That's exactly the kind of feedback I wanted to know as I've been eagerly awaiting a phone that doesn't have 80% of its functionality locked down.
Sad... and for the price I may as well get a fully functional unlocked proprietary handset.:/ Still, I would really like it if OpenMoko and any similar attempts did well.
Marking this redundant would be redundant itself - I'm just chipping in my $0.02.
I very much have the ability to spy on my colleagues in my position in IT. There are inevitably times when I see personal data on people's PCs. But I don't snoop because it's really much easier that way.
You can rationalize this to not having time, being caught, having ethics, not having to hide something big or decide whether or not to, etc, but really they all factor in. It's just not worth the trouble and risk in general.
Thankfully where I work we have policies that prevent us from ever knowing user passwords, and various others to keep us from having too much control over their accounts in the wrong ways, or having to know things we don't need to.
Not even, sadly... Since I started working for a living and actually being able to afford good games, I buy them. I'd buy Mass Effect to try it.
However the DRM is an absolute deal breaker. If I try it, it won't be the purchased version! TBH though I'll probably just let it slide and not play unless someone hands me a precracked disc.
Yes. I have heard that is not due to whiskers, but the fact that the lead-free solder they use is much less ductile/more brittle than traditional types....but it's also an engineering issue as other products go lead-free without issues. It is a bit easier to pop off though.
Bunnie Huang recently looked at an RROD'ed system and found inconclusive results, but there are an assortment of reasons that could contribute to it.
I like Nokia - they make good reliable durable easy to use phones... but that had to be the dumbest thing I'd ever heard someone from that company say. And really, I'm sick of getting a new phone only to find half the advertised features are turned off and locked, so for example on my Moto KRZR K1, I can use MIDI and MP3 as ringtones, I can copy them to the phone and play them, but the only ones I can use for ringtones are ones I bought online. (I rename the files to the default bundled tones and overwrite those... but my last phone had no problem just doing it when I asked!)
More power to the OpenMoko team... the cell phone industry needs some hard disruption.
Rotaries, like 2-stroke engines, are very efficient in POWER TO SIZE ratio. Not fuel efficient, and the Renesis are just a bit better with emissions.
And because of the posting cooldown time I'll put my original post on the end here:
You can only do so much and moderation is ok. Personally, I only consider 1L to 2L engines and scoff at over 3 in a car. There is some merit to the article though, wanting more of a sports car I looked into the Toyota MR2 (discontinued) and the Lotus Elise, as both are very light and about average small car power and fuel efficiency, so they're pretty zippy. They do however both drive a bit differently if you're really pushing it though (he says vaguely.)
And hybrids often fall behind the best traditional cars. I really hope they keep working on them because it's a great idea, they're just not neccesarily the most efficient and certainly not the cheapest to own cars just yet. Apparently VW's TDI engined cars get really good mileage for a gas car (like 60mpg) on Diesel. I always hit reliability complaints when I read reviews though.
I think simply getting a little lowish powered 4-cylinder ~1.5L car is enough for most people to make a difference. Get a nice one that you like and all that, it's still going to be a massive leap over a Jeep, Hummer, or monster pickup truck. (Which are fine vehicles... if actually needed.)
WHAT? I've known about stuff like that for a while now, but when did it get so cheap? I may have an N800 by summer if I don't find something terrible...
And if the OP story is true, that would keep me from an iPhone. I want to just get one unlocked and drop in my SIM. Though whatever Apple wants I know places to do that with the current one anyway... it just costs as much as a small laptop so... I do serious stuff on laptops and hiptop surfing rarely on PSP. (But I will concede that the iPhone kicks its ass at it!)
That N800 looks like it packs a lot of less flashy more USEFUL functionality for me personally even if it were $400-$600.
Why not just cut out the middleman and write the spammers directly, giving them my address and asking them to please stop sending me anything, or not to do so in the future if they didn't already have it?
...and that was the day child porn on the Internet was completely eradicated. It was so simple - why hadn't anyone tried it before? All we needed was an American law telling a few US ISPs to block access to a blacklist of sites, because of course everyone knows where they're all hosted and there are never new ones... And only at the cost of blocking a bunch of legitimate sites, but it's ok, some of them were speaking out against government policies anyway.
Really, are these guys retarded? Yeah, that'll stop it as fast as all the gun bans! Only this time the trafficers are totally anonymous and as distributed as they want to be!
