It's sad to see how many people equate the number of bits the processor is based around with anything other than the number of bits that it handles.
32-bit doesn't instantly mean a machine is better than a 16-bit machine. It simply doesn't. The problem is that as certain popular processors evolved (Intel x86 for example), people equated the change from 16 to 32-bit with "better". People who did are just victims (suckers?) of not-so-clever marketing.
Personally, I think a PalmOS based handheld gaming platform is an awful idea, but not because it's 16-bit. I think they have (from what little information is available) included an adequate display, a good video chipset, and a decent OS. I just think it is overpriced.
Incidently, if we're all so worried about 32-bit processors being such a bit deal, why aren't we all upgrading to 64-bit Opterons this week? (maybe because it isn't the big deal you say it is?)
-- Lurgen// Hey, mod me down! I got karma to burn...
These guys just can't win. They get slagged off in the media for not contributing to schools (for not allowing the transfer of licenses, not offering free licenses to charities, etc).
Now they give in, do the right thing, and give the stuff away and they get in trouble for that!
If Microsoft stuff is free, and OSS stuff is free, surely the better product will win in that market sector? Sounds to me like OSS supporters are all-too-aware that their software has a way to go before anybody would choose it over Microsoft if it were free (other than the Germans perhaps...)
Once their prices hit the Internet, they're in the public domain. It would be like posting your prices in the window, and complaining that a car driving past could photograph them.
We all know that bots crawl the web - Google, Altavista, spam-bots... they're all common knowledge. You put information on a website, and it's going to be viewed by an automated process. Surely with that knowledge, it's ridiculous to think you can ban people for using the information you've posted publicly in whatever way they desire.
Perhaps these companies (airlines, computer stores, whatever) need to start offering their services at the price they really mean to sell it for, rather than this stupid haggling they expect from us. Or maybe it's time they focused on quality of service, value-add, etc rather than price wars (which never help anybody in the long term).
Bottom line? If you don't want your competitors seeing your prices, don't make them available to them - this means no junkmail, no spam, no website, no prices in the store window, no prices inside the store, nothing.
The guys from Penny Arcade won, regardless of what Am Greetings thinks...
Thousands of extra eyeballs saw their strip thanks to Slashdot. Even if a tiny percentage of those viewers went to the official site, and a similarly tiny percentage spent some money, I would expect that Penny Arcades page impressions, clickthroughs (they have such amazingly discreet advertisements, other sites could learn a lot from them), and subscriptions have boomed at least a little bit.
Worse for Am Greetings, they failed miserably at supressing the image. It's available to anybody who looks for more than a minute or two, google is returning mirrors to it now - so AG managed to burn up some more customer goodwill without achieving anything positive.
Why bother trying to sue them to get permission to repost the picture? A victory like this can't be awarded by the courts, it takes several million slashdot readers to make such a win possible:)
Congrats to Gabe and Tycho for a top-notch site. I'm not affiliated with it in any way, but I read it just about daily. I hope they gained a lot from this little event.
There's a lot more to it than just recording TV shows. If you are going to the expense of putting a PC into your living room (like I did), you want MPEG4, SVCD, DivX, MP3, DVD playback, and anything else you care to name. You don't want to be tied to a particular vendors lousy support for half the things you want - especially since none of the vendors currently offer anything vaguelly like a mature product.
I built my own system because nobody out there offered an off-the-shelf solution.
I found that the Zalman coolers were a life-saver. The CNPS-6000Cu is extremely heavy, but works perfectly (silent).
The hard drive was my second loudest component, which I replaced with a 60GB Seagate. Seagate introduced fluid bearings with the 60GB model, so anything by them of that size and above is much quieter than the older ones.
Power supplies are a problem though. I have a small Lian Li PC9300 case, which only takes a particular type of PSU. I've yet to find a silent version, but I'm considering modifying it myself to improve it.
I built a system up for exactly this purpose - DVD playback, MP3, TV tuning, Cable-TV tuning, digital VCR, etc. I wasn't happy with the typical DVD player's support for less "mainstream" formats either (such as DivX, MPEG4, SVCD, etc), so I was pretty motivated to find a better solution.
