A third of the readers of this column are not in the USA and I can’t claim anymore that America is on the cutting-edge of all things Internet so I’ll just fall back on the argument that this is happening here and could just as easily be happening in your country, too. Which brings us to today’s story of Charlie Ergen’s plan to dominate the distribution of TV content to America in an all-IP, post-broadcast, post-satellite future. John Malone and Reed Hastings beware!
Echostar owns Dish Network, America’s second-largest satellite TV provider. Charlie Ergen is Echostar’s iconoclastic founder, CEO, and largest shareholder. Just as John Malone does with DirecTV, Charlie runs Dish any old way he wants to, which is why his grand plan has taken awhile to come together in my mind.
Charlie — like Steve Jobs — doesn’t do very much explaining.
Echostar has been putting together a digital strategy for the all-IP future where competitors like Netflix and Hulu may replace DirecTV and Comcast. This strategy can’t bet the bank because Charlie knows he can’t predict everything with total assurance (neither can I). But it is possible at this point for him to acquire or deploy enough assets at a low enough price to guarantee Echostar a solid place in that IP future almost any way the future plays out.
I believe Echostar has all but one component in place for this flexible strategy and no significant barriers to acquiring the last part (if it is even needed at all — more on this below). If there’s a question of critical mass it has already been answered. Charlie just has to pull the trigger. When he’ll do that is anybody’s guess.
Here are the tools at Charlie’s disposal — the Dish Network and its subscribers, Sling Media and its customers, Blockbuster Video and its customers, services and locations, Move Networks content distribution network (bought earlier this year by EchoStar), Echostar’s IP cross-licensing agreement with TiVO, and finally what’s behind Door Number Five.
The Dish Network has access to hundreds of video channels and the ability to place that content in tens of millions of homes in real time. Many of those satellite receivers have Digital Video Recorder capability with all of the DVR models having Ethernet ports and running the Linux operating system.
Sling Media developed the first mass market device specifically for streaming your own video content over the Internet. With a Slingbox you can watch your home video library, your nannycam, or even broadcast, cable, or satellite TV halfway around the world if you have a good Internet connection. I am unimpressed generally with Sling video quality but I don’t think that has to matter for this strategy to succeed. Just as there are millions of Dish DVRs installed, there are also more than a million Slingboxes, all of which also run Linux.
Under Echostar, Sling also markets a video streaming service offering movies and TV shows.
Blockbuster has a streaming video service, too, along with extensive license deals with the major film and TV studios — artifacts from when Blockbuster was the Big Kahuna of video rental and Netflix was a lot smaller than it is today. Blockbuster also has 4000+ rental locations, half of which the company is closing, but half are staying open, too.
Echostar’s TiVO license — the expensive outcome of a long legal battle — is something of a mystery here but I count it as an asset not just because it removed TiVO as an obstruction but also because it grants to Echostar a blanket license to TiVO IP, which no doubt includes some tech we haven’t seen before or have forgotten about. Remember all those video patents held by Burst.com? Well TiVO owns them now.
Charlie’s goal is clear. He wants to be a major distributor of professional video content for the rest of this century. He’s that right now, primarily with the Dish Network, but he wants to be at least as successful when IP video comes to dominate over the next 5-10 years.
In order to achieve this success Charlie needs a cheap supply of content, the right to distribute it, and a cheap, reliable, and pervasive method of video distribution. We’re not talking about 100, 1000, or 10,000 channels here. We’re talking about 50,000 movies and 150,000 TV shows — up to 200,000 channels in all and tens of millions of simultaneous connections.
I think Charlie is already there.
He has tens of millions of captive Dish, Sling, and Blockbuster customers, so Charlie’s marketing barrier is lower than it might be if he had to start from scratch. Netflix is in a similar position, which is why I feel this is a market segment where incumbents have a significant advantage over startups.
With only a licensing change Dish Network can be used to inject video content as-needed into millions of points on what will eventually become the Echostar (or Dish or Blockbuster) Virtual Video Network (VVN) — the successor to today’s satellite and cable systems. Every DVR becomes a repository or video cache on that network. All Charlie has to grab is a couple gigs per DVR to hold all the professional video ever watched.
The same will be true for Sling boxes, which can serve this distribution function whether or not there is a co-located satellite receiver.
