OK, I can understand the value of testing on multiple platforms; most organizations find a way to have all the supported platforms in a testing environment. Those who don't end up with egg on their face when a demo breaks on a prospect's MacBook or Debian laptop.
That aside, this needs some attention:
What I don't get is how anybody thinks that standardizing everything on windows is somehow going to just make everything cheaper and hunky dory. People use other platforms for a reason, and using a bit of intelligence there is no reason why sysadmins can't figure it out.
To put it simply, it's too freakin' expensive, and there are some cases where the administration tools are either nonexistent or too young and raw. Sure, there are some centralized anti-virus suites that cover multiple platforms, but what about security auditing utilities? Configuration and policy management? Sadly, the reason for requiring agent after agent being installed is because of lawsuits that have hit companies hard, and new exploit avenues found, and it's only going to get worse.
And you get the benefit of not grid-locking yourself into a single vendor.
So you'd rather have to deal with the hell of four or more vendors? All with differing practices, policies, support contacts, etc.? Been there, done that, worn the t-shirt, moved on.
I find Outlook a terribly annoying email client to use, and would prefer to use my own.
Imagine running sendmail/postfix/whatever and an IMAP server for 5000 users. And manually configuring their vacation messages. And still having to scrape together something to coordinate meetings, list telephone numbers, locations, etc., etc. This is why most organizations not already vested in *nix or a prior email infrastructure go with either MS Exchange or Lotus Domino. I haven't heard of a centralized Linux alternative that puts it all together. And hey, you could run Domino on Linux, but from what I've heard Notes is a worse email client than Outlook.
It comes down to this: the IT departments of large companies have a ton of stuff to try and organize, and not much for resources. And they don't exactly feel motivated to slog through O'Really books and Google searches to perform functions that are made easier (and documented far better) by closed-source companies.
I hope that some day an initiative will move forward to provide a Linux equivalent of Active Directory and Exchange. Something to integrate LDAP authentication, SELinux policy configuration, LDAP directory, IMAP-esque email that's far more secure, and ties into the LDAP directory providing centralized scheduling abilities, and so on. And an email client that doesn't flake out all over the place (I tried Evolution years ago; it flaked out all over the place). I think that most of this stuff is out there, but it's strewn about in various places.
why the heck would IT staff get anything beyond a cost-of-living increase when all they do is watching blinking lights and reboot servers??
Because without us, the Chief Directors of Vice would be running in a panic as the systems topple like dominoes, desperately trying to find an expensive consultant or a voice from 11.5 timezones away to make the angry voices stop.
Anyone can look at blinkenlights and restart servers. Be my hero and know what the system is doing. Look around, gather information, piece together the events, understand the system, then determine the proper course of action. And delegate it to whoever is responsible for watching the blinking lights and rebooting the servers. Hopefully they are looking around them, to continue the cycle of IT evolution.
Here is the prime issue at hand. IT staff: treat them as a row of toy soldiers, all identical, none requiring love? Or as a garden of plants, able to flourish given the proper nourishment and environment? The choice in that continuum is up to the company to decide, and they adjust it for maximum financial efficiency, as they are wont to do.
I use Insert all the time when it's easier to overtype than it is to type-and-backspace. People like you are why keyboard makers like Logitech, Razer, and Microsoft are doing the double-sized Delete key and relegating the Insert key to a meta key, or removing it from the keyboard altogether. Shame on you.
I actually use the Windows key for the ancillary functions (Windows-R for Run, Windows-L for Lock workstation, Windows-E for Explorer, etc.). Over time I learned to not press it during gaming, so that wasn't a problem (I don't use the Alt button in FPSes anymore).
Menu key? Use what it was before: Shift-F10. In fact, I wish that Microsoft would bring back the other window-control key combinations from 3.1 (Ctrl-F10 to maximize document window, etc.). I also wish that Microsoft didn't try to "webify" Office in 2000 with the "every document gets a taskbar button" scheme that breaks the "every program gets a taskbar button" paradigm. Consistency is key to a good user interface.
Num Lock: for when you need two Delete keys, two down arrows, two Page Down keys, etc. Try it sometime, it's fun!
Yes, I remember the exact same thing happening when I was there. Running out of the largest hard drives but having tons of FMI stuff lying around. I could understand stuff like the iPaq and PS2 back in Christmas 2000, where the supplier was having problems with production, but easily purchaseable items would still just trickle in, and sell out almost immediately. It hurt to keep telling customers that we didn't have a popular product, particularly customers who had visited before.
So now I have 2 major downfall reasons: inventory mismanagement, and not prioritizing the customer experience.
Maybe it's because, for some reason, returning certain defective items to the vendor is more costly (in all ways: money, time, relationship with vendor) than re-shrinkwrapping a product that performs its function acceptably. Some managers inevitably stretch this a bit and put unacceptable products back in the box. And if this was a perfect world, there would be a discount gondola with product boxes marked as previously used and of acceptable quality, with a proportional discount. I believe that MicroCenter still has a discount counter in their stores. BestBuy and CompUSA would sometimes just reshrinkwrap the box to make it look like a new product.
