Dell learned the hard way about cutting out the discs. They never shipped one-button recovery discs like Compaq used to. Instead it was always the Windows disc, the "Dell Resource CD" and some more driver/software discs.
In 2005 or 2006, I forget which year, they stopped shipping the discs by default because they decided the built-in recovery worked well enough. I started working there in 2006 and they realized they needed to start shipping discs again. We used them for fixing problems or of course just reinstalling when all was lost, so we ended up sending them out like candy. If we needed to use one and we realized the customer had an old version of the XP disc without the latest service packs we would send a new one. We also sent them if the customer asked.
Why Dell didn't also supply discs that did what the recovery partition did I can't guess accurately. They never seemed to mind sending out endless replacements for the numerous discs you needed to do everything manually (assuming they had discs available).
I haven't used a new Dell machine since 2008, so I can't say anything accurate about what they include now.
You don't. So what? Nobody said you need one. They said Microsoft has nothing to offer the people who do think they need one. Keep your Windows box (I know I will). They aren't going anywhere for a while.
I always encouraged customers to call their credit card company's fraud number as soon as they were done with me if I learned they purchased one of those scams. How many followed up I don't know.
My friend's dad also bought a rogue antivirus one day. He refused to believe it was fake. We quietly removed it and decided to let him deal with the consequences of giving his card number to con artists. Some people are just too much effort.
Perhaps they took that into account, thinking they might clean that up a bit while they go along. It would make no sense at all for most businesses to do something like that, but Google makes strange business decisions.
100,000 points if you can trick them into wrecking their software, their phone or flicking that voltage switch on the back of their workstation. (I wonder what the sentence would be for such an awesome crime.)
I think I had an easier time giving people things than you did. Despite not working in hardware support I once had to send a customer a new computer because hardware hung up on me when I did the transfer to get it replaced (mentioning I had the L2s on board). They'd tried to fix it three times and utterly failed.
The worst transfer from India was a lady looking to buy a spare part. She and her husband had a desktop where the power button broke. They wanted to buy that part that has the button, the LEDs and the little, colourful wires. So they ordered it twice and each time got the front face plate. So they tried again and instead of hardware sending her to spare parts she got me. I offered to check the part # she was given just in case. It was wrong. So I spent 30 min looking for the correct part.
When I was about to send her to spare parts an L2 walked by and told me to confirm with hardware. So I get some guy in India and ask him if I have the right part number for the part. He puts me on hold and comes back with a different number. I asked what it was and he says, "this is a six-foot power cable, sir." So I got kind of mad at him and reiterated what I was actually looking for. He says, "yes, yes, that is the right part" without even checking. I ended up thanking him for blowing me off, hanging up and sending the lady to parts because I knew I had it right. Maybe his centre didn't have enough "Be The Reason" posters.
In the case of the Optiplex systems the red screen also said to replace the motherboard immediately without troubleshooting. I started there in 2006 so I don't know when they added that part. It could easily have been after they caved and added three-year warranties for all those boards.
I did notice an awful tendency for hardware support to be useless unless you had Gold Support. They once hung up on me when I tried to get a customer's computer replaced and we had to do it ourselves as they had failed to fix it three times in a row (I did exclusively software support).
Different parts of the company had conflicting goals, information and widely variable competency. The outright lies and agents hanging up are just wrong and I don't blame anybody who runs away and doesn't come back. Sadly, the support from HP and Sony seems to be consistently worse (Sony forcing customers to reformat *before* troubleshooting comes to mind).
Lack of exposure. Even a popular mod for a popular game has so little exposure -- especially among non-technical users -- that it's not worth exploiting as a vector. It's easier to go with the familiar vectors discussed here all the time.
Malware still shows up in packages claiming to be pirate copies. My bro tried to grab a copy of Worms Armageddon. What he got was Worms Armageddon with the installer replaced by a trojan neatly disguised as the installer. I had a good laugh while I removed that. I've never seen, or even heard of a malicious mod, though.
