Dell quality suffering?, DRM: Good or Bad? & Jason Calacanis: The Menace to Diggital Society

Dell Quality Suffering?

Not a day goes by that you don't hear about Laptop's exploding, battery swelling or discoloration. It seems everyone is suffering from defects in product these days. Most recently Apple has been the Victim. But the new Victim these days is Dell. Just in the past week two laptops have exploded, for unknown reasons. And the fact that Dell has outsourced it's IT support for customers is not going well with certain people. Even when you get hold of someone, they all seem to be idiots. Add to that the mass reacall of 20,000 batteries and Dell has a major headache. But that's not the end of problems just yet. Take the case of one, Renata, who recently replaced an againg Sony machine with an XPS 400, one of Dell's top of the line systems. You'd think that a system like this would adhere tot the highest standards of quality. Apperently not. Renata reports on his blog that he was being BSOD'd daily and the system was crashing on a regular basis. He called up Dell and they sent over an independent service tech. The service tech diagnosed a problem with both the motherboard ant the memory. Now, time for a little clarifaction. Renata had something like 2 GB of memory in his new XPS 400. So what did Dell tell the-honest-to-goodness independent support tech? To replace one of the four memory modules, close the box and then leave. That may not seem like a bad until you consider the fact that Renada has paid for 2 GB not the 512 that Dell wants to replace. You'd think Dell would be more intelligent. Couple this with the fact that notebooks are exploding and the delay of the new XPS 700 which has hundreds of thousands of orders sitting in a factory somewhere in the Far East. But I digres. The fact of the matter is when my parents bought our Demension 4400 back almost 5 years ago now, the fact is we went to Dell for quality. Likewise of my good friends' family is Apple through and through. You go to your company of choice, not for the fact that they sell great hardware, although that is a great thing to have, but for the great service. With Dell, I'm tempted to tell my parents about Dell and suggest that we find hardware provider when we upgrade to out next system. I think that quality at Dell has dropped off the deep end ever since Michael Dell stepped down as CEO and President in 2004. Although I've had few problems with my Dell Demension, I guess other's have and that's why so many people hate Dell. If Dell really want to regain customer confidence they're going to have to do a 180 and fast.
Why DRM Sucks
My brother brought home a Switchfood CD the other night. Okay, fine, I like Switchfoot. Well I did until I realized that the CD has DRM on it. Okay, I'm fine with DRM. All the Music I buy from the iTunes Music Store has FairPlay DRM on it. FairPlay doesn't interfere as long as I adhere to certain guidlines. And so far I've followed those guidelines. This DRM being used by-guess who, Sony is very limiting in what I can do with the Music on the CD. The CD will only be copied in WMA which means that it will not copy into iTunes, which means as well I can't copy it onto my Ipod. This just really ticks me off. If I go out and buy a CD for $10-18 CAN, I expect to be able to make X amount of copies of it (within reason of course) able to put it onto my Ipod and put it onto multiple computers.
In case anyone here is unfarmilliar with the Sony-Rootkit tabackle, I will be you a brief run through. Back in October of this year, it was disovered that Sony Corp, was using a DRM technology based on Rootkit technology. For those of you who don't know what a rootkit is, it is a program that allows files to be hidden, not just from the user, but from the Operating System itself. This is used commonly as a Hacker Tool and is used to hide things like Trojan Horses while they work. The program was poorly designed as well as securiy was lax and allowed Hackers to construct virus' that exploited the holes the rootkit created. They did and they created at least 2 of them. The Rootkit deleted, without question, any file that contained the extension $sys$.exe. I have nothing against DRM. I don't mind FairPlay, it doesn't get in my way it allows me to do what I wish with it. But when DRM gets into my way (Back to the Switchfoot) it really starts to tick me off. I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to DRM. I'll have to wait and see what happens in the next few months or years.
Jason Calacanis: A Menace to Diggital Society
Digg has become a fixture of the Web 2.0 in the past few years. Started by Kevin Rose in 2004 after he left TechTv it now has well over 8.5 million unique visitors and was seeing 3000+ stories posted a day. Jason Calacanis, another Web 2.0 start up, started Weblogs Inc in 2003. The network consists of about 90 blogs that cover a variety of topics, including Gaming and Technology. Most notable amoung these is Engadget. Web Logs Inc. was sold to AOL for a reported $25 in 2005. However, the network retains it's original structure. Now a VP at AOL he was offered a chance to save Netscape.com. Once the Kingpin of Web Browsers Netscape's share slid under the direction of AOL when it was purchased by the former in 1998. Netscape 6 was built around the Mozilla Source code, which, at the time was far from stable. This blunder by AOL was another contributing factor the demise of Netscape. And AOL wants to save it? As Patrick Norton would put it "It's a smoking Crater". Well put Patrick it is and the fact is, that Netscape cannot be resurrected. Weather you redesign it or not, Netscape will never be what it once was and the fact is that the Geek community is not a bunch of idiots and Calacanis implies. Calcanis think's it's all about money. It's not about money. It's about having the respect of the community. It's not about earning $1000 a month by submitting a bunch of stories. I have much more respect for Kevin Rose, who is a much of a Geek's Geek where Calacanis is a white collar who could't tell you the difference between CSS and XHTML. Kevin can. He worked for the Department of Energy, Designed Digg from the ground up. He holds a degree in computer science and can correctly calculate how much Themite it takes to incinerate a Hard Drive. Okay, so maybe that's not that best example but Kevin know's his stuff and Jason may very know some stuff, but the fact is, once you enter the coperate machine, all your individual knowledge goes out the window. The bottom line is Jason is doing more harm then good for Netscape as it just alienates the remaining userbase of Netscape as well as large digg community (over 440,000) and the even larger Geek community. My advice is this: Jason, if you want to create positive spin Think of something new! Don't go around ripping off Digg!
Later,
Nathaniel

Sir, your Laptop is on Fire, Vista Delayed (again)? & Could you please speak into the PC?

Over the last few days I've discovered a lovely site called BoingBoing. If you will recall in the last post I rerferenced it for a story about the Core 2 Duo Chips. Anyways, it's an interesting site about odd stuff. They have interesting things on everything from writing on water to a giant fish. But I digriss. It's now added to the link's sidebar and feel free to visit it. Moving onto today's news.

Sir, your Laptop is on Fire
Back a few months ago there was a story about a Dell laptop catching on fire at a Japanese conference. The cause is not clear however it's kind of disturbing that it happened a bit more than a month later. Heh, You'd think Dell would learn from it's mistake's don't you? Well the fact that it recalled over 35,000 batteries would be kind of reashuring.Not really. It happened again Apperently according to a fourm post by an eyewitness the battery burned through the table and that's what was on fire. Now consider the fact that the battery is made of Lithium. Lithium is a very flammable metal. Imagine if that Laptop was being used in something like the Post Office where there's lots and lots of papeMy parents have a Dell 6000 they bought this past winter. It's a bit hot on the legs and I wonder if it'll ever explode. I'm typing on a Dell, my sister has a Dell. What if this doesn't just affect Laptop's? That would not be good news. Are entire network would be down. In 5 years we have bought 3 dells, and it's only crashed on us 1 or 2 times. Other than that we've had only minor problems with them. But this raises some interesting questions. If Dell quality is suffering from quality issues then Dell needs to reexamine itself and see if it needs to refocus prorities. I will now avoid using my parents Laptop and hope to goodness that Apple has fixed all the problems with they're Macbooks, when I eventually get around to getting one.
Vista Delayed? (Again)
This entire Windows Vista thing is getting way out of hand. First they cut half to three quaters of the features because of "deadlines". Then they decide that they're going to delay Vista to the begining of 2007. Fine. It gives the consumer more time to decided if he/she wants to blow $100-500 on a new OS. But now they're thinking of delaying it again. There is rampant speculation that Vista will be delayed once more due to problems in the codebase. My quesiton is when will Microsoft commit to a firm launch date. Vista is late as it is. XP is reaching for it's 6th birthday, one of the oldest Operating system's in Microsoft history, if not the oldest. My question is: When will they make up thier minds and get the ball rolling? But the height of the irony is, I think many people will go "Oh Vista, well that's nice". People I think, could care less about Vista and will stick with XP until support for it is dropped sometime in the next few years. Even more users would probably switch over to a Linux distro of the users preference. The most popular Linux distro right now is Unbuntu, which has a complete productivity suite set up for you. It includes Open Office, Firefox and the GIMP. So why wait for Vista to shell out hundreds of bucks when you can get an OS that is much more secure and guess what? It's Free. So why wait for Vista? Get Unbuntu.
Sir, Please speak into the PC
The theme of this post so far has been Odd- Rational and then now I'm continuing on with another Odd piece of news again from BoingBoing. Back a little while ago on digg, there was a story about the top ten Computer Setups. They're where some really cool ones there like the Wing, the ultimate Mac setup and the wall-o-monitors set up. The one I would like to focus on today is the whiskey bottle setup which is nothing short of amazing. Someone managed to cram a P3 733 Pentium Processor, 256 notebook RAM a 40 GB hard drive into a whiskey bottle. Going back to BoingBoing someone decided that he liked the old Shure 55 mic's, used most noteably by Elvis. The blogger got kind of creative and decided to put a PC into a Shure 55 made out of wood. The specs are not on the site but the shear coolness of putting a PC into something as small as a microphone. There was as PC a few months back that was completly wireless and was the size of a microprocessor. I can't find the link right now, but If I do I'll add it in later

