Ah, but in the minds of a LOT of people, such as those who are not in the OSS community scene and know there is a netscape and an IE, they are the same. Netscape has always been the same as mozilla and I think will always be the same, unless something is done.
Personally, I don't mind if netscape 6 is/.ed and I never download it. From what I saw of pr3 before I rm -rf'd away to where it belongs, it sucked. Basically take an old build of mozilla (nightlys are quite fine thankyouverymuch) and throw a bunch of crap in there, and release it as a.0 product.
Sadly, the way that people think is that netscape 6.0 is the same as mozilla, and when netscape 6.0 fails, or gets too critisized, I wouldn't doubt if aol just gives up, throws netscape down the crapper, and kills the mozilla project. Yes, mozilla is OSS but (from what I understand) they have financial backing from aol/netscape for developers. Even if they don't, the nice mozilla organization as we know it will probably get a kick in the head if aol decides to kill them off.
I know netscape isn't mozilla, and I know which is crap and which is coming along nicely. But does your mom? dad? grandparents? The ones that are the other 80% of the websurfers out there.
Of course, even if mozilla does die I'll probably keep on using my nightly builds, even if they're stuck on november 9th:)
Don't get me wrong, I love gnome, but konqeror rocks as far as a file manager goes. It's fast, and you click basically anything and it shows up in the same application, all embedded like (similar to the way that ie4/5 do things).
Nautilus from what I saw of pr1 was nice, had some neat features, but is just too slow (even on a pIII-500/256ram) to be really useful. Personally I do command line 99% of the time, but those are my impressions. I'm waiting for the debs of pr2 to come out so that I can play with them and see how much things have improved.
Great site! From what i can see on the css bug page, mozilla has *far* more of the happy green boxes than ie5. In fact, a few of the smaller tables it is the only one with all green (eg: box sizing properties).
Funnily enough, going to the site in konqueror rendered a white page with a few colored lines, and white text (on a white background):)
I've had it do that whole kill-explorer thing, it'll come back semi-cleanly but everything in the tray is gone (indicating that the main explorer shell has been restarted) and eventually everything goes to shit and I have to reboot. Granted, I don't use it a lot...
My appolagies, it's opera that doesn't support CSS then. I know that konqeror has some things it doesn't do, like link color (/. looks *weird* with blue links!). Stability issues have also kept me from using it (last I used were pre-2.0 debs). It is quite possibly the sweetest file manager I've used yet though, tied perhaps with efm because of efm's wackasscool command line interface:)
The sad thing is the mozilla team (and project) could lose all credability, funding, and support from AOL (*bleah*) because netscape 6.0 sucks. I've used netscape 6.0 and it does suck. Mozilla does still suck, but it doesn't suck nearly as badly. Unfortunately the populus of the internet are going to see the "new and improved" netscape 6.0 as the final realization of the netsape/mozilla project, see how it sucks, and cut it off at the knees. IMHO Netscape should go away. At least the AOL netscape 6.0 abomination with the crap that they've put in. Mozilla should live on as it's own entity, and not be "netscape's mozilla project". Kinda like guilt by association, and I don't know how to solve this (other than praying that they don't screw up netscape 6.0 too badly and that mozilla can keep on going with the coders and so forth that they have now):(
I'm really tired of these stupid flamefest articles on slashdot about Netscape/Mozilla/MSIE. One minute it's/. saying how wonderful mozilla is, keep up the great work, blah blah blah. Then it's michael coming off looking like a class-A idiot.
Erhm, actually, slashdot is just a news site (ok, not "just"...:). The articles have different opinions about x, y, and z, (kde/gnome, mozilla/ie, qt/gtk, insert your religious war of choice here), but that doesn't mean that/. is doing anything wrong. Rob and gang do a great job of posting stories and news from people with all sorts of different opinions.
