I have been pissed of lots of times, trying to use IE-specific websites (banks seem to like to do this especially) with a different browser, and it didn't work.
I've been pissed even more when I buy a piece of hardware that says "You can access it with any HTML compliant web browser". Only to find out that to truly access all of the functions in it that you need to use IE. I've come across a few software packages that make that same claim as well but wont fully work without IE. It's annoying.
I wanted to return a lot of PCS phones that were bad (no analog). I worked for an IV pharmacy that delivered to peoples homes, many of them in very rural areas of Missouri, Illinois & Iowa. So having analog work on all of our phones was extremely important to us.
I had already delt with Sprints runaround (No, I do NOT have 3 frickin' weeks to get my phones replaced!) so I decided to call Samsung. No matter what option I pressed I could not get to a real live person. In disgust, I eventually gave up after an hour solid of messing with it. The next morning I called investor relations (which had already closed when I made my earlier call) and asked to speak to the president. Lo and behold, a half hour later he did call me back.
"You do know that no matter what option you press you can't get to a real live person?" CEO: "No, there should be an option..." Me:"Let's try it!" I punched another line, dialed the number and let him have at it. He couldn't get to a real live person either. You could hear him suppressing his desire to cuss. He appologized & then said "I've never had to use the phone system, when I want to get ahold of someone I have my assistant place the call and connect me when they get through..." Must be nice.
After explaining what our business did -- I had my half dozen crates of replacement phones in less than 6 hours from the time that call ended and they were already activated for me. All of them worked flawlessly as well.
If you can't get to billing, try investor relations for getting a real live person.
Pizza companies do indeed speed a lot of money on software and database access to verify addresses. They spend money on address maps and surveys as well. Most of this is indeed done to protect the driver from getting hit over the head with a bottle and having his money stolen....But that isn't the only use for this data, nor is it the only thing they do with it. They also sell this information to a variety of database companies that use it for skip tracing, records verification, credit card purchase history, travel history (IE: you buy a domino's pizza on vacation in NY but you live in Kansas and regularly order there..The system does make a note of it.)
Perhaps you should wonder over to Nexis and have a look at all of the different packages they offer for various industries?
Re:I don't *want* concise user manuals
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
But for God's sake, don't forget about the concise user manual. I hate buying new gear and not getting a good manual with it. The manual should explain everything the unit can do in every configuration.
If they want to make a simple quickstart guide too, that's great, but don't leave out the full-blown details.
I recently bought a USR Turbo Wirless Access Point model 8054. It has the worst manual for a router I have ever come across. Half the functions aren't documented, the limits on fuctions (like how many firewall rules you can set, how to use the port forwarding feature (and what you have to disable to use it), all of the things that game mode turns off..), even very basic functions are undocumented. It came with a mere 4 scraps of paper, and a manual on the CD that is worthless. The online manual is the same as the one on the CD. Something like this with all of the features it has should come with at least a 60 page manual, not 4 frickin' scraps of paper and a handful of worthless HTML files.
I'm half tempted to return the thing and pay the restocking fee and get something else. The user interface isn't all that great either, have to reset the router to make even a single change. So configuring the thing is absolutely slow and painful. (The reset makes it RQ a new IP each time.) No dyn-dns support. Of course, that isn't documented either.
Some of the products out there are just downright frustrating. I hate having to call in for phone support and deal with voice jail for something where useful manual would have eliminated the problem in the first place.
I have to imagine the return rate on these things is fairly high...Eventually all of those ones returned as 'defective' would have to cost them something, maybe even enough to justify including a real manual?
More often then not, I find that the sales people that I've dealt with at large electronics stores don't know what they are talking about. Maybe it's due to the poorly written manuals or maybe it's that they don't even RTFM of the products that they're selling.
A sales person at one of these stores (sounds similar to a character on the Futurama show) began to tell me that the DVD-Audio designation on a DVD player meant that it allows you to playback mp3s that you've burnt using your DVD drive and left out the whole part about the DVD-Audio discs which is a competitor to the SA-CD format.
I think the problem is even more basic than that. I don't think any of the salesmen have actually used -- the products they are selling. It's a very different experience having set the product up, tested it out, gone through this or that hassle with it than just reading the features list off of the box for the person buying it.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any big electronics store that makes the employees sit down and actually use the products before they decide to: 1- carry it, 2- try to sell it to the customer. I think that experience would act as a filter for a lot of bad products if it was implimented correctly.
[Better call my lawyer and get a patent for this!]
So they crippled the car with mediocre performance by allowing only mediocre parts like those from the Chevette.
Now there was a car that truly deserves to be on the list of the worst cars ever, even more so than the Fiero and Pinto. Absolutely awful ride. GM had soo many cars during that era that should make this list! The Chevette being one of the biggest offenders.
Don't get to thinking that just because Honda makes a car, it's beyond reproach where mechanical failures are concerned. The S is one of Honda's more "tempermental" products of late.
Not that I experienced even half of these problems, but the ones I did (the 2nd gear thing, window switch, and the rear end 'click,' the first hint of diff failure) made me wake up and realize that there are no golden brands where cars are concerned.
Generally very reliable engines, the stuff that I saw as being a problem on them in commercial service (where problems crop up a lot faster) were suspension, and steering part related. The tripple wishbone in the accord is very problematic from a durability standpoint on the rough roads we have here. It's not at all unusual to see major suspension work ($2000+) on them at 70K in my area. The floor construction is also very disappointing if you ever carry anything heavy in them. It gets it's strength from it's shape, but it bends when you put a heavy load in it. (Set 3-4 60LB paper boxes in the back of one and look underneath.) Do this enough and that material looses it's integrity and you will find yourself suddenly needed an alignment as your car has bent itself out of shape. It's not even a lot of weight that causes the flexing, this is the weight of one slightly heavy person....And for the unbeliever: Go to a used car lot, look under the driver side, compare this with the passenger side.
Ford has had a long term relationship of some sort with Firestone, and they've used them disproportionately more than other brands for years. I've not been impressed by Firestones for a long time, holding them with about the same regard as BF Badrich and Uniroyal. For my money, the only tires I will buy are Goodyear and Michelin, which have thankfully been the two brands that have come on the past several new cars and trucks I've bought. Other than road hazard damage, which no tire is immune to, I've not had any complaints.
Makers love those high carbon gripless tires. They get their fuel economy up for the window-sticker on the car, but they don't grip worth a damn....From the years I spent working as a courier putting 80K plus a year on cars & trucks, my preferences and experience with tires leads me to believe that Michelin have the best build quality and durability for a non-commercial tire. If you feel the sidewall it's perfectly smooth inside and out. If it isn't, it's defective for a Michelin. Even on Goodyears you notice some ridges and seams. Firestones were(and still are) horrendous when you apply that test to them. Different manufacturing process. Very very poor sidewalls in many of the Firestone and Goodyear products.
The Michelins have a little bit thicker sidewall and better materials in the sidewall. You will eventually clip a curb at some point, or brush up against them parking, hit a deep enough pot hole that the strength of this will matter. It's not something most people pay attention to when buying them. I learned this lesson the hard way. Had some excellent gripping Goodyears with sidewalls that couldn't take life on the unmaintained streets of St Louis. The factory installed Firestones didn't fair well at all either, nor did the two I had replaced under warranty at very low miles.
I'm not real thrilled about the high carbon content in most of the new tires. Gets better mileage, but wont grip as good. The converse is, good sticky tires wear quick. If you can push your thumb down full force and leave a print, it's plenty sticky enough to stop you. If you can't, you are taking chances with your life. A set of sticky tires every 40K is cheaper than: #1 Doctors #2 Reconstructive Surgery/Physical Therapy #3 Body Work #4 Increased Insurance Premiums #5 Funeral Services #6 Guilt From Hurting Others.
If you have a truck that has some serious weight in it or a full size van & you really want a good tire, Commercial tire makes excellent tires. They are nearly indestructable, can be retreaded a couple times, come with the best warranty in the business, you can get them grippy or in fuel economy mode, and they have the toughest sidewall I've ever seen in a tire. They pass the perfectly smooth seamless test. (Just run your finger across it.) They also cost twice as much as anything else on the market, but worth it if you drive 80K a year. Almost all of the big fleet transport companies use them on their vans (DHL, Airborne, Fedex, UPS..etc). You pay more up front, but the TCO is lower over the long haul. They ride a bit rough though.
PC hardware tends to survive getting wet -- as long as two things are true:
1) There is no current running through it while it gets wet.
2) The mixture is not heavily filled with sugar or caramel (like Coke).
3) You let it dry out before you run current through it.
Even monitors usually survive a downpour if they have been unplugged for a day or so before you leave them in the rain.
Found this out while working for a charity thrift store. People would just throw their old junk up on the dock on the day we were closed, a good portion of that time it would rain.
So coffee (with sweet-n-low) doesn't surprise me. Coffee with sugar is more problematic. Pepsi & Coke tend to kill anything with moveable parts.
So we have to bypass all protection by copying everything at 100.5%. Yes, apprantly Canon thinks that people cannot tell the difference between a real dollar bill and one printed on lower-quality paper and is signifigantly different in tone and color, while anyone can tell that a dollar bill that is 100.5% bigger is a fake.
