"you can go out and buy Mac OS X and run it on generic hardware."
The version in retail boxes won't install or run on generic hardware. That might be true.
But I am sitting here looking at my office-mate's Dell running OS X right now. Runs like a champ too.
By the way, can anyone tell me what determines the cost of an international call? My provider (Sprint Canada) charges an average of 49 cents/min for a call to Asia though you can use some of the many pre-paid phone cards and make a call at about 7 cents/min to the same destination. It's pretty messed up. My wife calls back home to Spain all the time on her ATT cell phone (from the US). If she calls a land line it's like 2 cents a minute. If she calls a cell phone it's nearly 50 cents a minute. WTF??? I get pissed when she calls someone's cell for obvious reasons!
I admire you for your nobility, but in my experience, the real world isn't quite so idealistic, especially when judging straight-out-of-college applicants. I would definitely agree with this. However, after 3-5 years or so of real world experience it all washes out.
I failed out of an above average tech school my freshman year and finished up at a no name state university. It's been 10 years since we've been graduated and my "success" (depending on how you might define success - money, cars, house, quality of life, quality of job, etc) is just is as good, if not better, than all of my friends that did make it through that tech school.
I figure that would be easier than shipping a laptop around the country to wherever you might be going. I travel on average about 6-8 times a year (for the last 5 years or so) and have never had anything taken from checked baggage. Anecdotal evidence for sure.
I was coming back to the US from Spain last year and was bringing some wine back. They used to tell you to keep the bottles with you as a carry on and you'd get right through customs no questions asked (if under the limit, 3 bottles I think). This last trip I made, the Delta Rep told me it was better to pack it in my checked luggage as they would most likely stop me in customs if I was carrying it with me.
Shipping a laptop overnight can be terribly expensive. In many cases you might need it the laptop the same day. Does Delta Dash or other services still exist? Seems kind of silly if it's on the same flight as the one you are taking.;-) As other people have mentioned, it's not the value of the laptop itself, but really the data. I definitely agree with keeping important data on a usb stick/drive.
I'm in a good situation where I do most of my work and keep all my documents in a VM. If I really had to, I could simply copy the VM to a usb stick/drive and never have to carry a laptop around. I would just have to make arrangements at each destination to have a system to use.
For instance, a child may refer to a dog as a rug because he thinks "rug" means "something furry."/quote?
Hehe. We have 2 dogs and my kid calls them "Wa-Wa." Anytime he see another animal (cow, lion, giraffe, etc) he calls them "Wa-Wa's" too. Interestingly enough he does differentiate with our cat, and calls her a "shat" (scarily enough).
It is interesting to see them pick things up; you spend all day trying to teach them to say a word like "apple" and then you say something like, "Can you bring me the apple?" and they grab the right thing, and do the right action. I would agree and it is very interesting. My 19 month old has been able to understand "complex" instructions like that for a couple months now (in both English and Castilian), but only has a speaking vocabulary of about 30 words right now. He babbles in complete sentences though.:-)
They're not racist, they just hate poor service, and India's culture is not service oriented in any way at all (ex: In India/Pakistan, showing up 2 or 3 hours late for an appointment is okay [for both apointee and apointed]. I know this from having dealt with dozens of people from either culture and that is their personal experience when they were living there also. I have had quite the different experiences when I've called Dell support a few times over the last year. The person(s) I dealt with were overly polite, to the point it was insanely annoying.
"May I please put you on hold for 2 minutes sir?"
Yes, that is fine.
"Thank you sir for your extreme patience sir"
2 minutes pass...
"Thank you for holding sir, I appreciate your patience sir. I apologize for your inconvenience sir"
etc...
They spent more time saying "please," "thank you," and "sorry" than troubleshooting the actual issue. Then I would spend another 5-10 minutes on the phone (after the issue was resolved) with a supervisor verifying everything was completed to my satisfaction. Ug.
My biggest problem with the customer service was the lack of knowledge/understanding and everything was read from a script. That is typical and has little to do with where the customer service is outsourced. If Dell had their support out of the US or wherever, I guarantee the same issues (call a cell phone or cable company lately?).
Some do. At home I have 8MB cable, and also, for the infrequent times when the cable is down, I have an antique 56K telephone-modem subscription. The latter costs very little when unused, and instead costs by the minute when used. That's why I am glad my neighbor has an unsecured wireless router on a cable internet connection while I am on DSL.:-) Worst case scenario I use my cell phone as a modem.
$350 million a year to keep operational. Could someone please explain to me why something in space would require this kind of money to maintain??? I mean, it's up there, presumably running on it's own computers, power, navigation, etc. I could definitely see some costs down here to gather data, run computations, etc, but $350 million a year??? What am I missing in this picture?