This may be true, but as a 100% linux user, people don't have a choice. As it stands, linux users have the following options available:
Netscape - fast, sucks for resizing, basically a dead product
Mozilla - slow and bloated (though beta), lots of bells, whistles, and extra shit. Nice for resizing and rendering (IMHO) but still slow. Currently this and mozilla are the only ways that you can use verisign Certs (that I know of) in internet mail
Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) based on the mozilla browser so it renders nicely, missing some important features at the moment (cookies, ssl), but under heavy development
Opera - small, fast light. Rendering not as good as mozilla (IMO) but more feature complete than galeon, but it's not free IIRC, so people are going to rebel against this I think
Konquerer - fast, nice, requires KDE libs but can run nicely on a helix gnome system. No support for stylesheets from what I've seen, but a very nice file browser. Stability issues and not complete html spec compliance are problems though.
Lynx - for the purists only:)
Linx - for the new purist, a text based web browser that renders tables and forms wonderfully, but it still lacks gfx and plugins and everything that make this wonderful "web" the way it is today:)
So have I missed any? I probably have. My point is that netscape and mozilla may suck the bone right now, but they are still the best that we poor linux users have. I agree, IE is a good browser (I don't think it would be as fast as it appears to be if it weren't loaded with the OS, and because of that OS integration it has some problems that I've had as well as that whole "crash your browser crash your OS" thing, but these are relatively small issues.
Personally I use mozilla for my mail and browsing, galeon for my browsing when I'm not going to slashdot or some cookied site, and that's about it. When in windows (seldom) I either use mozilla nightlys or ie (but I feel dirty when I do it).
Would the medieval version of slashdot be so concerned when boats roamed through the seas and produced those things you earth-people called "maps"... I don't think so!:-)
You make an excellent point, wish I had some mod points still:)
I hate to agree, but media player 6.4 is great. It'll play practically any format, and pretty skip free. MP7 however sucks. MS had to go take a good thing and add a whole bunch of useless crap. Skins? Skins are great on a window manager level, or wiget level, but for one app? That and now MP7 plays things with all sorts of skipping and on occasion I've had files not play properly (go a bit then crap out) in mp7 that work fine in 6.4. The *only* thing that I liked in mp7 was playlist, but since when I am in windows I use winamp for my mp3 viewing (I don't really think you need a playlist for your mpg pr0n), that's not a big deal. Sad but true, mp6.4 would be a great app to have, or have the equivelant of, on linux.
Before upgrading, I am just wondering if this will break quake3 (voodoo 3 3500 vid card) and if not, what packages are needed (I have rpm->debs of the linux.3dfx.com drivers ATM) to make it run.
Doesn't work for me (debian unstable):(
After downloading the trailer from the official site, and trying to play with xanim I get:
$ xanim finalfantasy_320.mov
XAnim Rev 2.80.0 by Mark Podlipec Copyright (C) 1991-1999. All Rights Reserved
Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18)
Unknown(and unsupported) Audio Codec: QDM2(0x51444d32).
Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
Usage:
XAnim [options] anim [ [options] anim... ]
-h lists some common options, but may be out of date.
See xanim.readme or the man page for detailed help.
Note that the article says that Napster will develop a membership-based service, not that they will end their free service.
Yes, but you *know* this is going to happen. Or you'll be assaulted with banner ads or pop ups or some similar BS that everyone seems to think will sell their product when doing business on the Internet.
In a way, it's already a "membership based" service, as you have to sign in with a username and password. Granted, there is no checking done, but hey, it's still a way.
Now if they were to make it so you have to log in with an email address (not without an AUP of course, I'm sure the spammers would love to get their hands on a list like that) I have no problem with that, but if they expect me to pay, I'll move on to gnutella or [xyz file sharing service] and continue downloading...
This is my only real impression of turbo linux. It has nothing to do with their distro, software, or anything else. It has to do with their methods of sales.
