It would seem to me that by finding ways to save on the average cost of installation would allow them expand their network to more houses per budget period. From the article it sounds like the average installation cost could go from $2000-3000 per home to about $1600 per home.
If you consider that they will be taking an initial loss on installation for this service (that $70 install charge is basically for labor, vehicle and consumables used by the final technician) and that their bean counters have set aside a specific amount for expansion, then every little bit of savings help to expand their potential long term customer base to areas where the service is not currently availible (like my house in the 4th largest city in Washington).
So, as for passing on savings, of course they're not going to say "We were originally planning to pay this off in ten years but we're lowering your bill since it's only going to take seven."
And for people whining that 270Mbit isn't enough, grab a $20 crimper, a spool of Cat-6 and a drill and convert that last 50ft yourself. If their next best competitor is at 8Mbit then 270Mbit is acceptable for now.
It sounds as if the biggest concern is the availibility of e-mail archives at any given moment. Given the number of users and general indications that e-mail services are a valuable tool at your workplace, you could easily make a case for spending $3-$6 per user to setup enough redundancy to allow for you to switch to a backup server if the primary server kicks the bucket. Think in terms of three 400GB disks in RAID 5 on each server and a 1000Mb link between the two to keep them syncronized.
If you're currently worried about restore times then you probably already have a tape backup system in place for long term/off site storage. In the event of an act of god type event, (i.e. flood, fire, earthquake, Duke Nukem Forever going gold, etc.) You're boss(es) will be concerned with mitigating damage from so many different directions that you likely won't get any more heat from them than, let's say, the contractor that they had to hire to replace the roof that just doesn't seem to be there anymore.
If most of your users are using the system primarily for work related tasks, then don't try to entertain the delusion that they need to be re-educated or artificially restricted. Your job should be as transparent as possible to Paul Powerpoint in marketing and Susy Spreadsheet in accounting.
Stay away from the user education routine until you start seeing usage that is blatently innapropriate or dangerous. Put a quick stop to people sharing cute little joke executables since they may contain virii or could just be poorly written enough to cause a crash and a loss of unsaved work (which you will then have to try to rescue). Also put a stop to or properly escalate instances of pornographic, abusive or harassing e-mail. Do not try to stop people from sharing vacation or family photos, funny stories or other water-cooler content as those items are often an indication of a good functioning team and should not be overly discouraged so long as such usage is within reasonable limits. If such usage becomes unreasonable, as in large uncompressed photos and hi-res movies, have a little sit down with that person at their desk and show them how to save a little space while telling them that it will help you to make sure that they can still share those things in the future.
Consider opening with a product page instead of a mission statement when the user clicks their language icon. Also consider jumping straight to English from the.com domain and having Italian on it's own.it domain with a link between the two domains visible from the initial page load.
On the product page, try to think of a way to describe each product with just a simple 2.5 in squared picture. You could use the work of a photographer or graphic artist to produce the image, but you're probably going to have to figure out for yourself what that image should be. Many business owners, Executive types and general web-surfers have a fairly short attention span so you need your company page to jump out, grab their attention and lead them as quickly as possible to someone that will take their money. Graphics will help coax them into clicking forward since a picture may represent something that they want to touch, feel and actively examine, whereas text is just something to passively examine.
Remember that there are two types of people in the world, those who have bought from you and those that are going to. Structure your pages so that anyone browsing is reminded of what group they're in. Make all of your promises in the section for future customers and prove that you keep them in the sections for existing customers.
And if web site that the parent linked to does not belong to the submitter, then feel free to ignore everything that I've just said. Or not, I'll give you the choice there.
and further... (sorry I was trigger happy with the previous response.)
It seems that alot of the space used by this version is for the Windows on Windows64 to allow for bacwards compatibility with 32-bit software. And I just realized that for my fresh install number I quoted, I actually had Visual Studio 2005 and misc. SDK's loaded as well. oops.
Mostly I'm just taken aback by the fact that compared to my current system, my old 486 DX2/66 amounts to little more than a rounding error in nearly every possible specification (CPU-66Mhz:1800Mhz RAM-4MB:2048MB HD-420MB;594,944MB). And yet, at the time, it felt snappy and perfectly usable.
Have CR2032's become hard to find now? I used to replace them all the time in my Sharp scientific calculator.
I even replaced it a couple times in my NES Zelda cartridge. In that case the effort to pry it out was much greater than the effort to find the replacement.