First guideline when purchasing tech stuff at a physical store: LOOK AT THE BOX. Has it been damaged in any way, particularly in the locations that would see wear upon opening? Any sticker tears from the box being opened? If the box's surface (not counting the shrinkwrap) looks in pristine condition, then chances are you're safe. One advantage to those annoying clamshell cases that require a 5 watt laser to open is that you can obviously tell if it has been previously opened.
One thing that any retail store needs to learn in order to succeed is to be able to fall on their own sword for the customer. If it's a $50 joystick, eat the cost, make the customer happy. If it's a $300 videocard, this guy probably posts on some gaming forums and could have a devastating regional or national effect on your sales; eat the cost, make the customer happy. $1799 laptop? Okay, that's going to be a bit painful, but the manufacturer's warranty department is responsible here, unless they bought a replacement plan, in which case that department can assist the customer. But you don't make a customer so angry that they vow to never let you serve them again, and that they tell their friends locally or nationwide to never frequent your establishment.
Unfortunately, "make the customer happy" is becoming a victim to the rampant cost cutting that has been going on in the business world in the past 10 years or so. Anything that costs the company money is irrationally labeled "a bad thing" and verboten. Even "make the customer happy" costs the company money, so it MUST be a bad thing.
Same here (327, worked during the dot-bomb days of 1999-2000). All the "down to earth" coworkers were great colleagues, but there was a big rift between the red-shirts and most of the white-shirts. At times, it felt like working at a car dealership, since the push to sell TAP and replacement plans was never-ending. If a store can't be profitable by selling its product, and certain services with legitimate value, what kind of a store is it? In the case of CompUSA, a dead store.
The key to shopping there was to either do your homework first, or to be lucky and find one of those with genuine technical experience (I made sure to keep learning and experimenting with new stuff, and to use that knowledge). Unfortunately, CompUSA gained a bit of a reputation for not adequately helping the customer. After Slim's acquisition and taking the company private, things only got worse. When their selection and prices deteriorated over the years, it became a place to visit only when you needed something NOW; otherwise, just order it from an online retailer once you've determined what to get.
Yup, exactly the reason why I bailed on Verizon. Their phones wouldn't do Bluetooth OBEX transfers unless you happened to get a specific phone with an "accidental" firmware revision where they forgot to lock down OBEX. Add to that the mandatory Verizon crippleware UI, which slows down the majority of the baseline phones and sometimes results in confusing menus.
I purchased an unlocked RIZR in December 06 and brought it to a T-Mobile store. They gladly ran the FCC number port on the Verizon number and activated the phone. And it's MINE. It cost a bit more, but I have that knowledge that I can take it to the other US GSM network provider without having to choose an entirely different phone (unless they start putting in strange restrictions, but anyway). I know it's not going to last forever, but I felt burned going from a spartan-but-efficient Nokia 6015i to the scary mish-mash of RAZR flip phone knockoffs, plus the usability abortion that was the first-rev LG Chocolate.
For Heretic 2 (Quake 2 based), the godmode command was "playbetter".
Raven had an interesting theme of easter eggs in the cheat codes. For Heretic, using Doom's godmode cheat would result in "Trying to cheat? That's one..." printing on the screen; type it two more times and you instantly die. Entering the all-weapons cheat for Doom would take away all your ammo and weapons and print "Cheater, you don't deserve weapons" on the screen. Of course, there were functional cheat codes, but they were different from the parent Id game.
And to add insult to injury, for the Tonight Show visit by three Ducks players with the Cup, the band played the NHL on ESPN theme. Three times, if I'm not mistaken. Hopefully it wasn't just a gaffe.
It's the NHL's own fault for settling for less. In 2005, during the lockout, ESPN had the contract option in front of them for broadcasting the 2005-2006 season. They chose not to sign. The NHL probably figured, "Oh well, on to the next best thing", and got suckered into signing with the fourth ranked broadcast network (of four), and a cable provider with an agenda. Comcast shoves the NHL onto OLN, makes sure that only Comcast subscribers can see the games, and somehow thinks that adding just the NHL and arena football will somehow transform the Outdoor Life Network into an ESPN competitor. Somehow, OLN picked up the first few Stanley Cup games (ABC used to televise all of the Stanley Cup games on national broadcast).
I remember the good old days, when I had one TV on ESPN and another on ESPN2 during the playoffs, sometimes with a solid six hours of hockey. Now it's a toss-up on whether there will be professional bull riding, UFC, or hunting/fishing shows pre-empting national hockey.
I partially blame ESPN; they've become so conceited with their viewing schedule. The six most important sports, according to them: NFL, NBA, MLB, College Football, College Basketball, NASCAR. Post-February, the NBA rules above all (that was a significant steal from NBC, which formerly held the national broadcast contract). Their only dedicated hockey analyst is the washed-up Barry Melrose; most of the NHL vet analysts made a break for NBC and Comcast, while Buccigross and Pidto were relegated to SportsCenter or *shudder* ESPNEWS anchoring. They maintained their lucrative MLB and NFL contracts (and even cancelled Playmakers when the NFL threatened to cut back on their broadcast contract). The NHL's airing of highlights has been relegated to a terrible four minute segment with Barry Melrose. If it wasn't for the northeast and northern-midwest US audiences (as well as the homes of the original six), the NHL highlights would be squeezed into the ESPN Deportes minute along with UEFA, international tennis, Formula 1, etc.
