Unless they want to limit the number of free devices they want to give out... I recall a problem a few years back where a chinese company wanted me to send the motherboard to them overseas (ecs?) to rma it. Needless to say, the board was worth less than the shipping cost.
Hmm.. Guess you had a really bad experience. I know I got bumped to a ~$500 camera because I got 3 doa units in a row on the (much) cheaper camera I had.
Call the escalation department / "corporate operator". It's a call center staffed with english speaking folks who can be very helpful if you have issues. If you call their main number, error the ivr to get a person and ask to be transfered.
If you call the company and make your concerns known, they usually have a program where you can send back part of the drive (usually the top cover) and get your replacement without actually sending the platters in.
These folks had some problems (they mentioned that a picture was taken every 23 seconds and in that time clouds moved enough to make stitching a pain) but for general shots, wow, great app. Takes bloody forever (and you will notice a system slow down, even if you drop the process priority to idle), even on a 4400+ system, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand in photoshop.
Installer is tiny too, it's not bloated like most software apps these days...
Because your average user is stupid and will click away any phishing warning, especially if the email says "You may see a dialog like this, click yes/ignore (just like installing your printer, scanner, tv card, etc drivers)"
I really don't want to advocate handholding, but some people really do need it..
The problem is that they pretty much have to sign whatever nvidia, ati or creative has as a driver (especially for x64) when they release Vista. Otherwise, tons of hardware won't work and their marketing people would be in a tizzy.
A lot of the teachers at my school are great, but the people downtown calling the shots for the district are absolutely braindead
There may be some pretty smart people there, but in any academic institution, there becomes a point when people are x% to retirement and do everything in their power to go along with "insert stupid policy here" because to speak out against it puts them at risk of losing their retirement benefits. If you talk to a few of the upper level folks, you'll find that a lot of them are burned out As for a GED, it looks really bad, even if you do get done by 16. Most school districts have a program where they pay for community college and AP classes for juniors and seniors, you can even use the college classes towards your hs graduation credits or whatever your district calls them. Save a few bucks and most of the first year of university by going that route.
On RC1 before you activate, you can't change the time server from time.ms.com or whatever it is (will tell you you don't have permissions). Didn't try playing with DNS or anything, but that's one way they check the date.
To be fair, it's probably the fault of the nvidia drivers, which are pretty shitty. I hear ATI is in the same boat, no surprise there. Microsoft hasn't learned from XP - that piss poor drivers are the primary reason people think their OS is unstable (although the new explorer crashes all the damn time on my system because it wants to draw thumbnails and it doesnt like divx files). Sadly, they just let anyone who can cough up the money to use the "designed for windows xp/2000/vista" sticker and pretty much sign any driver they receive. I know that it really is someone elses product that is causing them the trouble, but they do (in theory at least) have the power to get the manufacturers to shape up.
And it never really stopped piracy anyways. I know people who have activated XP over 30 times on different systems, selling them each time. They had to call in, but I've never heard of MS actually declining a key unless it was posted on usenet or something.
They spent who knows how many millions of dollars developing Vista
Oh, only about 8 to 9 thousand of those million dollars linky.
Of course, how that is defined is a bit of a mystery, but even 10% of that is still a good chunk of change. Vista is more about pushing hardware sales for the oems (who have been lacking a "killer app" that would force Joe User to upgrade his 1 ghz box with a half gig of ram and onboard graphics that runs xp with outlook and email just fine). If you really think about it - for the majority of users have no real need to upgrade, they don't play games besides solitaire and stuff in flash, their hardware probably still works and ie, ff and office works fine if you toss in a bit more ram than the system shipped with. Their 1 gig system runs fine if it's filled with ram.
Now, in real life, that isn't true because the vast majority of systems out there are infected with 38 different spyware aps, with disks and page files fragmented to the 7th layer of hell and also bloated apps like virtually any current anti virus or any IM, movie player (real, etc) But, there really hasn't been a need to upgrade your system for a while unless you're a power user, and Vista is here to force upgrades. Add in trusted computing and dx10 to force sales of new video cards even among those with bleeding edge systems and you have a nice increase in sales of hardware and probably a fair bit of stock growth. If you look back in two years, you'll see that Vista made a lot of people who got stock options in the computer industry quite a bit richer. I suppose this goes more towards the ROI arguement, they could continue selling XP, but they wouldn't get these additional incentives. Of course, it really isn't the company making money, but groups of employees and executives. That's sufficient motivation for them to do it. Besides, you have to have your employees do something, they can't just sit around all day. Sure, they have to code patches, but regardless of what they'd like us to believe, that doesn't take them all that much time... I'm sure hollywood pitched in a few dollars for the drm, etc, too. There is a ton of money to be made in options here if the riaa/mpaa sponsored services take off.
