I've never used it, but am wondering, what does it lack on the desktop? Does it have a browser, chat clients, email stuff, office applications, etc? Skip games, besides that, why is it disappointing?
..seeing as how 99.99% of those calls on that day are going to be about the stupid switchover, you can A) have an automated response that goes through the whole spiel quickly and efficiently, then gives them an option at the end to talk to a human if they want to sit on hold, or B) let them sit on hold right off the bat with no explanation at all.
Which will be more annoying to your clueless, cheap and probably not buying anything anyway viewers? The people who didn't switch because they couldn't get the coupons yet at least know what has happened and won't be calling, that leaves your lowest uncommon denominator left. And with that said, if they haven't switched, they *won't be* viewers until such a time as they get a converter box or a real digital tuner/tv, so you lose that demographic either way you handle it for that viewing time period, so your point is moot.. Either way you are going to annoy people (and most likely your crappiest customers anyway), so why not choose the way that at least gives them one more chance with the information they probably need and want? Answering live at the ring you just know the queue is going to back up to hours on hold anyway as the really clueless ones will want to argue at you and then most likely start cussing and fuming, etc. I know I watch very little TV, but what I have watched over the past..whatever, many months now, I have seen those infoblurbs about the switch over many, many,many times. You would have had to NOT been watching any TV at all whatsoever to not see them.
Seems like a solid state thermocouple might be easier to use. I'd like to see some sort of heat pipe from the case to one, then use that output to power the screen (maybe not the main one but a smaller backup little screen??). I have no idea of the state of the art there though or what sort of useful electricity you might get from one. I have seen a kerosene lantern from Russia that uses a thermocouple to scavenge waste heat from the kero burning to provide power for a table radio.
So we would have to go back to something more balanced and actually produce goods in the US again? I fail to see a downside, considering I am old enough to remember when the bulk of the goods you could go out and buy here were produced here, and the economy was perfectly fine and the middle class was growing with actual savings and we didn't have near as much debt (personal/corporate/governmental). This is one of those things you have to have experienced, it is probably too hard to just muse on it intellectually, but yes, the US is large enough to be able to do this, to set as a primary goal a robust internal trading economy. If you look at it, it is a 50 state trading union, with an established common language and monetary unit. Now we can't support a huge bloated tick class of do nothing office wealth rearrangers hanging around million dollar offices who need bailouts when their gambling debts go bad with a domestic manufacturing economy, or some giant governmental "worker" base, but again, that isn't a downside.
The other method, taken as a whole, this globalization that completely ignored a lot of the reality on the ground such as foreign nations ignoring IP etc, has failed and the economy is in such a mess now that all sorts of wild assed schemes are needed to "save" it. I contend it is better to let the past few decades long experiment in alleged "investment" ponzi schemes and get rich quick schemes and so on just finish failing and rebuild back to the older model that really worked, and improve on that one instead. There were flaws then of course, but we threw the baby out with the bath water by "investing" in their "make china and a few other nations and a handful of CEOs rich while the rest of everyone else went into debt" model. That one has been mostly epic fail, the unemployment numbers and balance of trade numbers and debt load and whatnot recent bad economic news prove that without a doubt.
We traded a few years of cheap gadgets and an exploding debt crisis for more moderate and sustainable and balanced growth and security. I'd rather have had the latter. If their notion of globlization worked, we wouldn't be seeing all these western nations and companies and banks failing right now or going through various economic crises. You cannot borrow your way to wealth, eventually you have to work for it. You can't printing press up more money and call that a sound economy, that will never, ever work, money needs to be based on produced wealth, not unsustainable credit. Keynesian economics and what passes for globalization now are a *fraud* and have failed, it does no good to think rearranging them again with words that push those notions will fix the fundamental errors of that sort of economic system. It needs to be abandoned.
Ya, the supercars are cool if you are a bailed out banker with some buckets of cash sitting around, the three wheelers are...interesting.... looking, Detroit has the usual plethora of concept cars they are fooling around with like they always do, but the one to watch will be the Better Place organization because they are building the whole EV stack, they have a name brand big OEM behind them (nissan/renault to build the vehicles which will be normal looking, plus they are developing a standard charger plus fast battery pack swap outs), and have national governments and some US states behind them. These will be the electric cars that really get the show on the road for the "masses" guy.
Because right now you get both kinds of signal in most markets. That's why we got the zenith, it has analog pass through, so you can get either kind of signal. And even after the changeover, a lot of smaller powered community stations around the country will be staying with an analog signal. I dont know the particulars to the one you replied to, but it might be because the person's fav channel was analog only at this time, but they wanted to be prepared for the switch.
