I know many people will be skeptical about what I've said here about the lack of expertise of the Intel marketing department. So, at the bottom of this comment is the code of an HTML page. A link to this page was received this morning from Intel.
The URL of the page is http://program.intel.com/integrator/na/en/disti_lo cator.htm. The page is blank, but a pop-up appears to show Intel distributors. There is a JavaScript error. The "next_check_date" is "13-Mar-03", which was more than a month ago, so presumably this is an old error. Note that Slashdot has added a space to each line of the HTML; this interferes with the display of the last line of the code.
Anyone can make a mistake. However, mistakes like this from Intel's marketing department are common.
The last paragraph of the parent post should have read, "Alternatively, if you agree with Intel's view of reality, don't say at an outdoor party, "There are food and drinks inside",...
For me, it's a somewhat medieval experience talking to Intel marketing people.
They have acronyms that someone invented inside Intel, and they use them in
conversation, and they become unhappy if other people don't know the acronyms
and don't participate in their private reality.
I suppose they call them IPDs instead of dealers because someone at Intel is
trying to inflate the importance of his department.
I've sometimes been so annoyed at Intel marketing incompetence that I have
thought of applying for the position of marketing vice president at Intel. I
could hardly do worse than whoever they have now, even if I had a whole string
of bad days.
I've thought of writing a short presentation to the Intel board of directors
showing the ways the Intel marketing department could be improved. Of course,
whoever is in charge is undoubtedly ignorant of marketing and suspicious of
marketing, or he would not have let things become so disfunctional. I would
not be hired because the most important thing to him would be hiding his
ignorance. However, the presentation would at least make the point to the
board that something should be done.
Better for me to do something positive than just be irritated.
Intel has made an enormous and wonderful contribution to the world. It is
painful to me to see the company become self-destructive.
In my opinion, the problems are far, far worse than I've said here. In my
experience, it is impossible to get the full part numbers so that I can order
Intel motherboards from a distributor. I have more than once spent 2 hours on
the phone trying to get all the info I need. There are errors on Intel's web
site. No one cares about them. (Although I have reported broken links that
have been fixed.) Without the proper part numbers, I cannot be sure of what
I'm getting from the distributor. One answer: Order motherboards with Intel
chipsets from Gigabyte.
Yes, exactly. However, cooking the power supply is not a problem, since all power supplies have overcurrent protection. The problem is that the BIOS begins its detection process before the power supply has stabilized enough to provide the correct voltage, due to the unusual load. When the detection fails, there is an error message. So the BIOS pre-delay can be helpful.
Slashdot Readers: If you don't like an Ask Slashdot question,
ignore it!
Don't waste everyone's time posting a comment saying that you knew the answer
when you were 8 or 18 years old, and Slashdot is lame for posting such a
simple question.
Slashdot is meant to be a community. Not everyone in a community has the same
knowledge. Questions that are simple for you may be difficult for someone
else.
Yes, many questions can be answered by Google, IF you already know the answer
and therefore know the correct key words.
Slashdotters! If you don't find a story interesting, please don't
complain and call Slashdot lame. Just ignore the story. Do you complain to
your local newspaper that they should not publish recipes because you don't
cook?
Comment about the Slashdot question: The wording of the question seems
to imply that you believe that Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives have an
equal failure rate. That has not been my experience. My experience has been
that Western Digital are the most reliable hard drives. I'm very interested to
know the experience of other readers.
Western Digital went through a bad stretch in which they experienced a problem
that caused high failure rates several years ago, but that was cured.
It's shocking that you are in the computer business and knowingly shipping
products with a 4% failure rate. That's very expensive and annoys the
customers.
However, you are on the right track. Electronic products have what is called
"infant failure". Most failures occur in the first week. During 192 hours (one
week), the failure rate falls typically by a factor of 100 or even 10,000. At
the end of one week most failures have already happened.
It's very easy to write a program that exercises a hard drive. Just copy
files back and forth from folder to folder. It is easy to write a program that
fills a hard drive with files, then erases them and starts again.
The Promise Ultra133 TX2 supports adding four more hard drives to the 4
already supported by modern motherboards. Eight is enough for one test
computer, usually, because the power supply won't support more. Be careful to
use delayed start. Maybe you will need more powerful power supplies than you
normally use.
Make SURE that you are not having troubles with heat. Are your drives
cool when they are installed in your product? High heat will cause high
failure rate.
My impression is that Intel's position is utterly without merit. Could
Coca-Cola ever have prevented Pepsi-cola from using the term -cola? No.
