I went to Best Buy a while back to buy a memory card for my Playstation2. The sticker onthe shelf said $19.99. I got to the cashier and it rang up $24.99. I took the guy back and showed him the sticker on the shelf, with the same UPC code on the sticker as was on the package. He talked to the guy in the games department, removed the $19.99 sticker from the shelf, and told me the thing cost $24.99.
The lady at the customer service desk a few minutes later told me upon my asking that Best Buy's policy is to honor the sticker price on the shelf for those that saw that price, and only those coming after the sticker is changed are subject to the "correted" price sticker. But that cashier, he was adament that the thing would not be sold to me for the $19.99 advertized to me on the shelf.
Lucky me I get pissd off when someone is screwing with my wallet... The nice lady at the customer service desk gave me the sticker price I saw. I don't know what happened to the retard at the cash register, hopefully he got fired, but I doubt it.
Anyone heard of any plans for a version of this (or any other card for that matter) that can take a smartcard and show the encrypted channels?? I'd love to see such a thing before the broadcast flag requirement day comes upon us.
Or perhaps such a card with an easily hackable characteristic, such as removing a jumper or cutting a trace to disable the broadcast flag... So it can be sold with broadcast flag honoring enabled but have it reasonably easily undone with a cut and a pullup/down resistor to the appropriate chip's appropriate input or something like that... Could not enabled hardware disallow an open-source driver to remove the flag via software, but when hacked in such a way then allow any driver to run whether the driver honors the flag or not?
Would a free open-sourced driver fall under the flag restrictions after the requirement date, as if it's free it doesn't need to be "sold"?
I think it's rediculous to feel the need to ask such questions, but I also think it's rediculous that these guys would possibly prevent me from watching some show or movie if I'm stuck at work or onthe side of a road with a flat tire or whatever and cannot be in front of my TV at broadcast time, when I've already paid my cable bill for that month or already paid for that pay-per-view event or whatever...
I don't know enough about QAMs and VSBs and stuff to know if it will work with Comcast's cable service. I've heard something about QAM-8 and QAM-256, or perhas those are VSB numbers I'm getting things confused with. I don't see a 256 number in their features on the web page for anything... Can this thing work with Comcast's digital standard and HDTV service??
If the market size was all that mattered, all us Slashdot guys would be using Windows and Linux would not exist.
What's wrong with a port "just because"? If they are confident that their measly market share can pay the license fee to id and the programmers salaries, why the heck not? Heck, I come from Amiga land, where anything is few and far between these days, but we did have shiny retail box native ports of Quake 1, Myst, Heretic 2, and others. And surely our Amiga market is far smaller than the Mac or Linux markets... Now if only I had a G5. (My best Amiga currently only has a G4/800MHz for a Mac emulator to run with) But I have been hoping to buy an iBook next year, maybe they'll have G5 ones by the time I save up the money??
Basic point is, if there's enough of any market to pay the costs involved, what good reason is there to not port games or make originals?
What about all them people last time around who's votes were thrown out due to lawsuits and all that other nonsense? The first time I was old enough to vote I was disenfranchised. The Ballot was due at the courthouse back home (I was away at college) no later than 8AM Friday morning. I didn't receive my absentee ballot in the mail until Thursday evening the day before it was due. Around 7:30PM was when I made it to pick up my mail that day, so there was no way I could even fill it out and get it overnighted or anything.
When this happens, you really don't feel like voting again because the hypocrisy of your statement compared to the reality of what is actually done with our votes comes through very loud and clear. Your words are nice and all, but the reality is that a lot of people are told explicitly by what is actually done that no, their vote truely does not count for shit.
You simply are not going to get many of these people back to vote again. I sat out the election after they said "screw you" to me, but I've been back last time and today. My vote for the president's office doesn't count for much as I'm in Maryland and it is blatantly owned by whoever the Democrat is at the time, but I checked off a name anyway. (Not that I'm against voting for Kerry, I'm registered republican and I didn't vote for Bush, but I didn't check Kerry's name either.)