And same for those 2000 Blockbuster locations that are not slated to close. That’s 2000 neighborhoods in up to 2000 cities that could each hold a copy of all 200,000 shows and films. That’s only 200 terabytes per library, by the way. I’m not sure why this is actually needed, but there has to be some reason for keeping open those Blockbuster locations.
Echostar and Sling already have streaming deals with the studios but my guess is that Blockbuster’s legacy deal is better. That’s the initial key to content, at least for awhile. And if you’ll look in your terms of service for Dish, Sling, or Blockbuster you’ll see nothing that keeps Charlie from leveraging behind your back that device you think you own.
The part behind Door Number Five, if I were Charlie, would be a peer-to-peer streaming client like Veetle. That’s a client for real-time streaming, not downloading — a client that caches only small bits of code on the network making it much more studio-friendly. More important, Veetle or a Veetle clone makes vastly more efficient use of network bandwidth to deliver an HD signal at little or no cost — a distinct advantage over Netflix, YouTube, etc.
A system like Veetle can aggregate smaller data streams from many sources into a full HD signal, making it immaterial that one-to-one Sling video isn’t really that great. Get enough peers together and many-to-one can run at any bandwidth your Internet connection can support while still costing Charlie nothing.
This distribution cost advantage is small but what’s important is it drops all the way to the bottom line, giving Charlie a decided profit advantage over the other guys, but it only works if you already have tens of millions of Linux machines connected to televisions all over America.
Only Charlie Ergen has that.
That point at the very beginning of the article makes me wonder if someday commercial entertainment produced in the USA will be marketed to the entire world as an audience….
Funny you should mention that — Slingboxes recently went on sale in India.
One would hope the world would expect better.
Judging by the world’s cheap reality based television shows (that Americans finally realized is cheaper to produce and market), probably not.
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(Not that I know much, the single home TV is “women and children first”, but …)
Just FYI, in my corner of Europe the companies (three or four of them) playing the triple-play game (TV+phone+Internet) usually saddle the home subscriber with a DVR/decoder combo box. The labirintine, but functional, software in the box includes “video rentals”, for 48h or so. Once in a while they offer freebies to tempt the consumers, but I have yet to hear anyone boasting of renting movies.
The guys who seem to be killing it are the subscription channels with the sports programming, judging from the way package deals are offered.
Aside from that, in the intertubes we have a choice ranging from “not available in your region” to the usual suspects.
My brother lives in Saudi Arabia. TV content is HIGHLY censored and controlled over there. He has a Slingbox connected to my cable service here. There’s no way for the government to stop it.
This is bigger than you think!
One of the reasons I find your column valuable is your explication of what *could* happen. Thanks, again.
But one question: if what you describe is part of a grand vision, how did the once-discussed merger with DirecTV play into this? Or did this develop since that merger fell through?
So basically convert DishTV DVRs into Echostar-controlled streaming machines and reserve a portion of each user’s hard drive space to store content?
This seems possible, but also risky and problematic. You are talking about hijacking DVR recording space and broadband upstream bandwidth, both of which can affect the end user in a negative way.
@michael: what’s risky? you basically add a little code in the box to allow “channel whatever” to be tuned, supplied by the Ethernet port. Linux, being an -ix, after all, sees everything as a file. every episode of Hogan’s Heroes is a collection of files. the kernel is a file. any content that comes down any wire is a cubic buttload of files. there is only one difference between the digital dish input cable and the Ethernet, the port name.
and an -ls | include The Presidents Speech down one pipe is the same as another.
nothing risky, problematic, or negative there. you just have to be smart about which ISP you’re using, not a cranky one that thinks 500 Mb of data a month is a good cutoff point.
@swschrad You are absolutely correct.
Where do we get our broadband Internet (at least the USA where I live)? Cable, DSL or Fiber. All three of those are provided by people competing with Dish. Why would they let Dish do that? I’m all for net-neutrality, but obviously Charter (my ISP) isn’t. The monthly caps are one way to kill this. Traffic shaping is another. Port blocking is a third way. There are probably others too.
The risk is “hijacking DVR recording space and broadband upstream bandwidth, both of which can affect the end user in a negative way.”
And we don’t have a real choice of provider when there are so few they can copy each other’s prices and performance.
The risk is not technical. The risk is consumer dissatisfaction and sending your customers directly into your competitors’ arms.
Let’s say I was able to record 50 hours of shows on my DVR. After your little software update to the box I feel I own, I can now record 40. That’s going to piss me off. In fact, if my DVR had more than 40 hours of recordings and you wiped some shows from me, I’m going to be even more pissed.
