanging around in Starbucks? I've got work to do, and faced with the prospect of either packing up my gear and going to another Starbucks (where the connection might not work) or going home to my DSL, I would just go home. You don't pay $30-$60 a month for that kind of reliability.
The access itself was awesome: I rarely saw anybody else in Starbucks using it, and so I had a full T1 to myself. My bosses loved it because I was always reachable, and I could do any diagnostic work remotely.
But again, the whole time I was using it, I only met two other people who used it. People just won't pay $30 a month to get wireless access in a coffee house, not when their home DSL or cable modem isn't much more than that. And one, two, or three users a month don't pay for a T1, at least not at those prices.
Damn... $220 for a motherboard? what happened to sub $100 motherboards?
Read the article again. It's a dual-CPU motherboard, meaning you can plug in a pair of Athlons or Durons. Sub-$100 motherboards support a single CPU.
Here's a quote that stands out in the article:
Separately, embattled PC maker Gateway (GTW: down $0.10 to $6.07, Research, Estimates) said Tuesday it will phase out all of its systems based on AMD processors as part of its broader cost-cutting efforts.
It's cheaper for them to just source Intel CPU's and motherboards than to run two product lines, basically. I'm stunned that the price difference in the CPU alone wouldn't be enough to keep Gateway using AMD, but there you have it. For once, Intel is a cheaper decision.
My girlfriend works for Continental, so I fly for pretty much free, and ordinarily I'd jump at the chance. However, there seems to be a bit of a transportation problem these days. :-P
I got 6 insightfuls and 4 flamebaits. It just shows the most recent rating, I think. Whatever. I've got karma to burn. :-D
It's impossible to stare at the TV and not think of the horrific convergence between technology, politics, and information.
No, Jon, it's actually quite easy. I'm thinking of the thousands of people who lost their lives today at the hands of heartless terrorists. I don't think about technology, and I can't believe that you could. I thought you were just an idiot before, but you're not just brainless, you're heartless.
You can make your Windows desktop and website touchy feely using the logitech i-feel mouse. I have one and it actually works okay.
Got one myself, but there's a drawback: no matter what settings I put it on, it makes my wrists hurt within minutes. I've got the onset symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, and it's really getting better, but I had to turn off the iFeel feedback. Weird.
quite, but then where else are you going to find a review at all, let alone impartial, other than at www.transmetazone.com
Well, let's see, a quick Google search gives me ZDNN and ITReviews, plus a few more that I won't bother linking. Never underestimate the power of Google.
Oh, yes, that's a 'real impartial review'... it reads more like some oil-haired watchdripping toothshiner trying to sell you a car.
You're totally right. They completely gloss over the fact that this thing uses dongles for the VGA port and for the ethernet port. In a laptop that's aimed at the frequent traveler, carrying around not just one but two dongles is completely unacceptable. There's plenty of space on that thing for the full-sized ports, and that alone would score huge negative points in any review done by experienced laptop users.
"As the blurb at the end of the article says, it takes 3500 volts for a human to feel a shock, but only 200 to potentially scramble a microchip."
You can say the same thing about water - it takes quite a few drops for humans to notice that it's raining, but just one well-placed droplet will fry your motherboard. Do you see me suing Toshiba because I can't use my laptop by the pool?
So let me get this straight: at launch time, the Sony one will still be $299, the Microsoft one will be $299, and the Nintendo one will be $199?!? That's got to be the first time in history that the box with the IBM logo had the lowest price.
And on another note, I think this'll change that old slogan, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." I think if I expensed one of these, I'd have a hard time passing it off as an IBM part.
While this certainly sounds like a devious, underhanded and nasty thing to, is astroturfing in this manner a crime?
Remember that a court is involved: if they introduce anything like this in court, then yes, it's a straight case of perjury.
This can only mean one of two things: their marketing staff is too lazy to get real support letters, or they don't have enough supporters to write letters. The answer is obviously number one - any company with millions of products in the hands of consumers can find at least a hundred people willing to write in their favor. Even Ma Bell had customers that were against their breakup. I'm dumbfounded that their staff could be that short-sighted to fake letters, though. The time spent faking could have been spent simply talking to customers and getting the real opinions - no matter which way the opinions go.
the below Xwpen pen from Microsoft Research is real (see video on url), and records handwriting on paper and transmits writing via radio link.