Come on guys. While we all suspect this movie won't have a cleverly sculpted plot or heartwarming acting skills, we also know that almost all of us will be going to watch it. Just like Star Wars. How else can we accurately whine about how terrible it turned out?
Besides, I kindof miss the high-quality films I got to see on USA Up All Night and Joe-Bob Briggs' Mostervision. DOOM would surely fit in quite nicely with the likes of Cyborg 3...
Well, there was some slightly different sets in the first Resident Evil movie for different scenes. (Haven't seen the second movie yet) The DOOM movie I imagine will likely resemble the Resident Evil one I've seen in many ways, except for the babe.
You're computer doesn't have a huge honkin' rotary knob on the front? Oh wait, I still use an Amiga, sorry...:p But I did actually just order one of then audio cassette drives for my PC from ThinkGeek... Might arrive today even. Cool.
>IMO, alot of whats coming right now is technology >for technologies sake. I admit that i am captivated >by the appeal of a distributed mythTV setup with >FEs all over the house, but really, i shouldn't be >watching enough tv to justify that.
I'm building (or trying to more accurately) a MythTV box. I get Comcast analog-only basic+extended (mostly only watch Scifi for Stargate and Cartoon Network for Futurama reruns) and don't watch much else than those two shows. The MythTV box fills up plenty of time in itself. I'm not good with Linux, but I've learned a great deal through this project. I screw the thing up enough that I have to keep working on it, and haven't really got to use it for much recording TV yet after a year and a half. Haven't got Lirc or Samba or Svideo TV-output working yet, things seem to fall apart and I start again from scratch before I get those things working.
I don't know if I'll ever get to use it normally as a TV recording thing, but it's certainly been a way to learn about Linux. That's really become my reason to mess with the thing, I'm not sure I'll ever reach my goal of actually using it as a fully usable Myth box...
People tell me I could have long ago just bought a Tivo for less than the computer cost me, but that's not really the point now is it?:)
I was denied my right to vote my first time around. It was two elections ago, I was in college. I asked my hometown courthouse to send me the absentee ballot stuff, and they held it until a few days before it was due, I received it Thursday evening and the paperwork said it must be received at the hometown courthouse no later than 8AM Friday which was the next day. Which meant it was not possible to arrive there on time. (They didn't accept faxes...)
I complained about the outcome that time even though I had no input, but that wasn't my fault. I've voted since then and complained about the results as well.;)
It depends on how much they value the Linux market. They might not think there's enough Linux enthusiasts to be worth the time or trouble )ie. money). If they don't see a lucrative market, then things will be mediocre at best. I have a Raceon 9800 in my game PC and an AIW7500 in my shiny new AmigaOne rig, and have a few older cards and an AIW8500DV laying around for AmigaOS driver development. We have an NDA with ATI and still can't get docs for anything newer than the 8500 chips.:/
My Gentoo MythTV box has a Geforce of some sort, don't remember. Got the Geforce cause the AIW8500DV I tried in there I couldn't get drivers to work at all well with Linux, even just for display output.
I have a little Shuttle XPC box I'm sorting out to be a router/gateway for my cablemodem. For kicks tried getting KDE to run on it but can't get any better than 640x480 resolution on the built-in ProSavage S3 chipset, so I just ordered an Nvidia based card for that, regardless of if I really should just telnet to the thing and not have a monitor on it...
I've gotten much better with Linux over the last 6 months or so, but still have a good bit to learn. Until things are easier to deal with in Linux land, I'm not going to consider a graphics chipset other than Nvidia as even an option for a Linux box I have any association with. I'd love to use a Radeon card, as I've heard rumors that they're easier to get working with an HDTV s DVI port due to hardware interlace support or some such which Nvidia doesn't do. I don't actualy have my HDTV yet (waiting for DLP with 1080 support) but when I do I'll want to connect my Myth box to it. Do ATI's Linux drivers even support HDTV connections? Maybe, even if this runor is true, it's still irrelevant to Linux users?