If the NHL wants to survive, they need to become visible again. Let the Comcast contract wither and die, then come crawling back to Bristol with a hell of a deal.
I thought Nokia gave up on CDMA because they hated Qualcomm's guts? Same difference. Verizon Wireless has been buddy-buddy with Qualcomm since the Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile days.
Half the reason I'm jumping ship is because of the Verizon UI. It's non-native, so it induces lag. They also probably have UI bugs in some of the revs; rigit UI specs do not instantly mean rigid runtime behavior standards.
Well, I'm a VZW customer who was already contemplating his exit for the end of contract in April '07, but now I'm PLANNING it. I might even eat the early termination fee and jump ship within a month.
It's not like my current phone can actually do wireless web; it's a Nokia 6015i with a 96x65 12-bit color screen. But I was contemplating getting a rather nice dumbphone, since I'm supposed to be the techie with the flashy phone that has an onboard digital camera, mobile web, and hi-res screen, and not the econobar. But Verizon has almost nothing for the bar / slider format aside from two LG models (and I really don't like much of what LG is offering lately). Your VZW dumbphone vendor must be LG, Motorola (and almost none of Moto's good products), Samsung, or Pantech. And of course, CDMA 1x at least, which will be useless in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
And then you have the Borg interface. All Verizon dumbphones now have the exact same interface. Even if the specific port of the VZW UI interface is much slower than the phone's native UI, it goes on there. This results in the unavoidable menu lag. Once upon a time, you could get their lowest-end phone, and it would only have the Verizon bitmap on powerup (in fact this is exactly why I picked up the 6015i; Verizon's Borg interface was restricted to the more expensive phones then).
So if I did stick with Verizon, I'd be trapped with either a crappy phone with no Bluetooth, or an expensive phone with restricted (or hacked) Bluetooth, the laggy red Borg UI, the Pay Us Now! feature, the VCast spamvertising network, and now WAP spam. As for the choices, Sprint has more spamvertising and no phones to speak of, Nextel has Vegas odds for radio reception, and Cingular has their legendary customer disservice department. Gee, I wonder where I'm going...
Re:private ranges all marked differently?
on
Map of the Internet
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The private, nonroutable IP ranges, according to RFC 1918 are:
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)
Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"
Sounds like an endorsement of the "thin client, fat server" infrastructure. It would require many employees to unlearn what they have learned (like that VA employee who took home the data file with the personal information of 26 million veterans, which was stolen; that incident cries out for a solution where the data is stored ON THE SERVER and guarded with something that requires authentication [hell, even Remote Desktop to a company PC requiring password authentication would've been better than TAKING THE DISK HOME]).
Of course, there are tons of Windows applications in use by companies that just don't know how to run in a server/client fashion, and tons of old apps that piggybacked on the Win9X (or worse, DOS) days where the only purpose for a login screen was to get your NetBIOS shares. I don't believe that this "disastrous collapse" will happen without a lot of motivation; if anything, MAYBE there would be some newly hired managers that clean up the "free for all" mess. Unfortunally, this mess is more economically viable than setting up a hierarchy where authentication is key.
Maybe if more people worked with Unix systems, they would respect the attention to detail (requiring login credentials to be able to use a system, file servers using NFS requiring authentication to access files, etc.). Microsoft tried to get close to this with NT, but IMO the holdouts from the DOS / 3.11 days ruined it for the rest of us. We're stuck with people who think the only way they can work on a file is if it's on their C drive.
There are 100K+ employee Exchange installations all over the world that work just fine.
Yeah, and when "the Exchange server" serving >100K clients gets taken down for maintenance or disrupted due to unknown reasons, mail gets queued and thousands of people can't get their work done for hours on end. There is a reason why people call it "the Exchange server", and that reason is what Microsoft needs to fix ASAP. The marketing managers have justification too: it allows them to put another set of IMPORTANT bullet points on their PowerPoint slides (i.e.: "You can set up an Exchange cluster that will failover when one dies, allowing mail to continue to be delivered, and calendars to continue to be browsed and updated").
Seriously, Microsoft. Clustering and failover in Exchange. DO IT NOW.
We had expected IBM to stay for about three months, which all by itself would have blown our budget, given their $325/hr bill rate. But they were in our company for more than seven months, burning through more than a quarter million dollars a week. And Global Services wasn't the entirety of the IBM damage. We still had licensing and support fees for Websphere, Websphere Portal, Websphere Content Management, Tivoli Access Manager, and DB2.
IBM, which had promoted itself to lead vendor and integrator, had overpromised, overcharged, and underdelivered. We ended up with an overly complex enterprise portal with a few off-the-shelf portlets and a few integrated applications. Many application integration efforts had to be abandoned. It's unlikely that those apps will ever be in the portal, and the jury is still out on whether the portal will be a success. None of those slick knowledge management presentations we saw at the beginning of the project bore any resemblance to our outcome, and that original consultant was nowhere to be found.
Picture the Microsoft PDF format, in the same ridiculing manner that you'd consider Microsoft RTF, Microsoft HTML, and Microsoft XML: misshapen parodies of their former, more open, more rational selves.
Almost as if they were infested, mutated, and corrupted by the Flood from Halo. I find it interesting that Microsoft published and promoted a game containing a vivid metaphor of their "EEE" methodology.