Virgin Media Alan Hole, public relations manager 0 Progress road Brazil
Dear Customer,
We have recently noticed you have been taking advantage of your broadband connection. This is not a bad thing, but we remind you that the only approved uses for it are as follows: - Checking email - Browsing fully legal internet sites - Watching streaming, public domain video from the hours of 8:00am Saturday to 10:00pm Sunday. - Multiplayer gaming (note - if a complaint is filed against your account for inappropriate language or conduct, you will be placed on probation.)
Any unauthorized usage may result in account termination.
Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing Virgin Media!
And all it took was a global fuel crisis to make people slow down a little bit! I guess we can expect them off the road when gasoline isn't available at all.
Nothing against the vehicles themselves, they're very useful, just overused. For most people it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, driving themselves to work in a 6-seater that could haul a boat.
It's a terrible time for it, but I actually plan to get a small car soon. For now I ride a ~500cc motorbike to work in summer, and take the bus in winter so I'm not just jeering from the sidelines while not doing anything.
And for the people going on about running computers wasting power - true, but you know you're probably not drawing half your power supply's ability, and it's still far less waste than a pretty good car, right? Look at the "virtual mpg" ratings for plug-in hybrids.
I took it as a hateful activity because it would be much more reasonable and efficient to simply throw them in the trash on the day it goes out. Burning is traditionally a much more ritualistic way of making sure something (or someone) is completely destroyed, and overseeing its destruction personally. Then, in a gathering for that purpose, it's inevitable that the evils of the thing being burned will be brought up and discussed.
We are considering having something similar to a rally where parents and children can bring CDs and video games that they consider are destructive to the mind set of our youth and have a burning...
Young people are being influenced by what they see and what they hear. They are being influenced by television... television and videos are telling young people a vision but something that's not reality...
How sad is that? Kids have all kinds of games that bask in sex and violence, and if you ask most of them, they'll tell you it's just a game and that's what they're like. Then you have people like him, inciting grown adults to go out and do this empty, ignorant, exercise in hating a common enemy so they can feel like they've made a difference. The adults are behaving more foolishly and suggestibly than the children!
If these crimes have effected 90% of his congregation, maybe the common factor to the crimes is not gaming but... his congregation?
In Western Canada here if anything it seems that higher level maths are being taught at lower grades bit by bit. I actually went through early high school as one of these waves took effect and anyone who failed that term would have a harder course than they failed to redo. My parents did not believe me until I showed them that we had to do precalculus in high school.
I've also been reading articles that we've shifted too much emphasis onto homework and it's killing the kids bit by bit. I can believe it since my choice was homework or a social life, but both wasn't really an option. Each teacher would give an hour or two each every day just as a matter of course, as if they weren't doing their jobs if they didn't. Well... that comes to like 5 hours of homework a day.
Sometimes I wonder why things are signed at all when they're clearly fake - it must just be an artifact of the medium. The other day I got a nicely written bulk-mail letter from my vehicle insurance agent. It was signed at the bottom, but I could see the edges of the pixels in his signature. Ok... there's nothing official contained, it's basically a flyer. I guess most people just won't notice? But even then they wouldn't think the guy wrote a letter to each customer individually....though now I know the shape and thickness of the lines in his real signature...
Well, I didn't really accuse you of supporting HD-DVD, but I did bring it up since the two are kind of inextricably linked when criticizing one. TBH I'd like to put one to use, but still don't see the movies that really need it - I think I'd mostly get big budget all-CG movies if anything in HD...
The part I take issue with is the double standard people hold Sony to - DVD comes out, backed by a group of companies, cool - a new video format! Everyone takes to it eventually. HD-DVD comes out backed by a group of companies, again almost no one has a problem with it. Blu-Ray comes out backed by a group of companies including 6 of 10 of those behind the original DVD at first, before gathering many many more, and people whinge and whine about how Sony's forcing them to use another closed proprietary format! The other two were the exact same story. The much-loved DVD was also backed partially by Sony, there just wasn't a format war. As soon as there was a question of which to use, Sony's the villain again because... I don't know, some fantasy that they're out to ruin people's lives and other giant corporations are here to save us? Maybe confused resentment thinking that Sony BMG Music is the same as Sony Pictures, or that Sony Corporation forced Sony BMG to put the rootkit onto an audio CD? I can only guess. Whenever they make a move, a certain segment of people react as if Gator is doing a Google project and it's the end for all honest consumers or something...
