As a current customer of Demon all i can say is...stay the hell away.
As others have said years ago they used to be one of the best, these days they are one of the worst and charging a premium rate for "the privilege"
Forget customer support, 1st line and 2nd line are outsourced to India (and only work standard "office hours" aka when you, the customer, are likely to be at work) and there is no UK tech staff left (at least ones that will talk to customers) and no matter what their response is always "it must be your equipment/pc/router"
Cannot wait until i move at start of next year so i can dump them
This that is true...if they don't really use a computer at work. If they do then they will be confronted with windows machines everywhere they go (only exception if they go into the media) and rapidly get tired of having two systems to deal with and as the business will not change to suit them they change to windows instead, bye bye Mac
Actually, as certain cases with teachers finding kids "sexting" have shown, the authorities don't just consider it ‘gathering evidence’
The laws are so badly written being in possession of child porn for any reason is illegal
"You can call me naive if you want, but ask yourself: what the hell does Blizzard gain from you posting your real name on their forums? They already know it from your subscription info, it's not like you're giving them new data. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. That's the problem with conspiracy theories: people come up with them before realizing that the conspiracy would not provide any benefit to the alleged conspirators if true"
Naive if you know about the facebook integretion deal and believe that, just uninformed if you don't know about
Activision want to create THE social gaming network. Cannot do that if everyone is publiclly hidden behind alias. That is what the whole Real ID thing is about
"If you read their post announcing the turn-around, they say very clearly, "We did this because we thought it would improve the quality of the forums, and having heard your reaction, we're not going to do it." "
No that's not what it says
"As a result of those discussions, we've decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.'"
Key bit is "at this time"
Translation: "You, the customers, are obviously not ready for this, we still want it and will be doing our best to implement it (that Facebook deal is important to us after all), just it's now obvious we will have to be more sneaky about it"
Outing of the Blizzard gamers is coming, if you don't believe that you are fool. Just from now on it will be a more gradual change
"Sorta says something positive about Americans in general."
Yep that Americans are so bad with dealing with people of others cultures, especially Asian ones, that it’s handy to have a few of the more adaptable ones in your company if you want to do business with America
Like was only about a week ago there was an article about Chinese company's hireing white americans for the day to pretend to be the boss when interacting with potencial american customers
Ahh never mind, just figured out certain older themes hide them.
Though quite amusing that the official 4.0b1 theme is also marked as "incompatible" by Firefox
"Currently the latest version, with the PRO edition (not even the ultimate edition) is $729 dollars"
You are not doing your research, really only people who should be paying that much are enterprises (and even they rarely do, due to their own discounts) and Joe blogs on the street with more money than sense
Students get their own discounts and small company’s/start up's get theirs also.
For a small company/start-up that combines the two main plans together (Spark/Action pack) you get pretty much all the major MS software (OS's/Servers/Office/VS so forth) for about $200-$300 per year, If you just basically want VS that plan is free. And the "hoops" you have to jump though mentioned in the article is a little test you should be able to pass with your eyes closed in about 15 mins and to actually develop something. You have been able to get these discounts for a while now. Not free, but nor does it break the bank
MS realised a while ago, mainly with php, they were losing people due to start-up costs and they have been dealing with the issue, just they don't advertise the fact heavily for obvious reasons (bottom line) and make you work a little bit to find out about these alternative ways of getting the software
"Not to mention that.NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it."
Tech blogs/site/mag's make it seem it is, but that because talking about same old same old does not really generate readers, but if you look at actual job sites you will quickly see it's not.
Unless it's a massive, complicated, leading edge system (and for this.NET should generally not be used anyway, it's a jack of all trades, master of none) majority of company’s want stuff developed in.NET, basically because it's what they know and it's something they know they can easily (and not too expensively) get people resources for. Though i will say, change from VB.NET to C#.NET, VB.net is going the way of the Dodo in the commercial world
Aye got to agree, real dumb idea. If i still played this would kill me posting on the boards instantly, especially as my real name has a rather unique spelling which afaik only one other person in the world has. Thus making it pretty easy to track me down or for business contacts to see what I am doing in my private time
Really dumb on Blizzards part too, how long before some nut job trackssome kid down down for ganking them in game and then does them harm. Because this is forced public disclose on the official support channel you can bet your ass that not only will blizzard get sued but they will also probably lose such a case in many countries if it went in front of jury, especially if a child is involved
Slashdot Mirror
As a current customer of Demon all i can say is...stay the hell away.
