Well its my Fiance's Clie I got her for her birthday, but it features a QT video player. I mean quality isn't that great on the 320x somthing 65k color screen, but it works.
Although with the iPod getting larger everyday, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to DL a movie to it. I mean I have LOTR TTT on my HDD and it takes up about 1.2GB compressed in DivX and all. Hell that would fit on my 5GB iPod.
I use the iPOD for more than just music. My 250 song collection leaves plenty of room so spare, so I often carry back ups of my powerpoint and other files in there as well.
We still have an 8086 down in the basement, 4Mhz and 12 on turbo if I remember. whopping 640k of ram and EGA card. It still runs...I think.
I remember MS Works version 1.0 when everything was keyboard commands, no mouse support. THen we got version 2 with spell check and mouse "point and click" and that is how I wrote papers 1st - 7th grade.
I mean MS Works 2 today would do just about everything I need in a word processor. As memory becomes cheaper every day, there is no longer any need for programmers to uptimize code, thus we get the bloated crap out there.
One perfect example is the size of Lightwave or 3Dstudio Max (which is about 100 MB) compaired to Blender, which is about 3MB.
Oh yeah, and how many Jumpman fans are there still out there?
I orginally got my start in Web-site, ecommerce, consulting in particluar hardware. FreeBSD has been my #1 choice as a *iux based server for years. I tried ditching Windows for Linux and along came OSX. So when it came time to replace my Sony laptop, I purchased an iBook.
Recently my business partner and I moved to an office, we were getting enough business, so I decided that I'd DL the latest FreeBSD ISO's and formatted over my Linux drive with FreeBSD 5-Current. Gee, with KDE 3 and everything, I couldn't notice any whopping difference. The OSS desktop community doesn't cater to FreeBSD as FreeBSD proably still has its place on my Racks as a server, but when we hire a secetary, looks like she will get the FreeBSD tower with Openoffice instead of Linux.
Biggest thing I think, is that FreeBSD still has the old text based installer, but its not as ass backwards as say 2.2 or 3.4. For most noob's the YaST in SuSE and whatever it is on RH is very pleasing and better to use. Plus Linux gets support for the latest and greatest in hardware with drivers, etc.
But if your just looking for a nice, stable, OS, you can't loose with either FreeBSD or Linux. Especially if you use Gnome or KDE. Looks the same, and proably 99.95% of the people would never know.
Sit in a pipe-smoke filled room with powerful members of the Republician party. Point out I did donate the maxium allowed contribution, plus all the volunteering time on campaigns, and that this *really needs to be looked at here*.
You think I'm kidding...sad thing is I'm not. I worked on a number of campaigns while I was in college and made some in roads with the staffs of several people, most notably Roy Blunt's staff (the House Majority Whip aka, 3rd most powerful man in the House if I remember my rankings correctly).
I figured, being in one of the most republican or republican strong holds on the face of the planet, responsible for most notably John Ashcroft, that it was a unquie place to make political allies. Yeah, politics are dirty, but hell if you know how to play the game, you can get somewhere.
I'll donate to the EFF, when they can actually win a case other than getting Paramount to stop sueing Trekkie sites.
Wow, mentioned Ashcroft, dissed the EFF, and made fun of trekkies. Great, I know that I'm going on a few people's Foe list tonight around here.
Maybe in your case that worked. I too am a consultant and had two wonderful years of service before this with Cingular. Only time we had a major outage was right after a series of F4 tornado's, and even then it was restored in a couple hours.
So when it came time to renew last summer, I did. They were switching to GSM, great I've used GSM in Europe for years and was looking forward to SIM cards and other related technologies.
Well in the last 3 months since I switched, both my fiance and I have had nothing but problems with people calling, but the phone doesn't ring. Part of it, from what I've read, is that our 6340/6340i have well documented issues with quality, and the other part is with Cingular's service itself and their transition is not going very...smoothly, yet we were forced to get a new GSM phone when we renewed.
With the portablity 'comming' in less than 60 days when I went to cingular two weeks ago after loosing about $1000 contract because they could never reach me, they still were going to A) make me pay full retail for a new phone, B) Pay termination fee of $150 and go else here. Well, I figure I had 1000 roll over minutes and to reprint letter heads, business cards, brochures for the both of us was going to run $1500.
Plus, I know that every carrier here will be offering the deals of the century in an attempt to steal each other's customers so chances are, waiting would be to our benefit.
However I learned this past week that we won't see the ablity to switch until late spring of next year. So I am going to bitch and see about getting Cingular to cave, if not, then I will eat the cost of printing up business cards etc., and the termination fee at the end of this month.
Jay Nixon, the Missouri AG, has sued several out of state companies for violating our no-call list. This seems to be a step out the same play book as the No-call list.
I could say "Its about time", but at least he is doing something about it. I have not been impressed with some of his politicing in the past, but might actully vote for him next time around if is does/can run again.
He's been our best AG since, dare I say the name around here, Ashcroft.
After my problems with Cingluar, part of the problem is the handset I have is a piece of junk the other is with their new GSM still flickering on and off and I am glad at least I have a dual tech phone (GAIT), I cannot wait to switch. My Fiance and I both rely on our Cell's as our only phone since we are both consultants, me technology to small businesses and her Wedding Planner, and depend on people actually being able to get in touch with us for our living. I was ready to pay the termination fee, but remember about number portablity. With it only being less than 60 days away I figured it would much cheaper since it would cost us several hundred dollars in reprinting business cards and brochures with our new numbers, plus it gives me a month to bitch at cingular as I lost one bid/customer during their network problems which means I lost some where around $700 - $1000 in business. (I have been fighting with Cingular for the last two weeks and no one seems to care or think I'll ditch their service until I remind them about number portablity as it would be cheaper to pay cingular the termination fee and go else where than to purchase a new handset at retail, even though this is my 3rd Nokia 6340 in 3 months because they all keep dropping calls, not ringing when called or auto powering off even after the battery is tightened. My Fiance has had the same problem with her 6340i and two other friends have had issues with their handsets too. I dunno, sounds like a Nokia problem to me and the if Cingular gave a rats ass about their customers, would offer to exchange the value of the phones and go back to Nokia and fight out the QC problems.
