Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me... Or thinks I'm a smart ass... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
I've heard that in Russia and countries close to Russia, all the lights are yellow at the same time, and then they flick from yellow to green and yellow to red simultaneously. A friend of mine went over there with an exchange student he met in the states. He said that there are two speeds of cars: Off, and Maximum. And with a red-yellow-green sequence, it's like get ready, set, go. He says it makes you appreciate yellow lights in America - if you run a yellow light over there, you're probably dead. Yet somehow, he never saw a traffic accident.
But only Microsoft provides a hands off and automagic way for somebody to take advantage of the insecurities in SMTP with little trouble.
Thats what is so bad about these little episodes. SMTP has existed since the early 70's, yet e-mail born viruses that take advantage of the SMTP header spoofing have only existed a few years.
This isn't only a windows problem. It's relatively easy to write a shell script to set an arbitrary from: line in an email. Heck, you can edit your user-domain= in your ~/.pinerc and send mail "from anywhere". Nevertheless, the fact remains that a great majority of spam comes from sysadmins who don't know how to configure their/etc/sendmail.cf file correctly, creating open mail relays.
Please, check your/etc/sendmail.cf for this:
R$* ! $* @ $* $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R$* @ $* @ $* $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R$* < $* @ $* @ $* > $* $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R$* % $* < @ $=w . > $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R"$*@$*" $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R$*<"$*">$* $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info" R<"$*"> $#error $@ 5.7.1 $: "571 Refused (Refusal code 01) - see
http://somewebsite.com/spam.html for info"
Reuse the old monitors. Also, keep a few in stock for quick replacements when they do die. Most users will stick with 800x600 on a 17", and 1024x768 on a 19"+ anyways, so the clarity isn't too big an issue. Only your heavy spreadsheet users and graphics pros need a really good monitor.
Another thing to think about is Flat panel monitors.
Yeah, they're expensive, but... you pay the power bill right? In a year, you'd save money with flat panels, besides impressing your employees. AND flat panel monitors absolutely rock for spreadsheet and number reading. They do not, however, rock for gaming, which is precisly what you don't want people doing on the clock.
For office work, flat panels are great. Easy on the eyes, superb clarity of text / numbers, low power consumption.
Tech support should be an option that people have to pay for - either the screwdriver guy in the neighborhood, a local third-party, or as an add-on from the company that sold you the gear in the first place.
Trust me, I TOTALLY understand where you're comming from. I used to sell computers for The man and I can tell you first hand that people don't want to pay upfront. They want the computer from the company that has a 30 day parts, 90 day labor warranty and the cheapest parts (caugh eMachine power supply caugh). The problem is that no one wants to pay for the service after the initial sale, either.
The reason for this is that extended warranties are the only way to get extended tech support, and extended warranties are a rip off.
Let me say that again. RIP OFF. We were constantly pushed to sell the 3 year in home service plan for a computer, which comes with 24 hour tech support, because it wsa 80% profit. Problem was that it was two hundred freaking dollars.
If that's the cost of tech support - an 80% waste of money - what's the point?
The attitude of computer retailers, and retailers in genereal, is that people in general don't want to pay for tech support, ever, and the ones that do are suckers.
I can't even be bothered to find an old invoice most times, for all my needs, I always look up phone numbers online. It took my DSL going out 5 times before I remembered to look up the number on their website WHILE I HAD INTERNET CONNECTIVITY.
Most of the time, if I didn't have a prior bill sitting on my desk, I'd just let it go, and assume it would be up sometime soon....
Oh, believe you me, there's nothing like slashdot to point out EVERYTHING that's wrong with one's webhosting company, philosophy, gender, habits, etc. =)
We'll be changing a few things on the website shortly. That is one of them.
True, true, I was just taking a look at the top report for that server. As it's only about 7 months old now, not too many accounts are on it, but we could stand to stick another 128 or 256 in it. It's not using much swap space yet, but it is using a majority of the ram. To stay ahead of the game, we'll probably go ahead and upgrade it.