When the Linux market grows a bit more I think more companies will have more enthusiasm for the platform. While it's still more geekish thing to do, we'll have mostly this level of support from the hardware vendors.
What I don't really get is why other countries are so interested in doing things our way. The DMCA sucks, why "harmonize" with it at all? Why not encourage the USA to "harmonize" with Australia, or the EU (before they copied the DMCA and software patents that is), etc?
Come on guys, us Americans is just a bunch of numbskulls. You isn't gonna want to keep doin' what we doin' forever. Surely there's a smarter and fairer bunch of lawmakers out there somewhere that can think for themselves?
>Well, I've asked a lot of MS users about this, and so far every one of them has disagreed with you. >Their answer is always of the form "The software I want/need is only available on DOS/Windows >(depending on the year that I asked)."
I want to play Final Fantasy XI. What are my choices? PSX2 or Windows, not Linux... There's a lot of that, and that's a legit situation.
But Linux and some other OSS stuff is still too hard to use for a lot of people out there, and this is the biggest problem with OSS growth. I'm not going to install linux on my mom's PC which is only used for email and a little web surfing, because I don't want to deal with that over the phone maintenence nightmare, and she lives too far away to just go over there and deal with it myself without the phone in the way.
Ease of use will need to become big-time important in Linux, BSD, and other OSS projects before they will catch on in the real market.
My biggest problem with encouraging people to use Linux or BSD or whatever is that the people that would be listening to me would not be able to use them. My mom can barely do anything with Windows, my sister did somehow manage to reinstall a modem driver that got nutzed up in Windows which was a neat suprise. But if Linux needed some maintenence (and don't tell me it's 100% free of requiring maintenence) there's no way in heck she could have got the modem working again. My parents would call me far more often asking me to help them do something over the phone. (I live 300 miles away and am not driving back and forth for no other reason than to get a friggin PC running again or install a program for them) I have enough trouble making my own linux box do what I want (mythtv), I'm in no way qualified to support linux to a newbie over the phone.
I've dealt with Windows enough that I can for the most part be helpful over the phone, even made it through a long phone call to update my dad's 98-1st box to 98-2nd (weird story, bought a PC at a computer show that had 98-1st installed on the hard drive but came with a 98-2nd CDROM that wasn't an update version, he had no boot floppy for use twiddling stuff already on the HD with, and the HD install of 98-1st had nutzed itself enough to not be able to make a floppy, that was a heck of a day...)
Linux is currently too hard for dummies to deal with. It's hard enough to setup and configure initially that many smart enough don't care to deal with it. I don't agree that more marketing will broaden things significantly as things are, Linux and other OSS stuff needs to become easier to install, configure and use, and then perhaps more marketing will be helpful.
I spent a couple months on and off trying to get my Gentoo MythTV box's Santa Cruz sound card to work. Back and forth between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, compile ALSA as a module inthe kernel tree, then as a seperate emerge, sometimes right channel worked but left did not, mostly neither worked, etc. Somehow it did work pretty good recently but I had no freakin' idea what made that happen so I couldn't reproduce it if needed in the future. Swapped for a Soundblaster Live as that seems to be more popular in the Linux forums, it seems to be working well from whatever mystical good thing I did for the Santa Cruz. But my TV card still doesn't work, emerge ivtv won't do any good, and I'm waiting for new versions of the driver and/or kernels that will be agreeable with each other on my machine. Running a 2.6.7 kernel now which I understand ivtv has issues with 2.6, but I just got sound working and I don't want to deal with making it go again changing to a 2.4 kernel. I've waited a coiuple years so far, I can wait a bit longer for it to work completely...
But I would never recommend going through this to people that aren't obsessive hobbyists, most computer users today will be much happier with 'doze.
>Whenever I see the make money fast schemes on >television or on the internet, my first question is >always, "What do they need me for?"
Well, most people that buy into these schemes fail. Part of why the guy selling hte scheme to others doesn't just do it himself is that whatever method he's selling isn't the true make money fast scheme. The real make money fast scheme is what he himself is doing - selling some most likely to fail business method to unsuspecting people trying to make a quick buck, and who aren't likely to sue the guy when they can't get it to work.
