ThinkPad Battery Recall
Alexander Muse , September 29, 2006
Comments Off
Lenovo and the IBM Corporation are voluntarily recalling approximately 526,000 Lithium-Ion batteries worldwide that were manufactured by Sony Corporation.
The batteries were sold in ThinkPad® notebooks or as replacement batteries between February 2005 and September 2006. Lenovo has confirmed that these batteries may be subject to overheating, posing a potential fire hazard, and is advising customers to check if they are using one of them. Lenovo will provide free replacements for all recalled batteries.
Full details of which systems could be affected and how your customers claim their free replacements are available at lenovo.com/batteryprogram.
Comcast VoIP Penetration
Alexander Muse , September 25, 2006
Comments OffYou might be surprised to learn that Comcast has over a million VoIP customers. The company is adding 4,000 jobs to support this new segment of their business. Om Malik reports,
UBS Cable and Satellite Analyst Aryeh Bourkoff believes that the company crossed the million subscriber mark at the end of August which translates to about 310,000 VoIP subscribers for the first nine weeks of the third quarter. That is up 32% from the previous quarter. Bourkoff had an estimate of roughly 390,000 net adds in the current quarter, but at current pace, the company could add roughly 420,000 VoIP subs in the third quarter. [via UBS Research] What this means? The heat has been turned on a notch for the likes of Vonage, and even the phone companies which are struggling to roll out their video (thus the triple play) products.
Microsoft Vista on one DVD
Alexander Muse , September 23, 2006
Comments OffIn a cost saving move, Microsoft will ship all Vista versions on one DVD. This will be good for Architel as we will only have to carry a single disk, but ultimately it will be bad for Microsoft as hackers will figure out how to get Ultimate on his machine without paying the upgrade fee.
IT Sea Change
Alexander Muse , September 22, 2006
Comments OffNicholas Carr has an interesting post titled, “An IT sea change for smaller companies.“Â He suggests that the time has come for small businesses to stop rolling their own information technolgy,
I would call it more a habit than a myth - the ability for companies to jettison most or all of their in-house IT infrastructure is a recent development - but I think he’s right. Ironically, even as many smaller companies are embracing hardware hosting, software-as-a-service, and other forms of utility computing, many others are currently building up their IT assets, drawn by low component costs. I think those companies are going to end up regretting a lot of the investments they’re making. They’ll soon find that the highest IT costs aren’t component costs but labor costs, maintenance costs, electricity costs, and other secondary expenses - and that owning your own gear ends up reducing your flexibility rather than increasing it.
Website Notice
Alexander Muse , September 22, 2006
Comments OffOur WordPress websites are going to be down for some period of time this weekend. Our hope is to get them down and back up this evening. This includes Big in Japan, Architel, SimpleTicket, Spur, hResume and all of the other ones as well…
Intel Pentium 4 Price Cuts
Alexander Muse , September 21, 2006
Comments OffIntel is slashing pentium prices up to 58%. The Pentium 4 3Ghz processors will sell for $69 each. According to Arstechnica,
With the introduction and successful reception of the Core and Core Duo lineup, the Pentium 4’s status as an evolutionary dead-end has become ever more glaring. Intel once had lofty hopes for the Pentium 4 and the Netburst architecture. Its deep pipelines made high clockspeeds possible, but the company ran into problems with power density and transistor leakage, and couldn’t continue the insane clockspeed ramping that saw it take such a commanding lead over AMD, IBM, and Motorola during the days of the “megahertz myth.”
Architel Merger
Alexander Muse , September 20, 2006
Comments Off
Dell Battery Explodes
Alexander Muse , September 20, 2006
Comments OffWarning: they were not kidding when they recalled those batteries! One Yahoo employee found this out the hard way causing hundreds of employees to be evacuated from their building. Dude, you should have taken Dell up on that freaking recall…
Should you outsource everything?
Alexander Muse , September 20, 2006
So says David Berlind from ZDnet in an article titled, “SMBs should outsource everything and vendors must adjust.” He concludes that very few businesses will be able to justify insourcing their infrastructure by saying, “those businesses are fewer and farther between and if you ask me, sales in the SMB infrastructure channel are basically surviving on a myth: the myth that SMBs should be insourcing.”
David came to this conclusion after meet with EMC. “But a real IT partner should say “Well, we’d be happy to sell you that storage, but perhaps there’s a different way you should be thinking about your IT.” Along the way, outfits like EMC could instead, recommend EMC-outfitted hosting providers instead.”
We have slowly been headed in this direction with our online backup solution, hosted spam and hosted DNS services.
You Like Us, You Really Like Us
Alexander Muse , September 20, 2006
Okay, we’re overplaying it a bit, but we just got a really kind note from a customer, which we’d like to share:
I’ll keep your card in my rolodex, and I appreciate all the personal attention and superb service we’ve received. Honestly, Architel is TOP NOTCH, and having worked for huge firms my entire career (Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. included), the service we get from Architel is as good as any IT Department I ever worked with - and THAT is saying something. Many thanks and very best regards to you all
Wow, does that make our day.
