Its funny, I've had a full featured Skype client running on my Windows Mobile powered HTC Apache on the Sprint network for a few years now. And I can use the 3G connection for Skype calls. Why people keep going crazy about the iPhone is completely beyond comprehension.
We are a large, publicly traded, global consumer electronics company. We have
- Lots of real servers running Linux - A couple VMware clusters with Linux server VMs running on them - A few Sun servers running Solaris - More than 100 engineers running on Linux workstations - More than 100 laptops running Linux - Most of IT running on Linux - A massive memcached fronted mysql database for customer use - Java web apps (although proprietary) with licenses that also permit us to modify the source code for our own use - All Java web apps run under plain Tomcat or JBoss - Several successful product lines of Linux based devices
I have four computers on my desk, three run Linux, one runs Windows.
Who says that you can't have Linux in the enterprise?
"Face it, 99% of staff using a computer as part of their daily work don't need a full desktop PC and certainly don't need dual-core systems with Gbs of RAM."
You are absolutely correct.
I am an engineer, so I get a Core2 Quad linux workstation with 4GB RAM. Understandable, since I'll do software builds on my machine sometimes and legitimately *need* the cpu power to enhance productivity. However, the standard issue WindowsXP workstation that gets issued to regular office staff is a Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. All of that power to run Word, Excel, and Outlook. We're generally very green here, but all that CPU power to run Office seems silly.
Yet another trolling Swede. What is with you people?
I have a four year old EVDO phone from Sprint that will pull down 2Mbit/sec in places so devoid of people you can't even imagine it. Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I'll just leave it at that.
The problem I have with bonuses is that they are given to people who helped AIG fail. What kind of sane employment contract allows failure to be financially rewarded?
Actually, if NASCAR were looking for an eco-friendly division, the amount of funding for alternate fuel vehicles would probably skyrocket, consumer prices would come down, engineering quality would go up, and we'd all have awesome cars.
Allow me to introduce you to the contiguous states of Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Just those three states combined are larger than Sweden with a dramatically lower population density.
I live in Kansas. Population density in the US *is* a problem for broadband. Most Europeans I know had trouble grasping the midwest until they actually came here.
We have the countdowns at every traffic signal controlled intersection in the city I live, and the red light running has actually gotten noticeably worse. The drivers simply don't pay attention because they just don't care. You make the fatal assumption that the average person *cares*.
"Ford and Toyota all use proprietary parts in their vehicles that can not be swapped out for third party bits from any supplier a user might want to pick from."
What? You can't encrypt or apply DRM to mechanical parts. Its not possible to hide the design of a hose or a fuel injector.
Well, I was just wearing a Sennheiser aviation headset when I was flying last Thursday. I don't recall the model, as they were my friend's, but they were his "cheap" backup pair. In a noisy little airplane like the Diamond DA20 I was flying, I had no trouble hearing my copilot over the headsets, and the engine noise was minimal. It was just as good as a nice set of David Clarks and almost as good as a Bose Aviation X headset.
In most states, you are legally required to take a breathalyzer test if an officer suspects you of DUI and asks you to take the test. Refusal to do so will result in a DUI arrest and a statutory summary suspension of your driving privileges. If you really weren't drunk, you can then fight the suspension in court, its much easier than a full blown DUI trial.
There are still two rotary dial Western Electric 554 phones hard wired into my parents' house that are fully operational and used on a nearly daily basis. They have the finest sound quality and reliability of any phone I've ever used.
"I never learned drafting, the core of engineering then. The archived records would presumably let skilled engineers recreate the project, but we don't have the same skills."
Please turn in your engineer card. If an engineer can't read drawings he is a liability to clients and a danger to the public.
What about the G3/G4 towers? Those are some of the easiest to work on machines out there. Pull the lever, lower the side of the case, tada! Easy to change drives, PCI cards, CPU, and memory. These were probably the best built Macs ever.
Stop buying poorly engineered cars and you'll be much happier.
Transmissions shouldn't fail at 104K miles unless they are *designed* for such short lifetimes. You might have to replace a clutch in that timespan on a car that isn't built with planned obsolescence, but the gearbox should not die at that age under regular use unless the engineers wanted it to die young.
