Becauase I have an old IBM PC300GL that's used for picture scanning, editing and printing. It has an ACEcad serial tablet. It runs Win95. I think it has 384MB RAM which is actually a lot for that machine and it doesn't even make good use of that. As I said it's a Pentium 450 and it runs fine. Also has an old version of Corel WP, runs Netscape 7.2. Doesn't have a sound card and the scanner HP IIc is attached via an old 8-bit SCSI-1 ISA adapter. 30GB drive which the BIOS can't handle correctly so it's cut up into a bunch of smaller partitions.
We're inches away from the RIAA/MPAA declaring that all content can only be viewed or heard on a pay per view basis at any of their convenient 'media centers'. We're taking a huge leap backwards to the days when movies were shown in dirty 5 cent halls. Maybe we should invest in good digital to analog reader-writer technology and bring back 16mm home movies and reel to reel.
MS said pretty much said, and I paraphrase, that Zune is a dead product, that it really won't be available for a 'few' years, that they really don't have a clear idea of its feature set and we shouldn't get our hopes up. Apple crushed this product 2 days before it was announced by doing the easiest thing possible - out MSing MS. All they did was double the HD size, repackaged some older shells and in an interesting twist, reinvented the shuttle as a clever clever little package. MS simply couldn't compete with last year's hardware.
Hell even the 'tech' guy on CNBC couldn't say much more than the screen is 30% bigger than the iPod and that's about it. I think we can expect that Zune will be an abortive product. And if they actually sell any of them they will pull the product in less than a year. Because let's face facts. Only MS believes that people want to watch DRM DVD's on a tiny screen. Apple is offering video download on their newest offering but I think we understand that the sweet spot isn't "Final Destination IV" or "The Notebook", director's cut. It will be videos, video poscasts, class lectures that sort of thing.
How much of the cost is the CPU? It would seem that it's not very large though every little bit helps. I'm guessing the cost of a Via C3 is pretty cheap too. And since there appears to be very little marketing cost, customization, mostly free software, little packagings and limited post sales support then $125 seems reasonable. How much of an average person's monthly income is that, anyway? And for what it's worth the Fortune 10 company I work for has cut back on 'standard' desktops to the point where anyone with 900Mhz or more won't be getting any upgrade/replacements any time in the future. If you have a need for more you have to demonstrate it and we run office software that's a lot bulkier than most.
The senior ranks of large corporations have been the hotbeds (literally) of skullduggery for as long as there have been power mad underlings. Bill Agee at Allied Signal in the '80's was banging his investment banker on the deal for a hostile buyout of another company. Maurice Greenberg at AIG was bribing everyone he could. Most of the heads at Wall St. firms in the last 25 years have been replaced by being arrested or threatened with lawsuits. Tyco? MCI? The great hdge fund meltdown of 2004-5?
iPod's interface is remarkably efficient and usable. It appears to be based on real world testing and not some crappy faux retro Hi-Fi panel designed by software engineers in a vacuum. It has what you need and little if anything of what you don't. So if iPod moves forward and gets bigger it will be through interface improvements. Anything else they look at: more bells and whistles, hardware add-ons, opening up the hardware, etc etc will be only a short term crack-hit. Because in the end, the device is rather easy to create, a bunch of codecs, some controllers, a power source, storage. I have a cheap Chinese mp3 player that has all that albeit not as much storage. But it's the interface on my cheap-o that sucks. This BTW is why Zune will fail. MS has an uncanny ability to jam its bad interface ideas down on people. I'm sure it will look like Windows for PDA's and have Outlook built in etc etc. which will leave most people spending their time fumbling with the device instead of enjoying it.
When you use a credit card - I just wish the people who want your home phone number, the people who want to see your drivers licence, the people who want your addrss and zipcode and the people who want the hash code off the credit card would all get together and decide which pain in my ass I have to accept.
