Re:I just bought an Alienware Area-51m
on
Dell's Gaming Monster
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I bought an alienware 3 yrs ago. I don't remember the model name, but it was the best system they had at the time. Two of my friends also bought the same system.
I have to say that alienware is one of the worst companies I have ever had the misfortune to be a customer of. EVERYTHING on that system broke multiple times (Poor ESD control in their mfcting?). But beyond that - they absolutely hands down have the worst support of all time in the whole universe. I think they kept changing who they outsource their support to, so stuff would be in mid fix, and then some whole new set of clowns would get involved.
These were all big things, like (multiple) motherboards burning out, cpus dying, video cards dying, everthing.
Last year I bought a Dell, and have had 0 issues.
I sincerely hope you are happy with your system and won't have problems, if you do start having issues, make sure you write down exectly who you talked to in support, and how you got to them (you will usually be bounced all over the place, and won't end up in the same place twice). If they do wind up shipping you new motherboard and cpu, make sure you take pictures of what you ship back to them. On one occasion their own tech shipped a motherboard/cpu back to them in the motherboard box. They claimed that there was no CPU when it arrived, and wound up charging me for it (never mind that their own tech packed it and shipped it, and declared it dead before it left).
First off, you might as well tell them up-front ta Unix evangelist. It isn't likely to be a secret, and there is always someone who'll chalk up a point or two for honesty.
I could only get this far and then I just couldn't take it anymore. This whole article is like something written by a child. At least when you read some MS fud article, it at least shows some sense of maturity. This sort of writing just looks foolish.
bwt - I use one Unix for or another for just about everything, and I'm certainly don't think that the author had a good point, this was just done very immaturely.
A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to.
I don't think this is really true. I can understand Math, CS, Engineering, Physics being more difficult than other disciplines, ex Education, given that you would go into different jobs from those different degrees. If the jobs requiring the more difficult degrees don't pay more, then they won't find people to fill those jobs as supply would dry up. It does seem to even out in the end, at least a lot of the time.
As a related anecdote, the day I graduated with my CS degree, I had a conversation in the morning with somebody else in CS dept. We were discussing how we had to bust our asses for those degrees, whilst those in other disciplines (I think we were talking about sociology) didn't. We were pulling all nighters in the lab and they were complaining about 2 hours of homework. Then I ran into somebody who was graduating with a sociology degree. He was lamenting his serious lack of employment options. I had had a job lined up for months which payed at least double anything he was even looking at.
I had to bust my ass for those 4 years, working and getting a CS degree. He had it fairly easy for his college career. Now, I have loved all of the jobs I've had since college, and that guy is still just scraping by and hating his work hours.
Even myself however would by my current knowledge still dare to publish sometime
composed music pieces by me on the internet using MP3 or Vorbis/ Ogg data reduc tion (but with a warning hint not to listen to them excessively)
Banks of course aren't the only sites which only support IE, but they certainly seem to be some of the most official and useful online sites.
This divergence of browser functionality is MS's way of really kicking every other browser builder off the map, but let's not forget that it was Netscape wich started this trend. Starting with html2, the standards were basically following Netscape's implimentations by 6 months
Apparently it was only fatal to snakes without headaches. To snakes which had headaches at the time, it made them feel clear and refreshed, ready to take on the world.
They also fed some snakes equinox, and those ones stopped worrying about the deaths of their brethren.
Geeks, on the other hand, are intelligent and have enough free time to sit around and discuss about how they're getting royally fucked over...which, of course, they are.
Intelligent people, geeks or not, don't waste their time talking about a company using their free service to find people to spam, and they certainly don't consider that to be getting 'royally fucked'.
This would be brilliant if both pieces of software were written by the same company. Sort of like the company that makes radar detectors and radar guns. Or the tracer, trace buster, and trace buster buster (did anybody else see that movie?)
I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but I have to tell you, and I'm sure that many will agree with me, that Sun did just as much to kill Java, by trying to control the language while producing crappy jres and compilers, as Microsoft did, by producing greate jres and compilers and subverting the language.
I don't find it too difficult to imagine a constantly evolving open-source game engine, where various companies periodically
grab a version of the engine and sell art for it.
That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You are telling me that you expect there to be "various" companies whose business model is to grab a snapshot of this game engine and provide "art" for it?
Do you think that Ford should provide the engineering specs for their cars, and various companies could then build them and provide different paint and interior options?
I suppose you also think that there could be various companies that take the Linux kernel and package it up and...
Except for the people who have been working hard at Oracle. For them it would be more like a job cut. Which means that those people wouldn't be able to buy the products of the companies who were saving money by not having to pay for databases.
You didn't answer any of his questions or tell him how to do any of the things he was trying to do. All you did was attempt to tell him that his point was invalid. Do you think somebody new to the system gives a shit if ALT-F4 is a window manager thing? All he knows is that it doesn't do what he wants and there's no easy way for him to do it.
I myself have no idea if there is a way to make 'y' hit the yes button (I don't think this is just a toolkit issue as I suspect that the button doesn't even have focus). I use WindowMaker, so ALT-F4 is easy enough to set up (you have to click on the little configuration icon thingy to and its on one of the panes). To change your resolution you have to dick around with/etc/X11/XF86Config.
The revelation was actually that explaining something to a newbie is harder the more of a "I'm such a leet guru" attitude you have. There are plenty of those around who can't help anybody because their ego gets in the way.
Why do slashdot editors feel that they have to throw in their 2 cents. I'm glad you posted the article, thanks for the summary, but I don't want to hear your lame ass opinion. Especially when it is something as non-specific as a little fluffy. It's like you are afraid that all the slashdotters will be talking amongst themselves and saying "what's up with that fucking fluffy article that was posted", so you are attempting to protect yourself against that eventuality by saying - hey this is fluffy.
people don't and won't purchase heavily restricted music online at higher prices for a less useful item.
It's interesting that the article never seems to see this point. They simply make the statement that people don't seem to want to buy music online.
I for one would pay for music online, but I would never buy into anything that would attempt to lock me down to a single machine/os/player/provider. That's just useless to me.
For now it makes a lot more sense for me to buy the cd and rip it. Now I can access my whole collection from work and home and wherever else that I have the bandwidth to pull them down.
The current solutions appear to be building a great straw-man to get nocked down and 'prove' that online music is a bad idea.
Here is a little article on smart credit cards (yahoo).
Judging from that posts I have read here, there is a general lack of information about them, so I'll post a few relevent lines:
WHAT ARE SMART CARDS?
Smart cards have an embedded microchip instead of the magnetic strip used by credit cards. The cards need a special reader to transfer information from a personal computer to online merchant Web sites or at point of sale terminals at retail stores.
Look, it took me a long time to get my dsl set up through Qwest. I need it. If you bunch of loosers can't figure out how to turn of telnet and web on your cisco 678 then please learn some shit own your own and don't bitch at Qwest.
I know that in a rational world they would care about you as a customer, but they don't. They are a monopoly and never will. But if you make them angry then they will decide to stop dsl service altogether, because really, they barely have the ability to get it up and running at all, and if they think they are going to have problems, they will just pull it.
Why would you want to keep a company afloat which has no sustainable business model? That just makes no sense. The company is failing - ok, then they either did something wrong in their business or their technology.
The message this would send to Windows-only game developers is "Ok fellas, here is the absolute maximim market size for Linux games, plus some contrived, inflated amount". This message probably does not say what you want it to.
Besides, even if you could keep them afloat, AND by some miracle they were able to take off and start being self-sufficent, and even start doing well, then isn't this the exact same point at which the OpenSource community would rally against them as a corporate behemoth?
For example, let's see what the definition of RedHat is on everything2:
"Evil company directly responsible for commercializing GNU/Linux and making "Linux" the biggest buzzword in the computer industry. They distribute GNU/Linux (commonly called just plain "Linux", but that's evil too:) and sell boxed CD-ROM's at outrageous prices. Added in the price is tech support, which can easily be gotten for free from tech-savvy geeks like myself.
they have, however, contributed quite a bit of support (financial and otherwise) to some projects, I'll give them that."
Isn't this the prevailing sentiment about RH on/.? I think it is.
When mysql just can't keep up...
on
Case Tweaking
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Is your CPU overclocked?
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Lars,Dre,RIAA et al: Great! Now that we've shutdown the one that was centrally served/non encrypted/public about their actions, and forced users off to other much harder to track systems, we can.. ah.. oh.
They have traded the enemy they know for the 20 or 30 that they don't.
How is the fear that the one employee using ruby would leave and nobody would support the app stupid, untechnical and irrational?
Stupid? I don't think so. Many program languages come and go. You really do need to be able to maintain the thing.
Untechnical? How? Because all of the pros and cons of the language were not evaluated? When it comes right down to it, aren't things you can do in ruby that you can't do in perl/python, or vice versa, so really you are talking about the language that works best for the task. Why do you want the best language for the task? Well first to get it done quickly, and second for maintainablity. The latter was already covered and I haven't seen anything that can be done in ruby faster than perl or python.
Irrational? Come on, you just looked up stupid in a thesaurus didn't you?! That doesn't count.
I understand why you would not want those anoying popup ads.
What I don't understand is with banner ads, especially on a niche site like slashdot, aren't the banner ads somewhat likely to contain info about things you might want?
If a company spends a lot of time and effort making something that they really believe you would like, what do you suggest they do to let you know about it?
Nothing? Think about all of the things you have purchased. Do you really believe that you have done all of your own research and fully cogitated on the pluses and minuses of all the competition?
Really, it's just a banner ad. You have to scroll down to read this far anway. If the ad holds no interest for you, you've already forgotten it.
I'd like for sites like slashdot to get paid so they can buy more bandwidth/servers/routers (and contractors to fix them!) so that I can get more out of it.
Re:I dunno ... the Big Crunch woulda been cool....
on
Universe is Flat
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I agree.
With the big crunch comes the possiblity for it
to start all over again. Big bang, gravity,
particles, planets, plants, animals, people,
linux, FreeBSD, slashot.
With the big crunch comes the possiblity of the
bigger oscillation. (bang->crunch->bang->crunch)
If the universe is flat it means every expanding,
ever cooling, life dying out, empty space a very
(relatively) few rocks laying about.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought an alienware 3 yrs ago. I don't remember the model name, but it was the best system they had at the time. Two of my friends also bought the same system.
I have to say that alienware is one of the worst companies I have ever had the misfortune to be a customer of. EVERYTHING on that system broke multiple times (Poor ESD control in their mfcting?). But beyond that - they absolutely hands down have the worst support of all time in the whole universe. I think they kept changing who they outsource their support to, so stuff would be in mid fix, and then some whole new set of clowns would get involved.
These were all big things, like (multiple) motherboards burning out, cpus dying, video cards dying, everthing.
Last year I bought a Dell, and have had 0 issues.
I sincerely hope you are happy with your system and won't have problems, if you do start having issues, make sure you write down exectly who you talked to in support, and how you got to them (you will usually be bounced all over the place, and won't end up in the same place twice). If they do wind up shipping you new motherboard and cpu, make sure you take pictures of what you ship back to them. On one occasion their own tech shipped a motherboard/cpu back to them in the motherboard box. They claimed that there was no CPU when it arrived, and wound up charging me for it (never mind that their own tech packed it and shipped it, and declared it dead before it left).
Good luck.
To everybody else - don't buy aw. They suck.
First off, you might as well tell them up-front ta Unix evangelist. It isn't likely to be a secret, and there is always someone who'll chalk up a point or two for honesty.
I could only get this far and then I just couldn't take it anymore. This whole article is like something written by a child.
At least when you read some MS fud article, it at least shows some sense of maturity. This sort of writing just looks foolish.
bwt - I use one Unix for or another for just about everything, and I'm certainly don't think that the author had a good point, this was just done very immaturely.
A degree from a college or university should mean the same regardless of discipline as far as the standards the student is held to.
I don't think this is really true. I can understand Math, CS, Engineering, Physics being more difficult than other disciplines, ex Education, given that you would go into different jobs from those different degrees. If the jobs requiring the more difficult degrees don't pay more, then they won't find people to fill those jobs as supply would dry up. It does seem to even out in the end, at least a lot of the time.
As a related anecdote, the day I graduated with my CS degree, I had a conversation in the morning with somebody else in CS dept. We were discussing how we had to bust our asses for those degrees, whilst those in other disciplines (I think we were talking about sociology) didn't. We were pulling all nighters in the lab and they were complaining about 2 hours of homework. Then I ran into somebody who was graduating with a sociology degree. He was lamenting his serious lack of employment options. I had had a job lined up for months which payed at least double anything he was even looking at.
I had to bust my ass for those 4 years, working and getting a CS degree. He had it fairly easy for his college career. Now, I have loved all of the jobs I've had since college, and that guy is still just scraping by and hating his work hours.
Even myself however would by my current knowledge still dare to publish sometime
composed music pieces by me on the internet using MP3 or Vorbis/ Ogg data reduc
tion (but with a warning hint not to listen to them excessively)
Yeah, I bet that really brings in the crowds...
Banks of course aren't the only sites which only support IE, but they certainly seem to be some of the most official and useful online sites.
This divergence of browser functionality is MS's way of really kicking every other browser builder off the map, but let's not forget that it was Netscape wich started this trend. Starting with html2, the standards were basically following Netscape's implimentations by 6 months
You have to read the article more carefully.
Apparently it was only fatal to snakes without headaches. To snakes which had headaches at the time, it made them feel clear and refreshed, ready to take on the world.
They also fed some snakes equinox, and those ones stopped worrying about the deaths of their brethren.
Just goes to show - Drugs are good.
url is supposed to be url
Geeks, on the other hand, are intelligent and have enough free time to sit around and discuss about how they're getting royally fucked over...which, of course, they are.
Intelligent people, geeks or not, don't waste their time talking about a company using their free service to find people to spam, and they certainly don't consider that to be getting 'royally fucked'.
This would be brilliant if both pieces of software were written by the same company. Sort of like the company that makes radar detectors and radar guns. Or the tracer, trace buster, and trace buster buster (did anybody else see that movie?)
I'm not exactly a Microsoft fan, but I have to tell you, and I'm sure that many will agree with me, that Sun did just as much to kill Java, by trying to control the language while producing crappy jres and compilers, as Microsoft did, by producing greate jres and compilers and subverting the language.
I don't find it too difficult to imagine a constantly evolving open-source game engine, where various companies periodically
grab a version of the engine and sell art for it.
That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You are telling me that you expect there to be "various" companies whose business model is to grab a snapshot of this game engine and provide "art" for it?
Do you think that Ford should provide the engineering specs for their cars, and various companies could then build them and provide different paint and interior options?
I suppose you also think that there could be various companies that take the Linux kernel and package it up and...
Oh, never mind. I guess.
Except for the people who have been working hard at Oracle. For them it would be more like a job cut. Which means that those people wouldn't be able to buy the products of the companies who were saving money by not having to pay for databases.
These things are all related.
You didn't answer any of his questions or tell him how to do any of the things he was trying to do. All you did was attempt to tell him that his point was invalid. Do you think somebody new to the system gives a shit if ALT-F4 is a window manager thing? All he knows is that it doesn't do what he wants and there's no easy way for him to do it.
/etc/X11/XF86Config.
I myself have no idea if there is a way to make 'y' hit the yes button (I don't think this is just a toolkit issue as I suspect that the button doesn't even have focus). I use WindowMaker, so ALT-F4 is easy enough to set up (you have to click on the little configuration icon thingy to and its on one of the panes). To change your resolution you have to dick around with
The revelation was actually that explaining something to a newbie is harder the more of a "I'm such a leet guru" attitude you have. There are plenty of those around who can't help anybody because their ego gets in the way.
A little fluffy, but still a good read.
Why do slashdot editors feel that they have to throw in their 2 cents. I'm glad you posted the article, thanks for the summary, but I don't want to hear your lame ass opinion. Especially when it is something as non-specific as a little fluffy. It's like you are afraid that all the slashdotters will be talking amongst themselves and saying "what's up with that fucking fluffy article that was posted", so you are attempting to protect yourself against that eventuality by saying - hey this is fluffy.
Just post the fucking thing.
Thank you.
people don't and won't purchase heavily restricted music online at higher prices for a less useful item.
It's interesting that the article never seems to see this point. They simply make the statement that people don't seem to want to buy music online.
I for one would pay for music online, but I would never buy into anything that would attempt to lock me down to a single machine/os/player/provider. That's just useless to me.
For now it makes a lot more sense for me to buy the cd and rip it. Now I can access my whole collection from work and home and wherever else that I have the bandwidth to pull them down.
The current solutions appear to be building a great straw-man to get nocked down and 'prove' that online music is a bad idea.
Here is a little article on smart credit cards (yahoo).
Judging from that posts I have read here, there is a general lack of information about them, so I'll post a few relevent lines:
WHAT ARE SMART CARDS?
Smart cards have an embedded microchip instead of the magnetic strip used by credit cards. The cards need a special reader to transfer information from a personal computer to online merchant Web sites or at point of sale terminals at retail stores.
Look, it took me a long time to get my dsl set up through Qwest. I need it. If you bunch of loosers can't figure out how to turn of telnet and web on your cisco 678 then please learn some shit own your own and don't bitch at Qwest.
I know that in a rational world they would care about you as a customer, but they don't. They are a monopoly and never will. But if you make them angry then they will decide to stop dsl service altogether, because really, they barely have the ability to get it up and running at all, and if they think they are going to have problems, they will just pull it.
Thank you for your time.
Why would you want to keep a company afloat which has no sustainable business model? That just makes no sense. The company is failing - ok, then they either did something wrong in their business or their technology.
:) and sell boxed CD-ROM's at outrageous prices. Added in the price is tech support, which can easily be gotten for free from tech-savvy geeks like myself.
/.? I think it is.
The message this would send to Windows-only game developers is "Ok fellas, here is the absolute maximim market size for Linux games, plus some contrived, inflated amount". This message probably does not say what you want it to.
Besides, even if you could keep them afloat, AND by some miracle they were able to take off and start being self-sufficent, and even start doing well, then isn't this the exact same point at which the OpenSource community would rally against them as a corporate behemoth?
For example, let's see what the definition of RedHat is on everything2:
"Evil company directly responsible for commercializing GNU/Linux and making "Linux" the biggest buzzword in the computer industry. They distribute GNU/Linux (commonly called just plain "Linux", but that's evil too
they have, however, contributed quite a bit of support (financial and otherwise) to some projects, I'll give them that."
Isn't this the prevailing sentiment about RH on
Is your CPU overclocked?
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/usr/www/users/syslogic/poll/phpPollUI.php3
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Current Results
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:
Lars,Dre,RIAA et al: Great! Now that we've shutdown the one that was centrally served/non encrypted/public about their actions, and forced users off to other much harder to track systems, we can.. ah.. oh.
They have traded the enemy they know for the 20 or 30 that they don't.
What in the hell are you talking about?
How is the fear that the one employee using ruby would leave and nobody would support the app stupid, untechnical and irrational?
Stupid? I don't think so. Many program languages come and go. You really do need to be able to maintain the thing.
Untechnical? How? Because all of the pros and cons of the language were not evaluated? When it comes right down to it, aren't things you can do in ruby that you can't do in perl/python, or vice versa, so really you are talking about the language that works best for the task. Why do you want the best language for the task? Well first to get it done quickly, and second for maintainablity. The latter was already covered and I haven't seen anything that can be done in ruby faster than perl or python.
Irrational? Come on, you just looked up stupid in a thesaurus didn't you?! That doesn't count.
They should create a web site. If I ever need their product, I will find it through google.
Are you saying that you only spend money on things you need? You are mighty unusual.
Capitalims is based on the assumption that the best product wins in a Darwinian manner, not the best advertised product.
No it isn't. Capitalism is built on the assumption that the best corporation wins in a Darwinian manner. This includes advertising.
I understand why you would not want those anoying popup ads.
What I don't understand is with banner ads, especially on a niche site like slashdot, aren't the banner ads somewhat likely to contain info about things you might want?
If a company spends a lot of time and effort making something that they really believe you would like, what do you suggest they do to let you know about it?
Nothing? Think about all of the things you have purchased. Do you really believe that you have done all of your own research and fully cogitated on the pluses and minuses of all the competition?
Really, it's just a banner ad. You have to scroll down to read this far anway. If the ad holds no interest for you, you've already forgotten it.
I'd like for sites like slashdot to get paid so they can buy more bandwidth/servers/routers (and contractors to fix them!) so that I can get more out of it.
Yes, I agree.
:(
With the big crunch comes the possiblity for it
to start all over again. Big bang, gravity,
particles, planets, plants, animals, people,
linux, FreeBSD, slashot.
With the big crunch comes the possiblity of the
bigger oscillation. (bang->crunch->bang->crunch)
If the universe is flat it means every expanding,
ever cooling, life dying out, empty space a very
(relatively) few rocks laying about.
I miss Douglas Adams.