I live in SW missouri, Springfield to be exact (awaits Simpsons comments), and I went to the Alltel store yesterday as my business partner uses them and has been quite happy with their service, but was ready for an upgrade on his handset (he had an old Nokia 4100 or 5100) and asked them about number portablity. The Alltel sales rep was friendly and told me, "Our billing system is ready, but they are starting with the top 100 metro areas in the country. We won't be able to do that down here until late spring, proably around May and June."
May or June of 2004...I can't wait that long. I mean when it takes effect would be the best time because I know everyone is going to bend over backwards with good deals to steal each other's customers. Unfortunatly the cost of reprinting business cards and other materials looks to be a lot less than the potential of lost clients/jobs if I don't switch now.
So yes, number portablity is good...if it really would be available on November 24th everywhere.
I know that we have a NAT firewall on the Wi-fi router in my appartment and then I use Apple's IP firewall on my ibook along with several *iux based security tools and Zone Alarm on my PC and I rarely see any messaged on the PC pop-up about attempted port scan.
When I lived on the dorms, it was a different story. There were an average of 4000 attempt portscans on my machine a day.
Its almost gotten to the point of without turning to viglantism on the internet and launching counter DDos attacks on the spammers themsleves, especially those outside of countries that don't enforce or don't attempt to enfore any type of Spam laws. Most spammers now operate outside of western countries, so what's the cure?
Filtering helps, tools like Spamassassin has brought my total spams from like 80 a day to less than 10.
I for one, as much as I hate them, wouldn't mind to see a few class action lawsuits against spammers. How much longer until the pipes bust with junk and turn the Internet into a near useless medium.
I know several of my clients now call me instead of email as they say that they "Have to wade through 30 junk messages for one valid message". I have rules set up to where my customer's and family email go to seperate folders, and that helps even more, but something needs to be done.
As much as I hate to bitch and not offer any answers, I am afraid that I am stumped. I fear that any attempts to write new protocals, espically by the likes of M$, Yahoo, HP, and other major players, with result in the closing of networks, (i.e. this message was not authenticated by a pallidum enabled server, therefore it will be rejected. Please trade your Mac in for a PC with Win XP^2 for $1000) and cause a leap backwards. At the same time, while people here can say the OSS community will develop an "open" solution, the very fact that its open means that the very people we try to stop will be able to circumvent anything the community develops. Not to say this won't happen with closed-source technology, but then companies like M$ can possible use DMCA against the spammers that reverse engineer such technology.
In any case, spammers are winning and we all are losing.
I am a technology consultant to small and a couple "medium" sized companies. I don't do web design/layout/programming work anymore, but I sit in on meetings with vendors that do and listen to how they code. Most "Web Designers" are either graphic artists with Dreamweaver and a few come from programming backgrounds.
Usually people get bids from two or three different "web designers" and I always ask to which standards do they code to. 90% of the time I hear, "MSIE". I retort, so you don't use Xhtml, html 4, CSS 1 or 2.0 as your standard as defined by the W3C? Usually makes them a tad bit uncomfortable when they know they are dealing with an expert. Then after peeling the onion back a little bit further and they say, "90% of the world uses MSIE, therefore that is what standard we code too". These are "Web Professionals" and people wonder why people are paying me money to sit in on meetings and tell them if Web Design/Networking company X is bullshitting them.
Then I say to the business owner, however that means that 10% of potential customers may not be able to access the site. Business owners get the point, sometimes. Other times they stick with the, "Well all my current customers use Windows and MSIE, its what we use, so if they can't use Netscape or Safari, too bad. They need to get a PC".
However I have a bigger fear, and that is the moving away of technology from open standards creating closed global networks. While some will defend open standards to their death, the truth is with openness, also comes the ablity for those to abuse it for their own gain. Just look at Email and Spam. Even if a new "Open" protocal is designed, how long until the spammer find a way to circumvent the technology and continue their annoying habbits? Not to say it wouldn't happen with a closed solution, but here is where the closed solution (bit of a slippery-slope) could come into play:
Spam is a problem. I hear this all the time from my clients wanted to improve their technology. It becomming such a problem and some of the major players come to develop a new method for delivering Email, let's just all it NixSpam, that is harder to fake, but here comes the kicker: It requires you to have a DRM chipset and server solution to authenticate messages sent. Co inside this with paliadim(sp?) and other M$ technologies on the horizon.
Some of my clients would pay the money if the technology worked. Would they care that Mac and Linux users could no longer send them email, maybe some with Mac users, but most would say, "Well if Person X want's to communicate with the rest of the world, they can buy a Dell like everyone else" (Yes I do here that more than you would think).
Again, at the same time, many of my customers are tired of playing the "Let's spend thousands every 18 months to upgrade all our software and hardware" game and some have seriously looked at Linux, and I have had one office of about 18 make the switch and several smaller mom & pops have switch to using Mac's. Linux has matured to the point where it may just be ready for Desktop use at larger offices that have at least a small dedicated IT staff, however most still are afraid of not having the level of support of Windows or Apple.
However, if M$ would be sucessful in creating closed API's like they have in the past for email or even webbrowsing, any hope of making Linux a reasonable and viable alternative to Windows is gone.
Actully, if I remember from my early days with personal computers, there were IBM's and IBM compatiables. "PC's" as found as your defition of describing any computer running on an x86 architecture didn't happen until at least the late 1980's, when it refered to any computer that was not a time-share or mainframe. At which point, you either ran an IBM, IBM-clone, or an Apple.
Sometime in the either mid or late 1990's only then did PC's come to mean a computer with an Intel Chip and Windows. Today its a computer with an x86 chip.
But what we call PC's today in slang is not the true meaning of the word first recorded in 1977 by Mr. Websters. According to that definition, Apple running any Macintosh OS other than their Xserve qualify, by defition provided in my earlier post, as a "Personal Computer".