Better yet are the quotes from 343 Guilty Spark, the ever-so-polite robotic floating ball (which I like to use as a metaphor for Microsoft PR; anyone who has played through Halo may understand why):
You can see how the body's been transformed by the genetic restructuring of the Flood infection. The small creatures carry spores that cause a host to mutate. The mutated host then produces spores that can pass the Flood to others. It is insidious and elegant. As long as any hosts remain, the Flood is virulent.
The fan he mentioned was an AC fan, so yes, a capacitor would have worked to slow the fan down in that case. But why would you want to wire up 120VAC by hand inside a computer case?
If you want a case with good airflow, the Antec P180 would be a great choice if you want sound deadening on the case panels, or if you don't mind the case fans that much, the Thermaltake Armor or the CoolerMaster Stacker is a great choice. The Tt Armor also has an accessory side panel with a 250mm fan: http://www.thermaltake.com/product/Chassis/misc/A2 356A2400/sidepanel_index.asp
In my opinion, what Nokia should do first is eliminate the "joystick" cursor controller that they have on their phones. Instead of a directional pad, as on most phones, they have a little projecting square or circle that you can press in four directions, or downward as the "Menu" or "OK" button. Unfortunately this means that you have to spend a considerable amount of time if you're going through the menus, because you have to make sure that you don't accidentally push the joystick into the case, which triggers the "Menu"/"OK" button. This is easier said than done; the "Menu"/"OK" function of the joystick is so sensitive, you're ultimately forced into angling your thumb at awkward angles to push the joystick in the intended direction, and not down into the case, which would cause a mistaken "Menu"/"OK" command to be sent.
I've tried navigating the menu in a phone with this (the Nokia 6236i). It was terrible; it took about 100% to 200% more time to navigate into the ringmode profiles than it did on my current Nokia phone with a directional pad (6015i). It's a shame, because the 6236i would be a rather good phone if it didn't have the joystick and the camera (those of us who work in visually secure places have learned to hate this trite "camera phone" trend, and how it locks us out of choosing a phone). Perhaps there's a menu function to disable the "straight down" keypress of the joystick, but I didn't hunt around for that type of function at the time.
I tried this on a 12" PowerBook, and it doesn't quite work. At idle, the registers say the following:
Roll: Left 1835 Tilt: -2070 Force: 0 0
Motion of any kind doesn't really affect it (obviously, I didn't try too hard, because I don't feel like having sector errors all over the place). The sensor registers seem to spike at quasi-random intervals, and adjusting the brightness control seems to move the registers to opposite corners. The version of Sudden Motion Sensor in the 12" PowerBook is 1.0; perhaps the newer SMS versions in the MacIntelToshes have better magnitude-sensitivity.
Additionally, addresses entered that don't result in a DNS "non-existent domain" error will trigger an MSN search for the string
Oops, I meant to say 'addresses entered that DO result in a DNS "non-existent domain" error'. If addresses that succeeded DNS lookup triggered an MSN search, that would be a slowdown for the user and a gigantic load increase for MSN search.
Internet Explorer 6 (and also 5) has a feature where any string entered in the address field that does not start with "http:" or "www" (and perhaps more string combinations) will trigger a "Search for $enteredtext" in the dropdown below the address bar. If you click this entry (or press the down arrow to highlight it and press Enter), it will navigate to an MSN search for that string. Additionally, addresses entered that don't result in a DNS "non-existent domain" error will trigger an MSN search for the string (which usually ends in that smarmy "We can't find $enteredtext" page from MSN). This feature could be interpreted by some organizations as a security vulnerability if users constantly enter an internal hostname or internal machine IP address without leading it with "http://", as they should be doing. Other browsers would just interpret it as a request to navigate to "http://$enteredtext"
So how does a discrete "search" field make things much different than before? Or was Google just looking for a "catalyst", an excuse to start litigation?
Unrelated observation: I've noticed that a lot of other browsers are adopting the "error page" scheme of displaying errors, as opposed to dialog boxes that need to have "OK" clicked to dismiss the dialog boxes. So far I've seen Opera 8.5 (Windows and OS X) and Firefox 1.5 (Windows; haven't confirmed OS X yet) doing it. I do like the fact that I don't have to click "OK" to dismiss the window, but I can't shake the thought that it's taking extra processing to render these errors. Then again, it was Internet Explorer that I always saw taking a long time to render something from "res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdoclc.dll", but that was most likely from a quirk in the status bar code (which is perhaps why Microsoft now discourages the use of the status bar in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer).
Regarding the "lashing" out at the customer service supervisor: I was trying to get her to help her own company out. The fact that she was not told anything about a new level of spam filtering nor had (she claims) a way to contact a manager on a weekend about a PR problem may be a standard problem for that level of supervisor, but I wanted to give her a way to be a hero internally and stop a PR problem from getting worse.
