Obviously they havent heard of quality at all.
on
2005 IDEA Awards
·
· Score: 1
With the contenders being mostly of the ones with minority counts of parts made in North American/EU countries, I'd still have to say the entire computer category has greatly lowered their standards to the point where even a Chinese Government run/funded company such as Lenovo can get in there with something that has an abysmal build quality at best. If only they'd separately considered North American/EU mfg's (that have used less than 40% of Asian designed high level and low level parts), then I'd give these awards some merit.
Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!
This is where you have my intents correct - Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1 (However, I wont be complaining about a ZX with quad Hypersparcs - 2xcpu per module - not being able to run, that's a heat issue). As for the ZX, it was in at 2.6, dropped in Solaris 8(couldnt do the file replacement) - the 8 bit GX based adapters have only been dropped with the whole platform at Solaris 10.
First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?
Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.
...OpenSolaris will be done. Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?). Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware".
Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers
That has to be a typo, since I've yet to see high-quality anything from there. What's made from there might be in high volume, but I've yet to see anything from Dell or HP after 2000 that hasnt been built as a "disposable machine". Now that IBM has sold off to the PRoC (via front company Lenovo), you can all but forget about quality.
Since there's been the illogical departure from quality to price, 1) Who still sticks to quality for laptops and avoids offshoring (like IBM has, and Apple does not count)
or
2)When will one be able to build their own laptop from the ground up their way - where if I want that black matte finish, no trackpad, 2x PCMCIA/ExpressCard, dual media bay, highend replaceable video subsystem with a 15" 1600x1200 display (or higher, still my choice), highend mobile CPU (heck even PowerPC would do here, but P-M is fine), casing of my own choice or design of higher than Asia quality (read: something like the recent pre-sellout IBM T series), long life battery(without compromising on size or graphics), IBM rivalling in durability laptop. Is that too much to ask, even if I am prepared to pay 3k+ to have something long lasting enough to never need a service call?
Coboc and similar need not apply, barebones laptops are just the same in quality as the ones from Dell/HP/Apple/Lenovo (non-Thinkpad) - abysmally low.
Also it allows the client company to produce faster, cheaper computers. What bastards eh?
Only if you use them up for the entire useful life as you see fit and not just until the next immediate major upgrade. As the saying goes, "Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick two." - and there are enough people to make things worth it to large-scale businesses to forego cheap to get profit from them.
One has now decided to step far out, some others will stay with quality and performance for their profit. They dont need rumormills- little more than the facts provided at the right time does quite nicely for them.
Sure, IBM might be in it on the Intel side, but they do make other non-crippled systems (Unless you count trying to run AIX as crippled wrt OpenPower) that start at the $3600 mark. If Apple does switch, that doesnt mean it's the end of using a well-known alternative to Intel/AMD based hardware.
The only thing is that it wont help in a network made to only accept and trust "DMCA Compliant nodes".
-Doors that dont have keylocks, but you have to put in your driver's license to check your family's history for worthiness to enter. Midwesterners are automatically rejected per Stanford Policy.
-The ignition is controlled not by keys either, but there is a slot that accepts only $100 US bills to start (regularly, anything lower are taken in only 10% of the time per Stanford Design), but takes anything from the current H-1B/L-1 countries resembling paper currency.
-Automotive horn is replaced with a nautical horn not unlike the one at the stadium at Stanford.
-Ignition interlock systems activate if driver is from the Midwest, but will still accept currency if said Midwesterner has somehow subverted Stanford Policy and has attempted to use the vehicle.
-GPS Navigation systems are replaced by a refined Google Maps's service.
...before I even think of this kind of form factor. I'll go for the 4gb memorystick -> adapter and 3GP rips before I even touch media that doesnt have fully recordable/rewritable formats. Never mind the $250 UMD reader(already have) or the $25,000 + Sony's blessing devkit, I'll take UMD's that can read and write the way things I want it to - not Sony's way.
...either in funds, or in flesh. Would that be with or without the blood in case of flesh? Last time that was suggested in a fictional work, they werent able to collect "just flesh".
I almost see the thing looking like it's almost a step towards being able to build your own laptop. They have a core module with all the independent parts of the PC, then they tack on all the i/o devices that make it a laptop, desktop or tablet machine. If they would take it a step further, and allow as many components to be customized like a desktop would, then maybe you could have a laptop that's a lot more to your liking (CPU/GPU, network, display) without having to arm-wring a manufacturer to do it (or have to worry about a Lenovo situation).
And can someone tell me why IBM is still selling laptops if they sold off their laptop business to Lenovo. I am confused on who will handle warranty, etc.