In the end I gave up on the TV tuning part of the project. I ended up with a dead-silent machine that can play almost any sound or video codec with perfect quality, but could not find a decent solution to the TV tuning functionality.
Quality was my first real problem with the TV signal. Even the software supplied with the Leadtek TV-2000XP resulted in lousy picture quality. The UI was awful too! I didn't want a monitor, so I was depending heavily on my TV out support.
The second problem was that the UI was never really intended to be used as a VCR replacement. It's like nobody ever seriously considered that I didn't want a keyboard or mouse (just a remote).
Finally, drivers were buggy, crashes were frequent, and I gave up.
On the other hand, I now have the best DVD player on the market. Picture quality is better than any commercially available DVD player. The digital audio output supports standards that my amp can't begin to decode (Dolby Digital 7.1 is a little too advanced for my amp).
My advice to anybody trying this sort of project is to focus on the achievable first - TV tuning is not yet mature enough to be a viable option.
Buy yourself a Realmagic X-Card, a copy of JovePlayer (easily the best DVD player application in the world, but requires the X-Card), and build the machine. Then look at extending the functionality as the software/hardware matures.
Just go see the movie, and enjoy it for what it is. Where it came from makes for interesting discussion, and how they made it look so cool is worthy of amazement, but that the end of the day it's just entertainment.
I'll see Hulk too, because it looks like fun. I saw Spiderman, and enjoyed it. I've got no interest in seeing it just to mock its heritage (Akira, Ghost in the Machine, Blade Runner, etc).
Tying professionalism and hourly rates together almost negates the first. For me, the first responsability of a consultant is providing advice. Sometimes, that advise will conflict with other peoples opinion. Once in a while, it will totally agravate your current employer. But in my opinion it is the duty of a consultant to put forward the RIGHT answers as he sees it.
One of the benefits of being a consultant is not being tied to the politics of an organisation. You come in, do your thing, and you leave. Stepping on toes isn't anywhere near as dangerous as it is in a full-time role - 3 months is hardly a career.
I'm a consultant myself, and I actually make use of this regularly. Once in a while I have to shoot down some full-time employees idea, but I make sure to do so in such a way as to make it obvious that I'm only interested in the solution, not the politics. Usually, if I present my case properly it is accepted.
Of course, there will always be times when you are over-ruled, and forced to implement a bad solution. Do you do it? Of course you do - you are under contract to deliver the services requested by your employer. But first you make sure that it is clear that you don't agree.
Failing to accept that you won't always be allowed to do what you personally think is best is a fatal flaw in any employee. None of us will have the right answer every time. Every one of us will make bad or stupid choices once in a while. Knowing how to present your answer, and yield when necessary will help you progress and develop. It will also help ensure you don't just get fired on the spot.
Being a geek, and knowing your material are two different things. To assume that a tech can't possibly be qualified or knowledgable in two fields is silly - I teach (although not full-time) both IT related subject and martial arts. I also write semi-professionally for several magazines.
Surely I would not be able to do these things if you were right?
When I was in high school, I had a mathematics teacher who was absolutely brilliant. He was a gifted teacher, a skilled mathematician, and a role-model to many of us. But he studied computing at the same time. And history. He chose not to teach either subject, but certainly could have.
My point is this - anybody who has been to college or university knows the pain and suffering that under-skilled lecturers cause. We spend enourmous amounts of money on our tertiary education, only to find that our programming instructor is actually only capable of teaching physics. That our philosophy teachers know more about computer systems security (unlikely, but hey, why not?). We end up with a sub-standard education.
As a paying customer (aka "student") I think it is a fair thing to expect our teachers to know their material - claiming that it's just too difficult to know both aspects of a difficult subject is not good enough. (my car mechanic doesn't get upset because I expect him to know how to fix both my engine AND transmission!).
The "alternative" is to insist on quality, and never accept that "difficult" is a good enough excuse not to meet these standards.
How about the responsibility of our educators to actually know their material? Surely nobody thinks it appropriate for a college lecturer to be teaching a subject about which he quite obviously knows nothing?
And yes, I realise that most college lecturers are borderline useless, but why encourage it?
My advice to your "friend" would be simple - bugger off and learn your material. When you know more than your students, THEN you can consider teaching.
