That's the worst part of tech support (for customer and tech). After a couple weeks of supporting the same product/service, you can recite it in your sleep.
After working tech support for an ISP, i could easily describe the minute differences between the win95 and win98 tcp/ip control panel settings...now that's enough to turn a (wo)man to drink!
My school rolled out VoIP to all residence rooms this year! What a fiasco that was. From randomly disconnected calls to 'mr. roboto' sounding conversations, the quality has certainly been poor.
The biggest problem in our situation was marketoids selling products to drooling PHB's, ignoring the tech's. Not to mention that the products delivered had never been used to this scale before.
One of the techs told me that the competition later demonstrated two boxen handling the same load as a whole room full of our current solution.
To make matters worse, students don't even have the option of an 'old-school' line from the local telco.
To get back on topic, this could be awesome if done well, and no skimping on hardware. Otherwise, you don't want to work tech support for these guys ! (I had to handle more than one angry student with bad service).
I just hope to see more of this in the near future, especially at those prices!
I've got a better question. Why does have to open in your browser at all? Intergration...phooey...I don't want ppt files opening in IE, same goes for all the others. We've got these apps for a reason, let them do their job.
I think that the one thing that could re-level the playing field (was it ever really level) is the following:
If you make a new product that uses any type of file or protocol, the document format and/or protocol specification must be open to all competitors (all those interested).
This would make a product compete on best implementation (ie: speed, stability, etc) instead of you can't read our formats, integrate with our protocols...Let MS keep their shit closed. If they have to use open formats and protocols, that'll hurt them more, while at the same time helping the entire industry (MS included if they're willing to play).
I actually popped back into this thread to post a very similar comment. I first learned vi for my first CS class at university. We had an older (almost retired) prof that preferred old-school tools. I'm still saddened by the fact that the prof that now teaches the course has students use pico (good for pine, not general purpose editting)...
Anyway, this prof was old-school enough that he didn't even use pine. He preferred command-line mail instead.
I bet that there are lots of people in this same situation, not that it's bad!
Hell, all it would take is to have the 'Post Story' button run the story through ispell automatically upon submission. Or, dare I say it, USE PREVIEW (with auto ispell). Maybe the first and only use of the tag would be to flag stupid spelling errors on slashdot.
Agreed. This guy sounds more like a 13 year old PFY than a 22 year old young adult. Should have spent some time working on the social skills a bit more.
In my experience, the benefit of scsi isn't the speed, it's the durability/reliability. I've found that scsi drives just last longer than ide drives. Example: The 486 I mentioned above has a 640 meg scsi drive (picked up for free) circa 1992 (what do you think that cost way back then??) that works just fine. I don't think there are many 10 year old ide drives that can say the same.
You're right though, for most intents, ide is just as good as scsi.
Unfortunately, I can't remember the type of motherboard that we were using, but at my last co-op position, our scsi-based (intel) servers were able to boot from scsi-cdroms. They do exist.
Also, I hadn't considered scsi, but you make a good point. My post was mostly refering to home machines (I'm not lucky enough to be able to afford scsi at home)...so yes ide (very vulgar) is what I was mostly referring to. However, given that most people buying computers for home use (read: Joe Sixpack) don't know that they're using ide, let alone that scsi exists, I think that they could surely get away without a floppy drive.
I just ordered a new machine last week (still waiting for it), and I decided to start a new trend. No floppy disk drive!!
The last time I actually personally _needed_ to use a floppy disk was installing Debian on a 486 with no cdrom. For older machines, you can' t beat the 3 disk net install. This, however, is 2002. We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.
Why has the floppy survived this long? I work at a helpdesk position at my University between classes for extra cash...I've seen firsthand the horrors of the fragility of this ancient storage media. Ever lost your thesis due to lost clusters, bad sectors, etc? (But it worked at home this morning...)
And directly in proportion to 'not reinventing the wheel' is 'innovation'. The less time we spend recoding things that are 'well understood', the more time we can spend theorizing about and coding the tools and platforms of tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, MS didn't 'innovate' this protocol either. SMB/CIFS (LanMAN) were around before MS ever decided to 'innovate' them.
-Ben
Funny? More like Insightful...I'd correct this if I had moderator points!
-Ben
That's the worst part of tech support (for customer and tech). After a couple weeks of supporting the same product/service, you can recite it in your sleep.
After working tech support for an ISP, i could easily describe the minute differences between the win95 and win98 tcp/ip control panel settings...now that's enough to turn a (wo)man to drink!
-Ben
Are you saying that MCSE's aren't housebroken?
-Ben
My school rolled out VoIP to all residence rooms this year! What a fiasco that was. From randomly disconnected calls to 'mr. roboto' sounding conversations, the quality has certainly been poor.
The biggest problem in our situation was marketoids selling products to drooling PHB's, ignoring the tech's. Not to mention that the products delivered had never been used to this scale before.
One of the techs told me that the competition later demonstrated two boxen handling the same load as a whole room full of our current solution.
To make matters worse, students don't even have the option of an 'old-school' line from the local telco.
To get back on topic, this could be awesome if done well, and no skimping on hardware. Otherwise, you don't want to work tech support for these guys ! (I had to handle more than one angry student with bad service).
I just hope to see more of this in the near future, especially at those prices!
-Ben
Why .jp2??? Why not .jpeg2. This legacy DOS naming convention drives me nuts. Not even Windows is crappy enough to still require 8.3 filenames.
I still cringe when I see default.htm. It's a frickin' html file, name it properly.
-Ben
Keeping up with the Jones', anyone?
-Ben
How about it keeps ordering them beers until you look good?
-Ben
Even if shaving it is cool, putting sharp objects near it in order to shave it is _not_ cool.
-Ben
It's _PEOPLE_...Soylent Green is _PEOPLE_!
-Ben
Although I'm by no means an Enya fan (read: Can't stand her music (great voice tho)), she is by no means as bad as Celine Dion.
As a Canadian, I can honestly say that our two worst exports are bar none: Celine Dion, and Brian Adams.
-Ben
I've got a better question. Why does have to open in your browser at all? Intergration...phooey...I don't want ppt files opening in IE, same goes for all the others. We've got these apps for a reason, let them do their job.
-Ben
I think that the one thing that could re-level the playing field (was it ever really level) is the following:
If you make a new product that uses any type of file or protocol, the document format and/or protocol specification must be open to all competitors (all those interested).
This would make a product compete on best implementation (ie: speed, stability, etc) instead of you can't read our formats, integrate with our protocols...Let MS keep their shit closed. If they have to use open formats and protocols, that'll hurt them more, while at the same time helping the entire industry (MS included if they're willing to play).
-Ben
I actually popped back into this thread to post a very similar comment. I first learned vi for my first CS class at university. We had an older (almost retired) prof that preferred old-school tools. I'm still saddened by the fact that the prof that now teaches the course has students use pico (good for pine, not general purpose editting)...
Anyway, this prof was old-school enough that he didn't even use pine. He preferred command-line mail instead.
I bet that there are lots of people in this same situation, not that it's bad!
-Ben
Obvious to everyone who has ever used it on the 'minimum' requirements...that's for sure.
Anybody here try Windows 2000 Pro on the minimum (P166, 64MB)?? What a frikkin' joke those requirements are!
-Ben
To the moderator who scored this as funny, I'd say that it's a lot closer to the truth than you may think.
-Ben
Whoever modded this as flamebait has obviously never been the new guy/girl...!
-Ben
Hire a new guy/girl...it's easier to saddle the new guy/girl with the crappy (but very important) jobs!
-Ben
Me hope it do, two!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
-Ben
Hell, all it would take is to have the 'Post Story' button run the story through ispell automatically upon submission. Or, dare I say it, USE PREVIEW (with auto ispell). Maybe the first and only use of the tag would be to flag stupid spelling errors on slashdot.
-Ben
Agreed. This guy sounds more like a 13 year old PFY than a 22 year old young adult. Should have spent some time working on the social skills a bit more.
Obnoxious.
-Ben
In my experience, the benefit of scsi isn't the speed, it's the durability/reliability. I've found that scsi drives just last longer than ide drives. Example: The 486 I mentioned above has a 640 meg scsi drive (picked up for free) circa 1992 (what do you think that cost way back then??) that works just fine. I don't think there are many 10 year old ide drives that can say the same.
You're right though, for most intents, ide is just as good as scsi.
-Ben
Unfortunately, I can't remember the type of motherboard that we were using, but at my last co-op position, our scsi-based (intel) servers were able to boot from scsi-cdroms. They do exist.
Also, I hadn't considered scsi, but you make a good point. My post was mostly refering to home machines (I'm not lucky enough to be able to afford scsi at home)...so yes ide (very vulgar) is what I was mostly referring to. However, given that most people buying computers for home use (read: Joe Sixpack) don't know that they're using ide, let alone that scsi exists, I think that they could surely get away without a floppy drive.
-Ben
I just ordered a new machine last week (still waiting for it), and I decided to start a new trend. No floppy disk drive!!
The last time I actually personally _needed_ to use a floppy disk was installing Debian on a 486 with no cdrom. For older machines, you can' t beat the 3 disk net install. This, however, is 2002. We have cheap burners, media that costs no more, if not less than floppy disks, and BIOS's that boot from CD as a standard feature.
Why has the floppy survived this long? I work at a helpdesk position at my University between classes for extra cash...I've seen firsthand the horrors of the fragility of this ancient storage media. Ever lost your thesis due to lost clusters, bad sectors, etc? (But it worked at home this morning...)
Please: Consider abandoning the floppy!
-Ben
And directly in proportion to 'not reinventing the wheel' is 'innovation'. The less time we spend recoding things that are 'well understood', the more time we can spend theorizing about and coding the tools and platforms of tomorrow.
-Ben