I should always be able to move, minimize and close an application immediately no matter what that application is doing.
No kidding. I RC1, the desktop still hangs for about 15 seconds when you move an icon OVER a shortcut that points to a disconnected network share. Although they've added eye candy, some bugs that have existed since 95 still haven't been fixed.
And there, in a nutshell is MS' philosophy. Assume things are going to go right. I call bullshit. If you provide scads of additional information, such as what file is being copied, or how many [giga/mega/kilo]bytes remain, or what registry key is being written, or what dll is being registered, normal users will ignore it. Those who know things will be able to help when things go wrong.
The Vista copy process box does show the speed, but it also it lies to you. When I first installed, I was moving 20 gigs of small files, it kept "estimating" the time until I cancelled it. By then about 3 gigs had already been moved. Awesome.
Better? No, not really You get to see a whopping 10 icons in the default view (it randomly switches depending on the folder), and more than half of the window is useless. You can resize it, but you'll have to resize it every time.
Slashdot Mirror
They're spending 9-9 billion actually. But, like most of the people have replied, their wga notification tool is crap and gives false positives.
Unless they want to limit the number of free devices they want to give out... I recall a problem a few years back where a chinese company wanted me to send the motherboard to them overseas (ecs?) to rma it.
Needless to say, the board was worth less than the shipping cost.
If firmware upgrades aren't enough, they'll replace your hardware, with you paying just the shipping.
The question is where to? This really has no value if they have you ship your card / router / motherboard to China via insured courier...
Hmm.. Guess you had a really bad experience. I know I got bumped to a ~$500 camera because I got 3 doa units in a row on the (much) cheaper camera I had.
Call the escalation department / "corporate operator". It's a call center staffed with english speaking folks who can be very helpful if you have issues. If you call their main number, error the ivr to get a person and ask to be transfered.
If you call the company and make your concerns known, they usually have a program where you can send back part of the drive (usually the top cover) and get your replacement without actually sending the platters in.
Auto stitch
These folks had some problems (they mentioned that a picture was taken every 23 seconds and in that time clouds moved enough to make stitching a pain) but for general shots, wow, great app. Takes bloody forever (and you will notice a system slow down, even if you drop the process priority to idle), even on a 4400+ system, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand in photoshop.
Installer is tiny too, it's not bloated like most software apps these days...
Because your average user is stupid and will click away any phishing warning, especially if the email says "You may see a dialog like this, click yes/ignore (just like installing your printer, scanner, tv card, etc drivers)"
I really don't want to advocate handholding, but some people really do need it..
Or it breaks and you have to file a BBB complaint (or threaten to) to get them to fix it.
Especially considering that I can get a new laptop for $399 without having to play with rebates...
Sale is dead now, but wait a week or so and there will be another
Really. Is this really a choice that you have to think about?
The problem is that they pretty much have to sign whatever nvidia, ati or creative has as a driver (especially for x64) when they release Vista. Otherwise, tons of hardware won't work and their marketing people would be in a tizzy.
A lot of the teachers at my school are great, but the people downtown calling the shots for the district are absolutely braindead
There may be some pretty smart people there, but in any academic institution, there becomes a point when people are x% to retirement and do everything in their power to go along with "insert stupid policy here" because to speak out against it puts them at risk of losing their retirement benefits.
If you talk to a few of the upper level folks, you'll find that a lot of them are burned out
As for a GED, it looks really bad, even if you do get done by 16. Most school districts have a program where they pay for community college and AP classes for juniors and seniors, you can even use the college classes towards your hs graduation credits or whatever your district calls them. Save a few bucks and most of the first year of university by going that route.
Or, if you're enlisted, you can get a fuckup senior officer which is arguably worse.
OCS does not a good leader make...
