You forgot that they have like 1.5 million people on a waiting list for the converters. Of course, none of the legislation passed forces them to use more of their cash for the converters. They just want to wait till the ones they've given out expire so that they can reissue them.
Right now I work 8 hours a day (8:30 to 5:30 with an hour lunch). The trick is, we are a global company, and we stop doing computer support at 5:30pm est. So our plants on the west coast can't get any computer help after 2:30pm! So, my boss wants one of us to work until 8ish every day, kind of "on call" but with the expectation that we'll get multiple calls every night. It's not horrid, since it ends at 8pm and we can do it from our homes, but it's still a bit of a change. So basically 5 of our technicians would go to working 9 hour days and on one day a week we would work 4 hours from home in the evening.
My boss is trying to push us to go to a 9 hr day 4 days a week, and then have us work from home for half a day on the 5th day. The idea is that we could increase our coverage hours, but he doesn't want us to have to sit in an office late at night. I don't think it's a bad idea, but I'm not all that fond of having to work till 8pm once a week.
I didn't have any problems with the person on the phone. They quickly and with no hassle gave me the activation code. I don't consider a phone call a problem, as long as I get what I need.
I've never had a problem with activating windows xp. I have a copy that I have activated at least half a dozen times. I've moved the license from computer to computer to laptop to computer to computer etc. I've never had it installed more than once, but I've installed the crap out of it. Every time they just ask me how many copies I have installed, and then they give me the unlock code. I guess maybe I have just gotten lucky.
I don't mind product keys. Sure, they are a little silly, easy to bypass, and can be a pain when you loose them, but they aren't very intrusive after you've entered them. Windows XP wasn't bad. Vista is near the edge between good and bad.
All that will come out of this is that the game manufacturers will be forced to put a tiny label on the box saying that it has DRM on it. You'll need a magnifying glass to read it, and you wont know what it means unless you are up on the subject.
You can't buy a budget computer from Gateway and expect the uber support from MPC that cost $$$. There is a reason they went under, and it's because whats the point of paying $200 extra per computer when you can buy a good business class desktop for $500? If you are buying 500 computers, 500 * $200 = $100,000 of saved cash. For that amount of cash you can have 100 "spare" computers and have enough money left over to hire a full time A+ technician to have on site. I'm not saying their system was economically sound, because it obviously wasn't, but back when desktops were expected to cost over $1000, it was a much better business model.
The best part was their warranty support for businesses. Not only were ALL of their level ONE support A+ certified (so they weren't total idiots at least), but they would allow onsite storage of spare parts. They would give us a spare desktop to keep on site in case any of our desktops needed a part. Part dies, we swap it with one from our spare system, call Micron and a swap is made for the extra part. They would even do chassis swaps for off site laptops where they would even clone the serial number/asset number of the system being replaced. None of this "Send it in and maybe in 5-10 days we'll give it back" crap. I'm sad to see a company that had such great policies go down.
I've had users who preferred to use their mouse like a trackball. When I offered to purchase a trackball for them, they always look at you like a deer in headlights. They assure me that they are fine with what they have and they don't need anything purchased. It's really shocking what people will put up with some times. Then you have the other extreme of the spectrum where people are asking for new stuff left and right. We have some people using a blurry 13 inch CRT monitor, afraid to ask for a new LCD because of the cost, while some one else in the department has 4 22inch LCDs and a special stand ordered so he can see all of the screens at once.
9) Call for tech support from their cell phone when their landline is dead, to complain that their dialup service isn't working
10) Call from their cell phone - in the car, while driving - to get support for a program that runs on a desktop.
All of these are based on real calls that I received while working for AOL tech support.
I've had a lot of calls from our sales people similar to these. They work out of their home offices, so they have a lot of really odd things happen to them. For instance, a guy called because he couldn't connect to dialup. After some prodding, it turns out his voice line was down because of a storm, but he figured his data line was still working. The phone company was coming to his house to fix the voice line later that day. He wasn't happy when I told him to have the phone company check his data line when they were there.
I don't get people calling from the car about desktop issues, but I do get A LOT of sales people calling me about laptop issues while they are in the car...driving. They can't understand why I can't help them while they are driving. Forget the fact that the company policy doesn't allow talking on cell phones while driving.
I use AutoHotKey for some macroing. Someone must have used it to make a virus, cause Symantec started detecting it as a trojan. A few changes to the packaging and it's not detected again. False positives are really annoying.