Worked out better for us. Don't know about the economy overall, but for us it was a deal, it made it so the old set is still functional, and it improved it immensely! Like a really good cheap upgrade! Got the coupon, bought a zenith 901 converter, and we get more stations now and they come in *clear*, out in north cow flop rural Georgia. Before, stations were all fuzzy, none of them clear, plus we picked up PBS, which we couldn't get at all before. Granted, you can *not* screw with the antenna once it is set, but once you have it adjusted ~just so~, it's great, the old tube has the best picture evar, like watching a disk. That's a dollars-intangible personal subjective improvement, but the lessening of the fuzzy stations annoyance factor has some net worth. And that is just using indoor rabbit ears! And despite other folks anecdotals, we haven't experienced much in the way of bad weather dropouts.
The only thing I don't like about the digital conversion is, we have two old battery portable units to use for during power outtages, and there are few replacements for those on the market yet and all spendy (compared to 15 dollar analog portable sets you can get still). There's a market niche that needs to be filled, I am sure many other people would like to have a portable digital TV in the affordable category. If I have to I'll just get another converter and run both devices from a 12 volt battery and an inverter. I have that rig now but use it for my laptop when the power goes out.
With that said, I wish the government would just broadcast a plain vanilla constantly updated local weather radar scan (that can be analog on some locked assigned frequency maybe), the weather radios don't quite cut it without that visual. That would be another improvement.
So, for some small spending, cash out of pocket plus my citizen tax payer share of the proceeds from the public spectrum auction in the form of the converter coupon, we get much better TV quality, and more stations, without having to purchase a new TV or go to monthly big bill satellite TV. Is that good or bad for the economy? For us it was a good enough deal. And who knoweth but maybe the freed up spectrum (the other 1/2 of the digital conversion package that will be used somehow) might go to someone getting wireless broadband that works out here, lead pipe cinch there isn't going to be anything wired ever run, no company is going to run anything decent for more than a mile to maybe pickup a total of six households, just ain't never gonna happen. And that is roughly 15% of the nation that still can't get any sort of broadband. And the benefits of broadband/internet are well understood. I use the net all the time to look stuff up we need for farming (just the amount of crap that breaks and needs new parts makes online shopping worthwhile) or to research things for my various geekier projects, saves a ton of time and driving around expense and cash dollars when we go to spend them. Dialup is good enough for that (although more expensive than most peoples broadband now), but for keeping a linux distro updated (or even getting the distro downloaded) it is the pits though...
I was actually looking forward to the overall big digital switch day, to see if we got even more channels as the stations went more power. We have an outside mast antenna, but it is more or less whipped and dysfunctional, if the big changeover goes very well, I will consider getting a rotor and a newer antenna to max out the freebie viewing experience (brand/make/model suggestions from anyone knowledgeable gratefully accepted).
Yes, I think they could do the assembly and shipping in house, at least for desktops and servers, notebooks and netbooks would come just premade, nothing much there to it, they will of necessity all be coming intact from Asia someplace. They just need guys onsite to insure quality and to have that quality warranted with whatever manufacturer they pick.
The economy in the US is awash in reasonably technical people who need a job now. They need a few people to really make intelligent decisions on the hardware, and to coordinate that with the software devs they already have to get to the "just freeking works, guaranteed" stage. Building computers is just a factory job after all, it's not that hard,and if you studiously avoid the typical east coast and west coast uber and oh so trendy high rent districts and have your assembly plant in the rust belt some place, you get cheap rent and reasonable labor and you can be picky on the labor quality as well. You aren't making any of the components, just assembling them. As to shipping, Fed Ex and UPS go everywhere, that is a non issue really.
As to sending people- joe six pack or joe business- out to do their own research on hardware, still too many horror stories about what allegedly works and doesn't with linux, its a moving target all the time. Check *any* distro's forums there. You basically *have* to follow the Apple-type model to insure the best quality control and to guarantee it "just works" with the software you install.
The whole idea of a big linux company like Redhat selling computers is they *would* be a better over all experience than getting some random production run from acme computer and trying to shoehorn something in. And again, Apple has proven that people will pay a reasonable premium over the lowest common denominator for that experience.
