That's unreal. I can't imagine being out at the South Pole for a 12 month stretch.
How connected are you to the outside world? What kind of bandwidth does your satellite setup get you? Is it warm enough indoors? How big is McMurdo Station?
You need a receipt from an authorized IBM reseller. If you don't have one contact the person you got it from and hope they can get you a copy. Good luck.
Call and escalate to customer service via a supervisor. Be firm but polite. Clearly explain the problem and how they are responsible for your nonworking machine. I'm willing to bet you'll get fixed if you're persistent. Don't take no for an answer. Most people below a management level have to submit to a request to speak to their supervisor.
Our support center has had numerous complaints about CompuUSA & Best Buy extended maintenance contracts. From "we can't get parts anymore, we're sorry, see ya sucker" when parts are available from us (at a cost, which is the problem for the retail outlet) to "sure we said we'd fix it for free but we really didn't mean it". Quite disheartening to see such blatant ripoffs because some people really don't have the nerve to push back.
Problem is with almost any large, managed support center, software probelem determination is going to be the customer's problem. If you can't do it yourself, hire a consultant. I know it's harsh, but it boils down to simple economics as far as I can tell.
I work in a large support center in the 2nd or 3rd rung above calltakers. A machine ships with higher than normal defects and we eat all the profit from that box and then some. Margins are thin. First, we can't afford more than hiring halfway intelligent people and training them to our products. Maybe half have decent computer skills and maybe 15% are competent. Second, we can't afford to have those competent people spend more than a minimal amount of time on the phone with customers. It's not a matter of not wanting to in most cases, we simply aren't given enough money to do it. And if we don't, someone else will. We have to pare down the problem to hardware or software. If it's hardware, we replace parts, send onsites, whatever it takes. If it's software, asta la vista.
It's not pretty, but it's such a daunting task to track down software conflicts with any number of 3rd party apps or 3rd party hardware installed that we could eat 3-4 times our profit margins and I still don't think we'd do much more than waste our and our customer's time. It becomes much, much cheaper to blow people off giving the standard "We don't guarantee that 3rd party apps will work on this machine without conflict, blah blah blah" and those who get upset enough about it go to customer relations and they either convince them they're not going to get help with it from us or they give them their money back.
It winds up being much cheaper to give that 1-2% their money back than attempt to support them. The situation is even worse with driver support for a product that may have sold less than 10K units. You'll spend less refunding or blowing off the 50-100 people that bitch and moan than hiring a software person to figure out the bugs and update the driver.
Sad, really. Back in my calltaking days this was one of my main "problems". Trying to help customer's out with problems that we weren't supposed to be helping them out with. Refer to OEM support, ask for reload, if problem persists replace hardware.
With something like this, you'll never get through to the article you're looking for. When you click on a link, an ad pops up that contains the actual link to the article you want. Kill the pop-up and you never get to the article....
Did you see how much data was packed away into the volume of a single nucleotide of that Klingon's DNA? That was probably my biggest 'ummmm....' moment of the entire show...
The closest star to our own is 4.3 light-years away.
From NASA, according to the Gliese star catalog, there are 63 stars within 5 parsecs (parsec = 3.26 ly's), 328 within 10, 1008 within 15, 2127 within 20 & 3496 within 25.
I agree. And the out-of-date maps explanation is especially ridiculous considering that the Embassy was the only building that's ever stood in that location.
That's weird, I had quite the collection of Construx during my childhood and never saw a green piece. Maybe 7 or 8 different sets. There were, however, black pieces that had just 3 stable sides and a 4th connector on a rotating hinge so you could get basically any angle you wanted or have drawbridges and the like...
"I wouldn't call it policing, we're just trying to comply with the law and by highlighting the issue to customers, its putting us in a better position as acting as a responsible Netizen on the Internet," the (excite@home) spokesperson said.
It just makes feel all giddy inside when I see such corporate self-delusion. I really boggles the mind that someone could believe that cutting people's accounts off without warning is "highlighting" and that this action is even going to begin to put them in some "better position". I'd sure as hell be looking for a different ISP if I were using their service.