I would be impressed if they came out with a sheetfeeder dock for this thing. Load up a small stack of papers, hit the button and be done with it. Or remove it from the dock to scan a page out of a book without trying to squish the book onto a flatbed scanner.
From what I've seen so far, it looks as if Vista will automatically go to Aero Basic if the hardware isn't up to snuff for the full DX10 accelerated Aero Glass. And, also from what I've seen, the Aero Basic should be about as processor intensive as XP's Luna.
If we consider that since the dawn of XP, even cheap boxes have upgraded to at least DX9 integrated *cringe* graphics, 256MB RAM and a processor that hovers around 2Ghz; a new commodity grade computer should be able to handle your basic www, e-mail and productivity applications with an interface that resembles XP with WindowBlinds. Albeit, some pagefile thrashing may be in order.
We just need to convince manufacturers to put a sticker on the machine saying "You didn't spend enough to play games on this POS, now go back to checking your email like a good grandma."
As for users that try to put this on a previous generation of commodity box. They're probably seven shades of outtaluck.
Most of those bargain systems ran okay once you turned off all the UI improvements and brought it down to something that more closely resembles Win2K. And often times a simple RAM upgrade would give you enough room to start turning things back on.
As a side note, alot of people that that purchase $400 w/monitor machines were either new computer users that would use the system to learn what to actually buy the next time around, or they were replacing an old 300Mhz/32MB Win9x/ME box.
Honestly XP with the classic look is only marginally slower, if at all, than ME and I'd much rather see someone running XP for the sake of better network security and thread management(i.e. crash mitigation) if nothing else.
When I read this, I actually imagined that the "officers" were really just interested in getting people riled up until one of them got angry enough to qualify for some variation of "distubing the peace" that they could actually act on.
A while back I was in a bit of a financial crunch and opted to ditch my cable TV subscription in order to keep my broadband connection. When the crunch ended, I never really felt compelled to start the service back up since I realized that I didn't miss it all that much.
Currently my TV is sitting in a closet next to a pair of rabbit ears, waiting for the next time I have guests that can't cope without their little glowing friend.
It could be that we're seeing a marketing scheme where people worry about Vista running on their systems up until launch when we all of a sudden get a flood of reviews and reports saying how it runs better than they expected, even on older hardware.
Build up tension about the interface so that people let that be their only reason for not upgrading, then when you knock down that barrier, they will still think that it was the only reason for not upgrading.
It's the strawman technique. For many consumers, it works.
I've heard of it refered to as "suspension of disbelief"
If, for 90 minutes, you can believe that little plastic toys are actually animate and sentient then there's a chance that you could also be made to believe that there is a good reason to ship a silly little toy back to the manufacturer.
Let's say that they take Buzz to a toy store to exchange him for a new one. Let's also say that, due to some sequence of dramatically timed events, he is tossed in a box, sealed up and shipped out for refurbishing before the store clerk figures out that they've run out of stock on the Buzz Lightyear figures so that Andy gets a rain check instead of a replacement Buzz.
From that point, there are a few possible paths that Buzz could take to get back to the toy store where Andy will see him on a shelf and somehow recognize some little chip or scratch that prompts him to use the rain check to repurchase his original Buzz.
You could toss in a bit of amnesia for Buzz after being refurbed. You could pair that amnesia with Andy's other toys making a trek to the shipping wherehouse where they find Buzz and jog his memory.
--- Basically since you already know that there's going to be a happy ending, the fun part of the story is watching the writers tie strange convoluted knots in the story and then try to anticipate how they plan to untie them.
On these benchmarks we see the Intel chip taking a slight lead nearly across the board. Considering that these are the first products after a major archetecture change, I think Apple is handling the transition smoothly so far with the only major holdup being the availibility of native binaries for third party applications.
The reviewer seems to be hung up on the way that some benchmarks are 30% better while some are nearly equal to the G5 predecessor. This shouldn't be surprising. In any comparison between closely matched AMD and Intel chips, you always see a variation as to which processor is best depending on what type of task you are performing. Why should Intel vs. Power be any different?
Why would they care? When you run Windows in a Virtual PC, you still have to license that copy of Windows and usually you are buying a retail version at full price rather than using an OEM bundled version.
And since Microsoft makes Virtual PC for both x86 and Power architectures, they should be able to re-use x86 native optimized machine code to create a version for Intel platform Macs.
Do you have any links for stopping distance with expert drivers w/out ABS vs. Layperson drivers w/ ABS?
