The "remote-deployed" may have something to do with it. These may be part of some kind of set-and-forget devices that are not maintained by IT types. Think industrial settings.
If the UPS units were desktop grade, they are a crapshoot for quality and would probably have to be rotated out every 2-3 years and are expensive to ship due to weight. Add in the hassle of recycling the lead-acid batteries.
While many full time employees will find employer provided insurance their best option, it can have substantial drawbacks. My employer policy is reasonably priced for the employee, but a family plan is $700/month with a $5000 deductible and $8000 out of pocket max. The provider network is also small and omits several area physician groups and hospitals. This is not uncommon for smaller companies.
The exchange plans are just as costly without the subsidy, but at least it gives options to those who are self-employed or who find the employer insurance less than optimal for their circumstances.
Note to those shopping for insurance, in many cases you can go directly to the insurer and price or buy insurance. The prices are probably the same, but at least the insurers website should work. Also, there are private health plan comparison websites that still exist and are selling 2014 ACA compliant plans.
While google apps mostly works just fine and is certainly a good product, sometimes it can take awhile to convince google fix an issue when problems do occur.
On the other hand, Tuffmail usually responds very quickly to issues.
Speaking only to business users, it seems that most employers I've worked with typically have a 3-4 year notebook rotation and buy notebooks that already include 3 year (or longer) warranties. My current employer often stretches the rotation to 4-5 years when they can get away with it. Thus, many people here are on their 2nd computer in 7 years. Admittedly, if you stretch it past the 3 year mark the notebooks are often pretty beat up and the battery is shot.
I recently had the same issue with the mini-pci wireless card upgrade from Lenovo failing the bios check on a T41. Lenovo Tech Support had me remove the card, upgrade the embedded controller firmware and the system bios, and reinstall the card which then worked. Apparently the newer bios has more (IBM/Lenovo) cards added to it's supported list.
It used to be on the written drivers test where I lived that the correct response to this was to "kick" the gas pedal to dislodge it or to shift into neutral on an auto or use the clutch on a stick (either will probably blow the engine). Turning the key off was not preferred as it locks the steering wheel on most cars causing a loss of control.
Re:Changed the view of the US?
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This creates debt, not more money. Not necessarily, debt can be used wisely. For example, a mortgage can be a very good thing as long as a person intelligently shops for a home and a good mortgage and doesn't buy beyond their means, plus most people can deduct a portion of the interest (on homes) in the US. The same is true of college loans, it provides the resources to go to college for many and the interest may be deductible.
There are hordes of open source and commercial virtual machines.
Are there any non-commercial ones that support Swing? Don't most of the non-commercial ones use the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector, which isn't nearly as advanced as the one Sun uses? It's just my impression that outside of research and a few niche markets that the open-source java virtual machines are mostly non existant. I have nothing against Java, I just haven't seen many non-commercial alternatives that are as capable as Mono.
Yes the game will probably suck. But I hope you don't believe the statements you quoted to be true of most family farmers. I grew up on a farm and much of my family still farms, most family farmers in the south are small operations and farm because they love the independence. They don't treat livestock badly because it's their livelihood. Similarly most small farmers don't do corn anymore because corn is expensive to grow (sucks a lot of nutrients out of the ground) and doesn't pay that well. Most farmers in the south that were dairies in the 70's have either disapeared or converted to cattle operations. Most of the truly bad stuff happens on the large incorporated farms in the west and in Mexico and elsewhere where their isn't as much regulation (remember much of our food is now imported due to NAFTA). Sadly I don't think there will be any family farms in a few more years, what person in the 20's can afford to take own half a million or so in debt to buy and farm and equip it?
With the first example I belive the point is that the string and vector classes will clean up themselves when they go out of scope (when their destructors are called). STL is very helpful especially when supplemented with the Boost libraries.
Dell still has Win2000 Pro on some desktops. Dell servers have win2k server, Netware 6, win2003 server, RH 8, Linux "9" (RH?), and NO OS as options. If you play the options right at Dell you can often buy a server for less than a desktop, however, the servers have pretty weak graphics and no sound.
I've seen problems as well. Things like crashes that seemed to be related to heat (fans worked and could be heard cycling on and off continuously during kernel builds). Also, older notebooks can have a flaky APM bios that will cause fits. Also, there seems to be a much higher variance in the quality of hardware and drivers for things like the NIC and modem with some not working under heavy load, some drivers not liking some implementations of common hardware (Tulip to name one). Finally, notebook hardware and drivers don't seem to be as debugged for things like running multiple NIC's and such. If you can afford a newer notebook, some of these problems should go away. Otherwise, google is your friend, research the model you want.
Re:Ask for a different rep, go elsewhere, or build
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 1
Oops, goofed the last paragraph and replying to myself, bad day already. I meant to say "I build for reliability and therefore don't care about gaming or having the absolute fastest computer."