On my computers USB autoplay doesn't work automatically. Sure, it pops up the window asking me what I want to do, (and one of those options will be the autorun.inf choice), but I have to click to let it do it's thing. That's why any good infection will come from a flash drive with U3 software on it. I've got a nice flash drive that will steal all your passwords in about 10 seconds after it's plugged in. No popups. It's also not detected by most AV programs, and since it's a virtual CD, the most they can do is not let the exe(s) run.
2. Microsoft doesn't make software for other OS versions, they make WINDOWS, they have no reason to mimic others just "because".
They aren't mimicking others for no reason, they are mimicking others because it makes sense from a security standpoint to limit users to their own profile as far as security goes. They shouldn't be writing data to the Program Files folder (except for initial installs), they should write data to their profile. They shouldn't write data to the local machine registry hive, they should only write data to the current user registry hive. It's not rocket science, but anyone who knows how applications interact with the file system and the registry would agree that making things more profile centric will increase security, and the apps should for the most part be able to handle it.
Most of the problems of Vista wasn't with Vista itself, it was with applications that were written poorly. I work for a company with ~2500 computers. We have over 10,000 unique pieces of software installed company wide. Many of those pieces of software were designed for Win95/98 and were only tweaked to work with XP. For example, they insist on installing to the root of C:\, the don't play well with multi-user installs, or they write data to their program files folder. I personally believe that Microsoft should get a medal for what they did with Vista, it's still a bitch to deal with, but they went out on a limb and tried to make programs behave properly. It's funny, if they hadn't done anything, people would have complained about the lack of security. They try to make apps behave like they do in other OS versions, and they get chastised endlessly. Hopefully you are correct and most widely used apps will be compatible with Windows 7. I didn't have any big issues with Vista, but many of utilities (A lot of it FOSS) I need to do my job didn't work under Vista.
The idea would be that if everyone was basically on maintenance, Microsoft would make a lot more "little" changes and a lot less big changes. Want a new OS feature? No need to shelve it till the next OS version, patch it in! Major revision changes would only need to be done if the core OS was drastically changing, but I doubt it would very often. If the plan was carried out well, it could really work. The problem is, when was the last time Microsoft did anything well?
I've known this for a long time now, but it still makes me hate the cell companies even more than I have in the past. It's things like this that make me want to trash my cell phone. I mean, it's easy to say you NEED a cell phone, but really, do you?
I went into a Verizon store last week to return a new phone I had gotten and the store tried to charge me a $35 restocking fee on the phone. I looked at their return policy and it said that I had to pay a restocking fee IF I was exchanging the phone, not if I was returning it. The sales guy called the manager and he starts reading the return policy a few times before he says..."Uh, yeah it looks like you don't have to pay the $35". The freaking manager of the store didn't know their return policy. WTF! I wonder how many people have (and will) paid the $35 when they didn't have to. Of course the reason I returned the phone was because Verizon has started FORCING you to subscribe to a data plan if you have a "smart phone". I didn't want to buy a phone for data usage over the air, I wanted one that I could use to check my email, skype, play games, etc over it's WiFi connection (most often when I'm out of the country). But no. You can't buy a smart phone from Verizon without paying at least $30 a month to them. Go figure. It was this treatment/policies that made me realize how much I don't want a cell phone...not by their rules anyways. If only there was a reasonable cell carrier in the USA.
I guess I should thank Verizon though. It was their shit policies and customer service (waiting 40 minutes in a line to return a phone) that made me ask my boss if I could port my cell number to my work phone (BlackBerry) and just use my work phone as my primary cell. When I found out the answer was yes, goodbye Verizon, goodbye cell bill, goodbye shitty contracts, and goodbye having two phones. Uhhhh I can feel the freedom already.
I've wondered to myself if a monthly charge for Windows would be a bad idea. I mean, not a large charge, but lets say $5 a month. That would give Microsoft a steady income. With a new release every 3 years, that would be ~$180 per OS (Not incredibly high, but not all that low either). Maybe a new computer would come with one year of service included. Where the consumer profits is that Microsoft would have less motivation to make a new OS, and more motivation to make a good OS. All new OS upgrades would be included. There wouldn't be tiers of OS's. It's not a perfect plan, but I think it has some potential.
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Here is a link to the final resting places of channels. http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-06-1082A2.pdf
You forgot that they have like 1.5 million people on a waiting list for the converters. Of course, none of the legislation passed forces them to use more of their cash for the converters. They just want to wait till the ones they've given out expire so that they can reissue them.
