Tech News You Can Use
… Or not, depending on your attitude.
The BBC reports Dell users: Latitude 6430u laptops ‘smell of cat urine’. Actually ‘cat urine’ isn’t quite strong enough as several users were of the opinion that their tomcats had ‘sprayed’ their computer. If you have ever owned a tomcat and were foolish enough not to have them neutered before they could even dream of marking, you know that the resulting odor is urine on steroids and growth hormones. Trust me, better a skunk than a tomcat.
It turns out that the odor was the result of the process used in manufacturing the keyboard surround, and, in a break with former Dell tradition, they will replace the offending slab of plastic.
On a more serious note, I heard someone opining on the radio that the government has to out-source its IT projects because IT graduates don’t want to work for the low salaries that the government offers. Sorry, but the government should advertize for job openings in the tech world and prepare for the flood of applications from experienced IT professionals who have been replaced by H1B slaves from Asia.
They might not make what they were making at their last job, but it would be a job with health insurance that paid better than clerking at convenience stores or big box retailers. It would be a wonderful idea to have some people who were on the government’s payroll reviewing the IT contracts. It would be extremely difficult to hire away senior people who have already been screwed over by ‘the private sector’.
13 comments
LOL @ the Dell Story! (But, not really surprised. Similar things have happened before. We had a similar incident at HP. but it was discovered before production during the in-house testing). In many cases, it’s generally a compound containing formaldehyde, a carcinogen. It’s not illegal in the USA, but is banned an many other countries.
Badtux, I came across a promotion Amazon have for $100 credit towards an AWS service (about 600 hours on their EC2 cloud). If you or anyone else is interested.
Amazon AWS Promotion Credits
Been pretty busy of late, and look to be busy for awhile. Lot of stuff happening lately.
“Expect me when you see me!”
When you get stuff made in China you can’t expect them to notice anything as minor as cat urine in air that you can chew after you cut off a chunk. Chinese manufacturing is chemical warfare against its own population and the world.
Chinese manufacturing is chemical warfare against its own population and the world.
sure looks like it to me.
Kryten, our AWS bill laughs at $100 credits. I spent today spinning up and tearing down clouds testing changes to the load balancing and scaling algorithms and probably used up half that much money in the process, since I had to put load onto the cloud servers, watch the scaling algorithm fire up more instances, wait and see how many would get fired off, put then remove the load and wait for the scaling algorithm to get rid of the instances no longer needed in order to maintain a 15% capacity buffer (it takes 3 minutes to spin up an instance so a capacity buffer has to be). Then destroy the cloud, change the parameters in the cloudformation template, and fire off *another* cloud. Wash, rinse, repeat. Rather fun, though, watching the number of instances rise as the load on the servers rises, and slowly fall off after ten minutes of overcapacity. Used to be you had to order servers from Dell and wait several days for them to be delivered when you needed more capacity and once you had them you had them, now you just set an alarm to tell Amazon to give you another instance (and what to inject into it to tell it how to grab its payload from the puppetmaster), and voila. And when you don’t need’em anymore, throw’em away. Whee!
Definitely interesting times we live in now…
My problem with Dell laptops is that Dell won’t customize them anymore. Dell used to customize *everything*. Now you get what Dell wants to give you. Period. With my HP, I told HP to deliver it with a SSD and a hard drive and various other nice things. With Dell, you take what they have, or go elsewhere. I went elsewhere.
The pictures out of Beijing lately are while beyond LA at its worst. They are polluting their entire country to make cheap junk to sell to MalWart. It’s a form of national suicide.
Dell crashed out and it will be a while before they come up to a level where they can customize, if they make it back in the consumer market. In the old days they gave you a baseline and you specified what went in it, now it is whatever arrived in a container. One of the small joys of outsourcing…
I realise that Badtux. But $100 is $100 you can spend elsewhere. *shrug*
I’ve been grabbing deals and discounts everywhere I can. It’s saved me more than 60% on my costs this year. Amazing how many companies forget to reset their *temporary* discount codes when the special is over. I just used one to get 20% off an annual Dev license @ LizaTom for some WP plugins & themes I wanted, that was supposed to expire Dec. 2012. Only cost me $55.20 for everything they have + updates + 1 year full support. Fine by me! Same with another where I got 64 GB of very high quality royalty-free stock (7360 x 4912 px photo’s, textures, PSD layouts, gradients, actions, icons, etc.) from BundleStorm for $42, normally $147. “Themify . me” do some excellent WP themes & plug’s, and have a pretty decent theme & plugin builders that I’ve been playing with. Saves a lot of time, and they work. 🙂 Normally $89 for an annual Developer subscription, I found a 50% discount. It all helps. and I also just got an Ultimatum Pro License (unlimited sites, royalty free & no copy-write) for $57/annum (Ultimatum makes what is quite possibly the most impressive WP theme builder out there. I created my first full WP theme with it in 2 hours! 🙂
The best deal though was JoomlArt. Their Dev subscription is normally $499 P.A. I stumbled across an amazing deal earlier this year and paid $89! That includes full lifetime copy-write removal for all their products, normally another $299 per domain! (I still pinch myself over that one!) LOL I’ve already created two full Joomla 3 based e-Commerce sites and I’m working on a third (for myself, finally!)
