the business side of computing is computers in offices, not computer sales. Computer sales will never be like car sales in that you can buy components and assemble a computer cheaply and have it be better than one built buy a large company.
1: Cheap PCs means jobs that were irrelevant already cease to exist
2: you are semi-right, but in the computing world an IT person (in the personnel sense) doesn't need business knowledge nearly as much as a businessman needs to learn IT.
3: that's not product differentiation. it's called market recognition. Grandma has not heard of a TransMeta Crusoe or a Via C3, she just knows what the commercials tell her. Thats what this is discussing, not geek use.
4: barriers to entry my ass. it's called economics...without someone to keep the other companies in check, prices would skyrocket.
5: people don't look at what a computer can do. they look at numbers they don't understand.
At the end of the day, you're a fucktard. Don't grab statistics out of mid-air.
i'll keep it in mind...though i think this thinkpad will keep me going for at least a 3 or 4 more years (or like you said, till IBM cuts my battery lifeline) if not longer. there are 2 manufacturers of laptop i particularly trust...IBM and apple. either way it'd be preowned, but ibm has tiehr wonderful corporate lease program that lets me get a great refurb for a good price
i truly feel sorry for your community...I have a small profit margin, but it's a side business for me. I get good parts only, and build new boxes with perhaps (from the box i am replacing) cannibalized floppy drives, cdrom/cdr/dvd, network card, modem, soundblaster live! card, etc. if they want to save some cash and the parts are in worthy condition. My dad used to work for one that was excellent back in California, and they're still around (he is now working for the county)
good computers can and will be built inexpensively if you have a trustworthy and knowledgeable advisor to turn to. I didn't say most shops right now fit the bill.
it's a Thinkpad 600E. I simply maxed out the ram and dropped in a 30GB hard disk to replace the 10 (even that was just for kicks...the original 10 was still great). Installed linux to replace the win98. 400MHz. Building up a 300mhz 600 for my wife... i bought a few broken ones on ebay to build one out of and to have some spare parts.
tablets are going nowhere...everyone i've talked to who was a non-geek hates the interface for letters. The only way they'll succeed is being more like laptops and less like stupid.
1: selling cheaper PCs means people get fired. That's why I build them for my friends who cannot afford them otherwise and usually give them a better computer than they could have gotten for twice as much out of an OEM like Dell or Gateway (and yes, I use good parts...Soyo motheboards, athlon chips, micron ram, and so on). People need to go back to the friendly neighborhood PC shop method of buying computers.
2:Companies should be spending more money on their computers systems than they are doing...if they need new computers. Most companies do not...penitum II in the office is plenty for MS Office.
3:There are large fixed costs involved in computers...for the OEMs and hardware manufacturers. But designing a gaudy case and bloated multimedia keyboard is not the kind of cost that the consumer should be forced to swallow.
4:Technology is controled by relatively few, and that's how Taiwan keeps the american companies' pricing in check (Viva VIA motherboard chipsets!)
5:Cost isn't an issue as much as people think it is...people don't upgrade because most people don't need to.
trademark law regards names in an area. for example, hormel has a fair and legit claim to spam as a trade name for a food product. Spam as a digital internet-like concept is entirely unrelated to Spam the luncheon meat. If they win this, lots of domain name disputes will get even more retarded.
Easy. Laptops are the future. I used to think they'd be horribly annoying, but then I got one. It's an old Thinkpad pentium II I bought when it came off corporate lease. I started using it with wireless ethernet for day to day use, and now I turned my desktop into a file server and never touch it.
I can bring it into the living room when i'm playing video games, or into the kitchen when i want to try out a recipe i found on google. I can even save the page of yahoo! travel and bring it to the airport when my parents are coming to town when i pick them up.