The second thing that’s going to piss me off is when I’m running 24×7 bittorrent and you ruin my upstream. Not that I do that, but look at the usage graph. Bittorrent is right there after streaming, so apparently that’s what people do. Upstream speed is almost always more limited than downstream speed, and you’ll be stealing that from me. And how will that affect the kids and their Xbox Live gaming? Do you expect people who can’t even setup wifi passwords to configure their network properly with QoS? Does their dirt-cheap router that Comcast gave them even have QoS? Also, the timing is bad. The very peak time that everyone will want to watch TV off of my DVR and bandwidth is the same peak time that me and my family will be wanting to use the Internet too.
Then I’m going to say to myself that nobody ELSE steals my DVR space and upstream bandwidth in order to stream to me. Hulu doesn’t, Netflix doesn’t, Crackle doesn’t, Youtube doesn’t, etc. Boy these Dish people are evil.
Now imagine an Engadget story that describes this problem. Imagine what happens when the AP picks it up from there. “DishTV update steals your storage and Internet”.
I, as a theoretical customer, don’t want to become home to a DishTV streaming server. I don’t want to donate my storage space and my bandwidth to DishTV.
I bet that code hack could be done in 20 to 45 K, but more likely will take 200 Kb.
that’s about a minute of video. two commercials you lose.
not so scary. really, all it is is adding another line to a bunch of case statements.
printer guys in the 90s didn’t get that all the inputs… Ethernet, AppleTalk, serial, parallel… all turned into 5 volt logic. nobody got that except QMS, on about the third sales call they made to our college, and the third time I told them it takes less code to pick the active port, look for Postscript, else drop to native print mode, than it did to put color on their test page.
10 months later, QMS had autoselect of both port and print mode.
first guy that listens to customers gets the sale.
Charlie will make it “op-in” and provide reasonably full disclosure. That addresses risk.
Also look at the acquisition of Move Networks earlier this year by EchoStar, it gives them a lot of the IP streaming capabilities you discussed.
Jesus! I for got about that! I should have mentioned it.
Echostar is moving from massive download capacity to infinite at the lowest cost anywhere.
What about the fact that almost all of the streaming video is downloaded at the consumer side, rather than uploaded? That means that Dish Network can use its satellite feeds to push the streams down to the boxes, which drastically reduces their ISP bandwidth usage.
You realize you are talking about TV without an Internet Service Provider! What an interesting idea. Oh wait…
Thanks for bringing up Burst.com, Cringely. I had just about stopped being mad at you for steering me towards that stock seven years ago. Now you remind me that Tivo owns the patents, and I’m holding shares of some turkey named “Democrasoft.”
(Then again, you did steer me towards Apple in 2001 so…we’re still friends. :>)
Well Charlie may capture the world, but I can not say I am happy about that.
I like free. Free from incomprehensible monthly bills, free from content I have no interest in, free from bundle deals, and, in general, free from the extortion practiced by the phone, cable, and satellite companies.
My antenna, thirty miles from the nearest towers, receives 17 beautiful high def channels. Long may they broadcast. The Charlies of the world would like to take this away from me.
If there is something I really want to watch, I can usually find it on the internet and view it on my tv with no additional charge beyond the monthly internet connection, though I will admit that we do use Netflix.
Netflix has set a new price point for video service — $8 per month. Compare this to the typical cable bill. Yes, you have Internet costs on top of that but you weren’t complaining about that before, were you? And Internet costs keep going DOWN while cable costs keep going UP. What Charlie is doing is taking the Netflix price point and cutting the distribution cost to less than zero, since he makes money on the hardware. That means he can do what Netflix can do and make more profit, which presumably he’ll put into more content. In the long run we’ll see higher-cost video services than Netflix, but I don’t think we’ll see $100 per-month video services like some of us see $100 per-month cable or satellite bills. This is competition for Netflix and others. Competition is good.
What I don’t need is for my satellite DVR to be getting me into trouble with my ISP. If Dish Network did this to me, even if it was in their terms of service, I would drop their DVR like a bad habit. There are other solutions that give me DVR capabilities without needing their DVR hardware.
This is the first thought I had as well. The whole “no running a server” clause of every ISP TOS.
