2. A drug checkpoint is not allowed. Merely having drugs in the vehicle does not create a present threat to the safety of the road, and the intrusion is not justifiable.
I agree that merely having drugs in the car would not pose a driving danger, but operating the vehicle under the influence of drugs would be. Wouldn't one of the signs of the influence of drugs be having drugs on hand? One of my friends found drugs (marajuna in this case) in their son's car recently so likely he either used them while driving or shortly before driving. Either case, he would driving under the influence and if stopped at a checkpoint, I think he would have warranted a search from some initial assessment. Even taking the actions you mentioned (cars the whip off the road, through the ditch, and burn rubber) don't necessarily indicate posession. The driver may have just remembered leaving his wallet at home or something like that.
Another variant that I've heard pop up lately has been the use of drug-sniffing dogs during routine traffic stops or roadblocks. Here, the dog goes nuts at one guy's trunk, so the cops declare they now have probable cause to search the vehicle. Now the question is: does the use of dogs in the first place qualify as a search, and if so, what reason is given for the dog-sniff-search?
This may fall under a similar situation of the DUI check points that get setup. IANAL but I believe as long as they have a system for checking cars (say every car, every third car, etc...), they can do a basic check on the operator and condition of the car. I'm sure the officer is trained to detect signs of intoxication (smell of alcohol being a pretty obvious sign) and I could see an extension of that to include drug sniffing dogs to ensure the driver isn't operating under the influence of drugs. If drugs or alcohol are detected, the officer may inspect the vehicle for further evidence without a warrant given that the driver would likely remove any evidence before a warrant could be obtained.
Boss: My boss says we need some eunuchs programmers.
Dilbert: I think he means UNIX programmers not eunuchs and I already know UNIX.
Boss: If the company nurse stops by, tell her " never mind "
If there were enough such books available and written by reputable professors there would be a movement towards making them the standard texts in classrooms.
and
Finally, the success of other free software projects at the university level suggests to me that a free text-book program would be quite welcome.
I wish I could agree with you on this, but I found that a good number of the professors for my classes were also the author of the book used in the class. I imagine they are pushed to publish and I don't know that they would go the route of freely developing free text books. My wife is currently attending school and my kids will start in 6 years so I would gladly welcome the free digital text book approach though.
I fully expect that each of us could pick one or more printer companies that have "failed" us. In my case that would be Lexmark, in yours it sounds like HP.
I haven't seen many OkiData printers lately (I want to say the last one I remember was a line printer but I might be remembering incorrectly).
I did forget about one HP DesignJet plotter that kept giving our group problems. I've dealt with several of these plotters (ranging from the 3 foot width to the 7 foot width) and generally they work very well. In one case though, we kept having problems with the HP Etherjet card but it might have been poor work on the part of the local HP tech who was called in to service the part (not sure why the lab administrator didn't just replace the card himself).
I don't have a lot of injet experience from Lexmark (brother-in-law has one that didn't work well but don't know of any other friends/family with inkjets from Lexmark), but the Lexmark laser printers seem to need pretty regular repair visits in my building. The HP laser printers seem to run pretty well and for home, I'm fairly happy with my Epson Stylus for the occasional prints. The Epson Stylus C86 I have uses the four cartridges (CMYK) and for the few prints, the convenience/cost is not too bad.
Main point though was agreeing with you on the Lexmark statement.
I believe you are correct for ArcGIS but Terraserver was way before ArcGIS. I really hate the fact that ArcObjects is COM based and locked to the Microsoft platform. Performance of ArcGIS compared to the ArcInfo Workstation seems pretty slow actually for what I do with it. I also find that the simple editing in ArcEdit is now much more complex in ArcGIS (especially if you work in ArcSDE). I do like that topology is maintained during edits (unlike ArcInfo) but I can tolerate the builds in workstation for the simplicity of the environment.
