Doesn't the Moon treaty basically say that the riches of outerspace belongs to all in the human race? Aka, why its not been economically viable to set-up operations on the moon because which ever country would would ahve to share the resources with the rest of the world...
I think it was Hitcock that said he'd never make a movie longer than the human bladder could control. The Extended Edition TTT is supposed to have like 43 minutes of additional scenes in it. That is a lot of scenes to be cut, and several of the scenes in Fellowship should have been kept, but I remember thinking five times in Fellowship, "Okay its going to end now"...and no it went on another 20 minutes, "Okay its going to end here", then another 20 minutes." Okay I'm going to the bathroom now", came back and still had another 45 minutes left.
Many don't use OSS because its "better", but because its "Just as good as/does everything I need" and "Cheaper". My own company uses phpProjekt for our intranet, basically an online Outlook and more. Cost? We used an old PIII 550 with 256MB of ram with FreeBSD installed. Granted we have a total of 11 employees, so the load on the server is not that great, but it works for us.
We do use MS Office for OSX and Macs for our dektops, but our sectaries now have those Bluebarry G3's for everyday office use and they run Office and Safari like a champ and they are 5 years old and we plan to get at least another two years out of them barring any major hardware failure.
Why not Open Office? Well we already have are licenses and V.X doesn't look to be replaced anytime soon and at the time a majority of our Office software was purchases, OO was no where near mature enough to use.
I do see linux being adopted on an enterprise desktop by 2010. Why? Linux is the only system which per-unit licenses actually decreases by the number of units installed upon. Large enterprises already has the IT support staff in place to do internal support.
Its SMB's that one won't see Linux running anytime soon. I have switched two medium sized companies to Linux from Windows, however they are progressive and had Linux in their server rooms since 2000 and the needed IT staff to manage the deployement. Most businesses do not have that level of expirtese.
I worked for a company in the 1990's that was doing some pretty damned advance RPV's, now called UAV's and I can say that its proably not the first, and not the most advanced. DARPA spent some major bucks on this research into UAV's, enough so that the Raptor and JSF are stop gap measures. Neither will be produced in extremely large numbers. They are designed to fill the air frame void from 30 year old planes until the UAV's are ready for massive use.
I can see where having a root superuser is a critical weak point in Unix from a design stand point. But its no different than hacking an account with "administrator" access in Windows. Generally speaking, it much harder to do so on *iux enviroments unles you have someone that knows what they are doing.
However, most geek worry about holes in code, but those of us in security know that over 80% of "hacking" jobs are inside jobs. Some angered sysadmin gives out the password to a friend or competitor for $$$. Or, my favorite, someone calls, says they forgot their password, and the help desk or someone gives it to them. That kind of security holes are platform independant...
Well, since our application are all written in PERL, PHP, and PostgreSQL, they should work on Linux, however over 70% of our deployments are NOT on Linux, mostly Sun or *BSD...
a mac user really need to run Linux on their native unix box? I switched from Linux to OS X because I had the same development ablities as on linux and had commerical software support.
First off, you don't need a 128MB vid card for a server. Most have 2MB intergrated RAGE ATI cards. Old as dirt, stable, and works.
Next, what are you uses? I mean most small business work groups I have seen might store larger Powerpoint, excel and other files. It takes them a while to fill up dual 160GB hd's in a raid 1.
Still, for our company we purchased 1.6TB Xraid's from apple with Fiber cards. Why? well we are doing a lot of work with FCP and need the quick access times that come with fiber vs. ethernet.
If you live in one of the top 100 markets (largest cities) you will have number portablity. In smaller area's, say springfield MO where I am, it will be another 6 months to a year.
Pisses my off because of Cingular's crappy switch from TDMA to GSM has cost me at least one contract because of their network down time. It was less than 45 days at that point until number portablitiy was to take place, so I went to Alltel and they told me it will be at least May, if not next october. I heard that from other reps of other companies as well. So I broke my contract with Cingular anyway and went to Alltel.
I switched my desktop to Linux in 1999. I had problems with my modem, recycled a jumper based ISA 33.6k, my Ethernet card (which was an older ISA model as well), my sound card STILL will not work under Lunux, scanner didn't work, printer didn't work, but I had Linux OS, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, and a native Unix-like platform for LAMPS development.