Actually, I play CS quite a bit (have since it first come out), and even with half a dozen smoke grenades in my field of view my framerate stays well over 60fps (it sits on 99 the rest of the time). I'm not running anything special - not a single component in my system would cost more than a refridgerated case.
But again, I want a quiet machine. One that is 100% reliable, no matter what too.
As for gamers being compared to athletes? Athletes (and any serious professional) know full well that you need the right equipment for the job. Overclocking, while impressive on a technical level, is always going to come a distant second to buying decent gear. For older games like CS, just about any current mid-range PC is plenty.
In my limited overclocking experience, there is a trade-off. You get more performance, less reliability, and a shortened lifespan. If you stuff it up, you get a melted CPU. The performance vs reliability/noise part is the killer for me. If I'm playing a CS tournament (or more likely, BF1942/MOHAA) the last thing I want is a crash/overheat mid-session.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a whole lot more work going into silent computers. Processors and video cards are at the point right now where overclocking only yields benchmark improvements - bumping that chip up 15MHz only gives you a few points in 3DMark, or UT2k3.
For actual use though, it doesn't make any difference. 150fps, instead of 130. Or 0.5 seconds faster load times. Does anybody really care any more?
I'd be a lot more interested in spending money reducing the noise output of my machine. Give me passively cooled power supplies (instead of these 3 fan monsters). Cases designed purely for better noise reduction (Antec Sonata is heading in the right direction).
Having a frozen CPU running 20% faster than it was meant to might win you a few brownie points at a LAN party, but does it actually make any difference? I doubt it.
*shrug* each to their own. I'll be impressed when I see a 3GHz P4 or Athlon running without any noticable noise.
Half the problem here is that we bill for bandwidth in the wrong way. By billing on traffic, we open ourselves to exactly this sort of problem - it would be like billing for water consumption based on pressure (rather than volume).
In the case of network access, it makes far more sense to bill based on access - the size of the pipe, and if necessary the level it can burst to.
The reason ISPs bill per megabyte is so they can bill multiple customers for the same piece of infrastructure... and at the same time, over-subscribe that piece of infrastructure.
Comparing water and bytes is a rather foolish analogy that the ISP business has invested hugely into. Water is a tangible object, whereas bytes cost nothing to create. In most cases, the cost is in providing the infrastructure - once the gear is in place, it doesn't actually cost anything to send a byte of data down it!
Some would argue that we pay by the byte in order to fairly charge for usage - if this were so, then the providers would simply need to offer a range of access levels. Unfortunately for us, it's not in their best interests to do this.
Charging by access speed means that we suddenly introduce a higher quality of service (you can't sell what you don't have, unlike with the current cost-model). This also promotes higher usage, which in turn promotes growth - without growth, most ISP's will never pay off their initial investment.
Strangely enough, paying a fixed fee based on the size of your connection is where the whole thing started. Paying per byte is a relatively recent (several years, but still recent) concept, thought up by greedy providers who realised they can charge many customers for something that is essentially free.
Take a look at the profit levels of some of the bigger providers in your country. Here in Australia, Telstra, Optus and Connect all report multi-million (and in many cases billion) dollar profits. Nobody can tell me that the core connectivity of the Internet isn't currently a profitable business.
Finally, there's the subject of double-billing. Upstream and downstream traffic being billed. I could write for hours on this particular injustice, but let's just consider this for a moment - you get hammered by a worm or hacker, and who gets the bill? The same data passes through the hackers network, generating charges for them. It then turns up at your front door, costing you a fortune too. Both people pay (usually, the hacker gets some poor schmuck to cover the costs though). Worse still, when the connections originate from the same providers networks, they still get charged twice. But I won't rant about this bit just now...
Corporations are notoriously disinterested in Open Source. If they weren't Microsoft, Novell and Apple wouldn't have a leg to stand on (hey, it applies to at least one of them still!).
In my experience, Open Source scares the hell out of corporations.
Besides, business are more interested in solutions that fit into their current systems. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's cheap (TCO and all that). A simple example would be Jabber vs MSN Messenger. Jabber is free (I think), MSN will cost for internal use (soon). Jabber is a whole new product to manage, MSN is just an attribute in Active Directory.
Once you've paid for the software, the overhead is more important in a business case. MSN becomes a breeze to manage, so it is easily rolled out.
