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Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
"Duke Nukem will be out by the end of the year. No, we promise. Not lying this time!"
JoeLinux
We have it deployed at our office. It's stable, easy to maintain, and nobody ever manages to break it.
"Derp de derp."
Cheif Information Officer
or something like that...
Daikatana.
Mandrake, regarding the Mandrake Club:
"All membership levels enjoy the same benefits."
Now it's "almost the same benefits".
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
We make a secure Operating System
- Microsoft
"Cigarettes don't kill people."
Read the damn article, moron.
This post mindlessly bashes Microsoft, advocates Linux, and has misspelled words and profanity. I'm surprised Slashcode's internal checks didn't auto-moderate this up to 5, Informative.
"Easy self assemble...."
"This new Athlon XP 2100+ with 512 megs of ram 160 GIG HD, G-force 4, DVD rewritable will help you get laid!" It was a cruel lie! I will never believe salesman again ;o(
I know it's overused, but hey it's valid.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Wang Mini Computer Systems sell a top of the l;ive 2200 system and neglect to tell the guy he sold it to, a drug store owner, that it had to be programmed.
:-)
The guy took it, put in a wood shed out behing his little counrtyu drugstore and left it there for a couple of years until it finally got reposessed and made its way to our software firm where we were programming Wang 2200 machine (in BASIC.
I met that salesman and he was an absolute sleaze.
Talk about selling a pig in a poke.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Slashcode. ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
This comment contained copyrighted text and was removed at the request of the copyright owner under the terms of the DMCA.
the purpose of a CIO is to advice and assist his/her supervisors and other senior managers to ensure that information technology is acquired and information resources are managed in a manner that implements the policies and procedures established by that corporation.
</learnin'>
This one time on slashdot, there was this IBM ad... they were cocky enough to claim that they could BOX HACKERS OUT and still manage to BUILD TRUST IN.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
For the entire software industry:
"It's not a bug, it's a feature."
--Metrollica
They're easy to install, a snap to program, and you can expand them any time, and we can do it for less than $4000.
An outrage on all counts. And a rip off. Stick with whatever Lucent calls its phones these days.
was fed that line by the support guys for a certain FEA package then next release the fix was to eradicate any trace of said feature. Guess i cant complain about it not working any more tho.
I got news for ya. You actually can do stuff with Windows. The vast majority of problems with the WinNT line (Win9X is horrid and i won't defend it at all) has nothing to do with Windows itself.
I realize I'm going to draw criticism for this, seeing as how apparently some people have issues with Win2k. My perspective on this is from being the assistant-administrator for my office of around 17 or so. Almost everybody is on Win2k, I think one person is on 98. Other than a minor issue with an old laptop having difficulty going into standby mode (a bios flash fixed this), I've had no Windows or even Microsoft related problems to report. The problems that do come up are nearly always the fault of the company making the software. Netscape, for example, doesn't like to stay running for an entire day without crashing at least once. That's not a Windows problem. Netscape has never been known for its stability on any platform.
In any case, MS certainly kept their promise of greater stability with Windows 2k, and I am very glad that we upgraded the whole office to it.
Let me give you a piece of advice, though. Do some research before you make a switch like that. Go to www.deja.com, for example, to see what people have to say about a product. If they say it sucks, then keep that in mind. Find out why. We didn't go to 2K until we had tested it on a few machines. We didn't buy it based on a vendor promise. We certainly aren't running MS servers, we're running Linux there. We know better because we looked into it. It is a lot harder to be succeptable to vendor lies when you do reasearch like this.
"Derp de derp."
the Mircosoft/Korn shell incident. Classic
-
if the client wanted to have an up-to-date, respectable website, it must have pull-down menus;
- if they wanted pull-down menus, they must do it in Macromedia Flash; and
- if they wanted Flash to work on their website, they must switch to Cold Fusion Server.
The vendor was a Macromedia shop with over a dozen employees; they are now out of business.Java is a Systems Language.
Java Community Program is open.
Java is a Standard.
and my favorite:
Java is Object Oriented.
...followed by an army of vendor-supplied consultants who barely know their name. 2 years later, the project is still on hold.
The ones that I hate the most, are the things not told. But where everything is set up so that it suggests, and you assume, that there's features that's not really there.
Fx. when comparisons or references to similar products are made and you assume that it has the same features as the other product. And sometimes features gets the same descriptions but it turns out to be a poor substitute.
Like when a certain software company's whitepapers for a product, claims it can to the same as the competition. When the boss buys it and you get to install it, you discover that it indeed are capable of doing the same things. The only catch is that it is implemented very poorly, but hey, das blinking lights are all in place.
Windows 95 is bug-free.... Then when Windows 98 came out We have fixed 7000 bugs since Windows 95 (keep going... keep going) :o)
Video Game cheats, hints a
Oracle: Unbreakable
--Metrollica
"Team Fortress 2 will only be avaliable as an expansion pack for the soon-to-be-released Half Life." Complete with screenshots.
This claim was made by a salesman to a non-tech potential client at a company I was visiting. The product had nothing to do with J2EE. The salesperson's rationalization for his misinformation was that their product didn't prevent you from running J2EE applications and therefore was compatible.
Says these pictures:
http://www.rapiscan.com/documents/Secure.htm
are X-rays.
"I'm sorry you're having problems, ma'am. Our computers are reliable and we rarely recieve customer complaints." - Me when I worked for Dell.
["Marge, I agree with you - in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory." - Homer]
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I'm sure some of you have purchased PBXs for your works at one time or another so let me tell you my little story.
Around 18 months ago it was announced that we were merging with a larger non profit in a way to save on administrative costs amoung other things... IT was not really talked to for the majority of the merger talks but then when it was announced, we had to come in and clean the mess. 18 months later everything is fine (replaced ageing computers and cut 1/2 the IT staff) but the PBX system in the meantime was a hassle and a 1/2. Some idiot suggested that for the 10 months that we were in 3 "campuses" that we needed to switch to a single vendor integrated solution. Alright I'll admit it, the idiot was me. But it was a good idea, most people didn't relate to anyone else in the other agency and getting on an integrated phone/computer system would help bridge some of the problems. The problem was the vendors... Computersystems were easy, we would do all the implementation so all we had to do was buy hardware... so we spend 100,000 on some new dells that have been the most reliable machines I have ever seen, no upkeep in terms of hardware and have only had to reinstall one machine. Now to the PBX system... ugh... I probably spent 160 hours talking to different vendors with their great supre fix all solution that in the mean time would save us 20k a year....
Alright the pitch was good, but there is a catch right? right? of course.. the salesman low balled the equipment price in order to make the sale and therefor wasn't to stringent on how the install went. so after the install was complete, we spent around 35k in service calls getting the system to where it needs to be and what was actually bid. Lawsuits are in the works but its most likely not worth it....
Yes, I must say I have not had a blue screen of death yet with Windows2000. I have however had many black screens of death.
The guy in my local computer games store telling me I should replace my ps2 with an XBox because 'Microsoft are far more reliable at fixing bugs and delivering patches' and apparently 'No, they wouldn't charge gamers for said updates or release an in-compatible games box in 6 months to replace it'
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
You unknowingly brought up a good point. The Athlon PR rating is a great example of corporate Bull Shit. AMD was screaming and yelling when they broke the 1gHz barrier. Now they're stuck at something like 1433 mHz but they compare at 2.2 gHz P4. They just call thier chip Athlon 2200 XP.
note: even though I'm blasting Athlon and AMD, even an overclocked p4 at 3.5 gHz still can't beat a new Athlon. I'm just pissed that AMD does idiotic PR crap when thier prices and speeds sell thier chips.
When they say on the back of packets - only takes twenty minutes - it'll only take twenty minutes if you have the shopping delivered to the door, have an oven that preheats instantly and someone to prepare all the ingredients for you!
Video Game cheats, hints a
Linux costs more than Windows
--Metrollica
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Yup, that's what the salesman told us back in 1984 or 1985 in some computer store downtown NYC.
... you know ... you can write your own operating system ... I did."
... only he voice his "... hey, if you can write an operating system, what are you doing here ?"
My friend/co-worker, Mike X. decided to go to CompuLand or something like that, to see the new line of PC clones. When we got to the store, someone straight out of Saturday Night Fever began to pitch us a system with the integrity of a used car salesmen.
When we started asking questions about the operating system, he perceptively asked us, with a wonderfully Broolynese accent "... you guys are programmers, right ?"
He went on, now with a bit of body English "... well I'm a programmer, you're a programmer
Appearently Mike had the same thought at the same moment I did
Needless to say, the salesguy left us alone from therein.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
There was some software engineering app out there. I asked the people about it and they claimed it could detect infinite loops in code without running the code. I asked them if it could detect all infinite loops, they said yes.
If you know anything about decidability and undecidability you'd know they were full of crap.
I had to write a special app just to get it to work on terminal server. Running it over a Point to Point T1 line was too slow, so even the folks in customer's biggest remote office (connected via the FULL point-to-point T1) have to use terminal services.
Same company: oh, sure the database is stable. And the ODBC driver works well.
FEH
Can't complain too much - their bugs keeps my company busy and hence well paid.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
A few months ago I moved to where I currently live. I called Comcast (the only cable company choice here) and asked if cable modems were available. After getting my address the service rep on the line replied "Absolutely. Would you like to setup cable service now?"
Happy, I went through the process of setting up an account. I was told that once the cable was installed, I could call back and setup the cable modem account.
A week later, cable installed, I call back. "Sorry, they aren't available yet". hmm. I asked when they would be. "Next week." I was disappointed, but hey, only a week.
I called back a week later. Now it was a month. I called back a month later, now they weren't sure, and I got a "Well, people in that call center don't know what they are talking about."
Two months later I call back. Still not available. By this point I had DSL installed (a whole 'nother story). I made one final call to get them to remove service (The only reason I got it to begin with was because of the cable modem!)
BTW, the whole time this was going on, several neighbors and I were all getting fliers from Comcast to sign up for cable modem service.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
"Sure! We can meet that requirement. No extra charge."
After the meeting: "So what did I promise him?"
And how deep a hole have they dug themselves with their lies before backing down?
How about :
This time our OS won't cr....
Abort, retry, or ignore?
Video Game cheats, hints a
And who can forget the Ashton-Tate PR guy who stated for the press that DBase IV would be out "Real soon now". Didn't come out for another 18 months. Unwittingly coined a classic description of vapourware. In fact I gotta feeling that debacle was also one of the first instances of the term "vapourware". ... even if its in writing.
Basic lesson , don't trust them
Bitter and proud of it.
"640k should be enough for anybody."
Sad but true, dude.
Gil: D'ah, she's a beut'. You can't beat a Coleco, eh ...? How many can I put ya' down for, a lot? Please say "a lot," I need this. Aw, thank God! Now, let's talk rust-proofing. These Colecos'll rust up on ya' like =that=, er ... shut up, Gil. Close the deal ... close the deal!
--rock me like a huricane? NO rock you
"It will reduce the 'skin effect' for better sound, and the arrows on the side indicate that it should be plugged in in that direction, because the electrons flow better that way." -- pimply 18 year old at The Good Guys
~Loren
Our Tapeback up system is capable of saving 160 Gigs of data an hour. The client was on a 10BaseT lan, and the throughput on a 10 Mbit lan is abou 4 Gig an hour. To get the 'advertised' though put they would have needed to upgrade their backbone to Gigabit. Nothign like being hte tech having to explain that limitation our system is you network backbone.
Sun guy once told me that thier servers would scale linerally. Every CPU you add will not add any over head. Needless to say we did not buy anything from these guys.
These are often used lies by venders 1. Its a turn key solution
(This means you will need a crowbar and a BFR) 2. There are no bugs in this software (To me this is a sure sign you have a real wanker for a salesman) 3. Its Infinitely scaleable ( I have only heard this one once but hey once is enough) 4. You Can achieve 100% uptime (heh no words are Adequate to describe this one)
Back in the 1GHz days, the Athlon and PIII were comparable MHz for MHz. The P4 and Athlon XP are so different that comparing using clock speed simply isn't possible.
While the PR scheme is a bit dodgy, what do you expect them to do? When a customer comes in to a shop and sees "2.2GHz!!!!!!!" for the P4 and "1.667Ghz" for the Athlon XP, which do you think they'll go for? Unless they're one of the clued in types, they'll fall for the larger number.
Suddenly everything clicks.
Ummm... shouldn't that be: "Suddenly everything freezes"?
Has anyone stopped to ponder the sales culture that encourages this hype?
Show me a sales rep who is patient enough to sit down and listen to the specifics of what a product does and doesn't. I have worked in sales for a long time, and I've seen one, maybe two who can. (Oddly enough, these guys were ENGINEERS before they become sales clowns.)
Too many sales reps thrive on the intangible: possibility, maybes, etc. Put them in front of an Excel sheet (or WORSE) a white board, and you're REALLY in for a doosy. I see my own people committing these atrocities in meetings with customers. I then have to then gracefully butt in and "clarify" what the assclown has just promised.
It's also sick to see them all assemble together. These fuckwads get drunk and there's no stopping the information warpage. I have seen sales goons literally gut a company that once had a bright future.
assistant administrator?
for 17 pppl? man, most admins i know are on a ratio 1 admin to 100-150 users (machines)
assistant lol
Your motherboard blows.
"...advertising the Mac as being 2x faster than PCs. Though they dont technically lie, the way they present their data is the same thing..."
;)
No argument there. Although this is didn't used to be such a "lie," in the last couple of years it really became one.
"For some reason people see Apple as being a good corperation, not like the evil variety such as MS..."
People see them that way because that's what they are: a good company. They sell fine products at prices that people are willing to pay and that people are highly satisfied with. They don't kick puppies and they don't pinch babies. Not that I've heard anyway.
Now Microsoft, on the other hand...
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
In my area we have the cable company advertising that "with cable additional outlets cost a fraction of satelite" then 2 seconds later they advertise their digital service [which doesn't cost a fraction per outlet].
To boot they removed the movie channels from normal cable so really if you want to have even a chance of watching something interesting you have to get digital cable.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It is partially true, on a mhz per mhz comparison. I found a Lightwave benchmark site at http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/index.html , it shows that in nearly all cases the Mac was significantly more efficient, mhz wise, to the PC. But what it doesn't show is the price per performance ratio. 1gig Macs just recently showed up at a time when PC's were at 2 gigz. They perform roughly the same.
Figure Athlon into this, and the benchmarks get more interseting. An Athlon 4 1.2 gig rendered a scene in 130 seconds, a Macintosh 867 took 271 seconds. I think both those processors came out about the same time, but that's a big difference, dontcha think?
In any case, I agree with you. Marketing has a way of twisting the numbers to their favor. It's funny how if you narrow a perspective a bit, you seem a lot more favorable.
"Derp de derp."
They promised me a live and talking Steven in the box with my new system. Dude, those lying bastards!
We had a local PC vendor where I grew up that told some tall tales. One teacher in our school bought a PC from him. She was having a hard time getting her sound card to work. He told her that she needed to bring her computer in to him so he could download the drivers _off_ the card.
The database package in question is DB-Text (version 3). I won't mention the national distributer's name as they'd probably sue me.
I could go on and on, I'm sure someone out there can put a name to this company so I won't.
Don't you guys remember when Oracle started advertising their database server as unbreakable?
Sure it costs $10,000, has black and white display, couldn't deliver on its promise of direct to disk video recording, doesn't have much software, and requires learning Objective C, but it's nothing short of revolutionary.
"Our product will integrate seamlessly into your system. Just tell your developers to read the documentation and within minutes they'll modify it to match your needs"
Licence agreement says: Any modification of code is prohibited. Use of external code to modify databases created by our program is prohibited.
Remember to send at least 10 copies of that line to the purchaser in the company. It's important they read it prior to signing the million dollar deal. It's your ass on the line, not theirs.
internet like monkeys'
...verify that is something POSSIBLE...
:-D
4/5 years ago a commercial tried to sell to a customer of ours a web site about translation...
You could browse literal works with a browser; on the left frame there should have been the original version and on the right the translated version (the customer had already the transaltions, obviously)
In his opinion the end-user would have been able to click on a word in the left frame of the browser to see the "translated word" highlighted in the right frame..
We stopped him just in time... but it was hard to make him understand that
1) there wasn't the technology to do it (frames were NEW those days)
2) the only way to link a word on the left frame with one on the right was to hire 5.000 people to create links between them (or using AI... that was out of the scope of a simple web site)
3) since they were literary works there was hardly any thing like a "translated word"!!!
(they were REAL translation, not crappy word-by-word translations...)
And he got angry with us because we "ruined" a sure contract
Bush wins.
Okay, just to be clear, if you are reading this as "I'm trying to piss off anti-MS people..." then I ask you to read it again. I'm talking about actual experience here with what I believe to be a good OS. The only reason this would draw 'flames' is because people are hard set in their opinions about MS. I can't do anything about that. I'm hoping maybe that if they see that there are people in the world doing just fine with MS, then maybe they'll open their minds a bit to alternatives like MS out there.
Trust me, if I were going for flame bait the post would have been rather different. I've been given 2 points for being insightful so far, take that as an indication that at least 2 people thought I wasn't trying to start a flame war.
"Derp de derp."
As seen while installing MS Windows
;)
Microsoft Windows 95: The best windows yet!
Microsoft Windows 98: The best windows yet!
Microsoft Windows ME: The best windows yet!
Microsoft Windows XP: The best windows yet!
Other favorites:
Windows is more secure than ever!
Windows is easier to use than ever!
At least Linus doesn't say "Linux 2.5.5: The best kernel yet!" Maybe Linux marketing gurus should take that into consideration as to why the Linux-on-desktops marketshare is so small
1: a massive 16K of RAM (1980)
2: a massive 512K of RAM (1985)
3: a massive 8M of RAM (1991)
4: a massive 128M of RAM (1996)
5: a massive 1.5G of RAM (this weekend)
I'm guessing that any slashdot reader who has been in the technical arena for more than 10 years is in the same position.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
This is like:
"Toasters don't make toast. People make toast."
Grr! Arg!
PPC, anyone? MHz myth?
You guys sound like Steve Jobs.
LOL.
"Windows XP is the most secure OS ever" -Microsoft
Hacker Media
While the PR scheme is a bit dodgy
A *bit* dodgy? It's like lying to your customer's face about how fast the computer is. Don't give me any of this B.S. about "the P4 and Athlon XP are so different that..."; the processors are being sold as things that they are NOT. Period.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I did, asshole.
When all our base are clearly not belong to you.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Microsoft touting "Zero Administration" when Windows NT 4.0 came out. My boss was like "we'll save so much!!! I can't even project the numbers!"... tisk tisk. Good thing I told him to wait until the marketing hype died ;-)
Linux-Mandrake 8.2 is a stability release.
Optimistic Muffin marketting.
Heh heh.
-Brandyn
you will never need more than 64kb of ram -Bill Gates
Man, you just dont stop do ya?
Quit your fucking bitching. The difference between 49 karma and 50 karma is trivial.
A used car salesman and a computer salesman?
A: A used car salesman knows how to drive a car.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"Yes, we do know we are doing..."
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Your T1 tests fine, it must be your equipment..(click)
"It's not stupid, it's advanced!"
"Coming to your home in 1995, only on the Nintendo ULTRA 64!" -- the game Killer Instinct, if you can find that in arcades, very loudly says that hehe.
For the uninitiated, the Nintendo 64 (ultra was dropped...) came out in 1996 with a whopping 2 games at launch.
"Derp de derp."
To me and my colleagues:
"Yes, there's money in the payroll account."
So we went to the bank that the checks were drawn on, to cash them directly. Once again, his lie bit him in the ass. That was the last time he told me that lie.
