Keep in mind that according to your service agreement with your ISP, they will probably hold you accountable for anything done with your connection, whether you were aware of it or not. So, for example, if someone sets up a laptop in front of your house and starts uploading kiddie porn somewhere, and somebody complains to your ISP, at the very least I'd expect your Internet access to be shut down.
Seems to me the problem is, politicians know that spending more money on their campaign is more effective at getting votes than actually doing what voters want. Perhaps the less popular you are, the more money it costs per vote, but if you don't pour money into your campaign, your opponent will, and you will lose, even if everyone with half a brain hates your opponent.
Let's get some equal coverage here on this unbiased "news" site called Slashdot
Slashdot has NEVER claimed to be unbiased. From the FAQ:
Personally, I have a pet peeve when people post comments saying things like "That's not News For Nerds!" and "That's not Stuff that Matters!" Slashdot has been running for almost 5 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker on what ends up on the homepage.... We've been running Slashdot for a long time, and if we occasionally want to post something that someone doesn't think is right for Slashdot, well, we're the ones who get to make the call.
If you're not happy about that, you don't have to keep coming back.:-)
OTOH, when I was having login and speed problems due to the update roundabout, I couldn't get a single person at ELN who could tell me WTF was going on. Normally their tech support is pretty good, so I have to wonder about this.
I don't know how much information is communicated between the people who work with the equipment and the people who answer the phones. Quite possibly not very much. Earthlink outsources some of their Windows tier-1 dialup support to other companies (they do tier-2, Mac dialup, and DSL support in-house). Also, Earthlink is a national ISP with millions of customers; a tech may not be aware of a specific issue with your particular CO. I did DSL support for Earthlink, but we had under a quarter million DSL customers, and regional problems were a bit easier to keep track of.
Finally, I noticed the Prosecutor called the software burglar tools. Well last I checked even they are legal to make and sell. They are illegal to possess if you are not a lock smith. So even that analogy is flawed.
Somebody needs to bring this up in court! In the DeCSS case, the MPAA's lawyers compared DeCSS to a "digital crowbar" that could be used to break into people's houses and commit crimes. Guess what? I have a crowbar in my garage! I could go down to Home Depot and buy crowbars in a variety of sizes! This is the United States of America; nobody's gonna tell me I can't buy a crowbar. But the electronic equivalent should be illegal? What's up with that?
is it really so bad? Couldn't we just use IP numbers directly? Sure, it's not the best, but lookups on WHOIS could make "mission critical" things like accessing my yahoo account still work!
Ummm, who do you think runs those whois servers you're querying? The same companies that control the DNS servers.
Get some cardboard, and cut out a piece in the shape of a standard ATX motherboard. Draw some chips on it. Cut out some cardboard PCI cards; attach them with duct or masking tape. Tape the whole thing inside the case. Draw tiny parallel lines on a long strip of paper; make it resemble an IDE ribbon. Get some string, run it around between things. And definitely, the transparent side panel is a must.
If the tech had to be that sneaky about it to avoid getting caught helping you, you should complain to upper management. Write a letter to the president of the company, or to the callcenter director maybe (not to the tech's supervisor or that supervisor's manager, it has to go higher than that). Let them know that you really appreciate what that tech wanted to do, and they were able to solve your problem, and if they hadn't been able to solve your problem, you would have taken your business elsewhere - but you think management's draconian policies about what the tech is and is not allowed to help you with are apalling, and you will not recommend their company to any of the clients you consult for unless you get some assurance that the environment will change. You were able to get help by being sneaky, but you can't expect other people to be sneaky like that, and you can't risk your reputation by recommending their company if things continue like this.
Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.
I think this is the key motivation for a lot of techs. If you can explain something in a public forum, and 20 people read it and understand it, you've just saved yourself and the rest of your team 20 phone calls, all in a couple of minutes. The fewer calls there are, the less stressful the job is (management doesn't bitch so much about long call times, and customers don't bitch so much about long hold times).
