What you mention is true, but how many people want to connect a high end video card to their computer over an external port? A few dozen?
One or two niche cases that aren't even a blip on the radar will not save thunderbolt. USB is ubiquitous, backwards compatibility guarantees a winner speed or not. How many devices do you use that use more than USB 2.0 bandwidth vs total USB devices that you have? The fact that it is also the charging standard means that they would really have to screw up to lose the crown.
So let me get this straight. If they ship me something that I did not order, I can either:
a) keep it at full price
or
b) say that I don't want it
In the second case, they will either eat the shipping cost both ways, offer me a discount, or just give it to me for free.
Why would I ever select option a? Yes, then they wouldn't ship me stuff ahead of me asking for it, but considering that I typically don't even know what I want until I go looking for it, I'm not sure how Amazon is going to do any better. Especially based on what I see recommended (maybe 1 of 10 items I *might* want)... seems like it's conceptually doomed.
I could see this being useful for businesses who need JIT delivery, but there's already a system for that.
We have those in my city. Some people hate it, but others love it. I use it to pace myself. If I am approaching a light and see five seconds left, I slow down way in advance of the light. Saves gas and my brakes.
It's these exact problems that finally forced me to switch to chrome, and I haven't looked back. Having 2/3 of my plugins stop working every few weeks was boggling. The rapid-release schedule doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and then to force compatibility problems makes it seem like they WANT users to leave.
This depends - are you looking to learn the new coding methods to remain competitive in the workplace, or just for fun?
Honestly if you make a living doing this then you need to adapt. You need to get over your preconceptions and accept the changes to the way computing works. There are millions of programmers out there, if you want to stay employed you need to show that you're adaptable to the new technologies while applying all of the tried-and-true knowledge and experience from your past. It's hard enough to get a job when you're more than a decade out of school.
Trust me, I understand where you're coming from. I hate the inefficiencies of the languages these days. I dislike the general idea of doing anything other than a script in a scripted language. However my (perhaps anachronistic) viewpoints don't have many applicable places anymore. Unfortunately the tradeoff between RAD and proper coding often leans a little too far to the RAD side, necessitating the use of many types of languages and tools that you will undoubtedly not enjoy.
Not only will you be a lot more productive, but you'll be a lot more marketable if you just succumb to the "dark side" that is today's trend in programming languages.
Not to incite, but I too have been with Kiva for a while (5 years), have made about 200 loans and my default rate is 0.55%. Carefully choosing those that you donate to can lead you to have very low risk and great reward for the karma and sense of accomplishment far more than monetary interest ever could get you. Honestly I have no idea how anyone could have a 30% loss rate considering that the average default rate is 1.09%. Please do not besmirch a fantastic organization with inaccurate statistics.
Yeah, I'd like to introduce the OP to this little thing out here that we have called "the internet".
You see on "the internet" the VAST MAJORITY of websites that use flash would not (by any sane or right-minded person) be classified as "drop-dead gorgeous". In fact many of them are aberrations of nature.
Flash has become a way for ignorant web designers lead by even more ignorant managers to design glittery and flashy (no pun intended) websites that focus on dazzling the user instead of usable and content-filled designs. Poor Jakob Nielsen probably cries himself to sleep every night.
Yes there are a few solitary websites out there that do use flash productively and do things that genuinely can be justified as a valued-added usage of flash that could not have been provided in plain HTML, but those are far and few between.
So what this sensationalist article is really spouting is that there are yet no good development tools for HTML5. Wow Really? So a product that just came out (relatively speaking) doesn't have as good or as many design tools yet as a product that has been around for a 14 years. Good thing you pointed that out!
Once the HTML5 tools are available and it's as easy to develop "drop-dead gorgeous" (for better or worse) websites for HTML5 as it is for Flash I think that Adobe is going to have trouble justifying Flash's existence ESPECIALLY because some of those utilities are going to be open-source and free.
I was there from Nov 28 to Dec 02 just wandering around Berlin, and I saw this and took a picture. you can find it here (take a note of the uptime, that's a W2K machine!)
In any case, it was pretty cool and I was watching it for a while, but that really doesn't look like a house, it's an office building in downtown Berlin... well "downtown" Berlin...