Come on now... let's just forget about that boring stuff and enjoy the Olympics! Those people who gathered around to welcome the torchbearer sure seemed excited so it must be a good one!...or we could boycott them and their sponsors. The IOC won't care, but if the sponsors wind up digging themselves into a pit with bad PR they might think twice before signing on again. Wishful thinking, I know, but why help them?
Poor HD-DVD, the plucky young open format backed by no particular company, its ambitions quashed by big bad Sony and their campaign to make every format unique and proprietary!
They're both proprietary formats because they're new, commercial, and DRMed. At one time CD was quite inaccessible unless you had rare expensive hardware to author them. DVD went through this too. Never mind little details like HD-DVD being pushed by Toshiba through things like bribing movie studios... or that the Blu-Ray Disc Association has 18 member companies and 66 contributors and even from its inception was formed of nine companies. It's those bullies Sony (Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung) making a format that no one else can read. After all, the only Blu-Ray players are made by Sony, right? Oh, they're not...
Sony Sixaxis PR? Yeah, total BS like most of what they'd said about gaming the last few years... they need to fix that. Seems a bit better now but I still can't trust them easily.
Also just wondering what kind of camera your friend has? My DSC-P150 does JPEG and MPEG, though I used to have a Kodak that did FlashPix...
But hey, I must be a Sony fanboy because I'm not a Toshiba fanboy spewing hate for Sony, right? That kind of thin rationalization usually goes hand in hand with the "it's another proprietary Sony format!" argument. Toshiba working with most of the founders of Blu-Ray backed DVD when it came out and they weren't the villains simply because the technical working group demanded a single format be released and the consumers' only choice was DVD or VHS. I think most people were just mad that they were made to choose and couldn't wait for a winner before buying either.
Wow. Sounds like something the "mark of the beast" alarmists would make up. So how long before you're denied any kind of basic service like travel, home ownership, car ownership, etc if you refuse to let them drill a hole in your skull and implant a brainwave monitor?
No... seriously. You're right to think that sounds absolutely insane, but what security news doesn't in the last 7 years? This kind of reckless Big Brotherism - no, McCarthyism makes me rage. We should work out some ways to stop arresting and punishing innocent people and THEN worry about finding more ways to incriminate them.
Oh snap... Yeah, I've returned monitors in the past by just giving them any old tag, but last time they had to be really specific and asked for a desktop's tag if I didn't know the original system it should have gone with.
Also, just once I had a new tablet from them that they had no record of the tag for. I basically had to find a copy of the invoice from our purchaser and give them the Dell order number that contained it. This was after the poor phone tech had looked up our company record and scrolled back through it ("It says you guys ordered $40k worth of stuff last month. We should just be able to take your word for it!" of course I know what it's like working a helpdesk and not having clearance to do a quick easy fix for someone...) That took two 1.5 hour calls to run through!
But still, from the 90s on, they are still my favorite premade system company since they're (historically) of good build quality and always very easy to disassemble. Also two things that sold me my laptop several years ago was that they were the only game in town for a laptop with an (upgradeable-ish) nVidia 3D card and a hot swappable secondary battery. Build quality and support quality are getting shaky lately; still, before this at work we were using HP-Compaqs! God, I replaced 1-3 worn out power supplies a week for about a year there... now the DVD-ROM/CDRWs are wearing out and gluing discs inside them, leaving gum on the disc hub! Now THOSE are bad PCs!
It's mixed for me - at home I have and had a few Dells at any given time and I've never needed support. At work we order hundreds of them and I'd say about 1-2% fail, but it's overwhelmingly cheap RAM (often Samsung in my experience.)
When I speak on the phone it's pretty easy to get the parts replaced and usually goes to a call center in the USA (Utah I believe) but I speak to home PC owners and they say they still get Indian call centers. For business it seemed for a while like they'd outsource, people would complain and they'd move operations to the US, then decide to cheapen it and outsource again for a while until people complain and they move it back again.