As the other responder indicated, MS did want to push MS SQL Server and their server operating system, but I thought they were competing with ESRI on GIS software in general (MapPoint versus ArcView).
True that Microsoft didn't copy from Google but if I remember correctly, Microsoft started the TerraServer project to compete with ESRI when they released their ArcIMS and ArcSDE applications (sorry, both links are for their latest releases rather than their earlier products). Way back, Microsoft's MapPoint (think that was the application) was competing with ESRI's ArcView application. ESRI began developing web based mapping tools and Microsoft decided to try to compete with them. If anything, Microsoft copied from ESRI or possibly another GIS vendor.
True that "Project Gizmo" is software and "The Gizmo" is hardware, but given how companies value names, I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone from SunRocket eventually notices this.
Is it a collision in the same market, though?
Given both Gizmo devices are used for VOIP, I'd worry about collision. While the actual "gizmo" differs, they both fill part of the VOIP solution.
BTW, I use SunRocket (replaced my home phone for $199 USD for unlimited service for 1 year) and their material highlights the Gizmo as the center of their offering.
SunRocket, a VOIP company, has a hardware device called "The Gizmo" (see SunRocket How to Install and you'll see their adapter named "The Gizmo"). I can't find anything to indicate which came first though.
I'm sure we could all point out cases where one vendor or the other failed more often in our labs. For servers in my labs, I have a mixture of Sun's, SGI's, Dell's, IBM's (PC, not mainframe), and HP's. Out of all of them, I've had to contact Dell the most for failed hard disk, power supplies, and even the motherboard in one. The Sun's, SGI's, and IBM's seem to have the lowest failures (I'll admit though that many of the systems are over 3 years old so maybe the newer equipment fails more frequently but even on the few new ones, I haven't had any problems in my labs).
I'll bet that every system administrator here will have a vendor that has let them down and you'll find other system administrators who will swear by that equipment. Me, I still prefer the Sun boxes for UNIX and I'm sort of neutral on the Win32 vendors.
They fucked up Java
How so? My group does a fair amount of development in a variety of languages (C/C++/Java/VB/C#/and various scripting languages) and by far, the developers prefer Java. I guess I don't see how Sun messed up Java as you indicate.
Oddly enough, my income is pretty decent and I have cable TV, but I also have one TV that still has "rabbit ears". The older TV is a small set that we keep in the kitchen so we can catch the news in the morning and the Simpsons in the evening (while preparing/eating meals). While I could certainly replace the TV with a newer set and run cable to the kitchen, I would prefer to spend my money on other things (student loans, car payments, etc...). I guess the point is that some people just choose not to go upgrade everything if the older version works. Income/class may not be the only factors. I'd add that importance of TV in one's life is also a factor to the number still relying on analog.
The source for various geospatial features will vary based on what is available and the accuracy needs. In some cases, survey information (blue prints, site plans, etc...) will be used, others use GPS units, and some will use aerial photos (the first company I worked for did this for many counties in North Carolina - the analyst had fun looking for shadows to help identify utility pole locations). As long as the attributes on the feature data include some source information, it could actually be a collection from multiple sources.
I think you will find just about everything in someone's GIS
Couldn't agree with you more. If data has a spatial element (coordinates or place name), it can be spatially referenced (can even have multiple references - see AeroText - if you refer to say a newspaper article that discusses the Iraq war - US and Iraq spatial references plus others possibly).
In addition to the GPS and survey records, add in aerial, satellite, and old paper maps and you have some of the more common methods of data collection. You can't forget through about sensor types when looking at any of the collection methods. Oh yeah, you could consider bathymetric data from ships or reports for things like ship wrecks and other obstructions.
Likely they'll do something with LIDAR. The county I worked at a while back was considering having LIDAR used to capture various height data (buildings, trees, ground, etc...) but the accuracy came into question for our particular use. The Dept. of Environmental Resources required a greater accuracy for flood water management efforts. The LIDAR accuracy we were offered would miss the changes in elevation for stream banks. For general building heights, it would probably be adequate unless you are looking to catch say the rail/wall that generally surrounds the building edge or some other smaller feature that may slip between the sampling points.
