it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.
The American Government is as capable as any to do the same. Anyone like to relive the political/social environment when Bush #43 was justifying a war on two fronts? I'm old enough to remember the fabrications used by Bush #41 to get congress to go to war in Kuwait.
By all appearances, they don't distribute it to other retailers. Most wouldn't carry it anyway.
Since Amazon is the only one carrying it, how does anyone know how many are sold?
I think the "news" actually is that they are trying to make a tiny bit of profit on a sale. Xboxes and the like are rumored to be break-even with profits coming from game titles sold.
If a machine is returned, unless something is broken, they can refurbish and resell it.
Let's say for a moment the device is refurbished. Not only have you lost money on the return, paid someone to fix the thing and get it ready for resale, AND offering it at a discount, does the cost of repairing make any sense at all?
I'm not saying "it's doomed" or an otherwise bad device. I'm saying the business end of the device will not work out well at all for the developers at $50 profit.
Yeah, the original math is bad. The corrected math in another post puts it at selling 8 units for every return. That's before anyone is on email support and the costs of shipping the devices back and forth is accounted.
Finally, the manufacturing costs would go down, but it does so in big quantity steps. If there's no money for resellers or advertising how will volume ramp up?
BTW, if the volume *ever* did ramp up fantastically there would be a knockoff by MSI and their counterparts in just a few months time at 2/3 the retail price of this device.
I really would like one. Really. It's just that many things aren't as well thought out as the device itself.
Let's imagine they go direct for now. No resellers at all.
When a single machine is returned, that's $250 out of the businesses pocket. It would take 10 sold machines to recoup the cost of the single return!
What are the industrial design the startup costs? You know, the casing mold, PCB sourcing/assembly. Someone pays to have the device tested by regulatory agencies. Now, you want to make a return on that initial investment too.
This is the epitome of crappy consumer journalism. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a reader to establish the value of the product.
Damning it with manufacturing issues when the consumer that cares is not Dell's primary customer. Were the issues preventable? Yes. Would the end-user price gone up to a point it no-longer makes sense to a Dell customer? Probably.
Damning it with performance issues. Again, the price would have been negatively affected by trying to make it mac-like. Not to mention driving *Dell* customers away!
I'm not a Dell consumer at all, but there was a very good reason they have become as large as they are. Customers think the product is 'good-enough.' This is a super-slim laptop that will be a good fit for Dell customers.
As my original post states, you are an Active Directory admin. You have made the classic mistake of thinking the *very* limited LDAP functions in AD are similar to running an LDAP server.
Microsoft has a long history of aggressively promoting some scheme and then watching it fail and screwing the OEM's all at the same time.
Tablet PC's come to mind as a very expensive failure for OEM's. Another failure, PlaysForSure was a not-so-recent major FU to hardware manufacturers, branding businesses.
Why, when they've been repeatedly burned by Microsoft, will they invest in these non-new failures?
I had serious trouble getting OpenFire to work with Active Directory
That would be the case for two reasons:
1. SSO is not LDAP. You can, in theory, use an LDAP directory to provide the settings for SSO, but it's not SSO. Off the top of my head, you need a gina to do all of the SSO-stuff for you.
2. Microsoft's implementation of LDAP is non-standard. It's very quirky outside of the very simplest LDAP operations. To which the legions of Microsoft domain admins will cry out "What?! He doesn't know what he's talking about!" To which I reply, you don't work with LDAP. You are an Active Directory admin. The two are not the same thing.
Some simple economics play into the pricing scheme.
Consumer Equipment: Anyone that can sell 100,000 units to customers who demand *far* less in the way of service and generalized performance can sell a cheaper widget.
Production Equipment: **Far** fewer customers (1000 units) who demand much higher levels of service, and generalized performance demands that the drives must be way, way more expensive than the consumer product.
The so-called "fourth estate" is still irrelevant.
You've *still* got media access tightly controlled in most government.
You've heard of National Public Radio right? They are non-profit get their content from the same sources, report it with about the same amount of complicity as any other news source.
Note, I am not laying all blame on newspapers. The consumer is happily paying for half-truths, advertising disguised as news, and 'man bites dog' stories.
In my direct experience, they are highly-skilled in copying/ripping off and even building on/improving on original ideas.
I can second this experience having worked for an OEM.
