I'm more curious about AIW VIVO and tuner support. Oh, and dual monitor outputs on my Radeon 7500 PCI. Even if ATI contributed specs and/or code to FINALLY enable x.org to run properly on their cards, I will continue to hate ATI and steer people away from their products. They are taking too damn long to get their act together.
*mourns the death of PCI video cards*
*wishes NVidia vendors would release a 6x00 or 7x00 based PCI card*
Strange it seems to me that hard drive makers all have their lemmons mixed with great quality lines. Its hard to tell.
Does anyone else here remember when 80MB drives were high end and 120MB drives were pretty much king of the hill? 40GB was the de-facto standard desktop computer size.
Well around that time (1991? 1992?) Seagate produced a huge run of bad 40GB drives and earned a bad rep for themselves that it took YEARS for them to shake off. If anyone on usenet or a BBS were to mention buying a Seagate drive, it'd be followed by about 30 posts claiming that Seagate sucks, "I had a 40MB seagate and it died" and so forth. Western Digital was the name to trust then.
In recent years, IBM Deskstars became known for enterprise-level performance on the desktop, and they had many, many great high-performance destkop drives. However they had a bad run of (60GB?) hard drives, and suddenly everyone was flaming IBM "Deathstar" drives across the board. Never mind that it was one specific batch of one specific model drive that was bad. Suddenly all IBM drives were bad.
In my personal experience (in reference to optical drives but hear me out) I had a bad experience with a Ricoh CD-RW drive - $800 at the time. I had the drive fail within the first month, sent it to Ricoh, got the same drive back, and it failed within a month again. Sent it back, received it. This happened SIX times during the warranty period. In the meantime news broke out on Usenet about a bad run of those drives (which were considered high end at the time) The last two times I sent the drive in I called them (Ricoh) beforehand to beg them to exchange the drive, or repair the specific issue. Each time I received the drive back and it died within weeks. During the warranty period the drive was in Ricoh's possession more than mine. After the warranty was out I disassembled the drive (CD-RW drives were still in the $500-$600 range by then), took apart the optical sled, cleaned it with isopropyl and lubricated it with white grease. The drive worked flawlessly from that point on. The problem was simple: Ricoh chose a poor lubrication (consistency was similar to petroleum jelly) which picked up every single piece of dust that entered the drive, and turned into a glue-like consistency, restricting the optical sled from moving smoothly, so it could no longer seek to follow the track consistently. Because of Ricoh's lousy customer service and their refusal to address the issue properly, I have never bought a Ricoh product again and never will.
(back on topic, you'll see why I mentioned the Ricoh issue in a moment)
I've had Western Digital drives fail. However each time WDC customer service has handled the issue with no questions asked, and in each case cross-shipped a new (or refurb) drive, and every time I've received a drive back it's lasted for many years. Because their customer service has been solid, I still buy WDC products, but ONLY the products with a three-year warranty or better.
I am partial to Seagate though and that's all I will ship to customers in desktop computers or servers when I can help it. With their 5-year warranty on all drives in all channels, you know they're confident in the product and are willing to back it. I just hope with their assimilating Maxtor that Maxtor's quality increases, as opposed to cheapening the WDC line.
I fail to understand why Seagate would want Maxtor though, except possibly to gain more factory space and maybe a couple of patents. Seagate's products are vastly superior, especially in terms of quality. Maybe it's Maxtor's external drive products they're after? It certainly can't be product quality/reliability.
It's an animated show. What difference does it make? Sure, you'll get a few less jaggies on the rendered portions of animation, but really how would HD vs. NTSC improve the show any?
It's getting poor ratings, so don't promote it. It's getting poor ratings because they don't promote it despite great critical reviews. When fans who discover the show find the timeslot, move it. Fan's can't find the show, leading to poor ratings. Move the timeslot again, citing poor ratings. Piss off fans by preempting it with an idiotic reality show. Release show on DVD, see seasons 1 and 2 become #1 and #2 sellers. Preempt show again with a rerun of another show, during sweeps. Cancel show, citing poor ratings. Brush off ABC and Showtime inquiries.
- Although by the 4th season it was kind of looking that way.