This served me well until last year when it came time for me to replace my old WIn 98 laptop. I purchased an iBook. I had my *iux enviroment plus a majority of my hardware just worked. Plugged in the USB cable and my scanner worked, printer worked, etc. Bottom-line, Apple beat Linux at the *iux desktop. Half of the developers I know are now carrying iBooks or Powerbooks to confrences and bought iMacs for home use. Why? "It just works". That's why I got fed up with both Windows and Linux. I was tired of conflicting drivers, crashes, or spending hours compiling or tweaking kernals. I just wanted something that worked and that saves me money by freeing up my time to do work.
Our company servers were all running Linux up until this past spring when I switched them all to FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Personally, I have liked FreeBSD as server OS for years. I find it much easier to write software for, because there is only 1 FreeBSD distro, and easier to maintain with a single update command. Its a shame to see the EOL for the Cobalt boxes, because the company had about 8 Raq 2's. I loved those systems with web-based, one click updates, but FreeBSD has the update cvs command and the ports tree makes installing needed applications, like PostgreSQL, easy and painless. Doesn't get any easier than Make && Make Install.
The company's desktop computers were all at end of life and I ordered all new Apple machines as replacements. Despite their higher front end cost, we didn't have to worry about the worm of the week. The employees bitched for about a week, and then startnig using the systems and began to notice they were resetting their computers once a month instead of once every couple hours. We have the stablity of Unix with commerically available software such as MS Office, QuarkXpress, Photoshop, and illustrator, pagemaker, and some nice apple only software like FCP and the iLife series.
After two weeks of bitching, the employees came to like the system's ease of use as well. And I know our productivity has increased because I maybe spend two hours a week Downloading updates compared to two hours a day helping with windows related problems...
If anything, this parent should be modded as off topic. I know, nobody here RTFA, but the author is not talking about home users.
Its true, for home users Linux offers no reason to migrate, but the article was talking about enterprises, aka Businesses and Corperations.
This is where Linux has a chance. There was an article about how Ernie Ball, the gutair string maker switching to Linux from top to bottom in like 1999 and has saved, "At least $80,000" in licenceing.
I don't totally agree with Debian as the source because there needs to be support hardware. Traditionally, SuSE and Redhat have led this arena offering the most drivers for everyday devices such as printers and scanners.
I work as a technology consultant and damn near shot myslef in the foot due to last week. I had overseen two medium sized businesses switching from Windows to RH 9 Linux and was advocating doing so to three other businesses as well.
Those that had switched found that the $40 for a copy of RH linux 9 desktop would expand the life of their existing hardware by another year to two at least. Most of their computers were PIII 700 Mhz with 128MB of ram. It runs Linux like a champ and with Open Office, they are not loosing much in terms of capablities.
The other company is using thin clients so that employees that don't need a web browser doesn't have one. They have testified that they have seen "a measureable improvement in productivity". Exact numbers, he didn't say, but still...
Businesses are tired of playing the "Let's pay M$ another $xxxx dollars this year, especially SMB's that several thousand dollars is a big deal. This is why most businesses are stilling using Office 2000. Most businesses I have spoken with have no plans to upgrade to 2003, or if they do, its because they are purchasing new computers.
However, switching to Linux also has a lot of risk. Large Enterprises have their own internal IT departments that can supply support. Here is where Linux will gain their foothold first. However, most SMB's maybe has one or two IT guys. And then having Red Hat stating that RH9 will be unsupported in April and SuSE's future in limbo for the time being as led me to recommend the other companies looking at Linux to go back and purchase Windows PC's or Macs if they need a Unix workstation.
I started a business with a college friend of mine. He is talented in advertising and marketing and has no clue how to run a business. That's why he asked me to become his partner and run the damn company. Yes he does a lot of the apperance and grunt work of coming up with slogans and such, but he can work 6 hour days and get away with it because he is that good.
I on the other hand spend an average of 14 hours a day in the office during the first year doing everything from strategy to accounting.