Suck it up, make the investment, and buy a better car. The initial outlay may be more, but you'll end up with something safer, more reliable, better built, more comfortable, and less prone to wacky electrical issues, leaks, recalls, or other problems. The mileage might not be as great as the econobox, but what you'll save in stupid repairs (or medical costs if you're in an accident) will make up for it. How much would replacing your transmission have cost?
I'm not trolling, I'm trying to point out that people don't take long term engineering and maintenance issues into account when purchasing a car. Before anyone goes "but teh European cars are super expensive to fix!" do some research. I laughed at a Honda dealer in Chicago when I took my mom's Accord in for maintenance. They charged more per hour than the Volvo dealer (who works on one of my cars) down the block. And the Volvo dealer gives me a loaner car while mine is in for work.
"The Volt is the ONLY thing GM is doing that makes the tiniest bit of sense. For goodness sakes, they released a passenger car hybrid that costs about the same as a prius, but gets about the same gas mileage as a minivan."
Uh, except for, you know, the entire lineup of more than 30 turbodiesel powered cars GM has. They also happen to be more reliable, and both cheaper and easier to maintain than ANY hybrid vehicle. They also have low resale values, so its easy to acquire one.
What's most offending is that GM *knows* how to make good turbodiesel cars, we Americans have just been brainwashed into thinking that diesel==bad. When I lived in the UK I had a Vauxhall Zafira 1.9CDTi. I loved that silly box, and it got the same mileage as the VW Sharan.
More interestingly, GM has brought the Astra over from Opel/Vauxhall and called it the Saturn Astra. Even doing the US/Imperial mileage conversions, the most efficient Astra sold in the US gets worse mileage than the least efficient diesel Astra sold in Europe.
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Its funny, I've had a full featured Skype client running on my Windows Mobile powered HTC Apache on the Sprint network for a few years now. And I can use the 3G connection for Skype calls. Why people keep going crazy about the iPhone is completely beyond comprehension.
We are a large, publicly traded, global consumer electronics company. We have
- Lots of real servers running Linux
- A couple VMware clusters with Linux server VMs running on them
- A few Sun servers running Solaris
- More than 100 engineers running on Linux workstations
- More than 100 laptops running Linux
- Most of IT running on Linux
- A massive memcached fronted mysql database for customer use
- Java web apps (although proprietary) with licenses that also permit us to modify the source code for our own use
- All Java web apps run under plain Tomcat or JBoss
- Several successful product lines of Linux based devices
I have four computers on my desk, three run Linux, one runs Windows.
Who says that you can't have Linux in the enterprise?
"Face it, 99% of staff using a computer as part of their daily work don't need a full desktop PC and certainly don't need dual-core systems with Gbs of RAM."
You are absolutely correct.
I am an engineer, so I get a Core2 Quad linux workstation with 4GB RAM. Understandable, since I'll do software builds on my machine sometimes and legitimately *need* the cpu power to enhance productivity. However, the standard issue WindowsXP workstation that gets issued to regular office staff is a Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. All of that power to run Word, Excel, and Outlook. We're generally very green here, but all that CPU power to run Office seems silly.
"Worst yet is that there is little/no public transportation to speak of"
I can see why, what with the buses that explode if they go faster than 55mph and then slow down.
I got bored with it *SEVEN YEARS AGO* using my Kyocera 6035 smartphone as the remote control for my stereo and tv.
Yet another trolling Swede. What is with you people?
I have a four year old EVDO phone from Sprint that will pull down 2Mbit/sec in places so devoid of people you can't even imagine it. Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I'll just leave it at that.
The problem I have with bonuses is that they are given to people who helped AIG fail. What kind of sane employment contract allows failure to be financially rewarded?
"Maybe the Sun had to do something with it"
My SPARC servers have never given me heat stroke, yours must be broken.
Probably not bad. My Diamond DA20 gets 29mpg in cruise.
Actually, if NASCAR were looking for an eco-friendly division, the amount of funding for alternate fuel vehicles would probably skyrocket, consumer prices would come down, engineering quality would go up, and we'd all have awesome cars.
"hopefully IBM knows how best to manage death with dignity for legacy operating systems."
Given how far back the history of z/OS goes, I don't think IBM is capable of this.