The comments about financing work for some, but not for most. VC will *at least* want to see some finished product moving. Even then you can easily end up with nothing to show for your efforts partnering with VC.
Finally, if the device is so special, license it out as soon as possible. Why? Because if you are at all successful your idea will be copied and sold at a steep discount. And no, you won't be able to afford the litigation.
Note to all, the telco monopoly litigate with vengeance when an organization tries to cut into their hostage base. See Vonage case for the ultimate, totally unjustified, vigorish.
Right now the entertainment conglomerates are transitioning their command and control structure.
1. They control the distribution of entertainment media practically worldwide and earn above-average returns maintaining that control. DRM schemes are cheap enough and discourage piracy enough.
2. Execs prosper in a political/corporate culture that has fleeced willing consumers for generations. Why would anyone want to screw that up?
In layman's terms this means Executive Management cannot find/do not have Shell projects that generate profit.
Even simpler, instead of using the money to grow the company, they are giving it all to the shareholders PLUS passing debt through to the shareholders as dividends.
Shell is in the process of being robbed by the Board of Directors and Executive Management. Moreover, the organization is totally ineffectual at the executive level.
I've been advocating for YEARS for Adobe to sell Linux boxen with CS locked on and pre-installed.
Adobe has a long history of hatred for Free software going way, way back to ghostscript. The hatred is born from the fact that they can't IP litigate Free software to a certain death like they have most graphics software innovators.
Just like the legal community is pretty much still using WordPerfect. It has little basis in merit or features.
The GIMP does the work of 80% of the worlds photoshop users, with about the same learning curve. The other 20% would run into a limitation and need to use some feature that is Adobe specific.
As a Father with a younger daughter I have very fundamental issues with having few boundaries on the internet. Especially for girls entering pre-pre sexual stages of their life.
Whether you like it or not, she will be exposed to very undesirable models of women in society in very un-prnographic, but still titillating images. If she watches a normal amount of TV, then she's being rushed along enough sexually. It reinforces the sexual hysteria that is so prevalent in the U.S.
I'm all for age-appropriate normalizing of sex topics, but less filtered internet access is not the way to achieve it.
Before flaming away at me she's probably getting enough exposure to peer-appropriate pre-pre sexual things in school. Hopefully, Right now its all a very immature kind of pubescent theater. That's enough and it hopefully is age-appropriate.
For those reasons I'm in favor of tight controls on the home Internets/IM until very late teens.
Everyone in the Marketing chain needed a simple, compelling message. It's easy to sell new cameras "7 is better than 6." The fact is the spec is almost meaningless and has been for a very long time.
It's easy to sell magazines "New 7mp cameras!" Give a new one to a well-known photographer and the story writes itself. This also sets off the feeding frenzy in the enthusiasts market.
but users are achieving excellent results at that density
This is magical thinking. Making a 1:1 association between megapixels and the perception of "better" results is wrong, wrong, wrong. No amount of jargon helps your case.
doesn't Ubuntu pull updates as part of the install process?
The basic ubuntu installation CD has all of the packages on it. That's how it can boot up as a LiveCD. That's why the author got a huge list of updates.
If you are used to the Debian installer then you will be generally disappointed. The Ubuntu installer is specifically designed for desktops and has very limited functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
it's easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.
The American Government is as capable as any to do the same. Anyone like to relive the political/social environment when Bush #43 was justifying a war on two fronts? I'm old enough to remember the fabrications used by Bush #41 to get congress to go to war in Kuwait.
There is nothing special about the Chinese.
Parent is 100% right. This is a non-story.
Anyone who goes to the trouble of checking their logs for nearly all Internet-facing services would be very, very familiar with this.
Where do they advertise to potential consumers?
Who are their customers?
By all appearances, they don't distribute it to other retailers. Most wouldn't carry it anyway.
Since Amazon is the only one carrying it, how does anyone know how many are sold?
I think the "news" actually is that they are trying to make a tiny bit of profit on a sale. Xboxes and the like are rumored to be break-even with profits coming from game titles sold.
If a machine is returned, unless something is broken, they can refurbish and resell it.
Let's say for a moment the device is refurbished. Not only have you lost money on the return, paid someone to fix the thing and get it ready for resale, AND offering it at a discount, does the cost of repairing make any sense at all?