I don't know anyting about running Linux on. I personally don't like trackpads either and if I had the time and it was my machine I would tweak the settings a lot to minimize the movement. At any rate it's solid has good fit and finish and is reliable enough for a college student to carry it around all day in a backpack. The widescreen format is excellent but I would prefer a slightly higher res option for a screen that large. My one caveat is that the power supply runs hotter than it should. My other semi - concern is that Lenovo appears to charge a great deal for replacing the base 80GB drive with 120 or larger unit - several hundred dollars. But since I have a USB hard drive as a backup device I don't need the extra storage. This is an N100 model
Seems like the biggest problems are in the area of multimedia DRM support, power consumption, NIC driver incompatibility, mulivendor VPN support and microcode difficulties. Moreover most of the corporate experience with Vista is on Thinkpads so we're seeing a lot of problems that we think are directly the result of not having designed Vista for that platform in the first place.
T's for corporate Lenovos for personal use
on
Rethinking the Thinkpad
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Based on the some of the latest feedback of the problems that people have with the T60's it seems clear that Lenovo's plan is to niche the Thinkpad into the corporate market where it can be supported and doesn't have to handle the media/entertainment features that home users want. On the other hand the Lenovo N series is better suited to home users anyhow. I have Thinkpad T40 and a Lenovo N100 so I feel I'm qualified to have an opinion about this.
When WGA discovers a problem it will blare "You Are Running An Unlicenced Version of Microsoft Vista, Please Contact Microsoft to Upgrade Your Licence" over and over and over for as long as your machine is running.
Ok this basic approach has been done before. The American Airlines SABRE system which for years was THE strategic advantage of American Airlines. SABRE was a massive project that involved the custom development of an Operating System: TPF which IBM built specifically for extremely high speed transaction processing - much faster than CICS over MVS. SABRE also lead the development of very high performance non relational DB's. IMS and IDMS are direct offshoots from this work, in fact IDMS was probably the fastest general purpose DB ever until Teradata came along. On the hardware side, they squeezed performance out of the IBM TCM mainframe line that no one thought possible. IBM had trouble benchmarking it is was so fast and it was years before they even published their results.
But again, the basic approach was to start from scratch and build the biggest fastest business application system they could design. The problem with SABRE is that change control and management were nightmarish in their complexity.
What I'd be interested in learning is how Google handles patch management, security APARs, change control, health checking and all those mundane process driven chores that catch us all up.
And yes I am old geezer. I did extensive work in high performance CICS systems such as running CICS as a continuous communications task.
Re:BTW do that have a good directory structure?
on
16GB Flash USB Dongle
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· Score: 1
Wiki is a wonderful example of people shaping information to reflect what they want it to represent instead of what it actually represents. It's really a self referential reference to the internet in general. Things mean what you want them to mean, fact is whatever you're willing to assert loud enough and people are experts if they say they are.
Bought a refurb drive, put it in an external USB drive box. Once a week everyone gets a complete backup. Keep the last or the last two for each machine. Simplest thing in the world.
Radio Shack is ok for the odd cable, cell phone battery and maybe a pair of cheap headphones. Other than that? Not much.
It has to work the same and so far, no
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
Firefox has to mate better with websites - especially those that require logon. It has to work the same as IE in a corporate setting. Until then and until we can figure out a better way to do MS Update, we'll have to keep IE around.
Even if we buy the idea that magical ink is 'better' HP and every other printer manufacturer goes out of their way and back again to create a slightly different cart for each and every printer model they make. Epson though I like them are horrible for this. Models in the same model family like the C82, 84, 86, 88 which are all essentially newer models of the same printer all use different ink carts. Lexmark? same thing. HP? Ditto and so on.
And guess what - just when people began all getting what are basically throwaway printers - ink jets you hope run a year year and a half, what do they do? Discontinue all the low end printers replace them with 'photoprinters' that cost 3x as much, the ink is 3-5x more expensive and they have all sorts of features you don't want or need in office printer. Unless of course you buy one of those piece of shit boatanchor all-in-1 devices that print scan fax copy all fairly poorly slowly and expensively and create a single point of failure for your whole home office.
No they're the same parameters we've been using since 1980 when such things were critical for ALL applications, regardless of their function. They're basically testing the arbitrary performance of the most non real world scenario possible in order to squeeze max numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Becauase I have an old IBM PC300GL that's used for picture scanning, editing and printing. It has an ACEcad serial tablet. It runs Win95. I think it has 384MB RAM which is actually a lot for that machine and it doesn't even make good use of that. As I said it's a Pentium 450 and it runs fine. Also has an old version of Corel WP, runs Netscape 7.2. Doesn't have a sound card and the scanner HP IIc is attached via an old 8-bit SCSI-1 ISA adapter. 30GB drive which the BIOS can't handle correctly so it's cut up into a bunch of smaller partitions.