I grew up in Montana with all it's snow, ice, gravel roads, etc. Currently I live in Washington where the roads are fairly moist 6mo/year. I've gotten used to threshold braking as the normal way to make an emergency stop since I've never owned a car with ABS. In especially hard braking I'm likely to momentarily lock just one wheel while the other three are stil rolling.
On the occations where I've driven an ABS car and tested the brakes, I found myself looking for that threshold and getting frustrated because the car wouldn't let me find it. I imagine there are quite a few genuinely experienced drivers out there that can actually notice these safety features getting in their way when they most need their car to be absolutely responsive and predictable.
Since I've never driven a car with traction control, I have to wonder. If I'm accellerating through a corner and my front end starts to understeer, can I correct by oversteering and applying more power to spin the front wheels and pull the car back in line? (this is assuming FWD) Or will the car cut the fuel flow because I shouldn't be trying to spin the tires?
It took me 11 on my box going between two old 120gb maxtors on different channels. Maybe the poster you're refering two was using newer SATA drives or just going by the seat of his pants and meant "about" 10s.
Many current hard disks can sustain 60-70 MB/s in benchmarks so 50 isn't too wild of a figure.
likely they'll design something that will take a very basic protein or nutrient and convert it into energy and proteins that it can use in it's own structure and then self replicate. It can then be tested in a solution of it's ideal diet in an otherwise sterile environment where it won't need to compete with bacteria that have the advantage of 3-4 billion years of evolution.
Once a basic structure is laid out, we can then start modifying it to serve specific purposes or we can try to piss it off by gradually changing it's environment and observing how it evolves to handle the new conditions.
But it will be quite a while before we artificially produce a single cell critter that can compete with native bacteria.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAE (economist)
It would seem to me that by finding ways to save on the average cost of installation would allow them expand their network to more houses per budget period. From the article it sounds like the average installation cost could go from $2000-3000 per home to about $1600 per home.
If you consider that they will be taking an initial loss on installation for this service (that $70 install charge is basically for labor, vehicle and consumables used by the final technician) and that their bean counters have set aside a specific amount for expansion, then every little bit of savings help to expand their potential long term customer base to areas where the service is not currently availible (like my house in the 4th largest city in Washington).
So, as for passing on savings, of course they're not going to say "We were originally planning to pay this off in ten years but we're lowering your bill since it's only going to take seven."
And for people whining that 270Mbit isn't enough, grab a $20 crimper, a spool of Cat-6 and a drill and convert that last 50ft yourself. If their next best competitor is at 8Mbit then 270Mbit is acceptable for now.
It sounds as if the biggest concern is the availibility of e-mail archives at any given moment. Given the number of users and general indications that e-mail services are a valuable tool at your workplace, you could easily make a case for spending $3-$6 per user to setup enough redundancy to allow for you to switch to a backup server if the primary server kicks the bucket. Think in terms of three 400GB disks in RAID 5 on each server and a 1000Mb link between the two to keep them syncronized.
If you're currently worried about restore times then you probably already have a tape backup system in place for long term/off site storage. In the event of an act of god type event, (i.e. flood, fire, earthquake, Duke Nukem Forever going gold, etc.) You're boss(es) will be concerned with mitigating damage from so many different directions that you likely won't get any more heat from them than, let's say, the contractor that they had to hire to replace the roof that just doesn't seem to be there anymore.
If most of your users are using the system primarily for work related tasks, then don't try to entertain the delusion that they need to be re-educated or artificially restricted. Your job should be as transparent as possible to Paul Powerpoint in marketing and Susy Spreadsheet in accounting.
Stay away from the user education routine until you start seeing usage that is blatently innapropriate or dangerous. Put a quick stop to people sharing cute little joke executables since they may contain virii or could just be poorly written enough to cause a crash and a loss of unsaved work (which you will then have to try to rescue). Also put a stop to or properly escalate instances of pornographic, abusive or harassing e-mail. Do not try to stop people from sharing vacation or family photos, funny stories or other water-cooler content as those items are often an indication of a good functioning team and should not be overly discouraged so long as such usage is within reasonable limits. If such usage becomes unreasonable, as in large uncompressed photos and hi-res movies, have a little sit down with that person at their desk and show them how to save a little space while telling them that it will help you to make sure that they can still share those things in the future.
And here I thought it was a bad idea to play Sony's current "CD"s.
Mauve might be to harsh. It is, after all, the universal color for danger.
That page needs some work.
.com domain and having Italian on it's own .it domain with a link between the two domains visible from the initial page load.
Consider opening with a product page instead of a mission statement when the user clicks their language icon. Also consider jumping straight to English from the
On the product page, try to think of a way to describe each product with just a simple 2.5 in squared picture. You could use the work of a photographer or graphic artist to produce the image, but you're probably going to have to figure out for yourself what that image should be. Many business owners, Executive types and general web-surfers have a fairly short attention span so you need your company page to jump out, grab their attention and lead them as quickly as possible to someone that will take their money. Graphics will help coax them into clicking forward since a picture may represent something that they want to touch, feel and actively examine, whereas text is just something to passively examine.
Remember that there are two types of people in the world, those who have bought from you and those that are going to. Structure your pages so that anyone browsing is reminded of what group they're in. Make all of your promises in the section for future customers and prove that you keep them in the sections for existing customers.
And if web site that the parent linked to does not belong to the submitter, then feel free to ignore everything that I've just said. Or not, I'll give you the choice there.
Starter seems to exist in order to go fishing for registered users in markets where piracy has been the normal way of getting software.
Remember, it's hard to organize a bloody coup by e-mail when your activation crack just broke because somebody ran Windows Update.
and further... (sorry I was trigger happy with the previous response.)
It seems that alot of the space used by this version is for the Windows on Windows64 to allow for bacwards compatibility with 32-bit software. And I just realized that for my fresh install number I quoted, I actually had Visual Studio 2005 and misc. SDK's loaded as well. oops.
Mostly I'm just taken aback by the fact that compared to my current system, my old 486 DX2/66 amounts to little more than a rounding error in nearly every possible specification (CPU-66Mhz:1800Mhz RAM-4MB:2048MB HD-420MB;594,944MB). And yet, at the time, it felt snappy and perfectly usable.
XP 64bit edition. (yes, basically it's a variation on 2003 Server)
XP is definately a disk hog compared to the old non-NT versions.
Currently ver reports "Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]" and just the Windows directory is 3.12 GB; at fresh install + patch it was 2.88 GB.
And to think that my first hard disk was 420MB; my first upgrade was 1.2GB at $300.
Oh well at least I have 0.55 TB now.
Have CR2032's become hard to find now? I used to replace them all the time in my Sharp scientific calculator.
I even replaced it a couple times in my NES Zelda cartridge. In that case the effort to pry it out was much greater than the effort to find the replacement.
I would be impressed if they came out with a sheetfeeder dock for this thing. Load up a small stack of papers, hit the button and be done with it. Or remove it from the dock to scan a page out of a book without trying to squish the book onto a flatbed scanner.
From what I've seen so far, it looks as if Vista will automatically go to Aero Basic if the hardware isn't up to snuff for the full DX10 accelerated Aero Glass. And, also from what I've seen, the Aero Basic should be about as processor intensive as XP's Luna.
If we consider that since the dawn of XP, even cheap boxes have upgraded to at least DX9 integrated *cringe* graphics, 256MB RAM and a processor that hovers around 2Ghz; a new commodity grade computer should be able to handle your basic www, e-mail and productivity applications with an interface that resembles XP with WindowBlinds. Albeit, some pagefile thrashing may be in order.
We just need to convince manufacturers to put a sticker on the machine saying "You didn't spend enough to play games on this POS, now go back to checking your email like a good grandma."
As for users that try to put this on a previous generation of commodity box. They're probably seven shades of outtaluck.
Most of those bargain systems ran okay once you turned off all the UI improvements and brought it down to something that more closely resembles Win2K. And often times a simple RAM upgrade would give you enough room to start turning things back on.
As a side note, alot of people that that purchase $400 w/monitor machines were either new computer users that would use the system to learn what to actually buy the next time around, or they were replacing an old 300Mhz/32MB Win9x/ME box.
Honestly XP with the classic look is only marginally slower, if at all, than ME and I'd much rather see someone running XP for the sake of better network security and thread management(i.e. crash mitigation) if nothing else.
When I read this, I actually imagined that the "officers" were really just interested in getting people riled up until one of them got angry enough to qualify for some variation of "distubing the peace" that they could actually act on.
Or they could just be puritan assholes.
A while back I was in a bit of a financial crunch and opted to ditch my cable TV subscription in order to keep my broadband connection. When the crunch ended, I never really felt compelled to start the service back up since I realized that I didn't miss it all that much. Currently my TV is sitting in a closet next to a pair of rabbit ears, waiting for the next time I have guests that can't cope without their little glowing friend.
It could be that we're seeing a marketing scheme where people worry about Vista running on their systems up until launch when we all of a sudden get a flood of reviews and reports saying how it runs better than they expected, even on older hardware.
Build up tension about the interface so that people let that be their only reason for not upgrading, then when you knock down that barrier, they will still think that it was the only reason for not upgrading.
It's the strawman technique. For many consumers, it works.
I've heard of it refered to as "suspension of disbelief"
If, for 90 minutes, you can believe that little plastic toys are actually animate and sentient then there's a chance that you could also be made to believe that there is a good reason to ship a silly little toy back to the manufacturer.
Let's say that they take Buzz to a toy store to exchange him for a new one. Let's also say that, due to some sequence of dramatically timed events, he is tossed in a box, sealed up and shipped out for refurbishing before the store clerk figures out that they've run out of stock on the Buzz Lightyear figures so that Andy gets a rain check instead of a replacement Buzz.
From that point, there are a few possible paths that Buzz could take to get back to the toy store where Andy will see him on a shelf and somehow recognize some little chip or scratch that prompts him to use the rain check to repurchase his original Buzz.
You could toss in a bit of amnesia for Buzz after being refurbed. You could pair that amnesia with Andy's other toys making a trek to the shipping wherehouse where they find Buzz and jog his memory.
---
Basically since you already know that there's going to be a happy ending, the fun part of the story is watching the writers tie strange convoluted knots in the story and then try to anticipate how they plan to untie them.
Quite a few people would recognize '!=' as the symbol you're looking for. '!' stands for a logical NOT in many languages.
On these benchmarks we see the Intel chip taking a slight lead nearly across the board. Considering that these are the first products after a major archetecture change, I think Apple is handling the transition smoothly so far with the only major holdup being the availibility of native binaries for third party applications.
The reviewer seems to be hung up on the way that some benchmarks are 30% better while some are nearly equal to the G5 predecessor. This shouldn't be surprising. In any comparison between closely matched AMD and Intel chips, you always see a variation as to which processor is best depending on what type of task you are performing. Why should Intel vs. Power be any different?
Apple II had the 6502.
C64 had the 6510 which could page between ROM and RAM at the addresses that the BASIC interpreter lived.
Why would they care?
When you run Windows in a Virtual PC, you still have to license that copy of Windows and usually you are buying a retail version at full price rather than using an OEM bundled version.
And since Microsoft makes Virtual PC for both x86 and Power architectures, they should be able to re-use x86 native optimized machine code to create a version for Intel platform Macs.
Do you have any links for stopping distance with expert drivers w/out ABS vs. Layperson drivers w/ ABS?
I grew up in Montana with all it's snow, ice, gravel roads, etc. Currently I live in Washington where the roads are fairly moist 6mo/year. I've gotten used to threshold braking as the normal way to make an emergency stop since I've never owned a car with ABS. In especially hard braking I'm likely to momentarily lock just one wheel while the other three are stil rolling.
On the occations where I've driven an ABS car and tested the brakes, I found myself looking for that threshold and getting frustrated because the car wouldn't let me find it. I imagine there are quite a few genuinely experienced drivers out there that can actually notice these safety features getting in their way when they most need their car to be absolutely responsive and predictable.
Since I've never driven a car with traction control, I have to wonder. If I'm accellerating through a corner and my front end starts to understeer, can I correct by oversteering and applying more power to spin the front wheels and pull the car back in line? (this is assuming FWD) Or will the car cut the fuel flow because I shouldn't be trying to spin the tires?
... welcome our new cybernetic judge, jury and executioner overlords.
Checking 512MB in 10s for you.
It took me 11 on my box going between two old 120gb maxtors on different channels.
Maybe the poster you're refering two was using newer SATA drives or just going by the seat of his pants and meant "about" 10s.
Many current hard disks can sustain 60-70 MB/s in benchmarks so 50 isn't too wild of a figure.
likely they'll design something that will take a very basic protein or nutrient and convert it into energy and proteins that it can use in it's own structure and then self replicate. It can then be tested in a solution of it's ideal diet in an otherwise sterile environment where it won't need to compete with bacteria that have the advantage of 3-4 billion years of evolution.
Once a basic structure is laid out, we can then start modifying it to serve specific purposes or we can try to piss it off by gradually changing it's environment and observing how it evolves to handle the new conditions.
But it will be quite a while before we artificially produce a single cell critter that can compete with native bacteria.