Less than a year later, the loan officer controlling the credit on the store shut it down. Turns out the store owner lied through his teeth about how much business and inventory they had. It was a landmark, almost 100 years old, and now they tore it down and put a bank in its place.
while this is not computer hardware per se, it is still hardware and worth sharing: after having seen blade II with my wife, we went into the local cooking store (chefworks santa cruz) since my wife's milk frother, a piece of crap glass jar with a metallic mesh, had broken. we looked at the selections and of course they carried model A, the one she had and model B: a solar powered milk frother. uuuuuh! that sounds cool. does it also work? we ask the salesperson: "does this work"; answer: "yes, of course". "have you ever frothed milk with it?" ... [long pause] "no". solar powered piece of hardware did not make it home with us...
"The reason that Playstations are going bad is because people are misusing them." -- that's what Sony said when they had LOTS of returned, defective Playstations.
"Derp de derp."
Well, maybe not original, but without it the PC landscape would be much different.
...) IBM Bigwigs asked Bill Gates at a meeting if his new PC-DOS OS would run CPM (CPM meaning CPM from the 8080 days) programs. Knowing it was a non-starter to tell them no, Bill Gates replied that it would indeed run CPM programs. I am pretty sure this is also documented in PC Roadkill, a fun afternoon read.
When the PC was a gleam in IBM's eye and PC-DOS and CPM-86 were the competing (well, CPM-86 kinda rolled over, but
Without this crucial early support from IBM into the OS for the masses business, MS would have been just another one of many today. Bill leveraged the results of that deal into the current MS.
but I installed Windows 98 this week (don't ask) and it said during the install it was the most stable and best performing version of windows ever, when NT4 was clearly better...
If you look up hint (http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/HINT/) you'll find that the 1GHz machines have a measurable difference between them.
From a commercial on TV.
Beings capable of interstellar travel.
Looking with wonder at a P4???
You gotta think that anybody capable of interstellar travel would have processors so fast that we could not even comprehend the speed or size of chip.
Just ribbing intel on this one. A 2G processor is pretty awesome.
17 users, add about 3 zero's and you will notice difference, hell just add 1 zero and you'll notice difference.
Then there's the software support service contract. It took me months to get them to bill us, then they send a bill for $16K, we send it in, then when it's time to place a service call it's "who are you again?". Our $16,000 is missing, no one knows where it is, even though I have a copy of the canceled check they cashed. We are now getting dunning letters demanding payment at the same time getting a cancellation notice on another contract we had with them along with a credit invoice. So now THAT system is up-in-the-air.
They are the most screwed up company I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. I won't even go into the crap software they use. Their linux fiber HBA drivers use sg version 3.0.16 for lk 2.2. When I tried to update it, everything broke. Turns out, and this was told to me from the driver's author no less, that sg version 3.0 was a development branch only, and that every minor release changed the interface and that EMC had *NO* business putting this crap into production. I ended up getting EMC code out of it (thank god I had source) and folding it into sg rev 3.1x under lk 2.4.
The site engineer I have is the only bright spot in the entire company. He's trying to get my contract issues resolved. It's time critical, because I've heard they are farming out their higher ed contracts to Dell (which actually may be a good thing).
EMC may be good to megacorps that spend 10s of millions a year on their "frames", but if you only spend a half a mil (which we did), from my perspective at least, it seems like they could care less about you...
My dad ran across an advertisement for a sewing machine in the newspaper once. It had a special feature: "an automatic buttholer".
My dad never did by the machine, but I have a feeling they were lying when they said it had a feature to automatically butthole something.
"Derp de derp."
I just poked through your Microsoft Lies webpage and found something rather interesting. This seems to work in mozilla, and probably in IE as well if my instinct is right..
:)
... hard to use that as a verb but thats what is happening.
There are several links on your page to cnet news regarding some of the wrong doings microsoft has committed, ie. this one and this one.
I think what you'll find interesting is, although not being very old (1999 articles), cnet has decided to "Expire" them... BUT the contents of the story seems to show up here in mozilla for less than a second, then mozilla redirects me to the expired page.
Now here is a much much much older article from 1996 that is microsoft-friendly in its nature..
But this one isn't expired
someone else try this because everytime i click those damn anti-microsoft articles, they get 'expired'
Over at msn they are saying this:
"Browser Not Supported"
"If you are seeing this page, we have detected that the browser that you are using will not render zone.msn.com correctly. To play on the Zone you need a computer running Windows95 or greater and we recommend either Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater or Netscape 6.0 or greater.The Zone is best viewed with Internet Explorer. To get the latest version, please select the free download link below."
Wow I can get a free download of Windows to run on my mac.
You're job is safe.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
"Windows {95,98,NT,2000,XP} is reliable"
I suspect most people replying to this thread, still being 14 year old script kiddies masturbating in their parent's basement don't even know what "vendor" actually means. But it's cool to post stuff like that to slashdot and pretend to be a real cool guy. I bet they can't wait until they're 18 and get a "Network Admin" job without a degree.
Biggest ACTUAL LIE told to me by a vendor: that I had to spend an extra $900 for a protocol license for a Xylogics terminal server, and when it shows up a protocol license is included free in the box from Xylogics.
Okay, now you can mod me down:
"Linux, ready for the desktop"
"Linux 2.4 will be out by the end of the year"
The leaders entire cigarette industry proudly declaring that nicotine is not addictive, and that they do NOT actively advertise towards kids - after being sworn in at a court of law.
The place I live sells accounts to rooms, single port in a room, you call in, 30 dollars to sign up, and 20 for a month, sounds good, right? .4k
So I call them up, ask them, what's the service, the plan, the billing, etc...
don't worry, its 2.2 mbps down, and 384kbps upload!
Ok, sounds good... sign me up.
well, aside from a quick little problem with the router attaching itself to your mac address,
it turns out that its sharing one road runner account through the whole apartment complex.
I call up tech support "can you tell me why my internet connection sucks so badly?"
re: "because its a sucky connection on sucky routers" (that's what tech support said, at least THEY were being honest).
well, can you fix it?
Sure, let us kick some other people off the network...
eeee!
Right now, I download at about 20-30k, and my upload is around the ballpark of
I can't play CS, because my choke is at 100 and my ping is 2000.
Give me a 36.6k modem! Pleaasseeee...
Disclaimer:The "Human" attached to this account is unresponsible for anything unless it wants responsibility.
'This ship is unsinkable!'
100:1 compression rate guaranteed
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
When we were looking for 3270-oriented database software years ago, vendor I (who has since been bought by mega-vendor C) told us that they could do relational-type databases and that their screen and application generator could do our applications for us.
We gave them a sample application and it couldn't be done, in fact they told us after some questioning that we'd have to write code. But they had the gall to try to intimidate us when we chose someone else over them.
More recently, another vendor (mumble) proposed 3270 to web integration software. They had good references, but some of those references hedged on some of our questions. In the bid response they said they had several clients that used the same database we use (the one we chose above) and they could not produce a single reference when asked for the names (by comparison, we recognized the clients that other vendors gave us).
Then, the vendor we chose (believe it or not, the one I just described - wasn't my personal choice) agreed as part of the contract to delivering a working application for part of the trial/roll-out. My understanding (I wasn't present when this was said) was that we were told we paid for so many hours on the application, but that they didn't sign blanket contracts for deliverable applications without hours attached. We are still in "acceptance period" so I can't say more.
They all lie. Ask questions. Ask lots of questions. Challenge everything. Assume that references may have been "bought", particularly if they are in the same city.
(Posted anonymously because I might be recognized)
The example press release with the company names changed:h tml
http://www.cio.com/archive/010102/hype_sidebar_1.
The real press release:
http://www.trueadvantage.com/press_04.htm
640K is all the memory everyone will ever need.
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
1 degree of separation.
-Version Number of that OS?
^Let me check.
Why it looks like it is Version 1.0000002a.
-Thank You Goodbye. Call me when service 2 pack has come out.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
... Enlarge your penis in 3 - 5 days with safe drugs!
or my favourite:
Buy diplomas from prestigous, non-accredited universities!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code. The setup was that a user would get sent offsite to the credit card validation service. They would enter their credit card details and the validation service would process the card, bill the user, and then send an activation code to my client's website. Recieving the activation code was confirmation that the credit card was legit and the user was a paying customer.
The problem was that the authorization code was always the same. In fact, according to the validation service's spec, the code was always '0000'. And all the codes were sent via the web pages the user accessed as HTML hidden variables. One could (and I did) build dummy HTML pages that simply sent the authorization code to the website, bypassing the validation service, and recieving all the goodies reserved for paying customers.
So I went to see the validation service people to explain to them their non-existant securtity model. And they acknowledged the problem and said they would have it fixed promptly. And if you believe that, boy have I got a bridge you'ld love to have!
First they claimed that since the code was a 'hidden variable' no one could see it.
After I built the dummy page in front of them (in friggin notepad), they claimed that I didnt get all the authentication codes in and they were sending 'secret, invisible' authorization codes that didn't appear on the web pages. Nevermind the fact if I, as the website programmer, couldn't access those 'secret, invisible' authorization codes I couldn't well check for them to autheticate users could I?
Then, they claimed that only people like me could do it, and that I was a Hacker (captial H, please). And, don't you know, Hackers arent allowed to access the validation service.
It was really bad. I ended up yelling at their chief programmer and calling him a liar to his face before they finally stopped stonewalling.
When a customer comes into a shop and sees "2.2GHz!!!!" and then sees a cookie, which do you think they will go for?
No Really, our boards are 100% AGP 2.0 compliant.
Know how to tell when an EMC sales rep is lying?
His lips are moving.
... maybe in sleep mode ;-)
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
It was the first day they were selling them. The cashier told me, with many witnesses(co-workers and other patrons) that I should purchase their extended warantee because "the game boy advance was first generation" and "they were not really sure what problems they had yet" and that "if it broke I would just be out of luck"
I can't imagine how many people that worked on.
Exactly. No people, no toast.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I'd say Intel is equally guilty of marketing BS. Their P4-1.5Ghz can barely keep up with a PIII-1.0Ghz. That's the only reason AMD went with the stupid PR rating. In fact, reviews like this one have shown that AMD has been very conservative with the PR ratings, and the Athlon XP regularly spanks the equivalently rated P4 in speed tests.
...now that is 1 degree of seperation.
Fake.
Get your Unix fortune now!
damn i love gir, im going to build a real gir robot.. gir rules
TACOS!
they go on about everyone takes payouts, never believe what you read - except from themselves of course - and then go on to recommend one company on the entire planet you should go to and talk to them for a couple of paragraphs.
how ironically amusing. did anyone else fall for it? it's a glorified ad.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
Of course, everyone who adopts Seibel's software does this.
Wow, I gotta get me some of that!
With the release of the UltraSprac 3 we've solved all of our "ecache bit-flipping cause your machine to crash at random times" issues.
"If it's easy, it isn't good."
If someone described a blind date as simple, yet powerful, would you go?
Here in New Zealand we've had two companies that've broken their marketing promises of flat rate interntet. First there was Chello, who closed their operations. Now we've got Telecom, who're claiming that their flat-rate accounts are being violated by people who *gasp* use their connection all the time.
SurfBest claimed **unlimited** dial-up access for $12.50 P/Month. They have 8 networks for people to dial into. However, only like one of them has truly **unlimited** service. The other 7 have limits on them, like 150Hrs, 200Hrs, and 250Hrs was the most I believe.
.... utility packages (costing millions!), the salesman of the vastly inferior product promised me that it would be rewritten to completely match the features of the product I preferred (it had nearly none of them), and that most of it would be done by the next release less than 6 months away. I was then flown to the "developent center" and introduced to the (1) developer who had just been hired, who was told to promise me the same thing. When I asked, I was told there were no plans in place, no direction, no schedule yet to make this happen "but you can be our model customer and drive it!".
It boggles my mind, but many within my own organization believed these people and I had quite the fight to keep from buying this and then being the one whose job it would be to make it work.
Go figure.
1000MB = 1GB
I'm not actually talking about the companies that made the games (Epic, Apogee mostly) but the actual companies that manufactured and sold the shareware packs on bargain racks in Radio Shack for $4.99 a piece.
It was baloney because if you looked at the screen caps on the back of the packages, they only showed screenshots from the registered versions of the game, while the disk inside was the shareware version (i.e. the one you get for free from BBSs.) This pissed me off so much, especially when I spent my hard earned allowance dough on what I thought was a real registered copy of Paganitzu but it was the shareware one I already played.
Hmm, no, it's not like lying in your customer's face.
Hypothetically, Intel could take the trusty old 386, remanufacture it in a 13 micron die size using modern fabrication methods, and run it at 5Ghz. (Ok, maybe not, but just suspend disbelief here) Would it perform better than even a 1Ghz P3 or Athlon? Probably not. But it would legitimately be running at 5Ghz. And people would buy it, because 5Ghz seems on sight to be much more impressive than 2.2Ghz.
Now, a 1.667Ghz Athlon XP provides similar (or greater) performance than a 2Ghz Pentium 4. Yet people will buy the P4, because it has a bigger number. AMD knows that consumers buy based on Mhz rating, so they've started using the PR ratings to even the playing field. It's not lying -- it's simply comparing the Athlon's performance to the P4's performance.
www.snowbound.com
No, actually it is being sold as being comparable to that MHz class of Pentium IV, it's primary competition. therefore, it helps to inform the innocent customer, not mislead him. However, I suspect you might just be an Intel fan, and that's fine...i'm not.
However, it might also help to point out that (the rumor is anyway), intel saw the way people were buying processors. MHz = Performance in many people's minds. They thought a bit, and then designed a low-IPC, high MHz processor. In that light...it seems that maybe intel is sticking it to the customer.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I worked for a company that made communication equipment that worked over CATV lines. I was a junior engineer at the time but being part of the hardware team kept me fairly knowledgeable with what was being developed.
Our sales force did a press release (that also showed up in the company newsletter) stating we had successfully modified our existing hardware so that our system could handle double the throughput.
Now, no one in the hardware group was aware of such a feat and some of the engineers became considerably annoyed since management would probably expect us to make good on what the sales force had already said we had done (which, if I remember correctly would have required us to break the laws of physics).
Anyway, some of the engineers complained to management and they were told they needed to be better TEAM PLAYERS!
Will make a 300 DPI laser print at 600 DPI.
I laughed so hard I could barely point her to the door.
It was an HP pavillion, and the guy said "it will never break".
You really shouldn't roll out the red carpet like that. (-:0
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have a reciever with both digital coax and optical inputs. When looking over the cables deciding, a Best Buy rep (Monster cable certified as well) talked to me about it. I asked what cable I should get, optical or coax. His response was to go with the coax because optical is unreliable due to vibrations that might occur, distorting the sound. I asked how an expensive Monster Cable optical could possibly get to the point of cutting off the optical signal without someone physicially bending the cable really hard, and how enterprise storage solutions seems to work fine on miles of flimsy optical cable in server rooms with tons of possible minute vibrations from the air movement.
In the end, I went with a normal RCA cable for the run since it works.
The Christmas-before-last, I told my parents I wanted a GeForce2 video card and a stick of RAM for Christmas. Well, they went down to CompUSA, and came back with a video card, 256MB RAM (like I had asked for) also they came back with TV-tuner card, an Ethernet cable (25ft) and a monitor switching hub. We took everything back except for the video card and RAM, and demanded a refund for the stuff, because according to my parents, the salesman told them I had to have the other stuff in order to install the video card and RAM. They were this close to getting my parents to buy software to go along with it. Good thing their budget just ran out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Well, I don't know about salesmen, but I do recall Jon Katz telling 500,000 Slashdot readers about a guy named Junis connecting to the internet from Afganistan with a Commodore 64.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
When assembling a bunch of laptops for a remote sales force, I got a shipment of equipment in, including about 50 surge protectors.
They were all marked 'Windows 95 compatible'. This was mid 1996. DAMN I wish I'd kept one!
creation science book
And, just like Google, Slashdot caved in like the little sissies they are.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
"News for nerds. Stuff that Matters".
::dons asbestos suit::
In late 1995 I worked for a web shop that was desperate for clients. In an attempt to beef up sales, we hired a friend of the CEO to act as a salesman and marketing drone. This poor guy didn't know squat about the web, let alone computers. Believe me, we really tired hard to teach him, but the only information that he ever would retain were buzzwords.
Fast forward a month later. We are pitching a large consumer products firm about the Wonders of the Web; trying to give them an idea of what the web can do for them. In the middle of the presentation our sales guy blurts out, "It's totally CASE SENSITIVE!"
You could have heard a pin drop as we stared very hard at our pet freak.
there is a solution to that and they've done it. simply remove the code that does that. for example, have you ever seen a win98 BSOD in win2000? nope. there's an NT crash screen, but I'd bet the win98 BSOD screen doesn't even exist in their code!
http://wigner.cped.ornl.gov/the-gang/1999-01/13
Does anyone else remember some Bungie executive, perhaps the ceo, promissing that Halo would be released on the Macintosh, first, or at least simultaneously with the xbox?
I hate Microsoft.
My company was considering replacing our internal development repository control system (currently a combination of software from various vendors with an internally developed VB GUI) with all-in-one solutions.
I was on the review committee that saw presentations from various vendors.
I saw Sourceforge's presentation. 'Nuff said.
Granted, Pentiums haven't been commonplace in most consumer PCs for some time now, but there's still nothing at all wrong with their claims.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I remember a great article on burning CDs in an audiophile magazine.
After the expected disclaimers about the limited quality of CDs, etc, they proceeded to review the options for media, burners, configuration options, etc. Then, as expected, came the result of their listening tests. Although the differences were subtle, the best quality was obtained by using the most expensive drive, with the most expensive gold media, set on 1x recording speed.
The kicker came near the end, where the author noted that "even though all of the CDs we burned were bit-for-bit identical when compared on our computer, the bits on CDs produced with less expensive recorders or at higher recording speeds had dirtier edges, and repeated copying further degraded the quality of the bits".
This meant that a 4MZ Z80 was about the same as a 1MZ 6502 (actually, it'd often be slower because the 6502 was pretty much a RISC chip without the registers). Nonetheless I'd run into people who were absolutely sure that a (1Mz) Apple was much slower than a souped up (4mz) TRS-80.... rong.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...but related.
car dealer: "OK folks, here we have the brand new car. It's top speed is 300
km/h, it has 12 airbags, it automatically avoids traffic jams, it needs only
2 liter per 100 km. No competitor has something similiar. Isn't that
something?"
customer: "does it come with a tow-bar?"
car dealer: "not from the manufacturer. But it's all standard, you can buy
one somewhere else or build it yourself."
customer: "well, if it doesn't come with a tow-bar it doesn't make things
simpler. I'm probably going to stay with my tractor."
about 4 months ago, I finally got Windows 2k installed on my work computer. Previously, I had been running Windows 95, which had memory leaks with the software I had to use, so stopping/restarting all programs and rebooting was necessary at least every other day, and I usually powered down nightly.
With Windows 2k, I have had no downtime whatsoever (I had to reboot a couple times the first day because the install person screwed my password, butsince then, it's been running 24-7).
Some guy tried to tell me I had to convert all the equipment in my house to digital. His reason was that signals could not be converted back from digital into analog. He said that "once they've been converted to 1's and 0's, then that's it! they can't be converted back into analog. So if you don't get all new digital equipment now, you're analog stuff will be obsolete soon!"
So I asked him how those 0's and 1's ended up producing audio signals, video signals that we could see and hear. He didn't really have any answer for that, the guy was clueless. I can't even remembe what I went in there for, but this guy was trying to sell me the store, and I never went back.
When you call up your cable/satellite/phone/DSL vender and the first thing you hear is "All services running at full capicity" when you know damn well (through traceroute) that it's one of their servers killing your bandwith...
The convienent web interface will speed trouble reporting and resolution...Uh...Hello? The truth is they can do absolutely nothing constructive...close the ticket and have no interaction with the customer whatsoever until he or she tries to CALL in to the call center and gets the 45 minute callback announcement. The truth is, salespeople are just doing a job. If the purchasers would consult with engineers and describe what they are promising the internal customer, then the engineer could make an informed recommendation. Instead, salepeople take the purchaser out to lunches, the purchaser buys the line of crap they're shoveing, and then the end-user suffers..but of course we know it's always the desktop/server/network....
