As usual, MS works with third parties to solve a problem, encourages them, etc, then builds their own to roll into the OS, screwing the third parties. Over and over and over. This is the biggest single reason I loathe MS. And no, I have never been one of the third parties. I just think their attitude sucks, and is terrible for both the software community and the user community.
Of course, if they just solved the real problems, this wouldn't even be an issue. Viruses wouldn't be rampant.
Does the current viral situation remind anyone else of midevial Europe? Black plague, anyone?
All BS? None? What? Either way, reinstall!
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Based on the last line of the story, I had to wonder if the whole thing was made up!
But, I recall one of my best friends being trained to handle support at [name withheld, but a hugemongous PC company in Texas] in the early-mid 90s. If the user had an actual problem, as opposed to simply not being able to figure out an app, the first two things my friend was taught to try were:
1) reboot the computer 2) if that doesn't fix it, reinstall Windows.
And he wasn't kidding me - that was how he approached his home system, afterwards, as well.
No. They just realize that they have a chance of getting away with it. The only thing they believe in is power and money - for them. It's a very prevalent attitude right now, and it's really, really screwing up commerce in the US. Almost as much as the insane governmental regs.
I was really happy to find vacuum tubes on this list. Despite the advamces in DSp and related technologies, nobody has managed to make a solid state guitar amp duplicate the tone and dynamics of a tube guitar amp. While it may be good enough for a lot of folks, it's not for a lot of others.
And the Soviets definitely ran way more tube gear than us, as they were convinced a nuclear war was probable. This is well documented. The fall of the Soviet empire, and the subsequent selling of most of ots assets, put *tons* of tubes into the market- far more than we've yet seen from US stores.
These sites will be blocked at the proxy servers. Piece of cake. Unless everyone and their mom starts using these ads. But we'll come up with something to kick these guys where it hurts-- just like they're trying to do to us.
Full-screen, must-view ads ate work? Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Maybe I *won't* block them after all. We got lawyers, too.
Gee, this sounds a lot like when Lawsuits-R-Us, I mean Toys-R-Us, threatened to sue me. Hmmm... Paperlicps and giraffes - both forms of pencil-necked geeks?
Maybe he should let them sue. It works for Guns-R-Us. If only he can get the same judge. Whoops. Wrong coast!
We don't actually have any evidence, per se, but as soon as they give us some, we'll give it to the court. They must have some. Surely someone does. Trust us.
We had a Vaio die (MB) a few months after the 1 year warranty ran out. It was going to cost us ***$2,000*** to get a new one (only one place i the metro area would touch this system). Since a new one was $1,500 or so, we bought a new one and kept the old one for parts.
That's not a business-friendly approach, in my book.
1: If the rest of the world works its butt off like the folks who built the US did, they'll have plenty of wealth.
2: The corporations and shareholders will all find ways to invest a big chunk of those profits to pay less taxes. besides, I don't *want* a "new deal".
Of course, one of the problems with the whole thing is that there is a growing %age of folks in the USA who aren't willing to work (or at least work hard), who expect to have everything given to them. But that's another issue.
I was hoping we finally had vacuum tubes grown on a chip. Besides building Eniac on a chip (but without the power bill and air conditioning problems) we could have every vacuum tube guitar amp ever made on a chip - just need a clean power amp after it.
I wonder if the claim they can't reliably test them would fall under false advertising or libel or something similar. Free software has a hard enough time getting accepted without the big companies that the masses haven't yet learned not to trust spreading complete crap like this.
I doubt it. They only have to prove that by their definition, under their peculiar set of circumstances, "they" "can not" "reliably" "test" "those open source products" (the ones they have had time and inclination to look at). IANAL, but I doubt they would have a hard time defending against that one.
An int *should* be 64 bits with a 64 bit processor. If not, somebody goofed up!
``RH is expensive...'' If it's Linux, they have to provide source for free, remember? The source they compiled from? Right?
Though we've been primarily a Red Hat shop to date (with almost 300 RH8 boxes at the moment), we do have one copy of SuSe running - on our dual Opteron. Lovely software. We bought it with the system, but again - they have to provide free source!
Of course, if you want free binaries, that could be a bit trickier. But even most of those can be got for free. As one of the big vendors freely admits (once you corner them 8^) they aren't primarily selling software (though there may be some non-copyable material on the CDs); they're selling support.
Unix was designed with security in mind. As they've added things (such as networking, which wasn't there initially) they've designed them with security in mind. Yes, sometimes they had to go back and add things or tweak things, but they designed it with security in mind.
Whereas I can't see that Windows was designed with security in mind. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I'm not willing to take MS's word for it - they've lied to me far too many times.
Looks like both to me. Someone at SCO has a cron job running that starts a DDoS (SYN) attack against www.sco.com from their internal network, and sends out a press release at the same time.
That way Darl doesn't even have to climb out of his lawyers' lap, where he spends the day happily napping and dreaming of Linus as his shoe shine boy.
Actually that comment almost made me quit reading. My sole WIndows box is a Latitude 350CPx. It had W2K installed when I worked at [nevermind]. When I bought it during the great post-9/11 RIFs, they reinstalled the original OS - W98. 98 is much faster on that laptop than W2K ever was. From what I've seen at work, it's faster than XP as well. Not *quite* as stable, but stable enough, given the speed and relative ease of use.
W2K was the first (IMO) real OS from MS, ever. At least sinece the DOS days. But for home use, 98 is fine. Annoying, but fine.
Meanwhile, I use it only for a few limited apps and some games. Everything else I do on Linux!
The fact that he denies ever saying it doesn't disprove that he did it any more than the fact that he's quoted as saying it proves that he did.
Regardless, I nominate Dell for building a 640MB limit into their X200 laptops. They'll take two memroy chips, and one can even be a 512MB chip. But the system maxes out at 640MB.
But that's OK. It makes it easier for me to push the less expensive but slightly larger Latitudes for the engineers - who *always* want more memory. Not that I blame them.
Sheesh. Before we bought Hayes modems, the company I worked for had some big honking UDS units with attached telephones. We also had a couple of acoustic couplers; in the Atlanta area, wet lines sometimes meant you only connected at *110 baud*. Slower than snail snot in July at the South Pole.
And there was no way I could buy a real modem one for home - way too many bucks.
Then came the Hayes. I used a 2400 baud Hayes for years, well into the 28K revolution (IOW, past the 19.2K glory days of Trailblazers), until lightning took it out. But guess what? The U.S. Robotics 28.8K I bought was based on the command set Hayes popularized.
I was mildly disappointed my Ascend ISDN router didn't understand AT commands. 8^/ I'm thinking of upgrading to rither cable or DSL, whcih means something much faster and cheaper must be about to break out!
OK, so we have the Enterprise series for the big companies with tons of money, and we have The Product Once Known as Fedora for folks who just want a toy, or geeks who can maintain it themselves. [1] But what about those in the middle - a *huge* group? Small businesses make up the majority of the business economy, at least in the USA.
There's no way my employer is going to pay the sort of prices RH is charging. We don't need much support, and 95% of the patches don't affect us. At the same time, we are trying to get away from the idea of pulling folks off the projects they are supposed to be on to help maintain the OS (and many companies don't have anyone capable of this). For the price RH wants us to pay, we could hire an extra person, and have them maintain the OS *plus* do other work.
RedHat has abandoned the middle class. The middle class has the most money, but they don't want to talk to us. OK, fine. I'm willing to bet someone else will. So we'll just be off, now.
Hey, Red Hat:
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH!
[1] I'm not putting the semi-consumer product down, just noting it's suitable only for a completely different set of markets.
We've pushed and researched, and come to the conclusion (supported by an admission by a cornered RH person) that yes, you can do this. As someone else noted, you may have problems with the support license. The other thing to be aware of is that RH *does* include some non-GPL'd software. You can *not* freely distribute that, and it's up to you to determine which pieces those are. Maybe someone has done this and documented it; I don't know.
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As usual, MS works with third parties to solve a problem, encourages them, etc, then builds their own to roll into the OS, screwing the third parties. Over and over and over. This is the biggest single reason I loathe MS. And no, I have never been one of the third parties. I just think their attitude sucks, and is terrible for both the software community and the user community.
Of course, if they just solved the real problems, this wouldn't even be an issue. Viruses wouldn't be rampant.