Back in the day there was a lot of chatter about this being applied to P2P as BitTorrent started clogging the ISP pipes, but nothing really happened other than some heavy users getting throttled or cut off.
But this is a different animal. A large commercial service piggybacking on ISPs for distribution. Not only would they compete with the ISP’s cable/IP TV services like ATV and Netflix, but this would also be uploading, and doing it from the EDGES! I think the ISPs would flip.
you have the wrong ISP is you’re worried about service caps. (disclosure, I work for a telco doing DSL.) none of the big telco ISPs enforce service caps. mine uses the ability to stream video while you VoIP while you surf to sell FTTN based DSL at high speeds. that’s the big sales point now.
as long as they can build backbone, and last I heard the vendors have not closed their order books, this looks to be a much more sustainable business model than selling dial-up and caller ID to little old ladies in nursing homes.
there are lots of independent ISPs that have swallowed hard, put in big pipes, and are eager to have high speed customers, as well as community broadband programs funded out of the “underserved market” tax on your bill.
if you’re on a cranky ISP, tell them they’re not with it by doing a market survey.
Unless you’re living right next door to the CO, cheap high-speed DSL is not an option. You have to use the one and only cable company or pay $300+/mo for about 1.5 mbps “T1”, no matter what the independent ISP calls itself.
A few notes:
1. The number of Blockbuster retail locations purchased as part of the bankruptcy auction is less than half of the 4,000 you mention here — I believe there were 1,700 locations left by the time it went to auction. Dish will likely keep less than 1,000 open.
2. You fail to mention Dish Network’s acquisition of satellite company DBSD and the broadband spectrum it picked up as part of the deal.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dish put forth a virtual video network over IP, but the only way it really works is if it can guarantee the quality of IP delivery — ie if it owns some type of wireless broadband. It’s not going to want to trust delivery to other broadband providers, esp. those that operate in rural communities where some of its user base lives. Remember — the reason a lot of people order satellite is that cable offerings nearby are often substandard. For those folks, IP video won’t help, because their broadband providers are likely not very good.
I’ve written about Dish’s digital future here: http://gigaom.com/video/dish-move-networks/ Feel free to read and comment.
I’m one of those rural customers, who’s currently a captive of comcast. Couldn’t even get quest out where were at, without paying a fair amount for them running several poles worth of cable. Luckily, nearby neighbor had comcast so they only had to run from one pole to another to our house. We currently have tv, phone, and internet through them, all for $180/mo. Not exorbitant but when I look at our viewing habits, I still feel we’re wasting $$$. Am planning on setting up areal for OTA channels and seeing if Netflix/iTunes/Amazon Prime can handle the rest of our stuff. Will be most difficult for daughter as she’s at the age when seeing a specific show the night before is ‘very important’ with her friends. Still, if that’s the worst life throws at her as a child, I think she’ll manage.
Will be following sat tv developments and the like. The idea of distributed distribution seems so logical (google on dark cable, etc.) that I think eventually someone will take a chance with it.
the first friend who can get 20 or 40 MB, you guys should get together, split the bill, and put up some wireless routers with outside antennas. kick-ass wireless.
now, some outfits will want to charge business rates, and take it down until you do (like, for instance, cablecos.) others won’t. you’re just piggybacking off an open WiMax point, hee hee. nothin’ happening here, officer.
Also, shades of this prediction reside here to:
https://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060216_000884.html
This is what I want from Netflix, frankly. The streaming from Netflix buffers out and is annoying, all too often. After a few buffering setbacks, the software back at Netflix HQ resets the quality they will send me. Result, no buffer hiccups, but blocky, ugly video.
With my cable ISP in direct competition with Netflix in this regard, I look for it to start implementing artificial buffer hiccups with Netflix movies, unless Netflix pays up. Which Netflix would do, because this is an advantage for cash-rich Netflix, keeping upstarts from being able to compete — they won’t be able to afford the cable company’s ‘protection and assured quality’ rates.
So why doesn’t Netflix partner up with Roku or some other settop box and automatically download your top 5 or so selections in the ‘Watch Now’ queue? The boxes could be built with P2P inside and even save Netflix some bandwidth on the popular movies and TV shows, which users would be shuttling around to one another. And the boxes could exhibit that Bittorrent bandwidth profile you described in you last post on Netflix, only taking what bandwidth was available, silently pulling down higher-quality video files in the background 24/7.
Higher quality Netflix movies, with no buffering hiccups. That’s what I want.
“Higher quality Netflix movies, with no buffering hiccups. That’s what I want.” Me too, but with bandwidth caps and the “bufferbloat” issue I remain skeptical.
Slingboxes have no local storage, so they wouldn’t make very good nodes in this proposed network. Also, they run WinCE, not Linux – all Slingboxes stream in WMV/VC-1, only the latest SOLO and PRO-HD models added H.264 streaming. This stems from the Windows roots. Slingboxes are pure pass through – whatever comes in is encoded and goes out, pretty simple devices overall.
As for the Dish DVRs, note that many of them are not connected to broadband. A lot of people opt for satellite because they’re outside the reach of terrestrial networks. If you can’t get cable, you generally can’t get broadband – except by satellite.
And, for those connected to broadband, upstream speeds are almost always much more limited than downstream. Residential broadband is designed to pull data down, not serve it out. And that doesn’t get into data caps, and provider policies against running any kind of ‘server’ or P2P. Nor does it deal with home gateways & firewalls, which often have to be manually configured to allow things like Slingboxes to work in the first place. (This is one of the major pain points for the Slingbox actually, getting the firewall configured to allow access from outside the network. BTW, for the record, I used to be a Beta Program Manager for Sling Media.)
As for the data centers in Blockbuster stores – that’s illogical. Geographic proximity is not the same as network proximity. Even if the Blockbuster down the street from me (yes, there is still one left in the area, though I haven’t been in one for a decade) became a data center, I would be unlikely to see any benefit. My connection goes to my cable MSO’s head end, and from there is aggregated into their back haul to their provider, etc. It’d end up going up the tree until it hit a peering point to whatever provider funnels down to the Blockbuster store. Putting data centers in neighborhoods, or having 1000, or even 500, of them, makes no sense – technically or economically.
No, data centers are generally located near a network nexus – a peering point, or somewhere they can tap directly into multiple backbone networks. You don’t want to be out at a leaf serving data, it is inefficient. You want to be plugged in as close to the trunk as possible, with as fast a pipe as possible. And instead of expensive retail real estate any old converted warehouse, etc., will do. All you need is effective environmental controls, reliable power, and good connections to the network. (I also worked for a data center company. Our facilities, and those of our peers, were exactly these – old warehouses, trucking depots, etc., in industrial areas. Relatively cheap, solid structures, with good security, reliable power (and space for the generator backups), located near major network connection points.)
For reliability and redundancy you’d want a few, geographically diverse locations, but even major companies, banks, etc., often run with 3-4 primary data centers. East coast, west coast, and somewhere in the middle is a common practice if the business is focused on the US. For global operations add APAC & EMEA locations. You add more if you’re that big and need to scale, but hundreds?
The costs would be crazy – you’d have to have IT staff for each location, or at least enough travelling staff to cover them. You’d need air conditioning, power backup, security, etc. And you wouldn’t have the economies of scale (it is less expensive to cool one large data center than 10 of them 1/10th the size, etc.).
So, while Ergen may have his sites set on IP video, I don’t think it is going to happen this way.
One thing I don’t see mentioned here is latency. I don’t quite understand how Dish customers could stream tiny Veetle packets to one another in HD when their communications medium, satellite, guarantees hundreds or thousands of milliseconds of latency. Generally, satellite customers (like me) are in remote locations where other broadband doesn’t bother to reach, so Internet is either dial-up or satellite as well … and while satellite is better, low-latency-dependent applications like Skype really suffer.
Maybe Slingboxes and TiVOs on other networks would be enough for this strategy, but I wouldn’t count in the Dish Network subscribers barring some tremendous innovation in satellite technology.
latency counts in videogaming, online stock trading, and other forms of gambling. latency makes VoIP impossible with that half second delay
elay
cond delay. and occasional ech
al echoes.
that’s because you have to switch directions and work in real-time. streaming video, shoot, it adds a half second to the start of the stream. if it’s a good connection, the rest is invisible. in hellacious rain storms or a howling blizzard, X-band signal fade means you have to reach for a DVD instead.
Whatever is coming, from whatever direction, let it happen. If worse comes to worse, I can always go back to watching the Golf channel. What, me worry? No way, no how!