Mention was also made in the road map of a new online update service (big whoop), and SmallFoot, which is a "Retail Hardened POS solution" (their words, not mine). When did "you want fries with that?" become associated with the five 9's of reliability? For the live update, he actually walked us through how you would set up an account to use the service, another indication that SCOs internal force has missed the last couple of years of the Internet (how could this be interesting to anyone there?).
You know, for Piece of Shit, I'll stick with my Win 98 box with my games. For Point of Sale, I like the IBM system we have. I think I'll keep it..don't tell SCO
One entry found for personal computer.
Main Entry: personal computer
Function: noun
Date: 1977
: a general-purpose computer equipped with a microprocessor and designed to run especially commercial software (as a word processor or World Wide Web browser) for an individual user
Macs seem to be "general purpose", have a microprocessor, and designed to run especially commerical software. Word, Photoshop, iTunes, etc.
So acording to the dictionary definition, Apple computers qualify as "PC's".
Apple caters to a Niche market folks. Most mac users could give a flying leap about the frame rate of Quake or other such applications. If they are playing Quake, maybe its for a little fun. Mac caters now to two types of end users. 1) Graphics & Video, 2) Unix developers.
I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.
I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.
Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.
I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.
Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.
Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.
Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.
So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.
I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.
Before becoming an independant tech consultant I worked at a start-up for a short while. I was recomending spending the $500 on a new laser printer on the office that could be networked between the 4 employees and reduce printer cost and increase quality. You get more professional results with a laser printer.
Well, the boss went one weekend to Staples or Office max or somewhere and bought 4 $80 Epson C82 printers. Granted, they printed fast, have the 4 cartige system and refills are about $10 per cartige. Well, with the amount of printing they are doing, they go through about 3 black ink cartiges a week and usually at least one color. You tell me how long its going to take before TCO of the laser would have been a better choice. We decided it would be best to "part ways" especially after my paychecked bounced and I he was blue collar, no college educated fool that has tried running 4 other businesses and they have all failed. He was selling an cool product circa 2000, but his market was quickly evaporating as WiFI becomes more prevelant.
Another one of my clients, against my recomendation, went ahead a bought one of those "all in one" fax/scanners/copiers/printers and it also uses ink jet cartiges, which according to the employes they are replacing at least once a week because they run out that fast.
Now for home use, its a different story. I still have an HP 710C from when I started college. I went through about one black ink thingy every semester and 1 tri-color cart. every year. The problem I had was I would always run out of one color, like blue, before any of the others, but still would have to fork over the $40 for the tri-color.
Also, some of my mom and pop shops maybe print off 10 copies of something a week and some color pictures for "specials" every once in a while and in their cases, they can get buy with an inkjet printer.
2) Make a specific statement for "loser pays": anyone suing under using this legislation who loses the case pays for the legal costs of both parties. Settlements don't count, and this will outright favor the bigger players, but in the American climate of "legal attrition" as a business strategy I see no other effective means of trying to relieve this aspect of the DMCA problem.
How about TORT reform to where anyone that brings a lawsuit without merit has to pay the loser's bills and limits damages. Yeah, yeah, people will cry that "victoms cannot be fairly compensated" which often times to me means, "You cannot put a montary value on life" (translated: Two Million isn't enough, but 100 Million, now that eases the pain a bit...especially AFTER I take my 30% as a lawyer).
I have to admit, I love the writing of these pens. Much better than even the Mont Blanc I got as a graduation gift.
The only reason why I switched to a uniball is I left one too many pilot V5's in my pants pockets and put them through the wash and more importantly the dryer...which caused the ink to explode all over everything ruining about $250 worth of clothes.
Actually it was after the third time I did that I stopped using the pens. An the time I forgot to place the cap back on, drove for three hours and when I looked down, noticed this huge black ink spot on my pants.
I work as a technology consultant, independant mainly to very small mom and pop shops and small offices. Many have upgraded PC's in the last few months and just now have Office XP/2002 and here 2003 is comming out at the end of the month.
These people express a disgust that every 18 months, what the buy today won't be powerful enough to run that in the future and its been cheaper to buy $700 boxes every 2 years and chuck 'em than to go through, upgrade hardware and software.
Many more use FreeBSD and Linux daily. I have helped 4 businesses set up ecommerce sites through Yahoo, they have no idea what the hell FreeBSD is, but that is what powers their site.
Also, I have a portable FreeBSD box called my Apple iBook that many take a look at and two mom & pop stores have switched to using Macs for Point of sale and other uses and love them because they are easy to use and don't crash.
I started out in the graphics/video production field with wedding businesses and most switched around 2000 - 2001 to Dell's and PC's. Many are now switching back to mac because of their lost time and work with system crashes.
Now to the kicker: I set-up a Linux or FreeBSD box with KDE set up and most people can pick up how to launch Mozilla and Netscape w/o any proablems. In fact over the next two weeks, I am converting one office over to Linux on all of their PIII 700 boxes they have. Total cost: About $2540. ($2500 to hire me to do it, $40 for a copy of RH). Most couldn't tell a difference between OpenOffice's Spreadsheet and Excell and since it can read/write MS office formats (at least for now) they have interoperatblity.
Their office file/print server has been Linux for "at least two years" one employee remarked, but I don't know I didn't set up their LAN. Well I know its RH 6.2 on IBM hardware, how long its been there...
Why did they switch? They had spent over $6000 US in the last two years just on support calls to wipe off viruses on these machines not to mention the cost in lost time due to data being lost and computer downtime. The hardest issue was to find a replacement for their accounting/payroll/inventroy software. So I recommended buying one new Dell just to run the software package as it would proably take longer and be a hell of a lot more to reset up 4 years of data on a new system and the PR person wanted an iMac, so I recommended getting her one so she can run QuarkXpress and Photoshop.
People and businesses are sick and tired the MS upgrade game every 18 months and I think Linux is poised to make some grounds in the business world. Red Hat and SuSE has done a wonderful job of taking Linux from Geekdom to so easy grandma could use it. Still the lack of commerical software is hurting the platform. OpenOffice has made some tremendous gains in terms of functionality to the point where it now can be used.
