Category: Tech

Best Buy at Wal*Mart

I really obsess before purchasing electronics. Eric needs a laptop computer for college, and we agreed that it should have a Blu-ray player with HDMI. The problem was, I had budgeted $600 for the purchase, and Blu-ray laptops are $750 and up. But then I found this Acer Aspire model on Wal*Mart’s web site for $598:

Acer 15.6″ Aspire AS5551-4200 Laptop PC with AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core P520 Processor, Blu-Ray Disc Drive & Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit Edition

Over the past month I’ve looked at a lot of laptop computers in Best Buy, Staples, Wal*Mart, and BJ’s Warehouse, and this Acer is a great unit, regardless of price. I’ve been very happy with my Acer Aspire One netbook, and the construction quality of this full-featured laptop is excellent. Blu-ray video discs start up much more quickly than on standalone players, and the playback is perfectly smooth.

FedEx shipping was only $0.97, and after placing the order on Sunday (a sales tax holiday in Massachusetts) it shipped on Monday and arrived on Wednesday. I know that Wal*Mart is thought of as being the Evil Empire, but I couldn’t pass up this deal.

Follow-up: The price has dropped to $578! This is the #1 bargain right now for a Windows laptop.

Note to Larry Ellison: Shut Up!

Can’t the board of directors at Oracle tell Larry Ellison to keep his stupid mouth shut?

In a letter to the New York Times, Ellison said, “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”

I agree that firing Steve Jobs from Apple was one of the worst corporate decisions in history, and that John Sculley as CEO was a joke, but why is Ellison commenting on the situation at HP? Stick to your own concerns, Larry. Mark Hurd isn’t a founder of HP, and from what I can tell he has absolutely no involvement with product. Hurd is a money guy, who wants sales targets met, and costs cut. In other words, he’s a corporate hack. Firing Hurd is not like firing Jobs, it’s like firing John Sculley.

Hewlett-Packard is a company that badly needs different leadership, despite doing well recently, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. For corporate computing, the only story that HP has to tell right now is the XP-series of storage area network systems, but it isn’t their story, it belongs to HDS — Hitachi Data Systems. HP needs to get back to being an engineering company. Hurd has zero conception of what a SAN is, or even what USB is, and that’s why he needs to go, regardless of anything related to money mismanagement and sexual impropriety.

Whose theme is Who?


Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

I’ve been trying to get back to Dave Dexter, Jr. and the Beatles, but I got distracted by a renewed interest in the fascinating history of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme. This is Delia Derbyshire’s stunning, shimmering production, which includes the famous sound effects for the show.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JUL/DoctorWho1963.mp3]

Snippets of sounds and music by Derbyshire and the workshop have been collected by the BBC into a Flash player that you’ll find at this link. It’s all too easy to make the sounds overlap, so be quick with the stop button, and watch out for the clips that loop. Here is Murray Gold’s fantastic, powerful arrangement and orchestration for the new Doctor series in 2005.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JUL/DoctorWho2005.mp3]

If this subject is of any interest I’ll let you find the same sites I’ve been looking at, but one favor I should do for you is assemble the pieces of a 2003 BBC documentary on the Radiophonic Workshop, called The Alchemists of Sound.