The fourth production season (seasons 4-5 broadcast) actually has many of the best episodes of the series. There were a couple of duds (which show doesn't have duds now and then?) but overall I'd have to say season 4 (production) is the best season of Futurama, and the general trend was the show was getting better and better with each episode.
It didn't tie things up, it left things open. There are plenty of story lines still open, plus Leela and Fry are still a question. Groening intentionally left it that way in case the show would be continued, because he expected FOX to pull the plug but knew the show had enough of a following to warrant continuation later.
Either Showtime or ABC will pick up Arrested Development, and either of those will promote the show heavily rather than the single token billboard Fox put up for the show. The other networks also won't play musical timeslots with the show either, and won't intentionally put it in a spot where it would get continually preempted.
Heh, referring to C3PO I take it? I love Bender. Bender is the anti-3PO.
Let's compare:
C3PO: Human cyborg relations, a pussy, high-strung, but cares about his master and does his work, sexless
Bender: Wants to kill all humans (except one), megalomaniac, couldn't give less of a shit about anyone else, to the point where the only thing that upsets him is lack of beer, womanizing
I've had similar experience with Novell. It is VERY difficult to reach the person you need to speak with there about ANYTHING. With that said, I'd rather give them money than Redhat. I've hated Redhat ever since they abandoned the desktop market, back when they had the potential to expand their offerings to OEMs. I mean, you could at one point go to CompUSA or Micro Center and buy RedHat linux off the shelf. They had an amazing opportunity to go head to head with Microsoft and they blew it, IMHO.
Also, the GUI in Redhat is nothing short of disorganized - when I work on clients' machines I always go for the virtual console and do EVERYTHING via the shell because they've gone backwards in their GUI.
And Fedora? I'm glad they are spinning Fedora off completely because I think Fedora will be all the better for it. I've tried Fedora and found that there are many configurations the install disk won't even boot from, where ubuntu, SuSE, Mandriva, and other install disks will,.
I might give CentOS a shot but I will never pay for DeadRat Linux.
Windows ME is the new Microsoft Bob. It is the single worst version of Windows to troubleshoot or repair. It is the ONLY version of Windows where I have had to resort to reformat/reinstall for relatively minor issues that I'd have been able to repair in any other build of Win9x in mere minutes.
er, one can infer directly from the context what the author is referring to.
And for what it's worth connectivity is not the primary function of IS. Providing and supporting the infrastructure for company data, processes, and infrastructure and making it as transparent (that is, problem free) for the users is what "IS" departments are for.
I've gone into companies and improved security (brought them beyond HIPAA compliance - they're behind two firewalls), reliability, etc. and now we hear from most of them very little. One customer we hadn't heard for in four months contacted us a couple of weeks ago. I had been wondering if there was a problem (e.g., they thought IT services were too costly) but when they called they had a laundry list of items, mostly concerning computers we didn't provide (mainly problems with Dell systems, which on the low end have a HORRENDOUS failure rate). When he called he said "I know you haven't heard from us in a while but to tell you the truth things have been running GREAT." It was satisfying to know that a nontechnical manager at a client understands the value of IT and that it is when you don't even think about your network that things have been done right.
Incidentally that was one of my clients where we deployed Open Office (saved $400 to $500 per seat on software there), Firefox, and other free/OSS solutions. Users (secretary/receptionist types) took to OOo immediately and discovered functioality that I didn't even know was in OOo, which underscores just how well OOo stacks up against M$ Office for typical office use. Sure, if they were working with 1200+ row formatted/hyperlinked spreadsheets they would not be able to use OOo due to severe performance issues, but they'll never encounter that there.
They have gone from continual downtime between spyware and a lousy (and insecure) network setup and flaky hardware to never even thinking about the computers. Their only remaining problem is they're still on Verizon DSL so they experience bandwidth issues when lots of terminal service users are logged in, but that's unavoidable until they bite the bullet and go with a T1 line, since Verizon STILL doesn't offer sDSL here. They had one minor incident where one individual who had the admin password was canned and they didn't change the admin password or let me know, and that user was a little spiteful and changed the admin password. That was quickly addressed (thanks to UBCD) and now I've created a secondary admin account just in case another manager has the same idea. Aside from that they have had no real problems.