I work for a company that was fortunate enough to be at the Comdex in Toronto earlier this year, in the Linux Business Pavillion. We were showcasing our new product and were situated right beside TurboLinux. They had hired a guy who called himself a "Perceptionist". IMHO a glorified magician. Anyway, I'm not denying this guy was good. He had a great act and had a lot of cool things he did.
However, he didn't mention Turbo Linux a lot. Once and a while he would go into a speil where he'd throw out words that had close meaning, and that related to TL, and occasionally he'd mention them by name. His main purpose (and only purpose if you ask me) was to draw people to the booth. With promises of "sign up here and recieve $25 worth of software" (I never recieved anything BTW) and the like. There was also the issue of clogging the isleways. And I do mean clogging. We had people turning the chairs around in our booth so they could sit or stand on them to see him. That and you literally had to fight your way through this crowd to get through.
Anyway, like I said, he had a good show. He also had a LOUD show. His speaker system was set very high. The first day of the show TL, Caldara, and Penguin Linux had an unofficial "you turned your volume up so I'll turn mine up" battle. Our company, situated beside him and withouth the budget that TL had didn't have a chance.
For all three days we re-scheduled our twice daily demos where the president made a presentation from 12:00 to 12:30 to accomidate TL's speaker. We were quite polite I think. We also asked them on more than one occasion if it would be possible to turn the volume down, as even with our entire booth between us and them we still had to yell to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to us.
Our complaints, polite at first, were met with "oh I'm so sorry I'll correct that right away" and "our volume is in the control of comdex, we set it to whatever they want us to", followed by, well, no action.
At one point we had a HUGE amount of people around our booth, clogging the isles in fact, listening to a demo that was being given. At this point the perceptionist seemed to think "hey, there's people around but they're interested in that booth, I'll draw them away" and started up his act, effectivly moving a lot of the people away fro us to them. Sadly, there's not a lot of chance of "new firewall product" information beating out "I'll give you $4000USD if you can cut higher than me". After this we went and talked to the main person from TL *again* and was again met with "gee I'm really sorry about that".
Plain fscking rude is what it was if you ask me.
Now I don't begrudge them for trying to get people to their booth. The more people at their booth the more potential people at our booth, or in fact around the Linux Bus. Pav. in general, which is good. However, there is a clear differnece IMHO between good business practices and bad business practices. In this case, this particular programmer has turned from indifferent about TL to not liking them at all. So sorry TL, better luck next time.
Oh, and a postscript to that.... the same perceptionist didn't seem to hold up to his wonderful promises of "I'm here because I'm a stockholder and I love this company" as he was p1mping himself for Compaq at the SJ LWE this August:)
There's a flaw in the concept, however, since most people don't read magazines, eat cereal, or view videos while seated at their computers.
Erhm, my morning is spent reading my linux [journal|mag] (if it has arrived in said month and I'm not done it) and eating cereal in front of my box, while surfing to/. first thing in the morning. A sad and depressing life to be sure, but still it proves that the author of the article has no clue.:)
Hmm... I want a cuecat now... I think I'll construct a security grid around the computer so that I don't even have to turn my head occasionally to see if my back is about to be attacked by one of the cats...
Agreed. At our company the source code is spread out on several developers boxen, depending on who they are and what they are working on. There is no nice tarball with a filename like full_product_source.tar.gz. More like: foo.c on box a, foo.pl and foo.pm on box b, bar.java on box c, baz.bz and qux.bz on box d.
*IF* someone knew exactly where things were they could maybe get several things of value. But that involves many levels of password (hack box a, then box b, then c, d, etc, *after* getting past the initial firewalls (all the developers use linux boxen). Sure, send a vbscript virus, no big deal, the salespeople get it, and you can look at proposed banner ads and shit like that. I'm assuming that it's similar to this at MS, only a HUGE amount more:)
Shit! Get the code and produce exploits from it???? Someone better tell this "linux" company that their code is out there for anyone to see and 'sploit them!
Hmmm... wait a minute, if the windows source wasn't closed to the world, this whole thing would't be a concern....