But this far, it's not overloaded by any means: load average: 0.12, 0.23, 0.58
Our boss is a pretty devout christian, and as the owner of the company it's at his discretion. However, to my knowledge, the only reasons we've ever taken anyone's site down are pirated software and because it was a fradulent order.
Basically, this is a legal issue, not a moral one. Whatever's illegal in Durham NC (where the company is incorporated) is forbidden by the TOS, plus porn. We can't afford to go to bat for someone who hosts a website with questionable content. Questionable is intentionally left vague because we basically have to leave it vague in order to anticipate the unknown. If we explicitly set out the limitations (You can have pro-Nazi sites, but not Anti-African-American sites) etc, first it would make the TOS rediculously long, and second, someone would find a way to break the spirit of the rule while staying within the letter of the rule. And as previously mentioned, we can't afford to go to bat legally for someone who hosts questionable content and comes under question from law enforcement agencies.
Seriously, though, if you have questions about content limitations or policies and issues with the TOS, feel free to email us: staff@netmar.com
No no no, our network is multi-homed. We haven't lost connectivity for more than a coupla minutes total, while all our BGP AS route announcements get switched over to Cable and Wireless.
We have a ticket open with sprint, and they're doing thorough line testing, finging out where the bad link is comming from.
The pages are because everytime any machine goes down and back up, I get paged 6 times (2 SMS and 1 numaric for the down and 2 SMS and 1 numaric for the up). Mostly, it's dedicated server customers resetting their servers, which is their perogative. Today's been especially busy, that's all.
Our boss is a pretty devout christian, and as the owner of the company it's at his discretion. However, to my knowledge, the only reasons we've ever taken anyone's site down is pirated software and because it was a fradulent order.
Basically, this is a legal issue, not a moral one. Whatever's illegal in Durham NC (where the company is incorporated) is forbidden by the TOS, plus porn. We can't afford to go to bat for someone who hosts a website with questionable content. Questionable is intentionally left vague because we basically have to leave it vague in order to anticipate the unknown. If we explicitly set out the limitations (You can have pro-Nazi sites, but not Anti-African-American sites) etc, first it would make the TOS rediculously long, and second, someone would find a way to break the spirit of the rule while staying within the letter of the rule. And as previously mentioned, we can't afford to go to bat legally for someone who hosts questionable content and comes under question from law enforcement agencies.
Seriously, though, if you have questions about content limitations or policies and issues with the TOS, feel free to email us: staff@netmar.com
That's the operative part. Our linux server. Which technically should be "Our linux shared hosting server". Our router runs linux, as does our primary name server, and several of our customer machines. Most of the staff workstations run linux too. But the majority of the machines are Sparc's and run solaris 7. To elaborate on what Ethan said in the other reply to this, our other shared hosting servers are a Sparcstation 10 and a quad processor Ultra Sparc II 3X300 Mhz (woohoo, is it fast - we cross compile stuff there that otherwise takes hours in minutes).
We do have about 50 machines, mostly beause of redundancy - 2 login servers, 2 mail servers, 2 NIS servers, 2 monitoring servers, 2 name servers, 3 meters that do nothing but display realtime graphs, and various other standard servers (backup system, model system for easy drive imaging, etc). Plus customer dedicated servers, which range from Sparc IPC's up to Dual P3 1.13 Ghz machines with 1 GB of ram and ~450 gigs of hard disk space.
Feel free to give us a call 8-5 EST monday - friday, 540 951 9404 or 1 800 691 7191, or email us at staff@netmar.com. We'll be happy to address any questions or concerns you have.
We understand that there's a lot of competition out there in the web hosting world. We're competing against the big guys, it's true. But we do our best to be friends with our customers, and to accomidate them. We care, honestly. We want your business, and we understand that it takes a pretty big commitment to our customers to keep them in this marketplace.
I'm a systems administrator at Netmar (I'm Will, for those of you who use us).