Anybody else notice that Dish is now “giving” away the Sling Adapters!
https://www.dishnetwork.com/redirects/promotion/freeTVeverywhere/default.aspx
I have used SlingBox and have been very happy with what I think is their adaptive quality stream. If in a poorly served internet region, they drop the quality of the streamed picture until it keeps up the pace without stuttering. Not that I like the low-fidelity picture, but I am willing to live with it in a poorly served area. I was able to watch recorded TV from my LA home when I was in a hotel room in France without getting up in the middle of the night to watch the show. I was able watch what I wanted, when I wanted, even if it was not the quality that I get at home. I think SlingBox offered a good solution considering the alternatives.
Won’t market fragmentation ruin the business model ?
If you have more hours of content than there are hours in the collective lifetime of everyone….
If you have more content than there can be shared experience of significant numbers ?
If you have content/eyeballs < production costs ?
Correctly, he's also marketing prepackaged niche collections of content .. all male shows OR all chic flic OR all child-safe.
But unless he can do this very well indeed, people are going to want to go with the least amount of effort to get basic cable with most first run movies OR internet on their tv.. And that's it.
Frankly, I'm interested in his service ONLY because he isn't comcast. Wouldn't that be a better and an easier business model… 'get cable to people, not be comcast'.
How many times are you going to post a prediction of Blockbuster retail stores holding all the content that they deliver on demand? First it was all movies on video ipod as the replacement for the DVD player, conveniently downloaded at your neighborhood Blockbuster.
USA since the 80’s ( 60’s?) had divided into the big – very big – and small – very small.
GM City Bank Google and you and me.
2008 showed that the government only aids the very big.
But the problem with that is that everything is dependent on the very small, you and me.
“to achieve this success Charlie needs a CHEAP supply of content, the right to distribute it, and a CHEAP, reliable, and pervasive method of video distribution”
My emphasis
Everything is going to cheap ‘Made in China’ elsewhere except in the USA so everyone is going to not work and have everything for cheap or next to free.
As I said elsewhere Capitalism is using Communist ideals and actions to achieve Communist principles – equality fraternity and no work!
But the proviso is that each corporation needs to be “too big to fail”
and becomes a “state corporation” just ask Putin!
so welcome to the US SR
If you have access to tens of millions of Linux boxes, you have access to a pretty big distributed computing cluster, video be damned. How many proteins can you fold overnight with 10 million boxes? Or ETs can you find?
Microsoft has that as well through win 7 premium and Media Center. Media Center already has internet TV as an option, and netflex as well.
It’s quite nice actually, Media Center in general. It’s so good I dropped my cable box and switched to it as my DVR of choice.
It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn’t done what you’re article describes already. With the exception of that P2P aspect. Not sure why you bring that up every time you cover ITV.
Call me selfish if you wish, but I’m not going to accept a business proposition where my equipment is being used to serve content for other users at my expense for a service for which I’m already paying. Besides this would eat through your cable company imposed bandwidth caps quickly with just the traffic you and your family are utilizing. Serving to other users would kill upload caps which would no doubt soon be initiated by cable cos if they haven’t already.
Forgot to mention Xbox as well, and sony through their game box.
Microsoft also has a proven track record in ITV interface given they handle that for U-VERSE, and Media Center, now. Word is it’s fairly well liked as well.
http://gigaom.com/video/dish-move-networks/
directv is working on this concept right now… they have been pursuing the conept since at least 2005-2006… if you take a look at the mpeg4 transport and other data streams coming down from the sat you can see for yourself…
I was an Dish Network customer for almost 4 years, and was astounded at the clown act the subject of your story employs. Not only was the ‘professional’ satellite installation botched, it took 3 other companies (subcontractors) to mitigate the errors committed by the first. The story goes on, and on, including the buffoonery displayed by the support monkeys via telephone, and in person. Coupled with the crapware apps on top of Linux (I use Linux daily, in a IT management role…), the unmitigated stupidity displayed by his employees lead me to believe he will never get where he needs to go, simply because of the lack of competent employees. I do believe there are some, however, none magically appeared during my tenure as a customer.
You have remarked very interesting points! ps decent website.
and there’s so little new stuff. I’m willing to pay the $1 on-demand for Zediva, though, and am using them much more (I have two small children and don’t go out to the movies).
and there’s so little new stuff. I’m willing to pay the $1 on-demand for Zediva, though, and am using them much more (I have two small children and don’t go out to the movies).
Power supplies are usually optimized for high loads (i.e. 70%-90% maximum power output). So I wonder if they use power supplies that can even use the CPU at full-power
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