between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi
Or maybe because it's the de-facto standard and virtually every application and device out there supports it. I got some mkv stuff a while ago and wanted to save a short clip from it. Dear God. What.A.Pain. Converting it to play on my Archos or other media player? Not a snowballs chance in hell. The one free program I saw crashed and I'm not going to pay $30 for something with no trial version off some website.
Ditto with mp4. I actually managed to do it after a fair bit of work, but still a pain in the ass.
I'm speaking in general terms, but if you want others to adopt something, you need to make it easy for others to use. The really smart folks behind some of these formats and codecs just don't seem to understand that though. I don't know if its an elitist attitude or what, but without good apps that can convert your awesome new format into existing ones so people can actually do what they want, you're not going to get widespread adoption.
There is some serious hatred towards mkv from quite a few people on the web because of this - and although mp4 is better, it still isn't perfect. People have portable video players, people might want to edit the clip in programs like premiere and virtualdub and people might want to burn it to DVD and watch on their old DVD player. So.. anyways... a rant to go with yours...
Because Toshiba as a whole doesn't really care if any of their products are lemons. Toshiba screwed thousands of people with poor quality laptops and even worse repairs, then screwed many, many people who bought pocket pcs from them when they decided to not release a promised upgrade - those aren't isolated issues either. Don't get me wrong - all companies have runs of bad products - but when toshiba does, it's not only that they don't care, but they refuse to admit a problem even exists.
Oh and this... strangely enough the Toshiba warranty on a replacement lamp not covered by the original TV warranty is 180 days. There is nothing strange about it - it is calculated and predicted, which is why the warranty period isn't standard. Short of a class action - and even then, because we all know how useless those are - yay 20% off 1 toshiba name brand lamp, people are going to get screwed.
If you try to break out of the automated system, you will get transfered to a call center in some random location in the world and there is a good chance that it is closed if you're doing this during business hours in the USA.
I tend to re-install a lot, so I call in, speak my code to that stupid, slow as hell voice recognition system, wait, repeat the fucking 60 digit code to an Indian and then finally can finish my install.
Kind of annoying. You'd think MS would be able to route to call centers properly if the customer punched out of the IVR. To say nothing of passing that activation code to the agent who answers the call.
Well... if you have a shitty builder in a new house, you just about as bad off. Guy I know finds out 6 months after moving in there isn't any insulation (at all) in his attic and the contractor used the walls as a garbage dump (instead of insulating them) Fun!
If your usenet experience sucks, you need a better client (no, not that piece of shit called agent). There are a few good ones that are designed for binaries nowadays. Some even have integrated search which you have to pay a tiny fee for, but lets you download whatever without downloading 6 gigs of headers.
It might also have something to do with the fact that Godaddy (as well as quite a few other merchants who started accepting payments via google checkout *cough* ritz camera *cough*) don't know their head from their ass on a good day, toss in the usual bit of substandard customer service by people who don't speak English and a new payment system and everything goes to hell. I know the google checkout thing is sort of secondary, but goes to show how badly companies can fuck up.
Wow.. crappy... I've personally had nothing but good luck with the escalation folks - got a brand new really nice upgrade of a camera and a few other things - just last week a brand new DVD burner. Never dealt with them on a laptop though. Sorry to hear about your situation.
I just don't see how it would be possible for a driver to be that version specific. Even if their crappy installer blocks the install in xp pro, you should always be able to grab the \system32 folder and just point device manager to that in your clean install (sometimes manufacturer's leave a config utility.exe or something in \windows too) Just seemed kind of suspicious to me...
If you had 5 re-repairs, why didn't you escalate and ask for a buyback or something? HP's tech support for certain products may suck, but their escalation / turbo team / "call the ceo's office" team is one of the (if not _the_) best in the industry.
Sooner or later, they will learn that they need to secure their site after they get hacked, used for a warez dump and find out that they have to pay (literally) for using 8x the bandwidth they paid in advance for. Expensive lesson usually means lesson learned.
Why are we supposed to help the stupid? Let them continue doing stupid things until they get pwnt and it costs them their business.