That said, as easy as it is for a business customer it will take at least 45 min to go through the whole process and I usually get a rep within a few minutes too... 1. System tag lookup 2. Troubleshooting steps 3. Ok, it's approved, collect contact info AGAIN 4. Call another agent to sit and listen as they confirm my contact info 5. Take a confirmation and dispatch number. 6. End call
Then the next day or two later the parts show up with a shipping label to send the bad one back.
switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS
And so it begins again... I'm sure Apple will do nothing to quell this. Both OS X and Win95 were beat to the punch by OS/2. Win95/98/ME/NT/XP/03/Vista looks a LOT more like OS/2 Warp than it does OS X (actually claiming they had any inspiration from OS X is kind of silly - XP looks like shiny Win95, which beat OS X by years and doesn't look like OS 9. If anything Apple noticed the widget placement in Win95 and decided to go with that.) In fact that widget layout is very reminiscent of even Amiga Workbench.
And when the iPhone came out I thought "hey, it's like MS Surface but actually available!" Looking at dates it seems Surface only beat it (in demonstration) by a month, but were there leaked videos? It seems like it was a lot longer than that...
As I see it, only a few countries like North Korea didn't erupt in protest and try to stop the torch from passing through. It's no longer at all about what the people want, it's about what the IOC wants because there are VAST UNTOLD RICHES to be made from this whole process. Lately, China is known primarily for defective goods, knockoff goods with zero gov't attempt to stop them, tained foods, human rights abuses, and a steady stream of new cyber attacks.
I say the Chinese government (not the people so much), the whole Olympic organization, and their sponsors can take a hike. Whoever continues to support it at this point gets what's coming to them. I'm just looking forward to seeing how many foreign-but-not-neccesarily-American tourists get trapped in Chinese prisons while over there while their governments stay quiet out of fear of upsetting China.
I already play next to no big commercial PC games because of random, carelessly severe copy protection scumware that's in it now. Having a TPM has no benefit to me, just added cost to restrict my usage so if I have a choice, I will get a PC without one. Not that I'm a pirate and think this will stop copying or anything, they'll probably just circumvent it like always unless it's integral to the function of the software.
But whatever, they can go this way and guarantee that I'll never buy another PC game. My consoles get lots of love already.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly the kind of feedback I wanted to know as I've been eagerly awaiting a phone that doesn't have 80% of its functionality locked down.
Sad... and for the price I may as well get a fully functional unlocked proprietary handset. :/
Still, I would really like it if OpenMoko and any similar attempts did well.
Marking this redundant would be redundant itself - I'm just chipping in my $0.02.
I very much have the ability to spy on my colleagues in my position in IT. There are inevitably times when I see personal data on people's PCs. But I don't snoop because it's really much easier that way.
You can rationalize this to not having time, being caught, having ethics, not having to hide something big or decide whether or not to, etc, but really they all factor in. It's just not worth the trouble and risk in general.
Thankfully where I work we have policies that prevent us from ever knowing user passwords, and various others to keep us from having too much control over their accounts in the wrong ways, or having to know things we don't need to.
Not even, sadly...
Since I started working for a living and actually being able to afford good games, I buy them. I'd buy Mass Effect to try it.
However the DRM is an absolute deal breaker. If I try it, it won't be the purchased version! TBH though I'll probably just let it slide and not play unless someone hands me a precracked disc.
Yes. I have heard that is not due to whiskers, but the fact that the lead-free solder they use is much less ductile/more brittle than traditional types. ...but it's also an engineering issue as other products go lead-free without issues. It is a bit easier to pop off though.
Bunnie Huang recently looked at an RROD'ed system and found inconclusive results, but there are an assortment of reasons that could contribute to it.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=223
Amen to that...
I like Nokia - they make good reliable durable easy to use phones... but that had to be the dumbest thing I'd ever heard someone from that company say. And really, I'm sick of getting a new phone only to find half the advertised features are turned off and locked, so for example on my Moto KRZR K1, I can use MIDI and MP3 as ringtones, I can copy them to the phone and play them, but the only ones I can use for ringtones are ones I bought online. (I rename the files to the default bundled tones and overwrite those... but my last phone had no problem just doing it when I asked!)
More power to the OpenMoko team... the cell phone industry needs some hard disruption.
Rotaries, like 2-stroke engines, are very efficient in POWER TO SIZE ratio. Not fuel efficient, and the Renesis are just a bit better with emissions.