"Sure," I hear you shouting, "but what about paper?" I rarely touch the stuff. And when I do, I usually lose it. Printer ink is expensive. Sure, call me lazy. Sure, call my thinkpad a crutch. I could say the same about your paper and pen. It's just a different paradigm.
my 13.3 inch screen may not be huge, but it's an LCD flat panel with a compact pentium 2 system attatched to it that does most of what I need it to. Desktops are for gaming and for family workstations, now more than ever. The need for a fast desktop system is once again relegated to the CAD and 3D imaging industries as computer speed has outpaced the public need. A computer is an appliance, as many of us are apt to forget. It's important to remember that it's more useful when you can move it from room to room without difficulty. Now that the main obstacle of wired networks has been overcome for most people's purposes, laptops are at a severe advantage everywhere but price.
And as you mentioned above, laptops are faster and run cooler than desktop PCs.
you don't understand it? I don't see why. There's no real innovation to be had these days for joe sixpack.
Mom and dad can get to their hotmail account and check their stocks just fine on their pentium II (or even pentium 1...my wife's grandparents only upgraded because lightning fried their modem and screwed up their motherboard). Usually all they need is an operating system reinstall or a larger hard drive since they aren't capable of actually cleaning out their files themselves.
Saying that most people want faster computers is primarily the fault of Microsoft (flamebait, blah blah) wanting to up the number of features at the expense of speed, as well as these users not knowing how to defrag or that they should get rid of the dozens of things running in their system tray. And let's not forget Longhorn's aspirations towards 3d-accelerated desktops. Something Joe User simply doesn't need but will "have to have" once he hears about it. That and upgrading their RAM.
Saying that most people want quieter computers is the responsibility of chipmakers, not of OEMs. Put a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP into a box and it's gonna have fans. No question. Put a Crusoe or a C3 into a box for grandma, and you might even be able to go fanless if you do it right. But she wants that Pentium 4 the TV told her she had to have.
As far as cheaper goes, as long as mom and pop are buying from OEMs like Dell and Gateway, it's not gonna happen.
Personally, as far as desktops go, I think it'd be far more beneficial for people to stop looking at megahertz or gigahertz. A 1.2 GHz Athlon with 1GB of RAM is going to run faster than a 2.4 GHz pentium 4 with 128 MB of RAM for someone who doesn't realize he has 200MB of programs running in his system tray alone. When I build PCs from scratch these days, I do whatever I can to put a bare minimum of a half gig of RAM, preferrably a full gig. Why? Because modern software is bloated, and because average users don't do anything to help the situation. You can try to teach them.
But trust me on the RAM. it's honestly all the average non-technical person who wants to have a computer for internet and word processing needs to upgrade if their current system is 300mhz or higher
disagree with me if you like, but was not the personal computer of the times 20 years ago an Apple II, atari, amiga, or commodore 64? personal computers were called these 20 years ago. They were not "IBM PC"s but they were the PC of the times.
DOS was the genesis of Windows. From it all versions of MS Windows until NT sprang forth. Therefore since the genesis of the Microsoft OS (these days called in common terminology "Windows") was DOS, and Windows was originally a GUI add-on to DOS. So yes, 20 years ago it was called dos.
you're neglecting the whole warrants part...it goes against the spirit of the amendment in that if law enforcement is gathering such info on a person without probable cause it seems a bit fishy to me
I would think this would cause more problems for law enforcement than for ebay...just because ebay makes that a policy doesn't make it law enforcement's right to take advantage of that without a warrant. It's certainly outside the spirit of the associated amendment.
I agree. honestly, if they need a support contract for every desktop they have, that's a blame policy rather than a support policy. "who can i say is at fault when something craps out." With Microsoft, pointing that finger is easy. With linux, who are you going to point your finger at if the user fouls up something? Linus? nope...try the user. Management, who don't understand computers, are afraid they'll screw something up and have to take the blame. Yes, i've worked places where that was the case.