This has been posted a bit in the main thread, but I'll restate it: the "customer service supervisor" you were talking to may have very few, if any, connections to Verizon corporate. For almost all large-scale customer service operations (where there are thousands or even millions of customers, and hundreds or thousands of customer support calls each month), the main company outsources their customer service department to an outside company (not necessarily overseas; there are a lot of companies that operate call centers within the US and Canada). This is because it would be too expensive for the company itself to hire the 24/7 staff, the call center telephone switchboard infrastructure, the office space, etc. to host its own customer service department. The staff under these companies are trained in the product (at varying levels of completeness, unfortunately), and have the customer service calls routed to their call center, where they attend to them. If the first customer service representative is unable to satisfy the issue with the tools at hand, they escalate to the next level, which could be ANYONE (a regular-hours engineer specialising in the issue, a call center representative with more experience in the product, or yet another pool of customer service representatives). Customer service trees can grow to have many levels, so if your issue actually did go to the top, you might be on the phone for hours or days at a time (or more likely, have to leave your number and be called back at some time).
Customer service operations are "outsourced" because the company providing the product does not want to spend the money to develop their own customer service infrastructure when they could just contract another company to use an existing infrastructure to receive service calls after an agreed-upon training curriculum and procedure policy. This is becoming a lot more common these days since businesses have been looking at ways to cut costs from every aspect of business, usually with disregard to the company's long-term well-being and public image. And of course, these call centers are only connected by their contract to the company producing the product, so there really is no way for them to relay company image issues, short of a weekly call statistics report.
Well, that about covers it; welcome to the brave new world of consumer products and services. This is the price of lower prices.
Slashdot Mirror
That aside, this needs some attention:
To put it simply, it's too freakin' expensive, and there are some cases where the administration tools are either nonexistent or too young and raw. Sure, there are some centralized anti-virus suites that cover multiple platforms, but what about security auditing utilities? Configuration and policy management? Sadly, the reason for requiring agent after agent being installed is because of lawsuits that have hit companies hard, and new exploit avenues found, and it's only going to get worse.
So you'd rather have to deal with the hell of four or more vendors? All with differing practices, policies, support contacts, etc.? Been there, done that, worn the t-shirt, moved on.Imagine running sendmail/postfix/whatever and an IMAP server for 5000 users. And manually configuring their vacation messages. And still having to scrape together something to coordinate meetings, list telephone numbers, locations, etc., etc. This is why most organizations not already vested in *nix or a prior email infrastructure go with either MS Exchange or Lotus Domino. I haven't heard of a centralized Linux alternative that puts it all together. And hey, you could run Domino on Linux, but from what I've heard Notes is a worse email client than Outlook.
It comes down to this: the IT departments of large companies have a ton of stuff to try and organize, and not much for resources. And they don't exactly feel motivated to slog through O'Really books and Google searches to perform functions that are made easier (and documented far better) by closed-source companies.
I hope that some day an initiative will move forward to provide a Linux equivalent of Active Directory and Exchange. Something to integrate LDAP authentication, SELinux policy configuration, LDAP directory, IMAP-esque email that's far more secure, and ties into the LDAP directory providing centralized scheduling abilities, and so on. And an email client that doesn't flake out all over the place (I tried Evolution years ago; it flaked out all over the place). I think that most of this stuff is out there, but it's strewn about in various places.
Because without us, the Chief Directors of Vice would be running in a panic as the systems topple like dominoes, desperately trying to find an expensive consultant or a voice from 11.5 timezones away to make the angry voices stop.
Anyone can look at blinkenlights and restart servers. Be my hero and know what the system is doing. Look around, gather information, piece together the events, understand the system, then determine the proper course of action. And delegate it to whoever is responsible for watching the blinking lights and rebooting the servers. Hopefully they are looking around them, to continue the cycle of IT evolution.
Here is the prime issue at hand. IT staff: treat them as a row of toy soldiers, all identical, none requiring love? Or as a garden of plants, able to flourish given the proper nourishment and environment? The choice in that continuum is up to the company to decide, and they adjust it for maximum financial efficiency, as they are wont to do.
I use Insert all the time when it's easier to overtype than it is to type-and-backspace. People like you are why keyboard makers like Logitech, Razer, and Microsoft are doing the double-sized Delete key and relegating the Insert key to a meta key, or removing it from the keyboard altogether. Shame on you.
I actually use the Windows key for the ancillary functions (Windows-R for Run, Windows-L for Lock workstation, Windows-E for Explorer, etc.). Over time I learned to not press it during gaming, so that wasn't a problem (I don't use the Alt button in FPSes anymore).
Menu key? Use what it was before: Shift-F10. In fact, I wish that Microsoft would bring back the other window-control key combinations from 3.1 (Ctrl-F10 to maximize document window, etc.). I also wish that Microsoft didn't try to "webify" Office in 2000 with the "every document gets a taskbar button" scheme that breaks the "every program gets a taskbar button" paradigm. Consistency is key to a good user interface.
Num Lock: for when you need two Delete keys, two down arrows, two Page Down keys, etc. Try it sometime, it's fun!
Yes, I remember the exact same thing happening when I was there. Running out of the largest hard drives but having tons of FMI stuff lying around. I could understand stuff like the iPaq and PS2 back in Christmas 2000, where the supplier was having problems with production, but easily purchaseable items would still just trickle in, and sell out almost immediately. It hurt to keep telling customers that we didn't have a popular product, particularly customers who had visited before.
So now I have 2 major downfall reasons: inventory mismanagement, and not prioritizing the customer experience.