And because of the posting cooldown time I'll put my original post on the end here:
You can only do so much and moderation is ok. Personally, I only consider 1L to 2L engines and scoff at over 3 in a car. There is some merit to the article though, wanting more of a sports car I looked into the Toyota MR2 (discontinued) and the Lotus Elise, as both are very light and about average small car power and fuel efficiency, so they're pretty zippy. They do however both drive a bit differently if you're really pushing it though (he says vaguely.)
And hybrids often fall behind the best traditional cars. I really hope they keep working on them because it's a great idea, they're just not neccesarily the most efficient and certainly not the cheapest to own cars just yet. Apparently VW's TDI engined cars get really good mileage for a gas car (like 60mpg) on Diesel. I always hit reliability complaints when I read reviews though.
I think simply getting a little lowish powered 4-cylinder ~1.5L car is enough for most people to make a difference. Get a nice one that you like and all that, it's still going to be a massive leap over a Jeep, Hummer, or monster pickup truck. (Which are fine vehicles... if actually needed.)
WHAT?
I've known about stuff like that for a while now, but when did it get so cheap? I may have an N800 by summer if I don't find something terrible...
And if the OP story is true, that would keep me from an iPhone. I want to just get one unlocked and drop in my SIM. Though whatever Apple wants I know places to do that with the current one anyway... it just costs as much as a small laptop so... I do serious stuff on laptops and hiptop surfing rarely on PSP. (But I will concede that the iPhone kicks its ass at it!)
That N800 looks like it packs a lot of less flashy more USEFUL functionality for me personally even if it were $400-$600.
Why not just cut out the middleman and write the spammers directly, giving them my address and asking them to please stop sending me anything, or not to do so in the future if they didn't already have it?
...and that was the day child porn on the Internet was completely eradicated. It was so simple - why hadn't anyone tried it before? All we needed was an American law telling a few US ISPs to block access to a blacklist of sites, because of course everyone knows where they're all hosted and there are never new ones... And only at the cost of blocking a bunch of legitimate sites, but it's ok, some of them were speaking out against government policies anyway.
Really, are these guys retarded? Yeah, that'll stop it as fast as all the gun bans! Only this time the trafficers are totally anonymous and as distributed as they want to be!
Virgin Media
Alan Hole, public relations manager
0 Progress road
Brazil
Dear Customer,
We have recently noticed you have been taking advantage of your broadband connection. This is not a bad thing, but we remind you that the only approved uses for it are as follows:
- Checking email
- Browsing fully legal internet sites
- Watching streaming, public domain video from the hours of 8:00am Saturday to 10:00pm Sunday.
- Multiplayer gaming (note - if a complaint is filed against your account for inappropriate language or conduct, you will be placed on probation.)
Any unauthorized usage may result in account termination.
Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing Virgin Media!
A. Hole
And all it took was a global fuel crisis to make people slow down a little bit! I guess we can expect them off the road when gasoline isn't available at all.
Nothing against the vehicles themselves, they're very useful, just overused. For most people it's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, driving themselves to work in a 6-seater that could haul a boat.
It's a terrible time for it, but I actually plan to get a small car soon. For now I ride a ~500cc motorbike to work in summer, and take the bus in winter so I'm not just jeering from the sidelines while not doing anything.
And for the people going on about running computers wasting power - true, but you know you're probably not drawing half your power supply's ability, and it's still far less waste than a pretty good car, right? Look at the "virtual mpg" ratings for plug-in hybrids.
I took it as a hateful activity because it would be much more reasonable and efficient to simply throw them in the trash on the day it goes out. Burning is traditionally a much more ritualistic way of making sure something (or someone) is completely destroyed, and overseeing its destruction personally. Then, in a gathering for that purpose, it's inevitable that the evils of the thing being burned will be brought up and discussed.
Incidentally... this is a much fuller article than I expected!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
We are considering having something similar to a rally where parents and children can bring CDs and video games that they consider are destructive to the mind set of our youth and have a burning...
... television and videos are telling young people a vision but something that's not reality...
Young people are being influenced by what they see and what they hear. They are being influenced by television
How sad is that? Kids have all kinds of games that bask in sex and violence, and if you ask most of them, they'll tell you it's just a game and that's what they're like. Then you have people like him, inciting grown adults to go out and do this empty, ignorant, exercise in hating a common enemy so they can feel like they've made a difference. The adults are behaving more foolishly and suggestibly than the children!