Yes, we do know what we are doing.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
This dickhead salesman sat in a meeting with us, including my boss, and told us we could run this product (DSS PRO for WinNT) with the 'agent' (which captures the packets) and the 'snifview' program (which lets you see the packets and run the agent) on the same machine.
The first goddamn time anything went wrong, the techies told us this wan't a supported configuration.
I sent the saleshit the URL for Ethereal, which I'm going to evaluate as replacement for all (or all but one) of our over-priced sniffers. He had to have one of his techies explain it to him.
But the real question is: how incompetent are your programmers when you can't run server and client on the same machine, but can do so on different machines? Isn't usually the other way around?
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
A friend of mine was supporting a group of a few hundred Wintendos boxes, and he ran into a problem where Excel was corrupting files on a semi-regular basis. When he took this to his assigned MS support rep, he was repeatedly told (over a number of months) "It must be something that you're doing wrong because I haven't been able to find anybody else with the same problem.
One day he was talking to this rep when my friend mentioned that he was talking to person X at company Y.
"Oh, yeah, he's one of my asignees,' interrupted the rep. "I talk to him all the time."
"Oh," replied my friend rather acusingly, "then you know about the problem that they've been having".
(They had been having the same problem for monthes and had been fed the same line by their [this same] MS rep.).
[guilty silence]
Busted!
And for this 'service' we paid thousands of dollars a year on top of the license fees.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I use Onebox.com as my voicemail box. I used to pay a yearly fee to get my own phone number (despite what it says below about a "free trial"), then they decided to cut the "premium" service altogether, but I got to keep the number. Here's a copy of the Onebox Plus page that's been up for the past year:
We have concluded our free trial of our Onebox Plus premium service and, due to the acquisition of Onebox.com, we have decided not to offer a paid premium service plan to users of our service. As a thank you for participating in our trial you may keep your Onebox Plus service for free. We have deleted your payment information from our system completely and you will never be charged for the Onebox Plus service.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us using the support form in our Help Center.
Thank you for your participation,
The Onebox.com Team
And HERE is the email I just received from OneBox:
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ONEBOX USERS
March 14, 2002
Dear Onebox customer,
Through the years, providing you with a reliable, high quality service has been our primary mission. In order to continue, Onebox will begin charging a nominal fee. If you would like to maintain your Onebox account, we require you choose a messaging package that best fits your needs no later than April 15, 2002. Unfortunately, if we do not receive your selection by this date we will discontinue your account.
If you have an account with Onebox, you will need to register for a paid subscription prior to this date. To subscribe, please click on the following link http://www.onebox.com/service/indexFounder.html . While registering, please update your profile information where necessary. To make the transition easier, your Onebox user name and password will remain the same and all your messages will stay in your account. However, you are required to change your phone number to a new, toll-free number.
Hmmmmm... What part of never didn't they understand? Bastards. I'd willingly pay them money to continue using my voicemail number, but they're not even giving me that option. Despite numerous emails asking about this, they haven't even responded. Bastards.
-Russ
Me
I'll be telling it in about 14 hours when I get to work tomorrow.
The misleading part is that the website only makes a vague reference to "pre-camp study". What that means is that you get to plow through 7 800 page books and you need to be hitting at least 50% to 60% on the Transcenders before you come to the camp or you don't have much chance of passing the exams.
One of the lies I remember specifically was when I asked the salesman if their product cached database query results. He confirmed it absolutely. Of course it didn't, which we found out during our training. It also didn't have date formatting in its templating system despite what the documentation said, so we had to build that.
Finally we got the thing into production and it crashed like mad. We never did find out why. Probably something to do with the NSAPI module that handled connections from the Netscape web server to the application server. Even when it wasn't crashing, performance was horrible.
That round of managers eventually left and the whole thing was re-done in mod_perl. Guess what? Stable, fast, easy to work with. Oh yeah, scalable too.
I wish I was home to post this a few hours ago - probably nobody will see this now.
One time I was at a conference sponsered by HP, Netscape, SCO and Oracle. It was called "UNIX in the Year 2000" (this was in 1998 or something). This took place in Israel. Netscape, SCO and Oracle sent some top-dog public-speakers from their European divisions, all of which gave great talks (even Oracle!)
HP had some guy from the Israeli vendors.
He was asked when HP is going to support 64-bit computing.
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Yes, caps and exclemation marks and all - the guy was YELLING at the person who asked the question. And he said this in front of HUNDREDS of highly experienced UNIX guys.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
One in particular that I ran into back when I was a kid - I was picking up a newer model soundblaster from a local computer store. I asked them if it could do general Midi, particularly emluating an MP-401 or a Roland system? They said yes, straight to my face. I mentioned that this was important to me, that it didn't just use the useless non-wavetable midi system of the old SB-16's and 8-bits.
This was, of course, bullshit. I tried to return it, but they would only give me store credit, and I didn't want anything else from them (mainly they had printers and full systems, very little in the way of parts).
I also had massive difficulty with the driver disk they gave me, so I mailed the company, and was informed that the card they gave me was an OEM edition specifically designed for use in certain systems, never intended to be sold separately.
At the time I didn't know this was standard procedure for the computer industry (I don't by anything but OEM, and most of it isn't meant for use outside pre-built boxes) so I ratted the store out for selling me that card.
Really, I feel kinda sleazy about it - the store was gone within a month, I wonder if it was my fault? Still, they did it to themselves, trying to rip off a middle schooler.
Whatever, that's the closest thing I know to the subject.
When it comes to protecting something important to us we're almost all sissies. Some of the smartest decision in life involve a concession or retreat of some sort. Life isn't like the movies, where in the end the hero gets rewarded for standing up for principle. Instead, you tend to wind up broken and regretful. Life is a long, long game, and it's tough to get to the other end without falling into the traps along the way. An easy way to fall prey to those traps is to make decisions based on pride and ego.
2 things:
1) Bought a DVD player as a gift from Best Buy. The checkout girl asks if I want the service plan. I say no. She says, "Well the technology in these things is changing all the time. It won't be able to play the DVDs that come out 6 months from now." That's why she's the checkout girl.
2) My friend who knows nothing about computers just wanted something to do email and word processing. She is also poor, so I took her to Best Buy to buy one of those cheapy e-machines. Like everything else, they don't have any. I remark that they shouldn't advertise stuff they don't have in stock. The sales guy bitchily replies, "You should have called first." That pissed me off, so back and forth until finally he says "You wanna take it outside?" Where do they get these people?
300M - $350 1.2G - $180 4.0G - $160 40G - $140
One of the (many) times that I had occasion to contact Iomega's technical support department due to a non-functioning drive, it went something like this:
Me: My drive makes strange noises when I put in a disk.
Iomega Rep: Is your Zip drive within 6 feet of your monitor?
Me: Why yes, it is?
Iomega Rep: Well, that could be the problem.
Me: Interesting...well, the cord that came with the drive is only 2 feet long. Should I try stretching it?
Needless to say, I eventually had to send it back. The one good thing I can say about Zip drives...the one year warranty never expires! You get a new one every 6-9 months when the old one dies.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
"I programmed this to happen to demonstrate the flexibilty of the program."
Former boss, while demonstrating our software, when a software-generated object started doing whatever it wanted [marching from left to right and back as if it were a target in a shooting gallery], in plain sight
Oh, please.
Ignoring the fact that AMD has no real choice in the matter since they would likely lose sales badly to higher-MHz Intel chips, I don't see how it's "lying to your customer" to accurately represent the performance of your chip when naming it. Hell, while I'm not a big believer in benchmarks, many of them show that the numbers AMD puts on the Athlons are actually rather conservative. There are 3DMark benchmarks out there that have the XP1600 ahead of a P4-2000, SysMark with the XP1500 ahead of the P4-2000, compiling a Linux kernel also with the XP1500 ahead of the P4-2000, blah blah blah.
I wouldn't expect such performance on a consistant basis in the real world, but the Athlon CPUs do perform quite well. To the best of my knowledge, all Athlon mobos display CPU speed on startup as well. It's not as if AMD is trying to shove the speed under the rug entirely; they're just naming their processors to accurately reflect their actual performance so they can remain competitive. It's most certainly not anywhere close to being the most outrageous vendor lie ever told.
I think this belongs, despite the fact that Bill Gates was actually speaking the truth when he said, a few days before the roll-out of Windows 95, that people needing tech support from Microsoft would never be kept on hold for longer than an hour.
Yup, it was the literal truth. Anyone who called Microsoft waited on hold, and then, after 59 minutes, they were cut off.
(For those who don't know crypto, this doesn't exist.)
In a later episode, at a company party, there was a "raffle" for a Palm III (it was several years ago). The sign said "Enter your business card for a chance to win a Palm III". My wife thought it a little fishy that the company's biggest customer won and her suspicions were confirmed when she later heard her boss (the same one) bragging how he had rigged the contest so the customer would win.
said bill gates anno 1981
well then, everytime you thing you have at last enough mem/hard drive space for everything you will discover a programme which needs more.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"A wide range of programs exist for the Texas Instruments Home Computer"
- found on the box to my TI99/4A
Was he talking about DOS'ing competitors off the net? :-)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So as friends around me were getting cable modems, I was envious. Then I got the flier saying "Cable modem access is now available in your area!" Lying bastards, they said otherwise when I called in and gave them my address. For six months, I continued to call back, only to be told I couldn't get anything.
Then a breakthrough happened - instead of calling in, I could enter my address in a new web form and check it myself. Still no luck, however. After another couple months, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I entered in my neighbor's address - bingo! It's available. I entered every address on my street, and every one could order cable model access right away. Me? Nope.
I called them up again, and when I was told again it wasn't available, I yelled "WAIT!!!" I explained the circumstances, and the girl looked in to the situation. Here's the kicker - I was told "Your house isn't on that street."
Turns out that the previous owner of the house never had cable, so the specific house address was never in their database, even after I ordered digital cable. So they sent a guy out, check the line (got one of the best signals he'd ever seen, btw) and a few weeks after that I was finally up and running.
Sheesh.
Reinstall Windows 95 and keep an eye out for the pitches made during the installation
m.mmm..myyy
Yea, a 1GHz G4 is just as fast 1.4 GHz Athlon. Great. Too bad that 1.7 GHz Athlons are dirt cheap in comparison to any Apple machine!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"At the game developers conference, Sun is releasing a white paper on their new "Java Games Profile." Their ultimate goal? To have one CD you could pop into an Xbox, a PS2, a Windows machine, or a Linux machine, and play the same game on them all. If they get full support for it I can finally get rid of that windows gaming partition!"
You are a terrible person.
God will punish you.
God is an Anonymous Coward
We had way too many false positives with their Scanner and Realsecure, even had an ISS guy onsite for a few days. Still, too many problems. With vendor support that... well... is a pain in the *@&%#$ to deal with we switched to Snort and Nessus . Much easier to manage and the false positives went to almost nothing. I'm not even going to start on the Managed firewall crap!
Might it be because of watching people crap on Motorola for years, because their processors don't run at the same clock speed as Intel chips?
No matter how hard you try, people have the "Megahertz myth" burned into their brains.
Clear, Dark Skies
Who purchases a high end Disk Solution only to run it on lunix boxes?
What the hell has this world come to. If you are running on an OS full of moving targets don't blame your storage solution which is meant to not be touched for years.
EMC still sucks, though.
Intel is (for better or worse) the benchmark for CPU speeds these days. Athlon is not selling the 2200 as a 2200mz processor, they're selling it as the equivalent to a 2200Mz P4. In terms of informing a customer of how (relatively) fast their CPU will run quake, this is accurate.
Anybody who knows enough to build and install a wall-mount CPU clock meter that actually measures the clock speed is likely to know that the AMD really is equivalent to the 2.2Gz Intel. For the rest of us, the AMD rating is both more informative for the average customer, and less un-flattering to AMD.
For an equivalent to this argument: Imagine if people bragged about what RPM their wheels span at rather then the speed that their car drove at. If you wanted to really brag, you'd get a 1/4" wheel and run it at 2200RPM (a whopping 1.6 miles/hour). One could argue that this is not unlike what Intel has been doing with the P4 vs the P3/athlon.
Think about it -- they're trying to sell a 1GZ P4 an an entry leve system about a year after the P3/800 was out -- but the year-old P3 (which would have normally been the entry level system by now) would have been faster than the P4 if intel hadn't 'de-emphasized' the P3.
This is why people came out with the dhrystone, whetstone and other benchmarks back in the '80s -- to get comparisons of the relative cpu power across various CPU architectures for which one-for-one CPU clock speeds were entirely inappropriate (e.g. a 4Mz Z80 was about the same speed as a 1Mz 6502 -- mostly becasuse the Z80 took 4 clock cycles to grab a byte of memory while a 6502 only took one).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Ok, I heard this from a guy at work, but it was hilarious.. and, sadly, I could really see it happening with our management.
He was in a meeting where the guy running the show was talking about the financial prospects for the coming year.
Ok, contract "A" is worth $100mil, but we only stand a 10% chance of winning it.
Contract "B" is worth $20mil, and we stand a 40% chance of winning it.
Contract "C" is only worth $10mil, but we stand an 80% chance of winning that one...
so, 10% of $100mil, plus 40% of $20mil, plus 80% of $10mil, means that we should make about $26mil in the coming year.
As all the other management was knodding their heads in agreement, the guy who told the story popped up and questioned what happened if we didn't win the 1st two contracts... or any of them for that matter. He was given a glare and ignored.
I had to uninstall the hotfixes, which really sucks, because you have to uninstall each one individually and then reboot--there's no way to do them all at once. So it takes me 6 reboots to uninstall this POS. That's win2k for you.
Everything went down hill when Belkin/Monster started dominating the retail cable market. Jesus christ it's hard to find cheap cables. Not as if spending $60 on cables would make a damn difference over $5 cables.. I remember going to Compusa to look for a CD-audio pass though cable and seeing the $18 price tag. WTF is that?
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
A great lie is the supposed "MicroKernel" Windows NT. .NETs
In NT4 it even got graphics engine part of the kernel IIRC
One of the advantage of a microkernel is easy portability. Ha! Can't wait to run an IIS server on my Dreamcast!!!
Hey dude what's that new awesome game?
Thats the newest hit from Microsoft, it's called Code Red!
It's a peer-to-peer game. We have to avoid getting caught in distributed
delete free(system.gc);
*smirk*
If you dealt with the "registers" on a 6502, this is funny. (ah, the freedom of the 680x0 series... yet the Apple ][ was just *so* well put together).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
apparently Jeff Minter's XBox died after a day or so.
:)
How could they do this to the Yak? (Of course, with his fetish for all things bovine, he refers to it as an Xb-ox
deus does not exist but if he does
Windows 95: It will be free of MS-DOS Windows 98: It will be free of MS-DOS Windows ME: DOS, you mean DOS? DOS isn't here...
My brother used condoms and died.
After phoning an Amiga vendor in Sydney, I asked about the prices for a new A1200, and chatted about Amigas in general - A1200's were still pretty expensive, around $1000 australian for one, and I commented on the price, also noting I'd been looking at a second hand powermac for a fifth of what he was charging.
In all seriousness he told me "An Amiga can emulate a macintosh faster than the fastest Mac runs".
This was apparently true for a few months When the first 68040 Amigas came out, but I'm damned sure quoting it to me in 2000 when G4's were hitting 500Mhz is just a small lie :P.
Back when I was a wee lad, we my dad for some reason agreed to let this guy come to our house to sell us this food service thing, where we'd get a freezer and have food delivered every so often, or some such thing.
My mother wasn't taking well to the pitch at all but it was when the guy said "our beef is higher quality than what you'll get in the supermarket. Our cows are fed a healthy diet of [corn or some cow food I forget]. The cows that go to your supermarket are fed only sticks and rocks" that my mother finally gave him the boot.
DeMe is a drug addict. I am not trolling. He'll +b you if you aren't careful. I'm rambling. NEG ME! Please? I'm not high. Shh, I'm not. I'm just happy. Very happy. Happy! 3 being happy.
DALnet is sexy.
Services rule.
Long ago, Nintindo was party to many 'anti-competitive' practicies regarding their rival, sega.
The most notable of these practices was putting out fake press released about upcoming nintindo products claiming to be comprable to newly released sega products... Their announcment of the SNES system held so much weight with gamers in getting them to hold off on buying a Genesis, they started using this power against all new sega products even if they had no intention of releasing the products they were announcing.
One of the most notable claims they made was the "Nintindo CD Add-on" to the SNES that they announced with the release of the SegaCD.
I overheard a couple talking to a salsemsn about Netscape Navigator, and they asked what the difference was between the one in the box and the one you could download. He said, "Yes, there is a version you can download, but it doesn't have as many features and things as the retail one."
To this day I still don't know why I didn't 'step in', but I figured 'Hey, this country operates by people trying to make money off of stupid people, who am I to change things?'
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
DeMe, you are a dog lovin' cow.
"w00t,"
Meerkat
"Chicks dig Unix Manuals"
Aselam you all, my brethren!
May allah shine his devine light upon you like a lensflare from the heavans above.
Catir, aniec.
One of my former employers actually sent a six-figure (in price) minicomputer to a customer that hadn't ordered it, to count it as a 'sale' just before they were acquired by another company. They were doing a lot of other shady crap too. After the merger went through, all the dirty deeds came to light, and the stock price of the new combined company dropped from around $80 to about $12.
Needless to say, those guys are facing stockholder lawsuits and possible jail time.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
I have an ãÑÍÈÇ for you!
Selam!
J^Raxis
when I asked the salesman in the video department about cables i also needed, and he saw that i had a surge protector (different from those in his department), he tried to pitch his units.
i asked him the difference between his and the ones across the store. "oh, these ones are specially made for home entertainment systems."
i was intrigued, and asked him exactly how. "oh, the voltage is different, and these are made for TV systems circuits."
yeah. thanks, dude. now go away...
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
Meerkat..you are one to talk. Go fulfill your necrodandrophiliac fantasy by molesting a dead shrub...freakzoid.
In the spring/summer of 1997 I was in the market for about 40 workstations for running engineering apps. We were an HP shop at the time and our friendly HP salesperson of the month explained to me how the C180 system boards were pin compatible with the Merced, which was due out in about a year. This would be an investment protection because we all know how fast Intel's first attempt at a 64-bit chip is going to be, right?
:)
When I asked him what the current status of the chip was, he told me that one of the big three auto makers (I think he said GM) had converted almost entirely to HP workstations running beta merceds and the performance was quite good compared to the PA7800 (or did the C180 come with the PA8000?).
The following year we bought Ultra 10's. They cost 1/3 as much and performed just as well as whatever HP was hocking at the time. Rather ironically, the Ultra 10's did actually come with a certain amount of x86 compatiblity with the SunPCi cards that they came with.
Cyrix used to do that... I fell for it back when I didn't know any better (5x86)... Of course, you see where they are now...
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
"Shared Source"
Less than 6 months ago I saw a shinkwrapped retail Creative Labs 56k modem at Wal-Mart with a sticker on the box that said "Y2K and MP3 Compatible."
:(
Its a sorry bastard that is gonna be buying that modem. I remember *trying* to download MP3s over a dialup line.
-Jeff
Didn't I read here on /. that a consultant sold someone an entire class A range of IP numbers for their business... starting with 10.x.x.x ? ;-^)
The sample press release with names altered out from that vendor hype article actually belongs to TrueAdvantage :)
(see here... - thx google
Nevrar
FUCK off, you.
Look no further than your next Slashdot news item.
is enough for anyone
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Sun is releasing a white paper on their new "Java Games Profile." Their ultimate goal? To have one CD you could pop into an Xbox, a PS2, a Windows machine, or a Linux machine, and play the same game on them all.