Re:We both know there is more to D & D than that..
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
The scans on that page remind me a lot of the White Power leaflettes that used to be put on my windshield when I was in college. A bible quote and nice black and white drawn pictures of how black people are evil and should all die... you know, good wholesome Godly words.
(disclaimer: I by no means think that everyone who believes in God or is a christian or [insert religion of choice here] is a phycho freak like these people).
This I must agree with. I did 4 years of tech support for realtos and the *first* thing I did when someone started in on me with "I've been doing this for x years and I went to school and I've had a computer..." is assume they were an idiot. Well, maybe not an idiot, but not someone who know what was going on. I assumed that they were not smart enough to admit they didn't know anything, but instead *thought* they knew something (or everything) and were going to be a huge PITA.
Generally these people with superior knowledge (*cough*) did not know what they were talking about when they told me they had to low level format their HD when the modem did not connect.
When on the one or two times I had a conversation with someone who had a clue (1 time I remember, total, for the 4 years) I knew he was clued because of what he was telling me, NOT him telling me how smart he was.
Now when I call tech support (not often as I hate waiting for 40 min on hold to find out that the person can't help me and I have to call some other random long distance number to weed my way through 15 levels of number pushing and another 40 min on old only to find that the department is closed because they are in a different time zone), I assume they are idiots as well. First line tech support generally operates with enough knowledge to ask someone to turn their computer on and off to see if that fixes it, and not much more. Case in point, errors connecting my dsl modem with a linux box, "no I don't have a control panel, I'm not using windows" "you're on a mac?" "just tell me why I'm not getting a dhcp address" "well, have you tried rebooting sir?" "ARGH!!!!!" (this turned out to be they had not actually hooked up my port, but I digress).
Admittadly, starting a conversation with "let me talk to someone who knows more than you" doesn't always leave you with the best first impression, but I don't really care a lot of the time, because if I COULD talk to someone who knows what I'm talking about, it'd be a 30 second phone call:)
Slashdot Mirror
Where can you download greymodern?
An OS with a fairly decent editor built in :)
Ah, but in the minds of a LOT of people, such as those who are not in the OSS community scene and know there is a netscape and an IE, they are the same. Netscape has always been the same as mozilla and I think will always be the same, unless something is done.
/.ed and I never download it. From what I saw of pr3 before I rm -rf'd away to where it belongs, it sucked. Basically take an old build of mozilla (nightlys are quite fine thankyouverymuch) and throw a bunch of crap in there, and release it as a .0 product.
:)
Personally, I don't mind if netscape 6 is
Sadly, the way that people think is that netscape 6.0 is the same as mozilla, and when netscape 6.0 fails, or gets too critisized, I wouldn't doubt if aol just gives up, throws netscape down the crapper, and kills the mozilla project. Yes, mozilla is OSS but (from what I understand) they have financial backing from aol/netscape for developers. Even if they don't, the nice mozilla organization as we know it will probably get a kick in the head if aol decides to kill them off.
I know netscape isn't mozilla, and I know which is crap and which is coming along nicely. But does your mom? dad? grandparents? The ones that are the other 80% of the websurfers out there.
Of course, even if mozilla does die I'll probably keep on using my nightly builds, even if they're stuck on november 9th
Don't get me wrong, I love gnome, but konqeror rocks as far as a file manager goes. It's fast, and you click basically anything and it shows up in the same application, all embedded like (similar to the way that ie4/5 do things).
Nautilus from what I saw of pr1 was nice, had some neat features, but is just too slow (even on a pIII-500/256ram) to be really useful. Personally I do command line 99% of the time, but those are my impressions. I'm waiting for the debs of pr2 to come out so that I can play with them and see how much things have improved.
Interesting point, but can you do:
:)
for i in *.html; do cat $i | sed -e 's/foo/bar/g' > $i.new ; done
in a file manager?