To be fair, ATI has released drivers (beta ones anyway, but the same thing can be said for NVIDIA) much more frequently than once every 3 months for their Radeon line.
Granted, there hasn't been one for nearly a month now, but there were 4 released in June, 5 in May and 2 in April.
Re:Looks like another also-ran...
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Tribes 2!:)
I've got a Geforce2 Pro 64MB card with a P3-933 processor & 384MB RAM and Tribes 2 does not run smoothly at 1024x768x32 with all the details turned up in all instances. Sure, indoors with five or six people around or outdoors with 3 or 4 it runs pretty well (40-100 fps depending). But you get 10-12 people mixing it up in a base assault and weapons exploding everywhere and it definitely starts dipping down below 20.
I've taken to running with a few features turned down here and there in 800x600 and all is well. A faster processor would help a bit too but so would a faster vid card. I'd love to be able to play in 1280x1024 or higher on a 21" monitor and stay above 80fps. I don't know of any current hardware that'll do that. (Let me know if there is...:) )
Thanks for the correction. It must have been that the lopped off chins & foreheads are more apparent with the black bar on the top and bottom cause I didn't notice it at all in the original airings. But I'll be damned if it didn't bug the hell out of me on the 5 or 6 episodes I rewatched on the letterbox edition. Psychological impact from the black bars no doubt...
Now I might be wrong here, feel free to flame/correct me if I am. But it's my impression that the original B5 was not filmed in letterbox and that the current sci-fi channel's letterboxing is nothing but a cheap gimmick.
My only proof being that far too many scenes have chins and foreheads lopped off as if they just stuck black bars on the top and bottom to make it "letterbox". I have not compared side-by-side. Please tell me I'm not hallucinating here...:)
Not to defend piracy or anything, but just consider how much they'd get for all the channels seperately. Something like $80 / month for all the standard channels + premium movie channels. Let's say I watch 10 of their $5 PPV movies, that's $50 more. Locals are $5 / month.
Now where the big bucks rack up is with the sports and porn channels. Porn is like $18/month for playboy? And all the others are $8 / 4 hour block. Sports... let's see . sports pack = 10/month, NFL is 169/year, MLB is 109/year, Gamplan is 89/year, shootout is 69/year, NBA is 169/year, NHL is 129/year, WNBA is 49/year.
So that 2-3K would be eaten up pretty quick if you were a sport or porn junkie. Even with the s&p, you'd be looking at 130+ / month. That 3000 escrow would last less than 2 years.
You know what? I wanted to state that I guarantee that The Eternal Life Device definitely lets you stay physically young forever! But a few of my friends told me not to claim it. They said that such a claim can get me into big trouble. I am pretty sure, though, that it DOES make you stay physically young forever! I can only say that it is believed to let you stay physically young forever or turn you younger, AND I am PRETTY SURE of it.
There is a solution to this. Simultaneous turn mode. I believe, to date, that Age of Wonders and Alpha Centauri had this option. Basically, everyone moves at the same time. This does get into some advantages given to the person who moves their piece first on a given border, but it is much preferrable to the eternal waiting given to the flat turn-based mode. You basically clicked on a button saying, "I'm ready to go to the next turn". And when everyone had clicked in, the next turn began. While waiting for everyone to click in, you could still move units (if you had movement points), and tweak your cities production and what have you.
I nearly feel embarassed for knowing this, but here goes...:)
The thing with C3P0 is attributed to the fact that droids are often memory-wiped in order to avoid them developing degenerate personalities or some such. According to the RPG sourcebooks, I believe. I think it also said something about C3P0 & R2D2 being abnormal in the fact they hadn't been wiped in so long and had not become particularly aberrant as of yet.
As for R2, I only saw Ep 1 once (and must have tried to block out my memory of it), but don't remember R2 in there. And if there was an R2 unit, they are supposed to be fairly ubiquitous in the Star Wars universe as Astromech droids. So who knows if it was "the" R2D2.
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I just might have done this in my bachelor days. Unfortunately, with a wife and a kid on the way, I don't think it's in the cards ... :)
That's unreal. I can't imagine being out at the South Pole for a 12 month stretch.