Ask for a different rep, go elsewhere, or build
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The solution is simple, tell the person you can't work with them and demand someone else or move to another vendor. Dell can be annoying, but so can IBM or Compaq or probably any of the other major vendors. Keep in mind that most vendors do have the policy of restoring the system to it's original state before they help diagnose problems (i.e. reload the original OS off the recovery CD and remove in added hardware inside the computer).
Also keep in mind that the "warranty" they offer isn't free, it's priced into the machine purchase or as an "extended" warranty option. They simply run the numbers each year and figure out how much repair costs are based on failure rates, pad that amount and then contract with a 3rd party servicing group. Locally, there are at least two different servicing groups that Dell uses.
That said, even though I buy Dell's for work I am still custom building for home. Unfortunately, the price points keep leaning more and more in Dell's favor. I build for reliability and therefore don't care about gaming or having the absolute most reliable computer. Dell or any of the big vendors can simply build decent machines a lot cheaper than we can by using volume purchasing and we don't have to worry about RMA'ing defective motherboards and such.
We used ordb.org and while it did block a significant amount of spam, it also seemed to block a considerable number of our clients (we service healthcare companies and I won't speculate about what this says about their IS/IT groups). The last straw was when it added a major ISP's email server (which probably did need fixing but we nonetheless couldn't afford the downtime). Of late, I've quit using blacklists in favor of simply blocking offending netblocks which has actually yielded better results with less grief. This works because most of the offending netblocks are not something that we'd be expecting legitimate email from.
I recently installed Woody as our corporate firewall. Worked great. I did go to the trouble of downloading the Woody ISO's (I know waste of bandwith, however, Murphy's law seems to prevail -- whenever I need to reinstall or build a server our ISP will either be down or in slow motion).
Anyway, Woody worked great as a firewall. After all, you don't usually install much software on a firewall . I don't have any network services running but SSH (and it's access controlled). I of course am also using NAT which means I upgraded to the 2.4.17 kernel and fetched the latest iptables using apt-get.
It's been very stable and reminds me of a back several years ago when the joke used to be that a beta in Linux was more stable than most other people's "production" software. Go back to the early to mid 90's and Linux as a whole was a beta, didn't keep people from using it quite successfully though.
E-File is $7.95, paper return is free. Used them this year and they worked ok. Not quite as much hand-holding as you'd get with Tax Act or Turbo Tax, but fine for most tax returns if you're used to filing your own taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
The "remote-deployed" may have something to do with it. These may be part of some kind of set-and-forget devices that are not maintained by IT types. Think industrial settings.
If the UPS units were desktop grade, they are a crapshoot for quality and would probably have to be rotated out every 2-3 years and are expensive to ship due to weight. Add in the hassle of recycling the lead-acid batteries.
While many full time employees will find employer provided insurance their best option, it can have substantial drawbacks. My employer policy is reasonably priced for the employee, but a family plan is $700 /month with a $5000 deductible and $8000 out of pocket max. The provider network is also small and omits several area physician groups and hospitals. This is not uncommon for smaller companies.
The exchange plans are just as costly without the subsidy, but at least it gives options to those who are self-employed or who find the employer insurance less than optimal for their circumstances.
Note to those shopping for insurance, in many cases you can go directly to the insurer and price or buy insurance. The prices are probably the same, but at least the insurers website should work. Also, there are private health plan comparison websites that still exist and are selling 2014 ACA compliant plans.
Why the term "snowflake" in the summary? Not enough racism going around to suit Slashdot these days?
While google apps mostly works just fine and is certainly a good product, sometimes it can take awhile to convince google fix an issue when problems do occur.
On the other hand, Tuffmail usually responds very quickly to issues.
Speaking only to business users, it seems that most employers I've worked with typically have a 3-4 year notebook rotation and buy notebooks that already include 3 year (or longer) warranties. My current employer often stretches the rotation to 4-5 years when they can get away with it. Thus, many people here are on their 2nd computer in 7 years. Admittedly, if you stretch it past the 3 year mark the notebooks are often pretty beat up and the battery is shot.
I recently had the same issue with the mini-pci wireless card upgrade from Lenovo failing the bios check on a T41. Lenovo Tech Support had me remove the card, upgrade the embedded controller firmware and the system bios, and reinstall the card which then worked. Apparently the newer bios has more (IBM/Lenovo) cards added to it's supported list.
What sources are you using for the quoted literacy rates or are you joking? 65% seems low except for the very poorest of nations.
It used to be on the written drivers test where I lived that the correct response to this was to "kick" the gas pedal to dislodge it or to shift into neutral on an auto or use the clutch on a stick (either will probably blow the engine). Turning the key off was not preferred as it locks the steering wheel on most cars causing a loss of control.
This creates debt, not more money.
