You can see jaggies with 600dpi? I call bullshit. If you print on a 600dpi printer at 600dpi and you don't send jaggies to the printer, you will never see jaggies. I've looked at 600dpi printouts under a lab microscope, and there are no jaggies. On a 600 dpi printer, you will get more smearing than on a 1200 dpi printer, but you won't ever get jaggies from the printer.
Operational excellence is not innovation. Quit diluting the meaning of words. Innovation means "introducing something new". If Dell introduced a different, cheaper way to put together computers, it would be innovation. If they found a cheaper supplier, it's good business but it's not innovation.
Anyway, it's not Dell who lowered prices, but rather the chip industry. They are the actual innovators here -- chip density increased more than 10-fold in the last 15 or so years, which is the sole reason for price reductions. If a processor and motherboard combo still cost $500 (which is what I paid in 1995), Dell would still be building $1000 computers.
Re:Current HDD prices...
on
Basics of RAID
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· Score: 0, Troll
I've never heard of a virus corrupting data. I think that's a lot less common these days than hard drive failures.
Cheap parts - at the prices they get them - don't grow on trees.
They don't grow on trees, they are manufactured in China/Taiwan/Korea. With Dell's volumes, they have no difficulty in obtaining them.
They almost singlehandedly turned the mass-market computer industry into something approaching Walmart.
The industry has been heading in that direction for the past 20 years or so. Dell's only achievement is finding a decent balance between price and quality.
A computer and monitor from a known supplier (ie, not some dipshit in his garage) for $350 isn't cheap?
It's cheap, it's not particularly creative or amazing given their volumes. Not to mention this would be a deeply-discounted promotional price which you would only get if you wait for a couple of months for a good combination of coupons and/or rebates. If you buy stuff at their regular prices (like most people end up doing), you won't save any money over any of their competitors.
If it were that easy, they wouldn't have increased their marketshare ridiculously over the last 5+ years, crippling Compaq, Gateway, and HP in the process
They got lucky. Part of the reason they are successful is because they never innovate and spend as little as possible on engineering and R&D.
Smart people are just that -- smart people. Visionaries are those who significantly advance the state of the art. There is quite a difference there. I'm sure there are quite a few smart plumbers out there, but how many of them can claim to have revolutionized plumbing?
I disagree, If you are good, boring business apps are the last thing you should worry about.
The low demand for CS Masters and PhD graduates is rather telling, in my opinion. Most companies that do any type of R&D seem to prefer to hire people with engineering backgrounds, such as EEs (and usually require at least an M.S.). Care to name a few companies which have significant CS R&D labs? There's Microsoft, and a few walking dead like SGI, HP, and Sun. They are all rather unappealing right now.
The new guy is pretty much the same type as Carly (though much less educated). He is a former salesman whose only claim to fame was making NCR slightly more profitable during his two-year stint there. You can obviously tell he was picked by the same idiots who picked Carly.
Dell doesn't do anything creative. They buy cheap parts and build cheap computers with them on a large scale. They have thinner margins than some competitors, but they make it up in volume and crappy support. It's not like their prices are particularly low or anything (unless they have a good combination of rebates, which can only be redeemed using small claims court).
Nothing particularly creative, it's a very straightforward and unimaginative approach that is mainly successful due to the general lack of innovation in the computer industry.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself
I'm not worried about him, I'm more worried about my own ass. If even large corporations don't need CS visionaries anymore, then CS is no longer a hot field. Thus, your main choices for a job are: coding boring business apps all day, or supporting boring and poorly written business apps all day. Real CS jobs (ones which depend on talent, rather than a "skillset" of buzzwords) are getting very difficult to come by.
Here's some advice: avoid working for cheapskates. If someone doesn't want to pay for the right tool for the job, they are extremely cheap and will probably screw you over. Surely the guy will save more than the $2000 it costs to buy a Mac from automation. Last I checked, windows doesn't have anything equivalent to AppleScript, at least not for controlling graphical apps.
12V electrolyses water just fine. You prevent it by sealing the connectors. The Prius uses something like 96V or more for its engines and probably steps it down for some of the accessories and such.
If you actually understood what the article was saying, you would have noticed that the only thing mentioned was that EPA might have expressed interest. It never says they even looked at it. As far as Ricoh, they won the competition simply because Ricoh liked the project, not because it's a workable idea. You think they have engineers sitting there evaluating project proposals?
The only efficiency figures in that article were some rough estimators from the students, but I really doubt they know enough of the relevant physics and thermodynamics to estimate efficiency correctly. It doesn't take much brains to stick a peltier to a couple of heatsinks and call it an air conditioner. It's considerably harder to measure its efficiency and compare it to that of a car system.