How connected are you to the outside world? What kind of bandwidth does your satellite setup get you? Is it warm enough indoors? How big is McMurdo Station?
If you don't mind me asking, that is.
Do you want to venture a guess as to how many more calls you would get if all of those same people were running Linux?
You need a receipt from an authorized IBM reseller. If you don't have one contact the person you got it from and hope they can get you a copy. Good luck.
Call and escalate to customer service via a supervisor. Be firm but polite. Clearly explain the problem and how they are responsible for your nonworking machine. I'm willing to bet you'll get fixed if you're persistent. Don't take no for an answer. Most people below a management level have to submit to a request to speak to their supervisor.
www.pc.ibm.com/support
Type in your machine type and model (i.e. 2168M61)in the quickpath and it'll pull up everything you're going to find.
Our support center has had numerous complaints about CompuUSA & Best Buy extended maintenance contracts. From "we can't get parts anymore, we're sorry, see ya sucker" when parts are available from us (at a cost, which is the problem for the retail outlet) to "sure we said we'd fix it for free but we really didn't mean it". Quite disheartening to see such blatant ripoffs because some people really don't have the nerve to push back.
Same policy at the company I work for, but only for laptops. Ostensibly because of high theft rates.
Problem is with almost any large, managed support center, software probelem determination is going to be the customer's problem. If you can't do it yourself, hire a consultant. I know it's harsh, but it boils down to simple economics as far as I can tell.
I work in a large support center in the 2nd or 3rd rung above calltakers. A machine ships with higher than normal defects and we eat all the profit from that box and then some. Margins are thin. First, we can't afford more than hiring halfway intelligent people and training them to our products. Maybe half have decent computer skills and maybe 15% are competent. Second, we can't afford to have those competent people spend more than a minimal amount of time on the phone with customers. It's not a matter of not wanting to in most cases, we simply aren't given enough money to do it. And if we don't, someone else will. We have to pare down the problem to hardware or software. If it's hardware, we replace parts, send onsites, whatever it takes. If it's software, asta la vista.
It's not pretty, but it's such a daunting task to track down software conflicts with any number of 3rd party apps or 3rd party hardware installed that we could eat 3-4 times our profit margins and I still don't think we'd do much more than waste our and our customer's time. It becomes much, much cheaper to blow people off giving the standard "We don't guarantee that 3rd party apps will work on this machine without conflict, blah blah blah" and those who get upset enough about it go to customer relations and they either convince them they're not going to get help with it from us or they give them their money back.
It winds up being much cheaper to give that 1-2% their money back than attempt to support them. The situation is even worse with driver support for a product that may have sold less than 10K units. You'll spend less refunding or blowing off the 50-100 people that bitch and moan than hiring a software person to figure out the bugs and update the driver.
Sad, really. Back in my calltaking days this was one of my main "problems". Trying to help customer's out with problems that we weren't supposed to be helping them out with. Refer to OEM support, ask for reload, if problem persists replace hardware.
Hilarious! Bill Hicks was the man.
He had a voice that was strong and loud, we'll miss him.
With something like this, you'll never get through to the article you're looking for. When you click on a link, an ad pops up that contains the actual link to the article you want. Kill the pop-up and you never get to the article....
Did you see how much data was packed away into the volume of a single nucleotide of that Klingon's DNA? That was probably my biggest 'ummmm....' moment of the entire show ...
The closest star to our own is 4.3 light-years away.
From NASA, according to the Gliese star catalog, there are 63 stars within 5 parsecs (parsec = 3.26 ly's), 328 within 10, 1008 within 15, 2127 within 20 & 3496 within 25.
16.3, 32.6, 48.9, 65.2 & 81.5 light-years, respectively.
I agree. And the out-of-date maps explanation is especially ridiculous considering that the Embassy was the only building that's ever stood in that location.
That's weird, I had quite the collection of Construx during my childhood and never saw a green piece. Maybe 7 or 8 different sets. There were, however, black pieces that had just 3 stable sides and a 4th connector on a rotating hinge so you could get basically any angle you wanted or have drawbridges and the like...