I've considered a few times of selling my own make money fast scheme, which will simply be guidelines on how to market your own make money fast scheme to others. (patent pending, patent pending, patent pending) basically tell people that the best way to make money fast is to be that guy on TV hocking his wares, instead of being the guy watching TV and phoning in your three easy payments of 57.95. I probably wouldn't need to dress up in a flashy suit like the Riddler might wear to inspire confidence in my product.:)
>The article doesn't divulge how many of the complaints are actually valid, but I think it's >reasonable to assume that a large percentage of the "429,000 complaints" figure were solicitations from >organizations claiming to represent charities or political bodies (all of the phone solitations I've >gotten since registering fall into this category).
Last night I got home with a emssage on my machine from someone tryng to sell som Atkins diet stuff. I hit the delete button without listening to the whole thing, and then got pissed off when I saw a not about this article on cnn or someplace. I forgot all about writing stuff down and complaining to the FTC, as I am on the list since the web site to subscribe went up, but I've gotten very few phone-spams for some time and no longer remember what to do.:/
They aren't all political or non-profit or surveys... I'm sure some complaints are as not everyone will remember or understand that those are exempted, but some of the phone-spammers really just don't care and will try to get away with it on dopes like me that toast the message without reporing it.
> The car companies make money doing service on your car
OK, but what if there's no dealer for your brand nearby when you need it? Last November I went back "home" to visit my family for Thanksgiving, and my Honda Civic broke down. Guess what? The nearest Honda service center was 80 miles away. (I grew up in a small PA town full of people obsessed with "American made" stuff) I wasn't going to pay to tow my car 80 miles when there were a few small independent mechanics in town, and why should I have to? Just because Honda wants to be the only guys that can fix my car?
Cars are too big/expensive shipping to send away for repair work, and they're way too expensive to consider disposable items like my Apex DVD players turned out to be. (After the third one in a year I gave up and bought a more expensive/less hackable brand) The codes should be available to these small town guys where there simply is no "official" brand service center available. While some may tell me to choose my next car purchase based on the one or two brand dealers/service centers near where I grew up, but that's silly, especially as certain independents do better work than some of the dopes/cons working at the dealers.
Wow. My dad, mom and sister are always calling me expecting me to fix their stuff over the phone. And I never get anything at all in return. Though they do provide a convenient way to remove aging computer parts from my own house when I get to upgrade their machines. That's the closest thing I have to a "reward". Lucky me!
>This is an interesting route to go about getting >rid of spyware, attacking its source of income >instead of the manufacturer.
I can't understand why the anti-spam laws weren't made to work that way. It's the only way that makes sense to me. Otherwise the companies will just hop from one spammer to another, and continue sending their junk to us. Same thing for these pop-up things and spyware. The only way to make a difference is to go after the people paying the bums...
Bah! Ignore us weirdos and just read the freakin thing and get your money's worth. Besides, though I enjoy the Guide series, I don't go around quoting it or obsessing about it nerly as much as I do about Army of Darkness, third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy. Besides, I'm still an Amiga user, so I've got other things to froth at the mouth about than the Guide. If you like zany humor, you would probably enjoy the Guide. If not, it may not be your cup of tea, but give it a go and at least find out for sure. I've never read the LOTR books, mostly because I hated the cartoons when I was young. Friends talked me into seeing the recent films, which I actually enjoyed, and I may give the books a try if I ever have time to sit down and read something. (I've got a pile of books I haven't got to yet)
Your mistrust of obsessive people may be keeping you from something you'd enjoy...
Slashdot Mirror
I went to Best Buy a while back to buy a memory card for my Playstation2. The sticker onthe shelf said $19.99. I got to the cashier and it rang up $24.99. I took the guy back and showed him the sticker on the shelf, with the same UPC code on the sticker as was on the package. He talked to the guy in the games department, removed the $19.99 sticker from the shelf, and told me the thing cost $24.99.