I wonder if AOL have considered that sort of thing....
1. Anybody who enables IM for the masses, is going to regret it 2. Anybody who allows IM traffic into and out of their organisation, is going to regret it
That said though...
3. Anybody who uses IM for internal communication only can benefit from it 4. IM (internal) can encourage and facilitate interaction between staff who normally never talk (believe me, I've seen it here) 5. IM can be implemented in less than ONE day (again, I did it here in a matter of hours, including client rollout).
Bottom line? (because it all comes down to money): A few hours of a techs time gave us an in-house communication tool that sees more use than our phones (for short questions between techs). With two helpdesk locations, it has seen a dramatic rise in interaction between the two sites, and a noticable boost in morale.
With the morale issue, I attribute it to a reduced feeling of "being alone". The 1st level support team now "speak" to the 2nd level team regularly via IM - a big improvement in my opinion.
(personally, I'd happily sacrifice a full working day if it yielded just a few conversations between techs who never speak. Or if it saw a few helpdesk calls each week solved faster).
Try using IM in a support environment, where staff don't always have the option of speaking to each other (especially while in a call, or when they are geographically dispersed).
In those situations, IM is really helpful - while taking a call, a tech can run a thought past another staff member, can see if anybody else can reproduce a simple fault, all without interrupting the user.
For those of us in tech support who remember that the user experience is important, little improvements like this can make the difference.
I have successfully implemented IM at a number of large organisations here in Australia.
Microsoft decided ages ago to start charging for the service with the release of Titanium (Exchange 2003), so it's hardly news that IM can be profitable.
Good to hear other vendors are getting involved, but until AOL pull their act together in terms of marketing and security, no corporate IT department in it's right mind would deploy their stuff.
Yeah yeah, it's two words (kinda), but think it through. How many documented vulnerabilities in sendmail can you find? What about Bind?
There's just two core components of many *nix distributions - regardless of what versions or alternatives exist, they don't have such a great history themselves, do they...
Face it - linux is insecure, windows is insecure, my car is insecure, and my left shoelaces are insecure. I try not to lose too much sleep over it.
That every desktop user in the world should move over the FreeBSD, and learn a whole new environment? We'll ignore the fact that Linux (in any of it's variations) is infinitely more difficult for the end-user.
Why is it people like you always miss the point - it's not about brand names or vendors. It's about a bloody tool. A PC is just another tool, and if it can't be used by the people who need it, it's not good enough. Sure, security is important, but what good is a secure computer that only 10% of the population can figure out how to log into?
I'll happily move over to a better OS if it comes along, provided it's actually going to help me do my job in a better way! Until then, forget Linux - it's 5 years behind MS, and probably 10 behind MacOS (and yes, I'm aware OSX is based on BSD, blah blah blah).
I've never been a big Buffy fan. In fact, I would be surprised to learn I've seen more than 10 episodes.
But they've been playing the advertising for the current season every time I look at the TV lately, and I have somehow started to want to watch it. Maybe the advertising works, maybe it's just because she's damn sexy, or maybe it's because I've been impressed by the complicated plots.
My friends all watch it, and I keep hearing about complex plot developments that are tangled not only between episodes, but between seasons.
There's not a lot of worthwhile television on these days. It'd be a shame to see this one go before I have a chance to see it all.
(incidently, whoever canned this series is probably the same maniacal genious who cancelled Futurama - my all-time favorite animated series!)
Surprised? - games have driven the PC hardware market for many years now. CPU manufacturers know this (thus the AMD vs Intel wars). Graphics card manufacturers are almost entirely aimed at the gaming market - business users (in general) don't care about video performance!
Ever since the first graphical cult-games (think Wolftenstein 3D and Doom), hardware sales and growth have both been focused on gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
It's sad to see how many people equate the number of bits the processor is based around with anything other than the number of bits that it handles.
// Hey, mod me down! I got karma to burn...
32-bit doesn't instantly mean a machine is better than a 16-bit machine. It simply doesn't. The problem is that as certain popular processors evolved (Intel x86 for example), people equated the change from 16 to 32-bit with "better". People who did are just victims (suckers?) of not-so-clever marketing.