This isn't to stop those bills being used against humans, it's to stop those bills being used against machines. In the not too distant past you could use a simple black and white copier to run one side of a bill and use them in whatever vending machines you wanted. Some of the machines that were simply there to provide quarters (say at car washes) got hosed royally. Enough people were doing it that it created a serious drain on resources for the secret service. (They would much rather be busting teenage hackers, threatening the presidents enemies, and going after major players in the counterfeit game.) Some of those machines that will accept that are still around, but the ability to make the copies as easily has decreased.
My understanding of the "law" in regards to copying money was that you have to blow it up to 150% of it's size for it to be legal.(I hope this is still correct, don't take it as gospel, I'm not a lawyer.) Tons of reporters and photographers take pictures of money and have to comply with that.
Mine don't do that. Then again, I installed Mozilla & set it as their default browser & mail client when I last cleaned up their machines. (One got away with a thorough scrubbing with Ad-aware and Norton Antivirus, while the other needed a nuke & reinstall.) After a few minutes' familiarization, they were good to go. I even set up WebWasher for them to kill banner ads.
I did that for my mother with Mozilla & Opera, but the result was somewhat unexpected. She uses sites that use every single insecure feature possible. It took about 3 hours of customization to get it to where it didn't filter out those sites that she wanted to use in that way. (Online games, web based crossword puzzles, and things of that nature...) There is no point in trying to explain to her how to configure webwasher, mozilla, opera, or any other piece of software. It goes over her head, and just results in a headache for me to support it. The one huge plus has been I don't have to worry about her getting infected from email anymore.
Just like trying to explain "Why is my computer slow?". It isn't the computer, it's the connection you have. She got used to having a T1 when she was working & uses dial up now. Told her about DSL..it's $10 more a month...but it's never sank in.
More and more I find myself leaving the IM programs off. It's just a distraction! I can live without the interruptions of MSN/AIM/ICQ/Jabber. I still let the mail program do it's checks every 15 minutes or so as I don't get enough mail for it to be a constant distraction.
I don't know how anyone gets anything useful done with all of that running.
Why would you assume people get laptops to save space on their desks? Since when is desk space a premium for most people, buy a new fucking desk, it's not like it's a new house.
If desk space wasn't a premium, people wouldn't be willing to shell out big money for LCD displays.
Ever set up a desktop in the dining room and know you are going to have to move it whenever you want to use it or have company over? Not every living space has the luxury of unlimited room. Laptops solve those kinds of problems very handily.
I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)
There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.
I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them...it's still a gamble on future OS's.
It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.
You're implying that it is ok to subject a child to any social situation, regardless of its moral value, and leave it up to each child to make their own distinction on whether that situation is correct or incorrect. This implies that morality is not a learned trait, but an in-born one. I can guarantee that a baby born into a community of criminals and never introduced to any other examples of social behavior, will commonly become a criminal himself. In those instances where he does not, it is usually because of a mentor or some other positive moral example.
The single largest predictor of the absence of criminal behavior is a father in the home. It also doubles the chance a kid will complete college, finish high school, and reduces the odds of girls getting pregnant in their teen years by 40%. The numbers hold pretty constant regardless of income, race, or location. Mentor indeed.
TV is a poor substitute for a father. Don't underestimate YOUR influence.
The P166MMX wasn't a rip off, it overclocked well.
My P166MMX will happily do 266mhz @ 75mhz bus stable. Exactly the same as my P200MMX does in that board stably. It's still performing it's function happily running W2K server same as it has been for the past several years.
The real problem back then was the OS it was running on. It's not easy to judge stability when you are running Windows 95/98. But put them with a decent OS & decent drive controller and they happily clock to the max your board allows in most cases.
Some of the socket 7 boards can be brought back to life, sometimes you need a voltage regulator, but if the board has the right jumpers -- you can throw in a K-6 and take them up a notch. You can also sometimes find those kits from Power Leap that will let you run them up to 500mhz with a K6-2, or even K6-3+ at 550). So an ancient "Gatway P-100" box may or may not be complete junk depending on the board. I never find any with K6's in them already. That tells me people are keeping them, or the mod wasn't very popular.
Found a couple decent NEC MultiSync monitors 17" night before last and a couple nice USR hardware modems. Not much else worth mentioning.
A good fourth of the time I can't communicate with AOL users period via email. Whether I use my ISP's server to send it, or the free service I have in Russia.
The free service I have in Russia blocks yahoo all of the time now, doesn't even tell the user who sent it that their mail couldn't be delivered. It just disappears into a blackhole. I'm sure they block others as well. It's pretty rare for me to get spam on that account. Since I know they block people I'm reluctant to use the address as much anymore, even though it's served me well. I change ISP's, but I keep that email address so people I know can get hold of me.
Email is quickly becomming unreliable, which is going to have severe negative effects on Ecommerce if we don't do something about it.
The way AOL is going about it is having negative impacts on other legit senders.
Seriously, hasn't anyone noticed that the spam is comming mostly from countries that have a technology infrastruction combined with lots of really poor people (China, India, etc.)? In a lot of those countries life is harsh. It's no wonder people turn to rather unpleasant means to better their standard of living. Sure spamming sucks, but it beats the hell out of 16 hrs/day making Nike shoes in a sweatshop. If you want spam to go away, do something about the general standard of living in the rest of the world.
Yeah, I'm sure that is the excuse that Ralsky uses. You just can't make it in America, he's desperate living in his million dollar home...
You know, criminals will break the law for the quick buck no matter what their income. The only thing a few of them fear is consequences. Spamming is not a crime of the impulsive, it is a planned willful act to disregard the standards of the community. It involves investment, planning, stealth, and usually some outside help (for software) to get going. We have not made the consequences fearful enough, nor do we have the enforcement means under the current laws to change the minds of those who would be affected by reasoning about the consequences.
Even if you multipled the standard of living over there 10 fold, spamming wouldn't stop. You know it, I know it. That's why guys like Ralsky exist.
I draw the line at about P120 for still being 'useable'.
A laptop is one thing, a desktop is a whole different animal when it comes to slow chips. I have some dual boards that will take P120's, so I do pull those socket 7 chips when I find them. They make decent enough low end servers. I will yank out any decent cards or parts that are useable. Have an entire closet full of parts. It used to be a lot more till I cleaned house and gave a lot of it away, and what I couldn't I pitched or took down to the metal recycling center.
My friend scruffy has an enitre basement stacked floor to ceiling with parts. Plus more on the first floor, and yet more on the 2nd floor. I'll never let my house get that bad!:) When I had him as a roommate he moved out and left me an entire basement filled with computer parts there too. heh
If your situation is as bad as Scruffy's current one, you might considering moving and just leaving it all behind.
Okay, 80% of what ends up on the curb is junk, but it depends greatly on where you live and the areas demographics as to what you can find.
I wont go out of my way to look very often, but I have a few spots behind certain engineering firms that I do look, and if I happen to see a box when I'm out and about I'll grab it. I can always throw it away again.
I've found decent SCSI controllers, small and medium SCSI drives, tons of decent size EDO and SDRAM, plenty of optical drives, several 17" good monitors that were reasonably clean, a working Athlon system (that just needed the ram in it reseated).
Of course, 4 out of 5 I stop and it's a P100 or 486 piece of junk, but that other 1 out of 5 nets something that is still usable.
I like Foobar. Most of my hardware is pretty old, and it gets along with it a slight bit better than Winamp3. It does, however, really pay to search out plugins for Foobar to get it to be a little less barebones. Don't care if it looks ugly, just like to have certain features (like searching).:)
I tried a mess of different players, many of them either choked when I tried to give them 10K+ playlist, or didn't support media formats I use (like.ogg). Foobar is probably the least resource hungry of the ones that didn't choke.
I have an old P133 laptop w/like 40MB of memory on it that runs windows 2000 just fine. I put 2000 on it (even though it is "technically" below the required specs) because I was tired of re-loading win98 every few months. It runs Win2k wonderfully, even better than Win98 in my opinion.. And I haven't had to reload it since:)
I've run Windows 2000 on machines as sad as a 486DX/2 66 W/ 40MB of memory. While it will install it, this isn't a machine I would want to spend any time using.
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I have been pissed of lots of times, trying to use IE-specific websites (banks seem to like to do this especially) with a different browser, and it didn't work.
I've been pissed even more when I buy a piece of hardware that says "You can access it with any HTML compliant web browser". Only to find out that to truly access all of the functions in it that you need to use IE. I've come across a few software packages that make that same claim as well but wont fully work without IE. It's annoying.
I wanted to return a lot of PCS phones that were bad (no analog). I worked for an IV pharmacy that delivered to peoples homes, many of them in very rural areas of Missouri, Illinois & Iowa. So having analog work on all of our phones was extremely important to us.
I had already delt with Sprints runaround (No, I do NOT have 3 frickin' weeks to get my phones replaced!) so I decided to call Samsung. No matter what option I pressed I could not get to a real live person. In disgust, I eventually gave up after an hour solid of messing with it. The next morning I called investor relations (which had already closed when I made my earlier call) and asked to speak to the president. Lo and behold, a half hour later he did call me back.