I don't really think the MPAA cares...keeping up with the times isn't one of their priorities. for example, if the MPAA is going to rate their movies, should they not re-rate them as time goes on for subsequent releases? I don't really think most R-rated movies from the pre PG-13 days would be higher than PG-13 anymore, if that. And let's not forget the huge publicity gained by the words, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." which wouldn't even turn a head nowadays.
So I think the real root of the problem is that the movie studios don't want to re-rate their old movies when they re-release them. After all, they went to the effort once already. We just need seperate ratings for violence, sexuality, language, and themes. For example, all of my younger sisters are allowed to watch Die Hard. They between 9 and 16. I recently watched the film with this in mind, and I realized the movie wasn't really that bad. Under my stated idea above, i'd rate it as this, using a standard 1 to 10 system:
Violence: 7 for gunshot wounds and destruction of property Sexuality: 2 for an extremely un-smooth operator and a 0.2-second-long shot of a woman's blurry, in-motion breast that most people don't realize is there. Language: 6 for frequent undirected profanity (Yes, I do realize this film contains many profanities and the immortal line "Yippe ki yay, motherfucker!", but little of this language is being used unreasonably nor in bad taste, nor does it tend to be used abusively.) Themes: 7 for terrorism and family dysfunction
ok, there you have it...an example of a good system. The big catch is that it's not designed for the box office discerning your age. it's designed for parents who Raise Their Own Damn Kids®. Without parental participation in this, a ratings system doesn't work anyhow the second it goes to video.
Therein lies your problem...you bought a dell rather than building your own and using a ski boat for a case. My computer I built from components, and I used an Apache attack helicopter as a case. Don't let those people at Dell sell you short like that!
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technically, companies are required to be for the public good...but the courts have forgotten that fact.
hehe...thanks. if it helps i have no stocks
the business side of computing is computers in offices, not computer sales. Computer sales will never be like car sales in that you can buy components and assemble a computer cheaply and have it be better than one built buy a large company.
1: Cheap PCs means jobs that were irrelevant already cease to exist
2: you are semi-right, but in the computing world an IT person (in the personnel sense) doesn't need business knowledge nearly as much as a businessman needs to learn IT.
3: that's not product differentiation. it's called market recognition. Grandma has not heard of a TransMeta Crusoe or a Via C3, she just knows what the commercials tell her. Thats what this is discussing, not geek use.
4: barriers to entry my ass. it's called economics...without someone to keep the other companies in check, prices would skyrocket.
5: people don't look at what a computer can do. they look at numbers they don't understand.
At the end of the day, you're a fucktard. Don't grab statistics out of mid-air.
thats what i use my wife's athlon for...i just don't need a desktop enough to really spend that much effort on it these days
i'll keep it in mind...though i think this thinkpad will keep me going for at least a 3 or 4 more years (or like you said, till IBM cuts my battery lifeline) if not longer. there are 2 manufacturers of laptop i particularly trust...IBM and apple. either way it'd be preowned, but ibm has tiehr wonderful corporate lease program that lets me get a great refurb for a good price
IBM has always had the upper hand in the keyboard world...i love the one on my thinkpad 600e
i truly feel sorry for your community...I have a small profit margin, but it's a side business for me. I get good parts only, and build new boxes with perhaps (from the box i am replacing) cannibalized floppy drives, cdrom/cdr/dvd, network card, modem, soundblaster live! card, etc. if they want to save some cash and the parts are in worthy condition. My dad used to work for one that was excellent back in California, and they're still around (he is now working for the county)
good computers can and will be built inexpensively if you have a trustworthy and knowledgeable advisor to turn to. I didn't say most shops right now fit the bill.
it's a Thinkpad 600E. I simply maxed out the ram and dropped in a 30GB hard disk to replace the 10 (even that was just for kicks...the original 10 was still great). Installed linux to replace the win98. 400MHz. Building up a 300mhz 600 for my wife... i bought a few broken ones on ebay to build one out of and to have some spare parts.
did i say laptops are faster? i don't recall doing so, but i may have.
desktops are better for gaming period. trackpoints and trackpads suck for gaming.
tablets are going nowhere...everyone i've talked to who was a non-geek hates the interface for letters. The only way they'll succeed is being more like laptops and less like stupid.