Personally, I think a PalmOS based handheld gaming platform is an awful idea, but not because it's 16-bit. I think they have (from what little information is available) included an adequate display, a good video chipset, and a decent OS. I just think it is overpriced.
Incidently, if we're all so worried about 32-bit processors being such a bit deal, why aren't we all upgrading to 64-bit Opterons this week? (maybe because it isn't the big deal you say it is?)
-- Lurgen
These guys just can't win. They get slagged off in the media for not contributing to schools (for not allowing the transfer of licenses, not offering free licenses to charities, etc).
Now they give in, do the right thing, and give the stuff away and they get in trouble for that!
If Microsoft stuff is free, and OSS stuff is free, surely the better product will win in that market sector? Sounds to me like OSS supporters are all-too-aware that their software has a way to go before anybody would choose it over Microsoft if it were free (other than the Germans perhaps...)
Once their prices hit the Internet, they're in the public domain. It would be like posting your prices in the window, and complaining that a car driving past could photograph them.
We all know that bots crawl the web - Google, Altavista, spam-bots... they're all common knowledge. You put information on a website, and it's going to be viewed by an automated process. Surely with that knowledge, it's ridiculous to think you can ban people for using the information you've posted publicly in whatever way they desire.
Perhaps these companies (airlines, computer stores, whatever) need to start offering their services at the price they really mean to sell it for, rather than this stupid haggling they expect from us. Or maybe it's time they focused on quality of service, value-add, etc rather than price wars (which never help anybody in the long term).
Bottom line? If you don't want your competitors seeing your prices, don't make them available to them - this means no junkmail, no spam, no website, no prices in the store window, no prices inside the store, nothing.
The guys from Penny Arcade won, regardless of what Am Greetings thinks...
:)
Thousands of extra eyeballs saw their strip thanks to Slashdot. Even if a tiny percentage of those viewers went to the official site, and a similarly tiny percentage spent some money, I would expect that Penny Arcades page impressions, clickthroughs (they have such amazingly discreet advertisements, other sites could learn a lot from them), and subscriptions have boomed at least a little bit.
Worse for Am Greetings, they failed miserably at supressing the image. It's available to anybody who looks for more than a minute or two, google is returning mirrors to it now - so AG managed to burn up some more customer goodwill without achieving anything positive.
Why bother trying to sue them to get permission to repost the picture? A victory like this can't be awarded by the courts, it takes several million slashdot readers to make such a win possible
Congrats to Gabe and Tycho for a top-notch site. I'm not affiliated with it in any way, but I read it just about daily. I hope they gained a lot from this little event.
There's a lot more to it than just recording TV shows. If you are going to the expense of putting a PC into your living room (like I did), you want MPEG4, SVCD, DivX, MP3, DVD playback, and anything else you care to name. You don't want to be tied to a particular vendors lousy support for half the things you want - especially since none of the vendors currently offer anything vaguelly like a mature product.
I built my own system because nobody out there offered an off-the-shelf solution.
I found that the Zalman coolers were a life-saver. The CNPS-6000Cu is extremely heavy, but works perfectly (silent).
The hard drive was my second loudest component, which I replaced with a 60GB Seagate. Seagate introduced fluid bearings with the 60GB model, so anything by them of that size and above is much quieter than the older ones.
Power supplies are a problem though. I have a small Lian Li PC9300 case, which only takes a particular type of PSU. I've yet to find a silent version, but I'm considering modifying it myself to improve it.
I built a system up for exactly this purpose - DVD playback, MP3, TV tuning, Cable-TV tuning, digital VCR, etc. I wasn't happy with the typical DVD player's support for less "mainstream" formats either (such as DivX, MPEG4, SVCD, etc), so I was pretty motivated to find a better solution.
In the end I gave up on the TV tuning part of the project. I ended up with a dead-silent machine that can play almost any sound or video codec with perfect quality, but could not find a decent solution to the TV tuning functionality.
Quality was my first real problem with the TV signal. Even the software supplied with the Leadtek TV-2000XP resulted in lousy picture quality. The UI was awful too! I didn't want a monitor, so I was depending heavily on my TV out support.
The second problem was that the UI was never really intended to be used as a VCR replacement. It's like nobody ever seriously considered that I didn't want a keyboard or mouse (just a remote).