Not necessarily, debt can be used wisely. For example, a mortgage can be a very good thing as long as a person intelligently shops for a home and a good mortgage and doesn't buy beyond their means, plus most people can deduct a portion of the interest (on homes) in the US. The same is true of college loans, it provides the resources to go to college for many and the interest may be deductible.
There are hordes of open source and commercial virtual machines.
Are there any non-commercial ones that support Swing? Don't most of the non-commercial ones use the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector, which isn't nearly as advanced as the one Sun uses? It's just my impression that outside of research and a few niche markets that the open-source java virtual machines are mostly non existant. I have nothing against Java, I just haven't seen many non-commercial alternatives that are as capable as Mono.
Yes the game will probably suck. But I hope you don't believe the statements you quoted to be true of most family farmers. I grew up on a farm and much of my family still farms, most family farmers in the south are small operations and farm because they love the independence. They don't treat livestock badly because it's their livelihood. Similarly most small farmers don't do corn anymore because corn is expensive to grow (sucks a lot of nutrients out of the ground) and doesn't pay that well. Most farmers in the south that were dairies in the 70's have either disapeared or converted to cattle operations. Most of the truly bad stuff happens on the large incorporated farms in the west and in Mexico and elsewhere where their isn't as much regulation (remember much of our food is now imported due to NAFTA). Sadly I don't think there will be any family farms in a few more years, what person in the 20's can afford to take own half a million or so in debt to buy and farm and equip it?
With the first example I belive the point is that the string and vector classes will clean up themselves when they go out of scope (when their destructors are called). STL is very helpful especially when supplemented with the Boost libraries.
Dell still has Win2000 Pro on some desktops. Dell servers have win2k server, Netware 6, win2003 server, RH 8, Linux "9" (RH?), and NO OS as options. If you play the options right at Dell you can often buy a server for less than a desktop, however, the servers have pretty weak graphics and no sound.
I've seen problems as well. Things like crashes that seemed to be related to heat (fans worked and could be heard cycling on and off continuously during kernel builds). Also, older notebooks can have a flaky APM bios that will cause fits. Also, there seems to be a much higher variance in the quality of hardware and drivers for things like the NIC and modem with some not working under heavy load, some drivers not liking some implementations of common hardware (Tulip to name one). Finally, notebook hardware and drivers don't seem to be as debugged for things like running multiple NIC's and such. If you can afford a newer notebook, some of these problems should go away. Otherwise, google is your friend, research the model you want.
Oops, goofed the last paragraph and replying to myself, bad day already. I meant to say "I build for reliability and therefore don't care about gaming or having the absolute fastest computer."
The solution is simple, tell the person you can't work with them and demand someone else or move to another vendor. Dell can be annoying, but so can IBM or Compaq or probably any of the other major vendors. Keep in mind that most vendors do have the policy of restoring the system to it's original state before they help diagnose problems (i.e. reload the original OS off the recovery CD and remove in added hardware inside the computer).
Also keep in mind that the "warranty" they offer isn't free, it's priced into the machine purchase or as an "extended" warranty option. They simply run the numbers each year and figure out how much repair costs are based on failure rates, pad that amount and then contract with a 3rd party servicing group. Locally, there are at least two different servicing groups that Dell uses.
That said, even though I buy Dell's for work I am still custom building for home. Unfortunately, the price points keep leaning more and more in Dell's favor. I build for reliability and therefore don't care about gaming or having the absolute most reliable computer. Dell or any of the big vendors can simply build decent machines a lot cheaper than we can by using volume purchasing and we don't have to worry about RMA'ing defective motherboards and such.
Two sides to every argument:
http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html
We used ordb.org and while it did block a significant amount of spam, it also seemed to block a considerable number of our clients (we service healthcare companies and I won't speculate about what this says about their IS/IT groups). The last straw was when it added a major ISP's email server (which probably did need fixing but we nonetheless couldn't afford the downtime). Of late, I've quit using blacklists in favor of simply blocking offending netblocks which has actually yielded better results with less grief. This works because most of the offending netblocks are not something that we'd be expecting legitimate email from.
I recently installed Woody as our corporate firewall. Worked great. I did go to the trouble of downloading the Woody ISO's (I know waste of bandwith, however, Murphy's law seems to prevail -- whenever I need to reinstall or build a server our ISP will either be down or in slow motion).
Anyway, Woody worked great as a firewall. After all, you don't usually install much software on a firewall . I don't have any network services running but SSH (and it's access controlled). I of course am also using NAT which means I upgraded to the 2.4.17 kernel and fetched the latest iptables using apt-get.
It's been very stable and reminds me of a back several years ago when the joke used to be that a beta in Linux was more stable than most other people's "production" software. Go back to the early to mid 90's and Linux as a whole was a beta, didn't keep people from using it quite successfully though.
Just my $0.02.
E-File is $7.95, paper return is free. Used them this year and they worked ok. Not quite as much hand-holding as you'd get with Tax Act or Turbo Tax, but fine for most tax returns if you're used to filing your own taxes.