I also recall issues with multiple returned signals (particularly for vegetation, but not exclusive) which returned multiple elevations. If you cover a forested area, you'll get returns from the tree tops and various levels of the vegetation before you get to the ground info. I imagine some buildings may experience similar results (a tent like structure, maybe glass ceilings, frameworks, etc...).
For some internal data collection programs, I used to write similar messages to code I was 99.99% sure would never be run. I don't recall anyone ever actually seeing it run so I guess I was OK. IIRC, the output went something like "Bad things happening here - ". The code never repeated the message though, it would just end the application after the user clicked "OK".
I had to debug some code from another developer who must have been watching the Scooby Doo movies at the time of development. Most of the comments/errors started as "Ruh Roh Shaggy" + an error statement. Not a profanity by any means, but still not something you'd want a potential customer to see during a demo.
IOGear 4D Cruiser is a pretty nice mouse but not wireless yet. This uses a track ball rather than a touch pad for scroll directions (horizontal and vertical). I've been using it for about a 1.5 years at work and have seriously considered getting one for home (if my mouse ever dies). I seem to recall the price being under $20 (USD).
Likely a large portion of the XP systems running in companies are from systems recently purchased rather than upgrades. Unless a company has a corporate agreement in place to allow any version of MS software to be run, upgrading from 2000 to XP isn't a cheap task (just from the licensing side). Add in the cost of rolling out an update: verifying it runs with the corporate applications, the manpower to actually do the upgrades (verifying system requirements - could be some old systems out there that can't support XP), and user training, and deciding to upgrade from what works is not appealing.
My employer has been rolling out XP for about 1 year now (at my site, almost 800 desktops) so we definitely held off. Without compelling reason to go to the next version, why should a company upgrade? My company actually downgraded new systems purchased with XP to 2000 to keep the same image on the desktops. Without a compelling reason to upgrade, I don't expect to see Longhorn system except in a lab or two as test systems.
I haven't had any direct experience with Cannon but my friend who does photography has some negative feelings concerning Cannon's digital camera offerings. Apparently Cannon's SLR digital models didn't support using lens from the traditional SLR cameras unlike Nikon which apparently does. I personally use a Minolta SLR but haven't been able to afford a digital Minolta SLR (which appears to allow many of the older SLR lenses to be used - maybe not all automated, but most are). I have a digital Kodak Easy Share camera that is a decent camera in well lit situations but definitely has limitations. It tends to do poorly in situations like kids on stage for plays/band, basketball, and wedding receptions (unless you have a lot of light).
As for printers, I have used both HP and Epson inkjets and the Epson does produce very nice quality prints but the cartridge test does seem to go through ink pretty fast. At work, my employer is switching from HP to Lexmark laser printers and I'm not sure this is a good move. I've seen quite a few of the Lexmarks in the hall with a service technician on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. I'm likely to continue using Epson for home can't make a recommendation for work printers.
Some people just don't have the interest. Most people have the intelligence levels to learn it, just not the desire. They use computers if necessary but only as a tool that should include specific instructions for what they need to do with it (even if this requires instructions to be printed out and left beside the computer).
No matter how simple the setup and usage of computers get, you'll still have some people who have little to no interest in figuring out how to make the system work. They'll continue to look at the system as a tool and want very specific steps to follow rather than trying to understand prompts/wizards.
I'll agree with you though that out of the box systems are becoming more simple to setup and use for those who have at least a casual interest in computers.
computers are easy to use as long as the user has some sort of intelligence.
One might think that, but I've seen some pretty intelligent users who have no interest in learning about computers (setup or usage). Services like "Geeks on Call" seems to cater to many of these.