Maybe it's because, for some reason, returning certain defective items to the vendor is more costly (in all ways: money, time, relationship with vendor) than re-shrinkwrapping a product that performs its function acceptably. Some managers inevitably stretch this a bit and put unacceptable products back in the box. And if this was a perfect world, there would be a discount gondola with product boxes marked as previously used and of acceptable quality, with a proportional discount. I believe that MicroCenter still has a discount counter in their stores. BestBuy and CompUSA would sometimes just reshrinkwrap the box to make it look like a new product.
First guideline when purchasing tech stuff at a physical store: LOOK AT THE BOX. Has it been damaged in any way, particularly in the locations that would see wear upon opening? Any sticker tears from the box being opened? If the box's surface (not counting the shrinkwrap) looks in pristine condition, then chances are you're safe. One advantage to those annoying clamshell cases that require a 5 watt laser to open is that you can obviously tell if it has been previously opened.
One thing that any retail store needs to learn in order to succeed is to be able to fall on their own sword for the customer. If it's a $50 joystick, eat the cost, make the customer happy. If it's a $300 videocard, this guy probably posts on some gaming forums and could have a devastating regional or national effect on your sales; eat the cost, make the customer happy. $1799 laptop? Okay, that's going to be a bit painful, but the manufacturer's warranty department is responsible here, unless they bought a replacement plan, in which case that department can assist the customer. But you don't make a customer so angry that they vow to never let you serve them again, and that they tell their friends locally or nationwide to never frequent your establishment.
Unfortunately, "make the customer happy" is becoming a victim to the rampant cost cutting that has been going on in the business world in the past 10 years or so. Anything that costs the company money is irrationally labeled "a bad thing" and verboten. Even "make the customer happy" costs the company money, so it MUST be a bad thing.
Same here (327, worked during the dot-bomb days of 1999-2000). All the "down to earth" coworkers were great colleagues, but there was a big rift between the red-shirts and most of the white-shirts. At times, it felt like working at a car dealership, since the push to sell TAP and replacement plans was never-ending. If a store can't be profitable by selling its product, and certain services with legitimate value, what kind of a store is it? In the case of CompUSA, a dead store.
The key to shopping there was to either do your homework first, or to be lucky and find one of those with genuine technical experience (I made sure to keep learning and experimenting with new stuff, and to use that knowledge). Unfortunately, CompUSA gained a bit of a reputation for not adequately helping the customer. After Slim's acquisition and taking the company private, things only got worse. When their selection and prices deteriorated over the years, it became a place to visit only when you needed something NOW; otherwise, just order it from an online retailer once you've determined what to get.
So passes CompUSA, son of Soft Warehouse.
Gentlemen, start your soldering irons!
Yup, exactly the reason why I bailed on Verizon. Their phones wouldn't do Bluetooth OBEX transfers unless you happened to get a specific phone with an "accidental" firmware revision where they forgot to lock down OBEX. Add to that the mandatory Verizon crippleware UI, which slows down the majority of the baseline phones and sometimes results in confusing menus.
I purchased an unlocked RIZR in December 06 and brought it to a T-Mobile store. They gladly ran the FCC number port on the Verizon number and activated the phone. And it's MINE. It cost a bit more, but I have that knowledge that I can take it to the other US GSM network provider without having to choose an entirely different phone (unless they start putting in strange restrictions, but anyway). I know it's not going to last forever, but I felt burned going from a spartan-but-efficient Nokia 6015i to the scary mish-mash of RAZR flip phone knockoffs, plus the usability abortion that was the first-rev LG Chocolate.
For Heretic 2 (Quake 2 based), the godmode command was "playbetter".
Raven had an interesting theme of easter eggs in the cheat codes. For Heretic, using Doom's godmode cheat would result in "Trying to cheat? That's one..." printing on the screen; type it two more times and you instantly die. Entering the all-weapons cheat for Doom would take away all your ammo and weapons and print "Cheater, you don't deserve weapons" on the screen. Of course, there were functional cheat codes, but they were different from the parent Id game.
And to add insult to injury, for the Tonight Show visit by three Ducks players with the Cup, the band played the NHL on ESPN theme. Three times, if I'm not mistaken. Hopefully it wasn't just a gaffe.
It's the NHL's own fault for settling for less. In 2005, during the lockout, ESPN had the contract option in front of them for broadcasting the 2005-2006 season. They chose not to sign. The NHL probably figured, "Oh well, on to the next best thing", and got suckered into signing with the fourth ranked broadcast network (of four), and a cable provider with an agenda. Comcast shoves the NHL onto OLN, makes sure that only Comcast subscribers can see the games, and somehow thinks that adding just the NHL and arena football will somehow transform the Outdoor Life Network into an ESPN competitor. Somehow, OLN picked up the first few Stanley Cup games (ABC used to televise all of the Stanley Cup games on national broadcast).
I remember the good old days, when I had one TV on ESPN and another on ESPN2 during the playoffs, sometimes with a solid six hours of hockey. Now it's a toss-up on whether there will be professional bull riding, UFC, or hunting/fishing shows pre-empting national hockey.