For now, the service is good despite getting the feeling the CSR you have is next to the Dell one. The only difference is that IBM doesnt mind calling you at odd hours for warranty calls - request electronically at 12am, get call at 1am, get laptop box around 8-10am, laptop's fixed and in your hands 1-3 days later.
IBM sends their laptops in to Selectron in most if not all cases for the service. If Lenovo still does that, it's going still be the same people making repairs, just that Selectron might be seeing metric tons more black/red/gold "Thinkpad" marked boxes that are only so in name but not in quality.
After IBM exits completely in 5-10 years, then there's going to be quite a stir as there will be tons of knockoffs, but no high quality standard - even if you were willing to pay $3500 for it, and definitely, I'm not going to put $3500 for an upmodded Sager or equivalent- I'd rather build my own laptop from chassis+board+cardbus+minipci/PCI-E video expansion board+matching 1600x1200 or better display+battery+dual media bays on up first (This is more or less designing it from the ground up, not off a design already in service, even though smart readers would think of an IBM A31p updated to features that'd make it something worth the A40p/A50p badge). Perhaps one might have to muscle some of the current producers (directly) into some custom orders with strict quality requirments since they're(IBM) the last to drop out of making quality equipment, even the Thinkpad.
Not far off the track at all, but mind that Google was founded by some people at Stanford which has at best misguided philantropy, and at worst, deliberate harm to the community. They (Stanford) have used Highway 101 to divide themselves from the community around them, and sometimes the community got the short end of the deal when it appeared to be a good gesture. Looks like Google wants to go the same path given their history. That history, is far from what I'd call philantrophy, but pure fraud.
...that gets 100+ miles to the gallon. Sure, there are the arguments that if everyone drove tanks we'd still have problems - just that I'd rather have the fuel efficiency on something a bit closer to a normal size car. The task might take a while, but I wont mind having a largeenough car on the road that wont get completely crushed by an errant 18-wheeler. Something along the lines of those two links in size, just favorably smaller than the first one.
As it is an *electronic* identifier, what prevents people from just frying it "accidentally" and then blaming it on the weather or some other electrical accident with the car? It'd not affect the human readable information, but it'd sure take out the RFID tag, where the problem seems to be.
NB:I honestly dont care about the intents of the parent poster if he's up to no good. It helps to kill time.
* Apple makes hardware that looks good, but (generally) sucks. Goes right back to the Apple ][. If they can finally build reasonable hardware -- good on them. The Apple ][ suxored (software floppies?!?), the Mac suxored (only 128KB ?!?) the Mac II suxored (unshielded cables, unshielded power supplies. Mac OS suxored (compared with Unix, compared with Smalltalk). Apple gave us exploding laptops! (major suxor!). Am I to believe that they can produce quality now?
* Apple software is "servicable", but not brilliant. It is closed, and generally refuses to interoperate (remember, this is the company that gave us the 'cr' delimiter, and resource forks)
That is where people mistake brilliance with arrogance, made by those of the exclusionist cloth (Apple, Sun, Pixar). At least Apple's chipmaker knows the design enough to do it right and makes things quite open wide for about everything. With that in mind, I'll take my chances with a pSeries 550 loaded to the gills with Enlightenment DR17 on my daily tasks. That, and I dont have to wait for U2 to get it in black. * Apple may be using an "open" core, but they won't open up the GUI for cross compatibility. I want to run Apple applications on my Sparc Solaris 9 box (at least the GUI), or from my Redhat box, or my AIX boxes, or my HPUX (well, you get the idea -- I have a few more different systems in the lab as well). But I can't. I could use the Apple as my desktop machine, but it won't play with my preferred keyboard and mouse (Lexmark Model M). Come on, open up the GUI client, guys!
Well, that's what you get with the kind of people who practice exclusionist ideas of Silicon Valley. Sun plays similar games with their HCL, notably with the ZX, so it's not something just with Apple on hardware, it's SOP for companies like them. Travel a couple thousand miles eastward, and you'll find the diamond in the rough with the more sensibly designed POWER machines without the Silicon Valley Syndrome.
At the rate the pSeries POWER5's are going at, go for the top tiers, one could just sell the G5 (on ebay?) or Segway, then go use that cash on a good pSeries. There's a lot of good hardware (GXT series graphics accelerators, for example) that could receive a nice bonus if the Linux [application] support was good enough for it. Apple has done enough to those G5's, now it's time for those black POWER boxes to leverage that horsepower that's been sitting in them.