Finally, drivers were buggy, crashes were frequent, and I gave up.
On the other hand, I now have the best DVD player on the market. Picture quality is better than any commercially available DVD player. The digital audio output supports standards that my amp can't begin to decode (Dolby Digital 7.1 is a little too advanced for my amp).
My advice to anybody trying this sort of project is to focus on the achievable first - TV tuning is not yet mature enough to be a viable option.
Buy yourself a Realmagic X-Card, a copy of JovePlayer (easily the best DVD player application in the world, but requires the X-Card), and build the machine. Then look at extending the functionality as the software/hardware matures.
Lurgen.
The most important bits...
RealMagic X-Card
Jove Player
Zalman CNPS-6000Cu (silence is golden)
Seagate 60GB hard disk (nice and quiet)
Just go see the movie, and enjoy it for what it is. Where it came from makes for interesting discussion, and how they made it look so cool is worthy of amazement, but that the end of the day it's just entertainment.
I'll see Hulk too, because it looks like fun. I saw Spiderman, and enjoyed it. I've got no interest in seeing it just to mock its heritage (Akira, Ghost in the Machine, Blade Runner, etc).
Tying professionalism and hourly rates together almost negates the first. For me, the first responsability of a consultant is providing advice. Sometimes, that advise will conflict with other peoples opinion. Once in a while, it will totally agravate your current employer. But in my opinion it is the duty of a consultant to put forward the RIGHT answers as he sees it.
One of the benefits of being a consultant is not being tied to the politics of an organisation. You come in, do your thing, and you leave. Stepping on toes isn't anywhere near as dangerous as it is in a full-time role - 3 months is hardly a career.
I'm a consultant myself, and I actually make use of this regularly. Once in a while I have to shoot down some full-time employees idea, but I make sure to do so in such a way as to make it obvious that I'm only interested in the solution, not the politics. Usually, if I present my case properly it is accepted.
Of course, there will always be times when you are over-ruled, and forced to implement a bad solution. Do you do it? Of course you do - you are under contract to deliver the services requested by your employer. But first you make sure that it is clear that you don't agree.
Failing to accept that you won't always be allowed to do what you personally think is best is a fatal flaw in any employee. None of us will have the right answer every time. Every one of us will make bad or stupid choices once in a while. Knowing how to present your answer, and yield when necessary will help you progress and develop. It will also help ensure you don't just get fired on the spot.
Lurgen.
http://www.lurgen.com/
Being a geek, and knowing your material are two different things. To assume that a tech can't possibly be qualified or knowledgable in two fields is silly - I teach (although not full-time) both IT related subject and martial arts. I also write semi-professionally for several magazines.
Surely I would not be able to do these things if you were right?
When I was in high school, I had a mathematics teacher who was absolutely brilliant. He was a gifted teacher, a skilled mathematician, and a role-model to many of us. But he studied computing at the same time. And history. He chose not to teach either subject, but certainly could have.
My point is this - anybody who has been to college or university knows the pain and suffering that under-skilled lecturers cause. We spend enourmous amounts of money on our tertiary education, only to find that our programming instructor is actually only capable of teaching physics. That our philosophy teachers know more about computer systems security (unlikely, but hey, why not?). We end up with a sub-standard education.
As a paying customer (aka "student") I think it is a fair thing to expect our teachers to know their material - claiming that it's just too difficult to know both aspects of a difficult subject is not good enough. (my car mechanic doesn't get upset because I expect him to know how to fix both my engine AND transmission!).
The "alternative" is to insist on quality, and never accept that "difficult" is a good enough excuse not to meet these standards.
How about the responsibility of our educators to actually know their material? Surely nobody thinks it appropriate for a college lecturer to be teaching a subject about which he quite obviously knows nothing?
And yes, I realise that most college lecturers are borderline useless, but why encourage it?
My advice to your "friend" would be simple - bugger off and learn your material. When you know more than your students, THEN you can consider teaching.
Actually, I play CS quite a bit (have since it first come out), and even with half a dozen smoke grenades in my field of view my framerate stays well over 60fps (it sits on 99 the rest of the time). I'm not running anything special - not a single component in my system would cost more than a refridgerated case.
But again, I want a quiet machine. One that is 100% reliable, no matter what too.