Well, not to mention that in most cars the compressor is just hooked to the engine drivebelt with a magnetic clutch, so you don't need a more powerful alternator or a motor to drive it. Although some high-performance cars do run it off the alternator to save on friction when it's turned off.
I agree.. for those who wern't born with comp skills.. stay the fuck away.
Or go to the library and read one or two computer books/magazines. If you buy any big-ticket item without doing research, you will most likely be ripped off.
There are a few reasons: 1. It's a hassle and a bureaucratic nightmare. It's easier to get one purchase order approved than 100 different ones. 2. It's more expensive. You don't get any volume discounts. You can't shop around and find the best deal if you need the system tomorrow. 3. It's hard to support. If you replace 100 machines one at a time, you will end up with 100 completely different machines. That means you can no longer use a single image for all of them. 4. Users get very pissed off when their computer fails and they have to wait for a replacement. It's better to prevent failures than to deal with them.
Well, OK. Change "deserve to be ripped off" to "can expect to be ripped off". The salesperson's job these days is to make sure you buy the most expensive, high-margin item you can afford. This isn't just true for computers, it's true for cars, stereos, and just about anything that costs more than $100.
As far as email viruses: they aren't a problem if you don't use Outlook and MSIE, don't open funny-looking attachments, and use an antivirus/antispyware program. This is something every computer user should be aware of, just like car owners know they need to change the oil once in a while.
First, that 8kbps codec will actually eat up about 50kbps or more once you factor in network overhead (you'll send LOTS of short packets). Second, you will end up with very choppy audio if you actually try to use the entire channel -- 70% of capacity is probably the absolute maximum you can use without problems. Third, don't forget that it's 50kbps both ways. Finally, wi-fi is a license-free environment, so your phone system could easily be brought down by any nearby access point, cordless phone, or microwave oven.
These factors basically mean you cannot have a wi-fi phone system that's as reliable as a wired phone or even a cellphone. Combine that with the fact that businesses generally have little or no need for wireless phones, and you've got the recipe for a non-starter.
I thought Peltiers would require a huge amount of current to do as much cooling as a car A/C system delivers.
The car's electrical system is not suited to supplying significant amounts of power. A typical alternator tops out at about a kilowatt of power (80A or so). Due to the low voltage, ridiculously large currents are necessary.
Of course, a peltier is much less efficient than a compressor system. A compressor typically has a coefficient of performance (COP) of around 3, meaning that it removes 3 units of heat for every unit of supplied work. For peltiers, this value is around 0.4, which is a huge difference. Thus, the peltier would consume about 7x more energy to supply the same cooling capacity. This is the main reason cars don't use peltier A/Cs.
Migration to Wifi? Here's someone who doesn't know what the fuck he/she is talking about. For the record, IP phones are mostly getting deployed in the enterprise, as cost-effective replacements for legacy PBX systems. A wifi phone sounds like a completely useless idea for most applications, especially considering that Wifi only has the capacity to support maybe 10 concurrent phone calls on one channel and has no QoS.
Colleges don't get any of your property taxes, and their computers are paid for directly by the students, often with a separate IT fee. The older computers often go to departments which don't have enough grant money to afford newer ones. If you go to a university surplus auction, you probably won't find anything faster than a P-II.
Not to mention that new computers actually end up costing less, because they do not require as much repairs and attention from the IT people. Fans, power supplies, and hard drives start to crap out in massive quantities after a couple of years and are not very economical to replace when there are hundreds of machines.
As far as the best buy thing: stupid people deserve to get ripped off. If you don't know anything about computers, you probably shouldn't be buying one.
Because of overall machine architecture. Crappy architecture breeds crappy hardware design. Crappy hardware design means hardware craps out more often. Crapped out hardware leads to a frustrating user experience.
You have no clue what you are talking about. How the hell can processor architecture influence hardware reliability? The only people who know what it even looks like is Intel, compiler writers, and OS programmers. Nobody else needs to deal with the instruction set. The only real downside is that compilers are harder to write, but who cares about that?
You have it completely backwards. If all their profit comes from a single, staid line of business, they had better invest in branching out while they still have a decent stream of income, or else their demise is only a matter of time.
There are entire companies whose only business is printers. Ever hear of Lexmark? Or Xerox? In fact, having only one line of business is often a good thing, because the company becomes more focused and delivers better products. As far as R&D is concerned: it's a matter of balance. You don't want to do too much R&D (it eats into profits) and you don't want to do too little (competition). You also don't want to do R&D in areas that are unlikely to contribute to the product line.
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I think engaging in cyberterrorism is not a very good tactic, unless you want to spend a few years at a certain military base in Cuba.