The gatorade powder stuff is great for when you're sick. There's something in it that makes you drink more than you would had just drank water. A couple weeks ago, I had bronchitis and did the "drink a lot / sweat lodge" approach to kill it and drank 3 coffee jugs of the mix to kill it. Worked well.
More or less same premise as the chicken soup too, salty chicken soup makes you want to drink more...
Besides when you read TFA, the investigator also points out that the jury viewed a list of sites accessed, many of which could not be reached without actively clicking on the ads:
The "investigator" didn't scan for adware. No shit. Never did a scan for adware. The "defense attorney" was apparantly ok with this.
The "investigator" also claimed that you would have to actively click on a link for it to become a "visited" link.
In other words, the detective (Mark Lounsbury) is a piece of shit who perjured himself on the stand or is so incredibly incompetent and doesn't have the same amount of knowledge of computer systems as a first year CIS student coding his first html page.
Hardly a reliable witness, but good enough for the jury - a group of people that the prosecutor ensured during selection didn't know jack shit about computers.
The detective in the investigation "admitted there was no search made for adware, which can generate pop-up advertisements". It's incredible that they never even _checked_ for spyware....
The fact that the machine was never scanned for spyware by the investigating authorities is outrageous. In fact, this alone should have resulted in the case being dismissed, as the defense found a major spyware infection by their expert forensic evidence.
It's not really surprising that the cops didn't even run a search - even if you assume that the detectives were competent with computers (which is a big assumption), since discovering the ad-ware would only aid in the defense, the search was not done. This is routine practice for police departments, who really have no interest in finding the truth, just gathering evidence for prosecution.
The defense attorney clearly had no fucking clue what was going on - the detective perjured himself on the stand by claiming that someone physically had to click on a link to make it "turn purple". Or perhaps he just was too fucking stupid to see that this was wrong. I don't know what is worse in an "expert witness" - perjury or incompetence, both are horrible.
The prosecutor (who hired the cop as the "expert witness") now has a "prosecuted kiddie molester" merit badge and something to put on their CV when they run for office. I can guarantee you that the prosecutor knocked off anyone who worked in the IT industry to ensure that the jury was full of uninformed people who would buy up whatever bullshit was thrown at them by the so called expert witness.
The judge fell asleep - and seeing as it took 8 months to remove a judge who was jerking off with a penis pump while court was in session, that really won't change anything.
If anything, this case shows how perverted the US legal system has become. Unfortunately, even this miscarriage of justice won't be enough for people to open their eyes and see what a joke the system has become, so ultimately, nothing will change.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke,
It's just another notch on the prosecutor's belt on the way to public office. It looks great when your CV includes "prosecuted person who showed porn to young kids"
I don't know about society in general. It doesn't take that many people to pervert the "justice" system.
Your average "successful prosecutor" is a sociopath who is only interested in another notch on their belt and a "I prosecuted kiddie porn and terrorism" merit badge so that they have a better chance of being elected to public office down the line.
Your average jury consists of the stupidest people in society, and in computer cases, you can be sure that the prosecution picks the most computer illiterate people they can find and will remove anyone who works in the field during jury selection.
The prosecutor is also the person who gets money to pay for "expert witnesses", which in this case include a cop who perjured himself and gave false statements on the stand.
To top it off, your average judge is a former prosecutor.
... with no added features as long as it stopped crashing. Granted, this only really happens when I have 50 or so tabs open across a few windows, but that is fairly normal usage for me and boy is it annoying. Yes, my ram's good. No, it doesn't matter if I have any extensions. No, nothing on the "yeah, this problem really doesn't exist, but if it did, you could try these steps to fix it" problem denial page.
The built in session restore feature is nice (as long as your connection can handle 2500 outbound connections at "once" as the dozens of images and the like load up, but ff 2.0 crashes at least once a day for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, the unabomber used the postal service, but let's not let that get in the way of your brilliant argument.
between pirates sticking with their habitual use of Xvid/DivX in avi
Or maybe because it's the de-facto standard and virtually every application and device out there supports it.
I got some mkv stuff a while ago and wanted to save a short clip from it.
Dear God. What.A.Pain.
Converting it to play on my Archos or other media player? Not a snowballs chance in hell. The one free program I saw crashed and I'm not going to pay $30 for something with no trial version off some website.