I'm not saying "it's doomed" or an otherwise bad device. I'm saying the business end of the device will not work out well at all for the developers at $50 profit.
Yeah, the original math is bad. The corrected math in another post puts it at selling 8 units for every return. That's before anyone is on email support and the costs of shipping the devices back and forth is accounted.
Finally, the manufacturing costs would go down, but it does so in big quantity steps. If there's no money for resellers or advertising how will volume ramp up?
BTW, if the volume *ever* did ramp up fantastically there would be a knockoff by MSI and their counterparts in just a few months time at 2/3 the retail price of this device.
I really would like one. Really. It's just that many things aren't as well thought out as the device itself.
There's no business to be built on $50 profit.
Let's imagine they go direct for now. No resellers at all.
When a single machine is returned, that's $250 out of the businesses pocket. It would take 10 sold machines to recoup the cost of the single return!
What are the industrial design the startup costs? You know, the casing mold, PCB sourcing/assembly. Someone pays to have the device tested by regulatory agencies. Now, you want to make a return on that initial investment too.
As an expensive hobby, it would work.
Oh, and I want one with a mythtv frontend.
This is the epitome of crappy consumer journalism. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a reader to establish the value of the product.
Damning it with manufacturing issues when the consumer that cares is not Dell's primary customer. Were the issues preventable? Yes. Would the end-user price gone up to a point it no-longer makes sense to a Dell customer? Probably.
Damning it with performance issues. Again, the price would have been negatively affected by trying to make it mac-like. Not to mention driving *Dell* customers away!
I'm not a Dell consumer at all, but there was a very good reason they have become as large as they are. Customers think the product is 'good-enough.' This is a super-slim laptop that will be a good fit for Dell customers.
Damn you Gizmodo! Daaaammmmmmnnnn you!!!!!!
I've migrated a metric crapload of LDAP apps
Yes, you've migrated them into ActiveDirectory, not another LDAP server.
Here's a little taste of the LDAP-like problems.
http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200312/msg00240.html
As my original post states, you are an Active Directory admin. You have made the classic mistake of thinking the *very* limited LDAP functions in AD are similar to running an LDAP server.
Microsoft has a long history of aggressively promoting some scheme and then watching it fail and screwing the OEM's all at the same time.
Tablet PC's come to mind as a very expensive failure for OEM's. Another failure, PlaysForSure was a not-so-recent major FU to hardware manufacturers, branding businesses.
Why, when they've been repeatedly burned by Microsoft, will they invest in these non-new failures?
I had serious trouble getting OpenFire to work with Active Directory
That would be the case for two reasons:
1. SSO is not LDAP. You can, in theory, use an LDAP directory to provide the settings for SSO, but it's not SSO. Off the top of my head, you need a gina to do all of the SSO-stuff for you.
2. Microsoft's implementation of LDAP is non-standard. It's very quirky outside of the very simplest LDAP operations. To which the legions of Microsoft domain admins will cry out "What?! He doesn't know what he's talking about!" To which I reply, you don't work with LDAP. You are an Active Directory admin. The two are not the same thing.
There's nothing like a few years in-the-field perspective before going back for an advanced degree.
This will give you a chance to see "which way the professional winds blow" for you.
Take those few years to work and have lots of safe, happy sex and generally have a great time. you know, live.
Some simple economics play into the pricing scheme.
Consumer Equipment:
Anyone that can sell 100,000 units to customers who demand *far* less in the way of service and generalized performance can sell a cheaper widget.
Production Equipment:
**Far** fewer customers (1000 units) who demand much higher levels of service, and generalized performance demands that the drives must be way, way more expensive than the consumer product.
The so-called "fourth estate" is still irrelevant.
You've *still* got media access tightly controlled in most government.
You've heard of National Public Radio right? They are non-profit get their content from the same sources, report it with about the same amount of complicity as any other news source.
Note, I am not laying all blame on newspapers. The consumer is happily paying for half-truths, advertising disguised as news, and 'man bites dog' stories.
This is another corporate welfare project.
In my direct experience, they are highly-skilled in copying/ripping off and even building on/improving on original ideas.
I can second this experience having worked for an OEM.
The comments about financing work for some, but not for most. VC will *at least* want to see some finished product moving. Even then you can easily end up with nothing to show for your efforts partnering with VC.