You can see jaggies with 600dpi? I call bullshit. If you print on a 600dpi printer at 600dpi and you don't send jaggies to the printer, you will never see jaggies. I've looked at 600dpi printouts under a lab microscope, and there are no jaggies. On a 600 dpi printer, you will get more smearing than on a 1200 dpi printer, but you won't ever get jaggies from the printer.
Operational excellence is not innovation. Quit diluting the meaning of words. Innovation means "introducing something new". If Dell introduced a different, cheaper way to put together computers, it would be innovation. If they found a cheaper supplier, it's good business but it's not innovation.
Anyway, it's not Dell who lowered prices, but rather the chip industry. They are the actual innovators here -- chip density increased more than 10-fold in the last 15 or so years, which is the sole reason for price reductions. If a processor and motherboard combo still cost $500 (which is what I paid in 1995), Dell would still be building $1000 computers.
I've never heard of a virus corrupting data. I think that's a lot less common these days than hard drive failures.
Cheap parts - at the prices they get them - don't grow on trees.
They don't grow on trees, they are manufactured in China/Taiwan/Korea. With Dell's volumes, they have no difficulty in obtaining them.
They almost singlehandedly turned the mass-market computer industry into something approaching Walmart.
The industry has been heading in that direction for the past 20 years or so. Dell's only achievement is finding a decent balance between price and quality.
A computer and monitor from a known supplier (ie, not some dipshit in his garage) for $350 isn't cheap?
It's cheap, it's not particularly creative or amazing given their volumes. Not to mention this would be a deeply-discounted promotional price which you would only get if you wait for a couple of months for a good combination of coupons and/or rebates. If you buy stuff at their regular prices (like most people end up doing), you won't save any money over any of their competitors.
If it were that easy, they wouldn't have increased their marketshare ridiculously over the last 5+ years, crippling Compaq, Gateway, and HP in the process
They got lucky. Part of the reason they are successful is because they never innovate and spend as little as possible on engineering and R&D.
True. I honestly can't think of any others, though. And who knows, IBM might just pull another HP -- they've already done some of that in Europe.
Smart people are just that -- smart people. Visionaries are those who significantly advance the state of the art. There is quite a difference there. I'm sure there are quite a few smart plumbers out there, but how many of them can claim to have revolutionized plumbing?
I disagree, If you are good, boring business apps are the last thing you should worry about.
The low demand for CS Masters and PhD graduates is rather telling, in my opinion. Most companies that do any type of R&D seem to prefer to hire people with engineering backgrounds, such as EEs (and usually require at least an M.S.). Care to name a few companies which have significant CS R&D labs? There's Microsoft, and a few walking dead like SGI, HP, and Sun. They are all rather unappealing right now.
The new guy is pretty much the same type as Carly (though much less educated). He is a former salesman whose only claim to fame was making NCR slightly more profitable during his two-year stint there. You can obviously tell he was picked by the same idiots who picked Carly.
Dell doesn't do anything creative. They buy cheap parts and build cheap computers with them on a large scale. They have thinner margins than some competitors, but they make it up in volume and crappy support. It's not like their prices are particularly low or anything (unless they have a good combination of rebates, which can only be redeemed using small claims court).
Nothing particularly creative, it's a very straightforward and unimaginative approach that is mainly successful due to the general lack of innovation in the computer industry.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself
I'm not worried about him, I'm more worried about my own ass. If even large corporations don't need CS visionaries anymore, then CS is no longer a hot field. Thus, your main choices for a job are: coding boring business apps all day, or supporting boring and poorly written business apps all day. Real CS jobs (ones which depend on talent, rather than a "skillset" of buzzwords) are getting very difficult to come by.
Try Voxee.com. They have very cheap prices and excellent quality, even to foreign destinations.
Here's some advice: avoid working for cheapskates. If someone doesn't want to pay for the right tool for the job, they are extremely cheap and will probably screw you over. Surely the guy will save more than the $2000 it costs to buy a Mac from automation. Last I checked, windows doesn't have anything equivalent to AppleScript, at least not for controlling graphical apps.
12V electrolyses water just fine. You prevent it by sealing the connectors. The Prius uses something like 96V or more for its engines and probably steps it down for some of the accessories and such.
If you actually understood what the article was saying, you would have noticed that the only thing mentioned was that EPA might have expressed interest. It never says they even looked at it. As far as Ricoh, they won the competition simply because Ricoh liked the project, not because it's a workable idea. You think they have engineers sitting there evaluating project proposals?
The only efficiency figures in that article were some rough estimators from the students, but I really doubt they know enough of the relevant physics and thermodynamics to estimate efficiency correctly. It doesn't take much brains to stick a peltier to a couple of heatsinks and call it an air conditioner. It's considerably harder to measure its efficiency and compare it to that of a car system.
Well, not to mention that in most cars the compressor is just hooked to the engine drivebelt with a magnetic clutch, so you don't need a more powerful alternator or a motor to drive it. Although some high-performance cars do run it off the alternator to save on friction when it's turned off.
I agree.. for those who wern't born with comp skills.. stay the fuck away.
Or go to the library and read one or two computer books/magazines. If you buy any big-ticket item without doing research, you will most likely be ripped off.
There are a few reasons:
1. It's a hassle and a bureaucratic nightmare. It's easier to get one purchase order approved than 100 different ones.
2. It's more expensive. You don't get any volume discounts. You can't shop around and find the best deal if you need the system tomorrow.
3. It's hard to support. If you replace 100 machines one at a time, you will end up with 100 completely different machines. That means you can no longer use a single image for all of them.
4. Users get very pissed off when their computer fails and they have to wait for a replacement. It's better to prevent failures than to deal with them.
Well, OK. Change "deserve to be ripped off" to "can expect to be ripped off". The salesperson's job these days is to make sure you buy the most expensive, high-margin item you can afford. This isn't just true for computers, it's true for cars, stereos, and just about anything that costs more than $100.
As far as email viruses: they aren't a problem if you don't use Outlook and MSIE, don't open funny-looking attachments, and use an antivirus/antispyware program. This is something every computer user should be aware of, just like car owners know they need to change the oil once in a while.
First, that 8kbps codec will actually eat up about 50kbps or more once you factor in network overhead (you'll send LOTS of short packets). Second, you will end up with very choppy audio if you actually try to use the entire channel -- 70% of capacity is probably the absolute maximum you can use without problems. Third, don't forget that it's 50kbps both ways. Finally, wi-fi is a license-free environment, so your phone system could easily be brought down by any nearby access point, cordless phone, or microwave oven.
These factors basically mean you cannot have a wi-fi phone system that's as reliable as a wired phone or even a cellphone. Combine that with the fact that businesses generally have little or no need for wireless phones, and you've got the recipe for a non-starter.
I thought Peltiers would require a huge amount of current to do as much cooling as a car A/C system delivers.
The car's electrical system is not suited to supplying significant amounts of power. A typical alternator tops out at about a kilowatt of power (80A or so). Due to the low voltage, ridiculously large currents are necessary.
Of course, a peltier is much less efficient than a compressor system. A compressor typically has a coefficient of performance (COP) of around 3, meaning that it removes 3 units of heat for every unit of supplied work. For peltiers, this value is around 0.4, which is a huge difference. Thus, the peltier would consume about 7x more energy to supply the same cooling capacity. This is the main reason cars don't use peltier A/Cs.
Migration to Wifi? Here's someone who doesn't know what the fuck he/she is talking about. For the record, IP phones are mostly getting deployed in the enterprise, as cost-effective replacements for legacy PBX systems. A wifi phone sounds like a completely useless idea for most applications, especially considering that Wifi only has the capacity to support maybe 10 concurrent phone calls on one channel and has no QoS.
Colleges don't get any of your property taxes, and their computers are paid for directly by the students, often with a separate IT fee. The older computers often go to departments which don't have enough grant money to afford newer ones. If you go to a university surplus auction, you probably won't find anything faster than a P-II.
Not to mention that new computers actually end up costing less, because they do not require as much repairs and attention from the IT people. Fans, power supplies, and hard drives start to crap out in massive quantities after a couple of years and are not very economical to replace when there are hundreds of machines.
As far as the best buy thing: stupid people deserve to get ripped off. If you don't know anything about computers, you probably shouldn't be buying one.
Because of overall machine architecture. Crappy architecture breeds crappy hardware design. Crappy hardware design means hardware craps out more often. Crapped out hardware leads to a frustrating user experience.
You have no clue what you are talking about. How the hell can processor architecture influence hardware reliability? The only people who know what it even looks like is Intel, compiler writers, and OS programmers. Nobody else needs to deal with the instruction set. The only real downside is that compilers are harder to write, but who cares about that?
You have it completely backwards. If all their profit comes from a single, staid line of business, they had better invest in branching out while they still have a decent stream of income, or else their demise is only a matter of time.
There are entire companies whose only business is printers. Ever hear of Lexmark? Or Xerox? In fact, having only one line of business is often a good thing, because the company becomes more focused and delivers better products. As far as R&D is concerned: it's a matter of balance. You don't want to do too much R&D (it eats into profits) and you don't want to do too little (competition). You also don't want to do R&D in areas that are unlikely to contribute to the product line.