Umm,. I know Dell and Redhat aren't in the same business. The article was more about Sun and Redhat. Sun sells software, services and hardware. Redhat only sells two of those things so far. That's why I thought it might be interesting if they took a crack at opening up the last leg of that tripod. I *do* know I would be more inclined to get hardware from Redhat knowing it just worked with Linux than getting a similar situation from Dell or Sun. Any place that advertises that they recommend Vista on the top of the "linux pre installed" hardware pages (that would be Dell) in their online catalog isn't really all that serious about it. They offer a few models, but that's about it, sort of a generic minimal effort sop to that market. Whereas if Redhat did it, they would most likely take it *very* seriously. Would it be worth say a 50 buck premium over a similar specced Dell offering (and just about anyone could beat sun on hardware prices)? I think so, especially if they shipped with the real long term supported redhat and not perpetual betaware Fedora. I use Fedora now but it is always a crapshoot every release, it is a fine line between brilliant and a steaming pile, because that is what it is, experimental, it's never stable. If I could get a decent specced machine from Redhat with a solid multi year supported distro on it and it all "just worked" out of the box..that would be quite tempting.
It takes one bay for the RAM drive with built in battery, but they could have an additional full drive bay expansion battery with a jumper cable connector to give it a much longer hold time with the machine shut down.
WTG! I'm glad you went heavy on the conservation angle first. Dollar for dollar, that is the most cost effective energy solution. And good luck with the microhydro project.
You have a creek for a cold water source? If it is close by, just the regular pvc pipe buried would be good enough, but any distance maybe you might want to think about insulating it so it doesn't lose coldness/gain ground warmth. Maybe a pipe inside another pipe with that split pipe insulation stuff on the inner pipe.
I don't live in that area anymore and didn't take pictures, but I think you can get it with this mental diagram. It's easy, Just a cheap plug in water pump and they use the existing coil and the squirrel cage blower. You'll need to use adapters to match the sizes on the coil. I guess you could use like a cheap/small used swimming pool pump, I didn't see what they were using, they just said a "water pump", sitting on a little shelf alongside the AC unit in a box. It was remarkably simple. I didn't even pick up on it until I visited their store a few times (normal cool inside like it had regular AC running, small little store) and noticed the water pipelines dropping down from the back of the unit (you could see it from the parking lot), so I went over and checked it out, then asked them about it. The guy who owned the store just took the old AC when it died and modded it. The creek is around 40 or so feet away, runs year round, little trout stream in north georgia mountains, so it is more or less pretty cold even in the summer months. They just drain it in the winter.
Thinking about it, you could build one with a car radiator and a box fan (measure window to get sizes where you need to put it), same deal, just add the pump, then maybe a little sheet metal shroud to tidy it up so it looked good. I've been meaning to build one myself, we don't use AC here, but I water the garden so much with cold well water that I keep thinking..hmmm..might as well. Just anther project, and I was going to put an underground tap out there anyway to eliminate hundreds of feet of garden hose out on the ground.
A family I know with a little country store do their cooling in the summer with such a system, All home made and really easy. It uses an old window AC unit modified to use liquids with a few new plumbing pieces. They just pump cold creek water through it, then it goes back to the stream. Works perfectly.
I know that, I just thought I had a live dell guy here in the thread, so I was taking advantage of it. I was trying to help a friend who's computer croaked last week, and found her that Dell model, but she needs dialup. I told her to go to import mart and get a usb us robotics model as that should work out of the box, but it still isn't an excuse for dell to not provide dialup support as an option,.
As to ISPs being usually clueless with anything but windows, what else is new. I know mine sent me their handy "install to get on the internet" cd, and I chucked it in the trash, a few dollars waste there on their side, and I TOLD them specifically I wouldn't be needing it in the first place, but they sent it anyway. And I just frikkin hate if you ever have to call them up and the first thing out of Abu's..I mean "Mikes" mouth is "which windows are you running?". This is 2009 now, I think that people can finally be taught what an operating system is and that yes indeedy there is more than one. Car analogy..you call up any joe random car repair place and they just assume you have a belchfire car, because belchifre is the biggest. And the person who wants a repair says "what's an engine?" It's way past time people took the initiative and learned just a little bit more about this thing they are sitting in front of. It really is that ignorant anymore, no different from not knowing what an engine, transmission, tires, etc are. If people can't be bothered to learn that much, just some really basic simple stuff... no computer for them, and who cares, those are the same ones who get rooted within five minutes and become part of botnets and just drive their friends and family nuts forever "fixing" their hosed computer and having to "explain" how to navigate a simple menu.
Now, I am not saying everyone should be an advanced administrator guru, I certainly am not, but jeez loweez, these companies (computer sellers and ISPs) should have been doing more to at least try and educate people and at least try to actually be operating system neutral by now.