With all due respect, seeing a video of something from any company, let alone vaporware specialists like Microsoft, is a long, long way from having it actually exist and be available to the public.
The only reason that infrared did not catch on is because Microsoft products do not support the IRDA Standard [irda.org] "out of the box".
Hmmmm, you think the lack of IRDA peripherals might have had something to do with it, though? I loaded the drivers the instant I got my first IR-equipped laptop, but I could walk around all day and not find anything to interact with. (Hey, lay off my personal life!) There just wasn't anything useful to do unless you had an infrared printer. PDAs had crummy synchronization tools back then, let alone infrared.
but with Windows 2000, Mircosoft has dropped support altogether.
Huh? I just printed to an HP printer over infrared with my Win2k laptop all the time. Works great - it's the best infrared support they've had yet.
Wow! I had no idea! All the articles I can find suggest it's a bare minimum of $10, and closer to $20-$30. Check out http://www.dabs.com/news/news-article.asp?atype=ne wsfeed&article=89 for example.
Hmmm, how many bluetooth devices have hit the market so far? Zero? One? Two? I haven't seen any. I love people that claim a market is failing when it hasn't even started yet. You probably think Internet Appliances are dead, too, right?
I was at Comdex two years ago, and had the privilege of playing with not one or two, but six different Bluetooth devices. Not a single one has hit the market - and this wasn't even last year, it was the show before that! I love it when people who admit to not having even seen a single product yet can talk about the markets. And yeah, when I can't name a single company that's in the black from making internet appliances, that's a dead market.
You could have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard without anything sitting on your desk to accept the IR, since the range of bluetooth could easily reach your PC if it's near your desk.
Oh, you mean like Logitech's? Or like Intel's? Yep, those exist. Nope, they're not worth the money to most of us.
You could have a bluetooth pen that sends what it is writing to your PDA or laptop, for archival.
That technology doesn't even exist without wires, let alone wireless.
Which one do I use if I have a medium sized device with a middlin' amount of power and want to communicate a moderate distance. Do I need both?
It gets worse. Even if you have a high-powered device like a laptop, the industry expects you to have both. You'll need Bluetooth to talk to your cell phone and PDA, and 802.11 to talk to your wireless lan. Forget that! Laptops are pricey enough as it is.
I think its a neat idea, but heck - USB was supposed to reduce the rats nest around my PC too and hasn't so far - I'm still waiting for monitors with USB ports that your keyboard and mouse connect to - I knwo they exist, but its not widely done (nor are keyboards and mice over USB)
Your wait will be even longer: Bluetooth is supposed to do *exactly the same thing*! One of Bluetooth's purposes is wireless mice/keyboards that work with each other, unlike the proprietary standards of today. If you think the wait for monitors with USB hubs was long, wait until you see the wait for monitors with Bluetooth receivers. The monitor industry's already been burned by this once with USB, they won't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon with yet another standard that doesn't really add value to the monitor.
The article, IMHO, misses the difference in uses - if you've got a small device that you want to conserve power on, and only communicate small distances, Bluetooth's ideal.
This sounds like the same arguments people were using for infrared ports a few years back, and that caught on like sandpaper pantyhose.
Bluetooth devices are failing for the same reasons infrared ports don't get used: they're just not that useful. Sure, when I want to print, it's awesome to be able to hold my PDA or laptop up to an HP printer and just fire away - but I have to hold it just so to maintain connectivity.
Bluetooth is the same way - you have to be so close that it's not really useful for much other than wireless keyboards and headphones. Don't even get me started about Bluetooth connections between a cell phone and a PDA: why shouldn't I just get out the cable and save even more battery power? No sense in burning extra power just to have the convenience of leaving my cell phone in my holster.
Am I wrong? Is there anything here that infrared didn't try to solve? Is there something that you would actually pay an extra $30 to add to your small battery-operated device, something that you wouldn't just use a cable or infrared for?