My last three computers have actually done this. It appears to involve unshielded electronics somewhere between the sound chip and my headset and it happens continuously. With practice I can learn to tell what's happening on the screen by the changes in the static in my headset. The mouse-moving noise is very quiet and subtle, but rendering a PDF or dragging a window over another one can make an impressive array of odd noises.
It doesn't bother me at all because it's so quiet. What bothers me is how everything that isn't a computer makes constant beeps, and loud ones at that. The girl in the back of the bus wakes up everybody because her Blackberry beeps with every text received, iPods click, and microwave ovens are the worst. They not only beep loudly (and often uncontrollably), but they have doors designed to make as much noise as possible at all times, preventing any kind of late-night stealth usage.
I don't know about him, but I was sitting around a campfire with a Sea Shepherd guy and he told me they sink ships. Sure, the commercial guys are doing things that are obviously wrong, but sinking ships sounds like terrorism to me. They're not considering the motivations and knowledge of everyone involved; they're just attacking the ships involved, effectively using intimidation to get what they want.
Things like this have been mentioned already, but games get kids interested. If he has a PC game he likes then see what it has for tool and languages? I wasn't interested in learning anything like programming until the local news paper mentioned there were map editors for DOOM. Had it possessed a scripting language at the time, I probably would have learned that in a hurry.
My brother's time running a private WoW server with his friends had him starting to learn MySQL. If a game can inspire a kid to try SQL surely it can inspire interest in something less fantastically boring!
If he likes FPS games, he might like to learn to build a map and script some invasion maps or neat effects. If like likes RTS games he could make some scripted stuff for maps or AI. If he likes RPGs there are any number of scripting things he could do. These kinds of scripting languages are usually just fine for teaching the basics of programming and they make it easy to have something cool to show your friends (who probably play the same game) in a real hurry.
Other posters have a good point about letting him go with his interests. He may take to programming if he tries something like this. He may not. Programming requires you to want to think in a certain way (putting the world together in logical steps?) and most kids aren't very interested in that. Having him build something -- *anything* -- for the game he likes might spark an interest in programming.
There are also games for the totally blind. Shades of Doom is an example. The idea there is interesting and could potentionally be expanded into something much more complex.
This situation depends on his degree of visual impairment. My good eye can manage a visual acuity of 20/200-20/400 on tests and I can play a lot of games with it just fine. I can see a lot of MMOs being playable with visual impairments if there are appropriate visual (or audio) cues for some events and accommodations to make the text more readable. He might be into that type of game because it doesn't require a lot of twitch action like an FPS or arcade game usually will. Sadly, the article didn't say anything about what kind of vision he has.
The remark about Sony profiting might be true, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Some of the changes you can make to software to help people with severe visual impairments will help a lot of other customers like your software better. I see a lot of geeks with 20/20 vision squinting at screens, getting lost in menus, complaining about colour contrasts, etc. There is a middle ground that might not make this guy totally happy, but would make life easier for a lot of users.
As a blind person (yes, legally I count as such), I do find his action offensive though. He's going about this all the wrong way. He should get in with some software people and make a positive difference, even if it's only in small ways.
or it is the specific area you've been working in recently? IT seems to have such a range of things you can do, and they can be very different. When I worked in tech support I dealt with all kinds of people, but didn't have to do anything very difficult technically. When I helped write code for research projects I learned new things and dealt with almost no people. Tech support also had a lot of extra corporate weirdness I had to deal with. Then there's my uncle who works as a systems analyst in a COBOL shop. I don't think he's learned much new in decades, but he likes it and makes a pile of money.
You didn't say what it is you do, but maybe before you decide to leave IT altogether you'll think of some area you like more than what you're doing now. Maybe you won't. If there's something else you really like doing then it's definitely worth investigating, but like some guys here have already said, make sure you check out the employment options and the finances compared with your budget.
