I have a Dell 1600n multifunction that annoyed me for 3 MONTHS of printing telling me that it was totally empty. It was ESPECIALLY annoying because it would beep when it had low toner.
After 3 months of hearing it warning beep as it warmed up, again as it started spitting out pages, and then another series of beeps as it finished. VERY annoying. After 3 months of "toner completely empty" warnings with absolutely ZERO print degredation, I finally changed the cartridge out of frustration.
At least my HPs only visually alerted you that it was almost out.
"...and they aren't going to chase anybody up for a lousy quid fifty..."
Dont count on it. Here in the 'States, there have been many instances of government agencies and the like actually chasing people down for sub-$1 amounts owed.
I remember reading a story about a woman that was actually arrested for an outstanding underpayment of 32 cents. Apparently they spent 6 months to a year mailing her notices about it. As I remeber she went to a court hearing for something else (as a defendant or witness)when they by chance discovered she had an outstanding warrant and arrested her on the spot.
Never underestimate the stupidity of government.
Besides, if he tried to pull the "you are responsible for the charges, here is my money order for $98.50" they would most likely hand it right back and say sorry, thats not the correct amount. bring us one in the proper amount.
Personally, I say adapt and accept the requirements of living in the real world here in the 21st century and get a freaking checking account. If you want to be paranoid and noconformist, go live in a shack in the mountains or move to a 3rd world country where they barter and dont use banks. (or at least dont try to do things like going to college that might require things like a bank account, credit accounts, etc)
I have noticed a disturbing trend in my Commiecast service. I dont watch that much TV, so I subscribe to basic analog cable. Every month or two, I find another channel displaying "this channel now only available on Digital cable channel XXX".
So over the past 2 years, my cable bills keep going up, and my channel selection is steadily going down.
Thanks Commiecast.
OH, but I HAVE gone from the teeny tiny 3mb cable to blazing fast 6mb cable. Who cares? I cant tell the difference when I use it for gaming.
what, you mean CNN.com now loads in a quarter second instead of a half second? oh well, that makes it all the more worthwhile!/sarcasm
I had a similar issue. in preparation for packet8, I connected my phone to the wall jack and power so it would charge and be ready when my adapter arrived. My plan was to disconnect the dry pair that goes to the world from inside my home network box and connect it to my VOIP adapter, but I hadnt done that yet.
About 20 mins later, my (supposedly) disconnected phone rang. when I had enough juice in the handset to try, I hit the talk button, and I had dial tone. Weird since I had never used a land line in the house since I bought it 3 years ago. I figured out what the number was by calling my cell, then did a reverse lookup.I called the phone company to report the trouble since they connected a neighbor 2 blocks away to the same pair as my house.
I was told that I couldnt even open a ticket to report the trouble since it wasnt my phone. Amazing. Even though I was sitting on my bed in my PJs, talking on a neighbor's phone line, as far as they were concerned there was nothing wrong. They expected me to walk down the street, find the person who owned the line, and have them call... they wouldnt even call the customer.
apparently it was because I wasnt authorized to accept any charges in case it was outside thier scope (in the house). I was able to point out that the problem HAD to be outside the house well within their scope of responsibility, but that just made them scratch their heads even more. Even a supervisor was unable to help immediately.
abso-freakin-lutely amazing.
Oh, and they finally agreed to hang up and call the customer immediately; too bad it was almost 11pm by this time. By this time, I wanted to have some fun at thier expense and didnt mention the local time to them.
As long as the website actually HONORS its own pledge. I recently purchased something from a website that claims " your personal information is never shared except with our marketing partners. Your credit card is used strictly for your purchase and will NOT be shared with anyone."
Long story short I got a call 3 mos after buying something from them, from some jerk trying to send us $40 in free gas vouchers if we sign up for a service that is $1 for the first month, $20/mo after that. Took forever to convince the jerk I didnt want thier crap. Thanks to a freak series of events, I was able to determine that they got the info from this particular website. The kicker? They already had the credit card number and were ready to bill us as soon as we said "send the vouchers".
So even tho websites claim they protect your info, they may not.
True. its called Tort Reform. Since many of the lawmakers once were trial lawyers (and presumably would return to the profession when they leave office), and they trial lawyer lobbists are VERY powerful, its getting nowhere fast. They are too afraid of people actually being afraid of losing and not suing at the drop of a hat.