As for gamers being compared to athletes? Athletes (and any serious professional) know full well that you need the right equipment for the job. Overclocking, while impressive on a technical level, is always going to come a distant second to buying decent gear. For older games like CS, just about any current mid-range PC is plenty.
In my limited overclocking experience, there is a trade-off. You get more performance, less reliability, and a shortened lifespan. If you stuff it up, you get a melted CPU. The performance vs reliability/noise part is the killer for me. If I'm playing a CS tournament (or more likely, BF1942/MOHAA) the last thing I want is a crash/overheat mid-session.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a whole lot more work going into silent computers. Processors and video cards are at the point right now where overclocking only yields benchmark improvements - bumping that chip up 15MHz only gives you a few points in 3DMark, or UT2k3.
For actual use though, it doesn't make any difference. 150fps, instead of 130. Or 0.5 seconds faster load times. Does anybody really care any more?
I'd be a lot more interested in spending money reducing the noise output of my machine. Give me passively cooled power supplies (instead of these 3 fan monsters). Cases designed purely for better noise reduction (Antec Sonata is heading in the right direction).
Having a frozen CPU running 20% faster than it was meant to might win you a few brownie points at a LAN party, but does it actually make any difference? I doubt it.
*shrug* each to their own. I'll be impressed when I see a 3GHz P4 or Athlon running without any noticable noise.
Half the problem here is that we bill for bandwidth in the wrong way. By billing on traffic, we open ourselves to exactly this sort of problem - it would be like billing for water consumption based on pressure (rather than volume).
In the case of network access, it makes far more sense to bill based on access - the size of the pipe, and if necessary the level it can burst to.
The reason ISPs bill per megabyte is so they can bill multiple customers for the same piece of infrastructure... and at the same time, over-subscribe that piece of infrastructure.
Comparing water and bytes is a rather foolish analogy that the ISP business has invested hugely into. Water is a tangible object, whereas bytes cost nothing to create. In most cases, the cost is in providing the infrastructure - once the gear is in place, it doesn't actually cost anything to send a byte of data down it!
Some would argue that we pay by the byte in order to fairly charge for usage - if this were so, then the providers would simply need to offer a range of access levels. Unfortunately for us, it's not in their best interests to do this.
Charging by access speed means that we suddenly introduce a higher quality of service (you can't sell what you don't have, unlike with the current cost-model). This also promotes higher usage, which in turn promotes growth - without growth, most ISP's will never pay off their initial investment.
Strangely enough, paying a fixed fee based on the size of your connection is where the whole thing started. Paying per byte is a relatively recent (several years, but still recent) concept, thought up by greedy providers who realised they can charge many customers for something that is essentially free.
Take a look at the profit levels of some of the bigger providers in your country. Here in Australia, Telstra, Optus and Connect all report multi-million (and in many cases billion) dollar profits. Nobody can tell me that the core connectivity of the Internet isn't currently a profitable business.
Finally, there's the subject of double-billing. Upstream and downstream traffic being billed. I could write for hours on this particular injustice, but let's just consider this for a moment - you get hammered by a worm or hacker, and who gets the bill? The same data passes through the hackers network, generating charges for them. It then turns up at your front door, costing you a fortune too. Both people pay (usually, the hacker gets some poor schmuck to cover the costs though). Worse still, when the connections originate from the same providers networks, they still get charged twice. But I won't rant about this bit just now...
They (MS) have integrated IM into existing products - take a look at Exchange 2000.
I think you might be mistaken...
Corporations are notoriously disinterested in Open Source. If they weren't Microsoft, Novell and Apple wouldn't have a leg to stand on (hey, it applies to at least one of them still!).
In my experience, Open Source scares the hell out of corporations.
Besides, business are more interested in solutions that fit into their current systems. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's cheap (TCO and all that). A simple example would be Jabber vs MSN Messenger. Jabber is free (I think), MSN will cost for internal use (soon). Jabber is a whole new product to manage, MSN is just an attribute in Active Directory.
Once you've paid for the software, the overhead is more important in a business case. MSN becomes a breeze to manage, so it is easily rolled out.
I wonder if AOL have considered that sort of thing....
A couple of thoughts on this...