Yes, but when it was around it ROCKED! The almost perfect mix of graphical and command line interaction with the contents of your computer.
Great site! From what i can see on the css bug page, mozilla has *far* more of the happy green boxes than ie5. In fact, a few of the smaller tables it is the only one with all green (eg: box sizing properties).
:)
Funnily enough, going to the site in konqueror rendered a white page with a few colored lines, and white text (on a white background)
I've had it do that whole kill-explorer thing, it'll come back semi-cleanly but everything in the tray is gone (indicating that the main explorer shell has been restarted) and eventually everything goes to shit and I have to reboot. Granted, I don't use it a lot...
My appolagies, it's opera that doesn't support CSS then. I know that konqeror has some things it doesn't do, like link color (/. looks *weird* with blue links!). Stability issues have also kept me from using it (last I used were pre-2.0 debs). It is quite possibly the sweetest file manager I've used yet though, tied perhaps with efm because of efm's wackasscool command line interface :)
Here you go!
The sad thing is the mozilla team (and project) could lose all credability, funding, and support from AOL (*bleah*) because netscape 6.0 sucks. I've used netscape 6.0 and it does suck. Mozilla does still suck, but it doesn't suck nearly as badly. Unfortunately the populus of the internet are going to see the "new and improved" netscape 6.0 as the final realization of the netsape/mozilla project, see how it sucks, and cut it off at the knees. IMHO Netscape should go away. At least the AOL netscape 6.0 abomination with the crap that they've put in. Mozilla should live on as it's own entity, and not be "netscape's mozilla project". Kinda like guilt by association, and I don't know how to solve this (other than praying that they don't screw up netscape 6.0 too badly and that mozilla can keep on going with the coders and so forth that they have now) :(
Erhm, actually, slashdot is just a news site (ok, not "just"... :). The articles have different opinions about x, y, and z, (kde/gnome, mozilla/ie, qt/gtk, insert your religious war of choice here), but that doesn't mean that /. is doing anything wrong. Rob and gang do a great job of posting stories and news from people with all sorts of different opinions.
- Netscape - fast, sucks for resizing, basically a dead product
- Mozilla - slow and bloated (though beta), lots of bells, whistles, and extra shit. Nice for resizing and rendering (IMHO) but still slow. Currently this and mozilla are the only ways that you can use verisign Certs (that I know of) in internet mail
- Galeon (galeon.sourceforge.net) based on the mozilla browser so it renders nicely, missing some important features at the moment (cookies, ssl), but under heavy development
- Opera - small, fast light. Rendering not as good as mozilla (IMO) but more feature complete than galeon, but it's not free IIRC, so people are going to rebel against this I think
- Konquerer - fast, nice, requires KDE libs but can run nicely on a helix gnome system. No support for stylesheets from what I've seen, but a very nice file browser. Stability issues and not complete html spec compliance are problems though.
- Lynx - for the purists only
:)
- Linx - for the new purist, a text based web browser that renders tables and forms wonderfully, but it still lacks gfx and plugins and everything that make this wonderful "web" the way it is today
:)
So have I missed any? I probably have. My point is that netscape and mozilla may suck the bone right now, but they are still the best that we poor linux users have. I agree, IE is a good browser (I don't think it would be as fast as it appears to be if it weren't loaded with the OS, and because of that OS integration it has some problems that I've had as well as that whole "crash your browser crash your OS" thing, but these are relatively small issues.Personally I use mozilla for my mail and browsing, galeon for my browsing when I'm not going to slashdot or some cookied site, and that's about it. When in windows (seldom) I either use mozilla nightlys or ie (but I feel dirty when I do it).