The lady at the customer service desk a few minutes later told me upon my asking that Best Buy's policy is to honor the sticker price on the shelf for those that saw that price, and only those coming after the sticker is changed are subject to the "correted" price sticker. But that cashier, he was adament that the thing would not be sold to me for the $19.99 advertized to me on the shelf.
Lucky me I get pissd off when someone is screwing with my wallet... The nice lady at the customer service desk gave me the sticker price I saw. I don't know what happened to the retard at the cash register, hopefully he got fired, but I doubt it.
Anyone heard of any plans for a version of this (or any other card for that matter) that can take a smartcard and show the encrypted channels?? I'd love to see such a thing before the broadcast flag requirement day comes upon us.
Or perhaps such a card with an easily hackable characteristic, such as removing a jumper or cutting a trace to disable the broadcast flag... So it can be sold with broadcast flag honoring enabled but have it reasonably easily undone with a cut and a pullup/down resistor to the appropriate chip's appropriate input or something like that... Could not enabled hardware disallow an open-source driver to remove the flag via software, but when hacked in such a way then allow any driver to run whether the driver honors the flag or not?
Would a free open-sourced driver fall under the flag restrictions after the requirement date, as if it's free it doesn't need to be "sold"?
I think it's rediculous to feel the need to ask such questions, but I also think it's rediculous that these guys would possibly prevent me from watching some show or movie if I'm stuck at work or onthe side of a road with a flat tire or whatever and cannot be in front of my TV at broadcast time, when I've already paid my cable bill for that month or already paid for that pay-per-view event or whatever...
I don't know enough about QAMs and VSBs and stuff to know if it will work with Comcast's cable service. I've heard something about QAM-8 and QAM-256, or perhas those are VSB numbers I'm getting things confused with. I don't see a 256 number in their features on the web page for anything... Can this thing work with Comcast's digital standard and HDTV service??
If the market size was all that mattered, all us Slashdot guys would be using Windows and Linux would not exist.
What's wrong with a port "just because"? If they are confident that their measly market share can pay the license fee to id and the programmers salaries, why the heck not? Heck, I come from Amiga land, where anything is few and far between these days, but we did have shiny retail box native ports of Quake 1, Myst, Heretic 2, and others. And surely our Amiga market is far smaller than the Mac or Linux markets... Now if only I had a G5. (My best Amiga currently only has a G4/800MHz for a Mac emulator to run with) But I have been hoping to buy an iBook next year, maybe they'll have G5 ones by the time I save up the money??
Basic point is, if there's enough of any market to pay the costs involved, what good reason is there to not port games or make originals?
What about all them people last time around who's votes were thrown out due to lawsuits and all that other nonsense? The first time I was old enough to vote I was disenfranchised. The Ballot was due at the courthouse back home (I was away at college) no later than 8AM Friday morning. I didn't receive my absentee ballot in the mail until Thursday evening the day before it was due. Around 7:30PM was when I made it to pick up my mail that day, so there was no way I could even fill it out and get it overnighted or anything.
When this happens, you really don't feel like voting again because the hypocrisy of your statement compared to the reality of what is actually done with our votes comes through very loud and clear. Your words are nice and all, but the reality is that a lot of people are told explicitly by what is actually done that no, their vote truely does not count for shit.
You simply are not going to get many of these people back to vote again. I sat out the election after they said "screw you" to me, but I've been back last time and today. My vote for the president's office doesn't count for much as I'm in Maryland and it is blatantly owned by whoever the Democrat is at the time, but I checked off a name anyway. (Not that I'm against voting for Kerry, I'm registered republican and I didn't vote for Bush, but I didn't check Kerry's name either.)
Heh, at least you got an answer. All I got was
:)
Server Error in '/FiosForHome' Application.
Come on guys. While we all suspect this movie won't have a cleverly sculpted plot or heartwarming acting skills, we also know that almost all of us will be going to watch it. Just like Star Wars. How else can we accurately whine about how terrible it turned out?