We are now in our third year and doing about $850k a year in business and now have 4 full time and 2 part-time employes along with four interns every semester. Think my job's gotten easier? No I work an average 60 hour work week. As the "General Manager" (aka CEO without the letters) of the company, I am required to attend an average of 3 business functions a week from weekly "Local business executive's breakfasts" to "Big client's wife's sucky art gallery opening".
Granted, I don't do much of the mundane billing, collecting and now have a secatary that does a lot of my dictation work, but now I have to deal with motivating employees, looking out on the horizon.
What was my salary last year? $175k plus $55k from profits. As an original founder, I get 30% of the profits, co-found/partner gets 50% and the other 20% is divided amoung the employees. Average employee salary is about $38k with all bonuses and benefits.
Yeah, so we get paid more than the average empolyee, but I built this company with hardwork, took a risk leaving a comfortable 9 - 5 job, and by the grace of god got lucky.
That depends. Sterotypically, wedding photographers are those lazy lutzs, but not the good ones. My Fiance is a wedding planner and getting ready to open her own bridal shop and I manage the websites for most of the weddings shows and vendors in this area.
We know the spectrum of photographers. Most do a stellar job, others do not. Same as with any trade. The most professional wedding photographer we know had to increase her prices to just over $3000 last year. Granted she is one of the best and on average takes between 800 - 1000 picture to which the bride and groom get all the proofs from those photos. However, that industry isn't cheap. She's spent over $45k in the last year setting up an 8 Terrabyte SAN. On average she does about 30 weddings a year and then senior and school pictures as well. So that's usually around 40k 15MB or larger image files per year...which adds up quickly. This doesn't include the some $1500 a year she has to spend to buy newer and better digital cameras for the latest and greatest.
Everyone remarked on how much cheaper digital photo revolution has been, but really I question that at the professional level. Only in the last year has top quality digital camera's been available and still, its another $1000 - $2000 a year to get the latest and greatest, not to mention the upgrades in IT she has had to do.
Yeah, it may seem like its a profitable gig, and I guess for the average joe smoe wedding photographer, yeah, its a nice pay check. But to those that are true professionals, its an expensive trade.
That latency appeared in OSX.2. I purchased a 14.1" 700Mhz G3 Ibook last year (top of the line at the time) and it shipped with 10.1. The volume key was quick and responsive. WHen I upgraded to OS 10.2 it became laggy. Also, when playing the one game I own, Stonghold, I notice it runs at the same speed as his 466 Ibook running 10.1. I think its something with the powermanagement on the ibooks and that it seems as though it cuts the processor down to half speed at all times.
We still have Nvidia's in our dual G4 Powermacs, but then new G5's all have 9800 pro. Granted these are for photoshop and Final Cut Pro, but I don't notice any great advantage with FCP).
At home, my PC came with a 8MB Starfighter in 1998. I upgraded to an ATI Rage Fury 32MB card in 1999. Then I rebuilt the system in 2001 and purchased a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX400 card with 64MB ram for like $70 two years ago. And that seems to run the two games I play quite well.
The "who has the fastest video card" no longer has much of an effect on me nor most people. The latest ATI card isn't going to render text any faster than the 1MB trident card in my old 486...
We actually spent the money and purchased an apple Xserve RAID and fiber cards for our video editing machines. Yeah, it was $12,000 for 1.2 TB, configured RAID-5 with 2x512MB RAID cards, but when dealing with large Final Cut Pro files rendered in HD, its needed. Granted this is for businesses.
At home I have a FreeBSD machine that runs IDE raid configured for mirroring and it backs up my webserver and shared files on my iBook.
I think that IP will be the next "Phone Number". Someday, someone is going to offer your cable, phone, and HSI all on one connection. Or more likely the content is going to be merged to being more "online". Voice and the internet are starting to take off, how long until we get on demand video from sat or cable?
Smith the virus corrupts the system - the Matrix more easily, but subtle effects begin to seep into the more heavliy shielded "real world" environment
I'm just waiting for the next DDOS virus to be called "the smith virus". I guess after the first 2.x versions of the matrix, they finally gave up Windows and switched to Unix...(Trin hacking the powerplant computer in the 2nd film. Have not yet seen the 3rd...its not in the cheap theatre yet.)