You make an excellent point, wish I had some mod points still :)
I hate to agree, but media player 6.4 is great. It'll play practically any format, and pretty skip free. MP7 however sucks. MS had to go take a good thing and add a whole bunch of useless crap. Skins? Skins are great on a window manager level, or wiget level, but for one app? That and now MP7 plays things with all sorts of skipping and on occasion I've had files not play properly (go a bit then crap out) in mp7 that work fine in 6.4. The *only* thing that I liked in mp7 was playlist, but since when I am in windows I use winamp for my mp3 viewing (I don't really think you need a playlist for your mpg pr0n), that's not a big deal. Sad but true, mp6.4 would be a great app to have, or have the equivelant of, on linux.
Before upgrading, I am just wondering if this will break quake3 (voodoo 3 3500 vid card) and if not, what packages are needed (I have rpm->debs of the linux.3dfx.com drivers ATM) to make it run.
TIA
After downloading the trailer from the official site, and trying to play with xanim I get:
$ xanim finalfantasy_320.mov
XAnim Rev 2.80.0 by Mark Podlipec Copyright (C) 1991-1999. All Rights Reserved
Video Codec: Sorenson Video not yet supported.(E18)
Unknown(and unsupported) Audio Codec: QDM2(0x51444d32).
Notice: Video and Audio are present, but not yet supported.
Usage:
XAnim [options] anim [ [options] anim
-h lists some common options, but may be out of date.
See xanim.readme or the man page for detailed help.
:(
Yes, but you *know* this is going to happen. Or you'll be assaulted with banner ads or pop ups or some similar BS that everyone seems to think will sell their product when doing business on the Internet.
In a way, it's already a "membership based" service, as you have to sign in with a username and password. Granted, there is no checking done, but hey, it's still a way.
Now if they were to make it so you have to log in with an email address (not without an AUP of course, I'm sure the spammers would love to get their hands on a list like that) I have no problem with that, but if they expect me to pay, I'll move on to gnutella or [xyz file sharing service] and continue downloading...
This is my only real impression of turbo linux. It has nothing to do with their distro, software, or anything else. It has to do with their methods of sales.
:)
I work for a company that was fortunate enough to be at the Comdex in Toronto earlier this year, in the Linux Business Pavillion. We were showcasing our new product and were situated right beside TurboLinux. They had hired a guy who called himself a "Perceptionist". IMHO a glorified magician. Anyway, I'm not denying this guy was good. He had a great act and had a lot of cool things he did.
However, he didn't mention Turbo Linux a lot. Once and a while he would go into a speil where he'd throw out words that had close meaning, and that related to TL, and occasionally he'd mention them by name. His main purpose (and only purpose if you ask me) was to draw people to the booth. With promises of "sign up here and recieve $25 worth of software" (I never recieved anything BTW) and the like. There was also the issue of clogging the isleways. And I do mean clogging. We had people turning the chairs around in our booth so they could sit or stand on them to see him. That and you literally had to fight your way through this crowd to get through.
Anyway, like I said, he had a good show. He also had a LOUD show. His speaker system was set very high. The first day of the show TL, Caldara, and Penguin Linux had an unofficial "you turned your volume up so I'll turn mine up" battle. Our company, situated beside him and withouth the budget that TL had didn't have a chance.
For all three days we re-scheduled our twice daily demos where the president made a presentation from 12:00 to 12:30 to accomidate TL's speaker. We were quite polite I think. We also asked them on more than one occasion if it would be possible to turn the volume down, as even with our entire booth between us and them we still had to yell to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to us.
Our complaints, polite at first, were met with "oh I'm so sorry I'll correct that right away" and "our volume is in the control of comdex, we set it to whatever they want us to", followed by, well, no action.
At one point we had a HUGE amount of people around our booth, clogging the isles in fact, listening to a demo that was being given. At this point the perceptionist seemed to think "hey, there's people around but they're interested in that booth, I'll draw them away" and started up his act, effectivly moving a lot of the people away fro us to them. Sadly, there's not a lot of chance of "new firewall product" information beating out "I'll give you $4000USD if you can cut higher than me". After this we went and talked to the main person from TL *again* and was again met with "gee I'm really sorry about that".
