Also home of NC State, 5th rated engineering college in the US, UNC Chapel Hill highest rated public university in the US and Duke, alma mata of 9 Presidents.
Has adopted a 'do it yur damn self' approach to desktop and deskside support. So from the perspective of which costs less to maintain Windows vs anything else, they've already made the decision that they don't care and it makes no difference. Reduced productivity is preferable to hiring someone to fix it. Of course wherever possible patch and software maintenance and updates are automated and desktop builds are standardized in as much as a such a diverse bunch of desktops are deployed and they do a good job of it(and make no mistake - corporate desktops are often the models that vendors can't sell so they're weird orphans to begin with). But if someone came to them and explained how if they deployed Macs which cost 20% more and would incur far less maintenance overhead, they'd be laughed out of the room because the suits already assume that the financial cost to THEM is zero.
If you don't believe this then why is so much IT work going to India and South America where the pure productivity derived from projects that have to connect and communicate North America with these locations is so much worse, and so popular at the same time?
Corporate car fleets are cheap ass Fords, not Camrys. We should learn from this example.
My problem is with CV. Cable works fine. But CV drops out at random nearly every day. No dial tone, nada. This requires me to unplug and reboot my cable modem, router and TA. AT&T thinks this is trivial, normal and acceptable. I on the other hand want their home addresses so I can firebomb them. I mean it's a goddamn phone. A PHONE. We licked the 'maybe it works maybe it don't' problem around the year 1890 or so. For my thinking, VoIP is an ENORMOUS step back in terms of reliability and simple ease of use.
Get rid of ALL external ports with the exception of USB. Build in 802.x and Bluetooth. Make a fanless design, close all the holes in the case and make some kind of effort to toughen up the box. And make the screen detachable through an internally doled out wire. Rubberize the keyboard so it's sealed. And absolutely standardize. You could drive down the cost enormously w/o having to get fancy. By comparison there is no earthly reason why VIA based micro ITX PC's cost MORE than their desktop counterparts except for the coolness factor and people seem to be willing to pay it. I myself have been looking for a micro ITX appliance sized box, fanless, one or zero PCI slots that can run w/o a keyboard or monitor and find that the premium for that form factor is too high. I might as well buy a Mac mini. And even that's a little too complicated. I don't need a CDRW/DVD drive. I don't need fancy graphics or sound. I don't even need a hard drive - rather I'd like an internal bay to plug in my own drive of any given size or none at all and run off a large thumbdrive. Once you remove the gewgaws from a microITX such as the DVD drive and you modify the power source a-la OLPC with some kind of dynamo you can get the size pretty damn small - perhaps not any bigger than my Thinkpad's AC adapter power supply. And that has got to be something very cheap to build. If they plunk in 1GB RAM you could could damn close to surface mounting the whole PC on a few chips and controllers, one tiny board smaller than a Freescale or PC-104 and a few connectors. If it lasts a year, you toss it like a cell phone.
Seriously, home hacks of routers, NAS boxes and the like are close to what one would need.
I have to say that using malware on VoIP hopes but cannot assume that VoIP is even functional and stable enough to do that. Maybe other people have a different experience but CallVantage is not ready for primetime and if they want to use it for exploits and malware they'll have to compete with the utter crappiness of the service that works like malware all on its own.
He said that it should be possible in the near future to contain the entirety of a human brain on hard drives and be able to download your 'self' to them. Maybe we're close.
a 2066-002 is midway up the 'Baby Freeway' z800 mainframe line. It has 2 CP's and benchmarks 1.0-1.2x the performance of a 9672-R36 itself a 4-5 year old model in the middle of the pack.
No that's not the point. The point is that hardware pricing is more or less pulled out of their asses. The manufacturing cost of a cheap laptop, if the costs reflected what it actually costs to build would be a fraction of price point used as a comparison for which the $100 laptop project was founded. In other words, if we saw a 'regular' laptop at the price that reflects the cost plus the margin they claim to get, then the end used price would ALREADY be far lower than what people pay today.
I took a look at Koobox PC's. Sure it starts out cheap. But then you have to replace the 40GB drive and quadruple the RAM. And by the time you're done it's a $600 unit. They price a harddrive upgrade for 120GB @ more than a hundred bucks. They want $129 for the RAM. I'd be happier if they didn't include anything at all. Straight retail mail order would be cheaper for the parts.
So I'm pretty sure we could all have $100 laptops if pricing was semi rational.
Seriously, turnabout is fairplay. If these fucking nimnertz can't decide which of our pockets to pick and chose to pick both of them then the GODDAMNED RIAA should foot part of the bill for this. Until then we should just boycott both formats and then they can all fucking sue me for NOT watching their crap.
Not just online, but TV news is often created ny advertisers (think drug companies) and simply rebroadcast by the networks. Ever wonder why they always seem to have a new 'expert' on this or that? Because those people don't work for the network, they work for the sponsor. So in the end, it's not all that different from corporate 'infotainment' masquerading as news.
Likewise, Wiki can be sponsored by whomever and it will largely go unnoticed. We may not even care. If we start seeing articles about global warming sponsored by groups who will profit from it, then ok. It's not as if Wiki isn't already whipsawed by junk science or junk politics or whatnot.
Hugely marked up in dash Pimp My Ride electronics will go a long way to distract buyers from the crappy quality of the underlying car, I guess. But I just don't see the F-150 market as the Pimp My Ride audience.
Do they think that high school students and urban wannabes can save Ford?
I really don't understand that. Can't they dick with Vista ensuring an endless stream of 'fixes' and evermore hardware requirements for 5 years? If it's just about money perhaps MS should look where we all know they are looking anyway: DRM, content and Xbox.
Since there are about 10 different versions of Vista in the pipeline, I'm sure they could spend the next 5 years making silly distinctions among them as they gobble up a few security companies and maybe a movie company or even a TV network. That way the next turn of the crank of the OS machine can be something so closely tied to content you will in fact be watching MS movies and TV channels, all for a nominal subscription fee.
Synology 106j or e units. They all have haphazard feature sets and do some things well and others poorly. Also after you figure out how to get most of the features running you discover that the onboard fan is so poor that you're bound to burn out your brand new SATA drive. You have to go all the way up to the 406 series to find a complete set of features that work plus environmentals that function. Which puts me where you alluded - to just building my own inside a PC. Ergo it's no longer quiet, compact or unobstrusive. And when all is said and done, the real limiting factor is the cheap-o 100mbit ethernet adapter in lieu of a gigabit network.
And I do not own any stock so I do not care. OTOH the company I work for is a bunch of slick theives who are doing this too - except with armies of in-house counsel covering their tracks as the rest of us peons get stuck with a poker. I guess when they get caught I'll be cheering.
Frankly I'm disappointed that the gadgets we already have really don't work so hot. Like Cell Phones. Why can't I get usable USB or Bluetooth drivers and sync software for my Samsung A640, even from Samsung? Oh yeah I forgot, Sprint wants me to pay for a service to email them to myself. Ditto my Sanyo 3100, Samsung A840, Samsung A900 or Sanyo 8400?
Why does my Xbox360 still require bizarre router settings to connect wirelessly to my router? Oh yeah I forgot, Microsoft does not care. Why did I have to return 3 different routers until I found one that worked with all my clients and VPN tunnels? Oh yeah I forgot, they're lazy. Why did the wireless print server I picked up naturally assume that it had to have the same IP address as my router and afforded absolutely no options to switch it? Oh yeah I forgot, the vendor bought the product instead of developing themselves. Plus the quality of their firmware is shit. Why am I still shopping for an affordable NAS that actually does what it's supposed to do without bugs and the feature set is actually what they say it is instead of vague promises and bullshit? Oh yeah I forgot, all the goodness is in the next version of their $700 unit. Sorry.
See I'm not a big fan of best new gadgets because next year either they will be abandoned as the shit they probably are, or, they will be shit anyway and still be around bolstered by hype, consumer indifference and marketing.
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Also home of NC State, 5th rated engineering college in the US, UNC Chapel Hill highest rated public university in the US and Duke, alma mata of 9 Presidents.
Has adopted a 'do it yur damn self' approach to desktop and deskside support. So from the perspective of which costs less to maintain Windows vs anything else, they've already made the decision that they don't care and it makes no difference. Reduced productivity is preferable to hiring someone to fix it. Of course wherever possible patch and software maintenance and updates are automated and desktop builds are standardized in as much as a such a diverse bunch of desktops are deployed and they do a good job of it(and make no mistake - corporate desktops are often the models that vendors can't sell so they're weird orphans to begin with). But if someone came to them and explained how if they deployed Macs which cost 20% more and would incur far less maintenance overhead, they'd be laughed out of the room because the suits already assume that the financial cost to THEM is zero.
If you don't believe this then why is so much IT work going to India and South America where the pure productivity derived from projects that have to connect and communicate North America with these locations is so much worse, and so popular at the same time?
Corporate car fleets are cheap ass Fords, not Camrys. We should learn from this example.
My problem is with CV. Cable works fine. But CV drops out at random nearly every day. No dial tone, nada. This requires me to unplug and reboot my cable modem, router and TA. AT&T thinks this is trivial, normal and acceptable. I on the other hand want their home addresses so I can firebomb them. I mean it's a goddamn phone. A PHONE. We licked the 'maybe it works maybe it don't' problem around the year 1890 or so. For my thinking, VoIP is an ENORMOUS step back in terms of reliability and simple ease of use.
Get rid of ALL external ports with the exception of USB. Build in 802.x and Bluetooth. Make a fanless design, close all the holes in the case and make some kind of effort to toughen up the box. And make the screen detachable through an internally doled out wire. Rubberize the keyboard so it's sealed. And absolutely standardize. You could drive down the cost enormously w/o having to get fancy. By comparison there is no earthly reason why VIA based micro ITX PC's cost MORE than their desktop counterparts except for the coolness factor and people seem to be willing to pay it. I myself have been looking for a micro ITX appliance sized box, fanless, one or zero PCI slots that can run w/o a keyboard or monitor and find that the premium for that form factor is too high. I might as well buy a Mac mini. And even that's a little too complicated. I don't need a CDRW/DVD drive. I don't need fancy graphics or sound. I don't even need a hard drive - rather I'd like an internal bay to plug in my own drive of any given size or none at all and run off a large thumbdrive. Once you remove the gewgaws from a microITX such as the DVD drive and you modify the power source a-la OLPC with some kind of dynamo you can get the size pretty damn small - perhaps not any bigger than my Thinkpad's AC adapter power supply. And that has got to be something very cheap to build. If they plunk in 1GB RAM you could could damn close to surface mounting the whole PC on a few chips and controllers, one tiny board smaller than a Freescale or PC-104 and a few connectors. If it lasts a year, you toss it like a cell phone.
Seriously, home hacks of routers, NAS boxes and the like are close to what one would need.
I have to say that using malware on VoIP hopes but cannot assume that VoIP is even functional and stable enough to do that. Maybe other people have a different experience but CallVantage is not ready for primetime and if they want to use it for exploits and malware they'll have to compete with the utter crappiness of the service that works like malware all on its own.
He said that it should be possible in the near future to contain the entirety of a human brain on hard drives and be able to download your 'self' to them. Maybe we're close.
a 2066-002 is midway up the 'Baby Freeway' z800 mainframe line. It has 2 CP's and benchmarks 1.0-1.2x the performance of a 9672-R36 itself a 4-5 year old model in the middle of the pack.
No that's not the point. The point is that hardware pricing is more or less pulled out of their asses. The manufacturing cost of a cheap laptop, if the costs reflected what it actually costs to build would be a fraction of price point used as a comparison for which the $100 laptop project was founded. In other words, if we saw a 'regular' laptop at the price that reflects the cost plus the margin they claim to get, then the end used price would ALREADY be far lower than what people pay today.
C'mon try to keep up. Thanks.
I took a look at Koobox PC's. Sure it starts out cheap. But then you have to replace the 40GB drive and quadruple the RAM. And by the time you're done it's a $600 unit. They price a harddrive upgrade for 120GB @ more than a hundred bucks. They want $129 for the RAM. I'd be happier if they didn't include anything at all. Straight retail mail order would be cheaper for the parts.
So I'm pretty sure we could all have $100 laptops if pricing was semi rational.
Never mind - go back to Libertarian wonderland. I'm sure the weather is fine there.
Wanna Bet?
Seriously, turnabout is fairplay. If these fucking nimnertz can't decide which of our pockets to pick and chose to pick both of them then the GODDAMNED RIAA should foot part of the bill for this. Until then we should just boycott both formats and then they can all fucking sue me for NOT watching their crap.
Program an organism to self destruct before it becomes a permanent danger.
Not just online, but TV news is often created ny advertisers (think drug companies) and simply rebroadcast by the networks. Ever wonder why they always seem to have a new 'expert' on this or that? Because those people don't work for the network, they work for the sponsor. So in the end, it's not all that different from corporate 'infotainment' masquerading as news.
Likewise, Wiki can be sponsored by whomever and it will largely go unnoticed. We may not even care. If we start seeing articles about global warming sponsored by groups who will profit from it, then ok. It's not as if Wiki isn't already whipsawed by junk science or junk politics or whatnot.
Go ask - women do not like the light they throw off.
Hugely marked up in dash Pimp My Ride electronics will go a long way to distract buyers from the crappy quality of the underlying car, I guess. But I just don't see the F-150 market as the Pimp My Ride audience.
Do they think that high school students and urban wannabes can save Ford?
I really don't understand that. Can't they dick with Vista ensuring an endless stream of 'fixes' and evermore hardware requirements for 5 years? If it's just about money perhaps MS should look where we all know they are looking anyway: DRM, content and Xbox.
Since there are about 10 different versions of Vista in the pipeline, I'm sure they could spend the next 5 years making silly distinctions among them as they gobble up a few security companies and maybe a movie company or even a TV network. That way the next turn of the crank of the OS machine can be something so closely tied to content you will in fact be watching MS movies and TV channels, all for a nominal subscription fee.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
You mean "everything" I can agree.
Synology 106j or e units. They all have haphazard feature sets and do some things well and others poorly. Also after you figure out how to get most of the features running you discover that the onboard fan is so poor that you're bound to burn out your brand new SATA drive. You have to go all the way up to the 406 series to find a complete set of features that work plus environmentals that function. Which puts me where you alluded - to just building my own inside a PC. Ergo it's no longer quiet, compact or unobstrusive. And when all is said and done, the real limiting factor is the cheap-o 100mbit ethernet adapter in lieu of a gigabit network.
uPnP OFF plus two TCP/UDP ports forwarded plus MTU adjustments.
So it's a win win for everyone.
And I do not own any stock so I do not care. OTOH the company I work for is a bunch of slick theives who are doing this too - except with armies of in-house counsel covering their tracks as the rest of us peons get stuck with a poker. I guess when they get caught I'll be cheering.
This sounds like a plea for investors. I wonder if they'll split with a suitcase full of cash for Costa Rica or Brazil?
Frankly I'm disappointed that the gadgets we already have really don't work so hot. Like Cell Phones. Why can't I get usable USB or Bluetooth drivers and sync software for my Samsung A640, even from Samsung? Oh yeah I forgot, Sprint wants me to pay for a service to email them to myself. Ditto my Sanyo 3100, Samsung A840, Samsung A900 or Sanyo 8400?
Why does my Xbox360 still require bizarre router settings to connect wirelessly to my router? Oh yeah I forgot, Microsoft does not care. Why did I have to return 3 different routers until I found one that worked with all my clients and VPN tunnels? Oh yeah I forgot, they're lazy. Why did the wireless print server I picked up naturally assume that it had to have the same IP address as my router and afforded absolutely no options to switch it? Oh yeah I forgot, the vendor bought the product instead of developing themselves. Plus the quality of their firmware is shit. Why am I still shopping for an affordable NAS that actually does what it's supposed to do without bugs and the feature set is actually what they say it is instead of vague promises and bullshit? Oh yeah I forgot, all the goodness is in the next version of their $700 unit. Sorry.
See I'm not a big fan of best new gadgets because next year either they will be abandoned as the shit they probably are, or, they will be shit anyway and still be around bolstered by hype, consumer indifference and marketing.