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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
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."
"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
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."
-
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.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.
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.
"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....
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
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?
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
"...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?
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."
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.
Don't you guys remember when Oracle started advertising their database server as unbreakable?
"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'
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."
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)
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...
Ever heard of SMS? If not, you can always write a Perl, Python, VB, ASP, PHP, Java script to check each w2k system.
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 ;-)
"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."
"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."
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...
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'll give you all the others, despite disagreeing with them. But how in fsck's name can you say with a straight face that Java is not Object Oriented?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
100:1 compression rate guaranteed
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
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.
Sure it wasn't 64 bytes??? Or 64 bits???
... maybe in sleep mode ;-)
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Exactly. No people, no toast.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...now that is 1 degree of seperation.
Fake.
Get your Unix fortune now!
it was "640K ought to be enough for anybody" not "you will never need more than 64kb of ram"
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.
.... 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.
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.
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
"News for nerds. Stuff that Matters".
::dons asbestos suit::
http://wigner.cped.ornl.gov/the-gang/1999-01/13
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.
Only, he never said it. It's not even true that DOS had a hard limit at 640KB. DOS ran on machines that were not IBM compatible. Xerox PC, 768KB. DEC Rainbow, 896KB. When will you people get it?
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.
When you build the machine:
Copy rcmdsvc under system32
cmd
c:\winnt\system32 rcmdsvc -install
sc config rcmdsvc start= auto
sc start rcmdsvc
problem solved.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
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
"Nobody will ever need more than 640K RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981
"Windows 95 needs at least 8 MB RAM." -- Bill Gates, 1996
"Nobody will ever need Windows 95. -- logical conclusion
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Just hit the stop before after the first one loads, I had no problem getting to the articles when I did this. (it did forward to the 'expired' page though, btw). If you want to see the content, I'll be glad to grab it and post it here somewhere.
What?
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.
It is. The prefixes youre used to using: kilo, mega, giga, etc., are meant to be in 1000s, not 1024s. The IEEE has invented new, stupid-sounding prefixes to mean 1024-units: kibi, mebi, gibi, and so on.
1000 MB = 1 GB.
1024 MiB = 1 GiB.
Liberty in your lifetime
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 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.
"A wide range of programs exist for the Texas Instruments Home Computer"
- found on the box to my TI99/4A
This is quite unfortunate. CNet was one of the few news websites that I really liked to use for reference links because they had a track record of keeping their URLs for stories the same for years. It looks like this is changing now. I hope to replace the links from KMFMS to dead articles with summaries whenever I can find a cached copy to summarize, so those who are interested in the original articles should read them now while they can still be accessed.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
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!"
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.
*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
Q: Whats the difference between ...
.sig
a car salesman and a computer salesman?
A2: The car salesman knows when he's lying to you.
-- this is not a
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.
"Chicks dig Unix Manuals"
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...
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.
is enough for anyone
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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
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!
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."
I'm not sure how this relates to blade II, but I do know a thing or two about milk frothers - for cappunccino, presumably? You want a stainless steel one. Put it on the stove to get the milk warm/hot, then put it in the sink, hold the lid on with a sponge, and give it some frothing the milk. I have no idea why ours works so much better than the glass ones, except perhaps that since it's steel I'm not nearly so worried about beating the crap out of it. You hold the lid with a sponge because the milk usually comes glooping out of the hole at the top where the frother goes.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Good cables are *absolutley* necessary in things like, studios :) To a consumer, as long as the impedance is close to what it should be, and theres no shorts a cable is a cable.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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?
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?
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?
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?
Hell, go to Lowe's, if you have one near. They sell the "Acoustic Response" brand, which works pretty doggone good for me. Good prices on cable, connectors, and wall mounts.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
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
"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.
Expensive home-theater cables are really essential if you're going to get that full theater experience with faithful studio quality sound reproduction from 0-50Khz.
Besides, all those oxygen-free single-crystal silver mithric-clad super-insulated home-theater cables are keeping my former college ladyfriend happily in 12-cylinder BMW 750s.
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?
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
Obviously getting rid of the people with the urge to kill. Because if you get rid of the guns, they will find more, fabricate more, or devise a suitable replacement. And then you'll have a bunch of victims unable to defend themselves against a well-armed aggressor.
funny munging
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.
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.
Tell me what qualities affect a cables fidelity? (seriously, Id like to know :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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.
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
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.
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.
sweet sig. I like it.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
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!
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.
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.
Like XP or Red Bull (Red Bull gives you wings).
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"
The NeXTDimension never did the mjpeg recording, unfortunately. Otherwise, you're wrong as hell.
It has tons of software (which I use to this very day.) You don't have to learn ObjC unless you want to program at the GUI. You can use C, C++ (with your favorite modern egcs), perl, etc.
It sure is revolutionary. All the geeks I know are getting hardons for Mac OS X.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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 ?
Its Accoustic Research, not Response. Good stuff. Lowe's sells the Pro Series, and I think their prices are better than Best Buy's who sells the cheaper AR stuff.
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.
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"
"Don't you think this is a little over the top, nerd? You need to find a girlfriend."
Wow, what a witty reply. So what's it like being a graduate of the Bob Saget School of Comedy?
I can't believe how fast this turns into a "Win2k sucks" thread. The funny thing is that the people that are bashing 2k don't appear to have used it much. For some reason 'changing dns via command line' is an important feature. Maybe it is. But I do the system administration for all the 2k boxes in my office. Once they were set up (easy to do), they were up and running. Everybody is still running. I don't have people walking into my office saying 'Uhh I think I broke it' like they did constantly with Windows 98 or 95.
In any case, this whole debate is stupid. 2K is a far better system for most of the users in most offices than Linux. I'm not criticizing Linux so much as pointing out that MS was made for the office types. Linux is easily a better server. Questions about which is better to administer seems rather academic, doesn't it? I could sit here and say that Win2k is far easier to administer for this reason and that reason, but I use it every single day! I don't know Linux so I can't say it's better or it's not. I do like that in Windows I can tell somebody over the phone how to do something like change their gateway. No big deal. I've tried to do commandline stuff over the phone before, and it doesn't work so well.
So put this stupid debate to rest, okay? Win2k is not a bad OS by any stretch of the imagination. Look at what it does do instead of judging it for something it doesn't do that you think you need it to. The average Linux user doesn't have the same needs as the average Windows user. It's hard to imagine they'd both need to do the exact same things if they're not for the same type of people, isn't it?
"Derp de derp."
OS/2 could run DOS and allow the programs to use chunks of memory that would otherwise be wasted, such as the mode 13h graphics memory (64000 bytes exactly). Ahh, I miss OS/2. Good thing we have Linux and FreeBSD.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
"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.
-- 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.
When you lose the argument miserably, just try to claim that "both sides are right, there shouldn't even be an argument like this". After all, this is what people are indoctrinated with in school here -- makes a great society of happy, unthinking sheep who would never question dominant religion, be interested in philosophy or -- completely impossible -- devise an original thought and be able to act on it, defend it in an argument, and achieve anything.
The fact is, it's even in theory impossible for Windows to get a decent remote, or automated system administration -- the lack of design pretty much condemned this system to have all "features" bolted on, implemented by monkeys (because anyone with a human brain would choke on his own puke after trying to develop this), with interoperability problems being solved by constant replacement of everything with Microsoft software, and protocols being replaced by thin wrappers to underdesigned "object model" of COM and its descendants. How recognizably sheepish -- don't try to apply any original thought, use Microsoft tools, and other Microsoft tools will do predefined actions using carefully collected set of interfaces that look like an explosion on a spaghetti factory.
I don't know, what your office of 17 does -- maybe it calculates optimal duration of the amber light, to maximize fines, commercially-collected with automated cameras. Maybe it makes late-night advertisements for "money making schemes". Maybe it even does something more useful. But very likely, it doesn't need computers in the first place, and it's possible that whatever good it made in its history, is negated by the amount of money it paid to Microsoft. Those money without any doubt will be used to make sure that people like you will never know what software exists now, that is far superior to what they are doing, and will force people to abandon the development of everything but VB interfaces to Microsoft's own software. Because Microsoft can do with bullshit more than anyone can do with bombs and guns. What brings us back to the topic of this discussion -- Microsoft is either the world leader in commercial bullshit, or the company that created most amount of harm using this bullshit.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
"VA is a good company. They care about the Linux community." - Everyone, a year ago.
Bowie J. Poag
"When you lose the argument miserably, just try to claim that "both sides are right, there shouldn't even be an argument like this"."
I never miserably lost an argument. It's not a very good agrument when people argue over points that have little relevance to the topic at hand. 'It doesn't do remote automation'. Okay, for that Linux wins. 'Win2k sucks as a webserver' yep, Linux wins. 'You can't even change DNS from a command prompt.' So? What's the big deal? use your mouse. That's the problem with Linux, you can't get at some of the features of it so easily with a mouse. You have to find the right command to type in. Sorry, but some of us think that really sucks. You can use Win2k without a manual.
In any case, your arguments against 2K, whether they are true or not, don't affect the fact that Win2k is an awesome desktop OS for the average office user. It also excels at being a 3D workstation for artists like me. I've already said that it's deployed where I work, and it works wonderfully. Some of it is for software development, some of it is for PowerPoint and Email. *shrug*
We paid a lot for it. But I don't regret it. It was easy to install on the wide variety of computer hardware we have, and I haven't had to fix a Windows related problem in ages.
The simple fact is that Windows 2000 is a good desktop OS and a great 3D Workstation Os. I have a great deal of experience with both, and virtually no horror stories to tell. Considering that I can't afford computer crashes during rendering, that's saying a lot.
"Derp de derp."
This was a very popular and ill fated ad campaign. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/308
In the early days Netscape sold a Gold version in retail which included the HTML editor whereas the downloadable verson was only the browser (Navigator).
Not quite. You could download the Gold version too, but you were expected to pay for it after the eval period expired. The base version had an indefinite eval period (i.e. it was never specified how long it was) and certain entities like nonprofits and educationals could use it free of charge.
-- Old Man Kensey
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...
You're quite right. Fluoridation, the most evil commie conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids...