If these crimes have effected 90% of his congregation, maybe the common factor to the crimes is not gaming but... his congregation?
In Western Canada here if anything it seems that higher level maths are being taught at lower grades bit by bit. I actually went through early high school as one of these waves took effect and anyone who failed that term would have a harder course than they failed to redo. My parents did not believe me until I showed them that we had to do precalculus in high school.
I've also been reading articles that we've shifted too much emphasis onto homework and it's killing the kids bit by bit. I can believe it since my choice was homework or a social life, but both wasn't really an option. Each teacher would give an hour or two each every day just as a matter of course, as if they weren't doing their jobs if they didn't. Well... that comes to like 5 hours of homework a day.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/1319256&from=rss
Sometimes I wonder why things are signed at all when they're clearly fake - it must just be an artifact of the medium. The other day I got a nicely written bulk-mail letter from my vehicle insurance agent. It was signed at the bottom, but I could see the edges of the pixels in his signature. Ok... there's nothing official contained, it's basically a flyer. I guess most people just won't notice? But even then they wouldn't think the guy wrote a letter to each customer individually. ...though now I know the shape and thickness of the lines in his real signature...
Well, I didn't really accuse you of supporting HD-DVD, but I did bring it up since the two are kind of inextricably linked when criticizing one. TBH I'd like to put one to use, but still don't see the movies that really need it - I think I'd mostly get big budget all-CG movies if anything in HD...
The part I take issue with is the double standard people hold Sony to - DVD comes out, backed by a group of companies, cool - a new video format! Everyone takes to it eventually. HD-DVD comes out backed by a group of companies, again almost no one has a problem with it. Blu-Ray comes out backed by a group of companies including 6 of 10 of those behind the original DVD at first, before gathering many many more, and people whinge and whine about how Sony's forcing them to use another closed proprietary format! The other two were the exact same story. The much-loved DVD was also backed partially by Sony, there just wasn't a format war. As soon as there was a question of which to use, Sony's the villain again because... I don't know, some fantasy that they're out to ruin people's lives and other giant corporations are here to save us? Maybe confused resentment thinking that Sony BMG Music is the same as Sony Pictures, or that Sony Corporation forced Sony BMG to put the rootkit onto an audio CD? I can only guess. Whenever they make a move, a certain segment of people react as if Gator is doing a Google project and it's the end for all honest consumers or something...
Come on now... let's just forget about that boring stuff and enjoy the Olympics! Those people who gathered around to welcome the torchbearer sure seemed excited so it must be a good one! ...or we could boycott them and their sponsors. The IOC won't care, but if the sponsors wind up digging themselves into a pit with bad PR they might think twice before signing on again. Wishful thinking, I know, but why help them?
Irrational memes are annoying.
Poor HD-DVD, the plucky young open format backed by no particular company, its ambitions quashed by big bad Sony and their campaign to make every format unique and proprietary!
They're both proprietary formats because they're new, commercial, and DRMed. At one time CD was quite inaccessible unless you had rare expensive hardware to author them. DVD went through this too. Never mind little details like HD-DVD being pushed by Toshiba through things like bribing movie studios... or that the Blu-Ray Disc Association has 18 member companies and 66 contributors and even from its inception was formed of nine companies. It's those bullies Sony (Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung) making a format that no one else can read. After all, the only Blu-Ray players are made by Sony, right? Oh, they're not...
Sony Sixaxis PR? Yeah, total BS like most of what they'd said about gaming the last few years... they need to fix that. Seems a bit better now but I still can't trust them easily.
Also just wondering what kind of camera your friend has? My DSC-P150 does JPEG and MPEG, though I used to have a Kodak that did FlashPix...
But hey, I must be a Sony fanboy because I'm not a Toshiba fanboy spewing hate for Sony, right? That kind of thin rationalization usually goes hand in hand with the "it's another proprietary Sony format!" argument. Toshiba working with most of the founders of Blu-Ray backed DVD when it came out and they weren't the villains simply because the technical working group demanded a single format be released and the consumers' only choice was DVD or VHS. I think most people were just mad that they were made to choose and couldn't wait for a winner before buying either.
Wow. Sounds like something the "mark of the beast" alarmists would make up. So how long before you're denied any kind of basic service like travel, home ownership, car ownership, etc if you refuse to let them drill a hole in your skull and implant a brainwave monitor?