1: selling cheaper PCs means people get fired. That's why I build them for my friends who cannot afford them otherwise and usually give them a better computer than they could have gotten for twice as much out of an OEM like Dell or Gateway (and yes, I use good parts...Soyo motheboards, athlon chips, micron ram, and so on). People need to go back to the friendly neighborhood PC shop method of buying computers.
2:Companies should be spending more money on their computers systems than they are doing...if they need new computers. Most companies do not...penitum II in the office is plenty for MS Office.
3:There are large fixed costs involved in computers...for the OEMs and hardware manufacturers. But designing a gaudy case and bloated multimedia keyboard is not the kind of cost that the consumer should be forced to swallow.
4:Technology is controled by relatively few, and that's how Taiwan keeps the american companies' pricing in check (Viva VIA motherboard chipsets!)
5:Cost isn't an issue as much as people think it is...people don't upgrade because most people don't need to.
trademark law regards names in an area. for example, hormel has a fair and legit claim to spam as a trade name for a food product. Spam as a digital internet-like concept is entirely unrelated to Spam the luncheon meat. If they win this, lots of domain name disputes will get even more retarded.
Easy. Laptops are the future. I used to think they'd be horribly annoying, but then I got one. It's an old Thinkpad pentium II I bought when it came off corporate lease. I started using it with wireless ethernet for day to day use, and now I turned my desktop into a file server and never touch it.
I can bring it into the living room when i'm playing video games, or into the kitchen when i want to try out a recipe i found on google. I can even save the page of yahoo! travel and bring it to the airport when my parents are coming to town when i pick them up.
"Sure," I hear you shouting, "but what about paper?" I rarely touch the stuff. And when I do, I usually lose it. Printer ink is expensive. Sure, call me lazy. Sure, call my thinkpad a crutch. I could say the same about your paper and pen. It's just a different paradigm.
my 13.3 inch screen may not be huge, but it's an LCD flat panel with a compact pentium 2 system attatched to it that does most of what I need it to. Desktops are for gaming and for family workstations, now more than ever. The need for a fast desktop system is once again relegated to the CAD and 3D imaging industries as computer speed has outpaced the public need. A computer is an appliance, as many of us are apt to forget. It's important to remember that it's more useful when you can move it from room to room without difficulty. Now that the main obstacle of wired networks has been overcome for most people's purposes, laptops are at a severe advantage everywhere but price.
And as you mentioned above, laptops are faster and run cooler than desktop PCs.
you don't understand it? I don't see why. There's no real innovation to be had these days for joe sixpack.
Mom and dad can get to their hotmail account and check their stocks just fine on their pentium II (or even pentium 1...my wife's grandparents only upgraded because lightning fried their modem and screwed up their motherboard). Usually all they need is an operating system reinstall or a larger hard drive since they aren't capable of actually cleaning out their files themselves.
Saying that most people want faster computers is primarily the fault of Microsoft (flamebait, blah blah) wanting to up the number of features at the expense of speed, as well as these users not knowing how to defrag or that they should get rid of the dozens of things running in their system tray. And let's not forget Longhorn's aspirations towards 3d-accelerated desktops. Something Joe User simply doesn't need but will "have to have" once he hears about it. That and upgrading their RAM.
Saying that most people want quieter computers is the responsibility of chipmakers, not of OEMs. Put a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP into a box and it's gonna have fans. No question. Put a Crusoe or a C3 into a box for grandma, and you might even be able to go fanless if you do it right. But she wants that Pentium 4 the TV told her she had to have.
As far as cheaper goes, as long as mom and pop are buying from OEMs like Dell and Gateway, it's not gonna happen.
