Amen! And the most surprising entry on the list of companies to try that approach is:
Comcast.
Yes, the cable TV/Internet behemoth. They had outsourced much of their tech support to India. Now they're bringing it back home, including building a customer service center a few miles from me here in Michigan.
The last time my Internet connection flaked out, I called Comcast, talked to someone who told me that it was a problem on their end that should be fixed within the next few hours, which it was, and he called me back afterwards to make sure that my Internet service was working. No scripted questions trying to diagnose phantom problems on my end. Amazing! Sad that it should be amazing, but, there it is. I even got the impression that the support rep is clueful.
It wasn't long ago that I was mad enough to wire up my condo complex for Internet and satellite TV service. Now I'm inclined to let the cable co. deal with it. Especially if the rumors on dslreports.com about Comcast upping their bandwidth limits to compete with DSL are true.
If it's so trivial, why does the Canadian government restrict it? Isn't it rather Big Brotherish to say "No, you can't subscribe to American television, it's Bad for you"? What, they're afraid people might watch Fox News?
Yes, I'll side with the Canucks on pot laws. It's a dumb habit but it's futile to outlaw stupidity.
And the protectionist crap Bush signed against Canada early in his term was major-league dumb, but I think he's learned his lesson there.
As for suing the Canadian government, it makes more sense than suing Canadian hackers.
Interesting how every time I take a swipe at socialists I get modded down. Probably by the same people who scream "McCarthyism!" at the drop of a hat.
for its protectionist legislation that prevents DirecTV from legally selling its services in Canada, thus REQUIRING Canadians to act illegally to acquire the programming they clearly want.
Better yet, Canadian voters should elect less socialistic/paternalistic representatives. Just a thought.
NG prices went up because nearly every new power plant being built is gas fired. Insert obligatory rant about environmentalist wackos preventing nuclear power plant construction. (Yes, wind and solar when practical, but we'll still need nukes.)
Like pumping highly explosive gas through residential neighborhoods is safe.
I'll stick with my Humanscale Freedom chair paired with two cheapo folding tables. I have an Aeron chair too (one chair for home, one for work, until I got downsized at least) but I like the Freedom chair better. I suspect Aerons work better for heavyset people rather than skinny folks like me.
Wired has an interesting superchair article that led me to the Freedom chair.
Gotta wonder what the Humanscale folks think about PCE calling their chair "Freedom" as well. Methinks somebody didn't do the obligatory Google search.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Or when you read how successful the war with Iraq was because there were only 200 fatalities, and you realise that they're just counting the Americans.
Or when you read how terrible the war with Iraq was because there were a few thousand Iraqi fatalities, and you realise that they're ignoring the many thousands of Iraqis per year that Saddam Hussein killed.
which nearly killed the classic dividend-paying stock model in favor of the far riskier growth stock model.
Most stocks are supposed to pay dividends. In effect, dividend-paying stocks act like bonds with greater risk in exchange for potentially higher payouts (good companies can and will increase their dividend payouts over time; really good companies do so steadily) and not having to pay back any principal. The company can cut its dividend if things go Bad, which is a risk for the investor but can help keep a wounded company from flatlining; a company financed with debt instead of equity would go straight to bankruptcy court.
So most new companies either go with the growth-stock model (which demands growth rates that are rarely plausible) or the debt-financed (junk bond) model (which imposes a crushing payment schedule). All because the American tax code is so fscked up.
Dividend payouts are also a concrete sign of financial health. It's way harder to cook the books when investors are expecting their quarterly checks to clear.
Of course, the odds of Congress actually killing the double-tax (by either letting companies tax deduct their dividend payouts or letting investors receive their dividend payments tax free, not both as is the case today) are slim, because the average lefty journalist and congresscritter thinks it would strictly benefit The Rich (tm).
Anyhow, human greed combined with the bubble-prone growth stock model caused the financial havoc of the past few years. Most of the putrid tech IPOs of the 1990's (literally half of which were dumped on the market by Goldman Sachs, run by Democrats like Sen. Corzine and ex-SecTreas Rubin) couldn't have made it as dividend-paying companies, public or private (and private makes a lot of sense when your capital expenses are small and you're just trying to retain techies), which in retrospect was a major Clue.
You should check Reseller Ratings before buying from a new mail order store. They'll save you a lot of grief. FWIW, Multiwave and NewEgg are my two favorite toy stores, and both of them are highly rated on RR. Both have handled RMAs from me well.
I don't think I've had any rebates fulfilled from gear I've purchased at CompUSA.