I only get about AU$620/fortnight and $240 of that is rent. There is no way in hell I could have even thought of starting an online biz, buying 3 domains, cloud hosting etc, etc, on that without a LOT of serious discounts. Nobody knows more about shoe-string budgets than I do! Considering what I’ve had to work with, and zero help, I think I’ve done well to get where I am. 20 years ago, I would have had the biz up-and-running in a Month with a fully staffed office. But I had money then. *shrug*
The only way I will be able to compete is with quality, speed of delivery, and cost. So I need to do grab whatever I can to help me cut time and costs developing sites and hosting for clients. Otherwise, I may as well just give up and dig a hole in the ground.
/rant
beyond LA at its worst.
la, then and now
heh, greyjing. (although the photos and the article are primarily about northern china and the pollution from using coal for heating)
national suicide? that’s one side f the coin… one of the good things about globalization, for us here in the u.s., is that along with shipping the jobs overseas, we’ve also shipped the pollution there as well, so arguably we’re doing our part toward committing a little friendly genocide.
Hipparchia, a major portion of our manufacturing pollution was the result of out of date equipment and facilities because of a lack of investment. The much newer facilities in China could easily have been less polluting and more efficient, but that wasn’t the way they went. They built new copies of out of date facilities and used the wasteful old procedures. They went cheap, instead of inexpensive, and the costs are going to be borne by their society.
The US is destroying itself economically by shipping the ability to create real assets to other countries. It isn’t as easy to see the effects, but they are just as deadly.
The problem with Dell is that they outsourced both manufacturing and design, and as a result they sell whatever Intel designs for them and their vendors in China and Mexico build for them. Back in the days when they built all their machines in Texas, they had control over the process and could build whatever they wanted when they wanted. Now it’s whatever the subcontractors build for them.
That said, Dell has some seriously nice networking gear nowadays, without the onerous maintenance contracts needed to keep Cisco gear up and going. Yes in many cases it’s re-branded Accton gear, but Accton makes good gear (they formerly were sold here as SMC) and Dell has made some very good improvements to the firmware to make it easier to manage and add additional features. I seriously do not understand why anybody buys Cisco gear nowadays. It’s too expensive and then you have to pay even more for security updates that should be free or else you’re “owned” by hackers.
It’s almost like the guys who created the products that made the company grow, shifted their focus to their network stuff, and left the consumer business to trainees. Yes, Dell servers still have credibility, because they are decent products according to the guys I know who use them.
Cisco suffers from ‘mainframe mania’, where all hardware and software was leased. It was great for the vendors, and less work for accounting, but it was a damn expensive way to get things done.
I used a lot of SMC products in SoCal when I was building machines. They were inexpensive, but not cheap, so you had to specify them. I built boxes I didn’t want to see again, so I never went with ‘cheap’. I ended up building my own because the guys I bought from decided to go ‘cheap’, instead of reliable, and stopped doing burn-in, ‘infant mortality’ testing. There is nothing worse than having a machine die within 10 minutes of being turned on, except for one that doesn’t turn on.
I’m having a coffee out of one of my fave mugs, a gift from Accton in the early 90’s. My company was Aus distributor for them (and a few others). They were good, and their support was better than some mainstream vendors. And they gave us a couple of each of their products for free, with training. Only other one who did something similar was d-link (I doubt they would now! The were new then). 3COM, DEC (except they did provide training for free) & HP made you pay for everything, though we did get some training free from HP because I knew the course manager, and when someone dropped out last minute, I was offered the place (which was already paid for. HP had a no-refund policy). It’s one of the reasons they head-hunted me. I’d done several of their courses, so knew a lot. *shrug* I still have all the certificates and accreditation. I wonder if the DEC ones are worth anything as *memorabilia*?
I’ve always hated Cisco gear. Always will. I’ve never recommended them on any projects, and even had their crap replaced on a couple. My projects always worked. It’s why I used to get paid $1,200 a day.
I have a pretty good collection of mugs from vendors. Some are no longer in business, but their mugs were great! LOL Island Graphics for eg. The only thing I have left from those days really.
Yeah, in the old days they actually gave you useful stuff, not just literature when you dealt with companies. These days they don’t even include manuals, they want you to download everything from the ‘Net, the cheap bastards. HP includes a CD with their printers and then tells you in the quick-start sheet that the software is probably outdated, so go download the stuff that works.
I remember the three-ring binders with manuals that once came with all software and major pieces of hardware, but now it’s a slip of paper with a URI. 🙁