Personally, as far as desktops go, I think it'd be far more beneficial for people to stop looking at megahertz or gigahertz. A 1.2 GHz Athlon with 1GB of RAM is going to run faster than a 2.4 GHz pentium 4 with 128 MB of RAM for someone who doesn't realize he has 200MB of programs running in his system tray alone. When I build PCs from scratch these days, I do whatever I can to put a bare minimum of a half gig of RAM, preferrably a full gig. Why? Because modern software is bloated, and because average users don't do anything to help the situation. You can try to teach them.
But trust me on the RAM. it's honestly all the average non-technical person who wants to have a computer for internet and word processing needs to upgrade if their current system is 300mhz or higher
simple...your users would be breaking the law. wireless network is in fact 2 way, whereas Wolfman Jack was just broadcasting.
and therein lies the problem. If there's no probable cause, there's No Fucking Excuse® for law enforcement to be rooting around in my dealings.
disagree with me if you like, but was not the personal computer of the times 20 years ago an Apple II, atari, amiga, or commodore 64? personal computers were called these 20 years ago. They were not "IBM PC"s but they were the PC of the times.
DOS was the genesis of Windows. From it all versions of MS Windows until NT sprang forth. Therefore since the genesis of the Microsoft OS (these days called in common terminology "Windows") was DOS, and Windows was originally a GUI add-on to DOS. So yes, 20 years ago it was called dos.
Then: C:\> win
Now: cargo@have-blue cargo# startx
sounds unreasonable to me
you're neglecting the whole warrants part...it goes against the spirit of the amendment in that if law enforcement is gathering such info on a person without probable cause it seems a bit fishy to me
I would think this would cause more problems for law enforcement than for ebay...just because ebay makes that a policy doesn't make it law enforcement's right to take advantage of that without a warrant. It's certainly outside the spirit of the associated amendment.
well put, my good man! Welcome to the friends list.
I agree. honestly, if they need a support contract for every desktop they have, that's a blame policy rather than a support policy. "who can i say is at fault when something craps out." With Microsoft, pointing that finger is easy. With linux, who are you going to point your finger at if the user fouls up something? Linus? nope...try the user. Management, who don't understand computers, are afraid they'll screw something up and have to take the blame. Yes, i've worked places where that was the case.
I don't really think the MPAA cares...keeping up with the times isn't one of their priorities. for example, if the MPAA is going to rate their movies, should they not re-rate them as time goes on for subsequent releases? I don't really think most R-rated movies from the pre PG-13 days would be higher than PG-13 anymore, if that. And let's not forget the huge publicity gained by the words, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." which wouldn't even turn a head nowadays.
So I think the real root of the problem is that the movie studios don't want to re-rate their old movies when they re-release them. After all, they went to the effort once already. We just need seperate ratings for violence, sexuality, language, and themes. For example, all of my younger sisters are allowed to watch Die Hard. They between 9 and 16. I recently watched the film with this in mind, and I realized the movie wasn't really that bad. Under my stated idea above, i'd rate it as this, using a standard 1 to 10 system:
Violence: 7 for gunshot wounds and destruction of property
Sexuality: 2 for an extremely un-smooth operator and a 0.2-second-long shot of a woman's blurry, in-motion breast that most people don't realize is there.
Language: 6 for frequent undirected profanity (Yes, I do realize this film contains many profanities and the immortal line "Yippe ki yay, motherfucker!", but little of this language is being used unreasonably nor in bad taste, nor does it tend to be used abusively.)
Themes: 7 for terrorism and family dysfunction
ok, there you have it...an example of a good system. The big catch is that it's not designed for the box office discerning your age. it's designed for parents who Raise Their Own Damn Kids®. Without parental participation in this, a ratings system doesn't work anyhow the second it goes to video.
he's right on the money.
Therein lies your problem...you bought a dell rather than building your own and using a ski boat for a case. My computer I built from components, and I used an Apache attack helicopter as a case. Don't let those people at Dell sell you short like that!