Besides, I kindof miss the high-quality films I got to see on USA Up All Night and Joe-Bob Briggs' Mostervision. DOOM would surely fit in quite nicely with the likes of Cyborg 3...
Well, there was some slightly different sets in the first Resident Evil movie for different scenes. (Haven't seen the second movie yet) The DOOM movie I imagine will likely resemble the Resident Evil one I've seen in many ways, except for the babe.
You're computer doesn't have a huge honkin' rotary knob on the front? Oh wait, I still use an Amiga, sorry... :p But I did actually just order one of then audio cassette drives for my PC from ThinkGeek... Might arrive today even. Cool.
Uhm... No comment. I didn't do it. I wasn't even there!! No, really, officer!
Really, I'm not sure how much I can answer anyway, I'm mostly just a layout/design flow guy. wtoner @ "that company's name" dot com.
Nah, it looks more like how someone with a stuffy nose would pronounce his request for "a kleenex".
I hope so. I work at Atmel, and the product line I'm involved with has an AVR 8-bit micro in it... :p
>IMO, alot of whats coming right now is technology
:)
>for technologies sake. I admit that i am captivated
>by the appeal of a distributed mythTV setup with
>FEs all over the house, but really, i shouldn't be
>watching enough tv to justify that.
I'm building (or trying to more accurately) a MythTV box. I get Comcast analog-only basic+extended (mostly only watch Scifi for Stargate and Cartoon Network for Futurama reruns) and don't watch much else than those two shows. The MythTV box fills up plenty of time in itself. I'm not good with Linux, but I've learned a great deal through this project. I screw the thing up enough that I have to keep working on it, and haven't really got to use it for much recording TV yet after a year and a half. Haven't got Lirc or Samba or Svideo TV-output working yet, things seem to fall apart and I start again from scratch before I get those things working.
I don't know if I'll ever get to use it normally as a TV recording thing, but it's certainly been a way to learn about Linux. That's really become my reason to mess with the thing, I'm not sure I'll ever reach my goal of actually using it as a fully usable Myth box...
People tell me I could have long ago just bought a Tivo for less than the computer cost me, but that's not really the point now is it?
I was denied my right to vote my first time around. It was two elections ago, I was in college. I asked my hometown courthouse to send me the absentee ballot stuff, and they held it until a few days before it was due, I received it Thursday evening and the paperwork said it must be received at the hometown courthouse no later than 8AM Friday which was the next day. Which meant it was not possible to arrive there on time. (They didn't accept faxes...)
;)
I complained about the outcome that time even though I had no input, but that wasn't my fault. I've voted since then and complained about the results as well.
It depends on how much they value the Linux market. They might not think there's enough Linux enthusiasts to be worth the time or trouble )ie. money). If they don't see a lucrative market, then things will be mediocre at best. I have a Raceon 9800 in my game PC and an AIW7500 in my shiny new AmigaOne rig, and have a few older cards and an AIW8500DV laying around for AmigaOS driver development. We have an NDA with ATI and still can't get docs for anything newer than the 8500 chips. :/
My Gentoo MythTV box has a Geforce of some sort, don't remember. Got the Geforce cause the AIW8500DV I tried in there I couldn't get drivers to work at all well with Linux, even just for display output.
I have a little Shuttle XPC box I'm sorting out to be a router/gateway for my cablemodem. For kicks tried getting KDE to run on it but can't get any better than 640x480 resolution on the built-in ProSavage S3 chipset, so I just ordered an Nvidia based card for that, regardless of if I really should just telnet to the thing and not have a monitor on it...
I've gotten much better with Linux over the last 6 months or so, but still have a good bit to learn. Until things are easier to deal with in Linux land, I'm not going to consider a graphics chipset other than Nvidia as even an option for a Linux box I have any association with. I'd love to use a Radeon card, as I've heard rumors that they're easier to get working with an HDTV
s DVI port due to hardware interlace support or some such which Nvidia doesn't do. I don't actualy have my HDTV yet (waiting for DLP with 1080 support) but when I do I'll want to connect my Myth box to it. Do ATI's Linux drivers even support HDTV connections? Maybe, even if this runor is true, it's still irrelevant to Linux users?