My point?
Express your goals:
- minimized downtime
- data integrity - redundancy, automated backups, etc.
- solid disaster recovery plans (minimize downtime in event of a failure)
- facilitate better communication and data exchange
- Make your IT infrastructure transparent. By transparent, I mean so problem-free that the users don't even have to think about you.
Remind them that a single day's worth of downtime for a business of that size costs more than it will cost to implement a proper network and process up front. I've seen a 130+ employee company (a software company) lose exchange due to HDD crashes (the acting IT director ignored the RAID warning when one drive failed, then a second failed) and the acting IT director was clueless. Management approached me to recover the data (knowing my background in Windows, Exchange, M$ mail, etc. prior to QA) but when I checked out the backups, I found that the acting IT director (the previous IT director left) had changed the backup several months prior, so that ONLY the directory structure was being backed up. No System State backup, no info store backup. No files backed up. They were toast. Also, ALL of the previous backup tapes had been recycled, including the ones at Iron Mountain, so they had NO backup. That situation lead to about a week's worth of no email, and likely hundreds of thousands worth of lost revenue. Fortunately
Gwen's solo stuff sucks - I won't buy it (hear that RIAA member labels?). I AM looking forward to No Doubt's album next year because they have a good track record of not producing crap. Gwen's material is a heck of a lot better when she's working with the band.
Why release a 10-12 song CD when the artist can only write 1 or 2 good songs?
Because the artist won't agree to releasing just the two marketable tracks. The recording studio will agree to let the artist do what they want for (n) number of tracks providing they get to release (x) number of marketed, watered-down-for-the-masses pop tracks.
Administrative costs (recording execs' salaries) Engineering (which is extremely IN-expensive nowadays and doesn't take months on end) Cocaine (see Advertising, below) Distribution costs Advertising (Payola, etc.) Buying their own product back at retail to pump up sales numbers to get charted Royalties to the actual artist (a very tiny slice of the pie)
They've obviously never done marketing analyses of the kind Wal*Mart does.
Economics 101:
In some cases, if you charge more for a product and sell fewer units, you make more money. Hasbro's "Ouija Board" game falls into this category. So do many exotic cars.
In other cases, if you lower the price a bit you can move many more items, and although your profit margin on a per-unit basis is lower, your bottom line will be deeper into the black. Pretty much anything you'll find at Sprawl*Mart falls into this category.
It's worked with movies. Remember when VHS movies averaged $79 to $90 each? Very few bought movies - they bought a second VCR and copied rental tapesinstead . When it FINALLY dawned on movie studios that dropping the price leads to more sales, profits went through the roof. Look at DVD prices - Sprawl*Mart sells many DVDs for $5.50 now - and they're not crippled or censored (does Wal*Mart still censor DVDs? I was pissed when I bought one and found a couple of lines were changed, and didn't buy DVDs from them for about three years afterward. There was NOTHING to indicate the change on the DVD), and it's not limited to initial-release no special feature DVDs any more. I just bought a whole bunch of great movies - many of them recent special editions - for $5.50 each, and a few for $7.50. Some of the movies I'd gone to the theater to see at least twice, and downloaded - and yet I still bought them. Wal*Mart would not be selling DVDs that cheap if it weren't profitable, and no way would their suppliers sell them DVDs so cheaply if they were losing money on them (oh sure, dumping a dud here and there they'd take a loss just to get rid of the crud - movies like Gigli, etc.
Everyone but tinfoil hat wearers know it's fake. DId that really have to be pointed out?
But I wonder if Art Bell actually believes the crap he talks about and "reports" on. He was fun to listen to - kind of like watching WWE. Everyone knows it's fake but some people just can't not watch, and not "root" for one er, "wrestling entertainer" over the other.
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I think Bush gradeated the sixth grade, just like Jethro. In fact I think he was one of Jethro's classmates!
I'm more curious about AIW VIVO and tuner support. Oh, and dual monitor outputs on my Radeon 7500 PCI. Even if ATI contributed specs and/or code to FINALLY enable x.org to run properly on their cards, I will continue to hate ATI and steer people away from their products. They are taking too damn long to get their act together.