Plain fscking rude is what it was if you ask me.
Now I don't begrudge them for trying to get people to their booth. The more people at their booth the more potential people at our booth, or in fact around the Linux Bus. Pav. in general, which is good. However, there is a clear differnece IMHO between good business practices and bad business practices. In this case, this particular programmer has turned from indifferent about TL to not liking them at all. So sorry TL, better luck next time.
Oh, and a postscript to that.... the same perceptionist didn't seem to hold up to his wonderful promises of "I'm here because I'm a stockholder and I love this company" as he was p1mping himself for Compaq at the SJ LWE this August
That's my TurboLinux story
Erhm, my morning is spent reading my linux [journal|mag] (if it has arrived in said month and I'm not done it) and eating cereal in front of my box, while surfing to /. first thing in the morning. A sad and depressing life to be sure, but still it proves that the author of the article has no clue. :)
Hmm... I want a cuecat now... I think I'll construct a security grid around the computer so that I don't even have to turn my head occasionally to see if my back is about to be attacked by one of the cats...
Of this I have no doubt, however, I was simply giving an example of how things were at my place of work :)
Agreed. At our company the source code is spread out on several developers boxen, depending on who they are and what they are working on. There is no nice tarball with a filename like full_product_source.tar.gz. More like: foo.c on box a, foo.pl and foo.pm on box b, bar.java on box c, baz.bz and qux.bz on box d.
:)
*IF* someone knew exactly where things were they could maybe get several things of value. But that involves many levels of password (hack box a, then box b, then c, d, etc, *after* getting past the initial firewalls (all the developers use linux boxen). Sure, send a vbscript virus, no big deal, the salespeople get it, and you can look at proposed banner ads and shit like that. I'm assuming that it's similar to this at MS, only a HUGE amount more
Shit! Get the code and produce exploits from it???? Someone better tell this "linux" company that their code is out there for anyone to see and 'sploit them!
Hmmm... wait a minute, if the windows source wasn't closed to the world, this whole thing would't be a concern....
The scans on that page remind me a lot of the White Power leaflettes that used to be put on my windshield when I was in college. A bible quote and nice black and white drawn pictures of how black people are evil and should all die... you know, good wholesome Godly words.
(disclaimer: I by no means think that everyone who believes in God or is a christian or [insert religion of choice here] is a phycho freak like these people).
This I must agree with. I did 4 years of tech support for realtos and the *first* thing I did when someone started in on me with "I've been doing this for x years and I went to school and I've had a computer..." is assume they were an idiot. Well, maybe not an idiot, but not someone who know what was going on. I assumed that they were not smart enough to admit they didn't know anything, but instead *thought* they knew something (or everything) and were going to be a huge PITA.
Generally these people with superior knowledge (*cough*) did not know what they were talking about when they told me they had to low level format their HD when the modem did not connect.
When on the one or two times I had a conversation with someone who had a clue (1 time I remember, total, for the 4 years) I knew he was clued because of what he was telling me, NOT him telling me how smart he was.
Now when I call tech support (not often as I hate waiting for 40 min on hold to find out that the person can't help me and I have to call some other random long distance number to weed my way through 15 levels of number pushing and another 40 min on old only to find that the department is closed because they are in a different time zone), I assume they are idiots as well. First line tech support generally operates with enough knowledge to ask someone to turn their computer on and off to see if that fixes it, and not much more. Case in point, errors connecting my dsl modem with a linux box, "no I don't have a control panel, I'm not using windows" "you're on a mac?" "just tell me why I'm not getting a dhcp address" "well, have you tried rebooting sir?" "ARGH!!!!!" (this turned out to be they had not actually hooked up my port, but I digress).
Admittadly, starting a conversation with "let me talk to someone who knows more than you" doesn't always leave you with the best first impression, but I don't really care a lot of the time, because if I COULD talk to someone who knows what I'm talking about, it'd be a 30 second phone call
</rant>
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest