I don't think this is the sort of thing that people just google for. Few of us sit around and wonder if tech support was so crappy 15 years ago, though I agree that you're right. It's news because somebody wrote a good story about it.:)
It's news because not everyone has worked that kind of job. Most of the people here on/. also know enough about their computers to never have to call that sort of line.
It's important to be reminded that normal users out there have a hard time with their computers. The user interfaces that they're given aren't necessarily the best or easiest to use, there's a lot of things that salespeople sell them that they don't need and add to the complexity of their machines, and all they want to do is read their email.
Well, I don't disagree. I certainly pay more in service fees than I make in interest. Some bank accounts (like the President's Choice bank accounts at Superstore) give 3% on a regular savings account with no fees. That's pretty good.
The reason why the bank needs my SIN is because even with a regular savings account, the interest is in MY favour. That is, I make money off of THEM. If I buy some sort of guaranteed savings bond, the interest rate is higher. I'm making income, and so it has to be reported to the CCRA (Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, roughly the equivalent of the IRS) so I can be taxed on it.
Credit card companies never let me make money off of them. There's no income involved, so nothing I can be taxed on. The government doesn't need to know how much I bought for any reason. In the case that they DO need to know how much I'm buying, they can go to the credit card company (presumably with a court order) and make them relinquish the documents that they need.
Credit card companies do NOT need your SIN. If they've asked for yours and you've given it, that's your option. You may even be able to ask for them to remove it from their databases, but I'm not sure how that would work.
If you want to read more about it, you can see the privacy commisioner's site about SINs here: http://www.privcom.gc.ca/fs-fi/02_05_d_02_e.asp
Sorry, are you talking US or Canada? I realize that it's hopeless in the States, but I have a perfectly reasonable credit rating without giving out my SIN number to anybody that asks. When I fill out credit card applications in the past, I just put a big line through the SIN portion, and that was that. I wasn't turned down for those credit cards, either.
It's illegal to REQUIRE a SIN (Social Insurance Number) in Canada if you aren't the government, an employer, or are somehow related to taxation. My bank can ask me for a SIN because they need to report the amount of income I made on interest. A credit card company CAN NOT ask for my SIN. If I refuse to provide it, and they refuse their service, I can file a complaint against the company. The SIN number is not meant as a unique identifier for anyone other than the government.
If someone asks for it, read the fine print. It's usually optional. If it's not optional, make sure you phone the company and ask why it's required, and make sure they know that you know that it's not necessary for them to have it. DON'T GIVE IT OUT. It's not necessary to have your SIN for companies to do a credit check on you here.
Re:And the thing about Prada that is most positive
on
RFID Tags For The Rich
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Mwaha.
For those of you that aren't Canadian, or have never heard of Radio Free Vestibule (I think they're just called 'Vestibule' now), this comes from one of their sketches. Zalgon-26 McGee's fine clothing!
Load times are peculilarily subjective. By far, it's the fastest browser I've ever used. Mozilla was slow in its interface as well as slow when loading pages. Phoenix was better, but never quite as good as Opera for me.
You don't have to pay, you know. You can have the little banner ad up in the top corner doing its thing. With the coming of context sensitive Google ads up there, I actually think it's worth it for me NOT to pay for it. I like those little things up there.
I just wish they'd hurry the port of version 7 for OS X. I miss a lot of the mouse gestures and things that I get with Opera.
I used to have crashes here and there, but I found I didn't care very much, since Opera is good about knowing what sites you were visiting when the browser crashed. So, I can always restore my state to the last thing that was going on when it died on me.
Opera's crashes are very much version dependent. Some are much worse than others.
Personally, I could never get used to the way that Mozilla did ANYTHING. Without Multizilla, I was forever opening new Windows instead of new Tabs. For my browsing needs, I never want to open a new window except under very specific instances. I found Mozilla opening up new windows all the time.
Also, Mozilla's tabs are exactly one size, regardless of the size of the original window. Opera's tabs are little windows, maintained within a big window. Sure, I normally have them maximized anyway, but it comes in handy now and then to have them resizeable.
I dunno. Both browsers, from an overall view work similarily, and both do a good job. For me, it was the little details that made Opera more appealing. It's hard to explain all the little things that I like about it, but at this point, I'm too familiar with it to change, unless something monumentally better comes along.
Will they have patches so that it actually freaking RUNS without crashing all over the place? I couldn't even make it off the ship at the beginning without the game crashing. It would crash in an auto-saved transition, too, so if I ran the game again, it would crash instantaneously if I tried to play from where I left off.
I went looking for fixes, and people were having the same problem, and proposed registry hacks to fix things. I sold the game. I shouldn't have to do THAT much to get it running, and if it doesn't run, they should patch it as quickly as possible.
It was easily the worst port I ever played, so I sold it. I tried the Mac version, and I managed to make it off the ship before I ran into the same problems with the game crashing. I gave up. I'm glad I got the game in trades. I would have been really mad if I had paid money for it.
I just got a flyer from Primus, a long distance and internet provider. They have something called 'Talking Broadband'. You order it, and they send you a little thing to plug into your network, and you connect the phone to that. Not only do they transfer your phone number over, but you can pick a new number, and you can pick the area code of any place that they service, no matter where you live. As well, you can attach up to two 'alternate' phone numbers with their own area codes. I live in Edmonton, and I'm thinking of signing up for the service and getting an alternate number with a Toronto area code. That way, phone calls that friends in Toronto make to that number are local calls. I get one-way unlimited long distance for $4 a month. I can't phone out on that line, but that's okay.
Check it out. Primus also does business in the States, though it doesn't look like they have this service in particular. You should mail and ask.
Hey, I agree. But it's value added. It makes no sense to WASTE the harddrive that's in the DJ. It wouldn't have been very hard to make it work properly. It's just lazy.
I guess that's what $50 extra gets you these days.:)
The reason it's been lost is because it's not true. The iPod's primary use is listening to music, but it's also a fully functionaly firewire harddrive (that you can boot a Mac off of, leading to a number of posts by SysAdmins saying that their iPod is part of their emergency server death toolbox), keeps your contacts and important dates and appointments, and has a few games on there to keep you amused if you ever have to go shoe shopping with your girlfriend.
And anyway, if it's hard to navigate to your music, or play exactly what you want (which is something that I'm getting from people here that post about their Dell DJs), it's not as useful, even if you only have to set everything up once. If you're spending 5 minutes finding and playing your music instead of 5 seconds, you're going to be frustrated with your device. Interface design is something of a lost art, and it's nice to see that Apple is still trying to make something that a lot of people find complicated (honestly! Not everyone is like a/. reader) easy to use.
That's a pretty poor reason. At least with the iPod, the only thing that's obfuscated is how to get the music off. At all other times, it's a fully functional and useful Firewire hard drive. You can't casually copy the music off the iPod, either, but at least you can always get files on and off the device.
I use my iPod primarily for music, but when my sister busted the DVD-ROM drive on her laptop, the only way that I could get a couple big files to her that she needed was by putting them on my iPod and transferring them that way. What a useless hassle to carry around a driver disk at all times.
Oh, I don't mean that testing whether it's broken or not is hard to test, merely whether it's a Cocoa-level bug, or a Safari-level bug. It could be that Apple screwed up at the API/Cocoa level, or that the Safari programmers all took a day off and forgot to put dropdown bars in the cycle.
I keep 20 or 30 windows open at all times. I can generally find what I need very quickly, even if the windows do start to blur together. If I've got 8 terminal windows, I usually just switch to any one of them using F9 and then pick which one I want using F10. At that resolution, I can definitely distinguish between my windows.
Ah, I see what you mean by not being able to fill things out.