As others have said years ago they used to be one of the best, these days they are one of the worst and charging a premium rate for "the privilege"
Forget customer support, 1st line and 2nd line are outsourced to India (and only work standard "office hours" aka when you, the customer, are likely to be at work) and there is no UK tech staff left (at least ones that will talk to customers) and no matter what their response is always "it must be your equipment/pc/router"
Cannot wait until i move at start of next year so i can dump them
This that is true...if they don't really use a computer at work. If they do then they will be confronted with windows machines everywhere they go (only exception if they go into the media) and rapidly get tired of having two systems to deal with and as the business will not change to suit them they change to windows instead, bye bye Mac
Actually, as certain cases with teachers finding kids "sexting" have shown, the authorities don't just consider it ‘gathering evidence’ The laws are so badly written being in possession of child porn for any reason is illegal
"You can call me naive if you want, but ask yourself: what the hell does Blizzard gain from you posting your real name on their forums? They already know it from your subscription info, it's not like you're giving them new data. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. That's the problem with conspiracy theories: people come up with them before realizing that the conspiracy would not provide any benefit to the alleged conspirators if true"
Naive if you know about the facebook integretion deal and believe that, just uninformed if you don't know about
Activision want to create THE social gaming network. Cannot do that if everyone is publiclly hidden behind alias. That is what the whole Real ID thing is about
"If you read their post announcing the turn-around, they say very clearly, "We did this because we thought it would improve the quality of the forums, and having heard your reaction, we're not going to do it." "
No that's not what it says
"As a result of those discussions, we've decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.'"
Key bit is "at this time"
Translation: "You, the customers, are obviously not ready for this, we still want it and will be doing our best to implement it (that Facebook deal is important to us after all), just it's now obvious we will have to be more sneaky about it"
Outing of the Blizzard gamers is coming, if you don't believe that you are fool. Just from now on it will be a more gradual change
"Sorta says something positive about Americans in general." Yep that Americans are so bad with dealing with people of others cultures, especially Asian ones, that it’s handy to have a few of the more adaptable ones in your company if you want to do business with America Like was only about a week ago there was an article about Chinese company's hireing white americans for the day to pretend to be the boss when interacting with potencial american customers
Rather foolish of them, IQ just measures baseline brain power, not knowledge nor real ability to apply it
Met more than a few members of MENSA that most of us would describe as “idiots” and failures at life
And conversely many people with just average (or even slightly below average IQ) who are some of the most “intelligent” people you will ever meet
Ahh never mind, just figured out certain older themes hide them. Though quite amusing that the official 4.0b1 theme is also marked as "incompatible" by Firefox
No close, minimize, maximize buttons at top?!? Come one guys that’s basic windows design 101
"Currently the latest version, with the PRO edition (not even the ultimate edition) is $729 dollars"
You are not doing your research, really only people who should be paying that much are enterprises (and even they rarely do, due to their own discounts) and Joe blogs on the street with more money than sense Students get their own discounts and small company’s/start up's get theirs also.
For a small company/start-up that combines the two main plans together (Spark/Action pack) you get pretty much all the major MS software (OS's/Servers/Office/VS so forth) for about $200-$300 per year, If you just basically want VS that plan is free. And the "hoops" you have to jump though mentioned in the article is a little test you should be able to pass with your eyes closed in about 15 mins and to actually develop something. You have been able to get these discounts for a while now. Not free, but nor does it break the bank
MS realised a while ago, mainly with php, they were losing people due to start-up costs and they have been dealing with the issue, just they don't advertise the fact heavily for obvious reasons (bottom line) and make you work a little bit to find out about these alternative ways of getting the software
"Not to mention that .NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it."
Tech blogs/site/mag's make it seem it is, but that because talking about same old same old does not really generate readers, but if you look at actual job sites you will quickly see it's not.
Unless it's a massive, complicated, leading edge system (and for this .NET should generally not be used anyway, it's a jack of all trades, master of none) majority of company’s want stuff developed in .NET, basically because it's what they know and it's something they know they can easily (and not too expensively) get people resources for. Though i will say, change from VB.NET to C#.NET, VB.net is going the way of the Dodo in the commercial world
Aye got to agree, real dumb idea. If i still played this would kill me posting on the boards instantly, especially as my real name has a rather unique spelling which afaik only one other person in the world has. Thus making it pretty easy to track me down or for business contacts to see what I am doing in my private time
Really dumb on Blizzards part too, how long before some nut job trackssome kid down down for ganking them in game and then does them harm. Because this is forced public disclose on the official support channel you can bet your ass that not only will blizzard get sued but they will also probably lose such a case in many countries if it went in front of jury, especially if a child is involved
Someone has not thought this through