I was only trying to state the ideal case where every new edition would be re-evaluated. Personally, I am using Netscape 8.0 on most of the PC's I access, Firefox 1.0.4 on the others, and whatever Sun's version of Mozilla is on Solaris 10. I still of course have access to Internet Explorer on any of the MS Win32 systems, but only use it for a few of my employers sites that require IE (although Netscape 8 makes switching to the IE engine per site pretty easy).
As for trust, that really should be part of the criteria. Consider how many request for proposals (RFPs) may base a decision on past performance. A company that has continuously performed poorly must have that taken into consideration but you still need to consider them.
Not that I'm in favor of supporting MS but saying that you will never go back to a particular vendor isn't exactly a reasonable statement to make. Always look for the appropriate tool for a job. Maybe you'll have a bias when evaluating the tools, but don't limit your research for an application.
I've only dealt with one StorageTek solution and I have mixed opinions on the solution. The online storage portion was very good but the tape storage didn't perform as well as we had been lead to believe. For the datacenter I was in, the complete backups (basically a level 0 once a week) were expected to complete within a couple hour window, but in reality took the entire weekend (late Friday to early Monday morning).
The cost was also a major disappointment. I don't know the exact figures to break out the storage versus backup portions but the joke in the datacenter was that they could pay the salary and buy the hardware to manually backup (load tapes, kick off backup, and manage tape rotation) all the systems at a fraction of the cost (apparently we could have paid someone a decent salary for about 10 to 15 years). Granted, the solution did allow easy retrieval of lost data and placing a value on that is hard to figure out.
I have two of those 24" Sun beasts, one is sitting idle in my bedroom (there was some spare space)
I'm not sure that you'll have much spare space after storing one of those in your room.
We used to haul the pair of those around in large cargo crates to conferences and customer demos. Fortunately for our backs, we've been using LCDs for conferences. Actual demos still use the CRTs, but customers generally come to our lab or we use customer displays as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
2. A drug checkpoint is not allowed. Merely having drugs in the vehicle does not create a present threat to the safety of the road, and the intrusion is not justifiable.
I agree that merely having drugs in the car would not pose a driving danger, but operating the vehicle under the influence of drugs would be. Wouldn't one of the signs of the influence of drugs be having drugs on hand? One of my friends found drugs (marajuna in this case) in their son's car recently so likely he either used them while driving or shortly before driving. Either case, he would driving under the influence and if stopped at a checkpoint, I think he would have warranted a search from some initial assessment. Even taking the actions you mentioned (cars the whip off the road, through the ditch, and burn rubber) don't necessarily indicate posession. The driver may have just remembered leaving his wallet at home or something like that.
Another variant that I've heard pop up lately has been the use of drug-sniffing dogs during routine traffic stops or roadblocks. Here, the dog goes nuts at one guy's trunk, so the cops declare they now have probable cause to search the vehicle. Now the question is: does the use of dogs in the first place qualify as a search, and if so, what reason is given for the dog-sniff-search?
This may fall under a similar situation of the DUI check points that get setup. IANAL but I believe as long as they have a system for checking cars (say every car, every third car, etc...), they can do a basic check on the operator and condition of the car. I'm sure the officer is trained to detect signs of intoxication (smell of alcohol being a pretty obvious sign) and I could see an extension of that to include drug sniffing dogs to ensure the driver isn't operating under the influence of drugs. If drugs or alcohol are detected, the officer may inspect the vehicle for further evidence without a warrant given that the driver would likely remove any evidence before a warrant could be obtained.
Boss: My boss says we need some eunuchs programmers.
Dilbert: I think he means UNIX programmers not eunuchs and I already know UNIX.
Boss: If the company nurse stops by, tell her " never mind "
If there were enough such books available and written by reputable professors there would be a movement towards making them the standard texts in classrooms.
and
Finally, the success of other free software projects at the university level suggests to me that a free text-book program would be quite welcome.
I wish I could agree with you on this, but I found that a good number of the professors for my classes were also the author of the book used in the class. I imagine they are pushed to publish and I don't know that they would go the route of freely developing free text books. My wife is currently attending school and my kids will start in 6 years so I would gladly welcome the free digital text book approach though.
I fully expect that each of us could pick one or more printer companies that have "failed" us. In my case that would be Lexmark, in yours it sounds like HP.
I haven't seen many OkiData printers lately (I want to say the last one I remember was a line printer but I might be remembering incorrectly).
I did forget about one HP DesignJet plotter that kept giving our group problems. I've dealt with several of these plotters (ranging from the 3 foot width to the 7 foot width) and generally they work very well. In one case though, we kept having problems with the HP Etherjet card but it might have been poor work on the part of the local HP tech who was called in to service the part (not sure why the lab administrator didn't just replace the card himself).
And DON'T buy Lexmark. ever
I don't have a lot of injet experience from Lexmark (brother-in-law has one that didn't work well but don't know of any other friends/family with inkjets from Lexmark), but the Lexmark laser printers seem to need pretty regular repair visits in my building. The HP laser printers seem to run pretty well and for home, I'm fairly happy with my Epson Stylus for the occasional prints. The Epson Stylus C86 I have uses the four cartridges (CMYK) and for the few prints, the convenience/cost is not too bad.
Main point though was agreeing with you on the Lexmark statement.
I believe you are correct for ArcGIS but Terraserver was way before ArcGIS. I really hate the fact that ArcObjects is COM based and locked to the Microsoft platform. Performance of ArcGIS compared to the ArcInfo Workstation seems pretty slow actually for what I do with it. I also find that the simple editing in ArcEdit is now much more complex in ArcGIS (especially if you work in ArcSDE). I do like that topology is maintained during edits (unlike ArcInfo) but I can tolerate the builds in workstation for the simplicity of the environment.
As the other responder indicated, MS did want to push MS SQL Server and their server operating system, but I thought they were competing with ESRI on GIS software in general (MapPoint versus ArcView).
True that Microsoft didn't copy from Google but if I remember correctly, Microsoft started the TerraServer project to compete with ESRI when they released their ArcIMS and ArcSDE applications (sorry, both links are for their latest releases rather than their earlier products). Way back, Microsoft's MapPoint (think that was the application) was competing with ESRI's ArcView application. ESRI began developing web based mapping tools and Microsoft decided to try to compete with them. If anything, Microsoft copied from ESRI or possibly another GIS vendor.
True that "Project Gizmo" is software and "The Gizmo" is hardware, but given how companies value names, I wouldn't be totally surprised if someone from SunRocket eventually notices this.
Is it a collision in the same market, though?
Given both Gizmo devices are used for VOIP, I'd worry about collision. While the actual "gizmo" differs, they both fill part of the VOIP solution.
BTW, I use SunRocket (replaced my home phone for $199 USD for unlimited service for 1 year) and their material highlights the Gizmo as the center of their offering.
SunRocket, a VOIP company, has a hardware device called "The Gizmo" (see SunRocket How to Install and you'll see their adapter named "The Gizmo"). I can't find anything to indicate which came first though.
I'm sure we could all point out cases where one vendor or the other failed more often in our labs. For servers in my labs, I have a mixture of Sun's, SGI's, Dell's, IBM's (PC, not mainframe), and HP's. Out of all of them, I've had to contact Dell the most for failed hard disk, power supplies, and even the motherboard in one. The Sun's, SGI's, and IBM's seem to have the lowest failures (I'll admit though that many of the systems are over 3 years old so maybe the newer equipment fails more frequently but even on the few new ones, I haven't had any problems in my labs).
I'll bet that every system administrator here will have a vendor that has let them down and you'll find other system administrators who will swear by that equipment. Me, I still prefer the Sun boxes for UNIX and I'm sort of neutral on the Win32 vendors.
