I like watching people whine about achievements being evil, be they in any form.
Some of the achievements are actually fun, and a way to say, "Hey, I actually did that." It's nice to have a log for bragging rights sake with your friends who might not be sitting there when you pull it off.
One example would be Ikaruga on the 360: There is an achievement called 'Dot Eater', in which you MAY NOT FIRE through the entire level. As a single ship on Normal, it's a little aggravating to squeeze through some of the bullet showers coming at you, but on Hard? Fun times. Get your happy finger on the polarity switch and start flipping FAST.
Other achievements are just boring (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Frequent Flyer' - Complete 50 single player games), aggravating due to low player volume despite the game's age (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Legend' - 1st Place in 5 ranked multiplayer matches in a row), or just not worth the effort needed to get there (You all know what I'm talking about).
Except that if you are the original owner of a system that has Computrace on it (Think Lo-Jack for laptops) for example, and someone steals your machine, do you want some random Dell tech saying, "Well, you could buy a HDD enclosure to get your important data off that drive" to some mook who is smart enough to steal the computer, but not smart enough to boost the data off the drive themselves?
I'd hope not.
I'd dare say the following statement holds some truth: Most of us here are the types of people who have two, three, ten, or more machines at our disposal, and a (semi-)permanent connection to the internet in some manner. Most of us ought to be able to key in a service tag, express service code, and the ownership data on our own to do a transfer.
And as for virus removal, it's a data change on the HDD for the technician (since for a couple of models at least, they can only offer a reinstall of the OS or transfer you to paid support that MIGHT wipe the virus), which is why they have to validate you against the records.
In my mind, legit people with legit purchases have no valid complaint about being asked to submit the form that puts it in their name so that Dell knows it's legit.
This promises to be an interesting bit of crying material for some customers that I'll deal with here.
I get callers using McAfee, and they tend to get infected for some reason or another (I don't care why -- not in my pay grade). Apparently, I should be expecting to hear over the next few days, "Hey, I clicked on a link in my email to upgrade my McAfee, and I think I have a virus.:("
Why?
Because SHEEPLE CLICK ON ANYTHING.
Fortunately, it looks like McAfee has rushed to put some caulk in those holes, so the flow of sheep will be minimal, but still.
A number of people have their old @aol.com email addresses that they are loath to let go of, and they're scared to cancel their AOL accounts because of the horror stories you may have heard about trying to cancel.
What most of them don't realize that they could easily cancel (AOL KW:cancel) their AOL subscription down to the Free level, keep their old email address, lose the ability to call Indi^H^H^H^Htech support when they need help, and drop the dialup service since a number of them are at least on residential DSL, or can be on it for the same amount that they're paying for their AOL account*. The best part is, they can do it without talking to a fast-tongued retentions agent, and be sure it's actually done, without being extended over and over and over and over and over again.
For those who actually want to keep a backup dialup account (since a lot of ISPs don't seem to offer this service in this area for when their connection goes out, but the customer must stay connected to the internet for some reason), then bumping down to the $9.95 plan is one option, as is going down to AOL Free, and installing NetZero/Juno** for the 10 free hours per month that's offered.
Notes: *: This pertains to the people on the older legacy AOL accounts that cost $25.95 a month before taxes and fees. Some areas have residential DSL for the same price. Some may have it for less. Your mileage may vary. See dealer for details. **: They're the same bloody company, but you could probably sign up for each one, have them both installed, and end up with 20 hours a month, just in case of a much longer outage, such as an 8 day outage that I've had with my cable ISP right around some stupid sporting event that everyone called to get service done for at that point.
That's exactly what Dell's claiming, and I know this first hand.
The machines are consistently off-lease machines; The (l)users who're buying them think:
* The machine is new * The machine has a warranty that covers everything including the end of the world * The machine is the latest hardware on the market
When in reality, the computers are:
* 3-4 years old * Outside of the official Dell warranty by months at the very least * Decent, but older hardware compared to the current systems (Latitude D600 compared to Latitude D630 or Latitude E5500) * Missing operating system media that customers do not want to pay retail for * Still in the previous company's name, which means the computers weren't bought through Dell Financial Services' Off-Lease division * Have a warranty through Bankers Warranty Group (as of the last time I actually called the hidden number on TD's site for a customer that I placed on hold, just to see how they handle it) that is very short-term, and often resolves issues by just exchanging the damn computer.
If it's got a gigantic electrical cord, they gave it the wrong name.