"I wouldn't call it policing, we're just trying to comply with the law and by highlighting the issue to customers, its putting us in a better position as acting as a responsible Netizen on the Internet," the (excite@home) spokesperson said.
It just makes feel all giddy inside when I see such corporate self-delusion. I really boggles the mind that someone could believe that cutting people's accounts off without warning is "highlighting" and that this action is even going to begin to put them in some "better position". I'd sure as hell be looking for a different ISP if I were using their service.
Thank you, I feel slighly less crazy now... :)
... :)
Especially since watching an episode recently and it looked perfectly alright
To be fair, ATI has released drivers (beta ones anyway, but the same thing can be said for NVIDIA) much more frequently than once every 3 months for their Radeon line.
Granted, there hasn't been one for nearly a month now, but there were 4 released in June, 5 in May and 2 in April.
Tribes 2! :)
... :) )
I've got a Geforce2 Pro 64MB card with a P3-933 processor & 384MB RAM and Tribes 2 does not run smoothly at 1024x768x32 with all the details turned up in all instances. Sure, indoors with five or six people around or outdoors with 3 or 4 it runs pretty well (40-100 fps depending). But you get 10-12 people mixing it up in a base assault and weapons exploding everywhere and it definitely starts dipping down below 20.
I've taken to running with a few features turned down here and there in 800x600 and all is well. A faster processor would help a bit too but so would a faster vid card. I'd love to be able to play in 1280x1024 or higher on a 21" monitor and stay above 80fps. I don't know of any current hardware that'll do that. (Let me know if there is
Thanks for the correction. It must have been that the lopped off chins & foreheads are more apparent with the black bar on the top and bottom cause I didn't notice it at all in the original airings. But I'll be damned if it didn't bug the hell out of me on the 5 or 6 episodes I rewatched on the letterbox edition. Psychological impact from the black bars no doubt ...
Now I might be wrong here, feel free to flame/correct me if I am. But it's my impression that the original B5 was not filmed in letterbox and that the current sci-fi channel's letterboxing is nothing but a cheap gimmick.
... :)
My only proof being that far too many scenes have chins and foreheads lopped off as if they just stuck black bars on the top and bottom to make it "letterbox". I have not compared side-by-side. Please tell me I'm not hallucinating here
Not to defend piracy or anything, but just consider how much they'd get for all the channels seperately. Something like $80 / month for all the standard channels + premium movie channels. Let's say I watch 10 of their $5 PPV movies, that's $50 more. Locals are $5 / month.
... let's see . sports pack = 10/month, NFL is 169/year, MLB is 109/year, Gamplan is 89/year, shootout is 69/year, NBA is 169/year, NHL is 129/year, WNBA is 49/year.
Now where the big bucks rack up is with the sports and porn channels. Porn is like $18/month for playboy? And all the others are $8 / 4 hour block. Sports
So that 2-3K would be eaten up pretty quick if you were a sport or porn junkie. Even with the s&p, you'd be looking at 130+ / month. That 3000 escrow would last less than 2 years.
There is a solution to this. Simultaneous turn mode. I believe, to date, that Age of Wonders and Alpha Centauri had this option. Basically, everyone moves at the same time. This does get into some advantages given to the person who moves their piece first on a given border, but it is much preferrable to the eternal waiting given to the flat turn-based mode. You basically clicked on a button saying, "I'm ready to go to the next turn". And when everyone had clicked in, the next turn began. While waiting for everyone to click in, you could still move units (if you had movement points), and tweak your cities production and what have you.
I nearly feel embarassed for knowing this, but here goes ... :)
The thing with C3P0 is attributed to the fact that droids are often memory-wiped in order to avoid them developing degenerate personalities or some such. According to the RPG sourcebooks, I believe. I think it also said something about C3P0 & R2D2 being abnormal in the fact they hadn't been wiped in so long and had not become particularly aberrant as of yet.
As for R2, I only saw Ep 1 once (and must have tried to block out my memory of it), but don't remember R2 in there. And if there was an R2 unit, they are supposed to be fairly ubiquitous in the Star Wars universe as Astromech droids. So who knows if it was "the" R2D2.