Ditto with mp4. I actually managed to do it after a fair bit of work, but still a pain in the ass.
I'm speaking in general terms, but if you want others to adopt something, you need to make it easy for others to use. The really smart folks behind some of these formats and codecs just don't seem to understand that though.
I don't know if its an elitist attitude or what, but without good apps that can convert your awesome new format into existing ones so people can actually do what they want, you're not going to get widespread adoption.
There is some serious hatred towards mkv from quite a few people on the web because of this - and although mp4 is better, it still isn't perfect.
People have portable video players, people might want to edit the clip in programs like premiere and virtualdub and people might want to burn it to DVD and watch on their old DVD player.
So.. anyways... a rant to go with yours...
Because Toshiba as a whole doesn't really care if any of their products are lemons.
Toshiba screwed thousands of people with poor quality laptops and even worse repairs, then screwed many, many people who bought pocket pcs from them when they decided to not release a promised upgrade - those aren't isolated issues either.
Don't get me wrong - all companies have runs of bad products - but when toshiba does, it's not only that they don't care, but they refuse to admit a problem even exists.
Oh and this...
strangely enough the Toshiba warranty on a replacement lamp not covered by the original TV warranty is 180 days.
There is nothing strange about it - it is calculated and predicted, which is why the warranty period isn't standard.
Short of a class action - and even then, because we all know how useless those are - yay 20% off 1 toshiba name brand lamp, people are going to get screwed.
Thanks to Trotsky, Marx and Lenin (or so the joke goes...)
There's this picture on the internet that contradicts that statement.
If you try to break out of the automated system, you will get transfered to a call center in some random location in the world and there is a good chance that it is closed if you're doing this during business hours in the USA.
I tend to re-install a lot, so I call in, speak my code to that stupid, slow as hell voice recognition system, wait, repeat the fucking 60 digit code to an Indian and then finally can finish my install.
Kind of annoying. You'd think MS would be able to route to call centers properly if the customer punched out of the IVR. To say nothing of passing that activation code to the agent who answers the call.
Well... if you have a shitty builder in a new house, you just about as bad off.
Guy I know finds out 6 months after moving in there isn't any insulation (at all) in his attic and the contractor used the walls as a garbage dump (instead of insulating them)
Fun!
If your usenet experience sucks, you need a better client (no, not that piece of shit called agent). There are a few good ones that are designed for binaries nowadays. Some even have integrated search which you have to pay a tiny fee for, but lets you download whatever without downloading 6 gigs of headers.
The Russian mafia lies in ruins, crushed under the boots of the RIAA.
LOL.
It might also have something to do with the fact that Godaddy (as well as quite a few other merchants who started accepting payments via google checkout *cough* ritz camera *cough*) don't know their head from their ass on a good day, toss in the usual bit of substandard customer service by people who don't speak English and a new payment system and everything goes to hell.
I know the google checkout thing is sort of secondary, but goes to show how badly companies can fuck up.
Because, you know, grunts walk around with EM detectors all the time...
Wow.. crappy... I've personally had nothing but good luck with the escalation folks - got a brand new really nice upgrade of a camera and a few other things - just last week a brand new DVD burner. Never dealt with them on a laptop though. Sorry to hear about your situation.
I just don't see how it would be possible for a driver to be that version specific. Even if their crappy installer blocks the install in xp pro, you should always be able to grab the \system32 folder and just point device manager to that in your clean install (sometimes manufacturer's leave a config utility .exe or something in \windows too)
Just seemed kind of suspicious to me...
If you had 5 re-repairs, why didn't you escalate and ask for a buyback or something?
HP's tech support for certain products may suck, but their escalation / turbo team / "call the ceo's office" team is one of the (if not _the_) best in the industry.
Yeah, but it takes time for the Indian programmers to get their orders and to ship the code back. /slams head on desk
India is far away, you know.
Really, XP Home only drivers?
I smell bullshit.
Sooner or later, they will learn that they need to secure their site after they get hacked, used for a warez dump and find out that they have to pay (literally) for using 8x the bandwidth they paid in advance for.
Expensive lesson usually means lesson learned.