And having worked at four different ISPs, I can tell you this is nonsense. Sure, if the ISP's admins don't know what they're doing, something may be misconfigured, but at most larger ISPs, the admins are quite competent. You would be amazed at what kinds of things can disrupt a dialup connection. Did you know that many people get different connection rates depending on the weather? Some people can't connect at all after a storm, even though their voice phone service seems to work fine. Copper POTS lines were never intended to carry data.
I've seen connections improve by replacing the phone jack in the wall. Moisture builds up and the contacts become corroded. It's not some lame excuse tech support made up to get you off the phone - it might not be the answer to your problem, but it's a known issue that can't be ruled out yet.
How do you explain it when a thousand other customers can all connect just fine, and you're the only one having problems, but you're connecting to the exact same equipment as everyone else is? Is that the ISP's fault?
You can dial your friend's ISP and get better speeds, so you assume your ISP is to blame. Take your computer to a friend's house, and plug into his phone line. Your connection speed vastly improves. Whose fault is it now?
And then there's 56k. First of all, did you know it's impossible to make a 56k connection if there's more than one conversion between analog and digital anywhere on the connection? Your analog line is converted to a digital signal at your phone company's central office - that's one conversion. If it converts back to analog at the other end, 56k is impossible.
Secondly, there are four protocols for 56k: X2, k56flex, v.90, and v.92. v.92 is pretty new and not widely supported, so I'm not familiar with it, and it's basically just an improvement over v.90. The other three, however, are all quite different. Now, everybody supports v.90, but that wasn't the case a few years ago. USR supports X2, Diamond and Lucent support k56flex. When v.90 came out, all the modem manufacturers released firmware updates to make X2 or k56flex modems support v.90 as well. However, early implementations of v.90 were astoundingly buggy. ISPs were applying firmware patches to their terminal servers as well. Picture this: X2 modems connect to the ISP at 56k. k56flex modems connect to the ISP at 33.6 (they drop down to v.34), because the ISP doesn't support v.90. The ISP updates to support v.90. The customers update to support v.90. X2 modems try to connect with v.90 and fail half the time. Enter an init string to make them use X2 instead, and they work fine again. k56flex users can now connect with v.90, and maybe they have better success. The ISP does another update, and now all those X2 modems can connect properly with v.90, so that's great - but now some k56flex modems can't connect at all anymore. Enter an init string to force them to drop down to v.34 (and the particular init string required to do this is different for each manufacturer, and they're usually cryptic, like "+MS=11,1"). Now they can get online, and go download a firmware update, and now v.90 works again (after changing the init string to re-enable v.90). A new firmware patch for the terminal servers is released, and the ISP tests it - it fixes a lot of problems. They roll it out, and it works great, until a modem manufacturer releases a firmware update that isn't compatible with the ISP's new firmware. So, the ISP splits their modem pool, and gives different dialup numbers to people with different brands of modems.
I don't do dialup support anymore, so I can't say how much of this is still an issue. I would imagine most of these kinds of incompatibilities have been resolved, now that v.90 has had a few years to mature. Still, don't assume the ISP is always responsible for your problems.
The tools are not the computers; the tools are the programs. Here, they compared the same tools, therefore the "quality" is the same.
Wrong. You're forgetting the operating system. It makes a big difference. An application running on Mac OS X and the same application running on Windows XP are NOT the same tool. I suspect anyone who disagrees has never really worked on a Mac.
You neglected to mention that the original 1701 from TOS was Constitution class. Also, the upgraded 1701-D with the third warp nacelle from the future that never happened in "All Good Things".
I heard a rumor that Gene Roddenberry had insisted that warp nacelles should always be in pairs, so you could have two or four of them but never three. He had recently passed away, so a third nacelle was used in that episode just because they knew it would have pissed him off - they also did as many other things in that episode as they could for the same reason. Can anyone comment?
Legally, the Phoenix browser does not infringe on Phoenix Technologies' trademark any more than the University of Phoenix, the City of Phoenix (or even the City of Phoenix). However, notice they said "The kind folks over at phoenix.com" - Phoenix Technologies has every right to be unhappy about about the Phoenix browser, and if they have politely asked the name to be changed, then this really isn't a legal issue. The Phoenix browser can be renamed simply to be nice.