Frankly, that's not a 'system' issue, per se. It's just a bad UI bug in the application. I don't know if you've written any Cocoa apps, but given my basic (but growing!:) knowledge of building interfaces, I think that the programmers didn't think about the drop-down bars. That sort of thing is hard to test, though.
When you move to the little circles, they light up with an 'X' in the red one, and a bar in the yellow one...I'm sitting at work, so I don't remember what's in the green one. It's not that much different from a Windows machine. You don't have to hover over it and wait for the popup text unless you've never really used a computer before.:P
The little circle is no more and no less intuitive than a big X or a picture of two squares or what looks to be like an underscore in the corner of a Windows window. The design of buttons for most window managers under XFree is usually even worse, since people just make them look however they think is best. You can even change the meaning of the button with most window managers, so NOTHING is the way you expect it to be.
If you're going to criticize something about the GUI, try picking something that isn't so trivial. There's lots of things wrong with it, but that's not one of any particular import, unless you're going to criticize all the buttons in all of the GUIs on every OS.
That's interesting. My Mac is faster, better and easier to use than my Linux machine ever was. I spend less time administering it, and more time working with it. And I'd rather use Expose than multiple desktops any day. I've used the multiple desktop thing for almost 10 years now, and I'm happy to have given it up.
Oh, and not only have I never had a problem filling out a web form in Safari, most of the time, the whole thing is filled out for me now automagically, with no errors.
If you really want to use Gnome, why didn't you just install X under OSX and use that desktop? Then you wouldn't have to go through all the hassle of actually refortmatting your machine and putting Debian on it?
Oh, and these days, if I ever see the beachball, it means that my application has crashed. I just restart it.
I feel guilty that my girlfriend doesn't use a Mac.
I sold my Linux box so I could own a G5. I don't have time to feel guilty about that because I'm getting too much work done. I've never been more productive.
If you feel guilty for using your Mac, you're doing it wrong.
I own 3 Kinesis keyboards myself. I recently got an Advantage USB for my Mac at home, and I use a normal essential at work. I have an essential at home that I used for years, but now needs a good cleaning before it'll work reliably again.
There are lots of people that swear by them, and I'm one of them. However, I'll tell you the real secret of the Kinesis keyboards:
Ctrl, Alt, PgUp, PgDown, Home, End, Backspace, Delete, Space and Return are all thumb keys. That's right, there're 12 keys that are actuated with your thumbs, and they're keys that you use all day long. Once you learn the joy of never having to hit the return key with your pinky, or being able to backspace quickly with your thumb without moving your hand, you'll never go back. Personally, I think it would have been cool if one of the thumb keys had been a shift key, but that probably would have been a bit cumbersome.
I bought a kinesis after someone talked about it on slashdot in the comments. Hopefully, someone out there will also visit www.kinesis-ergo.com and give one of their keyboards a try. You won't regret it, despite the price. If you spend all day typing, you owe it to yourself to have a keyboard that's comfortable and ergonomic. Seriously, I enjoy typing now more than I ever have in the past.
Actually, I DID think of the root of 'materialis' being 'mater', but it's a misleading implication to say that 'mater' and 'materialism' are from the same root and thus women are all out to be materialistic and spend money. Material is what makes us up, and is the 'mother' of all of us. It has nothing to do with how women like or don't like shopping.
As for the glory of battle, the thrill of victory, and the rage of defeat, I manage that just fine when racing, thanks. I did my share of fighting when I studied martial arts. I don't need any more of it.
You're right about me never being a great artist, though. I'm shitty at that stuff. However, how many great artists were inspired by women, or had women in their lives and still went on to create great things?
And, for the record, I DID look up how to spell 'misogyny', but I forgot to change it. Whoops.:P
Anyway, you're a pretty impressive troll. Does it take you long to come up with this stuff, or is it natural talent?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is the sort of thing that people just google for. Few of us sit around and wonder if tech support was so crappy 15 years ago, though I agree that you're right. It's news because somebody wrote a good story about it. :)
It's news because not everyone has worked that kind of job. Most of the people here on /. also know enough about their computers to never have to call that sort of line.
It's important to be reminded that normal users out there have a hard time with their computers. The user interfaces that they're given aren't necessarily the best or easiest to use, there's a lot of things that salespeople sell them that they don't need and add to the complexity of their machines, and all they want to do is read their email.
Well, I don't disagree. I certainly pay more in service fees than I make in interest. Some bank accounts (like the President's Choice bank accounts at Superstore) give 3% on a regular savings account with no fees. That's pretty good.
That doesn't make any sense.
The reason why the bank needs my SIN is because even with a regular savings account, the interest is in MY favour. That is, I make money off of THEM. If I buy some sort of guaranteed savings bond, the interest rate is higher. I'm making income, and so it has to be reported to the CCRA (Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, roughly the equivalent of the IRS) so I can be taxed on it.
Credit card companies never let me make money off of them. There's no income involved, so nothing I can be taxed on. The government doesn't need to know how much I bought for any reason. In the case that they DO need to know how much I'm buying, they can go to the credit card company (presumably with a court order) and make them relinquish the documents that they need.
Credit card companies do NOT need your SIN. If they've asked for yours and you've given it, that's your option. You may even be able to ask for them to remove it from their databases, but I'm not sure how that would work.
If you want to read more about it, you can see the privacy commisioner's site about SINs here: http://www.privcom.gc.ca/fs-fi/02_05_d_02_e.asp
Sorry, are you talking US or Canada? I realize that it's hopeless in the States, but I have a perfectly reasonable credit rating without giving out my SIN number to anybody that asks. When I fill out credit card applications in the past, I just put a big line through the SIN portion, and that was that. I wasn't turned down for those credit cards, either.
It's illegal to REQUIRE a SIN (Social Insurance Number) in Canada if you aren't the government, an employer, or are somehow related to taxation. My bank can ask me for a SIN because they need to report the amount of income I made on interest. A credit card company CAN NOT ask for my SIN. If I refuse to provide it, and they refuse their service, I can file a complaint against the company. The SIN number is not meant as a unique identifier for anyone other than the government.
If someone asks for it, read the fine print. It's usually optional. If it's not optional, make sure you phone the company and ask why it's required, and make sure they know that you know that it's not necessary for them to have it. DON'T GIVE IT OUT. It's not necessary to have your SIN for companies to do a credit check on you here.
Mwaha.
For those of you that aren't Canadian, or have never heard of Radio Free Vestibule (I think they're just called 'Vestibule' now), this comes from one of their sketches. Zalgon-26 McGee's fine clothing!
Load times are peculilarily subjective. By far, it's the fastest browser I've ever used. Mozilla was slow in its interface as well as slow when loading pages. Phoenix was better, but never quite as good as Opera for me.
You don't have to pay, you know. You can have the little banner ad up in the top corner doing its thing. With the coming of context sensitive Google ads up there, I actually think it's worth it for me NOT to pay for it. I like those little things up there.
I just wish they'd hurry the port of version 7 for OS X. I miss a lot of the mouse gestures and things that I get with Opera.
I used to have crashes here and there, but I found I didn't care very much, since Opera is good about knowing what sites you were visiting when the browser crashed. So, I can always restore my state to the last thing that was going on when it died on me.
Opera's crashes are very much version dependent. Some are much worse than others.
Personally, I could never get used to the way that Mozilla did ANYTHING. Without Multizilla, I was forever opening new Windows instead of new Tabs. For my browsing needs, I never want to open a new window except under very specific instances. I found Mozilla opening up new windows all the time.
Also, Mozilla's tabs are exactly one size, regardless of the size of the original window. Opera's tabs are little windows, maintained within a big window. Sure, I normally have them maximized anyway, but it comes in handy now and then to have them resizeable.
I dunno. Both browsers, from an overall view work similarily, and both do a good job. For me, it was the little details that made Opera more appealing. It's hard to explain all the little things that I like about it, but at this point, I'm too familiar with it to change, unless something monumentally better comes along.
Will they have patches so that it actually freaking RUNS without crashing all over the place? I couldn't even make it off the ship at the beginning without the game crashing. It would crash in an auto-saved transition, too, so if I ran the game again, it would crash instantaneously if I tried to play from where I left off.
I went looking for fixes, and people were having the same problem, and proposed registry hacks to fix things. I sold the game. I shouldn't have to do THAT much to get it running, and if it doesn't run, they should patch it as quickly as possible.
It was easily the worst port I ever played, so I sold it. I tried the Mac version, and I managed to make it off the ship before I ran into the same problems with the game crashing. I gave up. I'm glad I got the game in trades. I would have been really mad if I had paid money for it.
I just got a flyer from Primus, a long distance and internet provider. They have something called 'Talking Broadband'. You order it, and they send you a little thing to plug into your network, and you connect the phone to that. Not only do they transfer your phone number over, but you can pick a new number, and you can pick the area code of any place that they service, no matter where you live. As well, you can attach up to two 'alternate' phone numbers with their own area codes. I live in Edmonton, and I'm thinking of signing up for the service and getting an alternate number with a Toronto area code. That way, phone calls that friends in Toronto make to that number are local calls. I get one-way unlimited long distance for $4 a month. I can't phone out on that line, but that's okay.
Check it out. Primus also does business in the States, though it doesn't look like they have this service in particular. You should mail and ask.
New safari. One of the fixes should take care of your complaint. :)
5 215.shtml
:)
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2004/02/2004020216
At least they're aware of their bugs and fix them, right?
Hey, I agree. But it's value added. It makes no sense to WASTE the harddrive that's in the DJ. It wouldn't have been very hard to make it work properly. It's just lazy.
:)
I guess that's what $50 extra gets you these days.
The reason it's been lost is because it's not true. The iPod's primary use is listening to music, but it's also a fully functionaly firewire harddrive (that you can boot a Mac off of, leading to a number of posts by SysAdmins saying that their iPod is part of their emergency server death toolbox), keeps your contacts and important dates and appointments, and has a few games on there to keep you amused if you ever have to go shoe shopping with your girlfriend.
/. reader) easy to use.
And anyway, if it's hard to navigate to your music, or play exactly what you want (which is something that I'm getting from people here that post about their Dell DJs), it's not as useful, even if you only have to set everything up once. If you're spending 5 minutes finding and playing your music instead of 5 seconds, you're going to be frustrated with your device. Interface design is something of a lost art, and it's nice to see that Apple is still trying to make something that a lot of people find complicated (honestly! Not everyone is like a
That's a pretty poor reason. At least with the iPod, the only thing that's obfuscated is how to get the music off. At all other times, it's a fully functional and useful Firewire hard drive. You can't casually copy the music off the iPod, either, but at least you can always get files on and off the device.
I use my iPod primarily for music, but when my sister busted the DVD-ROM drive on her laptop, the only way that I could get a couple big files to her that she needed was by putting them on my iPod and transferring them that way. What a useless hassle to carry around a driver disk at all times.
Oh, I don't mean that testing whether it's broken or not is hard to test, merely whether it's a Cocoa-level bug, or a Safari-level bug. It could be that Apple screwed up at the API/Cocoa level, or that the Safari programmers all took a day off and forgot to put dropdown bars in the cycle.
I keep 20 or 30 windows open at all times. I can generally find what I need very quickly, even if the windows do start to blur together. If I've got 8 terminal windows, I usually just switch to any one of them using F9 and then pick which one I want using F10. At that resolution, I can definitely distinguish between my windows.
Ah, I see what you mean by not being able to fill things out.
:) knowledge of building interfaces, I think that the programmers didn't think about the drop-down bars. That sort of thing is hard to test, though.
Frankly, that's not a 'system' issue, per se. It's just a bad UI bug in the application. I don't know if you've written any Cocoa apps, but given my basic (but growing!
When you move to the little circles, they light up with an 'X' in the red one, and a bar in the yellow one...I'm sitting at work, so I don't remember what's in the green one. It's not that much different from a Windows machine. You don't have to hover over it and wait for the popup text unless you've never really used a computer before. :P
The little circle is no more and no less intuitive than a big X or a picture of two squares or what looks to be like an underscore in the corner of a Windows window. The design of buttons for most window managers under XFree is usually even worse, since people just make them look however they think is best. You can even change the meaning of the button with most window managers, so NOTHING is the way you expect it to be.
If you're going to criticize something about the GUI, try picking something that isn't so trivial. There's lots of things wrong with it, but that's not one of any particular import, unless you're going to criticize all the buttons in all of the GUIs on every OS.
That's interesting. My Mac is faster, better and easier to use than my Linux machine ever was. I spend less time administering it, and more time working with it. And I'd rather use Expose than multiple desktops any day. I've used the multiple desktop thing for almost 10 years now, and I'm happy to have given it up.
Oh, and not only have I never had a problem filling out a web form in Safari, most of the time, the whole thing is filled out for me now automagically, with no errors.
If you really want to use Gnome, why didn't you just install X under OSX and use that desktop? Then you wouldn't have to go through all the hassle of actually refortmatting your machine and putting Debian on it?
Oh, and these days, if I ever see the beachball, it means that my application has crashed. I just restart it.
I feel guilty that my girlfriend doesn't use a Mac.
I sold my Linux box so I could own a G5. I don't have time to feel guilty about that because I'm getting too much work done. I've never been more productive.
If you feel guilty for using your Mac, you're doing it wrong.
I own 3 Kinesis keyboards myself. I recently got an Advantage USB for my Mac at home, and I use a normal essential at work. I have an essential at home that I used for years, but now needs a good cleaning before it'll work reliably again.
There are lots of people that swear by them, and I'm one of them. However, I'll tell you the real secret of the Kinesis keyboards:
Ctrl, Alt, PgUp, PgDown, Home, End, Backspace, Delete, Space and Return are all thumb keys. That's right, there're 12 keys that are actuated with your thumbs, and they're keys that you use all day long. Once you learn the joy of never having to hit the return key with your pinky, or being able to backspace quickly with your thumb without moving your hand, you'll never go back. Personally, I think it would have been cool if one of the thumb keys had been a shift key, but that probably would have been a bit cumbersome.
I bought a kinesis after someone talked about it on slashdot in the comments. Hopefully, someone out there will also visit www.kinesis-ergo.com and give one of their keyboards a try. You won't regret it, despite the price. If you spend all day typing, you owe it to yourself to have a keyboard that's comfortable and ergonomic. Seriously, I enjoy typing now more than I ever have in the past.
...POS meaning 'Point Of Sale' and not...the other thing.
This isn't helping.
Actually, I DID think of the root of 'materialis' being 'mater', but it's a misleading implication to say that 'mater' and 'materialism' are from the same root and thus women are all out to be materialistic and spend money. Material is what makes us up, and is the 'mother' of all of us. It has nothing to do with how women like or don't like shopping.
:P
As for the glory of battle, the thrill of victory, and the rage of defeat, I manage that just fine when racing, thanks. I did my share of fighting when I studied martial arts. I don't need any more of it.
You're right about me never being a great artist, though. I'm shitty at that stuff. However, how many great artists were inspired by women, or had women in their lives and still went on to create great things?
And, for the record, I DID look up how to spell 'misogyny', but I forgot to change it. Whoops.
Anyway, you're a pretty impressive troll. Does it take you long to come up with this stuff, or is it natural talent?