Of course thats expected... next thing you know, we'll be shocked and amazed that they voted themselves another pay raise. huh... whodathunkit?
I want a job where I can set my own pay rate on a whim, regardless of my performance with no REAL repurcussions as long as I didnt go too hog wild. If the real world were like that, I could raise my pay and the board of directors wouldnt do jack crap about it. out of the 10, I'd say 6 would have no clue I even existed, 1 wouldnt care, 5 would complain amongst themselves, and only one of the five would even TRY to get me fired. The rest wouldnt take the time to vote, so I'd stay.
The only REAL winners in any lawsuit are the lawyers.
Which is lower on the food chain, in greater need to be extinguished like a bad case of herpes? Trial Lawyers or spyware/adware/virus writers?
Its getting pretty hard to decide these days. Especially THESE particular lawyers. "OK, so your product is installed surreptitiously, yet TECHNICALLY legal since you did inform them that you are installing it (even tho I as a lawyer have a hard time understanding the language in which you phrased it). Now you want me to sue somebody that is removing your product after the consumer was clearly told what was being done? Uh.... OK, I'll take the case."
Makes me want to take a shower even thinking of these guys.
I used to buy dell regularly (now not so much). two years ago my company dumped $125,000 in one shot to replace all our servers at 20 locations (plus rack, switches, etc).
6 mos later I finally cleaned up the mess. wrong parts spec'd, quotes not corrected before the order (and the quotes were so disorganized it was impossible to find the error as a consumer).
things like: -quoted the most expensive for a budgetary number... pedistal servers with the rack mount option added, with LTO drives. we opted to go with travan 40 drives and pedistal configs to save cash. They kept the LTO tapes and only deleted the rails from the order. So our pedistal servers with travan drives showed up missing the parts to make them pedistal servers (feet, top panel, etc), and the wrong tapes. they had to send me the conversion kits and it took me a day to convert them all back.
-when I sent back the 100 LTO tapes and ordered the replacement travan 40 tapes, they sent me 100 travan 20's.
-quoted a 240v fan top for the rack when I spec'd a 120v. was told "its the same part" when I questioned it. When it showed up, there was no voltage switch like I had assumed, and in 5 mins I found the part number they couldnt find.
but the BEST... the absolute BEST... when ordering from the spare parts division...
If its not available within 10 days or so of your order, they cancel the order with absolutely no warning. This is not isolated, as in the past 3 years, I have had 6+ orders cancelled without warning. What usually happens is I place an order for a part. after a week or so, I get an email "we're sorry, its backordered, it should ship within a week." Two weeks later, no part. I call for a status, and am told "sorry sir, that order was cancelled.". What?!?
Apparently if the order cant be filled within a certain time frame, the system automatically drops the order with no notice to ANYONE. That has got to be the most annoying part of the system. If they can email me to tell me its backordered, why not a courteous "sorry, we couldnt fill your order, so it was cancelled. Please call us to arrange an alternative solution."?
My Dell Inspiron D620 with gold support absolutely rocks. I dont have to talk to "Steve" (yeah right)in Bangalore, and when I call to say "um, yeah, my dog ate my laptop" they say " we'll see you tomorrow at your location" or "my server just started smoking" they say "great, see you in 4 hours".
In 2 years, my 21 servers have had a grand total of 8 service calls. not too bad I'd say, especially since all but 2 of those are for a specific problem with the Seagage tape drives... so not totally thier fault.
so gold service kicks ass, the products are rock solid... the rest is questionable.
My wife broke one a couple months ago, and I started sweating it a bit since I am a first time father of a 6mo old.
I was told by my poison control folks that they dont consider a single breakage of a CFL bulb to be too bad, as long as it didnt shatter into tiny pieces and was cleaned up.
Other types of flourescents, old bulbs (8', 10+ years old, etc)or multiple bulbs could be a concern but not a single CFL.
They recommended cleaning the area thoroughly and nothing else.
True enough. Vonage will be OK in the short term provided the nightly news-es dont pick up the story and start hyping it.
Brian Williams and his ilk start blabbing about it and it could very well go back from cutting off O2 to a bullet to the head as scared consumers start bailing like rats off an sinking ship.
Personally I PRAY it survives. I love the $15 I pay for phone service. I dont call many ppl, but those I call most are L/d. And to make matters worse I am in a virtual black hole of cell service so I cant rely strictly on my cell. It would cost over 2x for a pots line in my area, with no L/D (so realistically its over 2x).