I propose EVA, with a number less than 3 appended to the end as a choice.:)
I just hope that it has a backup battery on board with about 5 minutes of power, an AT field, and a prog knife for those days where someone manages to unplug the power source by some means...:)
What about all of those people who bought those Wal-Mart Everex boxes last year, or the people buying those MySpace PCs, or the people who buy the Dell inspiron mini 9s, for example?
Those are mass installs that are basically cookie-cutter installs of Linux right down the line. Most likely, these machines never get swapped to a distro that has balls, so a number of them exist in the wild, old security vulnerabilities and all.
Granted, they're in the extreme minority, but they too should be ownable, especially if the target PC's owner is a Happy Clicker.
tl;dr: not everyone knows not to accept everything the computer says as gospel.
Here's hoping for no such meltdown. This thing going stupid on April 1st would just add to my birthday present.
"Happy birthday, Orb. Now get back on the phones, we're all hands on deck for lusers calling in with that Conficker crap."
Now, of course, I'm wondering just where can someone stick the cork to stem the possible flow that this little barstard is going to cause to divert the most damage? Also, just how big does the cork have to be?
I had a few purchases sitting on my Vista desktop. When some jackass cut the cable line (for some dumb reason, they didn't bury my cable line -- they left it laying on the ground, and maintenance, when cutting the grass, ran it over), leaving me without internet for a week, I sat there, playing Audiosurf with very little issue. I just needed to unplug the cable, or disable the ethernet adapter, since Steam saw my router, and kept trying to reach out to touch itself.
Boy, was that a good weekend of flashing lights and seizures.
Except that there is a thing that allows you to pick upgrade options for each part, all on one page.
Granted, there's no flat increase, and I'll cede that point, but when ordering a box, switch it to list view from that annoying as sin icon view. It'll put all the parts stuff on one tab, accessories that you're probably going to skip on another, additional services like special warranty modifications (keep your hard drive, etc) on another tab, and the last tab builds what you've chosen.
(and yes, nothing is nicer than a keep your hard drive warranty. not sending a dead hard drive in to the man is awesome.)
My preference is largely non-financial. I make no money off people who have viruses. The few Windows users who I have helped with a virus issue, I did for fun, not profit.
My background isn't largely technical. I started on the old Apple IIc systems, migrated through Apple up to around System 5 or System 7 (can't quite remember), then was forced to jump over to Microsoft and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Progressed up through there to Win95 (Argh), 98 (ARGH), ME (... *dead*), 2000 (Heal'd!), XP, and finally Vista, while walking back over to the Apple side of the line for OS8, OS9, and the code-cat-named latest Apple OS.
Through all of that migration, I also spent some time in 'foreign lands', such as Debian Linux (back in 1998), QNX, BeOS (when it was marked as dead), Slackware, and other ports east.
Strange as it may seem, I would rather have Windows on my systems. I don't want to have to come home each night and figure out why a game that was working a day ago suddenly won't work. I don't want to figure out why the damn OS keeps setting the gamma so high that the colors are washed out, but will reset them once I open the nVidia applet in Eww-buntu.
I just want to come in after spending 13 hours of my day on work and commute, and play a game or two without figuring out why the graphics are broken up or won't display. It's hard to enjoy the evening beer when you're sitting there, poring over search results as to why you can't make this game work.
Largely, all of these OSes 'just work', but some of them 'just work' better than others. For example, my word processing needs are basic, so I don't need Office OR OpenOffice. Google Docs works well enough for me, since I go between multiple computers. Therefore, I don't have a problem with Windows coming without a major word processing app. It's not needed, and I view it as bloat when it's included, no matter who made the app.
(Before anyone tells me that I could do some sort of virtualization voodoo, know now that I lack interest in it. Most of my hardware is too old to make that worthwhile -- it has trouble running one OS sometimes, compared to a couple of OSes grinding their little blue nubs on each other's laptops.)
Probably because my Logitech Marble Mouse USB Trackball has two buttons that I pay attention to, two relatively useless buttons that I would rather rip off the damn thing because they are in a terrible spot, and a big ol' ball in the middle. This makes two buttons more than enough for me.:) No real need for a wheel (before one asks, it's very little trouble for me to hold down the control key before clicking to spawn a tab, or just lock and protect the tab when I'm at home to just easy-spawn a series of tabs from a given page), though I won't balk at one if I had to use it.
However, I forget that most people seem to hate trackballs, and have want of a mouse that has more buttons than is feasibly usable.
We just moved into an area with broadband internet via Cable, so I bought into their silly bundle with TV and Internet. The Internet was constantly used, but the TV, we'd watch a few hours combined in a week, after that first week was up. Granted, the first week saw more usage, simply because we had guests over.