NCR sort of beat them to the finish line. Sure, it's not PCI-E or even ISA, but it appeared to cross 3 architectures (8086|8088/Z80/68000) IIRC. The CPU was added in via a card in the back. Z80 by default, 8086/8088 or 68000 if you had it.
Given that similar policies have gone(hint: "trusted friends" is really an euphemism for something else related to where Orkut came from) on in other places in that area of the States, why is this surprising? At least somebody accurately hits the nail on the head on this kind of issue - where else do you get such arrogance that results in good code being sacrificed for California style political games, where you win by excluding the most people while presenting the best facade to the public of what you do.
Sure, there is more than a shred of validity of checking code, but when you use politics instead of quality to determine what goes in, it's not a meritocracy anymore, it's not even about the code. At that point, things like the Xorg/XFree86 split and the various BSD splits happen. Not minor code forks, but major splits.
To preempt you nuts who think nothing can be forced, fine. You just mindlessly confuse theory and practice as being the same in any situation regardless of politics, especially if it deals with places too exclusionary for their own good.
On the first part, you probably mean the folks down at Berkeley (if that could count). On the second, Google, known for hiring too many of these kind of uppity folk who pull off stunts such as this make me think that they're not the type that have the mindset to do so. Given their lack of anything that doesnt exclude people deliberately, it is safe to say Stanford, Google and Orkut are just different departments working towards the same goal - to be closed minded and closed to all who arent bluebloods.
I'd not mind if this allowed us to escape the "non-supported" part of Solaris by allowing 32bit SPARC machines and the peripherals they run(Yep, that includes some ZX support) to run a build of this. Throwing out a good chunk of the installed userbase on Solaris 10 and then releasing source for it, is not the best idea out there.
Given the reputation of the people that have come from Stanford, I doubt that there's any truth to that one. Given that they like to use smoke and mirrors at Stanford, and it's carried over to Google/Google Nexus^W^W Orkut, they're only going to last as long as they can deceive. If they dont get a lesson in true openness, and not the kind that just shows a good face, they will turn evil enough to notice.
The only reason I see them looking to the UK is that they want to jump regulation, and find a community much like themselves - closed, and arrogant.
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With the contenders being mostly of the ones with minority counts of parts made in North American/EU countries, I'd still have to say the entire computer category has greatly lowered their standards to the point where even a Chinese Government run/funded company such as Lenovo can get in there with something that has an abysmal build quality at best. If only they'd separately considered North American/EU mfg's (that have used less than 40% of Asian designed high level and low level parts), then I'd give these awards some merit.
Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!
This is where you have my intents correct - Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1 (However, I wont be complaining about a ZX with quad Hypersparcs - 2xcpu per module - not being able to run, that's a heat issue). As for the ZX, it was in at 2.6, dropped in Solaris 8(couldnt do the file replacement) - the 8 bit GX based adapters have only been dropped with the whole platform at Solaris 10.
First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?
Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.
...OpenSolaris will be done. Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?). Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware".
Outsourcing to low-cost, high-quality Taiwanese manufacturers
That has to be a typo, since I've yet to see high-quality anything from there. What's made from there might be in high volume, but I've yet to see anything from Dell or HP after 2000 that hasnt been built as a "disposable machine". Now that IBM has sold off to the PRoC (via front company Lenovo), you can all but forget about quality.
Since there's been the illogical departure from quality to price,
1) Who still sticks to quality for laptops and avoids offshoring (like IBM has, and Apple does not count)
or
2)When will one be able to build their own laptop from the ground up their way - where if I want that black matte finish, no trackpad, 2x PCMCIA/ExpressCard, dual media bay, highend replaceable video subsystem with a 15" 1600x1200 display (or higher, still my choice), highend mobile CPU (heck even PowerPC would do here, but P-M is fine), casing of my own choice or design of higher than Asia quality (read: something like the recent pre-sellout IBM T series), long life battery(without compromising on size or graphics), IBM rivalling in durability laptop. Is that too much to ask, even if I am prepared to pay 3k+ to have something long lasting enough to never need a service call?
Coboc and similar need not apply, barebones laptops are just the same in quality as the ones from Dell/HP/Apple/Lenovo (non-Thinkpad) - abysmally low.
Also it allows the client company to produce faster, cheaper computers. What bastards eh?
Only if you use them up for the entire useful life as you see fit and not just until the next immediate major upgrade. As the saying goes, "Fast, Good, Cheap. Pick two." - and there are enough people to make things worth it to large-scale businesses to forego cheap to get profit from them.
One has now decided to step far out, some others will stay with quality and performance for their profit. They dont need rumormills- little more than the facts provided at the right time does quite nicely for them.