"I don't think I've ever seen a consumer device that has a clock that is not reprogrammable."
you missed the point. yes they can all be reprogrammed manually. The way it was designed to work, you set the clock, and tell it whether DST is followed or not. From that point forward (in theory) you never touch the clock again unless there is a loss of power because it would automatically adjust itself.
My point was that I purchased a device that once I set the clock, it would automatically change the time at the appropriate intervals to follow DST. Now that Congress made this apparently worthless change, I now have 40 clock changes per year instead of 20 since half my devices with clocks were designed to switch automatically, but no longer do so properly.
What do you mean no manual alarm could cope? How did manual alarms cope before the change? Thats right you set it before you went to bed, This isn't rocket science. One more point. The Time change occurred on Sunday morning at or about 2am. You had a whole day to look at your clock and figure out it was a hour off before you went to be Sunday night. It's not DST fault you were late to work it was your fault. Nice try though
What about my non-reprogrammable gizmos like VCRs, Mini DV Camcorders, etc that if I want to work as originally intended, I need to either buy a new one or send back to the manufacturer for cleaning/service/updating(at a flat fee of $300 each for my Camcorders) if I want them to work as originally designed.
And thats on top of the week that I wasted strictly on patching my boxes for this mayhem, researching which ones were fixable and which had to be converted to UTC because the vendor stopped supporting them! Too bad I am salaried, otherwise I could use all that overtime pay to replace those gizmos and be back to normal. BAH!
all so some freakin polar bear can have ice for another week due to the reduced emissions, saved energy, etc. Bah! Just slaughter them for steaks and be done with it.
and as for the hordes of kids that we supposedly save because we didnt run them over as they waited at the bus stop in the dark? Screw them. if they arent smart or fast enough to get out of the road when they see headlight coming, ta-da! Darwin at his finest.
they also will not honor the support warranty if you switch XP versions.
I bought a laptop several years back at Best Buy, but it only had XP Home on it. I did the usual dump and reload, and installed XP Pro using one of my spare open licenses. I tried downloading the drivers like I do for every other brand, only to find they didnt exist.
I called support to find out how to get the windows drivers, and was told that they warrant the unit as a whole, and if ANY different OS is installed, they wouldnt talk to me. He did say that after running the restore utility to recover the factory load that it would be valid again.
Turns out that if anything ever happened to that laptop's software, the course of action would not be to fix the driver, etc, but to wipe and reload from scratch.
Thanks for nothing HP.
The next day I took it back to Best Buy and exchanged it for a Sony.
"I think the point was that CompUSA was one of the few retail stores that didn't gouge like that. Sure, they weren't as cheap as mail-order, but they didn't try to screw you the same way that Best Buy, Staples, and the rest of them do."
I call Shenannegans!
I used to work for CUSA. I distinctly remember buying $15 25->9 adapters for.75 with my employee discount. I remember it because until I tried to buy a cable using my discount, I had NO idea what they REALLY cost.
Anyone that tells you that the money isnt in cables and accessories is either lying or stupid.
Last count I had they make about 5-10% on PCs, lose about 5% on printers, and make high double to triple digit %%'s on accessories/cables/etc.
I just want half a chance for them to stop going UP. Also, I am not necessarily talking about the "Dear customers, we paid out too much, therefore everyones rates are going up. Although in my case, as a State Farm customer, when they dont pay out as much, they do issue rebate checks so in some cases they do pass along those savings (but I know most companies dont)
For what you are thinking, I guess it would help protect against the "dear specific customer. on XXXX date you were in an accident and we paid out too much on a claim. Therefore your rates are going up."
They cite the large drain on the health care system for the helmet/seatbelt laws.
IMHO, there should be no helmet laws or seatbelt laws.
Instead there should be a legally protected status for insurance companies (including Healthcare, auto, and MAYBE life) to be able to COMPLETELY deny paying out to individuals that are in an accident and not wearing the appropriate safety gear. Oh, and add the gov't paid medical treatment to that as well... AND make the debts related to the accident treatment "protected" in the same way student loans are from bankruptcy. Make it so that the idiot that was irresponsible has to pay for his choices and cant weasel out of it.