Special software is getting there too, like the NOLA Enterprise Resource Planning software, phpprojekt group ware, are good resources for medium sized businesses. What is lacking is some good small business software like Quickbooks that is extremely easy to use and designed for small business. Maybe there is something out there, I just havn't found it yet.
My fiance and I went to see Second Hand Lions, which a great film that if you get a chance to go see it you should, and the trailer played during the preview.
The theatre was dead silent during and a few seconds after the trailer stopped. Then three people got up and left. They had spent $7.50 each to see a 3 minute trailer and missed a wonderful movie.
I would go with Verizon if they were in this area, but they aren't. The choices are Sprint, AT&T, Nextel, DT/voicestream, and Alltel. Alltel piggy backs their nationwide service on Verizon's network.
Also when I say its $8.50 more a month, I am also considering the two days worth of lost work time to inform customers that the phone number has changed etc. and thus far I have not lost any contracts, but it could. I am going to complain again tomorrow. I have a couple hours tomorrow and I have a couple weeks until my next billing period.
I got my Motorola handset that I purchased in Europe (tri-band & GSM) and swapped out the Vodophone SIM card with my Cingular SIM. Call quality isn't as great as my Nokia, but I am still getting dropped calls, but at least its not powering off. Last time they had to adjust the battery. The viberating battery was a *great* engineering feat, considering it shakes the battery loose after a while the connectors have to be readjusted.
I've read the press reports about the quality of AT&T and Verizon, but what the press is saying and what my customers say about their service is two different things. My Customers that use AT&T have had similar issues as I with Cingular lately as well and their "home" calling area and the way they handle night/weekend minutes outside of this area sucks. It covers the western half of Missouri, but I do about 40% of my business in St. Louis and Southeast Missouri, where AT&T gets no signal at all, or if you do its still analog. Cingluar and Alltel are the best as far as coverage goes in those areas.
I know several people with verizon and everyone loves their basic service. Their new "push to talk" feature I've heard stinks, but Nextel isn't any better if not worse and Verizon would be my first choice if they actully had resellers or stores in this area, they don't.
I am considering giving Cingular time until the number portablitity gets here. Then I am going to switch proably to Alltel.
Now I will admit that I still have 2 Linux boxes I host client's web sites on, but most of my boxes now either run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I have an iBook as my main computer.
Why? It's been my humble opinion that Linux has been a bit of a bastard child. Is it a desktop OS, or a server OS? Its flexablity is its greatest strength and its achellies heel at the same time. With no standards between distros on simple things, like the path to PERL, can cause headaches for software developers. I once work on a project where we had to code three different versions of an app, one for RH, another for Mandrake, and one for Debian. After that expirance, I got fed up with the Linux Platform about the same time as Mac OS X.1 came out.
FreeBSD was/is designed as a server OS first, and if you want to toy with it, it can also make an effective workstation. However this is where Mac OS comes into play: There are companies that are publishing commercial software for the platform. So I can interface wtih 90% of the web design/graphics world that use Photoshop, dreamweaver, QuarkXpress, and other such programs where as due to the pain in the ass Linux is to port across distros, commerical companies WON'T port their products. I will even admit to having MS Office, and I actully LIKE it on mac. It works wonderfully.
While the OSS community has developed some kick ass apps, like the ERP module OSSuite (NOLA I think is the sourceforge project) is what I use to keep track of our business's accounting needs including payroll, W-2's, inventory, etc., there is still a vast void of software needs outthere. GIMP is certianly not a photoshop killer. Back in the days of PS 4 and 5, GIMP looked like it was on the track to possible create a much better product, but as now it seems as though GIMP has made very few improvements over the last two years and it still takes a lot more time and effort to get the same results as Photoshop. Photoshop 7 now blows GIMP away in my book.
The two Linux servers I have still are Sun Cobalt Raq servers and I still use them because of the ease of maintance, but all my ecommerce sites are on FreeBSD machines and I have had very little problems with these boxes. Hell two are still running FreeBSD 3.4 and had uptimes of like 250 days until I patched OpenSSH and several other updates two weeks ago.
RH and SuSE are getting closer to getting Linux from Geekdom to mainstream as SuSE is large in Europe. I used it when I studied over there for semester as the school had a windows lab and a linux lab, but that is mainly a result of GUI installers and KDE & GNOME.
At our new business, I have FreeBSD on both of the terminals (we inheirted two PIII 700 Dells & 3 PIII 550 Gateway's when we bought the business) and instead of paying $2500 for four new computers, I slaped FreeBSD 5 with KDE on there, install mozilla and linked them to the office server which is configured as a local webserver with no outside pipeline and we use OsCommerce as our POS system.
Now this article is a bit trollish about jumping ship. I stats and as Mark Twain wrote, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Stats". Approach with caution. OSS software is starting to get looked at, I work as a independant tech consultant, and Linux gets the press thanks to RH and SuSE providing what Linux needs to get into main stream: commericalization. There is a number you can call for support, if you need it.
The switch over to GSM is not going well. I renewed my plan last summer after 2 years of great service with cingular, but I and my Fiance both got new Nokia 6340 (Which is a GAIT phone that works on both regular and GSM networks) phones and have had nothing but problems. I had just gotten back from Europe where I used Vodophone's GSM network quite well and was looking forward to it being in the US, but its horrible.
At first I thought it was the phone, as it started to drop calls, not ring when people called, and then it started to automatically turn itself off. I went in to the the store owned by Cingluar, I was there for 5 minutes and I had a new handset. This was about the middle of August. Now, this handset is having the same problems and my Fiance's phone has had nothing but problems too. (Her's sets off alarm clocks and electronic devices).
I live and die by my Cell phone as I use it as my Only phone, business and personal because I am a consultant and often out to visit with clients on a daily basis and perfer to work from coffee shops when ever possible, and to have people call and the phone not even ring has cost me in terms of business and just generally annoying.
So I finally we both get fed up, so both my Fiance and I walk into store and politely complain about the handsets, and the rep camly states that "They have been having issues with their network and voice mail". I explain, that since this is my one and only phone and I use it for business purposes that I cannot afford to have this type of service and wanted to know about switching handsets. Well, we "couldn't trade in our handsets" and would cost us retail, about $250 - 300 depending on what model, to trade buy something else.