Sure, IBM might be in it on the Intel side, but they do make other non-crippled systems (Unless you count trying to run AIX as crippled wrt OpenPower) that start at the $3600 mark. If Apple does switch, that doesnt mean it's the end of using a well-known alternative to Intel/AMD based hardware.
The only thing is that it wont help in a network made to only accept and trust "DMCA Compliant nodes".
Seriously, that almost amounts (in some people's books) as going to the Dark Side. Not because of CoH, but the ever popular Lineage II
Their vehicles would also have:
-Doors that dont have keylocks, but you have to put in your driver's license to check your family's history for worthiness to enter. Midwesterners are automatically rejected per Stanford Policy.
-The ignition is controlled not by keys either, but there is a slot that accepts only $100 US bills to start (regularly, anything lower are taken in only 10% of the time per Stanford Design), but takes anything from the current H-1B/L-1 countries resembling paper currency.
-Automotive horn is replaced with a nautical horn not unlike the one at the stadium at Stanford.
-Ignition interlock systems activate if driver is from the Midwest, but will still accept currency if said Midwesterner has somehow subverted Stanford Policy and has attempted to use the vehicle.
-GPS Navigation systems are replaced by a refined Google Maps's service.
Namely these fine machines.
Not cheap, but at this level you have quality hardware.
...before I even think of this kind of form factor. I'll go for the 4gb memorystick -> adapter and 3GP rips before I even touch media that doesnt have fully recordable/rewritable formats. Never mind the $250 UMD reader(already have) or the $25,000 + Sony's blessing devkit, I'll take UMD's that can read and write the way things I want it to - not Sony's way.
...either in funds, or in flesh.
Would that be with or without the blood in case of flesh? Last time that was suggested in a fictional work, they werent able to collect "just flesh".
I almost see the thing looking like it's almost a step towards being able to build your own laptop. They have a core module with all the independent parts of the PC, then they tack on all the i/o devices that make it a laptop, desktop or tablet machine. If they would take it a step further, and allow as many components to be customized like a desktop would, then maybe you could have a laptop that's a lot more to your liking (CPU/GPU, network, display) without having to arm-wring a manufacturer to do it (or have to worry about a Lenovo situation).
And can someone tell me why IBM is still selling laptops if they sold off their laptop business to Lenovo. I am confused on who will handle warranty, etc.
For now, the service is good despite getting the feeling the CSR you have is next to the Dell one. The only difference is that IBM doesnt mind calling you at odd hours for warranty calls - request electronically at 12am, get call at 1am, get laptop box around 8-10am, laptop's fixed and in your hands 1-3 days later.
IBM sends their laptops in to Selectron in most if not all cases for the service. If Lenovo still does that, it's going still be the same people making repairs, just that Selectron might be seeing metric tons more black/red/gold "Thinkpad" marked boxes that are only so in name but not in quality.
After IBM exits completely in 5-10 years, then there's going to be quite a stir as there will be tons of knockoffs, but no high quality standard - even if you were willing to pay $3500 for it, and definitely, I'm not going to put $3500 for an upmodded Sager or equivalent- I'd rather build my own laptop from chassis+board+cardbus+minipci/PCI-E video expansion board+matching 1600x1200 or better display+battery+dual media bays on up first (This is more or less designing it from the ground up, not off a design already in service, even though smart readers would think of an IBM A31p updated to features that'd make it something worth the A40p/A50p badge). Perhaps one might have to muscle some of the current producers (directly) into some custom orders with strict quality requirments since they're(IBM) the last to drop out of making quality equipment, even the Thinkpad.
Not far off the track at all, but mind that Google was founded by some people at Stanford which has at best misguided philantropy, and at worst, deliberate harm to the community. They (Stanford) have used Highway 101 to divide themselves from the community around them, and sometimes the community got the short end of the deal when it appeared to be a good gesture. Looks like Google wants to go the same path given their history. That history, is far from what I'd call philantrophy, but pure fraud.
...that gets 100+ miles to the gallon. Sure, there are the arguments that if everyone drove tanks we'd still have problems - just that I'd rather have the fuel efficiency on something a bit closer to a normal size car. The task might take a while, but I wont mind having a large enough car on the road that wont get completely crushed by an errant 18-wheeler. Something along the lines of those two links in size, just favorably smaller than the first one.
Motorist: "No, but I know of a few places in the vicinity where I can find some nice fried silicon while you sort out finding my car."
As it is an *electronic* identifier, what prevents people from just frying it "accidentally" and then blaming it on the weather or some other electrical accident with the car? It'd not affect the human readable information, but it'd sure take out the RFID tag, where the problem seems to be.