*mourns the death of PCI video cards*
*wishes NVidia vendors would release a 6x00 or 7x00 based PCI card*
Does anyone else here remember when 80MB drives were high end and 120MB drives were pretty much king of the hill? 40GB was the de-facto standard desktop computer size.
Well around that time (1991? 1992?) Seagate produced a huge run of bad 40GB drives and earned a bad rep for themselves that it took YEARS for them to shake off. If anyone on usenet or a BBS were to mention buying a Seagate drive, it'd be followed by about 30 posts claiming that Seagate sucks, "I had a 40MB seagate and it died" and so forth. Western Digital was the name to trust then.
In recent years, IBM Deskstars became known for enterprise-level performance on the desktop, and they had many, many great high-performance destkop drives. However they had a bad run of (60GB?) hard drives, and suddenly everyone was flaming IBM "Deathstar" drives across the board. Never mind that it was one specific batch of one specific model drive that was bad. Suddenly all IBM drives were bad.
In my personal experience (in reference to optical drives but hear me out) I had a bad experience with a Ricoh CD-RW drive - $800 at the time. I had the drive fail within the first month, sent it to Ricoh, got the same drive back, and it failed within a month again. Sent it back, received it. This happened SIX times during the warranty period. In the meantime news broke out on Usenet about a bad run of those drives (which were considered high end at the time) The last two times I sent the drive in I called them (Ricoh) beforehand to beg them to exchange the drive, or repair the specific issue. Each time I received the drive back and it died within weeks. During the warranty period the drive was in Ricoh's possession more than mine. After the warranty was out I disassembled the drive (CD-RW drives were still in the $500-$600 range by then), took apart the optical sled, cleaned it with isopropyl and lubricated it with white grease. The drive worked flawlessly from that point on. The problem was simple: Ricoh chose a poor lubrication (consistency was similar to petroleum jelly) which picked up every single piece of dust that entered the drive, and turned into a glue-like consistency, restricting the optical sled from moving smoothly, so it could no longer seek to follow the track consistently. Because of Ricoh's lousy customer service and their refusal to address the issue properly, I have never bought a Ricoh product again and never will.
(back on topic, you'll see why I mentioned the Ricoh issue in a moment)
I've had Western Digital drives fail. However each time WDC customer service has handled the issue with no questions asked, and in each case cross-shipped a new (or refurb) drive, and every time I've received a drive back it's lasted for many years. Because their customer service has been solid, I still buy WDC products, but ONLY the products with a three-year warranty or better.
I am partial to Seagate though and that's all I will ship to customers in desktop computers or servers when I can help it. With their 5-year warranty on all drives in all channels, you know they're confident in the product and are willing to back it. I just hope with their assimilating Maxtor that Maxtor's quality increases, as opposed to cheapening the WDC line.
I fail to understand why Seagate would want Maxtor though, except possibly to gain more factory space and maybe a couple of patents. Seagate's products are vastly superior, especially in terms of quality. Maybe it's Maxtor's external drive products they're after? It certainly can't be product quality/reliability.
It's an animated show. What difference does it make? Sure, you'll get a few less jaggies on the rendered portions of animation, but really how would HD vs. NTSC improve the show any?
It just goes to show that FAUX execs don't know quality when they see it.
* Fry is the single most important person in the universe and still needs to help the Nibblonians save it at least once more *
And Leela is the other. . . she has a part in saving the Universe!
You DID report them on the gpl-violations mailing list, right?
Typical FOX logic:
It's getting poor ratings, so don't promote it.
It's getting poor ratings because they don't promote it despite great critical reviews.
When fans who discover the show find the timeslot, move it.
Fan's can't find the show, leading to poor ratings.
Move the timeslot again, citing poor ratings.
Piss off fans by preempting it with an idiotic reality show.
Release show on DVD, see seasons 1 and 2 become #1 and #2 sellers.
Preempt show again with a rerun of another show, during sweeps.
Cancel show, citing poor ratings. Brush off ABC and Showtime inquiries.
- Although by the 4th season it was kind of looking that way.
The fourth production season (seasons 4-5 broadcast) actually has many of the best episodes of the series. There were a couple of duds (which show doesn't have duds now and then?) but overall I'd have to say season 4 (production) is the best season of Futurama, and the general trend was the show was getting better and better with each episode.