And it sure is a slap in the face for dang dell to have "dell recommends Microsoft vista!" on the top of the few ubuntu equipped machines web site pages they have. It's cool they started selling them, but still..get the MS ads off the linux pages. And get that stupid MS sticker off of new hardware, got a new LCD monitor for Christmas, another dang retarded bit of Microsoft advertising stuck on the thing. I just want them to go away and quit being..whatever they are, the big bully. A long time ago I didn't care one way or the other about them, but since some years now, seeing how they have done business and all the weirdness that goes on...I have to admit I think they suck, I wouldn't use a single one of their "products" just on general principles now. Just too slimy, and I hate how thew rest of computerdom always kowtows to them. Just a personal gripe. they could have the best OS in the world and pay me 100 bucks to install it and I still wouldn't do it. I don't support the mafia, the mpaa, the riaa, or microsoft, they all are just too slimy and crooked for me. Different strokes.
Why does Dell not support modems and offer a built in modem that just works with Ubuntu? (I am assuming by your post you work for them) A lot of people (millions, a not insignificant number) still use dialup and/or dialup is all they can get. It isn't an option on their website, specifically the 530n desktop model on sale now. This is a long solved non problem given the correct modem, and at Dell's scale and so forth, should be something cheap like a 20 buck internal card modem option. Yes I know some aftermarket modem can be made to work, but when you offer a slew of options, it seems to be a glaring omission. People who order a bundle like that will most likely want to get online when the package arrives, you are sending the customer out to some *mart to shop, it becomes an annoyance factor, bad customer experience.
I'd say you are being a sober hard nosed realist. They are going to be pushing labor arbitrage all the way to the US becoming basically a two class society. That's what all the trends look like to me anyway.
I know I wouldn't have a problem at all paying google a reasonable sum per year-probably through a very modest isp hit, get it through them as an option-so that I could use a good search service that was ad free. And ad free as in if I run a search I *don't* want the whole first page of hits being something for sale that is marginally related to one of the search words, or link/spam farms, along with no ads on the side bar and no google analytics anything wherever I go, just plain search as a paid service. It's a very useful thing they have, just it keeps going downhill from all the ads and "buy me! Antarctica, icebergs! You want icebergs, check out ebay!" ( I saw that once on a google side ad, no lie) They could even have a toggle "repeat search with commercial ads and sites included" so you'd get what you see today with a google search. Not sure what that would be worth, but say an extra 20 bucks a year or something would be fine with me.
So that's one way they could make money without ads.
The upcoming administration is making noises they will be giving employers some sort of tax break or stimulus to "create jobs" and hire more people (up to 3 thousand bucks a job!). So..maybe it isn't far fetched to think a lot of the folks being laid off now will be rehired once this new tax break dodge starts back up again. Just a thought..
You aren't looking at the whole stack. Walmart having marginally more efficient trucks does nothing for the fact that one of the consequences of Walmart in general is an additional 1,000 (some huge number) of extremely dirty coal plants in China where the regulations aren't near as strict as the US, plus moving all the goods from China to the US on ships, and those ships have hardly any regulations at all while running on bunker fuel, which is downright nasty again.
Any savings in energy or cleaner air here are offset to a tremendous degree just by the business model of offshoring the manufacturing (let alone the hit to the wallets of all the out of work factory workers here and lost tax base). And air knows no boundaries, what was air pollution a week ago in China (remember when they had to almost close China down just to run the olympics so they could have tolerable air for the athletes?) has now traveled the Pacific and is hitting north America.
All you did was move the problem to the other side of an imaginary dotted line, plus cost tens of million of jobs domestically plus exported cash by the boatload and taken it out of the internal economy where it stopped being a force multiplier. That's why China is sitting on huge reserves of cash and is able to go around the planet and buy up the next 20-50 years of critical strategic minerals like they are doing in Africa right now, and the US is sitting in the debtors seat wondering where all the new jobs are going to come from.
So we still got way more air pollution in general, plus a lot of lost jobs that paid better than Walmart "associate" pay. The big trade was one generation of cheaper gadgets, and we got to play "make believe" that we cleaned up the environment when we didn't, we made it worse actually (looking at the planet as a whole), and now the US economy is partly collapsing from it.
Slashdot Mirror
A Taste of Armageddon
I've never used it, but am wondering, what does it lack on the desktop? Does it have a browser, chat clients, email stuff, office applications, etc? Skip games, besides that, why is it disappointing?