It doesn't benefit him, but it potentially benefits thousands like him who would suffer similar fates. It helps provide in some small way a defense against more of the same towards others. It's just the correct thing to do, even if it took them too damn long to do it!
I find it extremely offensive that any state would worry about that type of morality over the scientific/technological progress offered by such a man. Of course, in my world view, even if it was wrong or evil to be gay, I'd keep him around and happy just for the potential contributions towards turning humanity into an all-powerful machine society!
Well, I'm being retarded. Our candidates are still local and the printing is too. The design of our ballots being dead simple and unchanging probably saves us a pile of cash.
The concept of different ballot layouts doesn't compute here. There's one ballot. The candidates are in alphabetical order.
As for the rest of the costs, I could see ways the whole thing could be cheaper than a patchwork of machines, each variety needing a different set of technicians. Then there are the legal battles, the recounts, teaching people to use the things, the millions spent by states checking whether they're suitable, the backtracking when they're not, etc, etc. The machines also need to be secured, stored, maintained, and moved. No, I still have a suspicion our simple paper ballots work out to cheaper, at least until some useful standards appear for machines.
The frustrating thing is I can't find any info on the costs of these things. The costs of dealing with the machines have shown up here once in a while, but Canada seems to dislike putting costs on the web. Personally, I think any bureaucrat refusing to put any non-classified info on the web, and in the public domain, or even attempting to make an argument against it, should be shot.
This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.
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If you're going to fix the bugs anyway then why not take the money and put it into an organization you do support?
Dell learned the hard way about cutting out the discs. They never shipped one-button recovery discs like Compaq used to. Instead it was always the Windows disc, the "Dell Resource CD" and some more driver/software discs.
In 2005 or 2006, I forget which year, they stopped shipping the discs by default because they decided the built-in recovery worked well enough. I started working there in 2006 and they realized they needed to start shipping discs again. We used them for fixing problems or of course just reinstalling when all was lost, so we ended up sending them out like candy. If we needed to use one and we realized the customer had an old version of the XP disc without the latest service packs we would send a new one. We also sent them if the customer asked.
Why Dell didn't also supply discs that did what the recovery partition did I can't guess accurately. They never seemed to mind sending out endless replacements for the numerous discs you needed to do everything manually (assuming they had discs available).
I haven't used a new Dell machine since 2008, so I can't say anything accurate about what they include now.
You don't. So what? Nobody said you need one. They said Microsoft has nothing to offer the people who do think they need one. Keep your Windows box (I know I will). They aren't going anywhere for a while.
Cue the "If Microsoft Had Designed the iPhone" Photoshop contest!
I always encouraged customers to call their credit card company's fraud number as soon as they were done with me if I learned they purchased one of those scams. How many followed up I don't know.
My friend's dad also bought a rogue antivirus one day. He refused to believe it was fake. We quietly removed it and decided to let him deal with the consequences of giving his card number to con artists. Some people are just too much effort.
William Hartnell had one: Episode 7 of "The Daleks' Master Plan" in 1965. It was a farcical addition to a way-too-long serial.
Perhaps they took that into account, thinking they might clean that up a bit while they go along. It would make no sense at all for most businesses to do something like that, but Google makes strange business decisions.
100,000 points if you can trick them into wrecking their software, their phone or flicking that voltage switch on the back of their workstation. (I wonder what the sentence would be for such an awesome crime.)
I think I had an easier time giving people things than you did. Despite not working in hardware support I once had to send a customer a new computer because hardware hung up on me when I did the transfer to get it replaced (mentioning I had the L2s on board). They'd tried to fix it three times and utterly failed.
The worst transfer from India was a lady looking to buy a spare part. She and her husband had a desktop where the power button broke. They wanted to buy that part that has the button, the LEDs and the little, colourful wires. So they ordered it twice and each time got the front face plate. So they tried again and instead of hardware sending her to spare parts she got me. I offered to check the part # she was given just in case. It was wrong. So I spent 30 min looking for the correct part.
