Regarding the iBook's flimsiness, which iBook line does that apply to?
Gosh -- I really don't know. A few years ago (i.e. when Jobs came back) Apple decided to start eliminating visible model numbers on their machines with the justification that it was easier to market cohesive products without any customer confusion (Note that Creative Labs does a similar thing with many of their audio products -- there are many, many "Sound Blaster Live" cards out there with few internal hardware similarities. It is what one would call a "titanium iBook". I suspect a hardcore Mac support tech would know what that means, since he has to translate language like this each day.
The single button mouse would be quite irritating but I was also under the impression that you could use a normal 3 button USB scroll wheel mouse? I thought that OSX had the "triggers" in place for it?
Yes, I believe so. If an external mouse is no object (or even desireable) you should be happy. A number of people I know (including myself) just can't stand lugging around an external mouse, however, and find this not to be an acceptable fix.
Speaking of Office though, is there an Open Office port to OSX?
I'm almost certain that the answer is "yes", as I remember some people talking about OS X problems in Open Office at one point when working on some bugs, but I'd check the OO website and google around for impressions first. I haven't used it.
The command line sounds like it might be disappointing. I don't make extensive use of it...
Again, if you are not a heavy GNU utilities user, you will probably not have a problem, and if you use Solaris or BSD as your primary UNIX systems, you will probably be comfortable. From the standpoint of someone who doesn't use the CLI heavily on a day-to-day basis, the differences are minor, requiring only a few changes. There are enough annoyances and missing functionality and commands, however, for GNU maves to go absolutely bonkers.
My original statement was incorrect (I oversimplified things), but your claim is not correct, though I'm going to have to be a bit semantically nit-picky to give a proper answer.
Metadata about a body of data is data relating to that body of data, yet outside of the body of data. EXIF data is metadata with respect to the JPEG-compressed content. It is not metadata with respect to the file as a whole, as the EXIF headers are part of that file. It *is* metadata with respect to the content of the JPEG-compressed data.
First, there are a lot of people that simply know DirectX already, and damn technical merit. Thus, it's easier to get developers that can do DirectX.
Second of all, DirectX forms a more comprehensive, consistent API than OGL does. OpenGL just lets you do 3D (and some very basic 2d work). Perhaps a bit of windowing. You don't have CD audio, music, 3d audio or a sound system handled. You don't have joysticks or an input system handled. You don't have networking support in place. Sure, there are replacement APIs for all this. You can use OpenAL for advanced sound features, SDL for 2d functionality and CD audio, and OpenGL for 3d graphics. It's quite technically possible to do. However, you need to do more cobbling things together.
Therefore, why develop for Direct3D when you can target OpenGL instead, and hit all the platforms, not just one?
Because an overwhelming majority of the game market is Windows based (yes, some of that is chicken-and-egg, but the point stands). A lot of companies don't shed too many tears at not being able to do Mac OS/BeOS/Linux/*BSD releases. That may change, but in general, none of the other platforms are all that lucrative.
Especially since Direct3D is so frequently the cause of problems with the graphics engine.
I'm not sure where you've heard of this.
Therefore one assumes that Direct3D is being chosen not on its techincal merit, but because someone thought it was a good idea, because it's the way that Microsoft thought things should be done.
DirectX is one area that Microsoft puts a lot of people on and a lot of money into developing. I think that most complaints date back to the version 3 era stuff.
All that being said, I've written software using OpenGL, and have never learned DirectX, so I *am* a bit uninformed about the state of things in Redmond. I don't think I'm too far off the mark, though.
OpenGL is not particularly unusable for anyone. If you want to write and sell a game using OpenGL, you can certainly do so. However, there *are* reasons folks tend to use DirectX.
You're comparing public policy researchers to medical researchers. There's a world of difference.
Studies are big becuase they can be used by politicians to sell things to the public. Which means that they shape much of our legal world. (Recommendations and regulations from government agencies come from these.)
I purchase a number of games. And not just games -- I have purchased *more expensive equivalents* and simply postponed purchasing a non-game product to avoid purchasing Microsoft products. I use Linux for things that it would be easier to use a pirated copy of Windows for. I use a MacAlly Q-BALL (and waited years to buy one) because the functional alternative was a Microsoft product.