Then I asked him, "How much is it to terminate the agreement?" and he responded studdering $150. And I then replied, "So it would be cheaper for us to break the contract and go to Alltel, then?" and he responded with silence for a few seconds then answered "yes" and then explained that it was problems with the network, not the phones.
I then asked him, "Look at it from my perpective. I am a consulant and if someone can't reach me, I loose money. Even a small contract usually totals several thousand dollars." And then I got the "any time with new technology, system, there is going to be problems" and I said, "This isn't a new system. Europe has been using it for quite sometime. In fact I used it when I was there working/studing abroad this time last year and it was great, I had no problems, so why are you? Why are you requiring all customers trade up for new phones that don't work?" He didn't have an answer.
My Fiance and I then went to AT&T, which isn't much better from what I have heard and way more expensive, and Alltel, which is pretty close to that of Cingular as far as price goes (about $5 difference a month) and for my Fiance is actully a tad bit cheaper.
That was Thursday and I didn't want to make a judgement based on emotion, because I ticked at the rep that gave me the run around on why the network isn't working even though its not his fault, and looked at the fact of the time it would take to call all of my clients and tell them I have a new number and the fact it would cost me about $8.50 more a month with Altell and decided to stick it out for a bit, but things have only been getting worse.
My fiance tried to call me 4 times today, only 1 got through and i continue to drop calls left and right. Before, I rarely had dropped calls unless I was in the middle of the sticks, now I get them all the time.
Bottom line, after reading that this is not just a local problem and speaking with several other providers in the area, that Monday morning my fiance and I are going to go back to the Cingular dealer and break our contract. Yeah its going to cost us $300, but both of us use it for business (she's a wedding planner) and losing just one customer for either of us will be an oppertunity cost of way more than $150. At the very least I go get to expense the cost off my taxes as a business expense so, I guess I break even on paper.
The only thing that sucks, is I just had a new set of business cards printed...always my damn luck...
Slashdot Mirror
Although with the iPod getting larger everyday, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to DL a movie to it. I mean I have LOTR TTT on my HDD and it takes up about 1.2GB compressed in DivX and all. Hell that would fit on my 5GB iPod.
I use the iPOD for more than just music. My 250 song collection leaves plenty of room so spare, so I often carry back ups of my powerpoint and other files in there as well.
I remember MS Works version 1.0 when everything was keyboard commands, no mouse support. THen we got version 2 with spell check and mouse "point and click" and that is how I wrote papers 1st - 7th grade.
I mean MS Works 2 today would do just about everything I need in a word processor. As memory becomes cheaper every day, there is no longer any need for programmers to uptimize code, thus we get the bloated crap out there.
One perfect example is the size of Lightwave or 3Dstudio Max (which is about 100 MB) compaired to Blender, which is about 3MB.
Oh yeah, and how many Jumpman fans are there still out there?
Geesh, I must be the only one that *still* uses PICO....
Recently my business partner and I moved to an office, we were getting enough business, so I decided that I'd DL the latest FreeBSD ISO's and formatted over my Linux drive with FreeBSD 5-Current. Gee, with KDE 3 and everything, I couldn't notice any whopping difference. The OSS desktop community doesn't cater to FreeBSD as FreeBSD proably still has its place on my Racks as a server, but when we hire a secetary, looks like she will get the FreeBSD tower with Openoffice instead of Linux.
Biggest thing I think, is that FreeBSD still has the old text based installer, but its not as ass backwards as say 2.2 or 3.4. For most noob's the YaST in SuSE and whatever it is on RH is very pleasing and better to use. Plus Linux gets support for the latest and greatest in hardware with drivers, etc.
But if your just looking for a nice, stable, OS, you can't loose with either FreeBSD or Linux. Especially if you use Gnome or KDE. Looks the same, and proably 99.95% of the people would never know.
Sit in a pipe-smoke filled room with powerful members of the Republician party. Point out I did donate the maxium allowed contribution, plus all the volunteering time on campaigns, and that this *really needs to be looked at here*.
You think I'm kidding...sad thing is I'm not. I worked on a number of campaigns while I was in college and made some in roads with the staffs of several people, most notably Roy Blunt's staff (the House Majority Whip aka, 3rd most powerful man in the House if I remember my rankings correctly).
I figured, being in one of the most republican or republican strong holds on the face of the planet, responsible for most notably John Ashcroft, that it was a unquie place to make political allies. Yeah, politics are dirty, but hell if you know how to play the game, you can get somewhere.
I'll donate to the EFF, when they can actually win a case other than getting Paramount to stop sueing Trekkie sites.
Wow, mentioned Ashcroft, dissed the EFF, and made fun of trekkies. Great, I know that I'm going on a few people's Foe list tonight around here.
So when it came time to renew last summer, I did. They were switching to GSM, great I've used GSM in Europe for years and was looking forward to SIM cards and other related technologies.
Well in the last 3 months since I switched, both my fiance and I have had nothing but problems with people calling, but the phone doesn't ring. Part of it, from what I've read, is that our 6340/6340i have well documented issues with quality, and the other part is with Cingular's service itself and their transition is not going very...smoothly, yet we were forced to get a new GSM phone when we renewed.
With the portablity 'comming' in less than 60 days when I went to cingular two weeks ago after loosing about $1000 contract because they could never reach me, they still were going to A) make me pay full retail for a new phone, B) Pay termination fee of $150 and go else here. Well, I figure I had 1000 roll over minutes and to reprint letter heads, business cards, brochures for the both of us was going to run $1500.
Plus, I know that every carrier here will be offering the deals of the century in an attempt to steal each other's customers so chances are, waiting would be to our benefit.
However I learned this past week that we won't see the ablity to switch until late spring of next year. So I am going to bitch and see about getting Cingular to cave, if not, then I will eat the cost of printing up business cards etc., and the termination fee at the end of this month.
I could say "Its about time", but at least he is doing something about it. I have not been impressed with some of his politicing in the past, but might actully vote for him next time around if is does/can run again.
