Sony's strategy is to build stylish electronics with lots of great features and sell it for a great price. In order to make this happen their quality is horrible, and their customer service is even worse. If you've ever tried to get a Sony product repaired you know what I'm talking about. I had a Vaio laptop and the 'L' key broke off. I called Sony, and despite the fact that I had registered the laptop and it was 6 months old, they were going to charge me $150 to repair it unless I had the original receipt (the fact that I bought it direct from Sony didn't make a difference)!!! And if they did repair it, I would have to back up my hard drive because they would have to format it! How bad can you get?
I went down to the local CompUSA and popped the L key off on of their display computers. About 1/4 of the keys were missing from that computer, I guess it was a common problem.
I had 5 other Sony products break within 2 months of this. I no longer buy Sony.
There are some very high quality consumer electronics out there though. If you've ever looked at high-end audio components (stuff that you can't buy at the local circuit city), you know what I mean. You certainly have to pay for it though.
The GoBook MAX notebooks work great. We use them at Team Dennis Conner on the deck of our boats where they constantly get hit with spray. You can literally hose them off. Read about them in a Marine Environment here: http://itronix.com/News/News_Article.asp?id=156
Definitely a good solution for the guy in the fish factory.
However if the computer is below deck its probably a lot cheaper to buy normal equipment and throw it overboard after it stops working (if that even happens before the next windows makes it too slow to run a web browser).
Could you imagine if there was the equivalent of the wayback machine for everything published in 5th century Athens? We'd know and incredible amount more about were the human race had already been intellectually and where its going.
I publish several websites and I don't mind this a bit - If someone wants to host my content for free and offer my customers a way to get at older versions of the site for whatever reason (maybe they want to know what prices were 2 years ago), then they've done me a service. Cool.
Arsdigita's biggest failure
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
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· Score: 2, Interesting
One of arsdigita's largest failures was not fully embracing the open source model. In my opinion they had the worst possible combination of open source code and proprietary products (from a company perspective, not a community perspective).
Althouh they released all of their early code via a GPL liscence, the vast majority (at least 95%) of the development was done by paid employees. Contrast that with a company like Redhat were the majority of the development is done by unpaid volunteers. Arsdigita therefore had all of the expenses of a closed source company, without the benefit of having proprietary assets.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should have kept their code closed source but they really missed out on not using what was at one time a very active development community to enhance their product.
Oracle has been losing a significant amount of marketshare to Microsoft's SQL server because SQL server is much cheaper. By putting their full support behind linux, oracle has a lower cost platform on which to compete.
This should also go a long way towards bolstering the impression of Linux in the IT world. If Oracle is running linux, then it must be able to handle mission critical apps (so the agrument would go).
Better than CD-Quality formats
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 1
It seems that most of the talk about the various digital music formats is in terms of how close to CD quality they come.
What about the newer media formats (and perhaps some older ones too) such as SACD or DVD-Audio that exceed CD quality?
Are there any digital file formats that are good for encoding these better than CD quality medias? What sort of bit rates do these require?
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's strategy is to build stylish electronics with lots of great features and sell it for a great price. In order to make this happen their quality is horrible, and their customer service is even worse. If you've ever tried to get a Sony product repaired you know what I'm talking about. I had a Vaio laptop and the 'L' key broke off. I called Sony, and despite the fact that I had registered the laptop and it was 6 months old, they were going to charge me $150 to repair it unless I had the original receipt (the fact that I bought it direct from Sony didn't make a difference)!!! And if they did repair it, I would have to back up my hard drive because they would have to format it! How bad can you get?
I went down to the local CompUSA and popped the L key off on of their display computers. About 1/4 of the keys were missing from that computer, I guess it was a common problem.
I had 5 other Sony products break within 2 months of this. I no longer buy Sony.
There are some very high quality consumer electronics out there though. If you've ever looked at high-end audio components (stuff that you can't buy at the local circuit city), you know what I mean. You certainly have to pay for it though.
The GoBook MAX notebooks work great. We use them at Team Dennis Conner on the deck of our boats where they constantly get hit with spray. You can literally hose them off. Read about them in a Marine Environment here: http://itronix.com/News/News_Article.asp?id=156 Definitely a good solution for the guy in the fish factory. However if the computer is below deck its probably a lot cheaper to buy normal equipment and throw it overboard after it stops working (if that even happens before the next windows makes it too slow to run a web browser).
Could you imagine if there was the equivalent of the wayback machine for everything published in 5th century Athens? We'd know and incredible amount more about were the human race had already been intellectually and where its going.
I publish several websites and I don't mind this a bit - If someone wants to host my content for free and offer my customers a way to get at older versions of the site for whatever reason (maybe they want to know what prices were 2 years ago), then they've done me a service. Cool.
Althouh they released all of their early code via a GPL liscence, the vast majority (at least 95%) of the development was done by paid employees. Contrast that with a company like Redhat were the majority of the development is done by unpaid volunteers. Arsdigita therefore had all of the expenses of a closed source company, without the benefit of having proprietary assets.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should have kept their code closed source but they really missed out on not using what was at one time a very active development community to enhance their product.
This should also go a long way towards bolstering the impression of Linux in the IT world. If Oracle is running linux, then it must be able to handle mission critical apps (so the agrument would go).
It seems that most of the talk about the various digital music formats is in terms of how close to CD quality they come.
What about the newer media formats (and perhaps some older ones too) such as SACD or DVD-Audio that exceed CD quality?
Are there any digital file formats that are good for encoding these better than CD quality medias? What sort of bit rates do these require?