Over a period of years, I have developed the impression that it is only the
microprocessor department of Intel that is skillful. The other departments
seem to me mostly good at avoiding work.
I've seen numerous instances of poor marketing from Intel. Intel marketing ran the Intel
consumer division into the ground, for example, in my opinion. The software
for an Intel video camera for connection to a PC was missing key features, so
that numerous buyers took them back to the store. That's just one of many
examples. After years of amazing lack of perception such as this, Intel closed its consumer
division.
I called and talked to one Intel employee and showed him how Intel was
marketing a PC Card networking product in a misleading way. The card would not
work with many of the most popular laptops, but that information was at a URL mentioned in a package insert
available only after the customer had opened
the box. The employee said, "We are updating our web site soon." One year
later, I called and happened to get the same employee. I had his name in my
notes. I mentioned the same problem, but didn't tell him I had seen it before.
He said, "We are updating our web site soon."
My overall impression is that Intel's marketing department, and most
departments outside of the processor and processor support design departments,
are major slackers. They have often given me many, many excuses why things
can't be done in a more efficient way.
For example, Intel's motherboards are sold at Fry's and many other retail
stores. However, several Intel employees and I have proven that it is not
possible to get the motherboard part number from any of the publicly
accessible web sites. It is possible to get close, such as 815EEA2 motherboard
(an old one that I remember), but it is not possible to get the trailing
digits that define what options are on the motherboard from a publicly
available Intel web page. I have often asked why this information must be
secret. No answer. Simply no one wants to be responsible.
I've seen many such examples of Intel's marketing that I consider utterly
foolish. Intel employees often use words or acronyms in their conversations
with me that have been invented inside Intel. For example, "IPD". Intel
employees often talk like I should know how Intel is organized.
I haven't spent much time considering the Itanium processor. However, whether
or not it is a good processor, the fact that people routinely call it the
"Itanic", without providing any explanation, shows that Intel's marketing is poor.
It's sad, really. Intel seems to be just one of the many U.S. companies that
is self-destructive. I buy Intel motherboards because I think there is less potential for
problems when the motherboards come from the company that made the processors.
However, while working with Intel products I have often been in the uncomfortable position of seeming to be more positive about Intel than Intel is about itself.
As you may have noticed in the subject line, my trademark is on this comment. "Futurepower Comment Inside" is my trademark. It does not infringe on Intel's trademark, since no one can possibly confuse a name for a comment with a name for a microprocessor. One reason they cannot confuse it is that my trademark says "comment".
If you are ever at an outdoor party, don't say, "There are food and soft drinks inside", because that infringes Intel's trademark. If you have a theatre in a hot climate during the summer, don't use your sign that says, "Air conditioning inside", because Intel owns anything that ends with the word "inside".
I think we need a new version of Steve Ballmer. At least a release version,
please. We've been limping along on v. 0.46 too long. I hope the new version
will have networking, instead of thinking of itself as a solitary god.
Ohter new technology we need from Microsoft:
TrueSpeak: So we don't have to hear the same old baloney.
WorkWell: Get rid of that mountain of sloppy code!
PlayTogether: Stop trying to run other people and technologies out of
business. $20 billion is enough for one person. Why do you want more?
I just opened this web page:
Complicated methods corrupt Oregon government and immediately saved it. The page has nested tables. I use them because they work with more browsers than CSS.
Any thoughts you might have about using Amaya would be appreciated. My experience is that HTML-Kit and Mozilla Composer are better free tools. Mozilla is WYSIWYG, but it outputs HTML that is not easy to edit.
Even Dreamweaver MX puts junk in HTML pages, and outputs pages in a poor-quality format for hand editing. Apparently the people who program these tools don't actually use them.
What do you think? Do you think that, if someone is violent, it is justified and sensible and okay to be violent in return? The U.S. has a Christian-influenced culture, and Jesus Christ recommended against being violent in return, but what do you think?
If you think that violence justifies violence, then here is a result that may amaze you: Most people in the U.S. don't know this, but the U.S. government has secretly sponsored violence against Muslims and Arabs for many, many years. So, if you think that violence justifies violence, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York was justified.
What is the cause of terrorism? The cause of the present terrorism against the U.S. is the constant violent interference by the U.S. government with the governments of other countries. I did some research about this and found a collection of links: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories. If I know more about U.S. government violence than you, it is only because I began being interested in reading about it about 30 years ago, and when I see a relevant article, I read it. There is a huge amount of material available to read.