You may be right that the majority of pirates do not feel this way. However, I do. I consider it an ethical mandate to avoid giving my money to Microsoft, and if I want something and there is no alternative to and the software cannot be pirated, I simply go without. This does not apply to any other company, but my wallet my own small way of expressing my unhappiness with Microsoft.
I even build systems in a day and age when OEM computers are price-competitive with home-built machines to avoid giving money to Microsoft.
And you aren't just trying to justify your actions to yourself?
You ever considered that the reason production values aren't higher is because Mac users don't produce enough of an influx of money due to...heh...piracy?
All I have to say is let the buyer beware. And in addition, we really need reviewers who can bring themselves to comment on HORRIBLE stability bugs. I always read the reviews before getting a game, and they never mention bugs, even if the game is so buggy that it doesn't hardly run, the reviewer will never mention that little tidbit. Don't you think that is maybe more relevant than anything else?
I'd like to see a "cumulative stability rating" for developers and publishers, based on (a) whether their games are stable out-of-box, and (b) how long it takes them to patch problems that *are* present, and (c) the severity and frequency of exibition of any such problems. This is the only way I can think of to properly encourage game developers and publishers to release stable games. The problem is that, at the time the review is produced, the reviewer has no idea whether the game will be patched in the future. Lots of reviewers informally mention stability issues ("company blargh has a history of buggy games") but there is not numerical, cumulative rating that companies can compete for.
If GameSpot would do this, I think we'd see a much more solid collection of games.
Don't get me wrong. I dislike game programmers that write their systems in DirectX too. However, they certainly aren't "shitty programmers". It's a pain in the ass to get games working on different video cards (anyone who would argue with this has probably never done more than lightweight 3d coding), forget about different operating systems.
There's a rather large difference between Legendary and other modes.
I liked Halo. I'd never pay for it, given that it was published by Microsoft. (I've played a pirated version and one purchased at employee discount by a friend of a friend working at Microsoft.)
The performance does suck, have to agree. The enemy variation isn't so bad, because the AI plays out each battle quite differently -- it isn't just "run, see enemy, shoot enemy" that Doom provides. If you were fighting human soldiers in real life, I doubt you'd get tired of fighting human soldiers.
There's only one area where I found the cut-and-pasting of maps to become egregious, and that was the Library. That being said, more level designers would not have been a bad thing.
Umm...you're crabby about the interscene movies in Neverwinter Nights? C'mon, that's just silly. Cinematics are neat for about the first time you see them, then are just another time-waster. Yanking 'em hardly impacts gameplay.
You sold out, you're now putting out Mac games through the 2004 equivalent of Lion Entertainment, the least you can do is STFU and get back to making Halo 2 (...for XBox) and suckling at the teat of your overlord Mr. Gates.
Note that Lion Entertainment has to their credit the Mac Warcraft II port, one of the best ports in the history of game ports. The port itself is rock solid. Plus, during they port, they also added (because it seemed like something that would be neat) TCP/IP networking and 3d audio.
Yeah -- I was talking about the browser. I didn't really read the grandparent, just the parent.:-)
Though, to be honest, HTML was designed to be a markup language, works best as a markup language, and is now generally used as a flawed layout language due to "features" like pixel-level positioning.
Let's suppose that your thesis is correct. If people can't handle creating a directory and placing files into it, why are you so confident that they'll be able to create and manage invisible "metadata"?
The problem is that many innocent improvements *do* break compatibility.
However, Microsoft has intentionally broken compatbility or leveraged incompatibility so many times in the past that they have simply lost the ability to break compatibility and be given the benefit of the doubt any more.
Second that. God, I hate Windows XP. Windows 2000 was annoying -- it was Windows, had a lousy terminal emulator, didn't have the POSIX utils, had that stupid file and directory locking that Windows is stuck with, yadda yadda yadda. However, it wasn't as if it were designed to be actively offensive. Windws Xp starts out with that lousy color scheme, makes you click on a talking dog's window to do each search, pops up useless speech bubbles constantly to give the user status information, has Explorer set up to silently fail on a number of file operations...argh.
A good friend has a titanium iBook. He treats it like glass to avoid mars and shattering the display (because the lid bends and flexes so much, it is possible to shatter the LCD display), but a hinge on the thing still broke. He tried to get a replacement, but because Apple ships the things all glued together, he was told that he could not obtain the part from Apple short of a $600 replacement display. He ended up spending hours and hours fabricating a new hinge, and disassembling and reassembling the computer to get the parts into place. The back of the display also seems to have fallen off.
I've been stunningly underwhelmed with the general sturdiness of Apple's laptops.
On the up side, Apple laptops had chronic problems for *years* with the port-covering panel breaking off. Apple seems to have fixed this, as the panel is firmly attached on his Mac.
OS X is usable without being incredibly irritating, a la Windows, but it still isn't Linux. You are stuck with a single mouse button trackpad, and you should be aware that purchasing a Mac is more than the initial purchase price -- software and hardware from Apple is pricy and a lot of software that Linux folks take for granted as free are quite expensive packages on the Mac. Finally, the PowerPC isn't what it once was -- the PPC used to be an incredibly cool (thermally cool) processor back in the day, but it's steadily consumed more and more power.
It all depends on what you like in a computer. I would *definitely* use a friend's Apple computer for a while before buying an Apple machine, unless the money really doesn't even measure on your financial radar. You may like the thing. It has plenty of eye candy, a much better UI than Windows, better commercial software support than Linux (well, for typical cubicle-worker stuff), and is fairly straightforward.
While it *does* have a CLI, it lacks the GNU utilities, which is *incredibly* annoying to anyone who has gotten familiar with them. If Solaris or BSD (well, sans GNU utils) drives you nuts with the more limited featureset in the CLI utilities, you are going to be equally irritated with the Mac OS.
If you're aware of what you're getting into, Macs can be a good deal.
Note that, before people get crabby about me bashing Apple, I have a Mac right next to me at the moment, and I've used and coded on Macs for years in the past. I think Apple's done some good stuff, but that people also tend to get an overly rosy view of their products.
When we want feedback from you we want it on a couple of slides. We don't want to know how you tweaked your code to get 1% performance increase. We want to know how we're progressing and if there are any show-stopping problems.
Okay. This raises the question of why, if the primary task of a manger is to simply take in input and regurgitate an obvious yes or no based on some simply risk and profit analysis that *anyone* could do, we need more than one manager per twenty engineers.
I just don't see a hell of a lot of functionality provided by most managers, aside from possibly information hiding -- which you could argue really is a useful service.
That doesn't mean that managers are unnecessary (collecting and summarizing information and handing it up the chain *is* a necessary task), just that there are a lot more of them than there should be.
You know, at one point I would have felt that your argument was weighty and official-sounding and something that's worth stepping aside for.
The problem is that I've run into an inordinate number of utterly incompetent corporate IT people who throw out lines that read *exactly* like the ones that you just wrote, and are utterly wrong. That doesn't necessarily reflect on your own abilities, but I've found that it's really amazing how often giving people non-sanitized communications with honest and in-depth information seems to make them much happier.
At one point, I thought that corporatespeak, the sort of truly zero-content material that appears on the websites of holding companies, groups of companies, and most investment-related firms was professional and respected by people reading it. Then I discovered that no, it's generally made fun of among everyone. Nobody, not even the PHBs, are in the least intrigued by a webpage that says that a company can promote "knowledge management producing synergy" or similar.
I just read Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line", and have decided that he has an excellent point. Users are *tired* of being fed sanitized, contentless information telling them that the product they have purchased is working fine and has no problems, that they have an "issue", not a "bug", and that the company is glad to continue to provide valuable and useful services to the customer. They don't want to see more stock business clipart of mindlessly grinning models sitting in front of keyboards wearing a telephone headset.
Note that Dell is pretty to-the-point for a company, probably because their primary interface to customers is through their website and if they dick around too much, they lose customers.
Here's a random exerpt from one of those content-free pages:
Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Techieindex
1. How is Business Objects planning to focus on the Global 2000 companies and other packaged application software vendors who have a proactive strategy to reach customers, prospects, partners, and employees using the Internet especially in a global economy that has not yet shown signs of picking up from the slump it has been in for the past two years? Global 2000 leaders understand that they can use information and the Internet to service customers better, drive cost out of the business and improve their business performance and velocity. This is the fundamental value proposition of Business Intelligence software - helping organizations of all sizes to more effectively track, understand and manage their business. Business Objects will continue to add capability to our best-of-breed BI stack, including the next major release of our product later this year, and help our global customer base of more than 17,000, utilize enterprise BI to see rapid business return.