This is how things probably happen in many companies... our boss has recently started giving overviews of the company's financial situation and those presentations usually contain a page on contracts in the pipeline, with percentages attached. He says you shouldn't try to understand the maths because it doesn't make sense at face value, but apparently in the long run that sort of valuation makes sense to someone.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
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); }
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!
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
There was a measurable difference, but it wasn't in the order of a 750MHz Athlon would spank a 1GHz PIII.
The old pre-TBird Athlons were slower at 1GHz than the PIII at the time. This was due to the cache running at 333MHz. When the TBird came out it was significantly faster than the PIII. However, they were pretty comparable, the major difference at the time was price rather than performance.
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
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.
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!"
polymorphism:
assume class B extends from A
A a = new B();
Tada!!
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.
Its Accoustic Research, not Response.
Whoopsie. My bad. And their prices ARE better than Best Buy. I bought a 6' digital coax from Lowe's for $9. The same cable at Ovation was in the $50-$60 range, at Best Buy & Circuit City it was ~$40. I misremember which brand Circuit City and Ovation flogs, outside of Monster, but those prices are hard to forget.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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
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.
Polymorphism is the ability to treat any subclasses as if they were the type of a superclass.
eg
BaseClass[] baseClass = new BaseClass[2];
baseClass[0] = new BaseClass();
baseClass[1] = new SubClass();
for (int i = 0; i < baseClass.length(); i ++){
System.out.println(baseClass[i].toString());
}
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
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.
yeah, you're right. Java doesnt explicitly require templates because of that Object base. But I'm actually in favor of generics because it can clean up code readibility. take a peek at gilad bracha's presentation[pdf] on the topic from last year's JavaOne. Note how the code reads (and when errors happen) in slides 9 and 10.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
"Nobody will ever need more than 640K RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981
Except that it is not Bill Gates that said that, Cf. a recent Slashdot article.
Funny post anyway
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).
Funny, I always seem to find the "one point" that they missed.
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.
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
Ok, say Im looking to recable my studio (and I am :), what *should* I be using ?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I guess that why all the big animation houses are moving to Win2k...oh wait, there moving to Linux.
I use win2k, ang its the best OS ms has made.
The command line argument, in general, is a waste. true Command lines are faster the mouse commands, but as long as you can do what needs to be done(in this case DNS) its fine.
The root of that complaint is the fact that is something goes wrong, MS GUI's a notoriously bad at handling it, and you end up rebooting. However in Linux if something mucks up the GUI, you can still use the computer without rebooting.
For you that means if your in the middle of rendoring and your GUI has a problem, you can go to command line, retart or fix the GUI and your background process is still running.
Out of all the #D workstatins, Win 2k is down towards the bottom. Considering its competotirs, Even being on the map is a good thing.
FYI I've installed several differnet Linux distros on wildly different PC, never had a problem.
However, if I did 3d rendering, or any CPU intensive work, it would be nice to be able to recompile it specifically for the processor and machine config I'm using.
Initial money is really irrelevent to WIN2k/Linux discussions, however, the money your going to keep spending to stay with the MS sofware is something that needs to be addressed by any company, perferable annually.
Only in the MS world would 2 years with an OS be considered "a great deal of experience".
I've been using Linux for years, and I've never had to fix a windows related problem!
Just a little levity in case this post seems to critical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" guess that why all the big animation houses are moving to Win2k...oh wait, there moving to Linux."
This is a hard number to quantify. The really big movie studios are using Linux for the network rendering. Let me reemphasize this, NETWORK RENDERING. This is not the same as actually developing the animation. I think Final Fantasy was mostly developed on Macs and PCs, and sent off to the Linux farm for rendering. This doesn't negate what you're saying, but rather it indicates that OSX and Win2k are useful in this area. It is my understanding that the animators are given the OS they know how to use. It also costs $12,000 per seat to get Maya. Interestingly enough, the desktop machines did rendering overnight as well. (This might have been Shrek.. I watched the making of on both these movies too close together...)
That's a little prohibitive for a medium sized Game Company or Television FX studio. The majority of these two businesses use either 3D Studio MAX or Lightwave. Neither of these two progams are available in Linux. If Win2k was as bad as some of the people here believe, then these companies would sooner buy Maya seats than rely on Win2K to handle their rendering.
Getting back to the topic at hand, MS promised greater stability with Win2k, and they easily delivered that. That's the only point I'm trying to make, if you sift back to the top of this thread, heh.
"Derp de derp."
...which is true. (or do you need Win95?)
yeah, the comment is lame. I just wanted to join in and tell you that I am exceptionally amused by your logical conclusion.
Jobs? Which jobs?
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.
Well, actually, this is pretty darn close to the truth for applications that are threaded. IIRC, Oracle ran about 28x as fast on a 30-way UE6000 as it did on a single processor of the same speed. (To be fair, there are darn few apps that are really written to take advantage of threading, Oracle is one of the best...)
I know this is hard for some Linux folks to swallow, but that's the reason some of us really love Solaris - it scales more linearly that anything else I've encountered. It's not exactly linear, but for well-written apps, it's pretty close...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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."
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.