My own personal view is that I'm against fighting violence with violence. I think that the least sophisticated way of relating to other people is killing them.
Should the U.S. government get into gun battles with Muslims? There are 5 times as many of them as there are U.S. citizens, and they have less to lose.
I have never heard of anyone in the U.S. government who is against Arabs or Muslims specifically. The people who create the violence are only looking for someone to kill. They are equal opportunity killers. They killed more than 2,000,000 Vietnamese, for example. (Vietnamese still die whenever an old land mine explodes.) They killed 6,000 in Panama. The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries in 58 years. By that measure, the U.S. government is the most violent government that has ever existed.
It's time to consider these issues carefully. The world could become a lot more violent. It has been more violent in the past, and it could become more violent again.
You don't really love your country if you only give attention to the beautiful things.
Microsoft's $52,931,000,000 is Total Current Assets, but that is equal to cash when within a few months. People who buy and sell things for billions of dollars don't quibble over a few months. It takes that long to arrange a sale, anyway.
Making small changes in a product and calling it a new product is an abusive, misleading business practice, in my opinion. Microsoft did that with Windows Milennium. Windows 2003 Server seems to have real changes.
Here are a few more abuses: Reasons to Avoid
Microsoft. (More than 200 in one year!) In case your boss is uncertain, this abuse list will help educate him.
My experience is that case manufacturers lack imagination. I've never seen a well-designed case, although some are better than others.
I did a search of more than 40 case manufacturers (several years ago) and the only one I was able to find that has cases with externally accessible filters is Macase. My experience is that the Macase power supplies have an extremely high failure rate, but they sell cases without power supplies.
It's great to be able to clean the filter without taking the chassis apart. Duh!! to the other manufacturers.
The Macase filters are good enough to reduce the dust by 95%. They are washable. It's necessary that the intake fan, behind the filter, has a higher airflow than the exhaust fan, inside the power supply. That way there is always positive air pressure, and air that has been filtered flows out of the leaks.
I don't know if Macase sells to the public. I've only bought wholesale from them.
Tried Vera on a Win XP machine. The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (the full
name of the font) font looks great!! Thanks to everyone who made it available.
Lucida Console is an excellent monospaced font, but it does not have enough
space between lines. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has sensible spacing.
It is very, very difficult to make a good font. Those who are knowledgeable
about computers tend to be very insensitive to graphical clarity, I've found,
although that is changing, it seems.
Bitstream Vera Serif is useless to me because it has a terrible bold. This is
a typical failing of fonts. Bitstream Vera Serif Bold is really a very
different-looking font, not a bold of Vera Serif. Vera Serif, not bold, looks
great, however.
To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need a demi-bold. Sometimes
you want a full bold, and sometimes a full bold is too heavy.
It took me 18 months to get a $150 Sony laptop rebate. During several of the
calls, the person at the rebate center was openly nasty. Finally, a
sympathetic woman said the Sony rebate fulfullment center was allegedly guilty
of fraud.
I called Costco/Price Club for a rebate, and they said, "Sorry you didn't get
your rebate. We will mail you a new check in 6 to 8 weeks." I called in 6
weeks and they said the same thing. Finally, someone at Costco sent me a check
that had been filled out using a typewriter. The Costco representative
aknowledged that I hadn't gotten the rebate checks. She said Costco had sent
them. My guess: They were lying. If there had been a possibility that I had
cashed the "other checks", they certainly would not have sent me a check.
CompUSA is REALLY bad with rebates, in my experience. My experience with Fry's
is that they sometimes sell defective merchandise really cheap after rebate.
It seems that when a company's marketing department really, really wants to
damage the company's reputation, it does fraud with rebates. I don't forget
who stole from me.
What amazes me is that companies have departments of fraud, and employees who
are willing to lie to people about having already sent a check.
COMPLAIN. The only way to get your money is to complain often and politely but
insistently.
COMPLAIN to elected representatives. Wish list: 1) 2 week maximimum time to
process rebate, 2) Confirmation of receipt of rebate request on the internet
within one week after receipt, 3) Return of all incomplete or not accepted
rebates, 4) Heavy fines for intentional abuse of rebates.
Slashdot Mirror
I know many people will be skeptical about what I've said here about the lack of expertise of the Intel marketing department. So, at the bottom of this comment is the code of an HTML page. A link to this page was received this morning from Intel.
The URL of the page is http://program.intel.com/integrator/na/en/disti_l
Anyone can make a mistake. However, mistakes like this from Intel's marketing department are common.