He's been our best AG since, dare I say the name around here, Ashcroft.
I live in SW missouri, Springfield to be exact (awaits Simpsons comments), and I went to the Alltel store yesterday as my business partner uses them and has been quite happy with their service, but was ready for an upgrade on his handset (he had an old Nokia 4100 or 5100) and asked them about number portablity. The Alltel sales rep was friendly and told me, "Our billing system is ready, but they are starting with the top 100 metro areas in the country. We won't be able to do that down here until late spring, proably around May and June."
May or June of 2004...I can't wait that long. I mean when it takes effect would be the best time because I know everyone is going to bend over backwards with good deals to steal each other's customers. Unfortunatly the cost of reprinting business cards and other materials looks to be a lot less than the potential of lost clients/jobs if I don't switch now.
So yes, number portablity is good...if it really would be available on November 24th everywhere.
When I lived on the dorms, it was a different story. There were an average of 4000 attempt portscans on my machine a day.
Its almost gotten to the point of without turning to viglantism on the internet and launching counter DDos attacks on the spammers themsleves, especially those outside of countries that don't enforce or don't attempt to enfore any type of Spam laws. Most spammers now operate outside of western countries, so what's the cure?
Filtering helps, tools like Spamassassin has brought my total spams from like 80 a day to less than 10.
I for one, as much as I hate them, wouldn't mind to see a few class action lawsuits against spammers. How much longer until the pipes bust with junk and turn the Internet into a near useless medium.
I know several of my clients now call me instead of email as they say that they "Have to wade through 30 junk messages for one valid message". I have rules set up to where my customer's and family email go to seperate folders, and that helps even more, but something needs to be done.
As much as I hate to bitch and not offer any answers, I am afraid that I am stumped. I fear that any attempts to write new protocals, espically by the likes of M$, Yahoo, HP, and other major players, with result in the closing of networks, (i.e. this message was not authenticated by a pallidum enabled server, therefore it will be rejected. Please trade your Mac in for a PC with Win XP^2 for $1000) and cause a leap backwards. At the same time, while people here can say the OSS community will develop an "open" solution, the very fact that its open means that the very people we try to stop will be able to circumvent anything the community develops. Not to say this won't happen with closed-source technology, but then companies like M$ can possible use DMCA against the spammers that reverse engineer such technology.
In any case, spammers are winning and we all are losing.
Usually people get bids from two or three different "web designers" and I always ask to which standards do they code to. 90% of the time I hear, "MSIE". I retort, so you don't use Xhtml, html 4, CSS 1 or 2.0 as your standard as defined by the W3C? Usually makes them a tad bit uncomfortable when they know they are dealing with an expert. Then after peeling the onion back a little bit further and they say, "90% of the world uses MSIE, therefore that is what standard we code too". These are "Web Professionals" and people wonder why people are paying me money to sit in on meetings and tell them if Web Design/Networking company X is bullshitting them.
Then I say to the business owner, however that means that 10% of potential customers may not be able to access the site. Business owners get the point, sometimes. Other times they stick with the, "Well all my current customers use Windows and MSIE, its what we use, so if they can't use Netscape or Safari, too bad. They need to get a PC".
However I have a bigger fear, and that is the moving away of technology from open standards creating closed global networks. While some will defend open standards to their death, the truth is with openness, also comes the ablity for those to abuse it for their own gain. Just look at Email and Spam. Even if a new "Open" protocal is designed, how long until the spammer find a way to circumvent the technology and continue their annoying habbits? Not to say it wouldn't happen with a closed solution, but here is where the closed solution (bit of a slippery-slope) could come into play:
Spam is a problem. I hear this all the time from my clients wanted to improve their technology. It becomming such a problem and some of the major players come to develop a new method for delivering Email, let's just all it NixSpam, that is harder to fake, but here comes the kicker: It requires you to have a DRM chipset and server solution to authenticate messages sent. Co inside this with paliadim(sp?) and other M$ technologies on the horizon.
Some of my clients would pay the money if the technology worked. Would they care that Mac and Linux users could no longer send them email, maybe some with Mac users, but most would say, "Well if Person X want's to communicate with the rest of the world, they can buy a Dell like everyone else" (Yes I do here that more than you would think).
Again, at the same time, many of my customers are tired of playing the "Let's spend thousands every 18 months to upgrade all our software and hardware" game and some have seriously looked at Linux, and I have had one office of about 18 make the switch and several smaller mom & pops have switch to using Mac's. Linux has matured to the point where it may just be ready for Desktop use at larger offices that have at least a small dedicated IT staff, however most still are afraid of not having the level of support of Windows or Apple.
However, if M$ would be sucessful in creating closed API's like they have in the past for email or even webbrowsing, any hope of making Linux a reasonable and viable alternative to Windows is gone.
Sometime in the either mid or late 1990's only then did PC's come to mean a computer with an Intel Chip and Windows. Today its a computer with an x86 chip.
But what we call PC's today in slang is not the true meaning of the word first recorded in 1977 by Mr. Websters. According to that definition, Apple running any Macintosh OS other than their Xserve qualify, by defition provided in my earlier post, as a "Personal Computer".
You know, for Piece of Shit, I'll stick with my Win 98 box with my games. For Point of Sale, I like the IBM system we have. I think I'll keep it..don't tell SCO
From M-W.com's:
One entry found for personal computer.
Main Entry: personal computer
Function: noun
Date: 1977
: a general-purpose computer equipped with a microprocessor and designed to run especially commercial software (as a word processor or World Wide Web browser) for an individual user
Macs seem to be "general purpose", have a microprocessor, and designed to run especially commerical software. Word, Photoshop, iTunes, etc.
So acording to the dictionary definition, Apple computers qualify as "PC's".
I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.
I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.
Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.
I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.
Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.
Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.
Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.
So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.
I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.
Well, the boss went one weekend to Staples or Office max or somewhere and bought 4 $80 Epson C82 printers. Granted, they printed fast, have the 4 cartige system and refills are about $10 per cartige. Well, with the amount of printing they are doing, they go through about 3 black ink cartiges a week and usually at least one color. You tell me how long its going to take before TCO of the laser would have been a better choice. We decided it would be best to "part ways" especially after my paychecked bounced and I he was blue collar, no college educated fool that has tried running 4 other businesses and they have all failed. He was selling an cool product circa 2000, but his market was quickly evaporating as WiFI becomes more prevelant.
Another one of my clients, against my recomendation, went ahead a bought one of those "all in one" fax/scanners/copiers/printers and it also uses ink jet cartiges, which according to the employes they are replacing at least once a week because they run out that fast.
Now for home use, its a different story. I still have an HP 710C from when I started college. I went through about one black ink thingy every semester and 1 tri-color cart. every year. The problem I had was I would always run out of one color, like blue, before any of the others, but still would have to fork over the $40 for the tri-color.
Also, some of my mom and pop shops maybe print off 10 copies of something a week and some color pictures for "specials" every once in a while and in their cases, they can get buy with an inkjet printer.
How about TORT reform to where anyone that brings a lawsuit without merit has to pay the loser's bills and limits damages. Yeah, yeah, people will cry that "victoms cannot be fairly compensated" which often times to me means, "You cannot put a montary value on life" (translated: Two Million isn't enough, but 100 Million, now that eases the pain a bit...especially AFTER I take my 30% as a lawyer).
The only reason why I switched to a uniball is I left one too many pilot V5's in my pants pockets and put them through the wash and more importantly the dryer...which caused the ink to explode all over everything ruining about $250 worth of clothes.
Actually it was after the third time I did that I stopped using the pens. An the time I forgot to place the cap back on, drove for three hours and when I looked down, noticed this huge black ink spot on my pants.
Its a good pen, just not for the absent minded.
I work as a technology consultant, independant mainly to very small mom and pop shops and small offices. Many have upgraded PC's in the last few months and just now have Office XP/2002 and here 2003 is comming out at the end of the month.
These people express a disgust that every 18 months, what the buy today won't be powerful enough to run that in the future and its been cheaper to buy $700 boxes every 2 years and chuck 'em than to go through, upgrade hardware and software.
Many more use FreeBSD and Linux daily. I have helped 4 businesses set up ecommerce sites through Yahoo, they have no idea what the hell FreeBSD is, but that is what powers their site.
Also, I have a portable FreeBSD box called my Apple iBook that many take a look at and two mom & pop stores have switched to using Macs for Point of sale and other uses and love them because they are easy to use and don't crash.
I started out in the graphics/video production field with wedding businesses and most switched around 2000 - 2001 to Dell's and PC's. Many are now switching back to mac because of their lost time and work with system crashes.
Now to the kicker: I set-up a Linux or FreeBSD box with KDE set up and most people can pick up how to launch Mozilla and Netscape w/o any proablems. In fact over the next two weeks, I am converting one office over to Linux on all of their PIII 700 boxes they have. Total cost: About $2540. ($2500 to hire me to do it, $40 for a copy of RH). Most couldn't tell a difference between OpenOffice's Spreadsheet and Excell and since it can read/write MS office formats (at least for now) they have interoperatblity.
Their office file/print server has been Linux for "at least two years" one employee remarked, but I don't know I didn't set up their LAN. Well I know its RH 6.2 on IBM hardware, how long its been there...
Why did they switch? They had spent over $6000 US in the last two years just on support calls to wipe off viruses on these machines not to mention the cost in lost time due to data being lost and computer downtime. The hardest issue was to find a replacement for their accounting/payroll/inventroy software. So I recommended buying one new Dell just to run the software package as it would proably take longer and be a hell of a lot more to reset up 4 years of data on a new system and the PR person wanted an iMac, so I recommended getting her one so she can run QuarkXpress and Photoshop.
People and businesses are sick and tired the MS upgrade game every 18 months and I think Linux is poised to make some grounds in the business world. Red Hat and SuSE has done a wonderful job of taking Linux from Geekdom to so easy grandma could use it. Still the lack of commerical software is hurting the platform. OpenOffice has made some tremendous gains in terms of functionality to the point where it now can be used.
Special software is getting there too, like the NOLA Enterprise Resource Planning software, phpprojekt group ware, are good resources for medium sized businesses. What is lacking is some good small business software like Quickbooks that is extremely easy to use and designed for small business. Maybe there is something out there, I just havn't found it yet.
...the 9th circus of appeals...
That chair is more expensive than my desk ($100 from Office Max), Chair ($99 from Office Max), and three 5 self book cases ($60 each from Walmart).
The theatre was dead silent during and a few seconds after the trailer stopped. Then three people got up and left. They had spent $7.50 each to see a 3 minute trailer and missed a wonderful movie.
Anyway, I am downloading it now...
I would go with Verizon if they were in this area, but they aren't. The choices are Sprint, AT&T, Nextel, DT/voicestream, and Alltel. Alltel piggy backs their nationwide service on Verizon's network. Also when I say its $8.50 more a month, I am also considering the two days worth of lost work time to inform customers that the phone number has changed etc. and thus far I have not lost any contracts, but it could. I am going to complain again tomorrow. I have a couple hours tomorrow and I have a couple weeks until my next billing period. I got my Motorola handset that I purchased in Europe (tri-band & GSM) and swapped out the Vodophone SIM card with my Cingular SIM. Call quality isn't as great as my Nokia, but I am still getting dropped calls, but at least its not powering off. Last time they had to adjust the battery. The viberating battery was a *great* engineering feat, considering it shakes the battery loose after a while the connectors have to be readjusted. I've read the press reports about the quality of AT&T and Verizon, but what the press is saying and what my customers say about their service is two different things. My Customers that use AT&T have had similar issues as I with Cingular lately as well and their "home" calling area and the way they handle night/weekend minutes outside of this area sucks. It covers the western half of Missouri, but I do about 40% of my business in St. Louis and Southeast Missouri, where AT&T gets no signal at all, or if you do its still analog. Cingluar and Alltel are the best as far as coverage goes in those areas. I know several people with verizon and everyone loves their basic service. Their new "push to talk" feature I've heard stinks, but Nextel isn't any better if not worse and Verizon would be my first choice if they actully had resellers or stores in this area, they don't. I am considering giving Cingular time until the number portablitity gets here. Then I am going to switch proably to Alltel.