"You do know that no matter what option you press you can't get to a real live person?" CEO: "No, there should be an option..." Me:"Let's try it!" I punched another line, dialed the number and let him have at it. He couldn't get to a real live person either. You could hear him suppressing his desire to cuss. He appologized & then said "I've never had to use the phone system, when I want to get ahold of someone I have my assistant place the call and connect me when they get through..." Must be nice.
After explaining what our business did -- I had my half dozen crates of replacement phones in less than 6 hours from the time that call ended and they were already activated for me. All of them worked flawlessly as well.
If you can't get to billing, try investor relations for getting a real live person.
Pizza companies do indeed speed a lot of money on software and database access to verify addresses. They spend money on address maps and surveys as well. Most of this is indeed done to protect the driver from getting hit over the head with a bottle and having his money stolen. ...But that isn't the only use for this data, nor is it the only thing they do with it. They also sell this information to a variety of database companies that use it for skip tracing, records verification, credit card purchase history, travel history (IE: you buy a domino's pizza on vacation in NY but you live in Kansas and regularly order there..The system does make a note of it.)
Perhaps you should wonder over to Nexis and have a look at all of the different packages they offer for various industries?
But for God's sake, don't forget about the concise user manual. I hate buying new gear and not getting a good manual with it. The manual should explain everything the unit can do in every configuration.
If they want to make a simple quickstart guide too, that's great, but don't leave out the full-blown details.
I recently bought a USR Turbo Wirless Access Point model 8054. It has the worst manual for a router I have ever come across. Half the functions aren't documented, the limits on fuctions (like how many firewall rules you can set, how to use the port forwarding feature (and what you have to disable to use it), all of the things that game mode turns off..), even very basic functions are undocumented. It came with a mere 4 scraps of paper, and a manual on the CD that is worthless. The online manual is the same as the one on the CD. Something like this with all of the features it has should come with at least a 60 page manual, not 4 frickin' scraps of paper and a handful of worthless HTML files.
I'm half tempted to return the thing and pay the restocking fee and get something else. The user interface isn't all that great either, have to reset the router to make even a single change. So configuring the thing is absolutely slow and painful. (The reset makes it RQ a new IP each time.) No dyn-dns support. Of course, that isn't documented either.
Some of the products out there are just downright frustrating. I hate having to call in for phone support and deal with voice jail for something where useful manual would have eliminated the problem in the first place.
I have to imagine the return rate on these things is fairly high...Eventually all of those ones returned as 'defective' would have to cost them something, maybe even enough to justify including a real manual?
More often then not, I find that the sales people that I've dealt with at large electronics stores don't know what they are talking about. Maybe it's due to the poorly written manuals or maybe it's that they don't even RTFM of the products that they're selling.
A sales person at one of these stores (sounds similar to a character on the Futurama show) began to tell me that the DVD-Audio designation on a DVD player meant that it allows you to playback mp3s that you've burnt using your DVD drive and left out the whole part about the DVD-Audio discs which is a competitor to the SA-CD format.
I think the problem is even more basic than that. I don't think any of the salesmen have actually used -- the products they are selling. It's a very different experience having set the product up, tested it out, gone through this or that hassle with it than just reading the features list off of the box for the person buying it.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any big electronics store that makes the employees sit down and actually use the products before they decide to: 1- carry it, 2- try to sell it to the customer.
I think that experience would act as a filter for a lot of bad products if it was implimented correctly.
[Better call my lawyer and get a patent for this!]
So they crippled the car with mediocre performance by allowing only mediocre parts like those from the Chevette.
Now there was a car that truly deserves to be on the list of the worst cars ever, even more so than the Fiero and Pinto. Absolutely awful ride. GM had soo many cars during that era that should make this list! The Chevette being one of the biggest offenders.
Don't get to thinking that just because Honda makes a car, it's beyond reproach where mechanical failures are concerned. The S is one of Honda's more "tempermental" products of late.
...And for the unbeliever: Go to a used car lot, look under the driver side, compare this with the passenger side.
Not that I experienced even half of these problems, but the ones I did (the 2nd gear thing, window switch, and the rear end 'click,' the first hint of diff failure) made me wake up and realize that there are no golden brands where cars are concerned.
Generally very reliable engines, the stuff that I saw as being a problem on them in commercial service (where problems crop up a lot faster) were suspension, and steering part related. The tripple wishbone in the accord is very problematic from a durability standpoint on the rough roads we have here. It's not at all unusual to see major suspension work ($2000+) on them at 70K in my area. The floor construction is also very disappointing if you ever carry anything heavy in them. It gets it's strength from it's shape, but it bends when you put a heavy load in it. (Set 3-4 60LB paper boxes in the back of one and look underneath.) Do this enough and that material looses it's integrity and you will find yourself suddenly needed an alignment as your car has bent itself out of shape. It's not even a lot of weight that causes the flexing, this is the weight of one slightly heavy person.
Ford has had a long term relationship of some sort with Firestone, and they've used them disproportionately more than other brands for years. I've not been impressed by Firestones for a long time, holding them with about the same regard as BF Badrich and Uniroyal. For my money, the only tires I will buy are Goodyear and Michelin, which have thankfully been the two brands that have come on the past several new cars and trucks I've bought. Other than road hazard damage, which no tire is immune to, I've not had any complaints.
...From the years I spent working as a courier putting 80K plus a year on cars & trucks, my preferences and experience with tires leads me to believe that Michelin have the best build quality and durability for a non-commercial tire. If you feel the sidewall it's perfectly smooth inside and out. If it isn't, it's defective for a Michelin. Even on Goodyears you notice some ridges and seams. Firestones were(and still are) horrendous when you apply that test to them. Different manufacturing process. Very very poor sidewalls in many of the Firestone and Goodyear products.
Makers love those high carbon gripless tires. They get their fuel economy up for the window-sticker on the car, but they don't grip worth a damn.
The Michelins have a little bit thicker sidewall and better materials in the sidewall. You will eventually clip a curb at some point, or brush up against them parking, hit a deep enough pot hole that the strength of this will matter. It's not something most people pay attention to when buying them. I learned this lesson the hard way. Had some excellent gripping Goodyears with sidewalls that couldn't take life on the unmaintained streets of St Louis. The factory installed Firestones didn't fair well at all either, nor did the two I had replaced under warranty at very low miles.
I'm not real thrilled about the high carbon content in most of the new tires. Gets better mileage, but wont grip as good. The converse is, good sticky tires wear quick. If you can push your thumb down full force and leave a print, it's plenty sticky enough to stop you. If you can't, you are taking chances with your life. A set of sticky tires every 40K is cheaper than: #1 Doctors #2 Reconstructive Surgery/Physical Therapy #3 Body Work #4 Increased Insurance Premiums #5 Funeral Services #6 Guilt From Hurting Others.
If you have a truck that has some serious weight in it or a full size van & you really want a good tire, Commercial tire makes excellent tires. They are nearly indestructable, can be retreaded a couple times, come with the best warranty in the business, you can get them grippy or in fuel economy mode, and they have the toughest sidewall I've ever seen in a tire. They pass the perfectly smooth seamless test. (Just run your finger across it.) They also cost twice as much as anything else on the market, but worth it if you drive 80K a year. Almost all of the big fleet transport companies use them on their vans (DHL, Airborne, Fedex, UPS..etc). You pay more up front, but the TCO is lower over the long haul. They ride a bit rough though.
Should have used preview and changed that. You need all 3.
PC hardware tends to survive getting wet -- as long as two things are true:
1) There is no current running through it while it gets wet.
2) The mixture is not heavily filled with sugar or caramel (like Coke).
3) You let it dry out before you run current through it.
Even monitors usually survive a downpour if they have been unplugged for a day or so before you leave them in the rain.
Found this out while working for a charity thrift store. People would just throw their old junk up on the dock on the day we were closed, a good portion of that time it would rain.
So coffee (with sweet-n-low) doesn't surprise me. Coffee with sugar is more problematic. Pepsi & Coke tend to kill anything with moveable parts.
So we have to bypass all protection by copying everything at 100.5%. Yes, apprantly Canon thinks that people cannot tell the difference between a real dollar bill and one printed on lower-quality paper and is signifigantly different in tone and color, while anyone can tell that a dollar bill that is 100.5% bigger is a fake.
This isn't to stop those bills being used against humans, it's to stop those bills being used against machines. In the not too distant past you could use a simple black and white copier to run one side of a bill and use them in whatever vending machines you wanted. Some of the machines that were simply there to provide quarters (say at car washes) got hosed royally. Enough people were doing it that it created a serious drain on resources for the secret service. (They would much rather be busting teenage hackers, threatening the presidents enemies, and going after major players in the counterfeit game.) Some of those machines that will accept that are still around, but the ability to make the copies as easily has decreased.
My understanding of the "law" in regards to copying money was that you have to blow it up to 150% of it's size for it to be legal.(I hope this is still correct, don't take it as gospel, I'm not a lawyer.) Tons of reporters and photographers take pictures of money and have to comply with that.
Mine don't do that. Then again, I installed Mozilla & set it as their default browser & mail client when I last cleaned up their machines. (One got away with a thorough scrubbing with Ad-aware and Norton Antivirus, while the other needed a nuke & reinstall.) After a few minutes' familiarization, they were good to go. I even set up WebWasher for them to kill banner ads.