My guess is that you are thinking of NetBEUI. This is NetBIOS, a feature of the TCP/IP protocol.
The last paragraph of the parent post should have read, "Alternatively, if you agree with Intel's view of reality, don't say at an outdoor party, "There are food and drinks inside",
For me, it's a somewhat medieval experience talking to Intel marketing people. They have acronyms that someone invented inside Intel, and they use them in conversation, and they become unhappy if other people don't know the acronyms and don't participate in their private reality.
I suppose they call them IPDs instead of dealers because someone at Intel is trying to inflate the importance of his department.
I've sometimes been so annoyed at Intel marketing incompetence that I have thought of applying for the position of marketing vice president at Intel. I could hardly do worse than whoever they have now, even if I had a whole string of bad days.
I've thought of writing a short presentation to the Intel board of directors showing the ways the Intel marketing department could be improved. Of course, whoever is in charge is undoubtedly ignorant of marketing and suspicious of marketing, or he would not have let things become so disfunctional. I would not be hired because the most important thing to him would be hiding his ignorance. However, the presentation would at least make the point to the board that something should be done.
Better for me to do something positive than just be irritated.
Intel has made an enormous and wonderful contribution to the world. It is painful to me to see the company become self-destructive.
In my opinion, the problems are far, far worse than I've said here. In my experience, it is impossible to get the full part numbers so that I can order Intel motherboards from a distributor. I have more than once spent 2 hours on the phone trying to get all the info I need. There are errors on Intel's web site. No one cares about them. (Although I have reported broken links that have been fixed.) Without the proper part numbers, I cannot be sure of what I'm getting from the distributor. One answer: Order motherboards with Intel chipsets from Gigabyte.
Yes, except that the next Windows update may add it back without telling you.
Antec is a case maker. I have not been impressed with their power supplies. They are adequate, not wonderful, in my experience.
Yes, exactly. However, cooking the power supply is not a problem, since all power supplies have overcurrent protection. The problem is that the BIOS begins its detection process before the power supply has stabilized enough to provide the correct voltage, due to the unusual load. When the detection fails, there is an error message. So the BIOS pre-delay can be helpful.
Interesting.
Intel motherboards have a BIOS setting called "Hard Disk Pre-Delay". The system waits for the hard drives to spin before it tries to detect them.
Slashdot Readers: If you don't like an Ask Slashdot question, ignore it!
Don't waste everyone's time posting a comment saying that you knew the answer when you were 8 or 18 years old, and Slashdot is lame for posting such a simple question.
Slashdot is meant to be a community. Not everyone in a community has the same knowledge. Questions that are simple for you may be difficult for someone else.
Yes, many questions can be answered by Google, IF you already know the answer and therefore know the correct key words.
Installing ZoneAlarm is not enough. You must go to Security/Local/Customize in ZoneAlarm and select "block incoming NetBIOS".
Slashdotters! If you don't find a story interesting, please don't complain and call Slashdot lame. Just ignore the story. Do you complain to your local newspaper that they should not publish recipes because you don't cook?
Comment about the Slashdot question: The wording of the question seems to imply that you believe that Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives have an equal failure rate. That has not been my experience. My experience has been that Western Digital are the most reliable hard drives. I'm very interested to know the experience of other readers.
Western Digital went through a bad stretch in which they experienced a problem that caused high failure rates several years ago, but that was cured.
It's shocking that you are in the computer business and knowingly shipping products with a 4% failure rate. That's very expensive and annoys the customers.
However, you are on the right track. Electronic products have what is called "infant failure". Most failures occur in the first week. During 192 hours (one week), the failure rate falls typically by a factor of 100 or even 10,000. At the end of one week most failures have already happened.
It's very easy to write a program that exercises a hard drive. Just copy files back and forth from folder to folder. It is easy to write a program that fills a hard drive with files, then erases them and starts again.
The Promise Ultra133 TX2 supports adding four more hard drives to the 4 already supported by modern motherboards. Eight is enough for one test computer, usually, because the power supply won't support more. Be careful to use delayed start. Maybe you will need more powerful power supplies than you normally use.
Make SURE that you are not having troubles with heat. Are your drives cool when they are installed in your product? High heat will cause high failure rate.
My impression is that Intel's position is utterly without merit. Could Coca-Cola ever have prevented Pepsi-cola from using the term -cola? No.
Over a period of years, I have developed the impression that it is only the microprocessor department of Intel that is skillful. The other departments seem to me mostly good at avoiding work.