I, for one, welcome Apple to 1983 by gaining the capabilities of the Macintosh 512k.
Allow me to introduce you to the contiguous states of Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Just those three states combined are larger than Sweden with a dramatically lower population density.
I live in Kansas. Population density in the US *is* a problem for broadband. Most Europeans I know had trouble grasping the midwest until they actually came here.
We have the countdowns at every traffic signal controlled intersection in the city I live, and the red light running has actually gotten noticeably worse. The drivers simply don't pay attention because they just don't care. You make the fatal assumption that the average person *cares*.
"Ford and Toyota all use proprietary parts in their vehicles that can not be swapped out for third party bits from any supplier a user might want to pick from."
What? You can't encrypt or apply DRM to mechanical parts. Its not possible to hide the design of a hose or a fuel injector.
Well, I was just wearing a Sennheiser aviation headset when I was flying last Thursday. I don't recall the model, as they were my friend's, but they were his "cheap" backup pair. In a noisy little airplane like the Diamond DA20 I was flying, I had no trouble hearing my copilot over the headsets, and the engine noise was minimal. It was just as good as a nice set of David Clarks and almost as good as a Bose Aviation X headset.
In most states, you are legally required to take a breathalyzer test if an officer suspects you of DUI and asks you to take the test. Refusal to do so will result in a DUI arrest and a statutory summary suspension of your driving privileges. If you really weren't drunk, you can then fight the suspension in court, its much easier than a full blown DUI trial.
There are still two rotary dial Western Electric 554 phones hard wired into my parents' house that are fully operational and used on a nearly daily basis. They have the finest sound quality and reliability of any phone I've ever used.
Its an ipod touch for fat people! Multitouch on a small screen must suck for them.
"I never learned drafting, the core of engineering then. The archived records would presumably let skilled engineers recreate the project, but we don't have the same skills."
Please turn in your engineer card. If an engineer can't read drawings he is a liability to clients and a danger to the public.
Ah, you're right about the IDE cables, I forgot about those, the routing for them is rather silly. :)
What about the G3/G4 towers? Those are some of the easiest to work on machines out there. Pull the lever, lower the side of the case, tada! Easy to change drives, PCI cards, CPU, and memory. These were probably the best built Macs ever.
Stop buying poorly engineered cars and you'll be much happier.
Transmissions shouldn't fail at 104K miles unless they are *designed* for such short lifetimes. You might have to replace a clutch in that timespan on a car that isn't built with planned obsolescence, but the gearbox should not die at that age under regular use unless the engineers wanted it to die young.
Suck it up, make the investment, and buy a better car. The initial outlay may be more, but you'll end up with something safer, more reliable, better built, more comfortable, and less prone to wacky electrical issues, leaks, recalls, or other problems. The mileage might not be as great as the econobox, but what you'll save in stupid repairs (or medical costs if you're in an accident) will make up for it. How much would replacing your transmission have cost?
I'm not trolling, I'm trying to point out that people don't take long term engineering and maintenance issues into account when purchasing a car. Before anyone goes "but teh European cars are super expensive to fix!" do some research. I laughed at a Honda dealer in Chicago when I took my mom's Accord in for maintenance. They charged more per hour than the Volvo dealer (who works on one of my cars) down the block. And the Volvo dealer gives me a loaner car while mine is in for work.
"The Volt is the ONLY thing GM is doing that makes the tiniest bit of sense. For goodness sakes, they released a passenger car hybrid that costs about the same as a prius, but gets about the same gas mileage as a minivan."
Uh, except for, you know, the entire lineup of more than 30 turbodiesel powered cars GM has. They also happen to be more reliable, and both cheaper and easier to maintain than ANY hybrid vehicle. They also have low resale values, so its easy to acquire one.
But not if you're in the US.
What's most offending is that GM *knows* how to make good turbodiesel cars, we Americans have just been brainwashed into thinking that diesel==bad. When I lived in the UK I had a Vauxhall Zafira 1.9CDTi. I loved that silly box, and it got the same mileage as the VW Sharan.
More interestingly, GM has brought the Astra over from Opel/Vauxhall and called it the Saturn Astra. Even doing the US/Imperial mileage conversions, the most efficient Astra sold in the US gets worse mileage than the least efficient diesel Astra sold in Europe.