Put some of the responsibility for self protection back on the individuals. If you wear your seatbelt and take other reasonable precautions, you will be covered by the insurance claim. Be reckless and you are responsible for yourself. This applies to both the insured, as well as the injured in other vehicles that normally would be covered. Dont make my rates go up because some idiot in the other car wasnt wearing his belt and now has massive brain damage and is now disabled because he was ejected from the vehicle and ended up wearing the sign post like a hat.
its time we started taking some responsibility for our actions./cold and heartless
Its not a tax. They are just forcing you to use the higher end versions of their product.
Now if NO standard versions worked, and you had to buy Vista Standard for Mac, Vista Enterprise for Mac, etc. and they were all a higher cost than their regular PC counterparts, THAT would be a tax.
From the article... "An AOL spokesman said that it is "clearly ridiculous" to categorize his company's software as badware. "No company has done more to fight malware than AOL, and millions of users are protected by our software every day,"
Isnt this like the author of "virtual bouncer" claiming that they shouldnt be classified as malware/adware, simply because they remove adware/malware themselves? Yes, they removed all BUT the adware that pays them, but they still remove MOST adware/malware, therefore they should be considered good.
This is like paying the mafia to protect you from criminals... who will protect you from your protectors?
I cant even begin to count the number of PCs I have seen with the TCP/IP stack hosed due to an AOHell software corruption... and when you call support. "can you connect to AOL? you can? but you cant get other apps to talk to the internet when you are connected to AOL(MSN messenger, outlook express, etc)? oooh... sooory.... not our problem. our browser dials and surfs OK so you are on your own... not our problem."
They arent cheap, but they wont break the bank either.
The only drawback to the standard Terastation is its lack of support for large
(>2gb) files. I just noticed they now have a "pro" version, which
I have to assume supports large files but have not confirmed this.
I have a client using two standard terastations and they works beautifully.
Dont like your tastes tracked? Easy. Buy everything in brick and mortar, and pay cash.
I love how people think they are more important/influential than they really are.
So they know what your tastes are. Big Deal!
Guys, would you rather they start advertising things at random including O.B., Massengil, and other girly things?
Women, would you rather they start pushing things like jock itch cream and 4x4 truck parts?
We are already having our time wasted by advertising; I actually like (the theory) that its not a COMPLETE waste of my time because its not as likely I'll be seeing advertising for stuff I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in. Its bad enough they bug me about stuff I MIGHT buy.
TV already does that... they advertise based on the demographics of the viewers... guy stuff on spikeTV, girly ads on Lifetime.
And besides, if you are that sensitive/embarrased, maybe you shouldnt be doing whatever it is you are doing that you dont want others to know about.
No SH**! I love how they tout the fact that you can supposedly get your calls pretty much anywhere with those annoying commercials.
Then a while back the CEO (I think) of Verizon made some statement that it was foolish to think/assume/whatever that your cell phone would work inside your house due to technology issues (signal strength, etc).
I am one of those users. in a suburb, not too far out into the country... cant get crap for cell phone coverage in my house. gotta go out into the yard to (somewhat) guarantee good enough service to not have to yell to be heard.
Reminds me of a story I watched on the discovery channel regarding some cool hummer updates using MR (magnetorheological) fluids in the suspension. As you apply varying amounts of electrical energy, the fluid becomes more viscous, making the suspension more firm. It was really wild to watch them energize a drum, dip it in a plastic tub of this dirty looking oil, and watching it stick to the drum like it was freezing. After several seconds there was quite the buildup. They lifted the drum out of the fluid, then turned off the current, causing all of the fluid that had collected to just start flowing off (gushing, really)of it. REALLY cool.
I'm still waiting for samba to fully support my windoze users and fully emulate a windows box 100%.
a good example is printing support. I still cant deploy it to a network of windows boxes due to the lack of print queue management from windows workstation. They can print no problem, but god help them if they need to cancel that 200 page document. So far it cant seem to be done from the workstation. The workstation print queue shows the print jobs, but gives errors about not being able to connect to the server queue.
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I have a Dell 1600n multifunction that annoyed me for 3 MONTHS of printing telling me that it was totally empty. It was ESPECIALLY annoying because it would beep when it had low toner.
After 3 months of hearing it warning beep as it warmed up, again as it started spitting out pages, and then another series of beeps as it finished. VERY annoying. After 3 months of "toner completely empty" warnings with absolutely ZERO print degredation, I finally changed the cartridge out of frustration.
At least my HPs only visually alerted you that it was almost out.
"...and they aren't going to chase anybody up for a lousy quid fifty..."
Dont count on it. Here in the 'States, there have been many instances of government agencies and the like actually chasing people down for sub-$1 amounts owed.
I remember reading a story about a woman that was actually arrested for an outstanding underpayment of 32 cents. Apparently they spent 6 months to a year mailing her notices about it. As I remeber she went to a court hearing for something else (as a defendant or witness)when they by chance discovered she had an outstanding warrant and arrested her on the spot.
Never underestimate the stupidity of government.
Besides, if he tried to pull the "you are responsible for the charges, here is my money order for $98.50" they would most likely hand it right back and say sorry, thats not the correct amount. bring us one in the proper amount.
Personally, I say adapt and accept the requirements of living in the real world here in the 21st century and get a freaking checking account. If you want to be paranoid and noconformist, go live in a shack in the mountains or move to a 3rd world country where they barter and dont use banks. (or at least dont try to do things like going to college that might require things like a bank account, credit accounts, etc)
I have noticed a disturbing trend in my Commiecast service. I dont watch that much TV, so I subscribe to basic analog cable. Every month or two, I find another channel displaying "this channel now only available on Digital cable channel XXX".
/sarcasm
So over the past 2 years, my cable bills keep going up, and my channel selection is steadily going down.
Thanks Commiecast.
OH, but I HAVE gone from the teeny tiny 3mb cable to blazing fast 6mb cable. Who cares? I cant tell the difference when I use it for gaming.
what, you mean CNN.com now loads in a quarter second instead of a half second? oh well, that makes it all the more worthwhile!
I had a similar issue. in preparation for packet8, I connected my phone to the wall jack and power so it would charge and be ready when my adapter arrived. My plan was to disconnect the dry pair that goes to the world from inside my home network box and connect it to my VOIP adapter, but I hadnt done that yet.
About 20 mins later, my (supposedly) disconnected phone rang. when I had enough juice in the handset to try, I hit the talk button, and I had dial tone. Weird since I had never used a land line in the house since I bought it 3 years ago. I figured out what the number was by calling my cell, then did a reverse lookup.I called the phone company to report the trouble since they connected a neighbor 2 blocks away to the same pair as my house.
I was told that I couldnt even open a ticket to report the trouble since it wasnt my phone. Amazing. Even though I was sitting on my bed in my PJs, talking on a neighbor's phone line, as far as they were concerned there was nothing wrong. They expected me to walk down the street, find the person who owned the line, and have them call... they wouldnt even call the customer.
apparently it was because I wasnt authorized to accept any charges in case it was outside thier scope (in the house). I was able to point out that the problem HAD to be outside the house well within their scope of responsibility, but that just made them scratch their heads even more. Even a supervisor was unable to help immediately.
abso-freakin-lutely amazing.
Oh, and they finally agreed to hang up and call the customer immediately; too bad it was almost 11pm by this time. By this time, I wanted to have some fun at thier expense and didnt mention the local time to them.
Glad I am not using them anymore.
As long as the website actually HONORS its own pledge. I recently purchased something from a website that claims " your personal information is never shared except with our marketing partners. Your credit card is used strictly for your purchase and will NOT be shared with anyone."
Long story short I got a call 3 mos after buying something from them, from some jerk trying to send us $40 in free gas vouchers if we sign up for a service that is $1 for the first month, $20/mo after that. Took forever to convince the jerk I didnt want thier crap. Thanks to a freak series of events, I was able to determine that they got the info from this particular website. The kicker? They already had the credit card number and were ready to bill us as soon as we said "send the vouchers".
So even tho websites claim they protect your info, they may not.
True. its called Tort Reform. Since many of the lawmakers once were trial lawyers (and presumably would return to the profession when they leave office), and they trial lawyer lobbists are VERY powerful, its getting nowhere fast. They are too afraid of people actually being afraid of losing and not suing at the drop of a hat.
Of course thats expected... next thing you know, we'll be shocked and amazed that they voted themselves another pay raise. huh... whodathunkit?
I want a job where I can set my own pay rate on a whim, regardless of my performance with no REAL repurcussions as long as I didnt go too hog wild. If the real world were like that, I could raise my pay and the board of directors wouldnt do jack crap about it. out of the 10, I'd say 6 would have no clue I even existed, 1 wouldnt care, 5 would complain amongst themselves, and only one of the five would even TRY to get me fired. The rest wouldnt take the time to vote, so I'd stay.
The only REAL winners in any lawsuit are the lawyers.
I am finding myself torn...
Which is lower on the food chain, in greater need to be extinguished like a bad case of herpes? Trial Lawyers or spyware/adware/virus writers?
Its getting pretty hard to decide these days. Especially THESE particular lawyers. "OK, so your product is installed surreptitiously, yet TECHNICALLY legal since you did inform them that you are installing it (even tho I as a lawyer have a hard time understanding the language in which you phrased it). Now you want me to sue somebody that is removing your product after the consumer was clearly told what was being done? Uh.... OK, I'll take the case."
Makes me want to take a shower even thinking of these guys.
I used to buy dell regularly (now not so much). two years ago my company dumped $125,000 in one shot to replace all our servers at 20 locations (plus rack, switches, etc).
6 mos later I finally cleaned up the mess. wrong parts spec'd, quotes not corrected before the order (and the quotes were so disorganized it was impossible to find the error as a consumer).
things like:
-quoted the most expensive for a budgetary number... pedistal servers with the rack mount option added, with LTO drives. we opted to go with travan 40 drives and pedistal configs to save cash. They kept the LTO tapes and only deleted the rails from the order. So our pedistal servers with travan drives showed up missing the parts to make them pedistal servers (feet, top panel, etc), and the wrong tapes. they had to send me the conversion kits and it took me a day to convert them all back.
-when I sent back the 100 LTO tapes and ordered the replacement travan 40 tapes, they sent me 100 travan 20's.
-quoted a 240v fan top for the rack when I spec'd a 120v. was told "its the same part" when I questioned it. When it showed up, there was no voltage switch like I had assumed, and in 5 mins I found the part number they couldnt find.
but the BEST... the absolute BEST... when ordering from the spare parts division...
If its not available within 10 days or so of your order, they cancel the order with absolutely no warning. This is not isolated, as in the past 3 years, I have had 6+ orders cancelled without warning. What usually happens is I place an order for a part. after a week or so, I get an email "we're sorry, its backordered, it should ship within a week." Two weeks later, no part. I call for a status, and am told "sorry sir, that order was cancelled.". What?!?
Apparently if the order cant be filled within a certain time frame, the system automatically drops the order with no notice to ANYONE. That has got to be the most annoying part of the system. If they can email me to tell me its backordered, why not a courteous "sorry, we couldnt fill your order, so it was cancelled. Please call us to arrange an alternative solution."?
My Dell Inspiron D620 with gold support absolutely rocks. I dont have to talk to "Steve" (yeah right)in Bangalore, and when I call to say "um, yeah, my dog ate my laptop" they say " we'll see you tomorrow at your location" or "my server just started smoking" they say "great, see you in 4 hours".
In 2 years, my 21 servers have had a grand total of 8 service calls. not too bad I'd say, especially since all but 2 of those are for a specific problem with the Seagage tape drives... so not totally thier fault.
so gold service kicks ass, the products are rock solid... the rest is questionable.
Agreed. Scaremongering it is.
My wife broke one a couple months ago, and I started sweating it a bit since I am a first time father of a 6mo old.
I was told by my poison control folks that they dont consider a single breakage of a CFL bulb to be too bad, as long as it didnt shatter into tiny pieces and was cleaned up.
Other types of flourescents, old bulbs (8', 10+ years old, etc)or multiple bulbs could be a concern but not a single CFL.
They recommended cleaning the area thoroughly and nothing else.
We use Calcium Calendars. Pretty good, especially if you want a few read/write users with default read only public access.
http://www.brownbearsw.com/calcium/
Also supports iCal, user notifications/reminders, etc.
it also wont break the bank, starting at just under $200.
True enough. Vonage will be OK in the short term provided the nightly news-es dont pick up the story and start hyping it.
Brian Williams and his ilk start blabbing about it and it could very well go back from cutting off O2 to a bullet to the head as scared consumers start bailing like rats off an sinking ship.
Personally I PRAY it survives. I love the $15 I pay for phone service. I dont call many ppl, but those I call most are L/d. And to make matters worse I am in a virtual black hole of cell service so I cant rely strictly on my cell. It would cost over 2x for a pots line in my area, with no L/D (so realistically its over 2x).