I had a job where I did nothing but bring a new newspaper to anyone who called up and said their paper landed in a puddle, snow bank, on their roof, or was missing a section, etc. When people would call up and complain I would suggest they tip their delivery person better. The paper lost a lot of customers. Deliveries were handled by private contractors, thats the free market at work. If your getting $.15 cents a paper you sure can't spend 2 minutes on each one. Why is the delivery person's salary my problem?? If I were so inclined, how would I even tip the person as they simply drive by at 5AM and toss the paper through the window of their car.
How much money did it cost the paper for re-deliveries? Maybe they should have paid their delivery staff more and possibly solved the problem of poorly delivered newspapers...
Heck, our billing software runs on a Tandem! The project I work on is a collaborative mix of the Tandem billing system, a Unix-derived OS middleware, the Solaris cluster application server, and Windows clients. It's a veritable OS soup. Thankfully, on the software side, it's all developed and supported by a 3rd party vendor. Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc. The Tandem and middleware have never gone down, and the Solaris cluster has a required program which springs a memory leak requiring a process restart every 30 days or so. Not that I am defending Windows at all, but I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Tandems are a pretty closed, tight system. You can only do so much with them. Rebooting a Solaris box once a month is acceptable? Could your Windows headaches be crappy apps/developers and not the OS itself? Just because someone knows Visual Basic does NOT qualify them as a developer. I think part of the uptime/system problems could stem from the barriers of entry to develop on each platform. Windows developers are a dime a dozen while *nix developers typically are not.
I think another part of the problem is that people compare their Windows desktops to an Enterprise Windows server and assume they have the same issues b/c they might run the same or a similar OS. Think about how much crap people install on their desktops compared to how a true server (should) be run. I've seen many Linux, Unix and Windows *servers" with 365+ days of uptime because they are run the "correct" way. I think part of the issue is your run of the mill Jr Windows admin is more likely to junk up a Windows Server than a run of the mill Jr Linux or Unix admin would junk up their respective systems.
Can you show me a 50GB HD movie? What would you be doing with it that requires USB or Firewire?? My real question is what is the CPU hit for USB vs the non-CPU hit for firewire. And would it really matter if I had a quad-core (or greater) CPU. And if it did, I don't think we are dealing with a typical desktop grade system (Mac/Windows/Linux/whatever) at that point.
I guess it's great that technology from two years ago still isn't mainstream. Laugh away...what's your point?
With that said, CPU utilization will indeed be a HUGE concern since USB 3.0 is so fast. The relatively minor CPU overhead of USB 2.0 will give way to CPU stalling overhead unless USB 3.0 addresses it. There's not enough information to make a statement about this, so we'll have to wait for more information to be released. Sort of the same question I posed to an earlier post -
Can anyone define this CPU overhead? Will I really care with my snazzy new quad-core CPU? How about in a year with 8-cores or more? I'm already seeing complete Dell quad-core systems for less than $600. I think cheaper price/faster speed/more cpu overhead will win all the time, especially since CPU overhead (sure, use a whole core, I have 3 left) going forward will be almost negligible.
Second, USB uses CPU. Firewire uses its own chip. (Which is why Apple removed the chip from the iPods, it wasn't going to fit with that and the video decoder in the same form factor). I've seen several posts about USB using CPU. With today's (this year's anyway - dual/quad/beyond) CPUs and going forward, does that even matter in the discussion? Maybe us sheeple have been trained fairly well over the years, but I'm guessing the extra few seconds, even minutes to transfer stuff from cameras, HDs, usb sticks, etc really doesn't matter at this point.
All that being said, networking over coax (which is wired all over the place in most homes) and transmission lengths of 100M really interests me. I wonder if I can use the same coax that delivers cable to my TV and splice it to PCs and set-top boxes all in one fell swoop. Would love to have an HTPC setup with a PC in the basement, not generating extra noise and heat in my living room.
Why waste advertising money on something that is flying off the shelves? Once once sales start slowing down they can redouble their advertising efforts and get the "hype" machine moving again.
Also be true? Either nothing is changing or something is, you can't have it both ways. The reason for mergers and aquisitions is generally that the companies involved believe that through the merger some gains can be made. The way that history proves works is through reductions is redundancy. (call these layoffs, retrenchments, rightsizing, as your personal tastes dictate) The other not-so-successful-historically model is the "merge two companies with no redundancies, run them together and lose money" model (ref: AOL-Time-Warner among others) EMC and VMWare seem to have done this successfully. As a parent-company/subsidiary aspect I don't know if these are set up the same way or not however.
visit the US a lot (5 times this year) and the issue seems relatively consistant across a wide range of areas on the West Coast (largely the SF Bay Area and Seattle) - my phone lasts 2 days in the US, a week here in NZ - AT&T/Cingular coverage does seem spotty in places I wonder if phones/devices charge differently on 110 vs 220?
If you are receiving poor coverage, the fact that the phone is constantly searching for a signal/reconnecting to the network will drain a battery pretty quickly as well. This happens to me a lot when I do work in a data center that has little to no coverage and my phone is constantly reconnecting to the network and kills my battery in less than a day.