Specifically read the part about "What does bandwidth cost? / Is bandwidth really unlimited? / How can you offer unlimited bandwidth? "
I made the website (..you shoulda seen the old one). I put that in the FAQ SPECIFICALLY because of people who ask questions like this.
Lately we've had a guy using a lot of bandwidth, and our Sprint link has been up and down more times than I can count (i've received 135 pages today, from 3 monitoring systems, as of 9PM est). So we've ordered more bandwidth. We try to stay ahead of what people are using.
It's a fact, however, that BY FAR the most common cause of spikes in our bandwidth is illegal software. We don't tolerate it, because it hurts our business and because we can't afford to get sued by the MPAA RIAA Microsoft, etc.
I'm one of the guys that makes the decision about who stays and who goes based on TOS violations. It doesn't happen often. You have to be clearly bad. The whole satanic thing is cause the guy that owns the company is a strong christian dude (call and listen to our hold music 540 951 9404). But we don't censor people. At all. www.fredrock.org (my site) is there, and there's "swear words" on the front page.
Anyway, if you, or anyone, has questions, just email staff@netmar.com - we'll be checking it all weekend (we always do).
The difference between us and rackshack (ask www.web-xperts.com dude what he thought about them) is that they don't care. He said he asked a question about some problem he was having or other and they were like "that sux, good luck". He asked us a question about qmail (plesk uses it) and my co-associate was like "never used it, lemme read about it" and spent the day learning how to use it, so he could help the guy.
We may not know everything, but we know a lot, and if you have something you need us to know, let us know =). We do personal service. We're friends with our customers. We work for you.
~Will
Re:Best Buy = Best Fraud
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
This guy is either a complete moron or a troll who is good at his job. Not for months on slashdot have I seen a troll that is this good.
Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase.
This statement is the proof of trollness. It is incredibly obvious to ANYONE who has ever bought a copyable medium that you can not return it, or illegal use copying would be thru the roof. Note: Illegal use copying: making a copy of something to which you do not posess the origional. I'm all for open source and fair use and hate the copy proof CD's, etc. but - This is just COMMON SENSE. You can't buy a CD and rip it and expect to be able to return it.
Now, in your case, you claim the software didn't work. OK, well, there's not much you can do. It's sold as is. If you don't want to believe that, look on the back of your reciept. Now, granted you had a special case, but they have no way to know that.
The rest of us deal with this, understanding the implications. I bought the girlfriend a copy of The Sims: Hot Date for christmas, and it didn't work on her 233 Mhz laptop, unlike the Sims and all the other expansion packs (she's a big fan). So, guess what? I built her a computer for her birthday in february. I can't ask them to take it back because it didn't work...
Now: TO BEAT THE SYSTEM: Claim the software was defective, and exchange it for the same title. Then, the next day, go in and return the un-opened software that you exchanged the opened, "damaged" software for, using the origional reciept, which you should still have. Or get a friend to do it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is currently reading it, and I blah blah...
Phew! At first glance, I could have sworn that that said "My current wife is reading it...".
Must be my lysdexia.
~Will
"...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."
~will
Buy a domain and run webmin/usermin on the domain - web based email (plus a buncha other crap) via open source software.
Pretty amazing feat.
Putting the last nail in your own coffin, from the inside, I mean.
~z
I hope everyone also knows that you can get domains from Joker.com for dirt cheap.
.85E to the $1USD. Right now it looks like it's about .91. So, that's $11/year.
In fact, according to their pricing guide, you can register any of the big three (com,net,org) for 12 Euros.
Conversion rate for the Euro according to joker.com is about
Plus it says you can use some nameserver they have for free. I don't know the quality of it, but...
~Wx
yep.
My bad.
Oops. I'll watch that.
Yeah, or another way to look at it is:
$40 billion = 40 thousand million dollars.
Population of the U.S. = 281,421,906 source.
40,000 / 281.422 = 142
Therefore, Microsoft has enough money in reserve to make everyone in the U.S. a millionaire 142 times over.