"I don't think I've ever seen a consumer device that has a clock that is not reprogrammable."
you missed the point. yes they can all be reprogrammed manually. The way it was designed to work, you set the clock, and tell it whether DST is followed or not. From that point forward (in theory) you never touch the clock again unless there is a loss of power because it would automatically adjust itself.
My point was that I purchased a device that once I set the clock, it would automatically change the time at the appropriate intervals to follow DST. Now that Congress made this apparently worthless change, I now have 40 clock changes per year instead of 20 since half my devices with clocks were designed to switch automatically, but no longer do so properly.
What do you mean no manual alarm could cope? How did manual alarms cope before the change? Thats right you set it before you went to bed, This isn't rocket science. One more point. The Time change occurred on Sunday morning at or about 2am. You had a whole day to look at your clock and figure out it was a hour off before you went to be Sunday night. It's not DST fault you were late to work it was your fault. Nice try though
What about my non-reprogrammable gizmos like VCRs, Mini DV Camcorders, etc that if I want to work as originally intended, I need to either buy a new one or send back to the manufacturer for cleaning/service/updating(at a flat fee of $300 each for my Camcorders) if I want them to work as originally designed.
And thats on top of the week that I wasted strictly on patching my boxes for this mayhem, researching which ones were fixable and which had to be converted to UTC because the vendor stopped supporting them! Too bad I am salaried, otherwise I could use all that overtime pay to replace those gizmos and be back to normal. BAH!
all so some freakin polar bear can have ice for another week due to the reduced emissions, saved energy, etc. Bah! Just slaughter them for steaks and be done with it.
and as for the hordes of kids that we supposedly save because we didnt run them over as they waited at the bus stop in the dark? Screw them. if they arent smart or fast enough to get out of the road when they see headlight coming, ta-da! Darwin at his finest.
they also will not honor the support warranty if you switch XP versions.
I bought a laptop several years back at Best Buy, but it only had XP Home on it. I did the usual dump and reload, and installed XP Pro using one of my spare open licenses. I tried downloading the drivers like I do for every other brand, only to find they didnt exist.
I called support to find out how to get the windows drivers, and was told that they warrant the unit as a whole, and if ANY different OS is installed, they wouldnt talk to me. He did say that after running the restore utility to recover the factory load that it would be valid again.
Turns out that if anything ever happened to that laptop's software, the course of action would not be to fix the driver, etc, but to wipe and reload from scratch.
Thanks for nothing HP.
The next day I took it back to Best Buy and exchanged it for a Sony.
"I think the point was that CompUSA was one of the few retail stores that didn't gouge like that. Sure, they weren't as cheap as mail-order, but they didn't try to screw you the same way that Best Buy, Staples, and the rest of them do."
.75 with my employee discount. I remember it because until I tried to buy a cable using my discount, I had NO idea what they REALLY cost.
I call Shenannegans!
I used to work for CUSA. I distinctly remember buying $15 25->9 adapters for
Anyone that tells you that the money isnt in cables and accessories is either lying or stupid.
Last count I had they make about 5-10% on PCs, lose about 5% on printers, and make high double to triple digit %%'s on accessories/cables/etc.
yup. Sonicwall with thier CFS (content filter system). works like a dream.
Until somebody there goofs and flags the map image server for mapquest as porn (we are fighting that one now)
Luckilly they do have a user submission system to reclassify those goofs.
Oh, I dont expect them to go down.
I just want half a chance for them to stop going UP. Also, I am not necessarily talking about the "Dear customers, we paid out too much, therefore everyones rates are going up. Although in my case, as a State Farm customer, when they dont pay out as much, they do issue rebate checks so in some cases they do pass along those savings (but I know most companies dont)
For what you are thinking, I guess it would help protect against the "dear specific customer. on XXXX date you were in an accident and we paid out too much on a claim. Therefore your rates are going up."
They cite the large drain on the health care system for the helmet/seatbelt laws.
/cold and heartless
IMHO, there should be no helmet laws or seatbelt laws.
Instead there should be a legally protected status for insurance companies (including Healthcare, auto, and MAYBE life) to be able to COMPLETELY deny paying out to individuals that are in an accident and not wearing the appropriate safety gear. Oh, and add the gov't paid medical treatment to that as well... AND make the debts related to the accident treatment "protected" in the same way student loans are from bankruptcy. Make it so that the idiot that was irresponsible has to pay for his choices and cant weasel out of it.