When I was about to send her to spare parts an L2 walked by and told me to confirm with hardware. So I get some guy in India and ask him if I have the right part number for the part. He puts me on hold and comes back with a different number. I asked what it was and he says, "this is a six-foot power cable, sir." So I got kind of mad at him and reiterated what I was actually looking for. He says, "yes, yes, that is the right part" without even checking. I ended up thanking him for blowing me off, hanging up and sending the lady to parts because I knew I had it right. Maybe his centre didn't have enough "Be The Reason" posters.
In the case of the Optiplex systems the red screen also said to replace the motherboard immediately without troubleshooting. I started there in 2006 so I don't know when they added that part. It could easily have been after they caved and added three-year warranties for all those boards.
I did notice an awful tendency for hardware support to be useless unless you had Gold Support. They once hung up on me when I tried to get a customer's computer replaced and we had to do it ourselves as they had failed to fix it three times in a row (I did exclusively software support).
Different parts of the company had conflicting goals, information and widely variable competency. The outright lies and agents hanging up are just wrong and I don't blame anybody who runs away and doesn't come back. Sadly, the support from HP and Sony seems to be consistently worse (Sony forcing customers to reformat *before* troubleshooting comes to mind).
Lack of exposure. Even a popular mod for a popular game has so little exposure -- especially among non-technical users -- that it's not worth exploiting as a vector. It's easier to go with the familiar vectors discussed here all the time.
Malware still shows up in packages claiming to be pirate copies. My bro tried to grab a copy of Worms Armageddon. What he got was Worms Armageddon with the installer replaced by a trojan neatly disguised as the installer. I had a good laugh while I removed that. I've never seen, or even heard of a malicious mod, though.
My last three computers have actually done this. It appears to involve unshielded electronics somewhere between the sound chip and my headset and it happens continuously. With practice I can learn to tell what's happening on the screen by the changes in the static in my headset. The mouse-moving noise is very quiet and subtle, but rendering a PDF or dragging a window over another one can make an impressive array of odd noises.
It doesn't bother me at all because it's so quiet. What bothers me is how everything that isn't a computer makes constant beeps, and loud ones at that. The girl in the back of the bus wakes up everybody because her Blackberry beeps with every text received, iPods click, and microwave ovens are the worst. They not only beep loudly (and often uncontrollably), but they have doors designed to make as much noise as possible at all times, preventing any kind of late-night stealth usage.
Apple will sell me a stick of RAM for twice what just about anyone else will ask for the same stick.
I don't know about him, but I was sitting around a campfire with a Sea Shepherd guy and he told me they sink ships. Sure, the commercial guys are doing things that are obviously wrong, but sinking ships sounds like terrorism to me. They're not considering the motivations and knowledge of everyone involved; they're just attacking the ships involved, effectively using intimidation to get what they want.
You assumed correctly.
Things like this have been mentioned already, but games get kids interested. If he has a PC game he likes then see what it has for tool and languages? I wasn't interested in learning anything like programming until the local news paper mentioned there were map editors for DOOM. Had it possessed a scripting language at the time, I probably would have learned that in a hurry.
My brother's time running a private WoW server with his friends had him starting to learn MySQL. If a game can inspire a kid to try SQL surely it can inspire interest in something less fantastically boring!
If he likes FPS games, he might like to learn to build a map and script some invasion maps or neat effects. If like likes RTS games he could make some scripted stuff for maps or AI. If he likes RPGs there are any number of scripting things he could do. These kinds of scripting languages are usually just fine for teaching the basics of programming and they make it easy to have something cool to show your friends (who probably play the same game) in a real hurry.
Other posters have a good point about letting him go with his interests. He may take to programming if he tries something like this. He may not. Programming requires you to want to think in a certain way (putting the world together in logical steps?) and most kids aren't very interested in that. Having him build something -- *anything* -- for the game he likes might spark an interest in programming.