Does the current viral situation remind anyone else of midevial Europe? Black plague, anyone?
Based on the last line of the story, I had to wonder if the whole thing was made up!
But, I recall one of my best friends being trained to handle support at [name withheld, but a hugemongous PC company in Texas] in the early-mid 90s. If the user had an actual problem, as opposed to simply not being able to figure out an app, the first two things my friend was taught to try were:
1) reboot the computer
2) if that doesn't fix it, reinstall Windows.
And he wasn't kidding me - that was how he approached his home system, afterwards, as well.
He didn't stay in support very long, either.
No. They just realize that they have a chance of getting away with it. The only thing they believe in is power and money - for them. It's a very prevalent attitude right now, and it's really, really screwing up commerce in the US. Almost as much as the insane governmental regs.
I was really happy to find vacuum tubes on this list. Despite the advamces in DSp and related technologies, nobody has managed to make a solid state guitar amp duplicate the tone and dynamics of a tube guitar amp. While it may be good enough for a lot of folks, it's not for a lot of others.
And the Soviets definitely ran way more tube gear than us, as they were convinced a nuclear war was probable. This is well documented. The fall of the Soviet empire, and the subsequent selling of most of ots assets, put *tons* of tubes into the market- far more than we've yet seen from US stores.
These sites will be blocked at the proxy servers. Piece of cake. Unless everyone and their mom starts using these ads. But we'll come up with something to kick these guys where it hurts-- just like they're trying to do to us.
Full-screen, must-view ads ate work? Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Maybe I *won't* block them after all. We got lawyers, too.
Gee, this sounds a lot like when Lawsuits-R-Us, I mean Toys-R-Us, threatened to sue me. Hmmm... Paperlicps and giraffes - both forms of pencil-necked geeks?
Maybe he should let them sue. It works for Guns-R-Us. If only he can get the same judge. Whoops. Wrong coast!
(http://www.rru.com/ -> click on "no giraffes")
We don't actually have any evidence, per se, but as soon as they give us some, we'll give it to the court. They must have some. Surely someone does. Trust us.
We had a Vaio die (MB) a few months after the 1 year warranty ran out. It was going to cost us ***$2,000*** to get a new one (only one place i the metro area would touch this system). Since a new one was $1,500 or so, we bought a new one and kept the old one for parts.
That's not a business-friendly approach, in my book.
1: If the rest of the world works its butt off like the folks who built the US did, they'll have plenty of wealth.
2: The corporations and shareholders will all find ways to invest a big chunk of those profits to pay less taxes. besides, I don't *want* a "new deal".
Of course, one of the problems with the whole thing is that there is a growing %age of folks in the USA who aren't willing to work (or at least work hard), who expect to have everything given to them. But that's another issue.
I was hoping we finally had vacuum tubes grown on a chip. Besides building Eniac on a chip (but without the power bill and air conditioning problems) we could have every vacuum tube guitar amp ever made on a chip - just need a clean power amp after it.
Fooey.
I've never found Yahoo that great a serach engine. When I use them, it's for the same thing they started out as - a hierarchical category of links.
For searches, I use altavista, alltheweb and google. While google has been declining, they're still not *that* bad.
Most of the time.
OK, sometimes.
OnStar's commercials alone garner it my vote for worst tech of 2003!
I doubt it. They only have to prove that by their definition, under their peculiar set of circumstances, "they" "can not" "reliably" "test" "those open source products" (the ones they have had time and inclination to look at). IANAL, but I doubt they would have a hard time defending against that one.
An int *should* be 64 bits with a 64 bit processor. If not, somebody goofed up!
``RH is expensive...'' If it's Linux, they have to provide source for free, remember? The source they compiled from? Right?
Though we've been primarily a Red Hat shop to date (with almost 300 RH8 boxes at the moment), we do have one copy of SuSe running - on our dual Opteron. Lovely software. We bought it with the system, but again - they have to provide free source!
Of course, if you want free binaries, that could be a bit trickier. But even most of those can be got for free. As one of the big vendors freely admits (once you corner them 8^) they aren't primarily selling software (though there may be some non-copyable material on the CDs); they're selling support.
Nonsense.
Unix was designed with security in mind. As they've added things (such as networking, which wasn't there initially) they've designed them with security in mind. Yes, sometimes they had to go back and add things or tweak things, but they designed it with security in mind.