Later,
Nathaniel

Round Up: Core 2 Launch, Editorial: The Failure of AOL

Core 2 Duo Finally Arrives

Well they're finally here. The new Core 2 chips made my Intel have made they're way into the mainstream. The Core Two Duo chips codenamed Conroe(Desktop) and Merom(Mobile) respectivly, are set to replace the year and a half old Yonah first gen Core Duo chips. This puts the silicon crown back on Intel's head as these chips just shoot way ahead of anything that AMD has the market as of yet. The main feature of these new chips is not the clock speed but the L2 cache. For all you non-geeks out there the L2 cache is the part of the processor that does the repative tasks. For example, if your visiting something like BoingBoing, instead of retriving the data from memory the data will be stored in cache which will decrease the load times. The new Core 2 chips have a 4 MB cache that is shared between the two cores. However when using most programs, only one core is used and therefore you have full use of the 4 MB cache, increasing speed even more. The chips range in price and speed from 1.86 ($183) to 2.93 Ghz ($999) Rumours suggest that Intel is working on a 3.2 Ghz version as well as a single core version coming later on this year or early next year. My main question is this: How will this affect Apple? Will all the Macs be pushed up from the new chips. I would love to see the Mac Mini pushed to 1.8 Ghz or over and it wouldn't hurt to see the Macbook's and iMac's pushed up a bit either. I'll wait a little while before getting my Mac to see what gets a speed boost. It should be interesting to see what AMD follows up with especially now that AMD has aqquired ATI.
In more personal news I went through my first shift at work today. To say the least the staff are a tad quarky. But the job is fun since you get to walk around and help people. I managed my first sale within the first two hours and things where pretty steady. The staff are a bit.....crazy to stay the least but the money's good and the hours are good. So I hope to stick with it into the fall.

AOL: The Notable Web Failure

Is anyone here familiar with AOL? Anyone? Anyone living? Well all I can tell you is that AOL is one of the worst ISP's in the world today. Take the case of one Mr. Vinceant Farrari, an AOL cutomer who decided to cancel his account. He wasn't sour to AOL he just didn't use it. But the entire thing spending 22 minutes trying to cancel his account really ticked him off. And that's just he customer support. The software the AOL uses for it's browser is not great either. The UI is horrible and the experience is just "blah" in the word of a highly reliable source. (You know who you are.) And the fact is AOL is charging more for dail-up than for broadband! What's that for? I can understand the higher costs of maintaining Dail-Up networks but when your paying $15-16 for broadband and paying 1.5-2 times for half the service! But the fact is, AOL wasn't always that way. Before the merger with Time Warner, AOL was a pretty decent service. That fact is when a smaller company gets aborbed by a larger one one of two things usually happen. Profits go way, way up and quality goes down down *splat*. That's what happened to AOL. That's what could happen to companies like Aliant and Eastlink. The quality goes down down down while profits go up up, up. Until customers are presented with a third option, then the entire userbase jumps ship and usually the company goes bankrupt. And that's the direction in which AOL is headed unless it cleans up it's act of things like horrible customer support, and bribing bloggers.
Well that's my rant for tonight
Nathaniel