Finally, if the device is so special, license it out as soon as possible. Why? Because if you are at all successful your idea will be copied and sold at a steep discount. And no, you won't be able to afford the litigation.
Yes. Depends on how much bandwidth and hardware processing you've got versus the size of the conference.
Dunno how many people will jump into that though. Geeks like the safety of a keyboard. NAT issues may do the noble idea in altogether.
that are filled with Verizon/SBC/etc patents.
Note to all, the telco monopoly litigate with vengeance when an organization tries to cut into their hostage base. See Vonage case for the ultimate, totally unjustified, vigorish.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070417/005814.shtml
Right now the entertainment conglomerates are transitioning their command and control structure.
1. They control the distribution of entertainment media practically worldwide and earn above-average returns maintaining that control. DRM schemes are cheap enough and discourage piracy enough.
2. Execs prosper in a political/corporate culture that has fleeced willing consumers for generations. Why would anyone want to screw that up?
increase its debt load to pay for dividends
In layman's terms this means Executive Management cannot find/do not have Shell projects that generate profit.
Even simpler, instead of using the money to grow the company, they are giving it all to the shareholders PLUS passing debt through to the shareholders as dividends.
Shell is in the process of being robbed by the Board of Directors and Executive Management. Moreover, the organization is totally ineffectual at the executive level.
Forget the greenwashing. This is theft.
Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page.
Sounds like a *wonderful* malware delivery system.
Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8.
Yet another malware delivery system.
Why, in 2009, are they slapping on another layer of lard on top of their needlessly complex and largely ineffective OS security?
One thing is for sure, they aren't going to stop releasing dumb things like this so I'll never be out of work babysitting their products.
I've been advocating for YEARS for Adobe to sell Linux boxen with CS locked on and pre-installed.
Adobe has a long history of hatred for Free software going way, way back to ghostscript. The hatred is born from the fact that they can't IP litigate Free software to a certain death like they have most graphics software innovators.
But in the end, professionals use Photoshop.
Just like the legal community is pretty much still using WordPerfect. It has little basis in merit or features.
The GIMP does the work of 80% of the worlds photoshop users, with about the same learning curve. The other 20% would run into a limitation and need to use some feature that is Adobe specific.
As a Father with a younger daughter I have very fundamental issues with having few boundaries on the internet. Especially for girls entering pre-pre sexual stages of their life.
Whether you like it or not, she will be exposed to very undesirable models of women in society in very un-prnographic, but still titillating images. If she watches a normal amount of TV, then she's being rushed along enough sexually. It reinforces the sexual hysteria that is so prevalent in the U.S.
I'm all for age-appropriate normalizing of sex topics, but less filtered internet access is not the way to achieve it.
Before flaming away at me she's probably getting enough exposure to peer-appropriate pre-pre sexual things in school. Hopefully, Right now its all a very immature kind of pubescent theater. That's enough and it hopefully is age-appropriate.
For those reasons I'm in favor of tight controls on the home Internets/IM until very late teens.
Flame away.
3 MP would have been the end of it.
Everyone in the Marketing chain needed a simple, compelling message.
It's easy to sell new cameras "7 is better than 6." The fact is the spec is almost meaningless and has been for a very long time.
It's easy to sell magazines "New 7mp cameras!"
Give a new one to a well-known photographer and the story writes itself. This also sets off the feeding frenzy in the enthusiasts market.
but users are achieving excellent results at that density
This is magical thinking. Making a 1:1 association between megapixels and the perception of "better" results is wrong, wrong, wrong. No amount of jargon helps your case.
"Resolution" is a decades-old optical problem. To prove my point and provide another reference, the Mars rover captured images with a "gigantic" 1 megapixel sensor. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/pancam_techwed_040114.html
I acknowledge that gear geeks need some way to justify the new gear and I'm not going to change their behavior.
For those that don't know better, disregard the parent's jargon and go take pictures.
It work great. I run it on an nslu2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
How much power saving are we talking about here? It seems to me the LCD panel/backlight are by far the biggest consumer of battery power.
doesn't Ubuntu pull updates as part of the install process?
The basic ubuntu installation CD has all of the packages on it. That's how it can boot up as a LiveCD. That's why the author got a huge list of updates.
If you are used to the Debian installer then you will be generally disappointed. The Ubuntu installer is specifically designed for desktops and has very limited functionality.