1 computer for gaming
1 computer for everything else
Sorry if you can't afford a second, but that's how I do it. 1 computer for gaming
1 VM for everything else
Saves a few hundred bucks....:-)
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The version in retail boxes won't install or run on generic hardware. That might be true.
But I am sitting here looking at my office-mate's Dell running OS X right now. Runs like a champ too.
I figure that would be easier than shipping a laptop around the country to wherever you might be going. I travel on average about 6-8 times a year (for the last 5 years or so) and have never had anything taken from checked baggage. Anecdotal evidence for sure.
;-) As other people have mentioned, it's not the value of the laptop itself, but really the data. I definitely agree with keeping important data on a usb stick/drive.
I was coming back to the US from Spain last year and was bringing some wine back. They used to tell you to keep the bottles with you as a carry on and you'd get right through customs no questions asked (if under the limit, 3 bottles I think). This last trip I made, the Delta Rep told me it was better to pack it in my checked luggage as they would most likely stop me in customs if I was carrying it with me.
Shipping a laptop overnight can be terribly expensive. In many cases you might need it the laptop the same day. Does Delta Dash or other services still exist? Seems kind of silly if it's on the same flight as the one you are taking.
I'm in a good situation where I do most of my work and keep all my documents in a VM. If I really had to, I could simply copy the VM to a usb stick/drive and never have to carry a laptop around. I would just have to make arrangements at each destination to have a system to use.
Or just put it in your checked baggage.
"May I please put you on hold for 2 minutes sir?"
Yes, that is fine.
"Thank you sir for your extreme patience sir"
2 minutes pass...
"Thank you for holding sir, I appreciate your patience sir. I apologize for your inconvenience sir"
etc...
They spent more time saying "please," "thank you," and "sorry" than troubleshooting the actual issue. Then I would spend another 5-10 minutes on the phone (after the issue was resolved) with a supervisor verifying everything was completed to my satisfaction. Ug.
My biggest problem with the customer service was the lack of knowledge/understanding and everything was read from a script. That is typical and has little to do with where the customer service is outsourced. If Dell had their support out of the US or wherever, I guarantee the same issues (call a cell phone or cable company lately?).
need I say more?
Just like in 1979, eh?
How much money did it cost the paper for re-deliveries? Maybe they should have paid their delivery staff more and possibly solved the problem of poorly delivered newspapers...
I definitely agree. I was just stating another option (of many available) of what to do with the extra space instead of shrinking existing devices.
Heck, maybe they could even integrate the AC adapter into the laptop and have one less bulky item to worry about.
Or, keep the device sizes the same, reduce the battery size and add more functionality/technology/features/etc in said device.
Shrink a battery in a laptop and you can have enough extra room to have an additional 2-3 hard drives if one wanted.
Point taken.
I think another part of the problem is that people compare their Windows desktops to an Enterprise Windows server and assume they have the same issues b/c they might run the same or a similar OS. Think about how much crap people install on their desktops compared to how a true server (should) be run. I've seen many Linux, Unix and Windows *servers" with 365+ days of uptime because they are run the "correct" way. I think part of the issue is your run of the mill Jr Windows admin is more likely to junk up a Windows Server than a run of the mill Jr Linux or Unix admin would junk up their respective systems.
Can you show me a 50GB HD movie? What would you be doing with it that requires USB or Firewire?? My real question is what is the CPU hit for USB vs the non-CPU hit for firewire. And would it really matter if I had a quad-core (or greater) CPU. And if it did, I don't think we are dealing with a typical desktop grade system (Mac/Windows/Linux/whatever) at that point.
I guess it's great that technology from two years ago still isn't mainstream. Laugh away...what's your point?
Can anyone define this CPU overhead? Will I really care with my snazzy new quad-core CPU? How about in a year with 8-cores or more? I'm already seeing complete Dell quad-core systems for less than $600. I think cheaper price/faster speed/more cpu overhead will win all the time, especially since CPU overhead (sure, use a whole core, I have 3 left) going forward will be almost negligible.
All that being said, networking over coax (which is wired all over the place in most homes) and transmission lengths of 100M really interests me. I wonder if I can use the same coax that delivers cable to my TV and splice it to PCs and set-top boxes all in one fell swoop. Would love to have an HTPC setup with a PC in the basement, not generating extra noise and heat in my living room.
Why waste advertising money on something that is flying off the shelves? Once once sales start slowing down they can redouble their advertising efforts and get the "hype" machine moving again.
If you are receiving poor coverage, the fact that the phone is constantly searching for a signal/reconnecting to the network will drain a battery pretty quickly as well. This happens to me a lot when I do work in a data center that has little to no coverage and my phone is constantly reconnecting to the network and kills my battery in less than a day.
No, but Jr can claim ignorance when his Wi-Fi piggybacking causes physical harm to someone... ;-)