They can bring the characters back through a couple of mechanisms:
"It was all a dream"
"It was a parallel universe"
"The time-space continuum was all fuxx0red up!"
It didn't tie things up, it left things open. There are plenty of story lines still open, plus Leela and Fry are still a question. Groening intentionally left it that way in case the show would be continued, because he expected FOX to pull the plug but knew the show had enough of a following to warrant continuation later.
Either Showtime or ABC will pick up Arrested Development, and either of those will promote the show heavily rather than the single token billboard Fox put up for the show. The other networks also won't play musical timeslots with the show either, and won't intentionally put it in a spot where it would get continually preempted.
-- Robot with balls is something hard to come by.
Heh, referring to C3PO I take it? I love Bender. Bender is the anti-3PO.
Let's compare:
C3PO: Human cyborg relations, a pussy, high-strung, but cares about his master and does his work, sexless
Bender: Wants to kill all humans (except one), megalomaniac, couldn't give less of a shit about anyone else, to the point where the only thing that upsets him is lack of beer, womanizing
Woohoo! Behold my glorious golden ass! :D
That's valid ground for a lawsuit. If there is any justification at all in the world for an attorney, asshattery of that nature is it.
I've had similar experience with Novell. It is VERY difficult to reach the person you need to speak with there about ANYTHING. With that said, I'd rather give them money than Redhat. I've hated Redhat ever since they abandoned the desktop market, back when they had the potential to expand their offerings to OEMs. I mean, you could at one point go to CompUSA or Micro Center and buy RedHat linux off the shelf. They had an amazing opportunity to go head to head with Microsoft and they blew it, IMHO.
Also, the GUI in Redhat is nothing short of disorganized - when I work on clients' machines I always go for the virtual console and do EVERYTHING via the shell because they've gone backwards in their GUI.
And Fedora? I'm glad they are spinning Fedora off completely because I think Fedora will be all the better for it. I've tried Fedora and found that there are many configurations the install disk won't even boot from, where ubuntu, SuSE, Mandriva, and other install disks will,.
I might give CentOS a shot but I will never pay for DeadRat Linux.
Windows ME is the new Microsoft Bob. It is the single worst version of Windows to troubleshoot or repair. It is the ONLY version of Windows where I have had to resort to reformat/reinstall for relatively minor issues that I'd have been able to repair in any other build of Win9x in mere minutes.
er, one can infer directly from the context what the author is referring to.
And for what it's worth connectivity is not the primary function of IS. Providing and supporting the infrastructure for company data, processes, and infrastructure and making it as transparent (that is, problem free) for the users is what "IS" departments are for.
I've gone into companies and improved security (brought them beyond HIPAA compliance - they're behind two firewalls), reliability, etc. and now we hear from most of them very little. One customer we hadn't heard for in four months contacted us a couple of weeks ago. I had been wondering if there was a problem (e.g., they thought IT services were too costly) but when they called they had a laundry list of items, mostly concerning computers we didn't provide (mainly problems with Dell systems, which on the low end have a HORRENDOUS failure rate). When he called he said "I know you haven't heard from us in a while but to tell you the truth things have been running GREAT." It was satisfying to know that a nontechnical manager at a client understands the value of IT and that it is when you don't even think about your network that things have been done right.
Incidentally that was one of my clients where we deployed Open Office (saved $400 to $500 per seat on software there), Firefox, and other free/OSS solutions. Users (secretary/receptionist types) took to OOo immediately and discovered functioality that I didn't even know was in OOo, which underscores just how well OOo stacks up against M$ Office for typical office use. Sure, if they were working with 1200+ row formatted/hyperlinked spreadsheets they would not be able to use OOo due to severe performance issues, but they'll never encounter that there.
They have gone from continual downtime between spyware and a lousy (and insecure) network setup and flaky hardware to never even thinking about the computers. Their only remaining problem is they're still on Verizon DSL so they experience bandwidth issues when lots of terminal service users are logged in, but that's unavoidable until they bite the bullet and go with a T1 line, since Verizon STILL doesn't offer sDSL here. They had one minor incident where one individual who had the admin password was canned and they didn't change the admin password or let me know, and that user was a little spiteful and changed the admin password. That was quickly addressed (thanks to UBCD) and now I've created a secondary admin account just in case another manager has the same idea. Aside from that they have had no real problems.