..it's $10 more a month...but it's never sank in.
I did that for my mother with Mozilla & Opera, but the result was somewhat unexpected. She uses sites that use every single insecure feature possible. It took about 3 hours of customization to get it to where it didn't filter out those sites that she wanted to use in that way. (Online games, web based crossword puzzles, and things of that nature...) There is no point in trying to explain to her how to configure webwasher, mozilla, opera, or any other piece of software. It goes over her head, and just results in a headache for me to support it. The one huge plus has been I don't have to worry about her getting infected from email anymore.
Just like trying to explain "Why is my computer slow?". It isn't the computer, it's the connection you have. She got used to having a T1 when she was working & uses dial up now. Told her about DSL
More and more I find myself leaving the IM programs off. It's just a distraction! I can live without the interruptions of MSN/AIM/ICQ/Jabber. I still let the mail program do it's checks every 15 minutes or so as I don't get enough mail for it to be a constant distraction.
I don't know how anyone gets anything useful done with all of that running.
Why would you assume people get laptops to save space on their desks? Since when is desk space a premium for most people, buy a new fucking desk, it's not like it's a new house.
If desk space wasn't a premium, people wouldn't be willing to shell out big money for LCD displays.
Ever set up a desktop in the dining room and know you are going to have to move it whenever you want to use it or have company over? Not every living space has the luxury of unlimited room. Laptops solve those kinds of problems very handily.
I've had good experiences with them as far as reliability. I still have a 500is that runs fine, it's been abused in nearly every way possible and upgraded as much as it can possibly be upgraded without throwing in a powerleap kit. Many of the upgrades were listed as not possible in the service manual, but http://e4all.info/ has more information (on older ones) and the upgraders forum has a lot of people that have tried everything they can to make them still useable beyond their years. Most of the older ones can at least be upgraded to 512MB with very careful ram selection. That has kept the old 500is useable, even if it is slow. It's perfectly fine as another box to have up to surf the web and what-not. I have some even slower hardware taking care of other task as well.;-)
...it's still a gamble on future OS's.
There are many things that were cheap in a lot of their older (and still in their present) models. (A lot of them are the typical things that the big makers skimp on. Severely under rated power supplies, proprietary power supplies, POS modems that have no excuse for existing in any machine, if they come with a network card replace it with something else, ram modules that may or may not be worth keeping [though they seem to be getting away from the awful ram they were putting in a few years ago]... These are not severe issues in most of them, but the proprietary power supplies in them are a pain to work around if you are going to cram a mess of drives in them. Don't expect Emachines to give you a pin out for the power supply either.) I've not known anyone who had one of their laptops though.
The biggest disppointment with Emachines is *support*. The one thing that you may have trouble with is getting support for new OS's that comes out down the road. Emachines is somewhat unreliable about supporting their hardware beyond the OS it was shipped with. This can be very bad news in a laptop, and it can be awful news if you ever have to have your laptop worked on for warranty work.
I haven't heard the kind of horror stories I've heard about Compaq laptops in terms of getting them worked on, but based on my experiences with them
It's very hard to top Compaq for the worst possible hardware, worst possible support, worst ownership experience, worst batch of proprietary hardware...in "consumer grade" products. Emachines is well above that fold for the price range they are in. Even with the corners they cut, it's never going to be as unpleasant as that to own one. For the price range they are in, they are decent enough.
You're implying that it is ok to subject a child to any social situation, regardless of its moral value, and leave it up to each child to make their own distinction on whether that situation is correct or incorrect. This implies that morality is not a learned trait, but an in-born one. I can guarantee that a baby born into a community of criminals and never introduced to any other examples of social behavior, will commonly become a criminal himself. In those instances where he does not, it is usually because of a mentor or some other positive moral example.
The single largest predictor of the absence of criminal behavior is a father in the home. It also doubles the chance a kid will complete college, finish high school, and reduces the odds of girls getting pregnant in their teen years by 40%. The numbers hold pretty constant regardless of income, race, or location. Mentor indeed.
TV is a poor substitute for a father. Don't underestimate YOUR influence.
The P166MMX wasn't a rip off, it overclocked well.
My P166MMX will happily do 266mhz @ 75mhz bus stable. Exactly the same as my P200MMX does in that board stably. It's still performing it's function happily running W2K server same as it has been for the past several years.
The real problem back then was the OS it was running on. It's not easy to judge stability when you are running Windows 95/98. But put them with a decent OS & decent drive controller and they happily clock to the max your board allows in most cases.
Some of the socket 7 boards can be brought back to life, sometimes you need a voltage regulator, but if the board has the right jumpers -- you can throw in a K-6 and take them up a notch. You can also sometimes find those kits from Power Leap that will let you run them up to 500mhz with a K6-2, or even K6-3+ at 550). So an ancient "Gatway P-100" box may or may not be complete junk depending on the board. I never find any with K6's in them already. That tells me people are keeping them, or the mod wasn't very popular.
Found a couple decent NEC MultiSync monitors 17" night before last and a couple nice USR hardware modems. Not much else worth mentioning.
A good fourth of the time I can't communicate with AOL users period via email. Whether I use my ISP's server to send it, or the free service I have in Russia.
The free service I have in Russia blocks yahoo all of the time now, doesn't even tell the user who sent it that their mail couldn't be delivered. It just disappears into a blackhole. I'm sure they block others as well. It's pretty rare for me to get spam on that account. Since I know they block people I'm reluctant to use the address as much anymore, even though it's served me well. I change ISP's, but I keep that email address so people I know can get hold of me.
Email is quickly becomming unreliable, which is going to have severe negative effects on Ecommerce if we don't do something about it.
The way AOL is going about it is having negative impacts on other legit senders.
Seriously, hasn't anyone noticed that the spam is comming mostly from countries that have a technology infrastruction combined with lots of really poor people (China, India, etc.)? In a lot of those countries life is harsh. It's no wonder people turn to rather unpleasant means to better their standard of living. Sure spamming sucks, but it beats the hell out of 16 hrs/day making Nike shoes in a sweatshop. If you want spam to go away, do something about the general standard of living in the rest of the world.
Yeah, I'm sure that is the excuse that Ralsky uses. You just can't make it in America, he's desperate living in his million dollar home...
You know, criminals will break the law for the quick buck no matter what their income. The only thing a few of them fear is consequences. Spamming is not a crime of the impulsive, it is a planned willful act to disregard the standards of the community. It involves investment, planning, stealth, and usually some outside help (for software) to get going. We have not made the consequences fearful enough, nor do we have the enforcement means under the current laws to change the minds of those who would be affected by reasoning about the consequences.
Even if you multipled the standard of living over there 10 fold, spamming wouldn't stop. You know it, I know it. That's why guys like Ralsky exist.
I draw the line at about P120 for still being 'useable'.
:) When I had him as a roommate he moved out and left me an entire basement filled with computer parts there too. heh
A laptop is one thing, a desktop is a whole different animal when it comes to slow chips. I have some dual boards that will take P120's, so I do pull those socket 7 chips when I find them. They make decent enough low end servers. I will yank out any decent cards or parts that are useable. Have an entire closet full of parts. It used to be a lot more till I cleaned house and gave a lot of it away, and what I couldn't I pitched or took down to the metal recycling center.
My friend scruffy has an enitre basement stacked floor to ceiling with parts. Plus more on the first floor, and yet more on the 2nd floor. I'll never let my house get that bad!
If your situation is as bad as Scruffy's current one, you might considering moving and just leaving it all behind.
Okay, 80% of what ends up on the curb is junk, but it depends greatly on where you live and the areas demographics as to what you can find.
I wont go out of my way to look very often, but I have a few spots behind certain engineering firms that I do look, and if I happen to see a box when I'm out and about I'll grab it. I can always throw it away again.
I've found decent SCSI controllers, small and medium SCSI drives, tons of decent size EDO and SDRAM, plenty of optical drives, several 17" good monitors that were reasonably clean, a working Athlon system (that just needed the ram in it reseated).
Of course, 4 out of 5 I stop and it's a P100 or 486 piece of junk, but that other 1 out of 5 nets something that is still usable.
Just tried Winamp 5, so far it doesn't choke on anything either, this is vastly improved over Winamp 3.
I like Foobar. Most of my hardware is pretty old, and it gets along with it a slight bit better than Winamp3. It does, however, really pay to search out plugins for Foobar to get it to be a little less barebones. Don't care if it looks ugly, just like to have certain features (like searching). :)
.ogg). Foobar is probably the least resource hungry of the ones that didn't choke.
I tried a mess of different players, many of them either choked when I tried to give them 10K+ playlist, or didn't support media formats I use (like
I have an old P133 laptop w/like 40MB of memory on it that runs windows 2000 just fine. I put 2000 on it (even though it is "technically" below the required specs) because I was tired of re-loading win98 every few months. :)
It runs Win2k wonderfully, even better than Win98 in my opinion.. And I haven't had to reload it since
I've run Windows 2000 on machines as sad as a 486DX/2 66 W/ 40MB of memory. While it will install it, this isn't a machine I would want to spend any time using.