Store rebates encourage me to buy via mail order
on
Are Rebates Scandalous?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Seriously, most of the time, I can buy gear via mail order for about what the store price minus rebate is. I've had enough rebates "lost" to be very, VERY wary of them. Just give me a decent price to begin with and quit wasting my, the post office's, and some minimum wage working stiff at the processing center's time.
I can't help wondering whether these rebate processing companies aren't a variant of the coupon fraud crooks, where criminals gather those grocery store coupons and submit them for credit without anyone actually buying any items. al-Qaeda is/was involved in those. "When big corporations use rebates, they're funding terrorism!" (cue scary music...)
I'll give Best Buy credit for having the best rebate system out there. They print out separate "rebate receipts" and rebate forms at the cash register. I emailed them a complaint about the racks of rebate forms they used to have at their stores so I'd like to think I had something to do with that, even though they didn't quite get the hint that rebates in general are fscking repulsive. I think I've received every rebate since they started their new system though, averaging 2 months turnaround time.
I've reclocked my Athlon 1700+ (TBred core) to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS nForce2 chipset board, using a single Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM (yes, two DIMMs would be better, but they were too expensive at the time). It's just a matter of selecting the right BIOS settings. I left the voltage levels at their defaults. MemTest86 verifies that the memory is stable at that speed. Red Hat Linux runs until I need to reboot for the usual kernel/glibc upgrades. I went this this approach because I wanted to optimize the performence/power consumption balance, what with the machine running 24x7 and all.
Of course, tweaking speeds like this is not guaranteed to work, yadda yadda, but it generally does if you built your system right.
If you want serious firepower, build a dual Athlon box, which should cost no more than the uniprocessor P4 being reviewed. time make reports a bit over 9 minutes when building Wine with MAKEFLAGS=-j2 on my dual 2400+ (not overclocked). Nice, especially when you forget the --with-nptl switch the first time around (d'oh!).
Of course, next week, the Opterons ship, starting with Opteron DP 240's and 242's. It's unclear whether there will be cheap workstation motherboards available right away or just the seriously nice (and expensive) Newisys-designed 1U rackmount servers. It appears that AMD is going to use the Opterons to slap the high-end P4's around, saving the Athlon 64 until they want a low-to-midrange 64-bit desktop platform. I'm surprised the various hardware site reviewers haven't picked up on this.
That's what I did. I lost 20 pounds, 1-2 pounds per week. I'm less lethargic now too. I didn't make any other major changes to my diet. Fats in and of themselves aren't too big a problem.
Note that those "fat-free" desserts have even more sugar than the regular stuff. You'll never lose weight that way. Y'might give your chance at developing diabetes an additional boost though.
After reading your message I checked the XF86Config man page, which pointed me to the nv man page, which documents all sorts of interesting things, including:
Option "CrtcNumber" "integer"
nForce2, Quadro4, GeForce4 and NV30 may have two video outputs.
The driver attempts to autodetect which one the monitor is con-
nected to. In the case that autodetection picks the wrong one,
this option may be used to force usage of a particular output.
The options are "0" or "1". Default: autodetected.
Option "FlatPanel" "boolean"
The driver usually cannot autodetect the presence of a flat
panel so this option should be set when used with a flat panel.
With this driver a flat panel will only work if it was POSTed by
the BIOS, that is, the machine must have booted to the panel.
Default: off.
I'm sticking with nVidia's drivers, but I sure wish I'd noticed these nv flags before.
"Sir! Benetton is pulling out of their plan to plant RFIDs on their clothes. Our plan to track the trustafarian Former Soviet Useful Idiot protesters is off!"
It's a known bug in XFree86 4.3 when using DVI. Switch to your monitor's VGA port, install nVidia's current drivers, switch back to DVI. Or do a textmode install. I'm using RH9 with nVidia's drivers on my ViewSonic VG191b w/DVI now.
It is likely that other distributions using XFree 4.3 will have the same problem. I didn't have this problem with Red Hat 8 (XFree 4.2).
Be sure to pick up the "missing" RPMs on freshrpms.net when you're done.
I do wish nVidia would update their platform drivers. I had to build the nvnet driver for my nForce2 board the hard way rather than use their RPM. I'm using ALSA (thanks freshrpms!) for audio.
It's playing at the Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor. I think you can spring for the bus ride from Ypsi. Here's a link with a little more local info.
I used my existing Red Hat 8 install, which worked fine. I suspect that Win2K is too old to know how to deal with your state-of-the-art nForce2 board completely OK, especially if your install disc doesn't have any of the service packs integrated (heck, Win2K really wasn't stable until SP2). Yeah, I disabled SATA too. WinXP would be a better choice if you have to run Windows, but once you get Win2K loaded, SP3 installed, and the current nVidia drivers, you should be OK.
I'll assume you have a proper power supply. If it's P4 capable (has the extra 4-pin square power plug that uniprocessor Athlons don't use) you'll be OK.
Be sure to flash in BIOS 1002 from ASUS's website if your board didn't come with it. There were issues with many of the prior BIOS versions. I'm still running 1002 Beta 1.
AMD better forget these little incremental speed bumps and switch to a whole new architecture this year if they want to remain competetive.
It's called x86-64. The Opteron ships next month.
The current architecture is like milking a deadhorse and they are already running waay too hot.
I did not need that mental image...
Current Thoroughbred and Barton core Athlons don't run all that hot. An Athlon 3000+ runs cooler than a 3GHz P4.
I reclocked my TBred core Athlon XP 1700+ to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard (Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM). I kept the default core voltage (1.5v). MemTest86 verified that it works reliably. Upping the FSB is mostly a matter of motherboard and memory support, not CPU support (outside of being able to adjust the clock multiplier). A few years ago I reclocked a 150MHz Pentium to 1.5x100MHz. Worked just fine.
Opterons (SledgeHammer) come out in April. Athlon 64's (ClawHammer) have been pushed back to September, likely because AMD wants to be damn sure they have the SOI fab space to meet Opteron demand and because the good ol' Athlon line has been extended further than previously expected (Athlon 3000+, etc).
It's critical for AMD to clobber the Intel Xeon. Opteron can do that. Without the fat margins from overpriced Xeons, Intel's ability to engage in desktop/mobile CPU price wars without gushing red ink will be significantly constrained. Works in theory.
See if you can swap in a Thoroughbred core Athlon. The 1700+ runs at 1.5v, the 1800+ is probably the same. The 1800+ Palamino cores run at 1.75v. You'll probably need to flash in the current BIOS for your motherboard to recognize the TBreds. The lower core voltage makes a HUGE difference.
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Amen! And the most surprising entry on the list of companies to try that approach is:
Comcast.
Yes, the cable TV/Internet behemoth. They had outsourced much of their tech support to India. Now they're bringing it back home, including building a customer service center a few miles from me here in Michigan.
The last time my Internet connection flaked out, I called Comcast, talked to someone who told me that it was a problem on their end that should be fixed within the next few hours, which it was, and he called me back afterwards to make sure that my Internet service was working. No scripted questions trying to diagnose phantom problems on my end. Amazing! Sad that it should be amazing, but, there it is. I even got the impression that the support rep is clueful.
It wasn't long ago that I was mad enough to wire up my condo complex for Internet and satellite TV service. Now I'm inclined to let the cable co. deal with it. Especially if the rumors on dslreports.com about Comcast upping their bandwidth limits to compete with DSL are true.
If it's so trivial, why does the Canadian government restrict it? Isn't it rather Big Brotherish to say "No, you can't subscribe to American television, it's Bad for you"? What, they're afraid people might watch Fox News?
Yes, I'll side with the Canucks on pot laws. It's a dumb habit but it's futile to outlaw stupidity.
And the protectionist crap Bush signed against Canada early in his term was major-league dumb, but I think he's learned his lesson there.
As for suing the Canadian government, it makes more sense than suing Canadian hackers.
Interesting how every time I take a swipe at socialists I get modded down. Probably by the same people who scream "McCarthyism!" at the drop of a hat.
for its protectionist legislation that prevents DirecTV from legally selling its services in Canada, thus REQUIRING Canadians to act illegally to acquire the programming they clearly want.
Better yet, Canadian voters should elect less socialistic/paternalistic representatives. Just a thought.
So how's Tibet these days?
NG prices went up because nearly every new power plant being built is gas fired. Insert obligatory rant about environmentalist wackos preventing nuclear power plant construction. (Yes, wind and solar when practical, but we'll still need nukes.)
Like pumping highly explosive gas through residential neighborhoods is safe.
I'll stick with my Humanscale Freedom chair paired with two cheapo folding tables. I have an Aeron chair too (one chair for home, one for work, until I got downsized at least) but I like the Freedom chair better. I suspect Aerons work better for heavyset people rather than skinny folks like me.
Wired has an interesting superchair article that led me to the Freedom chair.
Gotta wonder what the Humanscale folks think about PCE calling their chair "Freedom" as well. Methinks somebody didn't do the obligatory Google search.
Or when you read how successful the war with Iraq was because there were only 200 fatalities, and you realise that they're just counting the Americans.
