If we get a new Pentium 4 machine though, Windows 2000 or XP has to be installed manually on it, drivers updated, windows updated, and software installed. This can take HOURS to do.
Why? So long as you are receiving in the same model machines, build one and Ghost it. Either use the MS "sysprep" tool to regen the sid on the next boot or use another tool to do the same. XP machines can be pushed out in the same 10 mins.
Believe it or not, I have had more of the newer DELL machines fail due to bad hard drives than I have ever had any of the old pentium 133s fail for ANY reason. They are built to last, and they have!
I agree the older machines are built stronger than new machines from Dell and the like. But 7 or 8 years? I don't have that much faith in any electronic product.
Don't forget you paid a lot more for that old machine than you do for the daily Blue Plate special from Dell or whoever. The mass machine builders build for price, not necessarily for quality. The custom system builder market is growing between 15 and 20 percent each year, and the quality of the big boys' machines is part of the reason why.
Yeah, I would call myself a businessman. Probably a pretty good one at that. I don't have all the answers, I was simply providing a different perspective on the topic - one that makes business sense for everyone involved. Thanks for your input, tool.
Not true, we've grown significantly - double digit growth every year. Nothing huge, just solid growth. Some clients leave, some have been with us for 10 years (predating the company as I mentioned).
With thin client everyonbe runs the same software becuse... uh, everyone is running the *same* software.
Not necessarily. In a lot of these "thin client" scenarios the customers are actually running old desktop hardware and using the MS Terminal Server Client or the newer RDP client. These machines have an operating system that needs to be maintained - patches, updates, etc. Most users don't use apps like IE through their Terminal Server, some tend to use Outlook installed locally on these "thin" clients. Bottom line, in the real SMB world, a thin client isn't necessarily as thin as it should be.
I'm glad you're not one of our clients either. I can see we would have to invest a lot of (unbillable) time educating you like we do many of our clients. Of course, once we explain everything our clients tend to understand and stick with us. Our average client has been with us for 5 years. Not bad for a company that is 5 years old! Some client relationships predate the company though - ie they were clients of mine and my business partners as long as 10 years ago when we both got into this business. Anyway, I'm *WAY* off topic now.
I'm not going to go posting a link here and bring the Slashdot effect down on my own company, but we started a buyback program in March (long before we knew about Dell and HP's plans - maybe they stole them from us!) for exactly this reason - get the old stuff away from the users and replace it with newer hardware. For us, the aging Pentium and Pentium 2 systems, most of which are still running Windows 95 or 98, are a support nightmare. The systems are not under warranty any longer, components are no longer available through distribution, and we don't have time to be searching ebay looking for a used 266MHz CPU. Besides, our customers tend to look at us funny when the bill ends up showing 4-5 hours of labor because of the cost involved in finding and obtaining old components. It's just not worth being in that market when a quality business class machine runs just under $1000 US.
As for thin client, it's a solution some of our customers like. However, it doesn't resolve the old hardware issue. Instead, it actually adds to the problem be extending the life of systems that were never designed to last more than 3-5 years. In the past week we have had a customer complain that their last 200MHz machine just died, another client complained that their last machine with ISA slots died and now they can't use their first gen ATI AIW ISA card, and we had a call from a client that couldn't figure out how to get their new (USB only) printer working with their 6 or 7 year old desktop (with no USB).
Supporting this old stuff for the SMB (small/mid-sized business) clients is a nightmare. We spend a lot of time convincing customers to "recycle" about 1/3 of their PC hardware per year so that all of their hardware is covered under warranty and so we can support the most recent Windows operating systems and applications throughout their organizations. Having part of the office on Windows XP, part on Windows NT 4, and part on Windows 95, and half under warranty and half not covered under warranty just increases support and management costs.
It seems that I never care for a new ST series when it is on first run. In addition, it seems that the newer the series, the less I like it. I love TOS and TNG, althought I only got into TNG a couple of years ago. I've caught a couple DS9 episodes lately since SciFi has been running them a lot and I've found those somewhat interesting, although I again found the show all but unwatchable when it was in first run. I started watching Voyager when it came on, but lost interest (sorry to say I ended up hooked on Melrose Place instead - ugh) very quickly. I managed to watch two episodes of Enterprise. The first episode was ok, but like everyone else I kept wondering why he didn't leap after saving the Klingon. Just couldn't get that out of my head. The second episode I saw was brutal, and that was it for Enterprise for me.
OS/2 Warp 4 Betas offered translucent windows. The feature was removed from the final release for performance reasons. Hardware just wasn't quite there in '95 to support that feature. As least that's my recollection of it.
Well, isn't that one of the reasons why they sell shower LINERS? You can keep your favorite shower curtain as long as you like, just change the liner once a year or so.
Maybe it's time to replace my aging Casio fx-7000G that I bought new for College Algebra and Trig (pre-precalc) back in '88 or so. Nah, this machine still kicks butt.
I tend to yell at people a lot. Business partners, vendors, pretty much whoever is around, except I stop just short of yelling at my customers directly. Venting helps. A lot. You get rid of the frustration and then you can focus better on what needs to be done. Pretty much everyone in the industry understands this concept, and most of them tend to do the same. If you're on the receiving side, just let it roll off.
This is a bit late since memory prices have been trending down in the past few days. Take a look at http://www.dramexchange.com where they present pricing in a stock-chart-like format. Seems like a great way to track the pricing on something as commoditized as PC components.
As a 30-something whose musical mainstay consists of "classic punk" like DK, Circle Jerks, Operation Ivy, Clash, Pistols, and so forth I haven't found too much recently that I care for enough to buy. Picked up a used Roger Waters CD (KAOS) on ebay recently.
However, I did stumble across (tongue in cheek here) a band called The White Stripes. Hard to not notice them actually. I first heard them when they played an entire week on Conan O'Brien's show here in the US. I was pretty impressed. Picked up their two most recent releases, Elephant (voted best album of 2003 by someone or another) and White Blood Cells (features the catchy "Fell In Love With A Girl". I think I'm now a fan. Both CD's are really great stuff - highly recommended.
Supporting the RIAA? Well, maybe, I don't really know, but what am I going to do? Never buy another CD? I think not.
I don't know who these people are...
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
...but it just took all of 40 seconds from the time I hit "enter" after typing "www.real.com" in my browser to the time the download window appeared asking where I wanted to store the *free* RP10. Of course I cancelled though. But really, is it all that difficult?
I complained to Click and Clack via their web-thingie when the original story posted and explained that running Windows Media Player just wasn't an option for us Linux users. I even got a nice reply from - I believe - their producer explaining that they "were working on it". Now if Real would just update their Linux player. C'mon guys - we're stuck at RP8 for how many years now?
...on my Ultra 5. I cringed thinking about loading Solaris on my Ultra 5 when I decided to use it as a syslog server. I looked around, and FreeBSD 5.2 was the latest and seemed to be the greatest for what I needed. Now I need an rsync server at a remote site and guess what I'm loading on the Ultra 10 allocated for that task? Yup, FreeBSD 5.2 - or maybe I'll splurge and download 5.2.1. Now if I could only install easily without using a serial connection.
As a former RedHat (4.x, 5.x) and Mandrake (6.x, 7.x) user that made the leap to SuSE and never looked back, I love that fact that SuSE is getting a lot of attention lately. I jumped from RedHat kind of by accident when a friend, who was supposed to order RedHat 6.0 ordered Mandrake 6.0 instead. I later stopped liking RedHat because of their MS-like "we know what is best for you" attitude, and even more recently when they killed off the free base product in favor of an unsupported (by RH anyhow) Fedora project. I jumped from Mandrake because nothing - especially accelerated 3D - ever worked right for me with Mandrake.