When the Linux market grows a bit more I think more companies will have more enthusiasm for the platform. While it's still more geekish thing to do, we'll have mostly this level of support from the hardware vendors.
I'll give a shiny new nickel to the first person to get a book published titled "aftab.com".
What I don't really get is why other countries are so interested in doing things our way. The DMCA sucks, why "harmonize" with it at all? Why not encourage the USA to "harmonize" with Australia, or the EU (before they copied the DMCA and software patents that is), etc?
Come on guys, us Americans is just a bunch of numbskulls. You isn't gonna want to keep doin' what we doin' forever. Surely there's a smarter and fairer bunch of lawmakers out there somewhere that can think for themselves?
>Well, I've asked a lot of MS users about this, and so far every one of them has disagreed with you.
>Their answer is always of the form "The software I want/need is only available on DOS/Windows
>(depending on the year that I asked)."
I want to play Final Fantasy XI. What are my choices? PSX2 or Windows, not Linux... There's a lot of that, and that's a legit situation.
But Linux and some other OSS stuff is still too hard to use for a lot of people out there, and this is the biggest problem with OSS growth. I'm not going to install linux on my mom's PC which is only used for email and a little web surfing, because I don't want to deal with that over the phone maintenence nightmare, and she lives too far away to just go over there and deal with it myself without the phone in the way.
Ease of use will need to become big-time important in Linux, BSD, and other OSS projects before they will catch on in the real market.
My biggest problem with encouraging people to use Linux or BSD or whatever is that the people that would be listening to me would not be able to use them. My mom can barely do anything with Windows, my sister did somehow manage to reinstall a modem driver that got nutzed up in Windows which was a neat suprise. But if Linux needed some maintenence (and don't tell me it's 100% free of requiring maintenence) there's no way in heck she could have got the modem working again. My parents would call me far more often asking me to help them do something over the phone. (I live 300 miles away and am not driving back and forth for no other reason than to get a friggin PC running again or install a program for them) I have enough trouble making my own linux box do what I want (mythtv), I'm in no way qualified to support linux to a newbie over the phone.
I've dealt with Windows enough that I can for the most part be helpful over the phone, even made it through a long phone call to update my dad's 98-1st box to 98-2nd (weird story, bought a PC at a computer show that had 98-1st installed on the hard drive but came with a 98-2nd CDROM that wasn't an update version, he had no boot floppy for use twiddling stuff already on the HD with, and the HD install of 98-1st had nutzed itself enough to not be able to make a floppy, that was a heck of a day...)
Linux is currently too hard for dummies to deal with. It's hard enough to setup and configure initially that many smart enough don't care to deal with it. I don't agree that more marketing will broaden things significantly as things are, Linux and other OSS stuff needs to become easier to install, configure and use, and then perhaps more marketing will be helpful.
I spent a couple months on and off trying to get my Gentoo MythTV box's Santa Cruz sound card to work. Back and forth between 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, compile ALSA as a module inthe kernel tree, then as a seperate emerge, sometimes right channel worked but left did not, mostly neither worked, etc. Somehow it did work pretty good recently but I had no freakin' idea what made that happen so I couldn't reproduce it if needed in the future. Swapped for a Soundblaster Live as that seems to be more popular in the Linux forums, it seems to be working well from whatever mystical good thing I did for the Santa Cruz. But my TV card still doesn't work, emerge ivtv won't do any good, and I'm waiting for new versions of the driver and/or kernels that will be agreeable with each other on my machine. Running a 2.6.7 kernel now which I understand ivtv has issues with 2.6, but I just got sound working and I don't want to deal with making it go again changing to a 2.4 kernel. I've waited a coiuple years so far, I can wait a bit longer for it to work completely...
But I would never recommend going through this to people that aren't obsessive hobbyists, most computer users today will be much happier with 'doze.