Or when you read how terrible the war with Iraq was because there were a few thousand Iraqi fatalities, and you realise that they're ignoring the many thousands of Iraqis per year that Saddam Hussein killed.
The reason why Dell is on top is they know what they are doing and put the best into their computers.
I call bullsh-t.
Their use of non-standard power supplies alone is reason to shun Dell.
At each access node, there is a Sisco Router/switch controlling what traffic can come in and out.
;-)
Let me guess, you're using a DS9 feed?
which nearly killed the classic dividend-paying stock model in favor of the far riskier growth stock model.
Most stocks are supposed to pay dividends. In effect, dividend-paying stocks act like bonds with greater risk in exchange for potentially higher payouts (good companies can and will increase their dividend payouts over time; really good companies do so steadily) and not having to pay back any principal. The company can cut its dividend if things go Bad, which is a risk for the investor but can help keep a wounded company from flatlining; a company financed with debt instead of equity would go straight to bankruptcy court.
So most new companies either go with the growth-stock model (which demands growth rates that are rarely plausible) or the debt-financed (junk bond) model (which imposes a crushing payment schedule). All because the American tax code is so fscked up.
Dividend payouts are also a concrete sign of financial health. It's way harder to cook the books when investors are expecting their quarterly checks to clear.
Of course, the odds of Congress actually killing the double-tax (by either letting companies tax deduct their dividend payouts or letting investors receive their dividend payments tax free, not both as is the case today) are slim, because the average lefty journalist and congresscritter thinks it would strictly benefit The Rich (tm).
Anyhow, human greed combined with the bubble-prone growth stock model caused the financial havoc of the past few years. Most of the putrid tech IPOs of the 1990's (literally half of which were dumped on the market by Goldman Sachs, run by Democrats like Sen. Corzine and ex-SecTreas Rubin) couldn't have made it as dividend-paying companies, public or private (and private makes a lot of sense when your capital expenses are small and you're just trying to retain techies), which in retrospect was a major Clue.
You should check Reseller Ratings before buying from a new mail order store. They'll save you a lot of grief. FWIW, Multiwave and NewEgg are my two favorite toy stores, and both of them are highly rated on RR. Both have handled RMAs from me well.
I don't think I've had any rebates fulfilled from gear I've purchased at CompUSA.
Seriously, most of the time, I can buy gear via mail order for about what the store price minus rebate is. I've had enough rebates "lost" to be very, VERY wary of them. Just give me a decent price to begin with and quit wasting my, the post office's, and some minimum wage working stiff at the processing center's time.
I can't help wondering whether these rebate processing companies aren't a variant of the coupon fraud crooks, where criminals gather those grocery store coupons and submit them for credit without anyone actually buying any items. al-Qaeda is/was involved in those. "When big corporations use rebates, they're funding terrorism!" (cue scary music...)
I'll give Best Buy credit for having the best rebate system out there. They print out separate "rebate receipts" and rebate forms at the cash register. I emailed them a complaint about the racks of rebate forms they used to have at their stores so I'd like to think I had something to do with that, even though they didn't quite get the hint that rebates in general are fscking repulsive. I think I've received every rebate since they started their new system though, averaging 2 months turnaround time.
I've reclocked my Athlon 1700+ (TBred core) to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS nForce2 chipset board, using a single Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM (yes, two DIMMs would be better, but they were too expensive at the time). It's just a matter of selecting the right BIOS settings. I left the voltage levels at their defaults. MemTest86 verifies that the memory is stable at that speed. Red Hat Linux runs until I need to reboot for the usual kernel/glibc upgrades. I went this this approach because I wanted to optimize the performence/power consumption balance, what with the machine running 24x7 and all.
Of course, tweaking speeds like this is not guaranteed to work, yadda yadda, but it generally does if you built your system right.
If you want serious firepower, build a dual Athlon box, which should cost no more than the uniprocessor P4 being reviewed. time make reports a bit over 9 minutes when building Wine with MAKEFLAGS=-j2 on my dual 2400+ (not overclocked). Nice, especially when you forget the --with-nptl switch the first time around (d'oh!).
Of course, next week, the Opterons ship, starting with Opteron DP 240's and 242's. It's unclear whether there will be cheap workstation motherboards available right away or just the seriously nice (and expensive) Newisys-designed 1U rackmount servers. It appears that AMD is going to use the Opterons to slap the high-end P4's around, saving the Athlon 64 until they want a low-to-midrange 64-bit desktop platform. I'm surprised the various hardware site reviewers haven't picked up on this.