NB:I honestly dont care about the intents of the parent poster if he's up to no good. It helps to kill time.
* Apple makes hardware that looks good, but (generally) sucks. Goes right back to the Apple ][. If they can finally build reasonable hardware -- good on them. The Apple ][ suxored (software floppies?!?), the Mac suxored (only 128KB ?!?) the Mac II suxored (unshielded cables, unshielded power supplies. Mac OS suxored (compared with Unix, compared with Smalltalk). Apple gave us exploding laptops! (major suxor!). Am I to believe that they can produce quality now?
* Apple software is "servicable", but not brilliant. It is closed, and generally refuses to interoperate (remember, this is the company that gave us the 'cr' delimiter, and resource forks)
That is where people mistake brilliance with arrogance, made by those of the exclusionist cloth (Apple, Sun, Pixar). At least Apple's chipmaker knows the design enough to do it right and makes things quite open wide for about everything. With that in mind, I'll take my chances with a pSeries 550 loaded to the gills with Enlightenment DR17 on my daily tasks. That, and I dont have to wait for U2 to get it in black.
* Apple may be using an "open" core, but they won't open up the GUI for cross compatibility. I want to run Apple applications on my Sparc Solaris 9 box (at least the GUI), or from my Redhat box, or my AIX boxes, or my HPUX (well, you get the idea -- I have a few more different systems in the lab as well). But I can't. I could use the Apple as my desktop machine, but it won't play with my preferred keyboard and mouse (Lexmark Model M). Come on, open up the GUI client, guys!
Well, that's what you get with the kind of people who practice exclusionist ideas of Silicon Valley. Sun plays similar games with their HCL, notably with the ZX, so it's not something just with Apple on hardware, it's SOP for companies like them. Travel a couple thousand miles eastward, and you'll find the diamond in the rough with the more sensibly designed POWER machines without the Silicon Valley Syndrome.
At the rate the pSeries POWER5's are going at, go for the top tiers, one could just sell the G5 (on ebay?) or Segway, then go use that cash on a good pSeries. There's a lot of good hardware (GXT series graphics accelerators, for example) that could receive a nice bonus if the Linux [application] support was good enough for it. Apple has done enough to those G5's, now it's time for those black POWER boxes to leverage that horsepower that's been sitting in them.
NCR sort of beat them to the finish line. Sure, it's not PCI-E or even ISA, but it appeared to cross 3 architectures (8086|8088/Z80/68000) IIRC. The CPU was added in via a card in the back. Z80 by default, 8086/8088 or 68000 if you had it.
Yes. Hire anybody who isnt Ivy League material (read: not in their blueblood circle) or is from/works in the Midwest that isnt in that circle.
Given that similar policies have gone(hint: "trusted friends" is really an euphemism for something else related to where Orkut came from) on in other places in that area of the States, why is this surprising? At least somebody accurately hits the nail on the head on this kind of issue - where else do you get such arrogance that results in good code being sacrificed for California style political games, where you win by excluding the most people while presenting the best facade to the public of what you do.
Sure, there is more than a shred of validity of checking code, but when you use politics instead of quality to determine what goes in, it's not a meritocracy anymore, it's not even about the code. At that point, things like the Xorg/XFree86 split and the various BSD splits happen. Not minor code forks, but major splits.
To preempt you nuts who think nothing can be forced, fine. You just mindlessly confuse theory and practice as being the same in any situation regardless of politics, especially if it deals with places too exclusionary for their own good.
On the first part, you probably mean the folks down at Berkeley (if that could count). On the second, Google, known for hiring too many of these kind of uppity folk who pull off stunts such as this make me think that they're not the type that have the mindset to do so. Given their lack of anything that doesnt exclude people deliberately, it is safe to say Stanford, Google and Orkut are just different departments working towards the same goal - to be closed minded and closed to all who arent bluebloods.
I'd not mind if this allowed us to escape the "non-supported" part of Solaris by allowing 32bit SPARC machines and the peripherals they run(Yep, that includes some ZX support) to run a build of this. Throwing out a good chunk of the installed userbase on Solaris 10 and then releasing source for it, is not the best idea out there.
#The company's motto is "Don't Be Evil"
Given the reputation of the people that have come from Stanford, I doubt that there's any truth to that one. Given that they like to use smoke and mirrors at Stanford, and it's carried over to Google/Google Nexus^W^W Orkut, they're only going to last as long as they can deceive. If they dont get a lesson in true openness, and not the kind that just shows a good face, they will turn evil enough to notice.
The only reason I see them looking to the UK is that they want to jump regulation, and find a community much like themselves - closed, and arrogant.