My only complaint with SuSE had been that SuSE wasn't a US based company, and as a US citizen in a struggling economy that bugged me. I cheered when Novell bought SuSE. I cheered again when Novell announced that YaST would become open source (at least I believe that was the announcement) since that was always the biggest complaint I heard from other Linux users about why they wouldn't use SuSE. Now that IBM is jumping on the bandwagon I'm excited for the product all over again.
"refusal by Microsoft to share more information about its products with competitors"
WTF? Is this business or a grade school playground? I enjoy blasting Microsoft as much as anyone, but who the hell thinks they need to share anything about their products other than the price with anyone? Complete morons, IMHO.
I'm in my 30's, in the US, and recall Dr. Who being extremely popular with the "geeks" when I was in high school (84-87). The fans were as into Dr. Who as Star Trek and Star Wars fans are into those shows, but there was somewhat fewer Dr. Who fans. Dr. Who has never really found it's way into the mainstream - at least not in the US. Dr. Who episodes were shown on PBS stations then. At the time I wasn't really interested, but I've since taken quite a liking to them.
Personally, I like the idea of a show set in the near future. It's not far enough in the future to allow for absurd plot lines, but it's far enough to have that "wow, cool" effect - maybe. I agree that there are too many law shows now. We keep stuff like The Practice around, we have two CSI's, three Law and Order's, and a merger of JAG and CSI called NCIS or something like that, and don't forget The Shield and The Wire, or COPS, America's Most Wanted, etc, etc, etc, yet they cancel good shows like The Agency. Go figure. Maybe there will be something original here though. I hope!
Maybe, maybe not. I'm excited to hear from some fellow hams in Cincinati about how this effects the usable radio spectrum. Everything we've heard until now has been little more than educated guesses as far as I'm concerned. Let's see some real data!
That was MAD Magazine's parady of the show. The comic was called "WKRAP in Cincinati". Funny stuff as I recall, but I was probably only 10 or 12 at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I really wanted to be interested, but my eyes just glazed over when I tried to read any of that.
If we get a new Pentium 4 machine though, Windows 2000 or XP has to be installed manually on it, drivers updated, windows updated, and software installed. This can take HOURS to do.
Why? So long as you are receiving in the same model machines, build one and Ghost it. Either use the MS "sysprep" tool to regen the sid on the next boot or use another tool to do the same. XP machines can be pushed out in the same 10 mins.
Believe it or not, I have had more of the newer DELL machines fail due to bad hard drives than I have ever had any of the old pentium 133s fail for ANY reason. They are built to last, and they have!
I agree the older machines are built stronger than new machines from Dell and the like. But 7 or 8 years? I don't have that much faith in any electronic product.
Don't forget you paid a lot more for that old machine than you do for the daily Blue Plate special from Dell or whoever. The mass machine builders build for price, not necessarily for quality. The custom system builder market is growing between 15 and 20 percent each year, and the quality of the big boys' machines is part of the reason why.
Yeah, I would call myself a businessman. Probably a pretty good one at that. I don't have all the answers, I was simply providing a different perspective on the topic - one that makes business sense for everyone involved. Thanks for your input, tool.
Not true, we've grown significantly - double digit growth every year. Nothing huge, just solid growth. Some clients leave, some have been with us for 10 years (predating the company as I mentioned).
Not necessarily. In a lot of these "thin client" scenarios the customers are actually running old desktop hardware and using the MS Terminal Server Client or the newer RDP client. These machines have an operating system that needs to be maintained - patches, updates, etc. Most users don't use apps like IE through their Terminal Server, some tend to use Outlook installed locally on these "thin" clients. Bottom line, in the real SMB world, a thin client isn't necessarily as thin as it should be.
I'm glad you're not one of our clients either. I can see we would have to invest a lot of (unbillable) time educating you like we do many of our clients. Of course, once we explain everything our clients tend to understand and stick with us. Our average client has been with us for 5 years. Not bad for a company that is 5 years old! Some client relationships predate the company though - ie they were clients of mine and my business partners as long as 10 years ago when we both got into this business. Anyway, I'm *WAY* off topic now.