That's what I did. I lost 20 pounds, 1-2 pounds per week. I'm less lethargic now too. I didn't make any other major changes to my diet. Fats in and of themselves aren't too big a problem.
Note that those "fat-free" desserts have even more sugar than the regular stuff. You'll never lose weight that way. Y'might give your chance at developing diabetes an additional boost though.
After reading your message I checked the XF86Config man page, which pointed me to the nv man page, which documents all sorts of interesting things, including:
Option "CrtcNumber" "integer"
nForce2, Quadro4, GeForce4 and NV30 may have two video outputs.
The driver attempts to autodetect which one the monitor is con-
nected to. In the case that autodetection picks the wrong one,
this option may be used to force usage of a particular output.
The options are "0" or "1". Default: autodetected.
Option "FlatPanel" "boolean"
The driver usually cannot autodetect the presence of a flat
panel so this option should be set when used with a flat panel.
With this driver a flat panel will only work if it was POSTed by
the BIOS, that is, the machine must have booted to the panel.
Default: off.
I'm sticking with nVidia's drivers, but I sure wish I'd noticed these nv flags before.
"Sir! Benetton is pulling out of their plan to plant RFIDs on their clothes. Our plan to track the trustafarian Former Soviet Useful Idiot protesters is off!"
"Curses! Foiled again!"
It's a known bug in XFree86 4.3 when using DVI. Switch to your monitor's VGA port, install nVidia's current drivers, switch back to DVI. Or do a textmode install. I'm using RH9 with nVidia's drivers on my ViewSonic VG191b w/DVI now.
It is likely that other distributions using XFree 4.3 will have the same problem. I didn't have this problem with Red Hat 8 (XFree 4.2).
Be sure to pick up the "missing" RPMs on freshrpms.net when you're done.
I do wish nVidia would update their platform drivers. I had to build the nvnet driver for my nForce2 board the hard way rather than use their RPM. I'm using ALSA (thanks freshrpms!) for audio.
Or better yet, rent it from Netflix, which is what I did. Or just buy the boxed set from the usual suspects.
It's playing at the Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor. I think you can spring for the bus ride from Ypsi. Here's a link with a little more local info.
Opteron is less than 3 weeks away. 'Nuff said.
So she was just using you for techs?
I used my existing Red Hat 8 install, which worked fine. I suspect that Win2K is too old to know how to deal with your state-of-the-art nForce2 board completely OK, especially if your install disc doesn't have any of the service packs integrated (heck, Win2K really wasn't stable until SP2). Yeah, I disabled SATA too. WinXP would be a better choice if you have to run Windows, but once you get Win2K loaded, SP3 installed, and the current nVidia drivers, you should be OK.
I'll assume you have a proper power supply. If it's P4 capable (has the extra 4-pin square power plug that uniprocessor Athlons don't use) you'll be OK.
Be sure to flash in BIOS 1002 from ASUS's website if your board didn't come with it. There were issues with many of the prior BIOS versions. I'm still running 1002 Beta 1.
AMD better forget these little incremental speed bumps and switch to a whole new architecture this year if they want to remain competetive.
It's called x86-64. The Opteron ships next month.
The current architecture is like milking a deadhorse and they are already running waay too hot.
I did not need that mental image...
Current Thoroughbred and Barton core Athlons don't run all that hot. An Athlon 3000+ runs cooler than a 3GHz P4.
I reclocked my TBred core Athlon XP 1700+ to 8x202MHz (404MHz DDR) on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard (Corsair PC3200C2 DIMM). I kept the default core voltage (1.5v). MemTest86 verified that it works reliably. Upping the FSB is mostly a matter of motherboard and memory support, not CPU support (outside of being able to adjust the clock multiplier). A few years ago I reclocked a 150MHz Pentium to 1.5x100MHz. Worked just fine.
Opterons (SledgeHammer) come out in April. Athlon 64's (ClawHammer) have been pushed back to September, likely because AMD wants to be damn sure they have the SOI fab space to meet Opteron demand and because the good ol' Athlon line has been extended further than previously expected (Athlon 3000+, etc).
It's critical for AMD to clobber the Intel Xeon. Opteron can do that. Without the fat margins from overpriced Xeons, Intel's ability to engage in desktop/mobile CPU price wars without gushing red ink will be significantly constrained. Works in theory.
See if you can swap in a Thoroughbred core Athlon. The 1700+ runs at 1.5v, the 1800+ is probably the same. The 1800+ Palamino cores run at 1.75v. You'll probably need to flash in the current BIOS for your motherboard to recognize the TBreds. The lower core voltage makes a HUGE difference.