>Whenever I see the make money fast schemes on
:)
>television or on the internet, my first question is
>always, "What do they need me for?"
Well, most people that buy into these schemes fail. Part of why the guy selling hte scheme to others doesn't just do it himself is that whatever method he's selling isn't the true make money fast scheme. The real make money fast scheme is what he himself is doing - selling some most likely to fail business method to unsuspecting people trying to make a quick buck, and who aren't likely to sue the guy when they can't get it to work.
I've considered a few times of selling my own make money fast scheme, which will simply be guidelines on how to market your own make money fast scheme to others. (patent pending, patent pending, patent pending) basically tell people that the best way to make money fast is to be that guy on TV hocking his wares, instead of being the guy watching TV and phoning in your three easy payments of 57.95. I probably wouldn't need to dress up in a flashy suit like the Riddler might wear to inspire confidence in my product.
>The article doesn't divulge how many of the complaints are actually valid, but I think it's
:/
>reasonable to assume that a large percentage of the "429,000 complaints" figure were solicitations from
>organizations claiming to represent charities or political bodies (all of the phone solitations I've
>gotten since registering fall into this category).
Last night I got home with a emssage on my machine from someone tryng to sell som Atkins diet stuff. I hit the delete button without listening to the whole thing, and then got pissed off when I saw a not about this article on cnn or someplace. I forgot all about writing stuff down and complaining to the FTC, as I am on the list since the web site to subscribe went up, but I've gotten very few phone-spams for some time and no longer remember what to do.
They aren't all political or non-profit or surveys... I'm sure some complaints are as not everyone will remember or understand that those are exempted, but some of the phone-spammers really just don't care and will try to get away with it on dopes like me that toast the message without reporing it.
> The car companies make money doing service on your car
OK, but what if there's no dealer for your brand nearby when you need it? Last November I went back "home" to visit my family for Thanksgiving, and my Honda Civic broke down. Guess what? The nearest Honda service center was 80 miles away. (I grew up in a small PA town full of people obsessed with "American made" stuff) I wasn't going to pay to tow my car 80 miles when there were a few small independent mechanics in town, and why should I have to? Just because Honda wants to be the only guys that can fix my car?
Cars are too big/expensive shipping to send away for repair work, and they're way too expensive to consider disposable items like my Apex DVD players turned out to be. (After the third one in a year I gave up and bought a more expensive/less hackable brand) The codes should be available to these small town guys where there simply is no "official" brand service center available. While some may tell me to choose my next car purchase based on the one or two brand dealers/service centers near where I grew up, but that's silly, especially as certain independents do better work than some of the dopes/cons working at the dealers.
Wow. My dad, mom and sister are always calling me expecting me to fix their stuff over the phone. And I never get anything at all in return. Though they do provide a convenient way to remove aging computer parts from my own house when I get to upgrade their machines. That's the closest thing I have to a "reward". Lucky me!
>This is an interesting route to go about getting
>rid of spyware, attacking its source of income
>instead of the manufacturer.
I can't understand why the anti-spam laws weren't made to work that way. It's the only way that makes sense to me. Otherwise the companies will just hop from one spammer to another, and continue sending their junk to us. Same thing for these pop-up things and spyware. The only way to make a difference is to go after the people paying the bums...
Bah! Ignore us weirdos and just read the freakin thing and get your money's worth. Besides, though I enjoy the Guide series, I don't go around quoting it or obsessing about it nerly as much as I do about Army of Darkness, third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy. Besides, I'm still an Amiga user, so I've got other things to froth at the mouth about than the Guide. If you like zany humor, you would probably enjoy the Guide. If not, it may not be your cup of tea, but give it a go and at least find out for sure. I've never read the LOTR books, mostly because I hated the cartoons when I was young. Friends talked me into seeing the recent films, which I actually enjoyed, and I may give the books a try if I ever have time to sit down and read something. (I've got a pile of books I haven't got to yet)
Your mistrust of obsessive people may be keeping you from something you'd enjoy...