When the TV we had finally gave up the ghost a few days ago, I looked my roomie in the eye and said, "Cancel the TV?"
His response? A resounding "Hell yeah."
Both of us noticed the same thing: * We were watching more shows via Hulu, [adult swim], and other direct sites with streaming media, or watching movies from our rather large DVD collection. * The versions of shows and movies we watched on TV had ads wherever they could manage to squeeze one in, compared to the much lower ad count on Hulu for similar or same content. We hate ads, but it's easier to view fewer ads per show online, in better spots than where they throw them on TV. * We're paying $45+ a month just for Digital Cable, and we're not using it enough to justify the costs. My mother always taught me to never waste money, lest you find yourself needing that money in the future. $540 a year savings by getting rid of something we aren't using anyway? "Hell yeah."
For people who're like myself and my roomie, who don't watch much TV, and can't really see a reason to throw money at Cable/Satellite/whatever, we don't see the DTV converter offer as a tax, as much as it might be a minor equipment upgrade for what we might have kept (10+ year old TV that still works fine, or whatever), compared to going out and spending $500 on something that's not going to be used much.
The program's probably not for us (since we'll be replacing his 10 year old TV, and I'm regretting already, all the windowshopping we've done to this point for one, since they're all expensive as hell), but for those who need it, I'm fine in seeing it being offered.
I'll give 'em a poke, since the local phone number is swamped with soccer moms calling in to QQ about Nickelodeon, PBR-swilling men callin' to complain that their beloved Spike is being spiked, et al.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I like watching people whine about achievements being evil, be they in any form.
Some of the achievements are actually fun, and a way to say, "Hey, I actually did that." It's nice to have a log for bragging rights sake with your friends who might not be sitting there when you pull it off.
One example would be Ikaruga on the 360:
There is an achievement called 'Dot Eater', in which you MAY NOT FIRE through the entire level. As a single ship on Normal, it's a little aggravating to squeeze through some of the bullet showers coming at you, but on Hard? Fun times. Get your happy finger on the polarity switch and start flipping FAST.
Other achievements are just boring (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Frequent Flyer' - Complete 50 single player games), aggravating due to low player volume despite the game's age (Outrun Online Arcade: 'Legend' - 1st Place in 5 ranked multiplayer matches in a row), or just not worth the effort needed to get there (You all know what I'm talking about).
Except that if you are the original owner of a system that has Computrace on it (Think Lo-Jack for laptops) for example, and someone steals your machine, do you want some random Dell tech saying, "Well, you could buy a HDD enclosure to get your important data off that drive" to some mook who is smart enough to steal the computer, but not smart enough to boost the data off the drive themselves?
I'd hope not.
I'd dare say the following statement holds some truth:
Most of us here are the types of people who have two, three, ten, or more machines at our disposal, and a (semi-)permanent connection to the internet in some manner. Most of us ought to be able to key in a service tag, express service code, and the ownership data on our own to do a transfer.
And as for virus removal, it's a data change on the HDD for the technician (since for a couple of models at least, they can only offer a reinstall of the OS or transfer you to paid support that MIGHT wipe the virus), which is why they have to validate you against the records.
In my mind, legit people with legit purchases have no valid complaint about being asked to submit the form that puts it in their name so that Dell knows it's legit.
This promises to be an interesting bit of crying material for some customers that I'll deal with here.
I get callers using McAfee, and they tend to get infected for some reason or another (I don't care why -- not in my pay grade). Apparently, I should be expecting to hear over the next few days, "Hey, I clicked on a link in my email to upgrade my McAfee, and I think I have a virus. :("
Why?
Because SHEEPLE CLICK ON ANYTHING.
Fortunately, it looks like McAfee has rushed to put some caulk in those holes, so the flow of sheep will be minimal, but still.
A number of people have their old @aol.com email addresses that they are loath to let go of, and they're scared to cancel their AOL accounts because of the horror stories you may have heard about trying to cancel.
What most of them don't realize that they could easily cancel (AOL KW:cancel) their AOL subscription down to the Free level, keep their old email address, lose the ability to call Indi^H^H^H^Htech support when they need help, and drop the dialup service since a number of them are at least on residential DSL, or can be on it for the same amount that they're paying for their AOL account*.
The best part is, they can do it without talking to a fast-tongued retentions agent, and be sure it's actually done, without being extended over and over and over and over and over again.
For those who actually want to keep a backup dialup account (since a lot of ISPs don't seem to offer this service in this area for when their connection goes out, but the customer must stay connected to the internet for some reason), then bumping down to the $9.95 plan is one option, as is going down to AOL Free, and installing NetZero/Juno** for the 10 free hours per month that's offered.
Notes:
*: This pertains to the people on the older legacy AOL accounts that cost $25.95 a month before taxes and fees. Some areas have residential DSL for the same price. Some may have it for less. Your mileage may vary. See dealer for details.
**: They're the same bloody company, but you could probably sign up for each one, have them both installed, and end up with 20 hours a month, just in case of a much longer outage, such as an 8 day outage that I've had with my cable ISP right around some stupid sporting event that everyone called to get service done for at that point.
That's exactly what Dell's claiming, and I know this first hand.
The machines are consistently off-lease machines; The (l)users who're buying them think:
* The machine is new
* The machine has a warranty that covers everything including the end of the world
* The machine is the latest hardware on the market
When in reality, the computers are:
* 3-4 years old
* Outside of the official Dell warranty by months at the very least
* Decent, but older hardware compared to the current systems (Latitude D600 compared to Latitude D630 or Latitude E5500)
* Missing operating system media that customers do not want to pay retail for
* Still in the previous company's name, which means the computers weren't bought through Dell Financial Services' Off-Lease division
* Have a warranty through Bankers Warranty Group (as of the last time I actually called the hidden number on TD's site for a customer that I placed on hold, just to see how they handle it) that is very short-term, and often resolves issues by just exchanging the damn computer.
Things that TFA wouldn't tell you, basically. :)
Because the computers aren't NIB.
They're consistently 3-4 year old off-lease machines from various companies and government organizations.
I'd know. I've taken at least 50 calls on this.
That'd be kind of creepy, what with that deep packshit inspection they seem to do to everyone.
I don't want them analyzing my poo to find out what I had for lunch!
By "planet", he was referring to an old, old copy of the Weekly Planet (commonly called The Planet) that they had a Vista SP2 DVD sitting on top of.
By a technicality, this makes the statement true.
If it's got a gigantic electrical cord, they gave it the wrong name.
I propose EVA, with a number less than 3 appended to the end as a choice. :)
I just hope that it has a backup battery on board with about 5 minutes of power, an AT field, and a prog knife for those days where someone manages to unplug the power source by some means... :)
Hardly.
What about all of those people who bought those Wal-Mart Everex boxes last year, or the people buying those MySpace PCs, or the people who buy the Dell inspiron mini 9s, for example?
Those are mass installs that are basically cookie-cutter installs of Linux right down the line. Most likely, these machines never get swapped to a distro that has balls, so a number of them exist in the wild, old security vulnerabilities and all.
Granted, they're in the extreme minority, but they too should be ownable, especially if the target PC's owner is a Happy Clicker.
tl;dr: not everyone knows not to accept everything the computer says as gospel.
Here's hoping for no such meltdown.
This thing going stupid on April 1st would just add to my birthday present.
"Happy birthday, Orb. Now get back on the phones, we're all hands on deck for lusers calling in with that Conficker crap."
Now, of course, I'm wondering just where can someone stick the cork to stem the possible flow that this little barstard is going to cause to divert the most damage?
Also, just how big does the cork have to be?
... I will NOT buy anything that gives me restrictions in any way.
I hope you don't buy things that you can eat at a given stage of its existence, then.
Have you looked at the restrictions on beef lately? Hooooly crap, you have to cook it first?!
Actually, it does work in offline mode.
I had a few purchases sitting on my Vista desktop. When some jackass cut the cable line (for some dumb reason, they didn't bury my cable line -- they left it laying on the ground, and maintenance, when cutting the grass, ran it over), leaving me without internet for a week, I sat there, playing Audiosurf with very little issue. I just needed to unplug the cable, or disable the ethernet adapter, since Steam saw my router, and kept trying to reach out to touch itself.
Boy, was that a good weekend of flashing lights and seizures.
Butbutbutbut, why didn't they just add cellular capabilities to the a-daaaah-mo, then? :)
It'd make it the ultimate little black book, then.
Except that there is a thing that allows you to pick upgrade options for each part, all on one page.
Granted, there's no flat increase, and I'll cede that point, but when ordering a box, switch it to list view from that annoying as sin icon view. It'll put all the parts stuff on one tab, accessories that you're probably going to skip on another, additional services like special warranty modifications (keep your hard drive, etc) on another tab, and the last tab builds what you've chosen.
(and yes, nothing is nicer than a keep your hard drive warranty. not sending a dead hard drive in to the man is awesome.)
+11 insightfully oblivious
That's ridiculous. It's not even funny.
This is NOT Sparta.
* Disregard if you are reading this from a location named 'Sparta'.
My preference is largely non-financial.
I make no money off people who have viruses.
The few Windows users who I have helped with a virus issue, I did for fun, not profit.
My background isn't largely technical. I started on the old Apple IIc systems, migrated through Apple up to around System 5 or System 7 (can't quite remember), then was forced to jump over to Microsoft and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Progressed up through there to Win95 (Argh), 98 (ARGH), ME (... *dead*), 2000 (Heal'd!), XP, and finally Vista, while walking back over to the Apple side of the line for OS8, OS9, and the code-cat-named latest Apple OS.
Through all of that migration, I also spent some time in 'foreign lands', such as Debian Linux (back in 1998), QNX, BeOS (when it was marked as dead), Slackware, and other ports east.
Strange as it may seem, I would rather have Windows on my systems. I don't want to have to come home each night and figure out why a game that was working a day ago suddenly won't work. I don't want to figure out why the damn OS keeps setting the gamma so high that the colors are washed out, but will reset them once I open the nVidia applet in Eww-buntu.
I just want to come in after spending 13 hours of my day on work and commute, and play a game or two without figuring out why the graphics are broken up or won't display. It's hard to enjoy the evening beer when you're sitting there, poring over search results as to why you can't make this game work.
Largely, all of these OSes 'just work', but some of them 'just work' better than others.
For example, my word processing needs are basic, so I don't need Office OR OpenOffice. Google Docs works well enough for me, since I go between multiple computers. Therefore, I don't have a problem with Windows coming without a major word processing app. It's not needed, and I view it as bloat when it's included, no matter who made the app.
(Before anyone tells me that I could do some sort of virtualization voodoo, know now that I lack interest in it. Most of my hardware is too old to make that worthwhile -- it has trouble running one OS sometimes, compared to a couple of OSes grinding their little blue nubs on each other's laptops.)
Interestingly enough, my city uses a .net TLD, not .gov for things regarding the public, and yes, it's quite legit.
Probably because my Logitech Marble Mouse USB Trackball has two buttons that I pay attention to, two relatively useless buttons that I would rather rip off the damn thing because they are in a terrible spot, and a big ol' ball in the middle. This makes two buttons more than enough for me. :)
No real need for a wheel (before one asks, it's very little trouble for me to hold down the control key before clicking to spawn a tab, or just lock and protect the tab when I'm at home to just easy-spawn a series of tabs from a given page), though I won't balk at one if I had to use it.
However, I forget that most people seem to hate trackballs, and have want of a mouse that has more buttons than is feasibly usable.
Or you just buy a two-button USB mouse, plug it in, and go back to the plain ol' "right-click, save!" mentality you're used to. :)
o/` Oh, Moja~ve! o/`
Sorry. :)
I'll also second this comment.
We just moved into an area with broadband internet via Cable, so I bought into their silly bundle with TV and Internet. The Internet was constantly used, but the TV, we'd watch a few hours combined in a week, after that first week was up. Granted, the first week saw more usage, simply because we had guests over.
When the TV we had finally gave up the ghost a few days ago, I looked my roomie in the eye and said, "Cancel the TV?"
His response? A resounding "Hell yeah."
Both of us noticed the same thing:
* We were watching more shows via Hulu, [adult swim], and other direct sites with streaming media, or watching movies from our rather large DVD collection.
* The versions of shows and movies we watched on TV had ads wherever they could manage to squeeze one in, compared to the much lower ad count on Hulu for similar or same content. We hate ads, but it's easier to view fewer ads per show online, in better spots than where they throw them on TV.
* We're paying $45+ a month just for Digital Cable, and we're not using it enough to justify the costs. My mother always taught me to never waste money, lest you find yourself needing that money in the future. $540 a year savings by getting rid of something we aren't using anyway? "Hell yeah."
For people who're like myself and my roomie, who don't watch much TV, and can't really see a reason to throw money at Cable/Satellite/whatever, we don't see the DTV converter offer as a tax, as much as it might be a minor equipment upgrade for what we might have kept (10+ year old TV that still works fine, or whatever), compared to going out and spending $500 on something that's not going to be used much.
The program's probably not for us (since we'll be replacing his 10 year old TV, and I'm regretting already, all the windowshopping we've done to this point for one, since they're all expensive as hell), but for those who need it, I'm fine in seeing it being offered.
Thanks for the reply to that.
I'll give 'em a poke, since the local phone number is swamped with soccer moms calling in to QQ about Nickelodeon, PBR-swilling men callin' to complain that their beloved Spike is being spiked, et al. :)
Jeff,
Will said refund trickle down the line to customers of Bright House Networks, since we're not "Time Warner" by name, but we are by service?
'cause that would be really nice.