A few years back, my Mom wanted to buy a computer. She asked my older brother what to get. "Don't buy an IBM AT, buy a compatible with a 386." She in turn asked my other brother, and me, and we all gave the same answer: get a 386.
So she bought an IBM PC AT with a 286 and 512 KB of RAM. "Why?!?!?" I asked.
"Well, the salesman told me it was the fastest computer they made." Okay, the AT he sold her was an 8 MHz 286, not the usual 6 MHz 286, and that did in fact make it the fastest PC AT that IBM ever made. But any 386 would have smoked it, and been able to run real software as well.
Not a vendor lie story, but still interesting, is the postscript to this story. After a year or so, the power supply in her AT died. As it died, it fried her motherboard too. We contacted IBM, and they informed us that we would have to ship the computer to them, then wait 6 to 8 weeks, for a repair; there would be no guarantee of any sort on the repair; and it would cost $X00 (I don't remember exactly how much but it was a lot). And of course after all this she would still have a 286 running at 8 MHz.
We went down to a friendly local computer shop. They installed a new power supply, a new motherboard with a 386SX and 2 MB of RAM, and a new VGA-compatible display adapter. They burned it in overnight to make sure all was working, and we picked it up the next day. Total cost was less than IBM had wanted to repair the AT.
I like to tell this story when people don't understand why I like my computers to be made from standard, easily-replaceable parts. (Apple's new iMac is cute, but I don't want one.)
My mom still has that computer, by the way, and it still works.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Linux on the Desktop....
Oops.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
mmm.... AltiVec goodness.
I think I wet myself.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Posted by CmdrNacho on Monday March 25, @06:51AM
From the "we should have seen this coming" dept.
Well it looks like our (ex) favourite search engine, Google has delisted slashdot due to a DMCA threat recieved by the scientologists this morning.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
When you search on price scanning sites and see those wonderful deals on digital cameras and such, it has been my experiance that almost every one of the vendors will say absolutly anything to get you to buy more. For instance I was told when buying by Sony trv-17 that a .4 wide angle lens is better then a .3, because a .3 casues too much barrel distortion (all wide angles do) when i asked for a .3 they didnt have. tsk tsk they still havent refunded me for some otehr mistakes.
is not every microsoft list of "system requirements" for the OS/App of the month at least half of what's actually required? consistantly? that deserves respect here, especially since the suckers still buy in.
heh.
Williw
I live in downtown Philadelphia. I was delighted to hear that my particular neighborhood was in comcast country. (We lost our local ABC channels when Turner and Disney had their little pissing contest the year before.)
Suffice to say after several (previosly mentioned by fellow slashdotters) after yatting with a few of the service guys at the local diner, I learned that it just wasn't happening.
Fortunately I live about a block from work, so I am in the process of rigging some 802.11 from to roof for broadband. There are times where it is good to be the admin.
Muhahahahahah
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Like the things your buttons go into, that have the stitched reinforcements on the sides?
Still, a hilarious typo.
Back in the 2nd half of the 90's, DV (digital video) poised to take the consumer video camcorder market by storm. The pesky Europeans had a taxation clause which added a hefty tax on professional digital video recorders, which would have also included consumer camcorders. The manufacturers disabled DV-IN in order to avoid this hefty sales tax. Australia on the other hand did not have this stupid tax, so most camcorders shipped with DV-IN enabled (just like in the US).
So I step into Ted's cameras (a big franchise in Australia) and ask for a Canon-MV1 (a PAL version of the Optura) and specifically ask if DV-IN was enabled. "Yes, all our cameras have DV-IN enabled". "Fine, here is the $3600 for the camera". 18 months later I finally purchase a Firewire card, and guess what, DV-IN is disabled on my model. Who do I complain to? It sucks, doesn't it.
Revolution = Evolution
Is there a description of what flamebait is somewhere? This is really starting to get on my nerves. Seems like I get modded down as flamebait quite a bit. Either there's something to the way I post, or some people's definition of what flambebait is a little off from mine. I'm asking for clarification.
I am dead serious this is what they said. I used to work for a game retailer. I used to sell those stupid things and the first run of them had a very high (1 in 4) defect rate! Couple that with a shortage, and you have a PR problem. Sony's response was 'The customers are mistreating the systems.'
I kid you not. I'm not exaggerating, that is what REALLY HAPPENED.
"Derp de derp."
Just wanted to show my appreciation to those who listened to me. Thank you.
"Derp de derp."
Well, it's a de facto standard due to MS' market share and it could well be a standard in (lousy) reliability and (poor) performance if we ignore the implied meaning.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
"Like the things your buttons go into, that have the stitched reinforcements on the sides?"
Yes, you are quite right. It was in either a Sear's ad or a JC Penny's ad, but my dad did show it to me. I have the image somewhere on a CD, but I don't think I could find it and post it before this topic loses interest.
I forgot to mention this was back in like the 60's or 70's. Not sure which but it was definitely a more conservative time. Today 'buttholer' is Beavis and Butthead funny, but I bet when this ad went to print people called up deeply offended, threatening to cancel subscriptions on their newspapers etc. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
Actually, Google restored the links to Xenu.net on Friday. It was a front page story on Yahoo!
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
Further along the lines of deception, Microsoft put up a little notice that Windows was not reliable on Dr. DOS, then set it up to crash after posting the notice. Microsoft also remapped Quicktime file suffixes to Windows Media Player without telling the users. Microsoft even put buggy APIs in their operating system, while at the same time, they implemented undocumented, non-buggy versions of the APIs for their own products to use.
Frankly, it is foolish to trust Microsoft at all. Things Microsoft is saying today will almost certainly be uncovered as lies in a couple years. Does anyone really believe that .NET will be cross-platform? Does anyone, besides Miguel De Icaza, believe that Mono will be fully compatible with CLR?
The veep of Engineering was a total moron, chosen because he must have been blowing the CEO behind closed doors. Anyways, one day while he was out with a large potential customer, trying to sell them scads of huge automotive engine testers, he was asked "What operating system does it use?"
He told them, "Word." They, apparently, believed him., as they bought a bunch of them.
Lemon curry?
Cyrix chips also had compatability issues with Intel processors. Although I must say, I used to work in a computer store and we would always explain the whole PR thing to customers, and upon hearing that, most didn't want the Cyrix. People are just too fixated on sheer MHz.
I always thought that the last chapter should be, "What do I do if it still doesn't work?"
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Scraping the encrusted cat shit from the litterbox will suddenly become a joy, not a chore.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Those aren't bullet holes...they're speed holes!
The point he was trying to make is that "Replace the PS2 with an XBox because the XBox is more reliable" is a flat out lie. If a salesman told this to me I would punch him in the face. If he said "Replace the PS2 with an XBox because the XBox is more fun", he would still be lying, but I wouldn't punch him in the face. (I would just tell him to get the hell away from me)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The worst for me (personal) was what Matrox did with the G400 Marvel - a nice bit of kit for video capture under Win98. Drivers were promised - a Win2K version was comming - and in the end, they turn the card into nothing more than a TV-Tuner if you want to run under Win2K. Very nice. (grrrr) Win9x was no treat with large files and what not... not the OS for (low end) video editing. When push came to shove, they pointed out it never actually said they supported Win2K - though they sure as hell hinted.
They "offered" a credit to buy the Marvel G450(?) for ~$250 (about what you paid on-line anyhow) that only did software encoding rather than the hardware encoding the G400 would do.
May they rot in hell.... Not that I'm bitter, 'cause I'm not.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Sometime within the last couple of years, there was a similar article asking about the best demo presentations people had given. Basically, a similar question, but from the opposite perspective. Some people had some pretty good stories to tell. I went searching for it a month or so ago, but didn't find it. Anyone remember some specific words from the title of the article so it would be easier to find?
And worked without fail
On that which I was assigned
Others may try to curtail
My glorious prowess
Over programming structure
But they no less
Than a pile of manure
As all my lies are just
All my time is valuable
Stalk, Stalk, Stalk
Gosh the others they cry
All I do is subvert and lie
Stalk Stalk stalk stalk till they die
The biggest lies I have ever been told have been by my employer.
"We plan to add a 401K plan this year".
"Our matching plan is BETTER than a 401K"
"We pay for overtime worked"
"We anticipate 50%/annum growth this year"
"This is an informal low-stress company"
"most people work from 9 to 6"
"we offer a competitive salary plan"
"your raise is being reviewed, we will get back to you shortly on the amount, which will be retroactive to your anniversary"
"we are going to replace our obsolete systems next month"
"we will hire additional staff this month to relieve the overworked sysadmin team"
I used to work for a computer resale store and here are the biggest lies I ever heard:
1) Yes we sell licenced copys of windows with every machine. (Win 3.1 days... our copies were on ubiquitus black verbatim disks with pen written lables all registered to elvis...)
2) Wow I can't believe you had problems with the hardware we sold, we test everything top to bottom before we sell it. (Yup we looked at it.. if no smoke stains must be good)
3) Of course a Cirix 486-120Mhz runs almost as fast as a P-120 (yeah in MS dos 6.22 who can tell?)
4) We have a well trained staff who caters to our customers needs. (Yes, and to their own... getting your comp back with 16M of ram instead of 32 but with the resolution turned up fools a lot of people)
Needless to say I didn't work there too long...
I like replies better than Karma, even if they are flames, because that tells me I got someone thinking.
This is from the mouth of a third level tech support from Maxtor explaining why their 20 gig HD doesn't work with their 8 gig HD on the same IDE cable.....
"Well the Master/Slave on an IDE cable is only a theory, so it doesn't always work.
The assumption being that the quality of your experience with the web is directly proportional to how well they can target advertisements at you.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Don't you dumbasses realize that all the problems with Microsoft are what's keeping you in your job outside of the MS universe?
And for those of us that do IT support for small businesses, THEY DON'T USE ANYTHING BUT MICROSOFT!
They don't understand anything else, there are no off the shelf utilities and programs for them, no other office suite than MS Office has the balls to sell to every business and government agency in the world, and there are no department stores that they can go to on "Sunday at the mall" to find someone to sell them on something else.
So, until one of you has the brains to write your own Office Suite and promote it to everyone in the world, or until you guys want to sell on Sunday, SHUT UP! Bill will hang himself.
connection. That was almost ten years ago. The company set up a demo in the board room that ran the client on the same box as the server (dual PPro200).
Funny, after we bought it all the support calls worked via pay-by-minute software. Sucked to be one of those trying to do non-nature show streaming video at the time. Ah, can you give us any reference accounts (wicked grins - and a lot of pr0n later...)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
100% uptime.
So we either get rid of the guns or the people who would use them to kill. Which do *you* think is easier, hmmm?
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
Prey.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
i saw this advertisement in the paper once... it said, 'last chance to send your $5 to '
... THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME YOU SEE THIS MESSAGE TO GET IN ON IT JUST SEND IN YOUR $5!'
... but again, i was also 6 years old... i had a hell of alot of fun with that one.
so me, being the copycat i am, i did the same in my local paper... in BIG bold print, i wrote, LAST CHANCE TO SEND YOU $5 TO
i got about $750
Runnin' On Empty
I heard of a few people here who got vaguely harrassing e-mail from the Co$. Don't know if it was related to negative comments they posted after the comment removal incident, but if it was... heh heh. Come and get us. I can't think of many better technical communities to challenge than Slashdot--probably because of its unique aggressive flavor that arises in times of conflict. :)
The coolest voice ever.
"Whatever you do will now be faster and more fun!"
I'd love see to a class-action brought by people who did not pass their kidney stones faster, and certainly didn't have more fun doing so, after installing Windows 95.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Er, um, no. The first is "x doesn't y z. z y z". In your example, you switched it to "x doesn't y x. z y x".
For your statment to be accurate, you should have said, "Toasters don't make people. People make people".
yes, but Cyrix wasn't conservative at ALL with their PR numbers. Cyrix's numbers were complete bullshit. AMD's numbers actually have a bearing on reality.
Cyrix's CPUs were both inferior clock-for-clock and did not run as fast as Intel CPUs. Cyrix tried a PR scheme to fool stupid people into buying crap.
AMD's CPUs are superiour clock-for-clock but do not run as fast as Intel CPUs. AMD is using a PR scheme to prevent stupid people falling into the MHz pit. As far as I'm concerned, AMD is doing 'em a favor.
When estimating the amount of time required for few of it's consultants to complete a set of tasks, estimated that 6000 hours would be required. (at $200/hour)
One small problem.
My boss and I completed the tasks in three days.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
"fearsomely fast Power Mac G4 squarely in the lead as the ultimate high-end graphics workstation"
"Graphics performance is off the charts
"The dual 1GHz Power Mac G4 is an astonishing 72 percent faster than the fastest PC on the market
"The PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine -- the chip that put supercomputing power on the desktop with the original Power Mac G4"
ha.. ha haa hoo HOO HAA ha haa!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
They often have triple shielding and claim that shielding is much more crucial for digital cables, when the truth is the exact opposite. You only need the shielding if you are passing through analog audio, where the noise is inseparable from the signal.
Using S/PDIF over the shittiest RCA cable you can find, with large amounts of interference, you still won't lose a single bit of data in the transfer.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Unbreakable
Diakatana team to develop Windows 2004 (Codename Mordor)
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The advertisement is from the Kansas City Star, circa 1970s. I happen to have a copy here, in National Lampoon's "True Facts: The Big Book." [1] The ad reads:
"Convertible free-arm sewing machine
Has 12 built-in, dial-to-sew stitches plus built-in button-holer. Includes 4 utility, 4 stretch, 4 decorative stitches. Built-in blind hemmer-mending stitch. Ask about Maintenancec Agreements. $159.95."
And on the left-hand side, in a white field, it reads "Built-in Buttholer!"
-Waldo Jaquith
[1] ISBN 0-8092-3559-2
Vendor: This ship is totally unsinkable!!
Buyer: really?
Vendor: yup, it is the biggest ever built
buyer: ok I'll take it. whats its name?
Vendor:The Titanic
I found a 99$ window and tried to install it on my computer, but it wouldn't fit in the CD drive.
-raph
it wasn't supposed to be an Atomic Butt-holer?
"There are no known performance issues with Java3D"
-- in the context of talking about whether or not it was too slow for graphic-intensive games --
While there is more consistency now, at Best Buy you would look at all the expensive speakers in the computer department, wander over to the stereo department and get something similar for a lot less. The same thing went for audio cables and CD holders, headphones...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I've done my time in the US military, and the biggest lie I was told, during my enlisted service, was ...
MRE = Meal, Ready to Eat
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
A customer complained about a bug.
The boss said: "That's not a bug, that's a feature."
What kind of complete moron would sign a license agreement with that line in it? That means you have to use that company's product forever. Actaully, technically speaking, you can't even upgrade the program without a special waiver.
I hope whoever signed that deal got shoved out the door so fast they got two week's pay instead of two weeks notice.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm posting this anonymous for a good reason - I know people who have been fired for even hinting at this stuff publically.
I work for the largest ISP in New Zealand - we are strongly associated with the largest Telco (who have a virtual monopoly on landlines)
We have been told to outright lie to customers relating to a number of issues, including
* Dropping port speeds to virtually 0 on a number of P2P applications
* Running out of IP addresses to give to paying DSL customers
* DSL network outages due to extremely poor design - we are not allowed to confirm these until "the word" comes through - even when half the country is without service.
We have to tell these lies every day - I don't think it will suprise anyone to know that Xtra (the ISP) has a content partnership with MSN.
The worst part is - half this stuff gets out in press-releases before we even get told at the helpdesk; and we're still meant to lie to customers even when the info is public!
Despicable if you ask me - I'm leaving as soon as I can.
We do Linux
(on thier web page, too): "Take our exam package (Cisco, Microsoft, A+, etc.), and if you fail twice within 90 days of buying our $1500 package, then we'll refund your money." Yeah. Well, I've just settled with the bank 2 years later (after calling and calling FFT) for a $1200 settlement. Seems kinda shady to me.
it's so easy to use... NO WONDER IT'S #1!!!
I had to have a cellular phone that was international-capable.
The deal was done. I tried to call. No go.
I went back to complain. This phone doesn't call international.
"That's because it doesn't have enough watts. You need the 5-watt bag phone to be able to call international."
"Some Assembly Required"
I'm growing to hate those words...
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
My "digital" cable service (RCN of Manhattan) uses a crappy Motorola cable box that sports a "Dolby Digital" logo on the front...but only provides analog audio and composite video outputs. That should be illegal!
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
people! pewter-balls are PEOPLE!!!!! arrrrrrgh!
>>Unless they're one of the clued in types, they'll fall for the larger number
:)
I heard a Fry's electronics sales guy this weekend "clueing" in some customers that were looking at some iMacs. He said you had to multiple the Mhz by 2.5 on the Mac side to compare it to Athlons
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
As a runner up, I guess I'd list, "You can't move into the 21st century without video conferencing".
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
So I go to buy a printer cable for my wife's laptop, and this guy INSISTS that this more expensive cable is indeed, E triple I compiant.
being a lapsed member of the IEEE, I laughed. Out loud.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
They sell macs at Fry's? And further, the sales guy was trying to sell one? Ye Flipping Gods! Whats the world coming to?
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
For a nice instruction & register set for an 8 bit processor, the 6809 is still my runaway favorite.
The 68000 seemed like a cross between the 360 and the VAX -- another nice, clean processor with a good set of addressing modes.
Accordingo to a friend of a friend, Motorola lost the processor war when they instituted mandatory drug testing among their employees... By the time the recognized the stupidity of that move, they'd lost a number of really good processor designers.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Actually, I have to agree. Win2K with the latest service packs isn't bad. Stability is good, setup isn't too hard, and it doesn't have all the user-hostile crap that comes with XP. It's better than NT 4, and almost as stable as NT 3.51 SP5.
I'd just like to add that I'm terribly disturbed that C|net is more of a M$ pawn than I thought.
Story 1:
Microsoft exec: Bundling only a benefit
By Bloomberg News
Special to CNET News.com
February 1, 1999, 6:05 PM PT
update WASHINGTON--Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system in many regards doesn't offer consumers more benefits than they could get by installing the company's Internet Explorer Web browser on an earlier version of Windows, said Microsoft senior executive James Allchin.
That testimony in the company's antitrust trial goes to the heart of one of Microsoft's main lines of defense: That the company put a Web browser in Windows 98 to benefit consumers, not squelch competition from rival browsers.
Under relentless cross-examination by the government's lead attorney, David Boies, Allchin acknowledged that Windows 98 gave consumers roughly the same capabilities they would get from separately installing Internet Explorer into an older version of Windows.
Boies grilled Allchin using the same videotaped presentation that Microsoft attorneys presented in court to detail the benefits of Windows 98.
Nineteen times, Boies played a clip from the tape and asked Allchin about Windows 98's purported benefits. He asked Allchin, "If you took a Windows 95 machine without any Internet Explorer technologies and added a browser that you got off the Internet, you'd get the same rich experience you got here?"
Allchin, whose answers became less and less audible, responded, "Yes, I believe that's correct."
The second Microsoft executive to take the stand at the company's antitrust trial under way here added that when Internet Explorer is installed separately on an operating system, it "replaces core files" in Windows that enable the browser to run in much the same way Windows 98's Web browsing function does.
"It doesn't matter where [consumers] get the software," Allchin testified, referring to Internet Explorer.
Boies shot back, "Within Microsoft, it mattered a great deal because if [consumers] got [Internet Explorer] one way it represented a competitive choice, and if they got it another way the consumer had to take it, right?"
Allchin agreed with the assertion after Boies showed him a copy of an email the executive sent in December 1995 that discussed Microsoft needing to "leverage Windows more" to gain share in the Internet browser market.
Critical exchange
Today's courtroom exchange is critical to the case against Microsoft brought by the Justice Department and 19 states, which allege the company used illegal tactics to protect its Windows monopoly from competitive threats posed by emerging Internet technologies. The government alleges Microsoft realized Internet browsers could become alternate computer operating systems.