I've seen numerous instances of poor marketing from Intel. Intel marketing ran the Intel consumer division into the ground, for example, in my opinion. The software for an Intel video camera for connection to a PC was missing key features, so that numerous buyers took them back to the store. That's just one of many examples. After years of amazing lack of perception such as this, Intel closed its consumer division.
I called and talked to one Intel employee and showed him how Intel was marketing a PC Card networking product in a misleading way. The card would not work with many of the most popular laptops, but that information was at a URL mentioned in a package insert available only after the customer had opened the box. The employee said, "We are updating our web site soon." One year later, I called and happened to get the same employee. I had his name in my notes. I mentioned the same problem, but didn't tell him I had seen it before. He said, "We are updating our web site soon."
My overall impression is that Intel's marketing department, and most departments outside of the processor and processor support design departments, are major slackers. They have often given me many, many excuses why things can't be done in a more efficient way.
For example, Intel's motherboards are sold at Fry's and many other retail stores. However, several Intel employees and I have proven that it is not possible to get the motherboard part number from any of the publicly accessible web sites. It is possible to get close, such as 815EEA2 motherboard (an old one that I remember), but it is not possible to get the trailing digits that define what options are on the motherboard from a publicly available Intel web page. I have often asked why this information must be secret. No answer. Simply no one wants to be responsible.
I've seen many such examples of Intel's marketing that I consider utterly foolish. Intel employees often use words or acronyms in their conversations with me that have been invented inside Intel. For example, "IPD". Intel employees often talk like I should know how Intel is organized.
I haven't spent much time considering the Itanium processor. However, whether or not it is a good processor, the fact that people routinely call it the "Itanic", without providing any explanation, shows that Intel's marketing is poor.
It's sad, really. Intel seems to be just one of the many U.S. companies that is self-destructive. I buy Intel motherboards because I think there is less potential for problems when the motherboards come from the company that made the processors. However, while working with Intel products I have often been in the uncomfortable position of seeming to be more positive about Intel than Intel is about itself.
As you may have noticed in the subject line, my trademark is on this comment. "Futurepower Comment Inside" is my trademark. It does not infringe on Intel's trademark, since no one can possibly confuse a name for a comment with a name for a microprocessor. One reason they cannot confuse it is that my trademark says "comment".
If you are ever at an outdoor party, don't say, "There are food and soft drinks inside", because that infringes Intel's trademark. If you have a theatre in a hot climate during the summer, don't use your sign that says, "Air conditioning inside", because Intel owns anything that ends with the word "inside".
I think we need a new version of Steve Ballmer. At least a release version, please. We've been limping along on v. 0.46 too long. I hope the new version will have networking, instead of thinking of itself as a solitary god.
Ohter new technology we need from Microsoft:
TrueSpeak: So we don't have to hear the same old baloney.
WorkWell: Get rid of that mountain of sloppy code!
PlayTogether: Stop trying to run other people and technologies out of business. $20 billion is enough for one person. Why do you want more?
I just opened this web page: Complicated methods corrupt Oregon government and immediately saved it. The page has nested tables. I use them because they work with more browsers than CSS.
Any thoughts you might have about using Amaya would be appreciated. My experience is that HTML-Kit and Mozilla Composer are better free tools. Mozilla is WYSIWYG, but it outputs HTML that is not easy to edit.
Even Dreamweaver MX puts junk in HTML pages, and outputs pages in a poor-quality format for hand editing. Apparently the people who program these tools don't actually use them.
I just took a look at version 8 of Amaya. It puts tons of junk in the HMTL, making it very difficult to edit by hand.
My experience is that it is badly designed, and not worth the time to load.
If you don't have commercial traffic to your house, my understanding is that there is no problem with having a business.
What do you think? Do you think that, if someone is violent, it is justified and sensible and okay to be violent in return? The U.S. has a Christian-influenced culture, and Jesus Christ recommended against being violent in return, but what do you think?
If you think that violence justifies violence, then here is a result that may amaze you: Most people in the U.S. don't know this, but the U.S. government has secretly sponsored violence against Muslims and Arabs for many, many years. So, if you think that violence justifies violence, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York was justified.
What is the cause of terrorism? The cause of the present terrorism against the U.S. is the constant violent interference by the U.S. government with the governments of other countries. I did some research about this and found a collection of links: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories. If I know more about U.S. government violence than you, it is only because I began being interested in reading about it about 30 years ago, and when I see a relevant article, I read it. There is a huge amount of material available to read.