No... seriously. You're right to think that sounds absolutely insane, but what security news doesn't in the last 7 years? This kind of reckless Big Brotherism - no, McCarthyism makes me rage. We should work out some ways to stop arresting and punishing innocent people and THEN worry about finding more ways to incriminate them.
Oh snap...
Yeah, I've returned monitors in the past by just giving them any old tag, but last time they had to be really specific and asked for a desktop's tag if I didn't know the original system it should have gone with.
Also, just once I had a new tablet from them that they had no record of the tag for. I basically had to find a copy of the invoice from our purchaser and give them the Dell order number that contained it. This was after the poor phone tech had looked up our company record and scrolled back through it ("It says you guys ordered $40k worth of stuff last month. We should just be able to take your word for it!" of course I know what it's like working a helpdesk and not having clearance to do a quick easy fix for someone...) That took two 1.5 hour calls to run through!
But still, from the 90s on, they are still my favorite premade system company since they're (historically) of good build quality and always very easy to disassemble. Also two things that sold me my laptop several years ago was that they were the only game in town for a laptop with an (upgradeable-ish) nVidia 3D card and a hot swappable secondary battery. Build quality and support quality are getting shaky lately; still, before this at work we were using HP-Compaqs! God, I replaced 1-3 worn out power supplies a week for about a year there... now the DVD-ROM/CDRWs are wearing out and gluing discs inside them, leaving gum on the disc hub! Now THOSE are bad PCs!
It's mixed for me - at home I have and had a few Dells at any given time and I've never needed support. At work we order hundreds of them and I'd say about 1-2% fail, but it's overwhelmingly cheap RAM (often Samsung in my experience.)
When I speak on the phone it's pretty easy to get the parts replaced and usually goes to a call center in the USA (Utah I believe) but I speak to home PC owners and they say they still get Indian call centers. For business it seemed for a while like they'd outsource, people would complain and they'd move operations to the US, then decide to cheapen it and outsource again for a while until people complain and they move it back again.
That said, as easy as it is for a business customer it will take at least 45 min to go through the whole process and I usually get a rep within a few minutes too...
1. System tag lookup
2. Troubleshooting steps
3. Ok, it's approved, collect contact info AGAIN
4. Call another agent to sit and listen as they confirm my contact info
5. Take a confirmation and dispatch number.
6. End call
Then the next day or two later the parts show up with a shipping label to send the bad one back.
switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS
And so it begins again... I'm sure Apple will do nothing to quell this.
Both OS X and Win95 were beat to the punch by OS/2. Win95/98/ME/NT/XP/03/Vista looks a LOT more like OS/2 Warp than it does OS X (actually claiming they had any inspiration from OS X is kind of silly - XP looks like shiny Win95, which beat OS X by years and doesn't look like OS 9. If anything Apple noticed the widget placement in Win95 and decided to go with that.) In fact that widget layout is very reminiscent of even Amiga Workbench.
And when the iPhone came out I thought "hey, it's like MS Surface but actually available!" Looking at dates it seems Surface only beat it (in demonstration) by a month, but were there leaked videos? It seems like it was a lot longer than that...
As I see it, only a few countries like North Korea didn't erupt in protest and try to stop the torch from passing through. It's no longer at all about what the people want, it's about what the IOC wants because there are VAST UNTOLD RICHES to be made from this whole process. Lately, China is known primarily for defective goods, knockoff goods with zero gov't attempt to stop them, tained foods, human rights abuses, and a steady stream of new cyber attacks.
I say the Chinese government (not the people so much), the whole Olympic organization, and their sponsors can take a hike. Whoever continues to support it at this point gets what's coming to them. I'm just looking forward to seeing how many foreign-but-not-neccesarily-American tourists get trapped in Chinese prisons while over there while their governments stay quiet out of fear of upsetting China.
I already play next to no big commercial PC games because of random, carelessly severe copy protection scumware that's in it now. Having a TPM has no benefit to me, just added cost to restrict my usage so if I have a choice, I will get a PC without one. Not that I'm a pirate and think this will stop copying or anything, they'll probably just circumvent it like always unless it's integral to the function of the software.
But whatever, they can go this way and guarantee that I'll never buy another PC game. My consoles get lots of love already.