Why are we supposed to help the stupid? Let them continue doing stupid things until they get pwnt and it costs them their business.
The gatorade powder stuff is great for when you're sick. There's something in it that makes you drink more than you would had just drank water.
A couple weeks ago, I had bronchitis and did the "drink a lot / sweat lodge" approach to kill it and drank 3 coffee jugs of the mix to kill it. Worked well.
More or less same premise as the chicken soup too, salty chicken soup makes you want to drink more...
Besides when you read TFA, the investigator also points out that the jury viewed a list of sites accessed, many of which could not be reached without actively clicking on the ads:
The "investigator" didn't scan for adware.
No shit. Never did a scan for adware. The "defense attorney" was apparantly ok with this.
The "investigator" also claimed that you would have to actively click on a link for it to become a "visited" link.
a simple demo showing that is not the case
No fancy html, really, it's as basic as it gets.
In other words, the detective (Mark Lounsbury) is a piece of shit who perjured himself on the stand or is so incredibly incompetent and doesn't have the same amount of knowledge of computer systems as a first year CIS student coding his first html page.
Hardly a reliable witness, but good enough for the jury - a group of people that the prosecutor ensured during selection didn't know jack shit about computers.
The detective in the investigation "admitted there was no search made for adware, which can generate pop-up advertisements". It's incredible that they never even _checked_ for spyware....
The fact that the machine was never scanned for spyware by the investigating authorities is outrageous. In fact, this alone should have resulted in the case being dismissed, as the defense found a major spyware infection by their expert forensic evidence.
It's not really surprising that the cops didn't even run a search - even if you assume that the detectives were competent with computers (which is a big assumption), since discovering the ad-ware would only aid in the defense, the search was not done. This is routine practice for police departments, who really have no interest in finding the truth, just gathering evidence for prosecution.
The defense attorney clearly had no fucking clue what was going on - the detective perjured himself on the stand by claiming that someone physically had to click on a link to make it "turn purple". Or perhaps he just was too fucking stupid to see that this was wrong. I don't know what is worse in an "expert witness" - perjury or incompetence, both are horrible.
The prosecutor (who hired the cop as the "expert witness") now has a "prosecuted kiddie molester" merit badge and something to put on their CV when they run for office. I can guarantee you that the prosecutor knocked off anyone who worked in the IT industry to ensure that the jury was full of uninformed people who would buy up whatever bullshit was thrown at them by the so called expert witness.
The judge fell asleep - and seeing as it took 8 months to remove a judge who was jerking off with a penis pump while court was in session, that really won't change anything.
If anything, this case shows how perverted the US legal system has become. Unfortunately, even this miscarriage of justice won't be enough for people to open their eyes and see what a joke the system has become, so ultimately, nothing will change.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke,
It's just another notch on the prosecutor's belt on the way to public office. It looks great when your CV includes "prosecuted person who showed porn to young kids"
I don't know about society in general. It doesn't take that many people to pervert the "justice" system.
Your average "successful prosecutor" is a sociopath who is only interested in another notch on their belt and a "I prosecuted kiddie porn and terrorism" merit badge so that they have a better chance of being elected to public office down the line.
Your average jury consists of the stupidest people in society, and in computer cases, you can be sure that the prosecution picks the most computer illiterate people they can find and will remove anyone who works in the field during jury selection.
The prosecutor is also the person who gets money to pay for "expert witnesses", which in this case include a cop who perjured himself and gave false statements on the stand.
To top it off, your average judge is a former prosecutor.
Bbbut, a jury of dumb motherfuckers listened to incorrect testimony from an "expert witness" and convicted her.
That's all we need, right?
... with no added features as long as it stopped crashing.
Granted, this only really happens when I have 50 or so tabs open across a few windows, but that is fairly normal usage for me and boy is it annoying.
Yes, my ram's good. No, it doesn't matter if I have any extensions. No, nothing on the "yeah, this problem really doesn't exist, but if it did, you could try these steps to fix it" problem denial page.
The built in session restore feature is nice (as long as your connection can handle 2500 outbound connections at "once" as the dozens of images and the like load up, but ff 2.0 crashes at least once a day for me.
I still use it over opera and ie, but...
Is there any need to ask rhetorical questions?