I'm not going to go posting a link here and bring the Slashdot effect down on my own company, but we started a buyback program in March (long before we knew about Dell and HP's plans - maybe they stole them from us!) for exactly this reason - get the old stuff away from the users and replace it with newer hardware. For us, the aging Pentium and Pentium 2 systems, most of which are still running Windows 95 or 98, are a support nightmare. The systems are not under warranty any longer, components are no longer available through distribution, and we don't have time to be searching ebay looking for a used 266MHz CPU. Besides, our customers tend to look at us funny when the bill ends up showing 4-5 hours of labor because of the cost involved in finding and obtaining old components. It's just not worth being in that market when a quality business class machine runs just under $1000 US.
As for thin client, it's a solution some of our customers like. However, it doesn't resolve the old hardware issue. Instead, it actually adds to the problem be extending the life of systems that were never designed to last more than 3-5 years. In the past week we have had a customer complain that their last 200MHz machine just died, another client complained that their last machine with ISA slots died and now they can't use their first gen ATI AIW ISA card, and we had a call from a client that couldn't figure out how to get their new (USB only) printer working with their 6 or 7 year old desktop (with no USB).
Supporting this old stuff for the SMB (small/mid-sized business) clients is a nightmare. We spend a lot of time convincing customers to "recycle" about 1/3 of their PC hardware per year so that all of their hardware is covered under warranty and so we can support the most recent Windows operating systems and applications throughout their organizations. Having part of the office on Windows XP, part on Windows NT 4, and part on Windows 95, and half under warranty and half not covered under warranty just increases support and management costs.
It seems that I never care for a new ST series when it is on first run. In addition, it seems that the newer the series, the less I like it. I love TOS and TNG, althought I only got into TNG a couple of years ago. I've caught a couple DS9 episodes lately since SciFi has been running them a lot and I've found those somewhat interesting, although I again found the show all but unwatchable when it was in first run. I started watching Voyager when it came on, but lost interest (sorry to say I ended up hooked on Melrose Place instead - ugh) very quickly. I managed to watch two episodes of Enterprise. The first episode was ok, but like everyone else I kept wondering why he didn't leap after saving the Klingon. Just couldn't get that out of my head. The second episode I saw was brutal, and that was it for Enterprise for me.
OS/2 Warp 4 Betas offered translucent windows. The feature was removed from the final release for performance reasons. Hardware just wasn't quite there in '95 to support that feature. As least that's my recollection of it.
Well, isn't that one of the reasons why they sell shower LINERS? You can keep your favorite shower curtain as long as you like, just change the liner once a year or so.
Maybe it's time to replace my aging Casio fx-7000G that I bought new for College Algebra and Trig (pre-precalc) back in '88 or so. Nah, this machine still kicks butt.
I tend to yell at people a lot. Business partners, vendors, pretty much whoever is around, except I stop just short of yelling at my customers directly. Venting helps. A lot. You get rid of the frustration and then you can focus better on what needs to be done. Pretty much everyone in the industry understands this concept, and most of them tend to do the same. If you're on the receiving side, just let it roll off.
This is a bit late since memory prices have been trending down in the past few days. Take a look at http://www.dramexchange.com where they present pricing in a stock-chart-like format. Seems like a great way to track the pricing on something as commoditized as PC components.
As a 30-something whose musical mainstay consists of "classic punk" like DK, Circle Jerks, Operation Ivy, Clash, Pistols, and so forth I haven't found too much recently that I care for enough to buy. Picked up a used Roger Waters CD (KAOS) on ebay recently.
However, I did stumble across (tongue in cheek here) a band called The White Stripes. Hard to not notice them actually. I first heard them when they played an entire week on Conan O'Brien's show here in the US. I was pretty impressed. Picked up their two most recent releases, Elephant (voted best album of 2003 by someone or another) and White Blood Cells (features the catchy "Fell In Love With A Girl". I think I'm now a fan. Both CD's are really great stuff - highly recommended.