Whereas I can't see that Windows was designed with security in mind. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I'm not willing to take MS's word for it - they've lied to me far too many times.
Looks like both to me. Someone at SCO has a cron job running that starts a DDoS (SYN) attack against www.sco.com from their internal network, and sends out a press release at the same time.
That way Darl doesn't even have to climb out of his lawyers' lap, where he spends the day happily napping and dreaming of Linus as his shoe shine boy.
Actually that comment almost made me quit reading. My sole WIndows box is a Latitude 350CPx. It had W2K installed when I worked at [nevermind]. When I bought it during the great post-9/11 RIFs, they reinstalled the original OS - W98. 98 is much faster on that laptop than W2K ever was. From what I've seen at work, it's faster than XP as well. Not *quite* as stable, but stable enough, given the speed and relative ease of use.
W2K was the first (IMO) real OS from MS, ever. At least sinece the DOS days. But for home use, 98 is fine. Annoying, but fine.
Meanwhile, I use it only for a few limited apps and some games. Everything else I do on Linux!
The fact that he denies ever saying it doesn't disprove that he did it any more than the fact that he's quoted as saying it proves that he did.
Regardless, I nominate Dell for building a 640MB limit into their X200 laptops. They'll take two memroy chips, and one can even be a 512MB chip. But the system maxes out at 640MB.
But that's OK. It makes it easier for me to push the less expensive but slightly larger Latitudes for the engineers - who *always* want more memory. Not that I blame them.
I prefer the metaphor of a sculptor.
``How do you make an elephant from a big rock?''
``You just chisel away everything of the rock that doesn't look like an elephant.''
I usually start with a rock of old COBOL or sphagetti FORTRAN 66, and just chisel away everything that doesn't look like C code or Java or whatever.
We don't always get all (or any) of teh desired features, but we *do* end up with *very* small programs.
"Ex-wives". You need to learn the difference between marriage and divorce.
-Me, Still happily married to the same woman for over 25 years.
... and the brains to get out while the gettin' was good.
Sheesh. Before we bought Hayes modems, the company I worked for had some big honking UDS units with attached telephones. We also had a couple of acoustic couplers; in the Atlanta area, wet lines sometimes meant you only connected at *110 baud*. Slower than snail snot in July at the South Pole.
And there was no way I could buy a real modem one for home - way too many bucks.
Then came the Hayes. I used a 2400 baud Hayes for years, well into the 28K revolution (IOW, past the 19.2K glory days of Trailblazers), until lightning took it out. But guess what? The U.S. Robotics 28.8K I bought was based on the command set Hayes popularized.
I was mildly disappointed my Ascend ISDN router didn't understand AT commands. 8^/ I'm thinking of upgrading to rither cable or DSL, whcih means something much faster and cheaper must be about to break out!
If I have to reboot more than once per year, I'm switching to Windows.
Yeah, then you only have to reboot once a day!
OK, so we have the Enterprise series for the big companies with tons of money, and we have The Product Once Known as Fedora for folks who just want a toy, or geeks who can maintain it themselves. [1] But what about those in the middle - a *huge* group? Small businesses make up the majority of the business economy, at least in the USA.
There's no way my employer is going to pay the sort of prices RH is charging. We don't need much support, and 95% of the patches don't affect us. At the same time, we are trying to get away from the idea of pulling folks off the projects they are supposed to be on to help maintain the OS (and many companies don't have anyone capable of this). For the price RH wants us to pay, we could hire an extra person, and have them maintain the OS *plus* do other work.
RedHat has abandoned the middle class. The middle class has the most money, but they don't want to talk to us. OK, fine. I'm willing to bet someone else will. So we'll just be off, now.
Hey, Red Hat:
SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH!
[1] I'm not putting the semi-consumer product down, just noting it's suitable only for a completely different set of markets.
We've pushed and researched, and come to the conclusion (supported by an admission by a cornered RH person) that yes, you can do this. As someone else noted, you may have problems with the support license. The other thing to be aware of is that RH *does* include some non-GPL'd software. You can *not* freely distribute that, and it's up to you to determine which pieces those are. Maybe someone has done this and documented it; I don't know.