On RC1 before you activate, you can't change the time server from time.ms.com or whatever it is (will tell you you don't have permissions). Didn't try playing with DNS or anything, but that's one way they check the date.
To be fair, it's probably the fault of the nvidia drivers, which are pretty shitty. I hear ATI is in the same boat, no surprise there.
Microsoft hasn't learned from XP - that piss poor drivers are the primary reason people think their OS is unstable (although the new explorer crashes all the damn time on my system because it wants to draw thumbnails and it doesnt like divx files). Sadly, they just let anyone who can cough up the money to use the "designed for windows xp/2000/vista" sticker and pretty much sign any driver they receive.
I know that it really is someone elses product that is causing them the trouble, but they do (in theory at least) have the power to get the manufacturers to shape up.
Respectfully, it was really goddamn annoying. The usergroups were full of pissed users (not that anyone from microsoft reads them, but hey)
And it never really stopped piracy anyways. I know people who have activated XP over 30 times on different systems, selling them each time. They had to call in, but I've never heard of MS actually declining a key unless it was posted on usenet or something.
They spent who knows how many millions of dollars developing Vista
Oh, only about 8 to 9 thousand of those million dollars linky.
Of course, how that is defined is a bit of a mystery, but even 10% of that is still a good chunk of change.
Vista is more about pushing hardware sales for the oems (who have been lacking a "killer app" that would force Joe User to upgrade his 1 ghz box with a half gig of ram and onboard graphics that runs xp with outlook and email just fine). If you really think about it - for the majority of users have no real need to upgrade, they don't play games besides solitaire and stuff in flash, their hardware probably still works and ie, ff and office works fine if you toss in a bit more ram than the system shipped with. Their 1 gig system runs fine if it's filled with ram.
Now, in real life, that isn't true because the vast majority of systems out there are infected with 38 different spyware aps, with disks and page files fragmented to the 7th layer of hell and also bloated apps like virtually any current anti virus or any IM, movie player (real, etc)
But, there really hasn't been a need to upgrade your system for a while unless you're a power user, and Vista is here to force upgrades. Add in trusted computing and dx10 to force sales of new video cards even among those with bleeding edge systems and you have a nice increase in sales of hardware and probably a fair bit of stock growth. If you look back in two years, you'll see that Vista made a lot of people who got stock options in the computer industry quite a bit richer. I suppose this goes more towards the ROI arguement, they could continue selling XP, but they wouldn't get these additional incentives. Of course, it really isn't the company making money, but groups of employees and executives. That's sufficient motivation for them to do it. Besides, you have to have your employees do something, they can't just sit around all day. Sure, they have to code patches, but regardless of what they'd like us to believe, that doesn't take them all that much time...
I'm sure hollywood pitched in a few dollars for the drm, etc, too. There is a ton of money to be made in options here if the riaa/mpaa sponsored services take off.
I should always be able to move, minimize and close an application immediately no matter what that application is doing.
No kidding. I RC1, the desktop still hangs for about 15 seconds when you move an icon OVER a shortcut that points to a disconnected network share. Although they've added eye candy, some bugs that have existed since 95 still haven't been fixed.
Also funny, although it needs no text.
Linky
I found Vista to be too heavy on the eye candy
So disable it.
Explorer and quite a few other apps look downright retarded if you turn off themes.
Preview is great!
Explorer and quite a few other apps look downright retarded if you turn off themes.
Don't forget "if you don't click no in the next 300 seconds, I'm going to restart anyways"
And there, in a nutshell is MS' philosophy. Assume things are going to go right. I call bullshit. If you provide scads of additional information, such as what file is being copied, or how many [giga/mega/kilo]bytes remain, or what registry key is being written, or what dll is being registered, normal users will ignore it. Those who know things will be able to help when things go wrong.
The Vista copy process box does show the speed, but it also it lies to you. When I first installed, I was moving 20 gigs of small files, it kept "estimating" the time until I cancelled it. By then about 3 gigs had already been moved.
Awesome.
Well, hopefully they will and will use a different save dialog. The new save dialog box is the worst thing to happen in windows gui design in years.
This actually makes my head hurt
Better? No, not really You get to see a whopping 10 icons in the default view (it randomly switches depending on the folder), and more than half of the window is useless.
You can resize it, but you'll have to resize it every time.