The company responded by "welding" Internet Explorer to Windows to ensure a dedicated distribution method with the majority of computer users. Windows runs on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers.
Company officials frequently cite, as they did today, language in a June 1998 appeals court decision in a related dispute that said the company is free to integrate new products into Windows as long as some consumer benefit results. That language was not central to the appeals court's decision.
Speaking outside the courthouse after the trial adjourned today, Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray dodged a question about the benefits Windows 98 has that consumers couldn't get by installing Microsoft's browser separately.
Instead, emphasizing the appellate court ruling, he said, "The government's case is really about trying to dictate product design...which would set back the growth of the high-tech sector in our economy."
Boies' questioning of Allchin today was intended to support the government's claim that there is no reason for Microsoft to link the two products except to illegally maintain its Windows monopoly. To support this charge, Boies cited pretrial testimony by Microsoft executive Ben Slivka, who answered "yes" when asked if integrating the browser into Windows was a response to the threat posed by Internet browsers.
Boies read this part of Slivka's deposition to Allchin, asking him if he agreed. Allchin answered: "Yes," saying that Microsoft "believed Netscape was a serious potential platform threat" to Windows.
Last week, Microsoft senior executive Paul Maritz testified that the software giant had asked Netscape not to compete against it in the Internet browser market in an attempt to have Netscape instead build products that worked with Windows.
Roll the video
Microsoft provided the ammunition for Boies' attack by introducing into evidence almost three hours of videotaped presentations. That video was intended to prop up Allchin's direct testimony about why it was important include Internet browsing technologies in Windows 98, which went on sale last June.
One segment featured Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at a 1995 conference explaining to software developers how Microsoft planned to make it easier to access information on the Internet by "reducing the number of steps the user has to learn." The company planned to "set standards" for configuring Web sites to help Internet users find information, he said.
Another video purported to show the ease with which computer users could "seamlessly" move from accessing files within their personal computers to information on the Internet. Microsoft employee David Fester showed that such features were unavailable when Navigator was loaded onto a Windows 95-based personal computer.
Boies called the comparison irrelevant. "This is not a trial about whether Navigator is better than [Internet Explorer] or whether [Internet Explorer] is better than Navigator," he told reporters. "This is a trial about whether consumers ought to have a free choice" between Web browsers, he said, noting later that Allchin's testimony showed that Microsoft had "no technological justification for what was done."
At the close of the day's proceedings, Microsoft attorney John Warden asked U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to "nullify" an earlier order barring the attorneys from talking to their witnesses outside the courtroom. Jackson turned Warden down.
Shares of Microsoft fell 2.0625 to close at 172.9375.
Story 2:
Chase admits another tape fudge
By Bloomberg News
Special to CNET News.com
February 16, 1999, 11:00 AM PT
Microsoft Vice President Brad Chase acknowledged that computer users could spend more time downloading a rival's Web browser than was depicted in a videotape the software giant had played at its antitrust trial.
The company's videotaped demonstration, which Microsoft played last week, showed that rival Netscape's Navigator Web browser could be downloaded from America Online in several easy steps.
Today, Chase acknowledged that a counter demonstration video prepared by the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) accurately portrayed a more complicated download process that took between 30 minutes and an hour. Chase also conceded that the Microsoft video skipped over several steps in the procedure that computer users had to follow to download Navigator, including opening a folder to find the browser once the process was completed.
"One of the things you skipped was opening up this folder?" asked David Boies, the government's chief trial lawyer.
"That's correct," Chase said.
The government's video "accurately describes what it purports to describe?" Boies asked.
"It accurately shows the setup process, yes," Chase said.
The issue is important because it marked the third time that the government had successfully challenged a videotape demonstration by Microsoft. In two earlier episodes, Microsoft was forced to concede flaws in their demonstrations. In one instance, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, said he was troubled by flaws in the presentation that raised questions about the reliability of the entire demonstration.
Chase today also apologized for inaccurately stating last week that the Netscape Navigator icon would appear on the computer user's desktop screen after the download was completed. In fact, users must click to a folder to find the icon, then move the icon to the desktop.
"I was incorrect, I apologize for that," Chase said, adding that most AOL users who download software from the Internet understand they have to go to the folder.
Microsoft had played its latest videotape in an attempt to show that downloading the Navigator browser was so easy that Netscape could easily distribute its rival product to users over the Internet. The video is intended to counter accusations Microsoft stifled competition from Netscape by making it harder for its rival to distribute its browser.
The government has presented evidence that Microsoft restricted how computer manufacturers and Internet service providers could promote Netscape. Microsoft argues the contracts that required distribution of its Internet Explorer Web browser were standard cross-promotional agreements that did not foreclose Netscape's ability to distribute Navigator.
Government uses Chase's email
Boies also showed Chase a November, 17, 1997 email the Microsoft vice president had written stating that Internet Explorer "has become too big to download" and the "set-up process is too hard for user to figure out."
The email also stated that "only a little more than half of the people" that download one application from Microsoft's Web site "end up installing the browser."
The government is trying to show that Microsoft understood that downloading large software programs like Web browsers was a difficult procedure. That would make it difficult for Netscape to distribute Navigator through installation on computers and would foreclose a key means of getting a product to customers.
Chase said the email contained overblown rhetoric. "It's sort of part of our culture to take strong, extreme positions in order to push people to get their attention." Besides, more up-to-date market figures showed that a much larger percentage of computer users ended up downloading the browsing software, he said.
Copyright 1999, Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Well if you don't believe People are the ones that kill, (know from experience I have used guns for a long while and YET I have to have killed someone).
Then I guess you believe that Windows has the majority of the market because IT IS A BETTER PRODUCT THEN LINUX/UNIX??? Think about it............
Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing...
I always wondered if that kind of thing ever happened. I'm glad to see it does...
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
biggest lie...
Caldera at Networld+Interop in 1997 telling someone that Linux runs on a 286 because the guy was going on and on about his old 286.
I even butted in to correct him and he insisted that it ran on a 286.
I decided not to go into the details of the boot.s file, and how it sets up all the protected mode stuff for the 386.
.. telling 640k would be enough for everybody ...
.. it's a feature!
uhm no, it's not a lie
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Interview by Bill Gates.
DOS 3.0 would be UNIX like and multitasking
True story: We had a, uh, enthuiastiac vice president. He was helping lead a tour of VIPs, including some government representative (senate or congress) from Alaska. The group went through the machine shop in the basement and the VP told him that all the guys in drafting do is hit a button, and presto, the machines pop out the parts. Never mind all those people standing around who actually interpret the drawings, and break it down into programs for the machines.
Then, when our VP found out that the VIP was from Alaska, he said something like "as a matter of fact, most of the manufacturing of our satellite parts is done by Intuit indians," and that "they were very reliable and good with their hands". Mind you that we were located just outside of Washington, DC, quite away from Alaska. And had no ties to Alaska. Another VP quickly changed the subject.
Luckily, I left before that company...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
"Microsoft must be free to innovate"
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Microsoft is more secure than Linux.
(Looked like Slackware & BSD really won)
--------------------------
Is this a sig?
--------------------------
or you just don't follow the licence agreement and don't tell them about it...ignorance is bliss =)
it's also great when you're just going to make your own version of the product
internet like monkeys'
I remember many many years ago, when I was buying my first CD recorder, Pinnacle Micro had just come out with the double-speed RCD-1000.
Back then, systems were meager and expensive. I wanted to connect it to a PS/2 (yeah, one of those boat anchors) via the Adaptec microchannel SCSI card.
Suspicious that the setup might not work, I spoke directly with one of PM's salemen. They were eager to talk, cause the drives were $2000 at the time and blank disks ran $25 from them and about half that from other vendors).
The salesman not only told me that the Adaptec SCSI card was certified to work with the drive, but offered to sell it to me as part of the bundle (with 100% markup on the cost of the card - $400).
After a month of troubleshooting, the umpteenth tech I spoke to on their support line (not an 800 number, and always a 45 to 60 minute wait on hold before they got to my call) told me that "It's the SCSI card - that particular one won't work with the drive". Then, he did some 'research' and told me of a BusLogic microchannel card that would work.
So I bought the BusLogic card.
The thing was still a $2000 coaster making toaster.
So, over the course of 12 more tech support calls (each with an hour on hold), I finally get escalated up to their head techie, who informs me "That drive doesn't work with any microchannel SCSI card! I don't know where you got the idea it would...." I gave him the names of the salesman who specified the Adaptec card and the tech who specified the BusLogic.
I finally got the drive working by saving up for many months and buying another (non-microchannel) system ($2500+ more down the drain) to use with the RCD-1000.
8 months later, the RCD-1000 burnt itself up, and PM wanted to charge me $460 to fix it. They said it was *just* out of warranty. Nevermind the months and months of downtime I had because they had outright lied to me.
THAT is the reason I will never, ever, again buy or recommend any of their products.
A long time ago, I interviewed with a company that made electronic cash registers. We were chatting at the end of the interview and I mentioned my best computer salesmen story. Well, they one-upped me with this:
The salesman had taken one of the few prototypes they had to a demo at a large hotel chain. The demo is going well and then one of the hotel people asks the question, "Will it pass the Coke test?". The salesman doesn't have a clue what the Coke test is, but in true salesman form, he answers "Yes." The hotel buyer proceeds to pick up a can of Coke, pop the tab and dump it down the keyboard of the very expensive prototype... Needless to say, that prototype never worked again. The real amazing part of the story is that the Hotel bought a lot of them -- with the newly designed rubber matt over the keyboard... I gather that particular salesman never made up answers to questions after that, too...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Advertised "250 watt" computer speakers which weigh three pounds and are powered off a 9V 300mA AC adapter.
P = E x I, where P is power in watts, E is electromotive force in volts, and I is current in amperes.
1 amp = 1000mA. You do the math.
A real 200 watt power amplifier will generally have a power supply with a transformer which weighs at least 50 pounds, and that's *per channel*.
And they use the term "PMPO" - "Peak Music Power Output". Fine, putting aside the fact that this term has no accepted definition in electrical engineering - let's say that those little Taiwanese-made speakers contain an amplifier with a big bank of capacitors to dump out enough current to achieve 250 watts peak. If the power supply to them is only 9V, the capacitors would never get above 9V. If the speakers themselves have a standard nominal impedance of 8 ohms, then we can calculate.
A simple application of Ohm's Law reveals that 9V into 8 ohms could yield a maximum current of (I = E/R) 1.125 amps. 1.125 amps at 9 volts shows 10.125 watts absolute peak. And in real world situations, we must include the on-state resistance of all the transistors in the output stages.
10.125W < 250W. Therefore, they are lying. By a factor of almost 25.
Wattage ratings tend to be utter lies with any consumer electronics, especially car audio equipment and boom boxes. The absolute worst come from tiny little Chinese sweatshops making brands of computer speakers that no one has ever heard of.
My computer's sound system includes a pair of Acoustic Research AR-4x bookshelf speakers driven off a highly modified Sound A-5000 power amplifier. B+ to the output stages is 45V DC derived from a 10 pound power supply transformer, and it does produce a solid and stable 25W RMS per channel into 8 ohms, using a 1kHz sinewave driving a resistive load. And that's the accepted standard for wattage ratings of real power amplifiers.
As a former professional sound technician who has done lead sound for Garth Brooks, Harry Belafonte, and The Three Tenors at such prestigious venues at the SkyDome, I've frequently used 240 watt power amplifiers from companies like ElectroVoice, Crown and QSC to power stage monitors on 5000 square foot stages. I speak from experience that running some of this stuff in your house will make your nose bleed. You're not gonna tell me with inflated numbers that a set of $19.95 at Fry's computer speakers will do the same thing.
There's no shame in admitting that a given computer speaker system has a rating of 1W RMS per channel, but idiot consumers just buy the biggest number they can find. In reality, it takes four times the power to double the volume.
Jeez, it's almost as bad as the horsepower ratings on new cars...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Ah... actually quite an inspiring story. They guy was a genius. Unfortunately, like many genuises, he was also insane., 16309,00.html
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
I remember when I buyed my first PC. The local computer salesman told me my lockups problems with Windows 95 where due to "Many harddrives at the same time". I have a 500Mb with two partitions, C: and D:.
They sell Macs at Fry's here in Austin, and there are generally about as many, if not more sales droids hanging out in that area than around the assembled x86 boxes. Not that I'm terribly interested in either, but you pretty much have to walk down through that area in order to get to where some of the other stuff is.
When I first bought Windoze(when all I knew was mac) a vendor told me "WindozeMe is just like Win98se only better and for 50 more dollars you can upgrade to it. Beat that.
(* Microsoft touting "Zero Administration" when Windows NT 4.0 came out. My boss was like "we'll save so much!!! I can't even project the numbers!" *)
Sounds like OOP and PHB's WRT "reuse", "simpler code", "less change impact", "less bugs", blah blah blah.
oop.ismad.com
(Yeah go ahead and mod me down as a "troll". You can mod me to -999 and OOP will *still* be evidence-free BS.)
Table-ized A.I.
Like XP or Red Bull (Red Bull gives you wings).
How is Dungeon Siege different from other RPGs?
Dungeon Siege raises the action FRPG genre to the next level. First, the Siege Engine immerses the player in a gigantic, seamless 3D world, enabling the player to move effortlessly between interior and exterior environments without ever seeing a load screen. This provides a visual depth to the game-world never before seen in an fantasy RPG.
What!?!? I can't recall the first time I have seen this, but I can tell you off the top of my head, Ultima 7 (published in 1991, looking at original box) did this, as with Ultima 6 if I recall correctly. Ok so its not 3D, Ultima 9 was, and it didn't have load screens.
Next, the ability to control an entire party of 8 characters, instead of just one, elevates the excitement and challenges the player in new ways, covering the gamut of skills from fierce warrior to fearsome leader.
Again, this was done in Ultima 7 as a quick example. I can't think of an example that in done in 3D, but the 8 characters thing has been done.
Lastly, Dungeon Siege is focused on delivering intense, over-the-top combat. The character creation process allows players to jump into the game almost immediately, without having to learn a complex rule set. You make your decisions about your character's abilities real-time as you play, choosing whether to specialize in melee combat, archery or magic as the situation requires. There are even party and inventory management tools so you can stay focused on the action, instead of minutia.
Again Ultima 7 did this. Oh Ultima how you were so advanced for your time... Its a shame that these are all marketing claims that Microsoft & Gas Powered Games haven't been looked into. No biggie, as I still have a masive stiffy for Dungeon Seige, but I just hate when a product is hyped up with blatent lies.
Maybe the managers were concerned about how the engineers were always discussing doping, and just got the wrong idea. Heh.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
In 1994 the company I worked for standardized on Compaq as their equipment vendor, with Novell as their server OS of choice. Our building had four Compaq Proliant servers. Over a six month period we replaced five motherboards in those four servers.
Compaq was called into a meeting to justify our staying with them as our preferred vendor. The Compaq rep told us that we were the only customer having this problem.
I told him to prove it, by tracking the serial numbers of a couple of motherboards for me and showing me their repair history. He said that Compaq did not keep track of that level of detail.
I'm not sure which was the 'bigger lie', but neither was true.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
[referring to a traceroute]
"Anything under 1000 ms to your first hop is acceptable"
"While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor?" Hrmm, how exactly is this offtopic? I don't see anything there a says "Tech Vendor" all I see is "vendor."
For the people, of the people and by the people.
Someone hates these cans.
This is from their creed. That all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others;
A modern day witchhunt.
off topic to subject, but not to parents:
I thing one thing alot of people over look on the whole "they choose to do it" thing, is Second Hand Smoke. I dont choose to breath it, but it sure as hell is there ever time i walk into my local Publix food store and the workers are sitting on the benches i walk past with their hairnets on, smoking and exhaling before i pass.
i swear to god i cough (atleast once) every time i get that nasty smell under my nose.
the only fact is that everything is an opinion
When the SAP guys told our company it's gonna cost $8 Mil.
Now 2 years later and $17 Mil into it and we could do better with a room full of homeless people with abacuses.
1985: a California graphics board manufacturer - I wrote firmware. The products actually shipped with a manual that said "This manual says what our product actually does, no matter what the salesman may have told you it does".
Need Mercedes parts ?
Frankly, that's nothing compared to Oracle's recent strong arming of customers. Check this article out for a cynical perspective.
www.valleyofthegeeks.com/News/OracleMafia.html
A better produced blank media will kick the ass of a lesser produced blank,however the retail price isnt related to the quality
Things like birefringence and reflectivity will definatly make a difference with the sound.
Also burn speed makes (or used to back then,over years ago) a big difference
When i was in the cd replication business i would test the burned media before i sent it to mastering and i could alway tell the ones recorded at over 1x speed they would usually have a huge bler rate.
I'll have you know that with a stove and a wire coat hanger, I have made toast. With a fire and a fork, I have made toast. With an oven, I have made toast. No matter how illegal you make toasters, toast will always be made.
Microsoft's answer to that would be "It's not an 'unrecoverable application error' because we don't call it that."
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
"We're a good religion."
Opinions are not Informative, though they may be Insightful or Interesting.
Any Mac people out there remember this one?:
Bungie: "Sure, we're still gonna bring Halo to the Mac."
Salesman: Sure, here is AMD's cooler certification page, see, this model is certified for K7 model 4 up to 1.4 GHz.
Two hours later, mobo, cpu and cooler mounted, box booted. CPU temperature: 85 Celsius. 5 minutes after starting the distributed.net client: CPU temperature 120 Celsius, self-rebooted, CPU dead.
Now I wonder where in Alaska AMD certifies coolers.
At least be my freak, okay?
When at Comdex in Chicago a few weeks back, we saw a booth that said Microsoft. It was a cute little white paper sign that looked like it had been printed with PrintShop. The booth for the electronic ab-workout thing was much bigger!
.net hype, and them wearing visual studio.net shirts, we fel compelled to ask about .net. We just asked what exactly it was. The guy made reference to it changing everything (go figure) and said it could be used pretty much anywhere.
Anyway, we stopped by thinking it was a mere retail booth, but the reps came off as really working for MS, so we went with it. With all of the
Well, we asked about speed of code, size of code, and security. He said it would be just as fast, or faster, be super small (even will all of the extra unused included libraries) and would be just as secure. The kicker was that he made reference to XML as being a security feature..... so we kind of chuckled and walked away.
Thank you M$!
In A.D. 2002 ....
War was beginning.
CmdrTaco: What happen ?
Hemos: Somebody set up us the google delisting
CmdrTaco: What !
CowboyNeal: Main screen turn on
CmdrTaco: It's You !!
L Ron Hubbard: How are you gentlemen !!
L Ron Hubbard: All your google hits are belong to us
L Ron Hubbard: You are on the way to destruction
CmdrTaco: What you say !!
L Ron Hubbard: You have no chance to survive make your time
L Ron Hubbard: HA HA HA HA
CmdrTaco: Take off every 'DMCA'
CmdrTaco: You know what you doing
CmdrTaco: Move 'DMCA'
CmdrTaco: For great justice
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
"Yeah, we'll interview you Real Soon Now."
A marketing lie if ever there was one.
Thanks to Maxtor, Seagate and the rest, who lobbed off the 24's in the 1024 bytes.
With 16, 18, and 20in viewable screen space.
I crash GTA3 on my PS2 regularly. If I piss of the FBI enough and there are enough cars and explosions on the screen at the same time, it locks up and I have to restart the console. It's happened to me at least 10 times.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
I bought a cadre of smart-card readers and Netsign software from Litronic, now known as SSP Solutions, because they promised "smart-card enabled dial-up access" with Windows 98. When I got them and was programming the pin number into them, I noticed that the familiar ***** appears on one of the dialog boxes. I thought "nooo, this can't possibly be what I think it is" and downloaded a windows password cracker that just reads the memory location that contains the contents of those *****. Sure enough, there was my pin number, protected only by the brilliant security of the Windows 98 operating system. After explaining what "smart-card" means to the tech guy, Litronic refused to take the readers & software back, citing a "no return" policy on their website. Needless to say these useless products are sitting in a cabinet waiting for me to find a use for them in Linux. SSP has taken the webpage down that duped me into buying this product, but you can still find the claim in reviews such as this onet.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
>Life isn't like the movies, where in the end the hero gets rewarded for standing up for principle.