Put some of the responsibility for self protection back on the individuals. If you wear your seatbelt and take other reasonable precautions, you will be covered by the insurance claim. Be reckless and you are responsible for yourself. This applies to both the insured, as well as the injured in other vehicles that normally would be covered. Dont make my rates go up because some idiot in the other car wasnt wearing his belt and now has massive brain damage and is now disabled because he was ejected from the vehicle and ended up wearing the sign post like a hat.
its time we started taking some responsibility for our actions.
Its not a tax. They are just forcing you to use the higher end versions of their product.
Now if NO standard versions worked, and you had to buy Vista Standard for Mac, Vista Enterprise for Mac, etc. and they were all a higher cost than their regular PC counterparts, THAT would be a tax.
From the article... "An AOL spokesman said that it is "clearly ridiculous" to categorize his company's software as badware. "No company has done more to fight malware than AOL, and millions of users are protected by our software every day,"
Isnt this like the author of "virtual bouncer" claiming that they shouldnt be classified as malware/adware, simply because they remove adware/malware themselves? Yes, they removed all BUT the adware that pays them, but they still remove MOST adware/malware, therefore they should be considered good.
This is like paying the mafia to protect you from criminals... who will protect you from your protectors?
I cant even begin to count the number of PCs I have seen with the TCP/IP stack hosed due to an AOHell software corruption... and when you call support. "can you connect to AOL? you can? but you cant get other apps to talk to the internet when you are connected to AOL(MSN messenger, outlook express, etc)? oooh... sooory.... not our problem. our browser dials and surfs OK so you are on your own... not our problem."
Best solution overall I Have see is the Buffalo Terastation.
They arent cheap, but they wont break the bank either.
The only drawback to the standard Terastation is its lack of support for large (>2gb) files. I just noticed they now have a "pro" version, which I have to assume supports large files but have not confirmed this.
I have a client using two standard terastations and they works beautifully.
...doesnt mean they ARENT watching you.
Dont like your tastes tracked? Easy. Buy everything in brick and mortar, and pay cash.
I love how people think they are more important/influential than they really are.
So they know what your tastes are. Big Deal!
Guys, would you rather they start advertising things at random including O.B., Massengil, and other girly things?
Women, would you rather they start pushing things like jock itch cream and 4x4 truck parts?
We are already having our time wasted by advertising; I actually like (the theory) that its not a COMPLETE waste of my time because its not as likely I'll be seeing advertising for stuff I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in. Its bad enough they bug me about stuff I MIGHT buy.
TV already does that... they advertise based on the demographics of the viewers... guy stuff on spikeTV, girly ads on Lifetime.
And besides, if you are that sensitive/embarrased, maybe you shouldnt be doing whatever it is you are doing that you dont want others to know about.
No SH**! I love how they tout the fact that you can supposedly get your calls pretty much anywhere with those annoying commercials.
Then a while back the CEO (I think) of Verizon made some statement that it was foolish to think/assume/whatever that your cell phone would work inside your house due to technology issues (signal strength, etc).
I am one of those users. in a suburb, not too far out into the country... cant get crap for cell phone coverage in my house. gotta go out into the yard to (somewhat) guarantee good enough service to not have to yell to be heard.
crappy cell phones...
Reminds me of a story I watched on the discovery channel regarding some cool hummer updates using MR (magnetorheological) fluids in the suspension. As you apply varying amounts of electrical energy, the fluid becomes more viscous, making the suspension more firm. It was really wild to watch them energize a drum, dip it in a plastic tub of this dirty looking oil, and watching it stick to the drum like it was freezing. After several seconds there was quite the buildup. They lifted the drum out of the fluid, then turned off the current, causing all of the fluid that had collected to just start flowing off (gushing, really)of it. REALLY cool.
I'm still waiting for samba to fully support my windoze users and fully emulate a windows box 100%. a good example is printing support. I still cant deploy it to a network of windows boxes due to the lack of print queue management from windows workstation. They can print no problem, but god help them if they need to cancel that 200 page document. So far it cant seem to be done from the workstation. The workstation print queue shows the print jobs, but gives errors about not being able to connect to the server queue.