..seeing as how 99.99% of those calls on that day are going to be about the stupid switchover, you can A) have an automated response that goes through the whole spiel quickly and efficiently, then gives them an option at the end to talk to a human if they want to sit on hold, or B) let them sit on hold right off the bat with no explanation at all.
Which will be more annoying to your clueless, cheap and probably not buying anything anyway viewers? The people who didn't switch because they couldn't get the coupons yet at least know what has happened and won't be calling, that leaves your lowest uncommon denominator left. And with that said, if they haven't switched, they *won't be* viewers until such a time as they get a converter box or a real digital tuner/tv, so you lose that demographic either way you handle it for that viewing time period, so your point is moot.. Either way you are going to annoy people (and most likely your crappiest customers anyway), so why not choose the way that at least gives them one more chance with the information they probably need and want? Answering live at the ring you just know the queue is going to back up to hours on hold anyway as the really clueless ones will want to argue at you and then most likely start cussing and fuming, etc. I know I watch very little TV, but what I have watched over the past..whatever, many months now, I have seen those infoblurbs about the switch over many, many,many times. You would have had to NOT been watching any TV at all whatsoever to not see them.
They will probably have an automatic recording set to answer the phones on that day, wouldn't you?
Seems like a solid state thermocouple might be easier to use. I'd like to see some sort of heat pipe from the case to one, then use that output to power the screen (maybe not the main one but a smaller backup little screen??). I have no idea of the state of the art there though or what sort of useful electricity you might get from one. I have seen a kerosene lantern from Russia that uses a thermocouple to scavenge waste heat from the kero burning to provide power for a table radio.
So we would have to go back to something more balanced and actually produce goods in the US again? I fail to see a downside, considering I am old enough to remember when the bulk of the goods you could go out and buy here were produced here, and the economy was perfectly fine and the middle class was growing with actual savings and we didn't have near as much debt (personal/corporate/governmental). This is one of those things you have to have experienced, it is probably too hard to just muse on it intellectually, but yes, the US is large enough to be able to do this, to set as a primary goal a robust internal trading economy. If you look at it, it is a 50 state trading union, with an established common language and monetary unit. Now we can't support a huge bloated tick class of do nothing office wealth rearrangers hanging around million dollar offices who need bailouts when their gambling debts go bad with a domestic manufacturing economy, or some giant governmental "worker" base, but again, that isn't a downside.
The other method, taken as a whole, this globalization that completely ignored a lot of the reality on the ground such as foreign nations ignoring IP etc, has failed and the economy is in such a mess now that all sorts of wild assed schemes are needed to "save" it. I contend it is better to let the past few decades long experiment in alleged "investment" ponzi schemes and get rich quick schemes and so on just finish failing and rebuild back to the older model that really worked, and improve on that one instead. There were flaws then of course, but we threw the baby out with the bath water by "investing" in their "make china and a few other nations and a handful of CEOs rich while the rest of everyone else went into debt" model. That one has been mostly epic fail, the unemployment numbers and balance of trade numbers and debt load and whatnot recent bad economic news prove that without a doubt.
We traded a few years of cheap gadgets and an exploding debt crisis for more moderate and sustainable and balanced growth and security. I'd rather have had the latter. If their notion of globlization worked, we wouldn't be seeing all these western nations and companies and banks failing right now or going through various economic crises. You cannot borrow your way to wealth, eventually you have to work for it. You can't printing press up more money and call that a sound economy, that will never, ever work, money needs to be based on produced wealth, not unsustainable credit. Keynesian economics and what passes for globalization now are a *fraud* and have failed, it does no good to think rearranging them again with words that push those notions will fix the fundamental errors of that sort of economic system. It needs to be abandoned.
Ya, the supercars are cool if you are a bailed out banker with some buckets of cash sitting around, the three wheelers are...interesting.... looking, Detroit has the usual plethora of concept cars they are fooling around with like they always do, but the one to watch will be the Better Place organization because they are building the whole EV stack, they have a name brand big OEM behind them (nissan/renault to build the vehicles which will be normal looking, plus they are developing a standard charger plus fast battery pack swap outs), and have national governments and some US states behind them. These will be the electric cars that really get the show on the road for the "masses" guy.
Ezekiel Running Bear, is that you?
Because right now you get both kinds of signal in most markets. That's why we got the zenith, it has analog pass through, so you can get either kind of signal. And even after the changeover, a lot of smaller powered community stations around the country will be staying with an analog signal. I dont know the particulars to the one you replied to, but it might be because the person's fav channel was analog only at this time, but they wanted to be prepared for the switch.
Worked out better for us. Don't know about the economy overall, but for us it was a deal, it made it so the old set is still functional, and it improved it immensely! Like a really good cheap upgrade! Got the coupon, bought a zenith 901 converter, and we get more stations now and they come in *clear*, out in north cow flop rural Georgia. Before, stations were all fuzzy, none of them clear, plus we picked up PBS, which we couldn't get at all before. Granted, you can *not* screw with the antenna once it is set, but once you have it adjusted ~just so~, it's great, the old tube has the best picture evar, like watching a disk. That's a dollars-intangible personal subjective improvement, but the lessening of the fuzzy stations annoyance factor has some net worth. And that is just using indoor rabbit ears! And despite other folks anecdotals, we haven't experienced much in the way of bad weather dropouts.
The only thing I don't like about the digital conversion is, we have two old battery portable units to use for during power outtages, and there are few replacements for those on the market yet and all spendy (compared to 15 dollar analog portable sets you can get still). There's a market niche that needs to be filled, I am sure many other people would like to have a portable digital TV in the affordable category. If I have to I'll just get another converter and run both devices from a 12 volt battery and an inverter. I have that rig now but use it for my laptop when the power goes out.
With that said, I wish the government would just broadcast a plain vanilla constantly updated local weather radar scan (that can be analog on some locked assigned frequency maybe), the weather radios don't quite cut it without that visual. That would be another improvement.
So, for some small spending, cash out of pocket plus my citizen tax payer share of the proceeds from the public spectrum auction in the form of the converter coupon, we get much better TV quality, and more stations, without having to purchase a new TV or go to monthly big bill satellite TV. Is that good or bad for the economy? For us it was a good enough deal. And who knoweth but maybe the freed up spectrum (the other 1/2 of the digital conversion package that will be used somehow) might go to someone getting wireless broadband that works out here, lead pipe cinch there isn't going to be anything wired ever run, no company is going to run anything decent for more than a mile to maybe pickup a total of six households, just ain't never gonna happen. And that is roughly 15% of the nation that still can't get any sort of broadband. And the benefits of broadband/internet are well understood. I use the net all the time to look stuff up we need for farming (just the amount of crap that breaks and needs new parts makes online shopping worthwhile) or to research things for my various geekier projects, saves a ton of time and driving around expense and cash dollars when we go to spend them. Dialup is good enough for that (although more expensive than most peoples broadband now), but for keeping a linux distro updated (or even getting the distro downloaded) it is the pits though...
I was actually looking forward to the overall big digital switch day, to see if we got even more channels as the stations went more power. We have an outside mast antenna, but it is more or less whipped and dysfunctional, if the big changeover goes very well, I will consider getting a rotor and a newer antenna to max out the freebie viewing experience (brand/make/model suggestions from anyone knowledgeable gratefully accepted).
Yes, I think they could do the assembly and shipping in house, at least for desktops and servers, notebooks and netbooks would come just premade, nothing much there to it, they will of necessity all be coming intact from Asia someplace. They just need guys onsite to insure quality and to have that quality warranted with whatever manufacturer they pick.
The economy in the US is awash in reasonably technical people who need a job now. They need a few people to really make intelligent decisions on the hardware, and to coordinate that with the software devs they already have to get to the "just freeking works, guaranteed" stage. Building computers is just a factory job after all, it's not that hard,and if you studiously avoid the typical east coast and west coast uber and oh so trendy high rent districts and have your assembly plant in the rust belt some place, you get cheap rent and reasonable labor and you can be picky on the labor quality as well. You aren't making any of the components, just assembling them. As to shipping, Fed Ex and UPS go everywhere, that is a non issue really.
As to sending people- joe six pack or joe business- out to do their own research on hardware, still too many horror stories about what allegedly works and doesn't with linux, its a moving target all the time. Check *any* distro's forums there. You basically *have* to follow the Apple-type model to insure the best quality control and to guarantee it "just works" with the software you install.
The whole idea of a big linux company like Redhat selling computers is they *would* be a better over all experience than getting some random production run from acme computer and trying to shoehorn something in. And again, Apple has proven that people will pay a reasonable premium over the lowest common denominator for that experience.