Jesus Christ.
~Will
I've heard that in Russia and countries close to Russia, all the lights are yellow at the same time, and then they flick from yellow to green and yellow to red simultaneously. A friend of mine went over there with an exchange student he met in the states. He said that there are two speeds of cars: Off, and Maximum. And with a red-yellow-green sequence, it's like get ready, set, go. He says it makes you appreciate yellow lights in America - if you run a yellow light over there, you're probably dead. Yet somehow, he never saw a traffic accident.
~z
move sales up in the alphabet.
Customer Consultant.
Better that than risk something awful happening, like one of the voice actors quitting or getting canned...
He also missed Maude Flanders. Gone. Poof. She's dead. Her voice performer quit. Notice you don't see much Helen Lovejoy either - same voice actor.
~will
Thats what is so bad about these little episodes. SMTP has existed since the early 70's, yet e-mail born viruses that take advantage of the SMTP header spoofing have only existed a few years.
This isn't only a windows problem. It's relatively easy to write a shell script to set an arbitrary from: line in an email. Heck, you can edit your user-domain= in your ~/.pinerc and send mail "from anywhere". Nevertheless, the fact remains that a great majority of spam comes from sysadmins who don't know how to configure their
Please, check your
Reuse the old monitors. Also, keep a few in stock for quick replacements when they do die. Most users will stick with 800x600 on a 17", and 1024x768 on a 19"+ anyways, so the clarity isn't too big an issue. Only your heavy spreadsheet users and graphics pros need a really good monitor.
? customer_id=04&keycode=6W300&order_code=dim44pri
Another thing to think about is Flat panel monitors.
Yeah, they're expensive, but... you pay the power bill right? In a year, you'd save money with flat panels, besides impressing your employees. AND flat panel monitors absolutely rock for spreadsheet and number reading. They do not, however, rock for gaming, which is precisly what you don't want people doing on the clock.
For office work, flat panels are great. Easy on the eyes, superb clarity of text / numbers, low power consumption.
Just a thought.
Also, I still think the comptuer from dell isn't that bad an ideal: $500 for a P-4 1.7, 128MB ram, 20 gig hard drive. Honestly, that's not bad, and it's from a top provider with a good name. Add 128 MB of ram, and upgrade again in 2005.
Link: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp
~will
$5 to the first person who can port linux to the thing and releases a distro.
.... um .... 4 days.
I'd give it about
And we can finally say that Linux now has a WindowsXP counterpart, as it's running on Fisher Price, so it must look like Fisher Price, right?
right?
~will
Tech support should be an option that people have to pay for - either the screwdriver guy in the neighborhood, a local third-party, or as an add-on from the company that sold you the gear in the first place.
Trust me, I TOTALLY understand where you're comming from.
I used to sell computers for The man and I can tell you first hand that people don't want to pay upfront. They want the computer from the company that has a 30 day parts, 90 day labor warranty and the cheapest parts (caugh eMachine power supply caugh).
The problem is that no one wants to pay for the service after the initial sale, either.
The reason for this is that extended warranties are the only way to get extended tech support, and extended warranties are a rip off.
Let me say that again. RIP OFF. We were constantly pushed to sell the 3 year in home service plan for a computer, which comes with 24 hour tech support, because it wsa 80% profit. Problem was that it was two hundred freaking dollars.
If that's the cost of tech support - an 80% waste of money - what's the point?
The attitude of computer retailers, and retailers in genereal, is that people in general don't want to pay for tech support, ever, and the ones that do are suckers.
~will
hah!
I can't even be bothered to find an old invoice most times, for all my needs, I always look up phone numbers online. It took my DSL going out 5 times before I remembered to look up the number on their website WHILE I HAD INTERNET CONNECTIVITY.
Most of the time, if I didn't have a prior bill sitting on my desk, I'd just let it go, and assume it would be up sometime soon....
~will
that guy isn't a $10/month customer, he has 5 (FIVE) dedicated serves with us. It was in our best interest to keep him happy.