I was taking a second look at the DMCA, and it apparently outlaws women's suffrage. Yay Blizzard! They just ended the suffrage of women every where!
It isn't OT. (4*9)+(1*4) = 40hrs. Not that I get OT anyways.
Right now I work 8 hours a day (8:30 to 5:30 with an hour lunch). The trick is, we are a global company, and we stop doing computer support at 5:30pm est. So our plants on the west coast can't get any computer help after 2:30pm! So, my boss wants one of us to work until 8ish every day, kind of "on call" but with the expectation that we'll get multiple calls every night. It's not horrid, since it ends at 8pm and we can do it from our homes, but it's still a bit of a change. So basically 5 of our technicians would go to working 9 hour days and on one day a week we would work 4 hours from home in the evening.
My boss is trying to push us to go to a 9 hr day 4 days a week, and then have us work from home for half a day on the 5th day. The idea is that we could increase our coverage hours, but he doesn't want us to have to sit in an office late at night. I don't think it's a bad idea, but I'm not all that fond of having to work till 8pm once a week.
I didn't have any problems with the person on the phone. They quickly and with no hassle gave me the activation code. I don't consider a phone call a problem, as long as I get what I need.
I've never had a problem with activating windows xp. I have a copy that I have activated at least half a dozen times. I've moved the license from computer to computer to laptop to computer to computer etc. I've never had it installed more than once, but I've installed the crap out of it. Every time they just ask me how many copies I have installed, and then they give me the unlock code. I guess maybe I have just gotten lucky.
I don't mind product keys. Sure, they are a little silly, easy to bypass, and can be a pain when you loose them, but they aren't very intrusive after you've entered them. Windows XP wasn't bad. Vista is near the edge between good and bad.
Why can't it be all of them?
All that will come out of this is that the game manufacturers will be forced to put a tiny label on the box saying that it has DRM on it. You'll need a magnifying glass to read it, and you wont know what it means unless you are up on the subject.
You can't buy a budget computer from Gateway and expect the uber support from MPC that cost $$$. There is a reason they went under, and it's because whats the point of paying $200 extra per computer when you can buy a good business class desktop for $500? If you are buying 500 computers, 500 * $200 = $100,000 of saved cash. For that amount of cash you can have 100 "spare" computers and have enough money left over to hire a full time A+ technician to have on site. I'm not saying their system was economically sound, because it obviously wasn't, but back when desktops were expected to cost over $1000, it was a much better business model.
The best part was their warranty support for businesses. Not only were ALL of their level ONE support A+ certified (so they weren't total idiots at least), but they would allow onsite storage of spare parts. They would give us a spare desktop to keep on site in case any of our desktops needed a part. Part dies, we swap it with one from our spare system, call Micron and a swap is made for the extra part. They would even do chassis swaps for off site laptops where they would even clone the serial number/asset number of the system being replaced. None of this "Send it in and maybe in 5-10 days we'll give it back" crap. I'm sad to see a company that had such great policies go down.
I've had users who preferred to use their mouse like a trackball. When I offered to purchase a trackball for them, they always look at you like a deer in headlights. They assure me that they are fine with what they have and they don't need anything purchased. It's really shocking what people will put up with some times. Then you have the other extreme of the spectrum where people are asking for new stuff left and right. We have some people using a blurry 13 inch CRT monitor, afraid to ask for a new LCD because of the cost, while some one else in the department has 4 22inch LCDs and a special stand ordered so he can see all of the screens at once.
9) Call for tech support from their cell phone when their landline is dead, to complain that their dialup service isn't working 10) Call from their cell phone - in the car, while driving - to get support for a program that runs on a desktop.
All of these are based on real calls that I received while working for AOL tech support.
I've had a lot of calls from our sales people similar to these. They work out of their home offices, so they have a lot of really odd things happen to them. For instance, a guy called because he couldn't connect to dialup. After some prodding, it turns out his voice line was down because of a storm, but he figured his data line was still working. The phone company was coming to his house to fix the voice line later that day. He wasn't happy when I told him to have the phone company check his data line when they were there.
I don't get people calling from the car about desktop issues, but I do get A LOT of sales people calling me about laptop issues while they are in the car...driving. They can't understand why I can't help them while they are driving. Forget the fact that the company policy doesn't allow talking on cell phones while driving.
That's cheap. Can I subcontract you to do my bidding?
I use AutoHotKey for some macroing. Someone must have used it to make a virus, cause Symantec started detecting it as a trojan. A few changes to the packaging and it's not detected again. False positives are really annoying.