They will on large ticket items, but $12.95 book or the like, isn't worth their time. Altough once upon a time (circa 1998) Dell wouldn't charge sales tax, however a couple weeks after the sale you'd get a note from the Missouri dept. of revenue for the sales tax. Had this happen to several neighbors, although I don't know if they still do this. I doubt it.
Well I have to chime in on this. We manage the technology infracture (fancy way of saying we run the ecommerce site and servers) for a local online art mall started by a coop of differnet art groups. Many of the members of these groups are rich wives of local executives with nothing better to do. Many go to local artists and purchase re production rights and will sell prints on everything from calanders to framed copies of the original.
Many local artists make enough money from these sales to do what they love, create art. Sure the rich wife might make $70K from the deal, but the artists often see $20 - 30k of that plus whatever commission or sale of orginials.
Several local artist have their own stores and sell orginial works of art that we scan in using QTVR and most make between $20,000 - $30,000 a year. Not a lot, but around here average salary is $24,600. Now many of the artists are professors or teachers at one of the 12 colleges in a 90 mile radius, others are retired and might only make enough to pay for their paints and some extra spending cash.
I like how artist were "sponsored" by the rich and powerful like back in the 16th and 17th century. I mean Joan Kroc (sp?) just gave NPR 200 Million.
I support local bands I like by purchasing their CD's and giving donations (okay this is to the Drum Corps I marched with to provide scholarships for good players without the $3k per summer or whatever they are charging)
I go see plays by the local theatre troop and help support they types of art I enjoy WITH MY HARD EARNED DISPOSABLE INCOME. A vouchure program would just be abused...
They wanted the corperate service agreement. I should have mentioned they also just purchased 40 Linux workstations also from IBM that are added into the renderfram during the evenings and weekends. The service contract states that "If it breaks, IBM will be there within 4 hours to fix it". Their datacenter had double the cooling power then what they needed and has its own rendunant power lines into that part of the building. I'm sure City Utilites are loving them...
I am a tech consultant and we had a client that ran a number of kiosk based advertising and application specific content. He had one competitor in the area with a slightly different product that did basically the same thing. Both ran Kiosk software ontop of Windows 2000 pro. Last spring we switched our client from windows 2000 to the linux based firecastOS since 90% of his special content was written in Flash and Java.
Well this past spring and summer, he said he saw a drop in service calls by an amazing 85%. Those remaining calls were either hardware or the three windows boxes he had to maintain because of that customer demanded it, they owned the kiosks, he just provided service so he was making money on the service call.
When the "Work of the Week" started, the other guy lost at least 30 customers that switch to using our client because they were getting complaints from their ISP that their boxes were being used in DDOS attacks from the competitor's product. In last week business journal, our client's competitor has filed for chapter 11.
Now, chances are they were having cash flow problems, the manufacture of their product is also having problems, however I know that our client has been able to undercut his competor by 20% in price because and he is still reporting increased profits of 10% after slashing prices. That's how much his TCO has lowered on service calls in the last nine months.
I know in our consultancy that using Apples with OS X have lowered our costs and increased productivy over Windows dispite their higher initial cost. Why? most of our units are about 4 - 5 years old and are now in use by administrative staff and going stong. That, and we make about $400 a week from the company on the second and fifth floors for fixing their computers.
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Doesn't the Moon treaty basically say that the riches of outerspace belongs to all in the human race? Aka, why its not been economically viable to set-up operations on the moon because which ever country would would ahve to share the resources with the rest of the world...
I think it was Hitcock that said he'd never make a movie longer than the human bladder could control. The Extended Edition TTT is supposed to have like 43 minutes of additional scenes in it. That is a lot of scenes to be cut, and several of the scenes in Fellowship should have been kept, but I remember thinking five times in Fellowship, "Okay its going to end now"...and no it went on another 20 minutes, "Okay its going to end here", then another 20 minutes." Okay I'm going to the bathroom now", came back and still had another 45 minutes left.
We do use MS Office for OSX and Macs for our dektops, but our sectaries now have those Bluebarry G3's for everyday office use and they run Office and Safari like a champ and they are 5 years old and we plan to get at least another two years out of them barring any major hardware failure.
Why not Open Office? Well we already have are licenses and V.X doesn't look to be replaced anytime soon and at the time a majority of our Office software was purchases, OO was no where near mature enough to use.
I do see linux being adopted on an enterprise desktop by 2010. Why? Linux is the only system which per-unit licenses actually decreases by the number of units installed upon. Large enterprises already has the IT support staff in place to do internal support.
Its SMB's that one won't see Linux running anytime soon. I have switched two medium sized companies to Linux from Windows, however they are progressive and had Linux in their server rooms since 2000 and the needed IT staff to manage the deployement. Most businesses do not have that level of expirtese.
I worked for a company in the 1990's that was doing some pretty damned advance RPV's, now called UAV's and I can say that its proably not the first, and not the most advanced. DARPA spent some major bucks on this research into UAV's, enough so that the Raptor and JSF are stop gap measures. Neither will be produced in extremely large numbers. They are designed to fill the air frame void from 30 year old planes until the UAV's are ready for massive use.
as many good chocies...and reasonable prices...
However, most geek worry about holes in code, but those of us in security know that over 80% of "hacking" jobs are inside jobs. Some angered sysadmin gives out the password to a friend or competitor for $$$. Or, my favorite, someone calls, says they forgot their password, and the help desk or someone gives it to them. That kind of security holes are platform independant...
Well, since our application are all written in PERL, PHP, and PostgreSQL, they should work on Linux, however over 70% of our deployments are NOT on Linux, mostly Sun or *BSD...
a mac user really need to run Linux on their native unix box? I switched from Linux to OS X because I had the same development ablities as on linux and had commerical software support.
Next, what are you uses? I mean most small business work groups I have seen might store larger Powerpoint, excel and other files. It takes them a while to fill up dual 160GB hd's in a raid 1.
Still, for our company we purchased 1.6TB Xraid's from apple with Fiber cards. Why? well we are doing a lot of work with FCP and need the quick access times that come with fiber vs. ethernet.
Pisses my off because of Cingular's crappy switch from TDMA to GSM has cost me at least one contract because of their network down time. It was less than 45 days at that point until number portablitiy was to take place, so I went to Alltel and they told me it will be at least May, if not next october. I heard that from other reps of other companies as well. So I broke my contract with Cingular anyway and went to Alltel.
I switched my desktop to Linux in 1999. I had problems with my modem, recycled a jumper based ISA 33.6k, my Ethernet card (which was an older ISA model as well), my sound card STILL will not work under Lunux, scanner didn't work, printer didn't work, but I had Linux OS, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, and a native Unix-like platform for LAMPS development.
This served me well until last year when it came time for me to replace my old WIn 98 laptop. I purchased an iBook. I had my *iux enviroment plus a majority of my hardware just worked. Plugged in the USB cable and my scanner worked, printer worked, etc. Bottom-line, Apple beat Linux at the *iux desktop. Half of the developers I know are now carrying iBooks or Powerbooks to confrences and bought iMacs for home use. Why? "It just works". That's why I got fed up with both Windows and Linux. I was tired of conflicting drivers, crashes, or spending hours compiling or tweaking kernals. I just wanted something that worked and that saves me money by freeing up my time to do work.
Our company servers were all running Linux up until this past spring when I switched them all to FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Personally, I have liked FreeBSD as server OS for years. I find it much easier to write software for, because there is only 1 FreeBSD distro, and easier to maintain with a single update command. Its a shame to see the EOL for the Cobalt boxes, because the company had about 8 Raq 2's. I loved those systems with web-based, one click updates, but FreeBSD has the update cvs command and the ports tree makes installing needed applications, like PostgreSQL, easy and painless. Doesn't get any easier than Make && Make Install.
The company's desktop computers were all at end of life and I ordered all new Apple machines as replacements. Despite their higher front end cost, we didn't have to worry about the worm of the week. The employees bitched for about a week, and then startnig using the systems and began to notice they were resetting their computers once a month instead of once every couple hours. We have the stablity of Unix with commerically available software such as MS Office, QuarkXpress, Photoshop, and illustrator, pagemaker, and some nice apple only software like FCP and the iLife series.
After two weeks of bitching, the employees came to like the system's ease of use as well. And I know our productivity has increased because I maybe spend two hours a week Downloading updates compared to two hours a day helping with windows related problems...
Its true, for home users Linux offers no reason to migrate, but the article was talking about enterprises, aka Businesses and Corperations. This is where Linux has a chance. There was an article about how Ernie Ball, the gutair string maker switching to Linux from top to bottom in like 1999 and has saved, "At least $80,000" in licenceing.
I don't totally agree with Debian as the source because there needs to be support hardware. Traditionally, SuSE and Redhat have led this arena offering the most drivers for everyday devices such as printers and scanners.
I work as a technology consultant and damn near shot myslef in the foot due to last week. I had overseen two medium sized businesses switching from Windows to RH 9 Linux and was advocating doing so to three other businesses as well.
Those that had switched found that the $40 for a copy of RH linux 9 desktop would expand the life of their existing hardware by another year to two at least. Most of their computers were PIII 700 Mhz with 128MB of ram. It runs Linux like a champ and with Open Office, they are not loosing much in terms of capablities.
The other company is using thin clients so that employees that don't need a web browser doesn't have one. They have testified that they have seen "a measureable improvement in productivity". Exact numbers, he didn't say, but still...
Businesses are tired of playing the "Let's pay M$ another $xxxx dollars this year, especially SMB's that several thousand dollars is a big deal. This is why most businesses are stilling using Office 2000. Most businesses I have spoken with have no plans to upgrade to 2003, or if they do, its because they are purchasing new computers.
However, switching to Linux also has a lot of risk. Large Enterprises have their own internal IT departments that can supply support. Here is where Linux will gain their foothold first. However, most SMB's maybe has one or two IT guys. And then having Red Hat stating that RH9 will be unsupported in April and SuSE's future in limbo for the time being as led me to recommend the other companies looking at Linux to go back and purchase Windows PC's or Macs if they need a Unix workstation.
I started a business with a college friend of mine. He is talented in advertising and marketing and has no clue how to run a business. That's why he asked me to become his partner and run the damn company. Yes he does a lot of the apperance and grunt work of coming up with slogans and such, but he can work 6 hour days and get away with it because he is that good.
I on the other hand spend an average of 14 hours a day in the office during the first year doing everything from strategy to accounting.
We are now in our third year and doing about $850k a year in business and now have 4 full time and 2 part-time employes along with four interns every semester. Think my job's gotten easier? No I work an average 60 hour work week. As the "General Manager" (aka CEO without the letters) of the company, I am required to attend an average of 3 business functions a week from weekly "Local business executive's breakfasts" to "Big client's wife's sucky art gallery opening".
Granted, I don't do much of the mundane billing, collecting and now have a secatary that does a lot of my dictation work, but now I have to deal with motivating employees, looking out on the horizon.
What was my salary last year? $175k plus $55k from profits. As an original founder, I get 30% of the profits, co-found/partner gets 50% and the other 20% is divided amoung the employees. Average employee salary is about $38k with all bonuses and benefits.
Yeah, so we get paid more than the average empolyee, but I built this company with hardwork, took a risk leaving a comfortable 9 - 5 job, and by the grace of god got lucky.
Could this be the reason why two of my client's have ditched their $20k Sun workstations for Macs?
We know the spectrum of photographers. Most do a stellar job, others do not. Same as with any trade. The most professional wedding photographer we know had to increase her prices to just over $3000 last year. Granted she is one of the best and on average takes between 800 - 1000 picture to which the bride and groom get all the proofs from those photos. However, that industry isn't cheap. She's spent over $45k in the last year setting up an 8 Terrabyte SAN. On average she does about 30 weddings a year and then senior and school pictures as well. So that's usually around 40k 15MB or larger image files per year...which adds up quickly. This doesn't include the some $1500 a year she has to spend to buy newer and better digital cameras for the latest and greatest.
Everyone remarked on how much cheaper digital photo revolution has been, but really I question that at the professional level. Only in the last year has top quality digital camera's been available and still, its another $1000 - $2000 a year to get the latest and greatest, not to mention the upgrades in IT she has had to do.
Yeah, it may seem like its a profitable gig, and I guess for the average joe smoe wedding photographer, yeah, its a nice pay check. But to those that are true professionals, its an expensive trade.
Half the pages with flash say that I have no flash player installed when I visit them with Safari. Although, that's only half...
That latency appeared in OSX.2. I purchased a 14.1" 700Mhz G3 Ibook last year (top of the line at the time) and it shipped with 10.1. The volume key was quick and responsive. WHen I upgraded to OS 10.2 it became laggy. Also, when playing the one game I own, Stonghold, I notice it runs at the same speed as his 466 Ibook running 10.1. I think its something with the powermanagement on the ibooks and that it seems as though it cuts the processor down to half speed at all times.
At home, my PC came with a 8MB Starfighter in 1998. I upgraded to an ATI Rage Fury 32MB card in 1999. Then I rebuilt the system in 2001 and purchased a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX400 card with 64MB ram for like $70 two years ago. And that seems to run the two games I play quite well.
The "who has the fastest video card" no longer has much of an effect on me nor most people. The latest ATI card isn't going to render text any faster than the 1MB trident card in my old 486...
At home I have a FreeBSD machine that runs IDE raid configured for mirroring and it backs up my webserver and shared files on my iBook.
I think that IP will be the next "Phone Number". Someday, someone is going to offer your cable, phone, and HSI all on one connection. Or more likely the content is going to be merged to being more "online". Voice and the internet are starting to take off, how long until we get on demand video from sat or cable?
I'm just waiting for the next DDOS virus to be called "the smith virus". I guess after the first 2.x versions of the matrix, they finally gave up Windows and switched to Unix...(Trin hacking the powerplant computer in the 2nd film. Have not yet seen the 3rd...its not in the cheap theatre yet.)
They will on large ticket items, but $12.95 book or the like, isn't worth their time. Altough once upon a time (circa 1998) Dell wouldn't charge sales tax, however a couple weeks after the sale you'd get a note from the Missouri dept. of revenue for the sales tax. Had this happen to several neighbors, although I don't know if they still do this. I doubt it.
Many local artists make enough money from these sales to do what they love, create art. Sure the rich wife might make $70K from the deal, but the artists often see $20 - 30k of that plus whatever commission or sale of orginials.
Several local artist have their own stores and sell orginial works of art that we scan in using QTVR and most make between $20,000 - $30,000 a year. Not a lot, but around here average salary is $24,600. Now many of the artists are professors or teachers at one of the 12 colleges in a 90 mile radius, others are retired and might only make enough to pay for their paints and some extra spending cash.
I like how artist were "sponsored" by the rich and powerful like back in the 16th and 17th century. I mean Joan Kroc (sp?) just gave NPR 200 Million.
I support local bands I like by purchasing their CD's and giving donations (okay this is to the Drum Corps I marched with to provide scholarships for good players without the $3k per summer or whatever they are charging)
I go see plays by the local theatre troop and help support they types of art I enjoy WITH MY HARD EARNED DISPOSABLE INCOME. A vouchure program would just be abused...
They wanted the corperate service agreement. I should have mentioned they also just purchased 40 Linux workstations also from IBM that are added into the renderfram during the evenings and weekends. The service contract states that "If it breaks, IBM will be there within 4 hours to fix it". Their datacenter had double the cooling power then what they needed and has its own rendunant power lines into that part of the building. I'm sure City Utilites are loving them...
Well this past spring and summer, he said he saw a drop in service calls by an amazing 85%. Those remaining calls were either hardware or the three windows boxes he had to maintain because of that customer demanded it, they owned the kiosks, he just provided service so he was making money on the service call.
When the "Work of the Week" started, the other guy lost at least 30 customers that switch to using our client because they were getting complaints from their ISP that their boxes were being used in DDOS attacks from the competitor's product. In last week business journal, our client's competitor has filed for chapter 11.
Now, chances are they were having cash flow problems, the manufacture of their product is also having problems, however I know that our client has been able to undercut his competor by 20% in price because and he is still reporting increased profits of 10% after slashing prices. That's how much his TCO has lowered on service calls in the last nine months.
I know in our consultancy that using Apples with OS X have lowered our costs and increased productivy over Windows dispite their higher initial cost. Why? most of our units are about 4 - 5 years old and are now in use by administrative staff and going stong. That, and we make about $400 a week from the company on the second and fifth floors for fixing their computers.