I am a Canadian... I went through their stupid process, and it decided to "reject" both of my credit cards, one saying that it was "locked" and the other one just didn't give me a reason. So I sent them an email and got a canned response back in return:
Thank you for contacting PayPal. We apologize for the delay in responding
to your service request.
I apologize for not being able to add this card to your PayPal account.
Unfortunately, this card was not accepted by our verification system. This
does impact valid cards occasionally and is not reflective of your credit
worthiness. For our security, we cannot register any cards that cannot be
verified by our system. Sorry for this inconvenience.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
However, to my surprise, BOTH CARDS were billed for their $1 fee... So I wrote them back saying "here's the code from my credit car statement proving that I own it, would you like a copy of my drivers license as well?" (well, I went on for more than that, asking them about how come their credit card verification system is so flawed), and what did I get back in return?
The same goddamed response.
So I replied again.
The same goddamed response.
I gave up. They get a bigass F- for customer service, and a A+ for incompetence.
Uh guys, VNC is to Terminal Services like what telnet is to X-windows. VNC is much slower, flaky, and doesn't have full compatibility.
With Terminal Services you can redirect sound, print jobs and serial port and floppy access, and mount your local drives on your remote machine for easy access. Last I checked VNC can't do that.
I love it, because I just leave my computer on with my ICQ and email and everything running, come in to work (where we are behind a firewall, but the TS port is open), and just connect back home and it's like I'm sitting there.
Yes, and I am well aware of x-windows as well, but that doesn't allow you to connect to an already running session. It does have the advantage that it's not transmitting screen captures like VNC is.
And I have heard about plenty of "quirks" and errors and problems with using linux, so...
And tell me, on your blue screen of death, what was the message? I'd bet that it was due to shitty hardware or a driver incompatibility, and last time I checked you cannot hold Microsoft responsible for what 3rd parties write... Thus driver errors are *NOT* microsoft's problem, but hey, I was running Win2K and it BSOD'd so it must be MS's fault, right? Couldn't be that third rate ISA sound card that I just installed...
So yes, to quote you it is absolutely amazing how ignorant people are about what's out there...
if anything I was dissing microsoft... I don't know what colour those glasses are that you're looking at the world with...:)
Yes, and there is a LOT more of the ignorant "micro$oft $uXX" posts running around than there are posts defending or supporting microsoft, so how come you don't complain about those?
Visual Age is a POS really, I tried it and it's horrbile.
And I have an inherant dislike of Java because it's designed to be inefficient and slow. It's a beast. I have been programming in it fulltime now for a year however, and I can appreciate that it comes with libraries that make things easy, however I dislike the language itself. It's like the "oohhh, no you're not smart enough to play with pointers!" type of thing. I know that in many cases programmers don't want to care about memory allocation and pointers, but what if I like optimization and efficiency? There should at least be some way to give me that functionality.
I have a circa 1995 program called Optima Power++ that makes it so incredibly easy to develop in C++ for windows... Like Visual Basic made easy for C... very very sweet. I can still use that to design the UI and then write the guts in a newer RAD tool... It's great. Very very easy. I don't think that anything like this exists quite yet for linux, but if I am wrong please tell me where!
As someone else pointed out, paying $72/year for any online amature news site is completely outrageous.
I can get magazine subscriptions (PCMag, et al) for like $40/year... I can get a HUGE newspaper at my door *every day* for $60/year, and I can *guarantee* you that it has a lot more coverate and stories and information than any online news site around will have, and it will be a lot better written too. Plus I'm not tied to my computer to read it, which as of right now is a nice thing. Sure, the wireless internet is great, but during a 45min commute to work in a carpool it's great to just flip open a newspaper.
I'd pay for salon if it was $30/year, but I think that's the magic number for me. Any more than that and there is a lot better places to go to get the information that I want.
HTTP Request caused a security alert, please contact our web master if you are getting this alert in error.
---
What is SecureIIS
SecureIIS offers websites running Microsoft Internet Information Server a broad range of protection from common vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. Because SecureIIS does not protect against specific vulnerabilities, but classes of vulnerabilities, it allows for a much more far reaching layer of security.
Is it possible that if HTTP_REFER == "www.slashdot.org" then they classify that as a "potential security risk"? This is Microsoft software after all...;P
You can get brand new iPAQs 3670s on eBay for $350USD-$400.