Regards,
Will
Oh, believe you me, there's nothing like slashdot to point out EVERYTHING that's wrong with one's webhosting company, philosophy, gender, habits, etc. =)
We'll be changing a few things on the website shortly. That is one of them.
Thanks though!
Regards,
Will
Netmar Staff
True, true, I was just taking a look at the top report for that server. As it's only about 7 months old now, not too many accounts are on it, but we could stand to stick another 128 or 256 in it. It's not using much swap space yet, but it is using a majority of the ram. To stay ahead of the game, we'll probably go ahead and upgrade it.
But this far, it's not overloaded by any means:
load average: 0.12, 0.23, 0.58
And that's high.
Regards,
Will
Netmar Staff
Our boss is a pretty devout christian, and as the owner of the company it's at his discretion. However, to my knowledge, the only reasons we've ever taken anyone's site down are pirated software and because it was a fradulent order.
Basically, this is a legal issue, not a moral one. Whatever's illegal in Durham NC (where the company is incorporated) is forbidden by the TOS, plus porn. We can't afford to go to bat for someone who hosts a website with questionable content. Questionable is intentionally left vague because we basically have to leave it vague in order to anticipate the unknown. If we explicitly set out the limitations (You can have pro-Nazi sites, but not Anti-African-American sites) etc, first it would make the TOS rediculously long, and second, someone would find a way to break the spirit of the rule while staying within the letter of the rule. And as previously mentioned, we can't afford to go to bat legally for someone who hosts questionable content and comes under question from law enforcement agencies.
Seriously, though, if you have questions about content limitations or policies and issues with the TOS, feel free to email us:
staff@netmar.com
Regards,
Will
Netmar Staff
No no no, our network is multi-homed. We haven't lost connectivity for more than a coupla minutes total, while all our BGP AS route announcements get switched over to Cable and Wireless.
We have a ticket open with sprint, and they're doing thorough line testing, finging out where the bad link is comming from.
The pages are because everytime any machine goes down and back up, I get paged 6 times (2 SMS and 1 numaric for the down and 2 SMS and 1 numaric for the up). Mostly, it's dedicated server customers resetting their servers, which is their perogative. Today's been especially busy, that's all.
Regards,
Will
Netmar Staff.
Our boss is a pretty devout christian, and as the owner of the company it's at his discretion. However, to my knowledge, the only reasons we've ever taken anyone's site down is pirated software and because it was a fradulent order.
Basically, this is a legal issue, not a moral one. Whatever's illegal in Durham NC (where the company is incorporated) is forbidden by the TOS, plus porn. We can't afford to go to bat for someone who hosts a website with questionable content. Questionable is intentionally left vague because we basically have to leave it vague in order to anticipate the unknown. If we explicitly set out the limitations (You can have pro-Nazi sites, but not Anti-African-American sites) etc, first it would make the TOS rediculously long, and second, someone would find a way to break the spirit of the rule while staying within the letter of the rule. And as previously mentioned, we can't afford to go to bat legally for someone who hosts questionable content and comes under question from law enforcement agencies.
Seriously, though, if you have questions about content limitations or policies and issues with the TOS, feel free to email us:
staff@netmar.com
Regards,
Will
Netmar Staff
Our Linux server is
That's the operative part. Our linux server. Which technically should be "Our linux shared hosting server". Our router runs linux, as does our primary name server, and several of our customer machines. Most of the staff workstations run linux too. But the majority of the machines are Sparc's and run solaris 7. To elaborate on what Ethan said in the other reply to this, our other shared hosting servers are a Sparcstation 10 and a quad processor Ultra Sparc II 3X300 Mhz (woohoo, is it fast - we cross compile stuff there that otherwise takes hours in minutes).