I partially blame ESPN; they've become so conceited with their viewing schedule. The six most important sports, according to them: NFL, NBA, MLB, College Football, College Basketball, NASCAR. Post-February, the NBA rules above all (that was a significant steal from NBC, which formerly held the national broadcast contract). Their only dedicated hockey analyst is the washed-up Barry Melrose; most of the NHL vet analysts made a break for NBC and Comcast, while Buccigross and Pidto were relegated to SportsCenter or *shudder* ESPNEWS anchoring. They maintained their lucrative MLB and NFL contracts (and even cancelled Playmakers when the NFL threatened to cut back on their broadcast contract). The NHL's airing of highlights has been relegated to a terrible four minute segment with Barry Melrose. If it wasn't for the northeast and northern-midwest US audiences (as well as the homes of the original six), the NHL highlights would be squeezed into the ESPN Deportes minute along with UEFA, international tennis, Formula 1, etc.
If the NHL wants to survive, they need to become visible again. Let the Comcast contract wither and die, then come crawling back to Bristol with a hell of a deal.
I thought Nokia gave up on CDMA because they hated Qualcomm's guts? Same difference. Verizon Wireless has been buddy-buddy with Qualcomm since the Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile days.
Half the reason I'm jumping ship is because of the Verizon UI. It's non-native, so it induces lag. They also probably have UI bugs in some of the revs; rigit UI specs do not instantly mean rigid runtime behavior standards.
Well, I'm a VZW customer who was already contemplating his exit for the end of contract in April '07, but now I'm PLANNING it. I might even eat the early termination fee and jump ship within a month.
It's not like my current phone can actually do wireless web; it's a Nokia 6015i with a 96x65 12-bit color screen. But I was contemplating getting a rather nice dumbphone, since I'm supposed to be the techie with the flashy phone that has an onboard digital camera, mobile web, and hi-res screen, and not the econobar. But Verizon has almost nothing for the bar / slider format aside from two LG models (and I really don't like much of what LG is offering lately). Your VZW dumbphone vendor must be LG, Motorola (and almost none of Moto's good products), Samsung, or Pantech. And of course, CDMA 1x at least, which will be useless in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
And then you have the Borg interface. All Verizon dumbphones now have the exact same interface. Even if the specific port of the VZW UI interface is much slower than the phone's native UI, it goes on there. This results in the unavoidable menu lag. Once upon a time, you could get their lowest-end phone, and it would only have the Verizon bitmap on powerup (in fact this is exactly why I picked up the 6015i; Verizon's Borg interface was restricted to the more expensive phones then).
So if I did stick with Verizon, I'd be trapped with either a crappy phone with no Bluetooth, or an expensive phone with restricted (or hacked) Bluetooth, the laggy red Borg UI, the Pay Us Now! feature, the VCast spamvertising network, and now WAP spam. As for the choices, Sprint has more spamvertising and no phones to speak of, Nextel has Vegas odds for radio reception, and Cingular has their legendary customer disservice department. Gee, I wonder where I'm going...
The private, nonroutable IP ranges, according to RFC 1918 are:
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)
Sounds like an endorsement of the "thin client, fat server" infrastructure. It would require many employees to unlearn what they have learned (like that VA employee who took home the data file with the personal information of 26 million veterans, which was stolen; that incident cries out for a solution where the data is stored ON THE SERVER and guarded with something that requires authentication [hell, even Remote Desktop to a company PC requiring password authentication would've been better than TAKING THE DISK HOME]).
Of course, there are tons of Windows applications in use by companies that just don't know how to run in a server/client fashion, and tons of old apps that piggybacked on the Win9X (or worse, DOS) days where the only purpose for a login screen was to get your NetBIOS shares. I don't believe that this "disastrous collapse" will happen without a lot of motivation; if anything, MAYBE there would be some newly hired managers that clean up the "free for all" mess. Unfortunally, this mess is more economically viable than setting up a hierarchy where authentication is key.
Maybe if more people worked with Unix systems, they would respect the attention to detail (requiring login credentials to be able to use a system, file servers using NFS requiring authentication to access files, etc.). Microsoft tried to get close to this with NT, but IMO the holdouts from the DOS / 3.11 days ruined it for the rest of us. We're stuck with people who think the only way they can work on a file is if it's on their C drive.
Yeah, and when "the Exchange server" serving >100K clients gets taken down for maintenance or disrupted due to unknown reasons, mail gets queued and thousands of people can't get their work done for hours on end. There is a reason why people call it "the Exchange server", and that reason is what Microsoft needs to fix ASAP. The marketing managers have justification too: it allows them to put another set of IMPORTANT bullet points on their PowerPoint slides (i.e.: "You can set up an Exchange cluster that will failover when one dies, allowing mail to continue to be delivered, and calendars to continue to be browsed and updated").
Seriously, Microsoft. Clustering and failover in Exchange. DO IT NOW.
Almost as if they were infested, mutated, and corrupted by the Flood from Halo. I find it interesting that Microsoft published and promoted a game containing a vivid metaphor of their "EEE" methodology.
Better yet are the quotes from 343 Guilty Spark, the ever-so-polite robotic floating ball (which I like to use as a metaphor for Microsoft PR; anyone who has played through Halo may understand why):
The fan he mentioned was an AC fan, so yes, a capacitor would have worked to slow the fan down in that case. But why would you want to wire up 120VAC by hand inside a computer case?