I've also seen them in stores for $550USD-$600.
The iPAQs are more expensive, yes, almost certainly in part to the WinCE lincense, however in many cases YGWYPF (you get what you pay for). I can't really comment because I haven't used one of these Sharp units yet, but I can't wait to try one.
Also, we have no idea WHAT the sale price of the Sharp unit will be, as it's not in stores yet. It could turn out to be $450, and by that time new iPAQs could have dropped to the same (in stores), so it's unfair to make a price comparison yet.
In my opinion, is a WINE for WinCE... If it had that, I'd buy one in a second.
As for the people who are saying that it's so easy to program, have you ever done any windows programming? I find it a *lot* easier to do programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux, but I could be wrong.
I am absolutely in love with the keyboard, as I had a Rim pager for a while and absolutely loved that keyboard. It took a bit of getting used to, but it was so much nicer than using a stylus.
The only thing that I'm worried about for these devices is the "quirks" that are so typically linux. I've used linux a lot, and it works great, that is provided that nothing goes wrong. As soon as anything goes wrong you require a lot more knowledge than the average CS person to get it working again, and there are also a lot more applications out there for WinCE than there are for Linux. Add to that when.NET comes out, you'll have a lot of WinCE applications that are just an extension of what you have on your desktop (I've heard some about what you will be able to do, and it will be damned neat for anyone who doesn't have a vendetta against Microsoft). For example, I have a friend who has an iPAQ with a wireless card in it, and he can use Terminal Services to TS to his main workstation while he's in a meeting, monitor his build progress, change a few things and recompile, and a bunch of other things. It's really quite neat.
Let the flaming begin, but if WinCE was available for this device then I'd definitely wait for it to roll out before buying a new PDA. But at this point in time I've heard too many complaints about using embedded linux (if you have any comments, no flames please, but I'd be glad to hear rational comments) and my personal experience with desktop linux hasn't been fantastic either. The last time I tried it the default install wouldn't work on either my old or my new laptop, and I still have yet to be able to recompile the kernel on my old laptop without it doing a kernel panic on boot.
Oh yeah, I forgot about when I was in residence at the university.
I presigned up and was up within frosh week, very fast, very good.
Unfortunately within 6 weeks we had 70 modems attached to our single segment serving about 250 people. I was lucky to get 10kb/sec.
Most techs were useless, except I found one tech who gave me some exact numbers and said "yes, unfortunately there is not much we can do at the moment, however we have calls out to break up the segment to solve the problem, but realistically it'll be a few months before you see this happen"... I said fine, and he told me to talk to one of the senior managers. I gave him my case, and he basically said "OK, I understand why you're frustrated, and I can understand your decision to switch to DSL, just so there's no hard feelings, we'll send a tech over to pick up the modem, and I'll zero out your bill."... So basically I had a month of high speed access and a month of decent access for free. I wasn't too angry with them after that. DSL gave me one month free, so for 4 months of having direct internet, I paid $38CDN! I was happy:)
Look, it's the old saying. You get what you pay for.
You're paying $50CDN/mo for service that should cost you around $60USD/mo! You're getting it cheap and it's usually reliable and fast.
Thus, I don't think that you have reason to complain.
*if* you were on a 99.999% uptime commercial contract and paying $500/mo, *then* you could complain.
I'm more than happy to pay $50 and get put out for a few days every few years. At least, my service has been very reliable. Occasional half-hour blackouts, but only a few significant events in the entire 2+ years that I've had them. Once was due to a massive blackout because a trunk was cut that wasn't their fault, and once was when they decided that we couldn't use static configuration anymore, we had to use DHCP (even though we have practically static addresses), and that caused some grief.
Oh yeah, forgot about that, our cable is also static IP (for the most part), and the Sympatico HSE DSL for the same price here is dynamic IP, and much slower.
take your pick, at least you still have broadband. If they didn't raise their prices you'd most likely be on a 56k right now... Perhaps excite@home should have done that instead of going belly-up.
If you're rogers, and you find out that you have like a month in order to do the changes, do you think you'll have time to do full testing?. To be perfectly fair, they didn't have the amount of time required in order to do full load testing and everything before they needed to switch out. As it was they switched out only a week before excite "might" be turning their lights out.
As for the login names, well, I have switched using Eudora 5.1 and had no problem. Most recent versions of email software shouldn't have any problem, and on their web site they layed out explicit instructions for not only the "official" supported clients, BUT ALSO the unsupported email clients too.
I think that they did all they could in the time that they were given.
Don't forget, this is no trivial task they are being asked to perform, and as you know fully well most of the time it's the management's fault, not giving the techs enough money, and in turn you can't really blame the management because they're on a strict budget.
I mean, COME ON, you are getting really high speed access. In my case in Toronto area I get, at maximum, 4mbit/s downstream and capped at 400kbit/s upstream. I can get single connection speeds of upwards of 180KB/s if the sending server is fast enough.
And you get all of this for $50CAD ($32USD) PER MONTH. That's cheaper than anywhere in the states, and you get faster speeds. For this price can you really complain if their email servers crashed because they only had a month to do a full switchover?
Just because you lost your precious email for a few days doesn't mean that you should go nuts. Get a little more fiber in you diet.
As for Sympatico, HA. DSL is slow, at least much slower than cable ever was for me (With the exception of being in res. 70 modem connections servicing 250 students on a single ring, yes, THAT was slow). 768kbit/s downstream vs 4mbit/s... Which do you think is better? Also 500kbit/s upstream vs 128kbit/s... I'd take cable any day.
Set your comment level to 0 and read any stories on/. that deal with Microsoft or Linux, and then say all of that again. The majority of users here do nothing but slam microsoft at every opportunity that they get, and yes, insult microsoft users. Sometimes even browsing at a level of 2 isn't enough to keep them out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is betamax vs VHS. Bluray vs HDDVD.
What you mention is true, but how many people want to connect a high end video card to their computer over an external port? A few dozen?
One or two niche cases that aren't even a blip on the radar will not save thunderbolt. USB is ubiquitous, backwards compatibility guarantees a winner speed or not. How many devices do you use that use more than USB 2.0 bandwidth vs total USB devices that you have? The fact that it is also the charging standard means that they would really have to screw up to lose the crown.
So let me get this straight. If they ship me something that I did not order, I can either:
a) keep it at full price
or
b) say that I don't want it
In the second case, they will either eat the shipping cost both ways, offer me a discount, or just give it to me for free.
Why would I ever select option a? Yes, then they wouldn't ship me stuff ahead of me asking for it, but considering that I typically don't even know what I want until I go looking for it, I'm not sure how Amazon is going to do any better. Especially based on what I see recommended (maybe 1 of 10 items I *might* want)... seems like it's conceptually doomed.
I could see this being useful for businesses who need JIT delivery, but there's already a system for that.
We have those in my city. Some people hate it, but others love it. I use it to pace myself. If I am approaching a light and see five seconds left, I slow down way in advance of the light. Saves gas and my brakes.
So 6 cars have a 2% reduction? Does that mean that I need 300 cars to fully power my office building?
Why does the title say that 6 cars can power an office building? By that logic, my cellphone battery can power my house!
It's these exact problems that finally forced me to switch to chrome, and I haven't looked back. Having 2/3 of my plugins stop working every few weeks was boggling. The rapid-release schedule doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and then to force compatibility problems makes it seem like they WANT users to leave.
This depends - are you looking to learn the new coding methods to remain competitive in the workplace, or just for fun?
Honestly if you make a living doing this then you need to adapt. You need to get over your preconceptions and accept the changes to the way computing works. There are millions of programmers out there, if you want to stay employed you need to show that you're adaptable to the new technologies while applying all of the tried-and-true knowledge and experience from your past. It's hard enough to get a job when you're more than a decade out of school.
Trust me, I understand where you're coming from. I hate the inefficiencies of the languages these days. I dislike the general idea of doing anything other than a script in a scripted language. However my (perhaps anachronistic) viewpoints don't have many applicable places anymore. Unfortunately the tradeoff between RAD and proper coding often leans a little too far to the RAD side, necessitating the use of many types of languages and tools that you will undoubtedly not enjoy.
Not only will you be a lot more productive, but you'll be a lot more marketable if you just succumb to the "dark side" that is today's trend in programming languages.
Not to incite, but I too have been with Kiva for a while (5 years), have made about 200 loans and my default rate is 0.55%. Carefully choosing those that you donate to can lead you to have very low risk and great reward for the karma and sense of accomplishment far more than monetary interest ever could get you. Honestly I have no idea how anyone could have a 30% loss rate considering that the average default rate is 1.09%. Please do not besmirch a fantastic organization with inaccurate statistics.
Yeah, I'd like to introduce the OP to this little thing out here that we have called "the internet".
You see on "the internet" the VAST MAJORITY of websites that use flash would not (by any sane or right-minded person) be classified as "drop-dead gorgeous". In fact many of them are aberrations of nature.
Flash has become a way for ignorant web designers lead by even more ignorant managers to design glittery and flashy (no pun intended) websites that focus on dazzling the user instead of usable and content-filled designs. Poor Jakob Nielsen probably cries himself to sleep every night.
Yes there are a few solitary websites out there that do use flash productively and do things that genuinely can be justified as a valued-added usage of flash that could not have been provided in plain HTML, but those are far and few between.
So what this sensationalist article is really spouting is that there are yet no good development tools for HTML5. Wow Really? So a product that just came out (relatively speaking) doesn't have as good or as many design tools yet as a product that has been around for a 14 years. Good thing you pointed that out!
Once the HTML5 tools are available and it's as easy to develop "drop-dead gorgeous" (for better or worse) websites for HTML5 as it is for Flash I think that Adobe is going to have trouble justifying Flash's existence ESPECIALLY because some of those utilities are going to be open-source and free.
I was there from Nov 28 to Dec 02 just wandering around Berlin, and I saw this and took a picture. you can find it here (take a note of the uptime, that's a W2K machine!)
In any case, it was pretty cool and I was watching it for a while, but that really doesn't look like a house, it's an office building in downtown Berlin... well "downtown" Berlin...
I am a Canadian... I went through their stupid process, and it decided to "reject" both of my credit cards, one saying that it was "locked" and the other one just didn't give me a reason. So I sent them an email and got a canned response back in return:
Thank you for contacting PayPal. We apologize for the delay in responding
to your service request.
I apologize for not being able to add this card to your PayPal account.
Unfortunately, this card was not accepted by our verification system. This
does impact valid cards occasionally and is not reflective of your credit
worthiness. For our security, we cannot register any cards that cannot be
verified by our system. Sorry for this inconvenience.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
However, to my surprise, BOTH CARDS were billed for their $1 fee... So I wrote them back saying "here's the code from my credit car statement proving that I own it, would you like a copy of my drivers license as well?" (well, I went on for more than that, asking them about how come their credit card verification system is so flawed), and what did I get back in return?
The same goddamed response.
So I replied again.
The same goddamed response.
I gave up. They get a bigass F- for customer service, and a A+ for incompetence.
Uh guys, VNC is to Terminal Services like what telnet is to X-windows. VNC is much slower, flaky, and doesn't have full compatibility.
...
With Terminal Services you can redirect sound, print jobs and serial port and floppy access, and mount your local drives on your remote machine for easy access. Last I checked VNC can't do that.
I love it, because I just leave my computer on with my ICQ and email and everything running, come in to work (where we are behind a firewall, but the TS port is open), and just connect back home and it's like I'm sitting there.
Yes, and I am well aware of x-windows as well, but that doesn't allow you to connect to an already running session. It does have the advantage that it's not transmitting screen captures like VNC is.
And I have heard about plenty of "quirks" and errors and problems with using linux, so
And tell me, on your blue screen of death, what was the message? I'd bet that it was due to shitty hardware or a driver incompatibility, and last time I checked you cannot hold Microsoft responsible for what 3rd parties write... Thus driver errors are *NOT* microsoft's problem, but hey, I was running Win2K and it BSOD'd so it must be MS's fault, right? Couldn't be that third rate ISA sound card that I just installed...
So yes, to quote you it is absolutely amazing how ignorant people are about what's out there...
if anything I was dissing microsoft... I don't know what colour those glasses are that you're looking at the world with... :)
Yes, and there is a LOT more of the ignorant "micro$oft $uXX" posts running around than there are posts defending or supporting microsoft, so how come you don't complain about those?
ah christ guys, it was a JOKE, leave me alone already.
And to the trolls who have been following me around marking my posts as flaimbait, don't you have anything better to do?
Visual Age is a POS really, I tried it and it's horrbile.
And I have an inherant dislike of Java because it's designed to be inefficient and slow. It's a beast. I have been programming in it fulltime now for a year however, and I can appreciate that it comes with libraries that make things easy, however I dislike the language itself. It's like the "oohhh, no you're not smart enough to play with pointers!" type of thing. I know that in many cases programmers don't want to care about memory allocation and pointers, but what if I like optimization and efficiency? There should at least be some way to give me that functionality.
Having said that, C# looks rather interesting.
MFC is very very old.
I have a circa 1995 program called Optima Power++ that makes it so incredibly easy to develop in C++ for windows... Like Visual Basic made easy for C... very very sweet. I can still use that to design the UI and then write the guts in a newer RAD tool... It's great. Very very easy. I don't think that anything like this exists quite yet for linux, but if I am wrong please tell me where!
As someone else pointed out, paying $72/year for any online amature news site is completely outrageous.
I can get magazine subscriptions (PCMag, et al) for like $40/year... I can get a HUGE newspaper at my door *every day* for $60/year, and I can *guarantee* you that it has a lot more coverate and stories and information than any online news site around will have, and it will be a lot better written too. Plus I'm not tied to my computer to read it, which as of right now is a nice thing. Sure, the wireless internet is great, but during a 45min commute to work in a carpool it's great to just flip open a newspaper.
I'd pay for salon if it was $30/year, but I think that's the magic number for me. Any more than that and there is a lot better places to go to get the information that I want.
SecureIIS application firewall security alert
HTTP Request caused a security alert, please contact our web master if you are getting this alert in error.
---
What is SecureIIS
SecureIIS offers websites running Microsoft Internet Information Server a broad range of protection from common vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. Because SecureIIS does not protect against specific vulnerabilities, but classes of vulnerabilities, it allows for a much more far reaching layer of security.
Is it possible that if HTTP_REFER == "www.slashdot.org" then they classify that as a "potential security risk"? This is Microsoft software after all
You can get brand new iPAQs 3670s on eBay for $350USD-$400.
I've also seen them in stores for $550USD-$600.
The iPAQs are more expensive, yes, almost certainly in part to the WinCE lincense, however in many cases YGWYPF (you get what you pay for). I can't really comment because I haven't used one of these Sharp units yet, but I can't wait to try one.
Also, we have no idea WHAT the sale price of the Sharp unit will be, as it's not in stores yet. It could turn out to be $450, and by that time new iPAQs could have dropped to the same (in stores), so it's unfair to make a price comparison yet.
In my opinion, is a WINE for WinCE... If it had that, I'd buy one in a second.
.NET comes out, you'll have a lot of WinCE applications that are just an extension of what you have on your desktop (I've heard some about what you will be able to do, and it will be damned neat for anyone who doesn't have a vendetta against Microsoft). For example, I have a friend who has an iPAQ with a wireless card in it, and he can use Terminal Services to TS to his main workstation while he's in a meeting, monitor his build progress, change a few things and recompile, and a bunch of other things. It's really quite neat.
As for the people who are saying that it's so easy to program, have you ever done any windows programming? I find it a *lot* easier to do programming for WinCE/Windows using any of the nice RAD tools that you can get, and I don't see so much in the way of linux, but I could be wrong.
I am absolutely in love with the keyboard, as I had a Rim pager for a while and absolutely loved that keyboard. It took a bit of getting used to, but it was so much nicer than using a stylus.
The only thing that I'm worried about for these devices is the "quirks" that are so typically linux. I've used linux a lot, and it works great, that is provided that nothing goes wrong. As soon as anything goes wrong you require a lot more knowledge than the average CS person to get it working again, and there are also a lot more applications out there for WinCE than there are for Linux. Add to that when
Let the flaming begin, but if WinCE was available for this device then I'd definitely wait for it to roll out before buying a new PDA. But at this point in time I've heard too many complaints about using embedded linux (if you have any comments, no flames please, but I'd be glad to hear rational comments) and my personal experience with desktop linux hasn't been fantastic either. The last time I tried it the default install wouldn't work on either my old or my new laptop, and I still have yet to be able to recompile the kernel on my old laptop without it doing a kernel panic on boot.
In any case, just my opinion.
Oh yeah, I forgot about when I was in residence at the university.
... So basically I had a month of high speed access and a month of decent access for free. I wasn't too angry with them after that. DSL gave me one month free, so for 4 months of having direct internet, I paid $38CDN! I was happy :)
I presigned up and was up within frosh week, very fast, very good.
Unfortunately within 6 weeks we had 70 modems attached to our single segment serving about 250 people. I was lucky to get 10kb/sec.
Most techs were useless, except I found one tech who gave me some exact numbers and said "yes, unfortunately there is not much we can do at the moment, however we have calls out to break up the segment to solve the problem, but realistically it'll be a few months before you see this happen"... I said fine, and he told me to talk to one of the senior managers. I gave him my case, and he basically said "OK, I understand why you're frustrated, and I can understand your decision to switch to DSL, just so there's no hard feelings, we'll send a tech over to pick up the modem, and I'll zero out your bill."
I have mail, I dunno what's wrong with yours.
Look, it's the old saying. You get what you pay for.
You're paying $50CDN/mo for service that should cost you around $60USD/mo! You're getting it cheap and it's usually reliable and fast.
Thus, I don't think that you have reason to complain.
*if* you were on a 99.999% uptime commercial contract and paying $500/mo, *then* you could complain.
I'm more than happy to pay $50 and get put out for a few days every few years. At least, my service has been very reliable. Occasional half-hour blackouts, but only a few significant events in the entire 2+ years that I've had them. Once was due to a massive blackout because a trunk was cut that wasn't their fault, and once was when they decided that we couldn't use static configuration anymore, we had to use DHCP (even though we have practically static addresses), and that caused some grief.
Oh yeah, forgot about that, our cable is also static IP (for the most part), and the Sympatico HSE DSL for the same price here is dynamic IP, and much slower.
Re raising prices,
take your pick, at least you still have broadband. If they didn't raise their prices you'd most likely be on a 56k right now... Perhaps excite@home should have done that instead of going belly-up.
Oh COME ON.
If you're rogers, and you find out that you have like a month in order to do the changes, do you think you'll have time to do full testing?. To be perfectly fair, they didn't have the amount of time required in order to do full load testing and everything before they needed to switch out. As it was they switched out only a week before excite "might" be turning their lights out.
As for the login names, well, I have switched using Eudora 5.1 and had no problem. Most recent versions of email software shouldn't have any problem, and on their web site they layed out explicit instructions for not only the "official" supported clients, BUT ALSO the unsupported email clients too.
I think that they did all they could in the time that they were given.
Don't forget, this is no trivial task they are being asked to perform, and as you know fully well most of the time it's the management's fault, not giving the techs enough money, and in turn you can't really blame the management because they're on a strict budget.
I mean, COME ON, you are getting really high speed access. In my case in Toronto area I get, at maximum, 4mbit/s downstream and capped at 400kbit/s upstream. I can get single connection speeds of upwards of 180KB/s if the sending server is fast enough.
And you get all of this for $50CAD ($32USD) PER MONTH. That's cheaper than anywhere in the states, and you get faster speeds. For this price can you really complain if their email servers crashed because they only had a month to do a full switchover?
Just because you lost your precious email for a few days doesn't mean that you should go nuts. Get a little more fiber in you diet.
As for Sympatico, HA. DSL is slow, at least much slower than cable ever was for me (With the exception of being in res. 70 modem connections servicing 250 students on a single ring, yes, THAT was slow). 768kbit/s downstream vs 4mbit/s... Which do you think is better? Also 500kbit/s upstream vs 128kbit/s... I'd take cable any day.
So no, it's not time to switch providers.
man that really made me laugh out loud.
/. that deal with Microsoft or Linux, and then say all of that again. The majority of users here do nothing but slam microsoft at every opportunity that they get, and yes, insult microsoft users. Sometimes even browsing at a level of 2 isn't enough to keep them out.
Set your comment level to 0 and read any stories on
Wow what a hoot.
I think I'm just anti-anti-microsoft, that's all. I think they get beat up far too often for things that aren't always their fault.