Funny thing is slashdot did get rewarded. By posting that they had to remove the post thousands, if not hundreds of thousands chose to seek a copy of it and educated themselves on the Co$.
...and then the cap is so tight, that the sub modem uploading speeds make the simple dns, http server requests, and cookie uploads take so long its almost like I don't even have broadband when surfing.
Is that some double speak bullshit or what? My neighbors and I are thinking about pitching in for a $400-$600 a month full T1 line and splitting the cost. ...maybe help with the costs by hosting some small websites.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I'm really happy to see Slashdot discussing as many consumer advocacy issues as they have been in the past few years. If you agree with the general stance of this forum, there IS something you can do about it!
Vote Nader! Vote consumer advocacy!
"Does Windows cluster as well as Linux? Windows clusters FAR better than Linux! In fact, out Hotmail service has over five THOUSAND clustered servers!"
(that last part is accurate. He fails to mention, though, that many of those they had to add to handle the same load after switching them slowly from FreeBSD/Qmail)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
We had a sale's engineer show up at the "customer" to install the system and the "customer" was wondering what he and the $100,000 worth of boxes were doing there. Turns out the sales weasel had forged the sales docs...
Windows Scales. Yea, whatever
A good one I ran into recently was from Microsoft. They sent a rep out to our school and showed us all this really cool software in the form of videos. It was a full circle product for education. It delivered content, allow content creation, allow teacher/student interaction, taimed the web, reported grades, and even beamed grades to parents pocketpcs. It was great. We asked them to bring the app in and show it to us in real life. It turned out it's Encarta Class Server. They left one little thing out. All the features in the video dont exist. It was a big pipe dream. The server app sucked. The client app sucked. The content was garbage. We couldn't help but laugh at them. -Tim
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
Good read that. I always wondered what the other side to that story is. Seems I've been mistaken 'bout Michael for a while... Just wish that site had gone up _earlier_.
Mine was a dead CD-ROM drive. It was 6 months since I bought the system, and the drive would not eject a CD, it would only open before the boot sequence.
Anyway, I figure they would have it fixed within 2-3 days, it's only a CD-ROM replacement, not like its difficult or anything...
They did some other testing on the system and saw that the hard drive had a whole mess of bad sectors on it (power supply was faulty and cause lots of power-losses during writing to the hard drive, that at least was fixed by HP, who sent out one of their repair men to my house cause it was within a month of getting the system)...We so they decide to replace my hard drive, I.E., just removed the old one, no data backed up, and sent it back to HP, and put in a new one.
So now, I have a computer with a broken CD-ROM drive and a blank hard drive. They said they would have reloaded the hard drive, but they couldn't get the system to boot, even with a boot disk. Its a good thing I at least HAVE CLUE ONE ABOUT HOW COMPUTERS WORK.
When I get it home and take it apart (since it wouldn't boot, just like they said), it takes all of 10 seconds to see that 1) they placed the hard drive on the same IDE channel as the CD-ROM, 2) Both the CD-ROM and the hard drive were set as master
I call them up immediatly and completly tell off the manager of their repair center, about how incompitant the people were that worked on this system. And made a formal complaint to corporate and HP as they were a certified repair center. Note that at this time, my CD-ROM drive had still not been replaced and/or repaired. Next day I get a call from CompUSA saying that they recieved a new CD-ROM for my system, they couldn't get the same one that I origionally had, but they got the latest one from HP for my system, and that they could install it if I wanted, or I could just come by and pick it up and install it myself (without it breaking my warrentee too)...Hmmm...I really wonder what finally got their asses moving, HP calling them up or corporate...I am betting on HP personally.
Needless to say, there was no way I was letting them touch the system to install the CD-ROM drive.
Your commercials suck.
I waited a week and called them up, that was when they said they ordered the part and were still waiting for it. A week after that, when I called again was when they told me the replaced my hard drive. The next week when I called they said the part was backordered. The next time I called I said I was comming to pick it up that day, no matter the condition of the system cause I was without a PC for way too long to fix a problem that wasn't really a bad problem, it was just inconvient to have to reboot the system everytime I wanted to change a CD...
I was collecting information to decide about the biggest purchase I ever made: my first computer.
I didn't know too much about the matter; I hade some ideas about 16 bit and 32 bit, and I knew that there was some mysterious thing called "co-processor", and I knew that 486 computers were newer, faster and more expensive than 386 ones.
It was a rather tough decision, as I wasn't exactly rich, and I wanted a good computer really bad. So I went to a shop (Vobis in Karlsruhe, Germany) and asked the salesperson: "Could you please explain the exact difference between a 386 and a 486?"
This guy answered: "That's quite easy. You know, the information is passed on and processed via electric signals?" - I nodded. He continued: "Of course, there can only be a very tiny portion of information on one wire - current or no current." (more like voltage or no voltage, I thought. But I said nothing.) "The difference between a 386 and a 486 is, that there are 386 wires going in a 386 and 486 wires in a 486, so the 486 can process 100 bits of information more at one time."
It took a few seconds till I found out how to react. I asked him what that bit stuff (16 vs 32 bit) I heard about was, then, if modern processors already operated with 486 bits. While he was stuttering something about him having to read this in their sales brochure, I continued asking about coprocessors, the difference between 486-DX and 486-SX and finally (he was rather sweating and red-faced by then) told him that I'd never buy a computer in a shop where nobody knows anything about computers. I left.
"Never feel disconnected again!"
.. wait a second.
Ummm
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
It's a neurotoxin with a toxicity above that of lead and only slightly below arsenic. It is a heavy metal, ("coincidentally" just like lead and arsenic), which means it accumulates in your body. It causes fluorosis and is suspected of contributing to osteoparhosis(spelling anyone?), and alzheimers. Not surprising since it's a HAZARDOUS WASTE PRODUCT generated by the aluminum industry. Aluminum? Yup, also linked to alzheimers. Go ahead, you're a bunch of smart guys...look up the MSDS sheets on it then look at your tube of toothpaste. See that big old "DO NOT SWALLOW" on it? Now you know why.
PS. Don't forget the water supply...Yet more evidence the government really does want to kill you....:=p~~
-- Telocity, early 2000
And it took 86 days to show up. No kidding.
FWIW, Telocity is now DirectTV broadband. I wonder if they're any better.
Paul
although, i've heard many times before that the simplistic 386 archetechture is vastly more efficent per transistor than these new-fangled 32 bit archetechtures. you might not be able to run 32 bit software on it, but a 386 @ .13 microns @ 400 mhz would probably a) be a great processor for pdas b) swamp the palm market with easy to code for palm devices, AND be compatible with virtually every dos program ever
moox. for a new generation.
Told to me by a salesman at a Harvey Norman Store, when I said I can knock together a AMD system from parts at the computer markets for not much more than half the price.
Anyone remember that Tomshardware article?, Dissecting Rambus, I think the ocassion deserves to remember it, specially the High-bandwidth Misinformation. 'Love will make you do things that you know is wrong': "Dell is perhaps the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers. Dell is also widely considered closely wedded to Intel. On the computer titan's site, the speed of the RDRAM used in its systems is difficult to find and, for the typical consumer, difficult to interpret. After drilling down to the RDRAM specifications for the Dell XPS B, the computer giant provides information that is not only misleading, but also simply false. Dell boasts that "RDRAM provides up to 1.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth versus only 800 MB/sec with conventional SDRAM," but elsewhere on this page the frequency of the RDRAM used in the system is stated at 356 MHz. As already explained in this article, this indicates in an indirect way that the system is equipped with the slower PC700 RDRAM which will never reach a bandwidth of 1.6 GB/sec. Also on this page Dell states correctly that the bus width for its RDRAM systems is 16 bits, but IT ALSO STATES THAT SDRAM'S BUS WIDTH IS ONLY 8 BITS when, as you already know, SDRAM has a 64-bit bus. Incorrect at best, misleading at worst, Dell should be harshly criticized for providing this disservice to its customers. In light of other misinformation currently surrounding RDRAM, Dell's actions are cast in an unfavorable light."
The bankruptcy will not impact our operations at all. We will not be closing datacenters. We haven't lost a single customer...
i was trying to but an ultra-sound-anti-musqito-device the other day.
:)
the vendor assured me that it was very good, 'cause it was tested in space...
*musqitos in space*
great movie title
----------------------------------
it aint all _that_ bad,.... right?
"VA is a good company. They care about the Linux community." - Everyone, a year ago.
Bowie J. Poag
I'm tired of this fucking picture popping up and destroying my apetite for 15 minutes.
ahhhh!
This one seems to be a better match. look at the later paragraphs.
s ie bel.html
http://www.edify.com/pr/press_releases/2001rel/
This was a very popular and ill fated ad campaign. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/308
Actually the 386 was the first "32bit" x86 compatible chip in the range, just that, at the time.. most people were running old 16bit software on it anyway.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Yeah, Windows doesn't make BSOD's, people make BSOD's...
This is a genuine explanation of why we got the BSOD on machines:
We had a batch of PCs which failed - we did the research and noted that the serial nos on the SIMMs were from a known faulty batch so we invited Digital (remember them?) in to replace the memory on the failing PCs. Here's the "technical expert" explanation of the fault:
"NT is a pre-emptive multi-tasking system, that means that it tries to guess what you're about to do and load up the memory in advance - sometimes you don't do what it expects and it has the wrong items in memory -- that's what causes the BSOD".
Apart from the factual howlers - the blatant "blame the victim" approach did wonders for their reputation with us; mind you they say laughter is a good medicine.
I know an old gentleman (correct term for this guy) who was getting quite aquainted with computers and had a 384DX40 with 4MB RAM.
He had some motherboard problems and the shop wanted 300 quid (UK pounds) to "repair" it.
These were the days when it cost 30 quid to buy one.
[They also sold him a 4-shade greyscale hand scanner for 150 quid or there-abouts.]
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Oh, welcome on board sir. This wonderful figure is your yearly salary! So, don't even think about those other offers from other companies because we start you out on a bit lower salary and increase it every couple of months. Now , what we won't tell you that this is TOTAL COST TO COMPANY. That means that this is the maximum amount of money that we will spend on you in a year. So, from that figure you can deduct income tax, medical aid, retirement fund, 13th check and maybe even training. So, what you have left (if any) will be devided into 12 months and that will be your true monthly salary. Oh Shit! They got me again, those Corporate bastards!
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
A couple of years back, when the world was still on 28.8k my (only) local cable ISP had folders saying: "Using our cable service you can download at more than 300 times the speed you could using a standard 28.8 modem. So what would normally take a year to download can now be downloaded in just one day."
The service they were advertising is a 300kbps downstream cable service.
even an overclocked p4 at 3.5 gHz still can't beat a new Athlon
I call bullshit.
Let's see ya back that up.
1 whole inch! garanteed!!
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
To the best of my knowledge, all Athlon mobos display CPU speed on startup as well.
Actually, I remmeber reading that AMD didn't want the actual CPU clock speed displayed anywhere in the POST, back when this PR for Athlons all started.
It's not as if AMD is trying to shove the speed under the rug entirely
Apparently they are.
*putting on my flameproof suit*
...and he is us.
The sad fact is that practically no one can articulate what their software actually does. It's all vague and subjective. So you go out and buy the software anyway without any idea of what it really does and then you complain because it doesn't do what you think it was supposed to do?
This 1980 home computer came with 1k (yes 1k of memory) with memory expansion packs ranging from 16k up to a whopping 64k (surely enough for anyone as Bill G would say)
Anyway the really outrageous advertising claim involved an advert stating that the ZX80 could run a nuclear powerstation (with the advert showing a ZX80 with 16k ram expansion)
What is really bad is that the ZX80 was notorious for 'Ram pack wobble' meaning that if you nudged the ram pack by mistake....it crashed
Not witstanding the fact that it would be totally unsuitable for running a powerstation for a number of other factors such as not having a real time os, system unreliability etc.
I always wondered whether the Russians had seen the advert and tired to use (or copy one) one at Chernoybl...one for the conspiracy theorists.
I was in PC World in Yeovil (England) about a week ago (I know, I know, but there's virtually nothing else around here) when I overheard a truly amazing conversation between a spotty-faced salesman (correction; sales-pre-pubescent-teen), and some poor shmuck looking to buy a new PC.
Customer: So this new machine has a CD-ROM burner built in yes? [Gesturing to some off-the-shelf PC with XP Home installed] Will I be able to transfer my music files to a CD that I can play in the car?
Sales-pre-pubescent-teen: [Sensing a quick sale] Oh no, you can't do that out of the box. You see, the music files that you'll be playing are in MP3 format, whereas CDs that you can play in your car use a format known as RealAudio.
I kid you not.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
1) Special green magic markers can make your audio CD's sound better.
2) Hard Drive manufacturers decide that 1 MB = 1,000 rather than 2^10
Some years ago I was at the National Exhibition of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, where the keynote talk was presented by Larry Ellison, which I thought might be of interest. Much music and effects (including 3-D glasses on every seat) introduced the man himself who cam on stage and started talking about home-banking, home-shopping and the like, all via your TV and all powered by Oracle. He then stated, clearly, that this was not the future, but the present, and that at the current time;
"Ordinary people in the UK are using their television every day to do these things with Sky TV"
...which was blatant, outright, fiction as Sky hadn't launched any kind of interactive TV at that time. He went on to introduce someone from Sky and the two of them talked about how users of Sky, through the power of Oracle, were able to bank, shop, etc. at the touch of their remote control. This was plainly untrue at that time, and I felt like standing up and shouting, but eventually just walked out in disgust.
It stunned me that someone like Larry Ellison would stand up in front of thousands of people and talk such bollocks, and such bollocks that was so easily provable to be bollocks. I've always wondered if he was miss-informed or knew he was lying.
Back in 1995, I was working for a small company based on the Wirral in the UK.
I was part of the field engineers. Hardware installation's, repairs etc. One day, on a site I visited regularly, I was replacing a small fly cable in the back of a monitor. I broke the tube. So I cleaned up the mess, got the swap out monitor from the van and told the onsite contact what I had done. He laughed and was happy to have a swap out monitor. No worries.
I got back and told my boss. He was ok with it. But somehow the account manager found out and was not happy. She stormed, and I do mean stormed. Into the office, shouting, pointing fingers and then informed me that if that happens again that I should lie to the customer!!! My boss and I pointed out that lying to our biggest customer was not the way to do business. She then went on, over a 12-month period, to push out everyone she didn't like. Screwing the MD was how she got away with this. The guy was a jellyfish.
The company is dead now. Three months after I left the receivers went in. Just goes to show that bad management can kill a company.
I'm fishing for a high rating on this one, but please, (in the tone of a talk-show guest hyping up the crowd); "Who uses Hotmail? Ever get any.. spam? Yhaaa I turn on the filter, what does it do? NOTHING." For some reason I have to use hotmail once in awhile but the 50-odd spam per day on an unpublished email makes me want to cry. Their spam filter is an insult to the word "filter".
ive got 2 real good ones... I once went into a store with my brother and asked if they sold 56k modems. the sales person tolds us they were sorry but they didnt carry them... well any way me and my brother turned around to walk out and as my brother walked around the corner of an ailse he triped over a pile of 56k modems that happen to be on sale.\new story; And this is the grand mother of them all. me and my boss once went into a store to buy new computers for video editing, we asked the salesperson what he sugested for a motherboard, and he asked us what type of machines we were currently using.We told him we were using a dual processor Intergraph workstation with a wildcat graphics card and 512 meg ram...(brace yourself cause here it comes) he told us "Thats nothing", and told us they just recieved machines with the new pentium processor and built in FAT32 chip. All we could say is "wow that is impressive" and then left the store.
"Microsoft Works!"
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Better Unix than Unix
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Consumer Reports used to make fun of mktng, and one they published was a misprint in a newspaper:
Used Cars at New Car Prices!!!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Says it all rearly ;-)
enough said.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Anyone without a basic (and I mean basic)knowledge of microcomputing is no longer allowed to use the word "micron" in a post.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I worked at a small company (that is now defunct but will remain nameless) that wrote software for other companies. I was told by my coworkers that before I worked there, they were going to be really late shipping some software so they shipped a blank disk to a customer to stall for time--later to claim that the disk must have been corrupted.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I had the engineer from a vendor tell me his product absolutely would not work in our deployment. His supervisor told me their product was not appropriate for our needs. A week later their salesman complained to an idiot consultant working in our corporate office. The salesman and consultant, who was making twice my salary, told our CIO that I was rude and I got written up.
Stupid bastards. The CIO ended up writing a check for $750K for a product that still doesn't work after a year and a half. I got fired and ended up back in radio.
My $45.00 solution using Apache/PHP/MySQL was ridiculed in that same corprate meeting -- but my shit is still working, despite my departure nearly nine months ago. I guess I get the last laugh.
BTW, if you check the vendor's site -- their product is dead. Whatever.
It's been ten years, I'm beginning to suspect that I'm never gonna see a return on all that cash I mailed out...
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
You want the truth?! You can't handle the truth!
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
(e.g. a 4Mz Z80 was about the same speed as a 1Mz 6502 -- mostly becasuse the Z80 took 4 clock cycles to grab a byte of memory while a 6502 only took one).
Uh, The 6502 _always_ took at least 2 clock cycles ( typically only 2 )... The z80 on the other hand took an enourmas amount of clock cycle for some operations - often 4-6. I think that's where the differance came in.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
and according to a study in england a few years ago 90 per cent of all people are caused by accident
one day I'll have a
Our ISP (soon to be ex) told me and my boss that they were getting ready to install upgraded internet hardware. It was supposed to clear up all of the internet problems we had been having. The funny thing is that during the meeting with this git, I got a phone call from one of their hardware engineers who would have to be intimately involved in installing of this hardware and he had no clue what the git was talking about. What he said sounded great, except it was 100% pure bs. The git was a VP of the company... which is now in Chapter 11.(I asked my engineer friend what he planned to do with all of his worthless options... build a paper mache castle be-like...)
The funny thing is that our saleperson was in the meeting too and she said that he lied to us... she was laid off shortly after that. I think she was lucky.
That linux would make it on the desktop!
In the early betas of Windows 2000 Advanced Server there was a concept called 'Windows Application Refresh' which was esentially a scheduled reboot, which addressed memory leaks and other issues of Microsoft Product Entropy. Thankfully I have not been cursed with having to use it since then. Can anyone tell me if Microsoft is still trying to sell this steaming pile of Cr@p as a standard system administration practice?
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Basically anything Microsoft has ever said about OS/2 would qualify. "OS/2 is Windows done right" was one of my favorites at the first OS/2 developers conference. Then there was the Corporate OS/2 days on the Redmond campus where Ballmer spent an hour extolling the virtues of OS/2.
they have to have *something* to surf on
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"IIS is secure" -Microsoft "a 486 is all Windows will ever need" -Bill Gates "Windows costs less than Linux" -Microsoft Press Release
forget it.
I still can't get over the BS that I heard re Y2K. The best (or worst if you will) was one of my clients was told they had to upgrade their AIX, plus more memory plus a bigger SCSI drive, all total around $10k. I did some research and they didn't need the upgrade. The vendor insisted to the point of threatening to drop support if they did not comply. So I took the president of the vendor company out for lunch and asked him what he was doing. "You know they [my client] don't need to this upgrade." I said. He looks me in the eye and says, "I don't care want you say, I want my money."
I'm so proud the be a tech specialist at moments like that.
We are experiencing unusually high call volumes.
not too long ago. I avoided an argument by just using a different service but the poster is right. The approval code is the same every time.
The product that, as advertised, would double your available RAM using "software memory", but was later discovered to do absolutely nothing?
The really sad part of that already-tragic tale is that hundreds of thousands of copies of it were sold...
From my brief stint in the Canadian Army Reserve, I can say that this doesn't apply universally to army food. Canadian IMP's (individual meal packs) are pretty yummy. Even the mac & cheese, which for some reason tends to be a "breakfast", is more edible than KD, and things like the beef stew, chicken a la king, etc. are great! The extras vary widely in quality, from the appalling instant coffee, to the downright weird but quite edible "petit pain" (bread, that's the French label) which we figured would last forever if not opened.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I can think of one vendor who routinely listed a heap of stuff on the spec sheet that the product DID NOT have. At best, these features might be described as being on the "TODO" list; things like SNMP and other buzzword-compliant acronyms. If you'd said, "Hey, SNMP is so last year, what about WBEM?", they'd have added that to the spec sheet by next week. Thus, the development process relied more on word processors than compilers. If a customer ever genuinely required the expected functionality and it was necessary to close the sale then yes, they'd put some effort into implementing it (usually as a quick hack). But not before.
;-)
But no customers ever noticed or raised the apparent disparity between what the product was supposed to do and evident reality. In fact, they had no use for those features (none of them owned an SNMP management console, let alone had the smarts to set one up). They just wanted to see the magic letters in the spec, to reassure them that the product was in some sense standards-compliant. Not one of them thought to test the alleged functionality in their free eval copy, or ask why it wasn't referenced in the otherwise comprehensive manual.
Moral: customers get the salespeople they deserve.
The problems people have with salespeople all spring from the false assumption that they possess any ethics, morals or goodwill in their dealings whatsoever. They have targets to meet. That's it, period.
Moral: salespeople have none, though they might occasionally confuse them with morale.
(I suspect that most of the best posts in this thread are anonymous.
I have ever been told was by a Qwest sales person, They told me that they could give me a fiber run from there local CO(15 Miles away) to my former employers door. This obviously turned into the biggest lie I was ever told by a vendor.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
Dude, You're getting a Dell.
Dude, no I'm not you liar.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
"I Do."
With out question, Oracle wins the cake. I was the CTO of a web company (part of the dot com flame out, of course). We had not one, not two, but three Oracle VPs tell us that they could do the work, on time, and within budget. They spend a small bucket of our money just writting a proposal that made it obvious to all that they were flamingly incompetent.
The money, and more importantly the time lost was infuriating. I never thought I'd say this, but in the lying contest, Larry beats even Bill.
To Oracle's small credit, we heard that at least one of the VPs and a handful of other people got fired over this fiasco. That didn't help me any; however, it might just help the rest of you.
Is there any vendor who doesn't claim to better than he really is?
C'mon, even if you go toa small market to buy a bunch of apples (the fruit one...), you will hear something like "this is the best fruit you'll ever taste!"
And even within a company enviroment, a CIO will "sell" his project as the most important for the company, telling the CEO whatever is useful to grant him the necessary budget...
- "Having a clean conscience is sign of bad memory"
The best one I can think of was when Sun Microsystems came to told us that some of the e-cache errors we where getting are caused by cosmic rays. I think they even brought a Astrophysicist in.
Lets just say that a person works for a publicly traded company. And said company puts out certain news releases. And let's say you are the database administrator with access to all of the (we'll call it...) REAL data. And let's suppose the news releases contain out and out lies...
Now let us suppose that due to technicalities, this database administrator is not an "insider"...
What responsibility, morally and legally, does said database administrator have?
...just a thought.
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
Umm.. That would be 8" floppy. Or punchcards, more likely.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
A certain large company that makes SPARC based servers, told us in a meeting that one of their lines of CPUs continually panics the systems, forcing a reboot, due to the affects of "cosmic rays" on the on board CPU memory caches.
-- sed s/liberty/profit/g US.Constitution
This is not necessarily the case. An application may crash because system calls put it in an inconsistant state or corrupt it's memory. The (published) Windows API is a debacle. Of course, MS programmers know the work arounds. Furthermore, an application crash should not make the entire system unstable.
I have not used Win2k much, but the first day I used it, it crashed as I was shutting down applications. Fortunately, I don't have to used MS products much.
I used to be a sales engineer, the company eventually changed its policy and we couldn't go to the development engineers to get technical info, we had to get the "marketing" approved version. Sufices to say, the marketing version was dumbed down and totally lacking technical detail. Long time clients weren't particualy happy about this.
It used to be that they hired engineers to sell the product, spent months training them on the software making you actually learn how to use the software so you could sell it (thereby giving you more credability). Eventually they switched over to more salesly types who totally depended on applications engineering support staff to answer any technical questions. These guys would promise the moon and some of them were quite successful without any real understanding of what the software did or how it worked. On the otherhand, sales engineers like myself were more likely to flat out tell you if you actually could use or need our product other than wasting your time on it.
What I would find amusing some times about the job was that when you would give a presentation that there was always one guy in the audience who wanted to be a jackass and ask stupid questions or attempt to make you(the sales engineer) look stupid, it was always funny to give him the correct answer to shut him up as the guy usually never realised that you were a real engineer at one point in your life. Kind of reminds me of the dilbert comic where he talks about abusing sales people as it is the one thing he can do in his life where its ok to be rude and demeaning to people(some sales people desirve it).
On a side note, the reason salespeople act the way they do for the most part is because it works. I always treated everyone with respect, but the salesguy constantly calls you once you express interest to force you to move on it else you forget or get distracted with something else (in sales your job is always on the line, sales is usually the first staff to get cut when times start to go bad).
If you wan't to get the real deal on anything, go speak with the applications engineer who supports the sales staff, they will usually give you an idea of the true capabilities of the product. Never trust the marketing guy, he will stretch the truth far more than the sales staff.
Lastly, if you are an engineer who can write and talk well and likes working with people, try sales or applications engineering at somepoint in your career. The money is VERY good. Besides you can always go back to your old job.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
A representitive of SBC called about there new colation facility. After telling me all about there new 100million dollar facility in Irvine with such wonderful features like showers and an Internet bar I asked him how much they charged per MBit. He quickly replied $670 a MBit with my responce being that was outragous. He asked how much I was expecting and I let him know we were paying $300 a MBit right now and we were looking to pay that or lower. He responded that no one could possibly make any money selling bandwidth at that price and they will be going out of bussiness soon which is why I should move to their new facility.
In 1996 I took delivery of a $5000 apochromatic refractor telescope for which I had waited 20 months to receive. UPS left it on the front porch of the house in the middle of Hollywood, California, despite numerous red/white stickers Adult Signature Required and the fact that the seller had paid for the certified delivery service. It was insured, so the $5000 was covered, but if it had been stolen, 20 months of waiting would have been for nothing.
Never trust UPS to follow delivery instructions.
Edith Keeler Must Die
A while back, I was setting up PC's for a small research company. 2 of our brand new Dell's had arrived, but when plugged in, they wouldn't display anything properly. I called up Dell, and they assured me that they were aware of the problem, and that there was a "virus" in the video card of each machine. A "virus" in the videocard, I asked disbelievingly? Yes, they replied. I asked them how it had gotten in there, just to play along, and they informed me it must have been introduced enroute from their packing facility to my office. Somehow, a "virus" had transmuted into vapour and then lodged itself in the VIDEO CARDs of our brand new machines. But don't worry, they told me - there was a patch available from their website that would fix everything.
Those lying jerks - why couldn't they just tell me there was a driver problem, and I could download the fixed drivers? WHY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
Older gentleman: "Why do I need a gold-plated printer cable?"
Salesman: "The connection is better, so you get higher quality prints. And it's faster."
-LlamaDragon
The best article I've seen on this subject is by Jonathan Rees - go look at it on Paul Graham's web site here.
People who say "Java isn't OO" really mean "Java doesn't have the features I like in other OO languages". Please say what you mean.
For the record, I'm a Lisp/CLOS hacker and I don't like the style of OO Java promotes.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I was duped by Marvel comics. Imagine my surprise when I first donned my X-Ray Glasses... "It's easy to deceive a child" - John Lydon
"That's a fact, in my opinion" -some peacenik on CNN
-BK
Chemical Blog
After the cable modem install guy failed to show for the SECOND TIME, I called Time Warner Cable to complain. I was greeted with a recorded message that said "Hello, and thanks for calling Time Warner Cable, where on-time service is our guarantee."
I spoke with somebody in Customer (No)Service and asked what "...where on-time service is our guarantee" means if the installer doesn't bother to show up. What, exactly, does TWC guarantee?
"Well, it means that if we aren't on time, we'll come back some other time, or even another day. We guarantee that."
(Insert uncomfortably long period of silence here.)
"Alrightly then... with whom do I speak about cancelling my order???"
From an Atari salesman at a computer fair: "The Atari 1200XL has more than 800 applications for it; the Apple ][+ has more than 500". Technically true, the Apple application count was considered to be about 20,000 by that point, which is more than 500... (1983).
From Microsoft: "Our Pascal compiler is faster than Turbo Pascal" (1985, when this $900 compiler took 3X as long to compile on a hard disk equipped IBM AT compared to the $49 Turbo Pascal compiler running on a floppy based 8088).
From a VMS-based Ada language vendor: "you need to go with Ada for embedded systems, since the C language is clearly being phased out". (1988) Riiight.
From Sun: "Open Look is the way to go; Motif is just a fad". (1991) Similar claims about News obsoleting PostScript were made.
From Atari: "the Jaguar will definately blow away the Amiga" (199...2?)
From Sun: When faced with a Sun IPX running at 99% CPU usage versus the equivalent HP model running at 40%, the Sun rep's answer was the 99% usage was a good thing because we "were getting your money's worth" [sic]. No, he was not kidding, he actually thought his machines being 60% slower was a good thing. (1994)
From IBM: "OS/2 will be available whereever DOS is sold" (1992). And of course, "IBM is firmly committed to OS/2" (1997, two weeks before IBM Germany announced they were discontinuing marketing of the product).
From Oracle: "by the year 2000, PCs will be solely legacy systems" (1998). Our rep was nothing if not faithful to the party line about NCs.
From a DSL provider, explaining why the service was performing at below 30% of promised speeds: they were "cleaning the pipes" (eh?) and that DSL speeds worsen in August because "the summer heat makes the wiring stretch". (2002)
One of the best lies I ever managed to catch vendor making redhanded was a multimillion dollar bid where their product was clearly inferior. They promised the new super duper version would be done by year end. This was in November, and no one had seen so much as a specification of it. We had a teleconference with their VP, who obviously was unaware of what the salescreature had promised; the VP said point blank that the beta program was not even scheduled to start until March...
It might possibly not be bullshit, for some marginal situations.
Even POTS lines are twisted pairs to reduce emissions and interference. Most generic phone cable is flat, not twisted pair. This leads to a reduction in signal quality. For a six foot run, it's probably not a big deal. For a longer run it might start to make a difference.
Surge Protectors with RJ-11 jacks to protect your modem are "Internet Ready".
Belkin, so forward looking.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Uh, windows TCO anybody?
it's just poor grammar. Another example I've often seen on /.: "irregardless."
Badgeez?! We don' need no steenking badgeez!
Clue: slashdot puts the domain name next to the link now, so there's nobody but yourself to blame when you get the big red eye
The biggest and most prevalent lie I come across is "winmodems are cheaper"... The fact is they are cheaper because M$ insists on encouraging their proliferation to discourage in "a little way" the use of Linux to connect via modem. if makers all used simple UART hard modems internally, they would me even less expensive than so-called soft modems.
Another good one is, when trying to order a PC without a MicroSlop OS pre-installed: "It's illegal to sell you one like that." And last but not least this is my favorite lie: "Windows is the most stable and secure OS, so why would you want a blank HD?"
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
My gun has killed fewer people than Ted Kennedy's car.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
MCI once called my wife "just to let you know that your long distance service has been fixed, and because of all the trouble we caused you we are going to give you $20. Just say yes to all the questions the auditor asks you..." Of course we didn't have MCI long distance, but we would have had my wife answered yes to all those questions.
AT&T was very aggresivily marketing their New York Local One Rate Service in my area a while back. Over a 1 year period I got about a dozen sales calls. Half of the sales people were either misleading or lying.
I spent over an hour on the phone with the first guy. I asked every question twice. And wrote down all the details of his plan. I agreed to sign up because it was a great deal. 6 weeks and 3 or 4 phone calls to AT&T later I found out that it was bogus, and I had been lied to. But I kept track of the actual terms of the plan, so I had them handy when subsequent sales people called.
One AT&T guy, thought he had me on the hook, because I kept agreeing with him on how great his plan was. When he asked me if I wanted to sign up I told him no. "Why?" he asked. I responded that I thought he was lying to me. He got all pissed off. I told him to call me back in a week, so I could find out if the terms he gave me were correct. His terms were wrong. He was lying. He never called back.
After a while I relized that AT&T's actual plan was actually competive with my existing Verizon plan. One of the phone sales deals was going to give $50 in cash, and a bunch of long distance minutes. I told the lady how much I like the plan, and how it was going to save me money, but I couldn't sign up. "Why?" Because AT&T is just too sleazy for me.
I consider MCI, and AT&T to be disreputable companies and will choose not to do business with them if I can. Verizon hasn't lied to me yet. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.
USADatanet is a great company. I have had great service from them, and absolutely no lies so far.
Slashdot viewership would drop by about 85%. I'll bet you don't even use Linux, junior.
Dell promised us that we could standardize on their GX-150 model because they would never change it...since we'd like to image them with ImageCast.
...Needless to say they changed the motherboard 3 weeks later to support 1.2GHZ PIII's...
Oh, and I have to mention that there is no way to tell the difference between the two boards from the post screen, however they require different bios updates and device drivers..
Oh you're getting Hell...
Which goes along with my theory...Dells love David Hasselhoff.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
"This is not necessarily the case. An application may crash because system calls put it in an inconsistant state or corrupt it's memory."
At first I thought that was the case. And then I tried to run Netscape on NT instead of 9X... *CrAsH*. Then Netscape'd crash on 2k, altho not as often, making me think Windows might be the culprit, right? Well I have friends using Mac and Linux that both say the same thing about Netscape. It sounds to me that they had trouble making it work right. The term 'Nutscrape' was being used commonly.
Netscape 6.2 has definitely gotten better, though.
"Furthermore, an application crash should not make the entire system unstable."
True in 9x, not true in 2K. I have an average uptime, on all my machines, of at least a week. I couldn't do that with NT, I couldn't get 9X to last more than a day. If you saw some of the BS I put my computer through, you'd be amazed.
"Derp de derp."
You'll never outgrow this system...
By the time all the software they sold us was loaded there was no room for the data, so we immediately had to purchase more storage.
(IBM System 23).
OK. I'm convinced now. The system of moderation on Slashdot is hopelessly broken. A means of winnowing comments and adding value by filtering signal from noise is now responsible for adding even worse noise.
Come on, folks. A post about tobacco manufacturers' extreme cupidity and criminally disingenuous behavior is VERY MUCH ON TOPIC in a discussion of Vendor Lies. And a rejoinder, however contentious, that cigarettes only kill when people smoke them, is not necessarily flamebait. It's merely an extreme viewpoint. Jeebus.
Over the years, I've valued Slashdot for its ability to point me toward news that I might not have had the time or inclination to search for. I've enjoyed the discussion of topics, rolled my eyes at the 8th-grade spelling mistakes committed by Cmdr Taco (you know you're barely making it when you run a "news site" and can't even afford a proofreader), actually snickered at the original iterations of trolls such as the Portman and penisbird posts, and have generally believed that moderation was a worthwhile service to bubble-sort the conversations.
In light of some of the poo that has splattered off the rotating blade recently, it's painfully obvious that the ship is adrift. The Slashdot concept is creaking and groaning under the weight of its own execution. Did the community exceed its critical mass back at UID #300000?
Pay-per-view is only a reasonable proposal when there is value added to the basic content. All I know is that the value of moderation is being subtracted faster than it's added, and I'd be curious to see if there's any legitimate way to fix it.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
After requesting pricing for Business DSL, she gave me two prices. One with Dynamic IP, the other with static. The static was $25/mo additional. I asked, "Why do you charge so much extra for a static IP address?" Her answer..."Static IP addresses make your connection much faster." I replied..."Isn't the service xMb/s either way?" Her reply..."Yes, but the static IP allows it to communcate faster over that xMb/s connection." Tee hee.
Is there a reason you don't just get the legal portion of your company to sue them? If what you say is true, it sounds like you could maybe recoup some of the money lost in relying on them while at the same time terminating your service contract neatly...
Vendor: this ship is unsinkable!
Buyer: whats it's name?
Vendor: The Titanic!
Buyer: Sounds big, I'll take one.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Calls maybe recorded to insure quality control.
Yeah, record this...
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Even today, the "blazing fast" (actual adjectives used on boxes) 56K modems can only reach download speeds of 53K. Thanks FCC!
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here. - AC
A serial cable "Optimized for use with Windows 95". It was only a couple of bucks more than a standard serial cable...
Customer: Will it __________?
Vendor: Sure, as a matter of fact, not only will it _______ but it will do it far better than our competition! It is easier to do too! Not only that but it does it at a lower overall cost and we have people around to support you when something goes wrong and you can't get it to do what you want!
Customer: But it costs so much more than the other products we are looking at...
Vendor: Well Bud, you get what you pay for, I'll admit that there are less expensive products out there but they either won't do what you want them to or, you will have to do so much more work to get from here to there than you will with ours... In the long run, your overall cost with our product will be lower because of increased productivity!
Customer: Will I need anything else to use it?
Vendor: Nope, this is all you need. There are some additional optional modules but this is all you need to ________.
Customer: What about upgrade programs?
Vendor: We will support the current version out of the box for 30 days. After that time you will need to enter into a support agreement with us for a nominal charge of $__,___.00 per year. This will cover the cost of support packs, version upgrades, and ongoing support (the ongoing support is almost mumbled).
Customer: What about extra seats? What will they cost me?
Vendor: We encourage you to buy all the seats that you will need now as this is a one-time price. After this, you will pay the retail price for additional licensing. For (exhorborant sum) you can purchase an enterprise license.
Customer: Thanks but no thanks.
Vendor: May I ask why?
Customer: I get all my software for free. It is called "Open-Source."
Vendor: (shocked) What? You mean you will trust your business to that crap? Who will support you? How do you know it is safe and reliable? Are you sure there aren't any serious bugs? It is after all amature software! You can't trust a business to this can you?
Customer: Well, when you put it that way, can I see your source code?
When the IDE spec first came out, exactly how the master/slave drive negotiation worked wasn't specified. As a result, drive manufacturers had to guess at how to go about implementation, and drives from different manufacturers wouldn't always work together.
:-P
Two drives from the same manufacturer, especially ones built less than a decade ago, should work just fine.
A Beowolf cluster will do that for you....
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
Without doubt the most bald faced tech lie on the planet. Followed by "G4 is a super computer". No one lies like Steve Jobs.
It depens on how the monitor circuit is done in the VCR. If the video out is fed a split copy of the input, you're OK. But that's a really useless sort of monitor. More commonly, IME, is the monitor out is done after the AGC, and its the automatic gain control that is affected by Macrovision. (I've never seen a [consumer] VTR that had enough heads to monitor the just-recorded signal like a 3-head audio cassette deck.)
Well, during the horizontal or vertical retrace interval, yes. All it does is confuse the AGC; and it does affect some monitors, like an Amiga 1080.
Here's instructions on how to recognise and avoid goatse links
We opened a brand new CompUSA store. During the 30-day training session before the store opened, we were told, and I quote, "the only people who need computer experience are the guys in the tech shop".
I was 18 at the time, but I had 35-year-old salesmen asking me questions about systems for users, I virtually ran the "upgrades" counter, and I was basically harrassed and kept from doing any of my tech shop work. I was later fired for working on two computers a week. If they had taken some time in those 30 days to teach the other employees about computers, I might have stayed there long enough to quit.
IIRC, the 6502 took 1 clock to fetch a byte, and the next clock to do something with it. But they overlapped these so most of the time the program ran at 1 clock per byte of program or data. The Z80 could fetch a byte in 3 clocks, but the first byte of an instruction required 5 clocks -- 3 to get the byte, two to decode. And this wasn't overlapped. Averaging out the way this impacted instructions of various length, the Z80 had to be clocked 3 to 4 times as fast to match the 6502. OTOH, when the 6502 was available in 1 MHz only, the Z80 could clocked 8 MHz (twice as fast), if you wanted to pay the premiums for "fast" RAM and ROM... But the real test was in overall system performance as it seemed to the operator -- and the 1MHz 6502 Apple allegedly beat anything else in it's price range. If you needed real power you laid out much more for a fast Z80 system with all the trimmings, and the CPM OS.
My manager was told 'we currently have some projects that are CMM level three!' As my manager pointed out, such ratings are for an organization, not a project!
----------- Sig what?
I notice that their current products no longer say they have "NO LIMIT". They say they can support up to 253 computers. I hope I had something to do with that. But I won't be buying any of their products ever again.
"Neverwinter nights will be released soon. We promise!"
are being sold as things that they are NOT.
Actually, the numbers match decently.
Which is the bigger lie, selling a CPU with a number that attempts to give a rough equivilence to the numbers the other guy uses (apples to apples) even though it's bigger than your MHz numbers, or hyping that your MHz is bigger than their MHz even though you know it has no bearing on the comparative performance (apples to oranges).
Sourcesafe. 'Nuff said.
Funny, I always seem to find the "one point" that they missed.
No, the Wang 2200 was a desktop; no 8", no card-reader. (You're thinking Wang Word Processing for the 8" and Wang VS for card?)
... higher grade tiny mechancial bits and medium than the audio cassette, but same form-factor. Tape drive was integrated and controled, a blocked device, not outboard streaming like on the early hobby computers.
On the Wang 2200, it was Cassette Tape
The 2200 later had an optional harddrive, who knows how small, we're talking 1970's here. It might have had an 8" floppy option, never saw one, but not 5.25".
There was very little off-the-shelf software before the flourishing of CPM. So the druggist was SOL unless he hired a Consultant or a kid to program it. Only a few years later, CPM provided niche software and nearly commodity hardward, but not binary compatible, no standard BIOS yet.
-- Bill
I've got four words for you: "Write once, run anywhere."
Come on, Sun, it's not that hard to deliver on that promise. The Perl and Python communities have done it for years...
I sent Oracle almost all of the money I'd saved to start the business. My delighted rep then asked me to speak to the Oracle quarterly meeting of top sales reps to help them get to know the small dot-com customers. He wanted his colleagues to be able to help other startups like he'd helped me. I was hoping to become an Oracle PosterGrrl -- and thus attract investors, partners, and customers.
I spent a couple days preparing a talk, flew to Boston, and told 400 reps and managers about my company and why I'd chosen Oracle's iStore. My favorite slide was one showing a bungalow and a half -- because I had just written Oracle a check worth 150% of my first house. And I had gotten a mortgage to pay for the house!
As I talked, I could see some of those shining faces showing more and more concern. Afterwards, an Oracle consulting rep told me I'd really need his team's help because no one had EVER installed the package they'd sold me without extensive help from their consulting branch. He estimated I needed another $100K. I had less than $10K left.
I flew home with the stunned feeling that Oracle had taken my money with the knowledge that this act would immediately drive me out of business.
A few weeks later, the prices did go up and the package I had bought completely disappeared from their website. Oracle wouldn't refund my money or apply it to other purchases when it became obvious I couldn't use iStore. And the last I'd heard, my accountant was still trying to get them to reimburse me for my hotel and meal expenses as promised. I wound up selling my company to get enough funding to continue.
So Larry Ellison, please feel free to send me a check for $62,259. And the rest of you, don't make the mistake I did in thinking that Oracle wants to help you grow so they can profit from a long-term relationship. They just want to devour your seed corn.
Sure I can. It's got a pair of LM386 ICs, held on with dull-gray blobs of solder on a printed circuit board that looks like the layout was done by a Parkinsons patient's left hand. Components will be skewed on the board, held in place only by cold solder joints. You might find it's actually built of discrete parts; I don't know and I don't care - but I assure you that there won't even be anything as substantial as a TDA2002 in them, despite the 250W claim.
Yep. And don't forget the REEAL simple power test: how BIG is the unit? Acoustically-good audio systems ted NOT to be extremely power-efficient, but even if it's relatively power-efficient, that means 50% or so at best, meaning that the box gotta DISSIPATE on the order of 250 watts, which means it has to have some size to it in order to get rid of that heat. I bet it doesn't even have a heatsink...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I am sick and tired or people referring to successful people as "fortunate," as though those people were born into a pre-determined set of life circumstances, and everything was simply handed to them, no effort required.
Fuck you, and your class-warfare driven bullshit. Fact is, most people that are financially successful have earned their success. It is the result of hard work, and/or good decision making.
I realize that this was hardly the point of your post, and agree that you are entitled to everything that was promised you...
Still, I'm sick and tired of the whole "victim of circumstance" song and dance.
Life's hard... Wear a fuckin' helmet.
That is the biggest lie.
Why thank you!! Good to see someone out there has a clue about Slashdot- discuss stuff, whatever it may be (hopefully on topic), and allow everyone their opinion.
:)) and 5 positive, to get the good ones out there.
I wasn't trying to be extemist or anything, just merely pointing out that there's a group effort for ciggarettes to kill- people to make them, advertise them, smoke them, continue smoking them, etc.
The crap flood is starting to get annoying, I agree, and the moderator system is getting to be a pain in the ass... Personally, I think we ought to get 10 moderation points. 5 of them for troll/offtopic/flamebait/dumbass (IE weed out frist posts, penis birds, gotse's, etc. Natlie is OK, if used appropriately in context, and is a new one.
Then make the metamoderation mean something- a little more careful scrutinization of moderations, a nice form-letter email to those who slightly don't get the idea (IE this flamebait issue.. it was flamebait, I admit, but I thought it added more to the conversation than the flames..), and $rbtl the idiots who crapflood then mod it up. Start killing the idiots out there, let them post AC. ACs are all but ignored by me.
Of course, any other suggestions to wake up the system are appreciated. But thanks for your support, at least! Glad to see I'm not the only one who wants discussion out there about whatever topics we may roam to, and all opinions accepted (even if I don't agree with them.)
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
On phone with MS (back when you could call them, long ago) -
"Yes, this does preemptive tasking."
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
He knew that after the box was put in production (months and many man-hours into the implementation) - people would pay for a hardware upgrade instead scrapping, restarting and switching to HP.
The last time we had to buy hardware, we doubled our expected demand on the box, just to get the real answer from the IBM salesman.
For some strange reason, all our new system platforms are Intel based....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I'm a bit late into the fray here, but this is one of my favorites. A coworker of mine used to work at a car dealership here in St. Louis (I'd have no problem mentioning the name, if I could only remember it). He did some kind of office or clerical work, but his desk was within earshot of a salesperson's. On with the story...
One day, a young couple came in, test drove a V-8 Camaro (or some F-body), and decided they really wanted one. Unfortunately, the dealer didn't have a V-8 in their preferred color. They did, however, have a V-6. Realizing that this was an impulse purchase and not wanting to lose the naive customers, he said something like, "Here's what we'll do: I'll sell you this V-6 here today at the V-8 price. We'll schedule a time next week for you to drop it off at the shop, and I'll have our mechanics install the other two cylinders."
They bought it.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
Im somewhat comfused with the findings. They say that this device can reduce the effect of gravity acting upon an object (decrease the weight), but then later in the article, they mention "The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship..." ....so what is the actual effect?
If it looses weight... it could simply be a shield from gravity... and it would not effect mass at all... but how exactly could this change the mass of an object?
I once talked to a vendor that sold 8mm tape
drives, but hadn't gotten around to selling
the new (at the time) 4mm tape drives.
He told me that the 8mm drives were better
because you could compress the data on an
8mm tape drive, but couldn't do that on a 4mm
drive because the bits were too small.
Subject says it all. Their cache is a SPOF. You lose the master cache card, you are dead.
I once attended a presentation of Shiva VPN Gateway back when VPNs was hot news.
The presenter, who was supposed to be the most technically competent Shiva engineer in all the Scandinavian countries, told us that the Shiva device was the ONLY device on the market capable of connecting to VPN devices from other vendors!
OK, I've read that and I've read Seth's site. I know neither except by those sites so I'm not commenting on either personally, I'm in no position to do so.
But I'm still not quite sure what Michael achieved by taking the site down like that. That one step baffles me.
Anyone?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Well done Bill, actually I was involved with the UK side of the operation, a long time ago, hence the the nome de plume and the low user ID, the NASDAQ delisting was unsurprising, we saw it coming after Freddy was dumped on the UK side, it was just a matter of time before things fell apart, and I see Frank has another company now. Anyway, its nice to make your aquaintence.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I recently got a call from a 'dude' from Microsoft. He was selling some e-commerce, website, and inventory application. I tried to be really nice, but then he said "Our software is sooo good, we have people using it that don't even have websites!" I thought about asking him to explain that, but opted for hanging up on him.
TrT
Berlin?
Heh. Were it not for my extremely quick reflexes, I would have been goatse.cx'd. Nice try.
Remember those flying machines in the back of comic books? They'd sell you a rack of wood to cut and put together, and all you had to do was find a vacuum cleaner to inert and voila! You're flying!
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is like argueing which is a more important part of a car the tires on the right side or the tires on the left. The tires on each side are vitally important.
Three facts:
1) People kill people without guns.
2) People kill people with guns.
3) Guns don't often kill people without the interaction of a human.
Damnit I AM acting my age. I'm 15 in hex!
Actually, you can't play your DVD through a VCR (you have to buy a separate RF modulator) but for a different reason: the DVD puts out a Macrovision-distorted signal, which the VCR is built to not be able to record. Unfortunately, it also can't pass the signal on to your tv!
That's one of my favorite strips, also. I am not normally a bitter person, but too many of the clowns that I work with bring out these traits in me. I am in a difficult position, because I too am a sales engineer. My job depends on their success, but I often think that the worse thing that could happen is if they do succeed and think that such behavior is merrited in the real world (or any other parallel universe for that matter!)
I am extremely bothered by the leeway that many sales reps get in an organization (perhaps it's their compensation for being the first who are cut!). While I think that a large part of each sales commission should go to the sales rep who found the opportunity, it seems as if they are getting away with *more* things than the average engineer (such as expensing their own meals with each other). Engineers, in my experience, are FAR more likely to talk about work-related details outside of work. We thrive on details!
This is what I do. First thing I ask for is their engineering counterpart's contact info. I immediately e-mail him/her with my questions, ask for white papers, etc. I only go back to the sales goon when I have specific $$$ questions regarding licensing and/or discounts.
Let's face it: most sales reps are parrots. They just "relay" information from customer to someone on the inside...from someone on the inside to customer. They're just a conduit that too often degrades the information as it passes through.
Agreed. There is a tremendous need for technical people who can make technology easy-to-use and non-threatening for the general public.
Perhaps the only thing that I hate *worse* than a sales goon is a techie is condenscending to those who aren't "in the know".
I unfortuantely see this type of mentality all the time with the IT fuckwads I've worked with. Perhaps it's because they realize that their MS certs will expire. (Then instead of being a dime a dozen, they will be a penny a dozen!)
Don't know what your direction is? Well, who's the one talking to the people who make decisions at the companies making contracts with you? The sales guy knows what your customers want to hear your product does...so you might as well just make it do it.
Of course, development of this type is totally unsupportable and encoruages the worst design imaginable. But it keeps you in business to strike with a really great product when you finally figure out what it is you want to do.
in chat support
"we are sorry for the inconveniance"
on the web
"No known service interruptions in this area as of 03/26/2002 01:59:36 AM EST"
the only fact is that everything is an opinion
Some dumb guy from an XBox exhibit said XBox uses TRI-layer DVDs... Maybe if the guy knew anything about optical media.......
Admission of causing Incredible Painful Computing
Telling the truth at last......
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Bah! Even Ming the Merciless was no match for Flash Gordon.
(And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear - Claude Reins was the Invisible Man...)
"I remember, doing the Time-Warp.....It's just a step to the left"
"Then a step to the r-r-r-right"
"Put your hands on your hips"
"Then do a pelvic thrust"
....
...
"Lets do the Time-Warp again......"
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
"MS software has no bugs?"
Admission of causing Incredible Painful Computing
:)
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Anyway, back to the topic, I recall occasionally doing some "assistant administration" in a small office. This meant that normally the system ran itself, but when it didn't, someone senior appointed themselves to fix it, but usually had no clue, which meant I had to step in.
(and ensure the NT servers had a full set of cygwin daemons running while I was at it)
Nope - if you look at the cycle times for NOP ( no operation ) you'll see it takes 2 cycles. This was a fundamental design in the 6502 specifically because of the fetch / write cycle it has.
The base 6502 was not overlapped.
Goto www.6502.org and there's some cycle/opcode charts you can verify.
The z80 was so slow because of the immense overhead per instruction.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have the marketing muscle or horde of fanatic, retarded consumer's that Apple does. Apple somehow convinced it's drones to start chanting "Megahertz doesn't matter" and later to double the G4 megahertz when comparing to x86 chips.
It really sucks that there is no standard benchmarking technique for processors with practically the same instruction set. While benchmarks can be misleading, I'm sure that they are (on average) better then pure megahertz numbers. Of course then there's the problem of not being able to benchmark the chip by itself...
Does anybody remember when Intel tried to leverage the P2's image off of the average idiot's perception of the Internet. All their ads said that the P2 "let's you unleash the power of the internet". This was way back when most people still used dialup (when the bottleneck was definitely not the processor). Most sites still use plain old HTML (as opposed to the much hyped VRML) for everything.
1000 free hours.
Directional, shmectional. The only time directional matters is when you're hooking up sewer pipes. Shit rolls downhill.
;-)
In an audio system, you're dealing with AC in your signal lines, and in AC you don't have electrons flowing from point A to point B. It's more of an oscillation. That means the electrons are going both directions.
If you've got a cable that "sounds better" in one direction than the other, you don't have a cable, you have a diode. But more likely you have a weak connection somewhere.
As for "oxygen free" or gold-plated connectors, all that does is tell your friends "look how much money I have to waste." An audiophile friend of mine made speaker cables out of TELEPHONE WIRE and they sound just as good as the thousand-dollar-a-foot-silver-wire-blah-blah cables the golden-fleece store wanted to sell him. And he's got a golden ear.
Someone mentioned the Belkin gold-plated telephone line cord for your modem. Granted, the gold-plated isn't going to do a lot for you, but the cord DOES have twisted-pair inside (the grey flat line cord doesn't). The twisting resists electrical interference, and there's a lot of it in the rat's nest behind your computer. Of course, this only benefits you if your premises wiring is twisted pair AND the telco wiring down the street is, too. I have seen it make a difference.
A gold plated sewer pipe doesn't make your shit smell any better.
Onto another rant, why does a stinkin' Belkin USB cable cost 20 bucks? Anyplace that sells Belkin seems to only sell Belkin, and that's anyplace that is a chain. I go over to my hole-in-the-wall screwdriver shop and they've got a no-name cable that's just as good for 6 bucks. What's up with that?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Amplifiers are often misleadingly advertised as well. I used to sell consumer audio stuff back in the '70s and trying to explain to the non-technically minded the differences between peak, peak to peak, instantaneous peak to peak, RMS, IHF, peak music power, and the acronym of the week was a major occupational hazard.
By the way, that's RMS as in root-mean-square, not that other RMS. Trying to explain him to potential customers would have been an adventure I'd just as soon have done without.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
what the fuck? doesn't the moderator understand that its directly related?
From HARVEY NORMAN Australia, Conversation with Salesperson for A computer i paid AUD $3000 for, "Of course you get a WindowsME CD" And then on Calling Harvey Norman enquiring about where my CD is.. "You are not entitled to it" Then they went and did it to my sister with XP!!!!!
How about this one... "Do you want to make some extra money??" "Have you ever hard of Amway?"
I had a camera store salesman tell me that JPEG is higher quality than TIFF, and why would I want to use TIFF, it just takes up more space on the memory chip?
This salesman is an accomplished photographer. Any questions on traditional film photography he can answer correctly. He's a valuable resource in that respect. But when it comes to computers and digital photography, he is absolutely clueless.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
But it would be interesting to see if you can see my comp through the router because according to the manual the way I have it setup should prevent you from contacting my machine directly.
Hey Tom. I know the manual you're talking about. It's the roughly-translated-from-the-Taiwanese manual on waxy paper which was packaged with your router when you bought it at Network Supply on Colonnade.
Yeah, big companies spend millions of dollars a year attempting to hack-proof their infrastructure, but I-can't-pronounce-it-in-English-Router-Company-of- Taipei has come up with a remarkably easy-to-configure router:
"Router have two mode: USEFUL an SECURE. On front panel adjacent to power switch, please to find large chrome toggle switch and turn it to whichever direction serves your needs. This conclude security configuration instruction. Enjoy meditation: Blade of grass that bends with wind will bring thousand happiness to potter who also breeds chickens. Thank you and best wishes from I-can't-pronounce-it-in-English-Router-Company-of- Taipei."
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I can crash win2k with edit.
repeatably.
No OS should ever go down because an application crashes. Ever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I can crash win2k with edit."
;)
Sounds like you have a shitty computer. You really shouldn't buy a Compaq and then blame Windows for it being unstable.
Meanwhile... my computer, which has been up for well over a week, is running Lightwave (Both LW Apps: Layout and MOdeler), Photoshop with an image I haven't saved yet, Opera which is not really all that stable (still tolerable, though...) Winamp, Kazaa, Outlook, and all on a Dual Monitor setup.
Sounds to me that Windows 2000 is doing pretty damn good. Could Linux do better? Perhaps. That's not the focus of this debate. The debate was that MS said that Win2k provided greater stability. It did. Case closed. You cannot argue that it didn't. It's over. I win.
"Derp de derp."
Fuck you, and your class-warfare driven bullshit. Fact is, most people that are financially successful have earned their success. It is the result of hard work, and/or good decision making.
Life's hard... Wear a fuckin' helmet.
How much did your helmet cost? Could I afford it? I love it when pointing out gross discrepancies in income levels (IOW, stating a fact) is labeled as "class warfare". Is pointing out that some people have lighter skin than others racism? Is pointing out that some people don't eat pork religious hatred?
Let's say some Enron exec got a USD $1,000,000 bonus last year and my bonus was USD $100. Following your crude logic, that exec is ten thousand times harder-working than I am. Care to explain how one man can do that much more work in the same time period? You make the mistake of assuming that the US economy and meritocracy are co-extensive when they clearly are not.
capitalism exploits...get a fuckin' clue.
Anyway, interference problems in your analog cables are much more likely to come from cables which are carrying some real power. S/PDIF doesn't transfer any power for devices, just signal (which, on the wire, would be a low power analog signal putting out no more interference than an RCA cable carrying a line level). So if you needed shielding to prevent your digital signal from interfering on your analog cable, you would need just as much shielding to prevent your analog signal from interfering with other analog cables.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
That's for the good stuff. If the equipment is poorly designed, it could easily have digital noise and harmonics out to hundreds of MHz. If you've done much entertainment center stuff, you've probably come across a cheap CD player or similar that screws up TV reception--I've come across several. Hostile equipment like that is why I recommend using good coax cables for digital. (Good doesn't necessarily mean expensive, but I try to avoid the cheapest cables.) It's far easier to prevent noise problems than it is to diagnose and fix them after they occur.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.