Now I will admit that I still have 2 Linux boxes I host client's web sites on, but most of my boxes now either run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I have an iBook as my main computer.
Why? It's been my humble opinion that Linux has been a bit of a bastard child. Is it a desktop OS, or a server OS? Its flexablity is its greatest strength and its achellies heel at the same time. With no standards between distros on simple things, like the path to PERL, can cause headaches for software developers. I once work on a project where we had to code three different versions of an app, one for RH, another for Mandrake, and one for Debian. After that expirance, I got fed up with the Linux Platform about the same time as Mac OS X.1 came out.
FreeBSD was/is designed as a server OS first, and if you want to toy with it, it can also make an effective workstation. However this is where Mac OS comes into play: There are companies that are publishing commercial software for the platform. So I can interface wtih 90% of the web design/graphics world that use Photoshop, dreamweaver, QuarkXpress, and other such programs where as due to the pain in the ass Linux is to port across distros, commerical companies WON'T port their products. I will even admit to having MS Office, and I actully LIKE it on mac. It works wonderfully.
While the OSS community has developed some kick ass apps, like the ERP module OSSuite (NOLA I think is the sourceforge project) is what I use to keep track of our business's accounting needs including payroll, W-2's, inventory, etc., there is still a vast void of software needs outthere. GIMP is certianly not a photoshop killer. Back in the days of PS 4 and 5, GIMP looked like it was on the track to possible create a much better product, but as now it seems as though GIMP has made very few improvements over the last two years and it still takes a lot more time and effort to get the same results as Photoshop. Photoshop 7 now blows GIMP away in my book.
The two Linux servers I have still are Sun Cobalt Raq servers and I still use them because of the ease of maintance, but all my ecommerce sites are on FreeBSD machines and I have had very little problems with these boxes. Hell two are still running FreeBSD 3.4 and had uptimes of like 250 days until I patched OpenSSH and several other updates two weeks ago.
RH and SuSE are getting closer to getting Linux from Geekdom to mainstream as SuSE is large in Europe. I used it when I studied over there for semester as the school had a windows lab and a linux lab, but that is mainly a result of GUI installers and KDE & GNOME.
At our new business, I have FreeBSD on both of the terminals (we inheirted two PIII 700 Dells & 3 PIII 550 Gateway's when we bought the business) and instead of paying $2500 for four new computers, I slaped FreeBSD 5 with KDE on there, install mozilla and linked them to the office server which is configured as a local webserver with no outside pipeline and we use OsCommerce as our POS system.
Now this article is a bit trollish about jumping ship. I stats and as Mark Twain wrote, "Lies, Damn Lies, and Stats". Approach with caution. OSS software is starting to get looked at, I work as a independant tech consultant, and Linux gets the press thanks to RH and SuSE providing what Linux needs to get into main stream: commericalization. There is a number you can call for support, if you need it.
You mean that signal spike in SETI@HOME was just an ovalten commerical...I thought it was ET phoning home....
At first I thought it was the phone, as it started to drop calls, not ring when people called, and then it started to automatically turn itself off. I went in to the the store owned by Cingluar, I was there for 5 minutes and I had a new handset. This was about the middle of August. Now, this handset is having the same problems and my Fiance's phone has had nothing but problems too. (Her's sets off alarm clocks and electronic devices).
I live and die by my Cell phone as I use it as my Only phone, business and personal because I am a consultant and often out to visit with clients on a daily basis and perfer to work from coffee shops when ever possible, and to have people call and the phone not even ring has cost me in terms of business and just generally annoying.
So I finally we both get fed up, so both my Fiance and I walk into store and politely complain about the handsets, and the rep camly states that "They have been having issues with their network and voice mail". I explain, that since this is my one and only phone and I use it for business purposes that I cannot afford to have this type of service and wanted to know about switching handsets. Well, we "couldn't trade in our handsets" and would cost us retail, about $250 - 300 depending on what model, to trade buy something else.
Then I asked him, "How much is it to terminate the agreement?" and he responded studdering $150. And I then replied, "So it would be cheaper for us to break the contract and go to Alltel, then?" and he responded with silence for a few seconds then answered "yes" and then explained that it was problems with the network, not the phones.
I then asked him, "Look at it from my perpective. I am a consulant and if someone can't reach me, I loose money. Even a small contract usually totals several thousand dollars." And then I got the "any time with new technology, system, there is going to be problems" and I said, "This isn't a new system. Europe has been using it for quite sometime. In fact I used it when I was there working/studing abroad this time last year and it was great, I had no problems, so why are you? Why are you requiring all customers trade up for new phones that don't work?" He didn't have an answer.
My Fiance and I then went to AT&T, which isn't much better from what I have heard and way more expensive, and Alltel, which is pretty close to that of Cingular as far as price goes (about $5 difference a month) and for my Fiance is actully a tad bit cheaper.
That was Thursday and I didn't want to make a judgement based on emotion, because I ticked at the rep that gave me the run around on why the network isn't working even though its not his fault, and looked at the fact of the time it would take to call all of my clients and tell them I have a new number and the fact it would cost me about $8.50 more a month with Altell and decided to stick it out for a bit, but things have only been getting worse.
My fiance tried to call me 4 times today, only 1 got through and i continue to drop calls left and right. Before, I rarely had dropped calls unless I was in the middle of the sticks, now I get them all the time.
Bottom line, after reading that this is not just a local problem and speaking with several other providers in the area, that Monday morning my fiance and I are going to go back to the Cingular dealer and break our contract. Yeah its going to cost us $300, but both of us use it for business (she's a wedding planner) and losing just one customer for either of us will be an oppertunity cost of way more than $150. At the very least I go get to expense the cost off my taxes as a business expense so, I guess I break even on paper.
The only thing that sucks, is I just had a new set of business cards printed...always my damn luck...