IANAL, and I have no idea what I'm talking about. This is Slashdot after all.:-)
Perhaps it would be better to say you've already gone to Linux on the servers, and you're seriously thinking about going to Linux on the desktops, because although you do keep good track of your licenses, you're afraid of the potential costs of a Microsoft audit. See how they respond to that.;-)
I seem to recal that the basic instructions for the PPC CPUs are taken from x86, meaning that at a basic level PPC CPUs are x86.
You recall incorrectly. x86 is a CISC instruction set, meaning it has lots of instructions that do many things per instruction. PPC is a RISC instruction set, meaning it has simple instructions that don't do much. It takes more PPC instructions to do the same work as fewer x86 instructions. This is offset by the PPC being able to process more instructions per clock cycle than the x86.
PPC and x86 are no more similar than, say, MIPS and m68k.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong; I probably messed up a detail or two.
I'd take any old computer! As long as it's a 486 or higher, it's still useful. Especially to a geek! Or give it to your child. Or just put it somewhere and use it as a typewriter. Or a print server. Or a regular ol' server. Or a file server. Or a router. Or a dildo. Er...maybe not the last one...but you catch my drift.
I just had another hard drive fail this week. It won't spin up. Probably due to the faulty power supply, which I also had to replace. Of course I won't be throwing out an entire PC, but I will be getting rid of some components.
"As long as it's a 486 or higher" - what if it's not?
if google made $1 everytime someone used them to find an answer to a tech support question, they would 0wn microsoft.
I always find it amusing when the answer to your question is in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but Microsoft's search engine doesn't seem to find it. Hint: add "site:support.microsoft.com" to the end of your query. For example, to see Microsoft's definition of quality:
Q218155:...the Wininet.dll file determines if the HTML content attached to the HTTP error is a well designed Web page. This is based on the size of the page.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that according to your service agreement with your ISP, they will probably hold you accountable for anything done with your connection, whether you were aware of it or not. So, for example, if someone sets up a laptop in front of your house and starts uploading kiddie porn somewhere, and somebody complains to your ISP, at the very least I'd expect your Internet access to be shut down.
Maybe the CLI environment is more UNIX than Linux is, but the kernel is Mach, the GUI is Quartz, and the APIs are Carbon and Cocoa.
;-)
That said, being able to type "crontab -e" and having it open in BBEdit is pretty amazing.
Seems to me the problem is, politicians know that spending more money on their campaign is more effective at getting votes than actually doing what voters want. Perhaps the less popular you are, the more money it costs per vote, but if you don't pour money into your campaign, your opponent will, and you will lose, even if everyone with half a brain hates your opponent.
Pretty sad.
Wouldn't that just be Freshmeat?
Slashdot has NEVER claimed to be unbiased. From the FAQ:
If you're not happy about that, you don't have to keep coming back.
OTOH, when I was having login and speed problems due to the update roundabout, I couldn't get a single person at ELN who could tell me WTF was going on. Normally their tech support is pretty good, so I have to wonder about this.
I don't know how much information is communicated between the people who work with the equipment and the people who answer the phones. Quite possibly not very much. Earthlink outsources some of their Windows tier-1 dialup support to other companies (they do tier-2, Mac dialup, and DSL support in-house). Also, Earthlink is a national ISP with millions of customers; a tech may not be aware of a specific issue with your particular CO. I did DSL support for Earthlink, but we had under a quarter million DSL customers, and regional problems were a bit easier to keep track of.
Finally, I noticed the Prosecutor called the software burglar tools. Well last I checked even they are legal to make and sell. They are illegal to possess if you are not a lock smith. So even that analogy is flawed.
Somebody needs to bring this up in court! In the DeCSS case, the MPAA's lawyers compared DeCSS to a "digital crowbar" that could be used to break into people's houses and commit crimes. Guess what? I have a crowbar in my garage! I could go down to Home Depot and buy crowbars in a variety of sizes! This is the United States of America; nobody's gonna tell me I can't buy a crowbar. But the electronic equivalent should be illegal? What's up with that?
is it really so bad? Couldn't we just use IP numbers directly? Sure, it's not the best, but lookups on WHOIS could make "mission critical" things like accessing my yahoo account still work!