My point?
Express your goals:
- minimized downtime
- data integrity - redundancy, automated backups, etc.
- solid disaster recovery plans (minimize downtime in event of a failure)
- facilitate better communication and data exchange
- Make your IT infrastructure transparent. By transparent, I mean so problem-free that the users don't even have to think about you.
Remind them that a single day's worth of downtime for a business of that size costs more than it will cost to implement a proper network and process up front. I've seen a 130+ employee company (a software company) lose exchange due to HDD crashes (the acting IT director ignored the RAID warning when one drive failed, then a second failed) and the acting IT director was clueless. Management approached me to recover the data (knowing my background in Windows, Exchange, M$ mail, etc. prior to QA) but when I checked out the backups, I found that the acting IT director (the previous IT director left) had changed the backup several months prior, so that ONLY the directory structure was being backed up. No System State backup, no info store backup. No files backed up. They were toast. Also, ALL of the previous backup tapes had been recycled, including the ones at Iron Mountain, so they had NO backup. That situation lead to about a week's worth of no email, and likely hundreds of thousands worth of lost revenue. Fortunately
And glorious 2-bit 320x200 graphics from a 4-bit color palette (even though the video chipset itself supported breathtaking 7-bit graphics)
Gwen's solo stuff sucks - I won't buy it (hear that RIAA member labels?). I AM looking forward to No Doubt's album next year because they have a good track record of not producing crap. Gwen's material is a heck of a lot better when she's working with the band.
Because the artist won't agree to releasing just the two marketable tracks. The recording studio will agree to let the artist do what they want for (n) number of tracks providing they get to release (x) number of marketed, watered-down-for-the-masses pop tracks.
Where is the money going?
Administrative costs (recording execs' salaries)
Engineering (which is extremely IN-expensive nowadays and doesn't take months on end)
Cocaine (see Advertising, below)
Distribution costs
Advertising (Payola, etc.)
Buying their own product back at retail to pump up sales numbers to get charted
Royalties to the actual artist (a very tiny slice of the pie)
They've obviously never done marketing analyses of the kind Wal*Mart does.
Economics 101:
In some cases, if you charge more for a product and sell fewer units, you make more money. Hasbro's "Ouija Board" game falls into this category. So do many exotic cars.
In other cases, if you lower the price a bit you can move many more items, and although your profit margin on a per-unit basis is lower, your bottom line will be deeper into the black. Pretty much anything you'll find at Sprawl*Mart falls into this category.
It's worked with movies. Remember when VHS movies averaged $79 to $90 each? Very few bought movies - they bought a second VCR and copied rental tapesinstead . When it FINALLY dawned on movie studios that dropping the price leads to more sales, profits went through the roof. Look at DVD prices - Sprawl*Mart sells many DVDs for $5.50 now - and they're not crippled or censored (does Wal*Mart still censor DVDs? I was pissed when I bought one and found a couple of lines were changed, and didn't buy DVDs from them for about three years afterward. There was NOTHING to indicate the change on the DVD), and it's not limited to initial-release no special feature DVDs any more. I just bought a whole bunch of great movies - many of them recent special editions - for $5.50 each, and a few for $7.50. Some of the movies I'd gone to the theater to see at least twice, and downloaded - and yet I still bought them. Wal*Mart would not be selling DVDs that cheap if it weren't profitable, and no way would their suppliers sell them DVDs so cheaply if they were losing money on them (oh sure, dumping a dud here and there they'd take a loss just to get rid of the crud - movies like Gigli, etc.
Everyone but tinfoil hat wearers know it's fake. DId that really have to be pointed out?
But I wonder if Art Bell actually believes the crap he talks about and "reports" on. He was fun to listen to - kind of like watching WWE. Everyone knows it's fake but some people just can't not watch, and not "root" for one er, "wrestling entertainer" over the other.
Is Art Bell still alive? Someone give him a call about this. Remember the "recording of hell" thing?