My own personal view is that I'm against fighting violence with violence. I think that the least sophisticated way of relating to other people is killing them.
Should the U.S. government get into gun battles with Muslims? There are 5 times as many of them as there are U.S. citizens, and they have less to lose.
I have never heard of anyone in the U.S. government who is against Arabs or Muslims specifically. The people who create the violence are only looking for someone to kill. They are equal opportunity killers. They killed more than 2,000,000 Vietnamese, for example. (Vietnamese still die whenever an old land mine explodes.) They killed 6,000 in Panama. The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries in 58 years. By that measure, the U.S. government is the most violent government that has ever existed.
It's time to consider these issues carefully. The world could become a lot more violent. It has been more violent in the past, and it could become more violent again.
You don't really love your country if you only give attention to the beautiful things.
Microsoft's $52,931,000,000 is Total Current Assets, but that is equal to cash when within a few months. People who buy and sell things for billions of dollars don't quibble over a few months. It takes that long to arrange a sale, anyway.
Making small changes in a product and calling it a new product is an abusive, misleading business practice, in my opinion. Microsoft did that with Windows Milennium. Windows 2003 Server seems to have real changes.
Here are a few more abuses: Reasons to Avoid Microsoft. (More than 200 in one year!) In case your boss is uncertain, this abuse list will help educate him.
My experience is that case manufacturers lack imagination. I've never seen a well-designed case, although some are better than others.
I did a search of more than 40 case manufacturers (several years ago) and the only one I was able to find that has cases with externally accessible filters is Macase. My experience is that the Macase power supplies have an extremely high failure rate, but they sell cases without power supplies.
It's great to be able to clean the filter without taking the chassis apart. Duh!! to the other manufacturers.
The Macase filters are good enough to reduce the dust by 95%. They are washable. It's necessary that the intake fan, behind the filter, has a higher airflow than the exhaust fan, inside the power supply. That way there is always positive air pressure, and air that has been filtered flows out of the leaks.
I don't know if Macase sells to the public. I've only bought wholesale from them.
On the Troll scale of 1 to 10, I'd give you a 6.
In my opinion, the forces of government corruption are strong in Oregon: Complicated methods corrupt Oregon government.
Since I didn't like the bold, I didn't think further about the font. You're right, Bitstream Vera Serif is useless without italics.
Tried Vera on a Win XP machine. The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (the full name of the font) font looks great!! Thanks to everyone who made it available. Lucida Console is an excellent monospaced font, but it does not have enough space between lines. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono has sensible spacing.
It is very, very difficult to make a good font. Those who are knowledgeable about computers tend to be very insensitive to graphical clarity, I've found, although that is changing, it seems.
Bitstream Vera Serif is useless to me because it has a terrible bold. This is a typical failing of fonts. Bitstream Vera Serif Bold is really a very different-looking font, not a bold of Vera Serif. Vera Serif, not bold, looks great, however.
To be truly useful, fonts meant for general use need a demi-bold. Sometimes you want a full bold, and sometimes a full bold is too heavy.
It took me 18 months to get a $150 Sony laptop rebate. During several of the calls, the person at the rebate center was openly nasty. Finally, a sympathetic woman said the Sony rebate fulfullment center was allegedly guilty of fraud.
I called Costco/Price Club for a rebate, and they said, "Sorry you didn't get your rebate. We will mail you a new check in 6 to 8 weeks." I called in 6 weeks and they said the same thing. Finally, someone at Costco sent me a check that had been filled out using a typewriter. The Costco representative aknowledged that I hadn't gotten the rebate checks. She said Costco had sent them. My guess: They were lying. If there had been a possibility that I had cashed the "other checks", they certainly would not have sent me a check.
CompUSA is REALLY bad with rebates, in my experience. My experience with Fry's is that they sometimes sell defective merchandise really cheap after rebate.
It seems that when a company's marketing department really, really wants to damage the company's reputation, it does fraud with rebates. I don't forget who stole from me.
What amazes me is that companies have departments of fraud, and employees who are willing to lie to people about having already sent a check.
COMPLAIN. The only way to get your money is to complain often and politely but insistently.
COMPLAIN to elected representatives. Wish list: 1) 2 week maximimum time to process rebate, 2) Confirmation of receipt of rebate request on the internet within one week after receipt, 3) Return of all incomplete or not accepted rebates, 4) Heavy fines for intentional abuse of rebates.
Thanks. Microsoft creates awesome confusion. What is the difference between an SR and an SP?
If I understand correctly, this only affects some licenses of Office 2000.