Supporting the RIAA? Well, maybe, I don't really know, but what am I going to do? Never buy another CD? I think not.
...but it just took all of 40 seconds from the time I hit "enter" after typing "www.real.com" in my browser to the time the download window appeared asking where I wanted to store the *free* RP10. Of course I cancelled though. But really, is it all that difficult?
I complained to Click and Clack via their web-thingie when the original story posted and explained that running Windows Media Player just wasn't an option for us Linux users. I even got a nice reply from - I believe - their producer explaining that they "were working on it". Now if Real would just update their Linux player. C'mon guys - we're stuck at RP8 for how many years now?
...on my Ultra 5. I cringed thinking about loading Solaris on my Ultra 5 when I decided to use it as a syslog server. I looked around, and FreeBSD 5.2 was the latest and seemed to be the greatest for what I needed. Now I need an rsync server at a remote site and guess what I'm loading on the Ultra 10 allocated for that task? Yup, FreeBSD 5.2 - or maybe I'll splurge and download 5.2.1. Now if I could only install easily without using a serial connection.
As a former RedHat (4.x, 5.x) and Mandrake (6.x, 7.x) user that made the leap to SuSE and never looked back, I love that fact that SuSE is getting a lot of attention lately. I jumped from RedHat kind of by accident when a friend, who was supposed to order RedHat 6.0 ordered Mandrake 6.0 instead. I later stopped liking RedHat because of their MS-like "we know what is best for you" attitude, and even more recently when they killed off the free base product in favor of an unsupported (by RH anyhow) Fedora project. I jumped from Mandrake because nothing - especially accelerated 3D - ever worked right for me with Mandrake.
My only complaint with SuSE had been that SuSE wasn't a US based company, and as a US citizen in a struggling economy that bugged me. I cheered when Novell bought SuSE. I cheered again when Novell announced that YaST would become open source (at least I believe that was the announcement) since that was always the biggest complaint I heard from other Linux users about why they wouldn't use SuSE. Now that IBM is jumping on the bandwagon I'm excited for the product all over again.
WTF? Is this business or a grade school playground? I enjoy blasting Microsoft as much as anyone, but who the hell thinks they need to share anything about their products other than the price with anyone? Complete morons, IMHO.
I'm in my 30's, in the US, and recall Dr. Who being extremely popular with the "geeks" when I was in high school (84-87). The fans were as into Dr. Who as Star Trek and Star Wars fans are into those shows, but there was somewhat fewer Dr. Who fans. Dr. Who has never really found it's way into the mainstream - at least not in the US. Dr. Who episodes were shown on PBS stations then. At the time I wasn't really interested, but I've since taken quite a liking to them.
Personally, I like the idea of a show set in the near future. It's not far enough in the future to allow for absurd plot lines, but it's far enough to have that "wow, cool" effect - maybe. I agree that there are too many law shows now. We keep stuff like The Practice around, we have two CSI's, three Law and Order's, and a merger of JAG and CSI called NCIS or something like that, and don't forget The Shield and The Wire, or COPS, America's Most Wanted, etc, etc, etc, yet they cancel good shows like The Agency. Go figure. Maybe there will be something original here though. I hope!
It works! I find stuff there all the time. foodnetwork.com is another good one, and there are plenty more.
Yeah, that was the first person I thought of!
Maybe, maybe not. I'm excited to hear from some fellow hams in Cincinati about how this effects the usable radio spectrum. Everything we've heard until now has been little more than educated guesses as far as I'm concerned. Let's see some real data!
--kc2kth
> Having a city park graced by golden statues of
> winged pigs?
You well heeled big wheel...
> KRAP
That was MAD Magazine's parady of the show. The comic was called "WKRAP in Cincinati". Funny stuff as I recall, but I was probably only 10 or 12 at the time.