I only have one good eye!
There are also games for the totally blind. Shades of Doom is an example. The idea there is interesting and could potentionally be expanded into something much more complex.
This situation depends on his degree of visual impairment. My good eye can manage a visual acuity of 20/200-20/400 on tests and I can play a lot of games with it just fine. I can see a lot of MMOs being playable with visual impairments if there are appropriate visual (or audio) cues for some events and accommodations to make the text more readable. He might be into that type of game because it doesn't require a lot of twitch action like an FPS or arcade game usually will. Sadly, the article didn't say anything about what kind of vision he has.
The remark about Sony profiting might be true, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Some of the changes you can make to software to help people with severe visual impairments will help a lot of other customers like your software better. I see a lot of geeks with 20/20 vision squinting at screens, getting lost in menus, complaining about colour contrasts, etc. There is a middle ground that might not make this guy totally happy, but would make life easier for a lot of users.
As a blind person (yes, legally I count as such), I do find his action offensive though. He's going about this all the wrong way. He should get in with some software people and make a positive difference, even if it's only in small ways.
or it is the specific area you've been working in recently? IT seems to have such a range of things you can do, and they can be very different. When I worked in tech support I dealt with all kinds of people, but didn't have to do anything very difficult technically. When I helped write code for research projects I learned new things and dealt with almost no people. Tech support also had a lot of extra corporate weirdness I had to deal with. Then there's my uncle who works as a systems analyst in a COBOL shop. I don't think he's learned much new in decades, but he likes it and makes a pile of money.
You didn't say what it is you do, but maybe before you decide to leave IT altogether you'll think of some area you like more than what you're doing now. Maybe you won't. If there's something else you really like doing then it's definitely worth investigating, but like some guys here have already said, make sure you check out the employment options and the finances compared with your budget.
Blink tags still work in IE and Firefox. I tested them recently because I was having a similar discussion with a friend.
Fortunately, they don't work on Slashdot. :)
It doesn't benefit him, but it potentially benefits thousands like him who would suffer similar fates. It helps provide in some small way a defense against more of the same towards others. It's just the correct thing to do, even if it took them too damn long to do it!
I find it extremely offensive that any state would worry about that type of morality over the scientific/technological progress offered by such a man. Of course, in my world view, even if it was wrong or evil to be gay, I'd keep him around and happy just for the potential contributions towards turning humanity into an all-powerful machine society!
Well, I'm being retarded. Our candidates are still local and the printing is too. The design of our ballots being dead simple and unchanging probably saves us a pile of cash.
Here's the law on the matter in case it interests anybody.
So you guys assume a majority of people voting don't have an idea who they're voting for?
I should point out the party doesn't matter in the layout. The order is on name only.
The concept of different ballot layouts doesn't compute here. There's one ballot. The candidates are in alphabetical order.
As for the rest of the costs, I could see ways the whole thing could be cheaper than a patchwork of machines, each variety needing a different set of technicians. Then there are the legal battles, the recounts, teaching people to use the things, the millions spent by states checking whether they're suitable, the backtracking when they're not, etc, etc. The machines also need to be secured, stored, maintained, and moved. No, I still have a suspicion our simple paper ballots work out to cheaper, at least until some useful standards appear for machines.
The frustrating thing is I can't find any info on the costs of these things. The costs of dealing with the machines have shown up here once in a while, but Canada seems to dislike putting costs on the web. Personally, I think any bureaucrat refusing to put any non-classified info on the web, and in the public domain, or even attempting to make an argument against it, should be shot.
This is what we do in Canada. Paper is simple. Paper scales well. Paper is cheap. The booths for voting are made from old tables and cardboard. We generally only have problems once in a while when some idiot grabs a ballot box and runs off, only to fling it in a ditch. Paper is also fast. We get our election results as fast as America, and with less second guessing.