They fucked up Java
How so? My group does a fair amount of development in a variety of languages (C/C++/Java/VB/C#/and various scripting languages) and by far, the developers prefer Java. I guess I don't see how Sun messed up Java as you indicate.
Oddly enough, my income is pretty decent and I have cable TV, but I also have one TV that still has "rabbit ears". The older TV is a small set that we keep in the kitchen so we can catch the news in the morning and the Simpsons in the evening (while preparing/eating meals). While I could certainly replace the TV with a newer set and run cable to the kitchen, I would prefer to spend my money on other things (student loans, car payments, etc...). I guess the point is that some people just choose not to go upgrade everything if the older version works. Income/class may not be the only factors. I'd add that importance of TV in one's life is also a factor to the number still relying on analog.
The source for various geospatial features will vary based on what is available and the accuracy needs. In some cases, survey information (blue prints, site plans, etc...) will be used, others use GPS units, and some will use aerial photos (the first company I worked for did this for many counties in North Carolina - the analyst had fun looking for shadows to help identify utility pole locations). As long as the attributes on the feature data include some source information, it could actually be a collection from multiple sources.
I think you will find just about everything in someone's GIS
Couldn't agree with you more. If data has a spatial element (coordinates or place name), it can be spatially referenced (can even have multiple references - see AeroText - if you refer to say a newspaper article that discusses the Iraq war - US and Iraq spatial references plus others possibly).
In addition to the GPS and survey records, add in aerial, satellite, and old paper maps and you have some of the more common methods of data collection. You can't forget through about sensor types when looking at any of the collection methods. Oh yeah, you could consider bathymetric data from ships or reports for things like ship wrecks and other obstructions.
Likely they'll do something with LIDAR. The county I worked at a while back was considering having LIDAR used to capture various height data (buildings, trees, ground, etc...) but the accuracy came into question for our particular use. The Dept. of Environmental Resources required a greater accuracy for flood water management efforts. The LIDAR accuracy we were offered would miss the changes in elevation for stream banks. For general building heights, it would probably be adequate unless you are looking to catch say the rail/wall that generally surrounds the building edge or some other smaller feature that may slip between the sampling points.
I also recall issues with multiple returned signals (particularly for vegetation, but not exclusive) which returned multiple elevations. If you cover a forested area, you'll get returns from the tree tops and various levels of the vegetation before you get to the ground info. I imagine some buildings may experience similar results (a tent like structure, maybe glass ceilings, frameworks, etc...).
Jim
For some internal data collection programs, I used to write similar messages to code I was 99.99% sure would never be run. I don't recall anyone ever actually seeing it run so I guess I was OK. IIRC, the output went something like "Bad things happening here - ". The code never repeated the message though, it would just end the application after the user clicked "OK".
I had to debug some code from another developer who must have been watching the Scooby Doo movies at the time of development. Most of the comments/errors started as "Ruh Roh Shaggy" + an error statement. Not a profanity by any means, but still not something you'd want a potential customer to see during a demo.
IOGear 4D Cruiser is a pretty nice mouse but not wireless yet. This uses a track ball rather than a touch pad for scroll directions (horizontal and vertical). I've been using it for about a 1.5 years at work and have seriously considered getting one for home (if my mouse ever dies). I seem to recall the price being under $20 (USD).
Likely a large portion of the XP systems running in companies are from systems recently purchased rather than upgrades. Unless a company has a corporate agreement in place to allow any version of MS software to be run, upgrading from 2000 to XP isn't a cheap task (just from the licensing side). Add in the cost of rolling out an update: verifying it runs with the corporate applications, the manpower to actually do the upgrades (verifying system requirements - could be some old systems out there that can't support XP), and user training, and deciding to upgrade from what works is not appealing.
