Posted on 01/10/2002 6:46:47 AM PST by colette_g
If Mr. Hewlett or Mr. Packard were still alive, you woudln't be witnessing the cluster f*** of a so-called merge with Compaq in the works either!
Attention HP Board of Directors: FIRE THAT DUMB B**CH CARLY FIORINA!!!!
My Konica Q-Mini digital camera hasn't had TWAIN support since Win95 (even Win98 isn't supported). Yet, the exact same camera (except for the trim and the ID bits the camera's firmware sends the driver), when sold under the Canon Powershot 350 badge, has NT support.
Who should I haul before the tribunal for this Great Injustice? Bill Gates, I presume?
If your stomach is so weak that you can't control it when confronted by the fact that no company can be expected to maintain endless driver support for third party hardware unsupported by the OEM vendor, then I suggest you find yourself a less stressful line of work.
I'm thinking "buggy whip salesman", or maybe "Get a Horse!" bumpersticker print shop.
And they are. They're going all over Linux and Mac OS even as we speak.
Most people don't speak cow?
You make an excellent argument for migrating to Linux.
I'm no huge fan of MS corportate policy or licensing, but you mananged to make a statement here makes no sense at all. You know that there are 1500 workstations, and nothing else...
Think about the business costs for a company with 1500 employees in a switch-over to a new OS, with a new look and feel, and all new apps... The cost in loss of productive time would be astounding! Then you need to know what applications the company needs. In many cases, no Linux application exists that can take the place of some of these canned apps. So now the company will have the added costs of paying to port over applications. It wouldn't be cheap...
Before making a statement like that you need to know what line of business the company is in. In this case, it's a hospital, and the costs would be enourmous...
I don't mean to be chiding you, but tech people have a tendnacy to make these sweeping statements, without knowing what the real costs involved would be. I used to make the same mistake, until I learned about something called "the business cost." Remember that unless you've got a company like EDS, which sells computer time, the IT/IS department is like the "black hole of Calcutta" to the beancounters. They keep shoveling money in, and get no direct return on their investment. Of course, most of the companies business is highly reliant on computers, but they don't generate revenue directly. Making a change like migrating to Linux would disrupt business like you wouldn't believe!
Mark
Maybe next year he'll wear a fez and talk turkey.
Add Compaq to the list. Over the last 3 years we've bought 12 desktops and probably 15 laptops and most recently 3 new servers.
The server we bought in March had a drive failure in August. I called Compaq at 3:00 PM and ordered the drive, which they assured me would be overnighted. Next morning, no drive. I call them and they say, oops sorry, maybe tomorrow. The kicker is that Compaq has a parts depot within 2 miles of our office, that had the drives. But since we had not bought 'compaq care' we weren't elgible for a depot drive. 2 hours of screaming produced the drive.
3 weeks later a power supply failed on a server only 4 days out of the box. Call to Compaq, sorry we're out of those, we'll try to get you one from one of our vendors. I asked if they had any new servers in the warehouse. Of course they did, I told them they should start taking them apart.
That was when we started buying Thinkpads.
Sounds like we're on the same page. I bought a new P4 Dell last summer. It came with a coupon for XP. I installed it without a hitch and it works fine for me. I still like Corel - just seems like a better product for me.
No in fact I live in LA and my life is just fine period.
I blame nether big blue or Bill Gates for anything.
Bill Gates is nether God or Satan he just a guy that makes software some good some not so good.
But if you think Bill Gates and THE MAIN REASON for the PC boom then AL Gore invented the Internet.
I have purchased Microsoft products for years and think there just fine.
But if some one buys a computer and a OS you should get a copy of the OS in case you need to reinstall it.
And that OS should allow you to upgrade your hardware and not balk because the OS's copy protect thinks your bootlegging it on to a new system.
And an OS sure as hell should not lock out other competing app
Look it a free world and anyone can buy and use anything they want to buy.
But my option Microsoft's XP adds very little of benefit to the end user but a lot to Microsoft benefit...
I get the impression your option is any thing that anything Microsoft want to sell is the great thing since sliced bread an Bill Gates is a god, if that is your option, I disagree.......
So let the market decide
Your friends are like most people. They are too damned impatient to take a few extra minutes to do things right. That's why there are millions of VCRs out there with the date flashing. Then when things go wrong, they quickly blame the manufacturer. Computers are very sophisticated devices and they require a little knowledge and patience.
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First Microsoft DOS built itself on the back of the IBM hardware and it's software apps base.
Microsoft DOS didn't make it big by porting is OS to other hardware platform did they?
The formula in the PC boom was Microsoft software (DOS) IBM firmware(BIOS) & Intel hardware(X86 cpu) and IBM was the big boy that made the PC the standard.
Other then back engineer the IBM bios with small changes so they could win in court that they were not violating IBM's copyright (The fact that IBM was the big bad guy at the time is,in my opinion, the reason they lost)
Did Bill Gates cry over this.. Hell no..(nor should he) The IBM BIOS his OS ran on had become public domain by court order.
Unless this happen there would be no Compaq, Corona, or any other IBM clones for his non-exclusively licensed OS to run on.
Now he could have try to port his OS to other hardware platform but then he would not have that nice big base of app for IBM to run.
Microsoft is in the place it is today in good part because IBM's BIOS was "pirated" and the court let it stand.
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If only more people understood these two points.
Bravo!
I'll simply say that I am being incorrectly characterized by that gibberish.
Carly was a PC hire from a failed company and will definitely take Hp back to the garage from which it sprang. Unfortunately, this time the garage will contain no entrepeneurs.
My newest Dell is a dual 2.0 GHz P4 and it came with a full Win2k installation CD (it is now called a "Reinstallation CD W2K + SP2"). The CD is not an image. It is the full installation CD. The CD key is on the case of the computer (and has been for the last several machines).
And, due to Microsft's asinine policies, the hospital in your example is wasting lots of money and man-hours doing unnecessary work.
You should consider the amount of time and money spent on:
You can migrate gradually, you know, which will spread migration costs over a long period of time.
See this article from CIO Magazine:
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