Ummm, who do you think runs those whois servers you're querying? The same companies that control the DNS servers.
Get some cardboard, and cut out a piece in the shape of a standard ATX motherboard. Draw some chips on it. Cut out some cardboard PCI cards; attach them with duct or masking tape. Tape the whole thing inside the case. Draw tiny parallel lines on a long strip of paper; make it resemble an IDE ribbon. Get some string, run it around between things. And definitely, the transparent side panel is a must.
If the tech had to be that sneaky about it to avoid getting caught helping you, you should complain to upper management. Write a letter to the president of the company, or to the callcenter director maybe (not to the tech's supervisor or that supervisor's manager, it has to go higher than that). Let them know that you really appreciate what that tech wanted to do, and they were able to solve your problem, and if they hadn't been able to solve your problem, you would have taken your business elsewhere - but you think management's draconian policies about what the tech is and is not allowed to help you with are apalling, and you will not recommend their company to any of the clients you consult for unless you get some assurance that the environment will change. You were able to get help by being sneaky, but you can't expect other people to be sneaky like that, and you can't risk your reputation by recommending their company if things continue like this.
Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.
I think this is the key motivation for a lot of techs. If you can explain something in a public forum, and 20 people read it and understand it, you've just saved yourself and the rest of your team 20 phone calls, all in a couple of minutes. The fewer calls there are, the less stressful the job is (management doesn't bitch so much about long call times, and customers don't bitch so much about long hold times).
And having worked at four different ISPs, I can tell you this is nonsense. Sure, if the ISP's admins don't know what they're doing, something may be misconfigured, but at most larger ISPs, the admins are quite competent. You would be amazed at what kinds of things can disrupt a dialup connection. Did you know that many people get different connection rates depending on the weather? Some people can't connect at all after a storm, even though their voice phone service seems to work fine. Copper POTS lines were never intended to carry data.
I've seen connections improve by replacing the phone jack in the wall. Moisture builds up and the contacts become corroded. It's not some lame excuse tech support made up to get you off the phone - it might not be the answer to your problem, but it's a known issue that can't be ruled out yet.
How do you explain it when a thousand other customers can all connect just fine, and you're the only one having problems, but you're connecting to the exact same equipment as everyone else is? Is that the ISP's fault?
You can dial your friend's ISP and get better speeds, so you assume your ISP is to blame. Take your computer to a friend's house, and plug into his phone line. Your connection speed vastly improves. Whose fault is it now?
And then there's 56k. First of all, did you know it's impossible to make a 56k connection if there's more than one conversion between analog and digital anywhere on the connection? Your analog line is converted to a digital signal at your phone company's central office - that's one conversion. If it converts back to analog at the other end, 56k is impossible.
Secondly, there are four protocols for 56k: X2, k56flex, v.90, and v.92. v.92 is pretty new and not widely supported, so I'm not familiar with it, and it's basically just an improvement over v.90. The other three, however, are all quite different. Now, everybody supports v.90, but that wasn't the case a few years ago. USR supports X2, Diamond and Lucent support k56flex. When v.90 came out, all the modem manufacturers released firmware updates to make X2 or k56flex modems support v.90 as well. However, early implementations of v.90 were astoundingly buggy. ISPs were applying firmware patches to their terminal servers as well. Picture this: X2 modems connect to the ISP at 56k. k56flex modems connect to the ISP at 33.6 (they drop down to v.34), because the ISP doesn't support v.90. The ISP updates to support v.90. The customers update to support v.90. X2 modems try to connect with v.90 and fail half the time. Enter an init string to make them use X2 instead, and they work fine again. k56flex users can now connect with v.90, and maybe they have better success. The ISP does another update, and now all those X2 modems can connect properly with v.90, so that's great - but now some k56flex modems can't connect at all anymore. Enter an init string to force them to drop down to v.34 (and the particular init string required to do this is different for each manufacturer, and they're usually cryptic, like "+MS=11,1"). Now they can get online, and go download a firmware update, and now v.90 works again (after changing the init string to re-enable v.90). A new firmware patch for the terminal servers is released, and the ISP tests it - it fixes a lot of problems. They roll it out, and it works great, until a modem manufacturer releases a firmware update that isn't compatible with the ISP's new firmware. So, the ISP splits their modem pool, and gives different dialup numbers to people with different brands of modems.
I don't do dialup support anymore, so I can't say how much of this is still an issue. I would imagine most of these kinds of incompatibilities have been resolved, now that v.90 has had a few years to mature. Still, don't assume the ISP is always responsible for your problems.
The tools are not the computers; the tools are the programs. Here, they compared the same tools, therefore the "quality" is the same.
Wrong. You're forgetting the operating system. It makes a big difference. An application running on Mac OS X and the same application running on Windows XP are NOT the same tool. I suspect anyone who disagrees has never really worked on a Mac.
You mean when you are cheating?
Yeah, that was my thought too. Unless he means when his wife isn't cheating?
You neglected to mention that the original 1701 from TOS was Constitution class. Also, the upgraded 1701-D with the third warp nacelle from the future that never happened in "All Good Things".
I heard a rumor that Gene Roddenberry had insisted that warp nacelles should always be in pairs, so you could have two or four of them but never three. He had recently passed away, so a third nacelle was used in that episode just because they knew it would have pissed him off - they also did as many other things in that episode as they could for the same reason. Can anyone comment?
It was called eWorld, and it died quietly because nobody wanted it. It would have been similar to AOL, except not annoying.
Legally, the Phoenix browser does not infringe on Phoenix Technologies' trademark any more than the University of Phoenix, the City of Phoenix (or even the City of Phoenix). However, notice they said "The kind folks over at phoenix.com" - Phoenix Technologies has every right to be unhappy about about the Phoenix browser, and if they have politely asked the name to be changed, then this really isn't a legal issue. The Phoenix browser can be renamed simply to be nice.
:-)
IANAL, and I have no idea what I'm talking about. This is Slashdot after all.
Mozilla: I shall call him Mini-me! :-)
MiniMoz?
Put a blank white background behind that, add some corny music, and you've got a switch ad.
Perhaps it would be better to say you've already gone to Linux on the servers, and you're seriously thinking about going to Linux on the desktops, because although you do keep good track of your licenses, you're afraid of the potential costs of a Microsoft audit. See how they respond to that. ;-)
I seem to recal that the basic instructions for the PPC CPUs are taken from x86, meaning that at a basic level PPC CPUs are x86.
You recall incorrectly. x86 is a CISC instruction set, meaning it has lots of instructions that do many things per instruction. PPC is a RISC instruction set, meaning it has simple instructions that don't do much. It takes more PPC instructions to do the same work as fewer x86 instructions. This is offset by the PPC being able to process more instructions per clock cycle than the x86.
PPC and x86 are no more similar than, say, MIPS and m68k.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong; I probably messed up a detail or two.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." - Linus Torvalds
I'd take any old computer! As long as it's a 486 or higher, it's still useful. Especially to a geek! Or give it to your child. Or just put it somewhere and use it as a typewriter. Or a print server. Or a regular ol' server. Or a file server. Or a router. Or a dildo. Er...maybe not the last one...but you catch my drift.
I just had another hard drive fail this week. It won't spin up. Probably due to the faulty power supply, which I also had to replace. Of course I won't be throwing out an entire PC, but I will be getting rid of some components.
"As long as it's a 486 or higher" - what if it's not?
Is this what it's supposed to say?
if google made $1 everytime someone used them to find an answer to a tech support question, they would 0wn microsoft.
...the Wininet.dll file determines if the HTML content attached to the HTTP error is a well designed Web page. This is based on the size of the page.
I always find it amusing when the answer to your question is in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, but Microsoft's search engine doesn't seem to find it. Hint: add "site:support.microsoft.com" to the end of your query. For example, to see Microsoft's definition of quality:
well-designed web page site:support.microsoft.com
Q218155: