First warning... end users that these terminals are targeted towards typically HATE having to use a terminal like this where the software is served remotely. Unless if you have enough server bandwidth and they are local enough to be able to deliver the needed software at a speed similar to using it locally on a PC, you're going to be doing nothing but frustrating the end users. For people that really need to do the work, they want their software to run as quickly as possible so they can get their job done as quickly as possible. Running it remotely is only going to slow things down.
Second warning... if you're going to do something like this, PLEASE understand that each person has a different function that may require different software. You have to make sure that each person has the software required to do their job, and to do it well. If they don't have the required software, you have to make it an easy/seamless process to get that software. Nothing makes a job suck more than upgrading the local hardware only to find out that the software one needs to do the job has not been made available and they have to wait while IT figures out how to make it available to you over the coming weeks.
The company I work for (a major luxury car manufacturer) is trying something like this where we're basically running on dummy terminals, but they never bothered to find out what each of us really needs for our jobs. We've had these new terminals sitting around for months not getting touched because the basic software we need to run the warehouse (yes, I'm on the warehouse side of things) is either not available through that terminal, or once it is, it is EXTREMELY slow. You don't mention whether or not those 3500 PCs are in a single building or location or not. If not, serving software from a remote location is going to be extremely slow, and as I said, it will really frustrate the end users.
If it were me, here is what I'd do (note: I'm not an IT specialist at all, but I'm an end user with more computing experience than most in my company):
1) Don't do dummy terminals. Go with real PCs. The users will be much happier in the end if you do.
2) Do a survey. Survey EVERYONE. Find out what people use. People in a single department are LIKELY to use very similar software. Some may use one or two things more than others, but it will still give you a baseline. It's better to have someone with two extra programs installed that they don't use than have a user that doesn't have the software they require.
3) Build a series of disk images based on people's needs. These are your backups. If something needs to be seriously fixed or upgraded, do it on the disk image first. Then put it on a test PC. Let them try it. Let them give you feedback and let you know how it works for them. Make sure that everyone that is getting upgraded has a chance to mess with it.
4) You want do so some storage remotely? Give the users remote storage space, and stress to them that this is to be their primary storage. Save their files there. If possible, save their settings there. If you're going to be doing Windows, if I recall correctly, there is a key that can be changed to make any location the default "Save" location. Make it this remote "drive" or "directory" to help encourage saving to the remote storage. This way when there are software updates and a PC gets re-imaged, their files are safe. Along with this, you have to also make people aware of company policy regarding the software they have available to them and what they can use. Basically boil it down to this: If there's something they need to get your job done that the company hasn't licensed, then they need to work with the company to see about licensing it. Otherwise, each re-imaging is going to wipe it out because it's not sanctioned.
5) Image the PCs with those disk images according to your surveyed results.
This way you kinda-sorta have the best of both worlds. The users have software running locally on the PC a
I couldn't decide between the two, so I'll post both.
My wife is really into Living Dead Dolls, and she'd been wanting a display case for them for a couple of years. So last Christmas I got some tools together and got some supplies, and I made a casket shaped shelf for them. It matches the boxes perfectly. It's flat black on all the outer surfaces (exterior, front edges of shelves) and glossy blood red inside. It came in at about 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide at the widest part.
The other one was a physics project back in my senior year. We had a choice of 4 different projects, and I chose to build a mouse trap car. About six other people decided on the same. Mine wasn't the fastest, but it went the farthest, and distance was the main goal. Everyone else wanted a quick start, hoping it would sling the car into action, aka "the hare". I went with "the tortoise." I used an old erector set, 2 CDs, to 12 inch records, a coat hanger, string, and a little synthetic motor oil. The CDs and records are obvious, and I used the erector for the body. I straightened out the coat hanger and used about 2 feet of it and "extended" the mouse trap with a hook arm, sort of like the one Doc Brown made for the Delorean in the first Back to the Future. I tied the string to the hook end, and wound it around the rear axle (where the records were, so more distance per revolution) and greased both axles. When the trap was triggered, it pulled the string SLOWLY, and moved rather smoothly down the hallway. It went about 45 feet down the hallway past two class rooms. No one else thought it was even going to go anywhere.
Exactly. I've had many times where a URL will not go through the Yahoo network, consistantly, even though there was no Yahoo client on either end (Trillian on one, Gaim on the other). It's not necessarily a conspiracy.
AltMe is a client that's a bit more than just IM written in a language called Rebol. From their website:
AltME provides an integrated environment for a range of communication activities including file sharing, alerts, calendars, contacts, user management, journalling, task tracking, shared document creation, and much more.
I first read the headline as "The Failure of Information Society", and I thought to myself, "Nah, they didn't do too badly. You still hear one of their songs once in a while." *doing*
I used to have a full tower case because I thought it would be a great thing to have. I quickly realized that I didn't have the cash (or motherboard resources!) to fill it full of extra drives of any sort (tape, CD, DVD, or otherwise). So, I ordered these things online that are disc trays. They almost look like CD drives, but when you press the button, the drawer slides out, and there were flip holders for 8 CDs/DVDs in each one. I got three of them, and they were great to put my frequenly used discs in. Restore discs, various Linux distro CDs, games, and whatever else. If I can remember where I got them, I'll post here again, but I just can't seem to remember now.
In the fourth space, I put a removable HD rack. That's really handy to have, especially if you have several smaller HDs that you want to make use of but not fill up your case. Or, you can use it for your offsite backups. Stick in a drive, backup to it, and take it away.
until they do a national awareness campaign to educate parents of content
Oh, you mean they're going to start teaching people to read again? Good. If they hadn't slacked on that in the first place, people would have realized that the name of the game was GRAND THEFT AUTO and not "Babysitter."
It's not an engineer, scientist, or programmer joke, but a doctor is close enough:
A gynecologist decided one day that he wanted to get out of medicine and try his hand as a mechanic. He went to classes at the local VoTech to get certified, and at the end of the course, he's given his final exam. The instructor tells the class that he'll mail them the following week with the results.
A week goes by, and the former gynecologist gets his results. Astonished that he received 50 points of extra credit on a 100 point test, he decides to call up his instructor and ask what happened.
When he gets him on the phone and asks, the instructor told him this:
"The first part of the test was to dismantle and label all parts of the car engine. You got a perfect score on that for 50 points. The second part of the test was to reassemble all the parts and have the engine work as a whole. Yours ran the smoothest in the class, so you got all 50 points for that. I gave you the extra 50 points because you did the whole thing through the muffler."
Oh man! The memories of my grandmother reciting by heart "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb". Good thing I wasn't a thumbsucker, otherwise it probably would have actually frightened me.:)
I, for one, would much prefer it if they could somehow get Todd McFarlane's Twisted Land of Oz characters to come to the big screen. THAT I would go see. If you're going to make Oz dark, don't do it half way.
Well, if you want apps that are easy to produce and based online, and you have a bit of programming experience, try out Rebol. It's very small, very fast, and the version with the Gui utilities built in is only 550K big! It's got a lot of really nifty data types (money, dates, tags) and it's fast. There are some issues with it presently (mainly dealing with the multi-line text box) that keep me from catagorizing it as perfect, but its damn cool if you have some time to kill. Rebol also has a decent online community with lots of example scripts, and also a good developers website. It's VERY network friendly. Anyone wanting something that they can keep on a website but run locally with no installation should definitely check it out.
What people don't realize is that these little black boxes are already happening without people's consent. I work for a luxury car company, and this is standard. I should know. I'm the one that programs the replacements for when the originals breakdown. It has been for years. It's just a matter of time before it works it's way down to "low end" vehicles.
Ah yes. I had forgotten about the keyboard shortcut setup for the one way maximize. I'm still not thrilled with that, though. I'm a half-throttle power user, and trying to retrain my brain to do that is just more effor than I'm willing to expend at the moment.
I know that there are supposed to be window managers that are Gnome compliant, so maybe I'll look into trying to switch out Metacity for something else. (the new version of XFWM is nice...)
I really like the Gnome desktop. I find the spatial nautilus very useful, but there are two things that I really don't like about the Gnome desktop. First is Metacity, the window manager. I can't stand it that I cannot middle click or right click on the maximize button and have it maximize the window vertically or horizontally. That is on of the most useful features that i've seen for quite a few window managers running under Linux and *BSD, and I see no reason for Metacity not to have it. (btw, if someone knows how to set that up, let me know! I'd love to change it...) My second beef is with gnome-terminal. It's WAY slow. I find myself installing rxvt just to have a fast terminal, even though it's not as pretty... or tabbed, which I miss when I have to use rxvt.
Other that that, Gnome is great, and I look forward to updating it on my Linux/BSD box.
I think that if people really want companies to start switching over to Linux, they need to start changing their stratagy. Companies use programs, not the OS. In other words, I don't believe that the OS is really what's important to most companies. It's the fact that the software that they need to run works under that particular OS that is the deciding factor. (and there's usually not even a decision to be made! It's already made for them by where the software is targeted) If companies are going to switch, then the software that they need will need to be written to work on both environments.
Here's how I look at it. At this point, most companies (or at least their IT departments) have heard enough about Linux to at least be curious. But they can't even begin to try it out because all the programs that they work with will only run under Windows. How can you try out something that will be mostly useless to them? So, if those major programs that the company used were written to run on Linux AND Windows, then those IT departments would at least be able to try it out, and see how it goes for them.
So with this, the software is where the focus needs to be. There needs to be office software that can not only compete, but surpass anything that MS offers. (yes, I know that OpenOffice is out there, and yes it's good, but it's not good enough for most companies to make the switch. And no, I can't put my money where my mouth is and start helping with development because I'm just an average Joe user. I'm not a programmer, or even a corporate user. I honestly don't know what it is that companies need. But there are people out there who do, and who can help) Graphics software is also sorely needed. Yes, the Gimp is good, but it does lack the polish, and some of the features (so I've heard) of Photoshop. And where the heck are the vector graphics programs? Nothing, at this point, can compete with CorelDraw or Illustrator.
These are only two "major" fields where excellent software is needed. Not just clones or ports of what's currently used under Windows, but truely exceptional software needs to be developed to bring people over.
Yes, I also know the argument that if the companies have the software under Windows, and the same is available under Linux, why would they bother to switch? As I said, I think that companies are curious, and they want to try it out now, but they can't. As far as adoption, I think it winds up being more of a grassroots sort of thing. Smaller companies will start to change first, because they are more able. As it starts catching on better, bigger companies will take the plunge.
Granted that a OS needs to be day-to-day usable, and perhaps for companies, Linux isn't quite there yet, but the more the BIG software gets developed for Linux, the more talent that flows in from the former MS camp and starts putting effort into making Linux a true competitor against MS.
Then the only thing we have to watch out for is Linux turning into another MS.:-p
Before I moved, I had comcast cable. I wasn't thrilled with it, but I was even less thrilled when I found out how much just basic cable costs (I had been living with in-laws for a short while) When my wife and I moved out, we went with DishNetwork. It's been RARE for anything to happen with the signal. Even during those famous Texas storms. It might blink a little now and then, but never as much as eve the cable did back in Maryland. Plus, the features are MUCH better than cable. No more waiting (and missing) to see what's coming on with the scrolling TvGuide channel. I just type in what channel I want to see in the guide, and there it is. I can even see what's on for the next two days without having to go and get a seperate TV guide or anything. DishNetwork all the way...
One guilty pleasure is taking a character, whether it be Diablo II or NexusTK, and just leveling as high as I can get. My other is doing stupid little things in the game just to make more money. I would kill those dang squirrels for hours in Nexus. *sigh* But I also love mayhem. Every so often I'll pop in GTA:VC, head on over to the stadium, (or to the golf course) and just run back and forth across the highest level, killing people again and again and again. You'd think that they'd hear a report somewhere like "500 people have been shot, blown up, chopped to bits, or beated bloody at the entrance to Bloodbanger's Stadium!" and they'd stop coming around, but since they're so stupid, they deserve to die. *bwahahahaha* And hey, you only get minimal cops up there. They're easy enough to take out in such small numbers (one or two every few minutes)
It's probably trial and error. It depends on the individual company. Take ISPs for example. I could never get through to Earthlink on the phone, but I had decent luck with chat. My current ISP, however, is excellent in all areas of support. Email questions answered (not auto-replied) within an hour, a real person the phone immediately who was friendly AND knowledgable. They don't have chat support, but if they did, I'm sure it would be good
I have to admit, from the first time I saw the commercial, I thought this was a movie with WhiteWolf's hand in it. I had no clue until now that this was a "clone" and they actually had nothing to do with it... So sad. So sad.
What about Flight of the Navigator? The way that ship morphed all metallic and stuff when it was getting ready for high speed takeoff was awesome!
Also, who can forget the original effects master and blockbuster... Citizen Kane! No, I'm not kidding. That movie set new standards that are still used for movies today.
Slashdot Mirror
First warning... end users that these terminals are targeted towards typically HATE having to use a terminal like this where the software is served remotely. Unless if you have enough server bandwidth and they are local enough to be able to deliver the needed software at a speed similar to using it locally on a PC, you're going to be doing nothing but frustrating the end users. For people that really need to do the work, they want their software to run as quickly as possible so they can get their job done as quickly as possible. Running it remotely is only going to slow things down.
Second warning... if you're going to do something like this, PLEASE understand that each person has a different function that may require different software. You have to make sure that each person has the software required to do their job, and to do it well. If they don't have the required software, you have to make it an easy/seamless process to get that software. Nothing makes a job suck more than upgrading the local hardware only to find out that the software one needs to do the job has not been made available and they have to wait while IT figures out how to make it available to you over the coming weeks.
The company I work for (a major luxury car manufacturer) is trying something like this where we're basically running on dummy terminals, but they never bothered to find out what each of us really needs for our jobs. We've had these new terminals sitting around for months not getting touched because the basic software we need to run the warehouse (yes, I'm on the warehouse side of things) is either not available through that terminal, or once it is, it is EXTREMELY slow. You don't mention whether or not those 3500 PCs are in a single building or location or not. If not, serving software from a remote location is going to be extremely slow, and as I said, it will really frustrate the end users.
If it were me, here is what I'd do (note: I'm not an IT specialist at all, but I'm an end user with more computing experience than most in my company):
1) Don't do dummy terminals. Go with real PCs. The users will be much happier in the end if you do.
2) Do a survey. Survey EVERYONE. Find out what people use. People in a single department are LIKELY to use very similar software. Some may use one or two things more than others, but it will still give you a baseline. It's better to have someone with two extra programs installed that they don't use than have a user that doesn't have the software they require.
3) Build a series of disk images based on people's needs. These are your backups. If something needs to be seriously fixed or upgraded, do it on the disk image first. Then put it on a test PC. Let them try it. Let them give you feedback and let you know how it works for them. Make sure that everyone that is getting upgraded has a chance to mess with it.
4) You want do so some storage remotely? Give the users remote storage space, and stress to them that this is to be their primary storage. Save their files there. If possible, save their settings there. If you're going to be doing Windows, if I recall correctly, there is a key that can be changed to make any location the default "Save" location. Make it this remote "drive" or "directory" to help encourage saving to the remote storage. This way when there are software updates and a PC gets re-imaged, their files are safe. Along with this, you have to also make people aware of company policy regarding the software they have available to them and what they can use. Basically boil it down to this: If there's something they need to get your job done that the company hasn't licensed, then they need to work with the company to see about licensing it. Otherwise, each re-imaging is going to wipe it out because it's not sanctioned.
5) Image the PCs with those disk images according to your surveyed results.
This way you kinda-sorta have the best of both worlds. The users have software running locally on the PC a
I couldn't decide between the two, so I'll post both.
My wife is really into Living Dead Dolls, and she'd been wanting a display case for them for a couple of years. So last Christmas I got some tools together and got some supplies, and I made a casket shaped shelf for them. It matches the boxes perfectly. It's flat black on all the outer surfaces (exterior, front edges of shelves) and glossy blood red inside. It came in at about 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide at the widest part.
The other one was a physics project back in my senior year. We had a choice of 4 different projects, and I chose to build a mouse trap car. About six other people decided on the same. Mine wasn't the fastest, but it went the farthest, and distance was the main goal. Everyone else wanted a quick start, hoping it would sling the car into action, aka "the hare". I went with "the tortoise." I used an old erector set, 2 CDs, to 12 inch records, a coat hanger, string, and a little synthetic motor oil. The CDs and records are obvious, and I used the erector for the body. I straightened out the coat hanger and used about 2 feet of it and "extended" the mouse trap with a hook arm, sort of like the one Doc Brown made for the Delorean in the first Back to the Future. I tied the string to the hook end, and wound it around the rear axle (where the records were, so more distance per revolution) and greased both axles. When the trap was triggered, it pulled the string SLOWLY, and moved rather smoothly down the hallway. It went about 45 feet down the hallway past two class rooms. No one else thought it was even going to go anywhere.
Exactly. I've had many times where a URL will not go through the Yahoo network, consistantly, even though there was no Yahoo client on either end (Trillian on one, Gaim on the other). It's not necessarily a conspiracy.
I first read the headline as "The Failure of Information Society", and I thought to myself, "Nah, they didn't do too badly. You still hear one of their songs once in a while." *doing*
man oh man I wish I had mod points! Thanks for the laugh! :D
I used to have a full tower case because I thought it would be a great thing to have. I quickly realized that I didn't have the cash (or motherboard resources!) to fill it full of extra drives of any sort (tape, CD, DVD, or otherwise). So, I ordered these things online that are disc trays. They almost look like CD drives, but when you press the button, the drawer slides out, and there were flip holders for 8 CDs/DVDs in each one. I got three of them, and they were great to put my frequenly used discs in. Restore discs, various Linux distro CDs, games, and whatever else. If I can remember where I got them, I'll post here again, but I just can't seem to remember now.
In the fourth space, I put a removable HD rack. That's really handy to have, especially if you have several smaller HDs that you want to make use of but not fill up your case. Or, you can use it for your offsite backups. Stick in a drive, backup to it, and take it away.
until they do a national awareness campaign to educate parents of content
Oh, you mean they're going to start teaching people to read again? Good. If they hadn't slacked on that in the first place, people would have realized that the name of the game was GRAND THEFT AUTO and not "Babysitter."
It's not an engineer, scientist, or programmer joke, but a doctor is close enough:
A gynecologist decided one day that he wanted to get out of medicine and try his hand as a mechanic. He went to classes at the local VoTech to get certified, and at the end of the course, he's given his final exam. The instructor tells the class that he'll mail them the following week with the results.
A week goes by, and the former gynecologist gets his results. Astonished that he received 50 points of extra credit on a 100 point test, he decides to call up his instructor and ask what happened.
When he gets him on the phone and asks, the instructor told him this:
"The first part of the test was to dismantle and label all parts of the car engine. You got a perfect score on that for 50 points. The second part of the test was to reassemble all the parts and have the engine work as a whole. Yours ran the smoothest in the class, so you got all 50 points for that. I gave you the extra 50 points because you did the whole thing through the muffler."
Oh man! The memories of my grandmother reciting by heart "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb". Good thing I wasn't a thumbsucker, otherwise it probably would have actually frightened me. :)
I, for one, would much prefer it if they could somehow get Todd McFarlane's Twisted Land of Oz characters to come to the big screen. THAT I would go see. If you're going to make Oz dark, don't do it half way.
Well, if you want apps that are easy to produce and based online, and you have a bit of programming experience, try out Rebol. It's very small, very fast, and the version with the Gui utilities built in is only 550K big! It's got a lot of really nifty data types (money, dates, tags) and it's fast. There are some issues with it presently (mainly dealing with the multi-line text box) that keep me from catagorizing it as perfect, but its damn cool if you have some time to kill. Rebol also has a decent online community with lots of example scripts, and also a good developers website. It's VERY network friendly. Anyone wanting something that they can keep on a website but run locally with no installation should definitely check it out.
What people don't realize is that these little black boxes are already happening without people's consent. I work for a luxury car company, and this is standard. I should know. I'm the one that programs the replacements for when the originals breakdown. It has been for years. It's just a matter of time before it works it's way down to "low end" vehicles.
Ah yes. I had forgotten about the keyboard shortcut setup for the one way maximize. I'm still not thrilled with that, though. I'm a half-throttle power user, and trying to retrain my brain to do that is just more effor than I'm willing to expend at the moment.
I know that there are supposed to be window managers that are Gnome compliant, so maybe I'll look into trying to switch out Metacity for something else. (the new version of XFWM is nice...)
I really like the Gnome desktop. I find the spatial nautilus very useful, but there are two things that I really don't like about the Gnome desktop. First is Metacity, the window manager. I can't stand it that I cannot middle click or right click on the maximize button and have it maximize the window vertically or horizontally. That is on of the most useful features that i've seen for quite a few window managers running under Linux and *BSD, and I see no reason for Metacity not to have it. (btw, if someone knows how to set that up, let me know! I'd love to change it...) My second beef is with gnome-terminal. It's WAY slow. I find myself installing rxvt just to have a fast terminal, even though it's not as pretty... or tabbed, which I miss when I have to use rxvt.
Other that that, Gnome is great, and I look forward to updating it on my Linux/BSD box.
I think that if people really want companies to start switching over to Linux, they need to start changing their stratagy. Companies use programs, not the OS. In other words, I don't believe that the OS is really what's important to most companies. It's the fact that the software that they need to run works under that particular OS that is the deciding factor. (and there's usually not even a decision to be made! It's already made for them by where the software is targeted) If companies are going to switch, then the software that they need will need to be written to work on both environments.
:-p
Here's how I look at it. At this point, most companies (or at least their IT departments) have heard enough about Linux to at least be curious. But they can't even begin to try it out because all the programs that they work with will only run under Windows. How can you try out something that will be mostly useless to them? So, if those major programs that the company used were written to run on Linux AND Windows, then those IT departments would at least be able to try it out, and see how it goes for them.
So with this, the software is where the focus needs to be. There needs to be office software that can not only compete, but surpass anything that MS offers. (yes, I know that OpenOffice is out there, and yes it's good, but it's not good enough for most companies to make the switch. And no, I can't put my money where my mouth is and start helping with development because I'm just an average Joe user. I'm not a programmer, or even a corporate user. I honestly don't know what it is that companies need. But there are people out there who do, and who can help) Graphics software is also sorely needed. Yes, the Gimp is good, but it does lack the polish, and some of the features (so I've heard) of Photoshop. And where the heck are the vector graphics programs? Nothing, at this point, can compete with CorelDraw or Illustrator.
These are only two "major" fields where excellent software is needed. Not just clones or ports of what's currently used under Windows, but truely exceptional software needs to be developed to bring people over.
Yes, I also know the argument that if the companies have the software under Windows, and the same is available under Linux, why would they bother to switch? As I said, I think that companies are curious, and they want to try it out now, but they can't. As far as adoption, I think it winds up being more of a grassroots sort of thing. Smaller companies will start to change first, because they are more able. As it starts catching on better, bigger companies will take the plunge.
Granted that a OS needs to be day-to-day usable, and perhaps for companies, Linux isn't quite there yet, but the more the BIG software gets developed for Linux, the more talent that flows in from the former MS camp and starts putting effort into making Linux a true competitor against MS.
Then the only thing we have to watch out for is Linux turning into another MS.
Hey, this is pretty cool! I'll definitely be taking a look at this one. Thanks for posting this!
Before I moved, I had comcast cable. I wasn't thrilled with it, but I was even less thrilled when I found out how much just basic cable costs (I had been living with in-laws for a short while) When my wife and I moved out, we went with DishNetwork. It's been RARE for anything to happen with the signal. Even during those famous Texas storms. It might blink a little now and then, but never as much as eve the cable did back in Maryland. Plus, the features are MUCH better than cable. No more waiting (and missing) to see what's coming on with the scrolling TvGuide channel. I just type in what channel I want to see in the guide, and there it is. I can even see what's on for the next two days without having to go and get a seperate TV guide or anything. DishNetwork all the way...
*wimpy cough* "I think I've got the black lung, pop."
"For chrissake, Derek! You've been down there one day. Talk to me in 20 years!"
One guilty pleasure is taking a character, whether it be Diablo II or NexusTK, and just leveling as high as I can get. My other is doing stupid little things in the game just to make more money. I would kill those dang squirrels for hours in Nexus. *sigh* But I also love mayhem. Every so often I'll pop in GTA:VC, head on over to the stadium, (or to the golf course) and just run back and forth across the highest level, killing people again and again and again. You'd think that they'd hear a report somewhere like "500 people have been shot, blown up, chopped to bits, or beated bloody at the entrance to Bloodbanger's Stadium!" and they'd stop coming around, but since they're so stupid, they deserve to die. *bwahahahaha* And hey, you only get minimal cops up there. They're easy enough to take out in such small numbers (one or two every few minutes)
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
:)
I thought it was, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets."
It's probably trial and error. It depends on the individual company. Take ISPs for example. I could never get through to Earthlink on the phone, but I had decent luck with chat. My current ISP, however, is excellent in all areas of support. Email questions answered (not auto-replied) within an hour, a real person the phone immediately who was friendly AND knowledgable. They don't have chat support, but if they did, I'm sure it would be good
I TOLD you it doesn't prove anything... *grin*
I have to admit, from the first time I saw the commercial, I thought this was a movie with WhiteWolf's hand in it. I had no clue until now that this was a "clone" and they actually had nothing to do with it... So sad. So sad.
What about Flight of the Navigator? The way that ship morphed all metallic and stuff when it was getting ready for high speed takeoff was awesome!
Also, who can forget the original effects master and blockbuster... Citizen Kane! No, I'm not kidding. That movie set new standards that are still used for movies today.