Diskless Client (Compactflash only)?

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by PGPfan

Actually Andy, that's not correct. AVSforum DID a groupbuy (with about 20 people participating) and what I posted (like $200-$250 for a server and 5 client license) was what they actually paid for. Due to personal reasons I couldn't participate, but was planning on it so I'm well aware of the costs involved.

Granted this was when the company was called "Venturcom" and the product was "BXP" but it IS the same exact thing. The upside for the company is simple, they get the 'word out' about their product that could generate future revenue. Downside is that they don't make a big profit on these FEW sales. Most companies will do such a thing, knowing that the HTPC market will have absolutely NO impact on their current sales, but the exposure of their software just might.

As Anders stated above also, the software isn't as expensive as you've been told, at least not if you look around a little bit.

-PGPfan

When it comes right down to it, the company I work for wouldn't be paying the prices that were mentioned above. I'm not saying that the price can't be bargained down, just that it's going to take a heck of a lot more people than we're gonna be able to scrape together to purchase it at a decent reduced rate.

Even if you got 100 people together, there's no way a software company is going to cut it's line item price by 4/5 just to get it out to 100 people. And that's basically what you're talking about there apples to apples (5 clients would be about $1000 at line item price.)

Don't get me wrong, anything is possible, but I'm not holding my breath.

[PGPfan]

I guess I'm not following your logic, Andy. You keep saying that there is no way they would consider selling us their software for a reasonable amount unless we have at least a hundred people on board for a group buy. This does NOT address the fact that the AVS forum DID purchase several licenses during a group buy, with no more than 30 people in total. I don't want to say you are wrong, but we do have enough people to at least explore the possibilities of a group buy.

I guess I don't understand why you are so hesitant to believe that AVS did successfully do a group buy, and why you seem to believe that it's not worth trying to do one ourselves?

-PGPfan

[AboveUnrefined]

As for CF, it just not meant to be used to boot from regardless of wether or not you can get an CF/IDE adapter. I've tried that numerous times before and performance in general is poor at best.

How is it poor? XP boots in less than 60 seconds from my 512 CF card on an EPIA MII1000... everything loads perfectly fine and it's not super snappy but it's not much slower than a hard drive would be. It only cost me $5 for the CF-> IDE adapter and the 512 MB CF card has been kind of lying around for years, you can ebay one for < $20. A perfect solution to me...

[PGPfan]

The CF card isn't designed for the types of continuous reads and writes that a hard drive is, which in most cases will result in drive failure. This is the reason that you don't see many devices using CF as boot drives.

That, coupled with very poor speed makes it not worth the cost (in time, or money savings) considering most everyone has access to a normal HDD as readily as CF if not more so.

-PGPfan

[AboveUnrefined]

I very much disagree with parts of the previous statement.... I'll digress.