We're inches away from the RIAA/MPAA declaring that all content can only be viewed or heard on a pay per view basis at any of their convenient 'media centers'. We're taking a huge leap backwards to the days when movies were shown in dirty 5 cent halls. Maybe we should invest in good digital to analog reader-writer technology and bring back 16mm home movies and reel to reel.
MS said pretty much said, and I paraphrase, that Zune is a dead product, that it really won't be available for a 'few' years, that they really don't have a clear idea of its feature set and we shouldn't get our hopes up. Apple crushed this product 2 days before it was announced by doing the easiest thing possible - out MSing MS. All they did was double the HD size, repackaged some older shells and in an interesting twist, reinvented the shuttle as a clever clever little package. MS simply couldn't compete with last year's hardware.
Hell even the 'tech' guy on CNBC couldn't say much more than the screen is 30% bigger than the iPod and that's about it. I think we can expect that Zune will be an abortive product. And if they actually sell any of them they will pull the product in less than a year. Because let's face facts. Only MS believes that people want to watch DRM DVD's on a tiny screen. Apple is offering video download on their newest offering but I think we understand that the sweet spot isn't "Final Destination IV" or "The Notebook", director's cut. It will be videos, video poscasts, class lectures that sort of thing.
for the companies that buy it.
2-3 times a week some police organization or another calls. I tell them to stop arresting so many people & they wouldn't need more money. Screw them.
How much of the cost is the CPU? It would seem that it's not very large though every little bit helps. I'm guessing the cost of a Via C3 is pretty cheap too. And since there appears to be very little marketing cost, customization, mostly free software, little packagings and limited post sales support then $125 seems reasonable. How much of an average person's monthly income is that, anyway? And for what it's worth the Fortune 10 company I work for has cut back on 'standard' desktops to the point where anyone with 900Mhz or more won't be getting any upgrade/replacements any time in the future. If you have a need for more you have to demonstrate it and we run office software that's a lot bulkier than most.
The senior ranks of large corporations have been the hotbeds (literally) of skullduggery for as long as there have been power mad underlings. Bill Agee at Allied Signal in the '80's was banging his investment banker on the deal for a hostile buyout of another company. Maurice Greenberg at AIG was bribing everyone he could. Most of the heads at Wall St. firms in the last 25 years have been replaced by being arrested or threatened with lawsuits. Tyco? MCI? The great hdge fund meltdown of 2004-5?
iPod's interface is remarkably efficient and usable. It appears to be based on real world testing and not some crappy faux retro Hi-Fi panel designed by software engineers in a vacuum. It has what you need and little if anything of what you don't. So if iPod moves forward and gets bigger it will be through interface improvements. Anything else they look at: more bells and whistles, hardware add-ons, opening up the hardware, etc etc will be only a short term crack-hit. Because in the end, the device is rather easy to create, a bunch of codecs, some controllers, a power source, storage. I have a cheap Chinese mp3 player that has all that albeit not as much storage. But it's the interface on my cheap-o that sucks. This BTW is why Zune will fail. MS has an uncanny ability to jam its bad interface ideas down on people. I'm sure it will look like Windows for PDA's and have Outlook built in etc etc. which will leave most people spending their time fumbling with the device instead of enjoying it.
When you use a credit card - I just wish the people who want your home phone number, the people who want to see your drivers licence, the people who want your addrss and zipcode and the people who want the hash code off the credit card would all get together and decide which pain in my ass I have to accept.
Been randomly selected half dozen times. Fuck the TSA and I hope they all crash and burn.
I don't know anyting about running Linux on. I personally don't like trackpads either and if I had the time and it was my machine I would tweak the settings a lot to minimize the movement. At any rate it's solid has good fit and finish and is reliable enough for a college student to carry it around all day in a backpack. The widescreen format is excellent but I would prefer a slightly higher res option for a screen that large. My one caveat is that the power supply runs hotter than it should. My other semi - concern is that Lenovo appears to charge a great deal for replacing the base 80GB drive with 120 or larger unit - several hundred dollars. But since I have a USB hard drive as a backup device I don't need the extra storage. This is an N100 model
Seems like the biggest problems are in the area of multimedia DRM support, power consumption, NIC driver incompatibility, mulivendor VPN support and microcode difficulties. Moreover most of the corporate experience with Vista is on Thinkpads so we're seeing a lot of problems that we think are directly the result of not having designed Vista for that platform in the first place.
Based on the some of the latest feedback of the problems that people have with the T60's it seems clear that Lenovo's plan is to niche the Thinkpad into the corporate market where it can be supported and doesn't have to handle the media/entertainment features that home users want. On the other hand the Lenovo N series is better suited to home users anyhow. I have Thinkpad T40 and a Lenovo N100 so I feel I'm qualified to have an opinion about this.
When WGA discovers a problem it will blare "You Are Running An Unlicenced Version of Microsoft Vista, Please Contact Microsoft to Upgrade Your Licence" over and over and over for as long as your machine is running.
You KNOW that's coming, don't you?
Ok this basic approach has been done before. The American Airlines SABRE system which for years was THE strategic advantage of American Airlines. SABRE was a massive project that involved the custom development of an Operating System: TPF which IBM built specifically for extremely high speed transaction processing - much faster than CICS over MVS. SABRE also lead the development of very high performance non relational DB's. IMS and IDMS are direct offshoots from this work, in fact IDMS was probably the fastest general purpose DB ever until Teradata came along. On the hardware side, they squeezed performance out of the IBM TCM mainframe line that no one thought possible. IBM had trouble benchmarking it is was so fast and it was years before they even published their results.
But again, the basic approach was to start from scratch and build the biggest fastest business application system they could design. The problem with SABRE is that change control and management were nightmarish in their complexity.
What I'd be interested in learning is how Google handles patch management, security APARs, change control, health checking and all those mundane process driven chores that catch us all up.
And yes I am old geezer. I did extensive work in high performance CICS systems such as running CICS as a continuous communications task.
Interesting; I will look into that. thanks you.
Wiki is a wonderful example of people shaping information to reflect what they want it to represent instead of what it actually represents. It's really a self referential reference to the internet in general. Things mean what you want them to mean, fact is whatever you're willing to assert loud enough and people are experts if they say they are.
I have USB drives that are limited to 130 entries in a folder regardless of size. I hope these big drives overcome that.
http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html
Of course it's $2800 US from TigerDirect.
Bought a refurb drive, put it in an external USB drive box. Once a week everyone gets a complete backup. Keep the last or the last two for each machine. Simplest thing in the world.
Radio Shack is ok for the odd cable, cell phone battery and maybe a pair of cheap headphones. Other than that? Not much.
Firefox has to mate better with websites - especially those that require logon. It has to work the same as IE in a corporate setting. Until then and until we can figure out a better way to do MS Update, we'll have to keep IE around.
Even if we buy the idea that magical ink is 'better' HP and every other printer manufacturer goes out of their way and back again to create a slightly different cart for each and every printer model they make. Epson though I like them are horrible for this. Models in the same model family like the C82, 84, 86, 88 which are all essentially newer models of the same printer all use different ink carts. Lexmark? same thing. HP? Ditto and so on.
And guess what - just when people began all getting what are basically throwaway printers - ink jets you hope run a year year and a half, what do they do? Discontinue all the low end printers replace them with 'photoprinters' that cost 3x as much, the ink is 3-5x more expensive and they have all sorts of features you don't want or need in office printer. Unless of course you buy one of those piece of shit boatanchor all-in-1 devices that print scan fax copy all fairly poorly slowly and expensively and create a single point of failure for your whole home office.
No they're the same parameters we've been using since 1980 when such things were critical for ALL applications, regardless of their function. They're basically testing the arbitrary performance of the most non real world scenario possible in order to squeeze max numbers.
Too bad the actual service sucks so bad it would impress the Minister of Dirka Dirka in West fucking Africa somewhere.