On my computers USB autoplay doesn't work automatically. Sure, it pops up the window asking me what I want to do, (and one of those options will be the autorun.inf choice), but I have to click to let it do it's thing. That's why any good infection will come from a flash drive with U3 software on it. I've got a nice flash drive that will steal all your passwords in about 10 seconds after it's plugged in. No popups. It's also not detected by most AV programs, and since it's a virtual CD, the most they can do is not let the exe(s) run.
2. Microsoft doesn't make software for other OS versions, they make WINDOWS, they have no reason to mimic others just "because".
They aren't mimicking others for no reason, they are mimicking others because it makes sense from a security standpoint to limit users to their own profile as far as security goes. They shouldn't be writing data to the Program Files folder (except for initial installs), they should write data to their profile. They shouldn't write data to the local machine registry hive, they should only write data to the current user registry hive. It's not rocket science, but anyone who knows how applications interact with the file system and the registry would agree that making things more profile centric will increase security, and the apps should for the most part be able to handle it.
Most of the problems of Vista wasn't with Vista itself, it was with applications that were written poorly. I work for a company with ~2500 computers. We have over 10,000 unique pieces of software installed company wide. Many of those pieces of software were designed for Win95/98 and were only tweaked to work with XP. For example, they insist on installing to the root of C:\, the don't play well with multi-user installs, or they write data to their program files folder. I personally believe that Microsoft should get a medal for what they did with Vista, it's still a bitch to deal with, but they went out on a limb and tried to make programs behave properly. It's funny, if they hadn't done anything, people would have complained about the lack of security. They try to make apps behave like they do in other OS versions, and they get chastised endlessly. Hopefully you are correct and most widely used apps will be compatible with Windows 7. I didn't have any big issues with Vista, but many of utilities (A lot of it FOSS) I need to do my job didn't work under Vista.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a difference between providing services and screwing people over. I don't think they are mutually exclusive.
The idea would be that if everyone was basically on maintenance, Microsoft would make a lot more "little" changes and a lot less big changes. Want a new OS feature? No need to shelve it till the next OS version, patch it in! Major revision changes would only need to be done if the core OS was drastically changing, but I doubt it would very often. If the plan was carried out well, it could really work. The problem is, when was the last time Microsoft did anything well?
I've known this for a long time now, but it still makes me hate the cell companies even more than I have in the past. It's things like this that make me want to trash my cell phone. I mean, it's easy to say you NEED a cell phone, but really, do you?
I went into a Verizon store last week to return a new phone I had gotten and the store tried to charge me a $35 restocking fee on the phone. I looked at their return policy and it said that I had to pay a restocking fee IF I was exchanging the phone, not if I was returning it. The sales guy called the manager and he starts reading the return policy a few times before he says..."Uh, yeah it looks like you don't have to pay the $35". The freaking manager of the store didn't know their return policy. WTF! I wonder how many people have (and will) paid the $35 when they didn't have to. Of course the reason I returned the phone was because Verizon has started FORCING you to subscribe to a data plan if you have a "smart phone". I didn't want to buy a phone for data usage over the air, I wanted one that I could use to check my email, skype, play games, etc over it's WiFi connection (most often when I'm out of the country). But no. You can't buy a smart phone from Verizon without paying at least $30 a month to them. Go figure. It was this treatment/policies that made me realize how much I don't want a cell phone...not by their rules anyways. If only there was a reasonable cell carrier in the USA.
I guess I should thank Verizon though. It was their shit policies and customer service (waiting 40 minutes in a line to return a phone) that made me ask my boss if I could port my cell number to my work phone (BlackBerry) and just use my work phone as my primary cell. When I found out the answer was yes, goodbye Verizon, goodbye cell bill, goodbye shitty contracts, and goodbye having two phones. Uhhhh I can feel the freedom already.
I've wondered to myself if a monthly charge for Windows would be a bad idea. I mean, not a large charge, but lets say $5 a month. That would give Microsoft a steady income. With a new release every 3 years, that would be ~$180 per OS (Not incredibly high, but not all that low either). Maybe a new computer would come with one year of service included. Where the consumer profits is that Microsoft would have less motivation to make a new OS, and more motivation to make a good OS. All new OS upgrades would be included. There wouldn't be tiers of OS's. It's not a perfect plan, but I think it has some potential.
Damn. Even Blizzard isn't stupid enough to charge by the hour.