We do have about 50 machines, mostly beause of redundancy - 2 login servers, 2 mail servers, 2 NIS servers, 2 monitoring servers, 2 name servers, 3 meters that do nothing but display realtime graphs, and various other standard servers (backup system, model system for easy drive imaging, etc). Plus customer dedicated servers, which range from Sparc IPC's up to Dual P3 1.13 Ghz machines with 1 GB of ram and ~450 gigs of hard disk space.
Feel free to give us a call 8-5 EST monday - friday, 540 951 9404 or 1 800 691 7191, or email us at staff@netmar.com. We'll be happy to address any questions or concerns you have.
We understand that there's a lot of competition out there in the web hosting world. We're competing against the big guys, it's true. But we do our best to be friends with our customers, and to accomidate them. We care, honestly. We want your business, and we understand that it takes a pretty big commitment to our customers to keep them in this marketplace.
Regards,
~will
nick is 1.) way pre netmar, and 2.) sarcastic.
I'm not going to sit here and trade barbs. The quality of my work is in no way related to my choice of nickname.
Read the FAQ.
I'm a systems administrator at Netmar (I'm Will, for those of you who use us).
Specifically read the part about "What does bandwidth cost? / Is bandwidth really unlimited? / How can you offer unlimited bandwidth? "
I made the website (..you shoulda seen the old one). I put that in the FAQ SPECIFICALLY because of people who ask questions like this.
Lately we've had a guy using a lot of bandwidth, and our Sprint link has been up and down more times than I can count (i've received 135 pages today, from 3 monitoring systems, as of 9PM est). So we've ordered more bandwidth. We try to stay ahead of what people are using.
It's a fact, however, that BY FAR the most common cause of spikes in our bandwidth is illegal software. We don't tolerate it, because it hurts our business and because we can't afford to get sued by the MPAA RIAA Microsoft, etc.
I'm one of the guys that makes the decision about who stays and who goes based on TOS violations. It doesn't happen often. You have to be clearly bad. The whole satanic thing is cause the guy that owns the company is a strong christian dude (call and listen to our hold music 540 951 9404). But we don't censor people. At all. www.fredrock.org (my site) is there, and there's "swear words" on the front page.
Anyway, if you, or anyone, has questions, just email staff@netmar.com - we'll be checking it all weekend (we always do).
The difference between us and rackshack (ask www.web-xperts.com dude what he thought about them) is that they don't care. He said he asked a question about some problem he was having or other and they were like "that sux, good luck".
He asked us a question about qmail (plesk uses it) and my co-associate was like "never used it, lemme read about it" and spent the day learning how to use it, so he could help the guy.
We may not know everything, but we know a lot, and if you have something you need us to know, let us know =). We do personal service. We're friends with our customers. We work for you.
~Will
This guy is either a complete moron or a troll who is good at his job. Not for months on slashdot have I seen a troll that is this good.
Unfortunately, this refusal to exchange software is a growing trend. Eventually, I will be forced to pirate all software for testing before I make an actual purchase.
This statement is the proof of trollness. It is incredibly obvious to ANYONE who has ever bought a copyable medium that you can not return it, or illegal use copying would be thru the roof. Note: Illegal use copying: making a copy of something to which you do not posess the origional. I'm all for open source and fair use and hate the copy proof CD's, etc. but - This is just COMMON SENSE. You can't buy a CD and rip it and expect to be able to return it.
Now, in your case, you claim the software didn't work. OK, well, there's not much you can do. It's sold as is. If you don't want to believe that, look on the back of your reciept. Now, granted you had a special case, but they have no way to know that.
The rest of us deal with this, understanding the implications. I bought the girlfriend a copy of The Sims: Hot Date for christmas, and it didn't work on her 233 Mhz laptop, unlike the Sims and all the other expansion packs (she's a big fan). So, guess what? I built her a computer for her birthday in february. I can't ask them to take it back because it didn't work...
Now:
TO BEAT THE SYSTEM:
Claim the software was defective, and exchange it for the same title. Then, the next day, go in and return the un-opened software that you exchanged the opened, "damaged" software for, using the origional reciept, which you should still have. Or get a friend to do it for you.
~z