2 356A2400/sidepanel_index.asp
If you want a case with good airflow, the Antec P180 would be a great choice if you want sound deadening on the case panels, or if you don't mind the case fans that much, the Thermaltake Armor or the CoolerMaster Stacker is a great choice. The Tt Armor also has an accessory side panel with a 250mm fan: http://www.thermaltake.com/product/Chassis/misc/A
In my opinion, what Nokia should do first is eliminate the "joystick" cursor controller that they have on their phones. Instead of a directional pad, as on most phones, they have a little projecting square or circle that you can press in four directions, or downward as the "Menu" or "OK" button. Unfortunately this means that you have to spend a considerable amount of time if you're going through the menus, because you have to make sure that you don't accidentally push the joystick into the case, which triggers the "Menu"/"OK" button. This is easier said than done; the "Menu"/"OK" function of the joystick is so sensitive, you're ultimately forced into angling your thumb at awkward angles to push the joystick in the intended direction, and not down into the case, which would cause a mistaken "Menu"/"OK" command to be sent.
I've tried navigating the menu in a phone with this (the Nokia 6236i). It was terrible; it took about 100% to 200% more time to navigate into the ringmode profiles than it did on my current Nokia phone with a directional pad (6015i). It's a shame, because the 6236i would be a rather good phone if it didn't have the joystick and the camera (those of us who work in visually secure places have learned to hate this trite "camera phone" trend, and how it locks us out of choosing a phone). Perhaps there's a menu function to disable the "straight down" keypress of the joystick, but I didn't hunt around for that type of function at the time.
I tried this on a 12" PowerBook, and it doesn't quite work. At idle, the registers say the following:
Roll: Left 1835
Tilt: -2070
Force: 0 0
Motion of any kind doesn't really affect it (obviously, I didn't try too hard, because I don't feel like having sector errors all over the place). The sensor registers seem to spike at quasi-random intervals, and adjusting the brightness control seems to move the registers to opposite corners. The version of Sudden Motion Sensor in the 12" PowerBook is 1.0; perhaps the newer SMS versions in the MacIntelToshes have better magnitude-sensitivity.
The Sony PSP and the PS2 use MIPS processors.
Oops, I meant to say 'addresses entered that DO result in a DNS "non-existent domain" error'. If addresses that succeeded DNS lookup triggered an MSN search, that would be a slowdown for the user and a gigantic load increase for MSN search.
Internet Explorer 6 (and also 5) has a feature where any string entered in the address field that does not start with "http:" or "www" (and perhaps more string combinations) will trigger a "Search for $enteredtext" in the dropdown below the address bar. If you click this entry (or press the down arrow to highlight it and press Enter), it will navigate to an MSN search for that string. Additionally, addresses entered that don't result in a DNS "non-existent domain" error will trigger an MSN search for the string (which usually ends in that smarmy "We can't find $enteredtext" page from MSN). This feature could be interpreted by some organizations as a security vulnerability if users constantly enter an internal hostname or internal machine IP address without leading it with "http://", as they should be doing. Other browsers would just interpret it as a request to navigate to "http://$enteredtext"
So how does a discrete "search" field make things much different than before? Or was Google just looking for a "catalyst", an excuse to start litigation?
Unrelated observation: I've noticed that a lot of other browsers are adopting the "error page" scheme of displaying errors, as opposed to dialog boxes that need to have "OK" clicked to dismiss the dialog boxes. So far I've seen Opera 8.5 (Windows and OS X) and Firefox 1.5 (Windows; haven't confirmed OS X yet) doing it. I do like the fact that I don't have to click "OK" to dismiss the window, but I can't shake the thought that it's taking extra processing to render these errors. Then again, it was Internet Explorer that I always saw taking a long time to render something from "res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdoclc.dll", but that was most likely from a quirk in the status bar code (which is perhaps why Microsoft now discourages the use of the status bar in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer).
This has been posted a bit in the main thread, but I'll restate it: the "customer service supervisor" you were talking to may have very few, if any, connections to Verizon corporate. For almost all large-scale customer service operations (where there are thousands or even millions of customers, and hundreds or thousands of customer support calls each month), the main company outsources their customer service department to an outside company (not necessarily overseas; there are a lot of companies that operate call centers within the US and Canada). This is because it would be too expensive for the company itself to hire the 24/7 staff, the call center telephone switchboard infrastructure, the office space, etc. to host its own customer service department. The staff under these companies are trained in the product (at varying levels of completeness, unfortunately), and have the customer service calls routed to their call center, where they attend to them. If the first customer service representative is unable to satisfy the issue with the tools at hand, they escalate to the next level, which could be ANYONE (a regular-hours engineer specialising in the issue, a call center representative with more experience in the product, or yet another pool of customer service representatives). Customer service trees can grow to have many levels, so if your issue actually did go to the top, you might be on the phone for hours or days at a time (or more likely, have to leave your number and be called back at some time).
Customer service operations are "outsourced" because the company providing the product does not want to spend the money to develop their own customer service infrastructure when they could just contract another company to use an existing infrastructure to receive service calls after an agreed-upon training curriculum and procedure policy. This is becoming a lot more common these days since businesses have been looking at ways to cut costs from every aspect of business, usually with disregard to the company's long-term well-being and public image. And of course, these call centers are only connected by their contract to the company producing the product, so there really is no way for them to relay company image issues, short of a weekly call statistics report.
Well, that about covers it; welcome to the brave new world of consumer products and services. This is the price of lower prices.