1. Anybody who enables IM for the masses, is going to regret it
2. Anybody who allows IM traffic into and out of their organisation, is going to regret it
That said though...
3. Anybody who uses IM for internal communication only can benefit from it
4. IM (internal) can encourage and facilitate interaction between staff who normally never talk (believe me, I've seen it here)
5. IM can be implemented in less than ONE day (again, I did it here in a matter of hours, including client rollout).
Bottom line? (because it all comes down to money):
A few hours of a techs time gave us an in-house communication tool that sees more use than our phones (for short questions between techs). With two helpdesk locations, it has seen a dramatic rise in interaction between the two sites, and a noticable boost in morale.
With the morale issue, I attribute it to a reduced feeling of "being alone". The 1st level support team now "speak" to the 2nd level team regularly via IM - a big improvement in my opinion.
(personally, I'd happily sacrifice a full working day if it yielded just a few conversations between techs who never speak. Or if it saw a few helpdesk calls each week solved faster).
Try using IM in a support environment, where staff don't always have the option of speaking to each other (especially while in a call, or when they are geographically dispersed).
In those situations, IM is really helpful - while taking a call, a tech can run a thought past another staff member, can see if anybody else can reproduce a simple fault, all without interrupting the user.
For those of us in tech support who remember that the user experience is important, little improvements like this can make the difference.
First post and all, but....
I have successfully implemented IM at a number of large organisations here in Australia.
Microsoft decided ages ago to start charging for the service with the release of Titanium (Exchange 2003), so it's hardly news that IM can be profitable.
Good to hear other vendors are getting involved, but until AOL pull their act together in terms of marketing and security, no corporate IT department in it's right mind would deploy their stuff.
I've got one word for you buddy: "sendmail"
Yeah yeah, it's two words (kinda), but think it through. How many documented vulnerabilities in sendmail can you find? What about Bind?
There's just two core components of many *nix distributions - regardless of what versions or alternatives exist, they don't have such a great history themselves, do they...
Face it - linux is insecure, windows is insecure, my car is insecure, and my left shoelaces are insecure. I try not to lose too much sleep over it.
Nah, the psycho readers will fill in the blanks, and blast Microsoft for being unworthy.
In tomorrow's headlines though, Microsoft guilty of WinXP Recovery Console SCAM!
That's right folks, Microsoft deliberately mislead us about this so-called "vulnerability". There never WAS a vulnerability, was there Mr Gates?!?
That every desktop user in the world should move over the FreeBSD, and learn a whole new environment? We'll ignore the fact that Linux (in any of it's variations) is infinitely more difficult for the end-user.
Why is it people like you always miss the point - it's not about brand names or vendors. It's about a bloody tool. A PC is just another tool, and if it can't be used by the people who need it, it's not good enough. Sure, security is important, but what good is a secure computer that only 10% of the population can figure out how to log into?
I'll happily move over to a better OS if it comes along, provided it's actually going to help me do my job in a better way! Until then, forget Linux - it's 5 years behind MS, and probably 10 behind MacOS (and yes, I'm aware OSX is based on BSD, blah blah blah).
I'm one of those nutters who taped every single Futurama episode that went to air in Australia.
I actually plan on buying the DVD sets for Buffy when I next get some spare cash.
I've never been a big Buffy fan. In fact, I would be surprised to learn I've seen more than 10 episodes.
But they've been playing the advertising for the current season every time I look at the TV lately, and I have somehow started to want to watch it. Maybe the advertising works, maybe it's just because she's damn sexy, or maybe it's because I've been impressed by the complicated plots.
My friends all watch it, and I keep hearing about complex plot developments that are tangled not only between episodes, but between seasons.
There's not a lot of worthwhile television on these days. It'd be a shame to see this one go before I have a chance to see it all.
(incidently, whoever canned this series is probably the same maniacal genious who cancelled Futurama - my all-time favorite animated series!)
Surprised? - games have driven the PC hardware market for many years now. CPU manufacturers know this (thus the AMD vs Intel wars). Graphics card manufacturers are almost entirely aimed at the gaming market - business users (in general) don't care about video performance!
Ever since the first graphical cult-games (think Wolftenstein 3D and Doom), hardware sales and growth have both been focused on gaming.