My employer has been rolling out XP for about 1 year now (at my site, almost 800 desktops) so we definitely held off. Without compelling reason to go to the next version, why should a company upgrade? My company actually downgraded new systems purchased with XP to 2000 to keep the same image on the desktops. Without a compelling reason to upgrade, I don't expect to see Longhorn system except in a lab or two as test systems.
I haven't had any direct experience with Cannon but my friend who does photography has some negative feelings concerning Cannon's digital camera offerings. Apparently Cannon's SLR digital models didn't support using lens from the traditional SLR cameras unlike Nikon which apparently does. I personally use a Minolta SLR but haven't been able to afford a digital Minolta SLR (which appears to allow many of the older SLR lenses to be used - maybe not all automated, but most are). I have a digital Kodak Easy Share camera that is a decent camera in well lit situations but definitely has limitations. It tends to do poorly in situations like kids on stage for plays/band, basketball, and wedding receptions (unless you have a lot of light).
As for printers, I have used both HP and Epson inkjets and the Epson does produce very nice quality prints but the cartridge test does seem to go through ink pretty fast. At work, my employer is switching from HP to Lexmark laser printers and I'm not sure this is a good move. I've seen quite a few of the Lexmarks in the hall with a service technician on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. I'm likely to continue using Epson for home can't make a recommendation for work printers.
Some people just don't have the interest. Most people have the intelligence levels to learn it, just not the desire. They use computers if necessary but only as a tool that should include specific instructions for what they need to do with it (even if this requires instructions to be printed out and left beside the computer).
No matter how simple the setup and usage of computers get, you'll still have some people who have little to no interest in figuring out how to make the system work. They'll continue to look at the system as a tool and want very specific steps to follow rather than trying to understand prompts/wizards.
I'll agree with you though that out of the box systems are becoming more simple to setup and use for those who have at least a casual interest in computers.
computers are easy to use as long as the user has some sort of intelligence.
One might think that, but I've seen some pretty intelligent users who have no interest in learning about computers (setup or usage). Services like "Geeks on Call" seems to cater to many of these.
I was only trying to state the ideal case where every new edition would be re-evaluated. Personally, I am using Netscape 8.0 on most of the PC's I access, Firefox 1.0.4 on the others, and whatever Sun's version of Mozilla is on Solaris 10. I still of course have access to Internet Explorer on any of the MS Win32 systems, but only use it for a few of my employers sites that require IE (although Netscape 8 makes switching to the IE engine per site pretty easy).
As for trust, that really should be part of the criteria. Consider how many request for proposals (RFPs) may base a decision on past performance. A company that has continuously performed poorly must have that taken into consideration but you still need to consider them.
but now, I will never go back
Not that I'm in favor of supporting MS but saying that you will never go back to a particular vendor isn't exactly a reasonable statement to make. Always look for the appropriate tool for a job. Maybe you'll have a bias when evaluating the tools, but don't limit your research for an application.
I've only dealt with one StorageTek solution and I have mixed opinions on the solution. The online storage portion was very good but the tape storage didn't perform as well as we had been lead to believe. For the datacenter I was in, the complete backups (basically a level 0 once a week) were expected to complete within a couple hour window, but in reality took the entire weekend (late Friday to early Monday morning).
The cost was also a major disappointment. I don't know the exact figures to break out the storage versus backup portions but the joke in the datacenter was that they could pay the salary and buy the hardware to manually backup (load tapes, kick off backup, and manage tape rotation) all the systems at a fraction of the cost (apparently we could have paid someone a decent salary for about 10 to 15 years). Granted, the solution did allow easy retrieval of lost data and placing a value on that is hard to figure out.
I have two of those 24" Sun beasts, one is sitting idle in my bedroom (there was some spare space)
I'm not sure that you'll have much spare space after storing one of those in your room.
We used to haul the pair of those around in large cargo crates to conferences and customer demos. Fortunately for our backs, we've been using LCDs for conferences. Actual demos still use the CRTs, but customers generally come to our lab or we use customer displays as needed.