Umm,. I know Dell and Redhat aren't in the same business. The article was more about Sun and Redhat. Sun sells software, services and hardware. Redhat only sells two of those things so far. That's why I thought it might be interesting if they took a crack at opening up the last leg of that tripod. I *do* know I would be more inclined to get hardware from Redhat knowing it just worked with Linux than getting a similar situation from Dell or Sun. Any place that advertises that they recommend Vista on the top of the "linux pre installed" hardware pages (that would be Dell) in their online catalog isn't really all that serious about it. They offer a few models, but that's about it, sort of a generic minimal effort sop to that market. Whereas if Redhat did it, they would most likely take it *very* seriously. Would it be worth say a 50 buck premium over a similar specced Dell offering (and just about anyone could beat sun on hardware prices)? I think so, especially if they shipped with the real long term supported redhat and not perpetual betaware Fedora. I use Fedora now but it is always a crapshoot every release, it is a fine line between brilliant and a steaming pile, because that is what it is, experimental, it's never stable. If I could get a decent specced machine from Redhat with a solid multi year supported distro on it and it all "just worked" out of the box..that would be quite tempting.
..if Redhat sold netbooks, laptops and desktops and servers pre loaded with linux that "just worked", all of it, no hardware gotchas anyplace.
It takes one bay for the RAM drive with built in battery, but they could have an additional full drive bay expansion battery with a jumper cable connector to give it a much longer hold time with the machine shut down.
WTG! I'm glad you went heavy on the conservation angle first. Dollar for dollar, that is the most cost effective energy solution. And good luck with the microhydro project.
You have a creek for a cold water source? If it is close by, just the regular pvc pipe buried would be good enough, but any distance maybe you might want to think about insulating it so it doesn't lose coldness/gain ground warmth. Maybe a pipe inside another pipe with that split pipe insulation stuff on the inner pipe.
I don't live in that area anymore and didn't take pictures, but I think you can get it with this mental diagram. It's easy, Just a cheap plug in water pump and they use the existing coil and the squirrel cage blower. You'll need to use adapters to match the sizes on the coil. I guess you could use like a cheap/small used swimming pool pump, I didn't see what they were using, they just said a "water pump", sitting on a little shelf alongside the AC unit in a box. It was remarkably simple. I didn't even pick up on it until I visited their store a few times (normal cool inside like it had regular AC running, small little store) and noticed the water pipelines dropping down from the back of the unit (you could see it from the parking lot), so I went over and checked it out, then asked them about it. The guy who owned the store just took the old AC when it died and modded it. The creek is around 40 or so feet away, runs year round, little trout stream in north georgia mountains, so it is more or less pretty cold even in the summer months. They just drain it in the winter.
Thinking about it, you could build one with a car radiator and a box fan (measure window to get sizes where you need to put it), same deal, just add the pump, then maybe a little sheet metal shroud to tidy it up so it looked good. I've been meaning to build one myself, we don't use AC here, but I water the garden so much with cold well water that I keep thinking..hmmm..might as well. Just anther project, and I was going to put an underground tap out there anyway to eliminate hundreds of feet of garden hose out on the ground.
A family I know with a little country store do their cooling in the summer with such a system, All home made and really easy. It uses an old window AC unit modified to use liquids with a few new plumbing pieces. They just pump cold creek water through it, then it goes back to the stream. Works perfectly.
I know that, I just thought I had a live dell guy here in the thread, so I was taking advantage of it. I was trying to help a friend who's computer croaked last week, and found her that Dell model, but she needs dialup. I told her to go to import mart and get a usb us robotics model as that should work out of the box, but it still isn't an excuse for dell to not provide dialup support as an option,.
As to ISPs being usually clueless with anything but windows, what else is new. I know mine sent me their handy "install to get on the internet" cd, and I chucked it in the trash, a few dollars waste there on their side, and I TOLD them specifically I wouldn't be needing it in the first place, but they sent it anyway. And I just frikkin hate if you ever have to call them up and the first thing out of Abu's..I mean "Mikes" mouth is "which windows are you running?". This is 2009 now, I think that people can finally be taught what an operating system is and that yes indeedy there is more than one. Car analogy..you call up any joe random car repair place and they just assume you have a belchfire car, because belchifre is the biggest. And the person who wants a repair says "what's an engine?" It's way past time people took the initiative and learned just a little bit more about this thing they are sitting in front of. It really is that ignorant anymore, no different from not knowing what an engine, transmission, tires, etc are. If people can't be bothered to learn that much, just some really basic simple stuff... no computer for them, and who cares, those are the same ones who get rooted within five minutes and become part of botnets and just drive their friends and family nuts forever "fixing" their hosed computer and having to "explain" how to navigate a simple menu.
Now, I am not saying everyone should be an advanced administrator guru, I certainly am not, but jeez loweez, these companies (computer sellers and ISPs) should have been doing more to at least try and educate people and at least try to actually be operating system neutral by now.
And it sure is a slap in the face for dang dell to have "dell recommends Microsoft vista!" on the top of the few ubuntu equipped machines web site pages they have. It's cool they started selling them, but still..get the MS ads off the linux pages. And get that stupid MS sticker off of new hardware, got a new LCD monitor for Christmas, another dang retarded bit of Microsoft advertising stuck on the thing. I just want them to go away and quit being..whatever they are, the big bully. A long time ago I didn't care one way or the other about them, but since some years now, seeing how they have done business and all the weirdness that goes on...I have to admit I think they suck, I wouldn't use a single one of their "products" just on general principles now. Just too slimy, and I hate how thew rest of computerdom always kowtows to them. Just a personal gripe. they could have the best OS in the world and pay me 100 bucks to install it and I still wouldn't do it. I don't support the mafia, the mpaa, the riaa, or microsoft, they all are just too slimy and crooked for me. Different strokes.
Why does Dell not support modems and offer a built in modem that just works with Ubuntu? (I am assuming by your post you work for them) A lot of people (millions, a not insignificant number) still use dialup and/or dialup is all they can get. It isn't an option on their website, specifically the 530n desktop model on sale now. This is a long solved non problem given the correct modem, and at Dell's scale and so forth, should be something cheap like a 20 buck internal card modem option. Yes I know some aftermarket modem can be made to work, but when you offer a slew of options, it seems to be a glaring omission. People who order a bundle like that will most likely want to get online when the package arrives, you are sending the customer out to some *mart to shop, it becomes an annoyance factor, bad customer experience.
I'd say you are being a sober hard nosed realist. They are going to be pushing labor arbitrage all the way to the US becoming basically a two class society. That's what all the trends look like to me anyway.
I know I wouldn't have a problem at all paying google a reasonable sum per year-probably through a very modest isp hit, get it through them as an option-so that I could use a good search service that was ad free. And ad free as in if I run a search I *don't* want the whole first page of hits being something for sale that is marginally related to one of the search words, or link/spam farms, along with no ads on the side bar and no google analytics anything wherever I go, just plain search as a paid service. It's a very useful thing they have, just it keeps going downhill from all the ads and "buy me! Antarctica, icebergs! You want icebergs, check out ebay!" ( I saw that once on a google side ad, no lie) They could even have a toggle "repeat search with commercial ads and sites included" so you'd get what you see today with a google search. Not sure what that would be worth, but say an extra 20 bucks a year or something would be fine with me.
So that's one way they could make money without ads.
The upcoming administration is making noises they will be giving employers some sort of tax break or stimulus to "create jobs" and hire more people (up to 3 thousand bucks a job!). So..maybe it isn't far fetched to think a lot of the folks being laid off now will be rehired once this new tax break dodge starts back up again. Just a thought..
You aren't looking at the whole stack. Walmart having marginally more efficient trucks does nothing for the fact that one of the consequences of Walmart in general is an additional 1,000 (some huge number) of extremely dirty coal plants in China where the regulations aren't near as strict as the US, plus moving all the goods from China to the US on ships, and those ships have hardly any regulations at all while running on bunker fuel, which is downright nasty again.
Any savings in energy or cleaner air here are offset to a tremendous degree just by the business model of offshoring the manufacturing (let alone the hit to the wallets of all the out of work factory workers here and lost tax base). And air knows no boundaries, what was air pollution a week ago in China (remember when they had to almost close China down just to run the olympics so they could have tolerable air for the athletes?) has now traveled the Pacific and is hitting north America.
All you did was move the problem to the other side of an imaginary dotted line, plus cost tens of million of jobs domestically plus exported cash by the boatload and taken it out of the internal economy where it stopped being a force multiplier. That's why China is sitting on huge reserves of cash and is able to go around the planet and buy up the next 20-50 years of critical strategic minerals like they are doing in Africa right now, and the US is sitting in the debtors seat wondering where all the new jobs are going to come from.
So we still got way more air pollution in general, plus a lot of lost jobs that paid better than Walmart "associate" pay. The big trade was one generation of cheaper gadgets, and we got to play "make believe" that we cleaned up the environment when we didn't, we made it worse actually (looking at the planet as a whole), and now the US economy is partly collapsing from it.
I think "clucker" was the clue there.... ;)