I had a few emails asking for more tech post’s so let get the ball rolling with this one.

Here you are sitting in your nice corporate office or home office for many. You have your nice desk, the Executive leather chair and all the nice wooden desk accessories to top it off. There is your wide screen LCD that everyone loves and your desktop PC neatly tucked away so no one can see the wires (maybe you have a laptop, but you can still have high end audio!).

Next to the monitor is a set of $19 speakers.

Your home theater may be built rather nicely and you enjoy the Mark Levinson system in your Lexus but the one place you spend the most time has little to offer musically.

I was in this same boat and decided I was going to put together an audiophile on a budget system for my home office machine as this is where I spend the most time listening to music. I rave about my Paradigm monitors in my great room yet 90% of my listening time is in front of the PC.

My system of choice

Amp- Parasound ZAMP ($299 or less). A high current \ high quality compact amplifier

Desktop Speakers- Paradigm Studio 20, B&W 685 or the Klipsch RB-61 (best buy of the bunch) $350-$800

Sub is optional- I will run a sub and chances are anything with a 8-10″ with 100+ watts will be fine. You can find a deal on a Boston Acoustics sub for under $300. Since the amp \ desktop speakers of such high quality you may not need a sub unless you want more entertainment quality at home.

Long work hours, early mornings or for pure show chances are you will enjoy a higher end audio system for your computer. This article is a reminder that you do not have to walk into Best Buy and get a “PC Speaker System” that will leave you little to talk about.

Some people want a cigar box on their desk while other’s would like to show off a fine set of Rosenut B&W’s.

The site will be up as we make changes so this should not interrupt your readings.

Post up any feedback \ suggestions.

After the system is built I start to think, XP or Vista? Part of me really wanted to do XP since it was solid and no hassles. After talking to a few people I decided to go with Vista just because I wanted to learn something new and why waste all this hardware with an old OS.

All was well until 5pm last night when I decided to install my second video card and had problems. The people I talked to said Nvidia has a few issues but they never told me Vista killed support for multiple video cards. At this point I am starting to boil a bit.

An hour on Google later I see it can work if you have two of the same cards which by luck I do. After some trick of running them in SLI and disabling one card as you install the driver for the other I finally boot up and have all three screens working.

I guess if that is all the problems I had then maybe Vista is not so bad after all but it is too early in the game to quote that statement.

I am not a manufacturing guru by any means or a SAP whiz either but I have a fair understanding of both. I have worked with and evaluated several ERP packages in my time and spent part of my career in manufacturing \ consulting.

The only question I would like anyone to give me an answer to is; What is your return on investment for implementing SAP?

I still have never had anyone sit down and show me. Show me how a $100 Million dollar manufacturer will get their money out of this investment? What I have witnessed is it can be if implemented correctly, very effective in large corporations where you would have X, Y or Z ERP package anyway.

But how does that mid-sized company benefit? After research I have found that aside from the high cost of the software\hardware you also have sky rocketing fee’s for consulting and training since your in house staff cannot get it done. I have read about instances where SAP will actually increase headcount. I have noticed that reports do not show the increase in staffing\recruiting fee’s to hire people with SAP experience which can add up to 20% extra  in compensation for a single person. Then if you hire someone without SAP experience you have to deal with the training and learning aspect which can take up to 3 months because it is not the easiest system to learn.

Now I know you will say you will have those problems with any ERP package but that is not correct. I have used other ERP systems that are much simpler to implement, train and cost far less.

So when it is all said and done and you have spent 1,2,5+ million on SAP, hardware, training, consulting, add on programs to do all the things SAP cannot do and pay for more skilled workers, where does SAP make up for all of those costs and save you money?

Does anyone know?

 A couple of hours later it came back up. Some reading later on leads me to news stories that Pakistan has blocked YouTube due to some videos being online that represents Islam poorly.

A little more digging and I find out the reason why YouTube went down is because of the Pakistan blockage. I still cannot find a single good answer on how though? They say it could have been a form of a web page hijack \ corruption of the Internet routing tables that is passed on to the bordering routers but still…… Are you telling me it is this easy to disrupt a website around the entire globe from one routing error? Sure if the company controlling the IP messed up but some router totally foreign to the setup?

I could see this is a local isolated issue but for it to replicate through so many tables makes me question the access control and change monitoring of the major Internet hubs. You see one item like this and you can only sit back and wait for someone else to create a mess like this for fun in the near future.

 So many products and so little time. I came across these devices while reading up on some other tech news. This is the first time I really took a look at these remotes as I have heard about them briefly in the past but figured it was time to see what it was all about.

I was surprised to see so many options from Logitech. I figured this was a business they were exploring but it seems they are in it full tilt. With 5+ remotes on the market ranging from around $100 to the flag ship model hand held that lists around $500.

The reviews are mixed with many of the complaints learning towards the colored buttons the euro’s get so many in the states wish they could get their hands on those. The remotes are sleek, stylish and over all from the reviews they seem rather functional.

I am a bit of a audio\video nut so I love stuff like this. I will be in the market for a new remote this year so I will keep an eye on Logitech and will post up what I buy with a review.

If you are in the market for a remote then you should check these out since it is not exactly one of the typical players you have seen around before.

What you had was Dell wanting to push AMD into retail and cut them from the website sales where a bulk of their PC’s are sold. There is also some news floating around that Dell is working on an AMD setup for businesses with their Tri-Core and Quad Phenoms.

One thing to think about is that Intel needs AMD to stick around. I know it sounds crazy but look at it like this, if you’re pretty much a monopoly in the market what do you have to compare your product to and you have  a business that is in the right situation to keep the feds off your back while you still get to ship and sell a superior product.

And for those penny pinching PC’s the system builders can toss an AMD chip in and keep the price low enough to make someone pull the trigger. Yes you can find brand new PC’s with AMD chips for $299 sometimes!

AMD had a bit of a bad run last year and we all had higher expectations for the Phenom but they are far from done yet.

Yahoo filed documents with the SEC noting their changes and implementation of a new severance package line up. Workers could see 4-24 months of base salary depending on their level with the company.

It is clear they do not want this to happen and if it has to they want a lot more money but its clear Gates will not up the ante.

Yahoo is playing this smart since they know people will start jumping ship as with any merger you will find many positions cut. This will help lower the turn over and the slight chance Microsoft doesn’t win this battle then they can still function at a high level.

Naturally CEO Jerry Yang and CFO Blake Jorgensen will get the maximum of 24 months along with some other executive but I am sure you’re not surprised by that one.

It is not exactly a portable DVD player but we rented a couple of movies from iTunes, I tossed on a bunch of my Henry Rollins spoken word CD’s and a couple of Linkin Park videos and off I went.

With all of the people on the plane that do not shut up for 4 hours and simple fact that I am impatient to begin with this device makes my travel life a whole lot easier.

One 3.5mm splitter and my wife and I had our own set of earphones. The movie was crisp and the sound was clear. After the first movie it looked like I had well over 70% of my battery life left so I think I could get 3-4 movies on one charge (enough to cover a flight to Paris). With one of those energizer packs I would be good for a trip around the world.

I was able to surf the net at the airport on wifi as well.

Along with the movies I had my spoken word audio tracks, a free podcast of HBO’s the Wire season 5 opener and some music videos. If I got bored with one thing then I had a few other options to play with.

Over all you can entertain yourself the entire plane ride and never worry about battery life. This unit will truly be a life safer on those long flights.

As started to shop for parts I ended up with this feeling that I haven’t had in a long time. For the audiophiles out there you know it as upgrade fever. Once you buy one high end stereo component it turns into a wide open river of upgrading your entire system.

This is the feeling I have now and its not about building the computer but the fact that the market had went into this high end niche where they have developed a good and better then the rest type of product base. You can have the platinum motherboards, the powerful video cards and CPU’s, ram that comes in matching sets with heat dissipation heat sinks, cases with high end power supplies that I could power my Subzero fridge with and fans you can use in a 787 wind tunnel test.

Now I have been into PCs since I was about 5 so I know there has also been the “best at the time” equipment but the last couple of years they have really kicked it up a notch.

 It isn’t just PC hardware anymore, I can look at a video card or a set of ram and feel like I am buying a Mark Levison or Mcintosh Tube amplifier. Well at least in the computer world I get that feeling that I am putting together a nearly perfect very high end machine.

If you have never built a PC then maybe it is worth a look sometime at the parts out there. If you like to hand select items and fool around with performance then turn off the TV the next time you see a Dell commercial and check out newegg.com or some of the other hardware sites to see what is out there.

You can truly build a world class machine.