This sort of crap doesn't actually appeal to *anyone*.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the iBook's flimsiness, which iBook line does that apply to?
Gosh -- I really don't know. A few years ago (i.e. when Jobs came back) Apple decided to start eliminating visible model numbers on their machines with the justification that it was easier to market cohesive products without any customer confusion (Note that Creative Labs does a similar thing with many of their audio products -- there are many, many "Sound Blaster Live" cards out there with few internal hardware similarities. It is what one would call a "titanium iBook". I suspect a hardcore Mac support tech would know what that means, since he has to translate language like this each day.
The single button mouse would be quite irritating but I was also under the impression that you could use a normal 3 button USB scroll wheel mouse? I thought that OSX had the "triggers" in place for it?
Yes, I believe so. If an external mouse is no object (or even desireable) you should be happy. A number of people I know (including myself) just can't stand lugging around an external mouse, however, and find this not to be an acceptable fix.
Speaking of Office though, is there an Open Office port to OSX?
I'm almost certain that the answer is "yes", as I remember some people talking about OS X problems in Open Office at one point when working on some bugs, but I'd check the OO website and google around for impressions first. I haven't used it.
The command line sounds like it might be disappointing. I don't make extensive use of it...
Again, if you are not a heavy GNU utilities user, you will probably not have a problem, and if you use Solaris or BSD as your primary UNIX systems, you will probably be comfortable. From the standpoint of someone who doesn't use the CLI heavily on a day-to-day basis, the differences are minor, requiring only a few changes. There are enough annoyances and missing functionality and commands, however, for GNU maves to go absolutely bonkers.
My original statement was incorrect (I oversimplified things), but your claim is not correct, though I'm going to have to be a bit semantically nit-picky to give a proper answer.
Metadata about a body of data is data relating to that body of data, yet outside of the body of data. EXIF data is metadata with respect to the JPEG-compressed content. It is not metadata with respect to the file as a whole, as the EXIF headers are part of that file. It *is* metadata with respect to the content of the JPEG-compressed data.
First, there are a lot of people that simply know DirectX already, and damn technical merit. Thus, it's easier to get developers that can do DirectX.
Second of all, DirectX forms a more comprehensive, consistent API than OGL does. OpenGL just lets you do 3D (and some very basic 2d work). Perhaps a bit of windowing. You don't have CD audio, music, 3d audio or a sound system handled. You don't have joysticks or an input system handled. You don't have networking support in place. Sure, there are replacement APIs for all this. You can use OpenAL for advanced sound features, SDL for 2d functionality and CD audio, and OpenGL for 3d graphics. It's quite technically possible to do. However, you need to do more cobbling things together.
Therefore, why develop for Direct3D when you can target OpenGL instead, and hit all the platforms, not just one?
Because an overwhelming majority of the game market is Windows based (yes, some of that is chicken-and-egg, but the point stands). A lot of companies don't shed too many tears at not being able to do Mac OS/BeOS/Linux/*BSD releases. That may change, but in general, none of the other platforms are all that lucrative.
Especially since Direct3D is so frequently the cause of problems with the graphics engine.
I'm not sure where you've heard of this.
Therefore one assumes that Direct3D is being chosen not on its techincal merit, but because someone thought it was a good idea, because it's the way that Microsoft thought things should be done.
DirectX is one area that Microsoft puts a lot of people on and a lot of money into developing. I think that most complaints date back to the version 3 era stuff.
All that being said, I've written software using OpenGL, and have never learned DirectX, so I *am* a bit uninformed about the state of things in Redmond. I don't think I'm too far off the mark, though.
OpenGL is not particularly unusable for anyone. If you want to write and sell a game using OpenGL, you can certainly do so. However, there *are* reasons folks tend to use DirectX.
Your friend has excellent taste in movies -- Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a really good work of art.
You're comparing public policy researchers to medical researchers. There's a world of difference.
Studies are big becuase they can be used by politicians to sell things to the public. Which means that they shape much of our legal world. (Recommendations and regulations from government agencies come from these.)
You are, in fact, wrong.
I purchase a number of games. And not just games -- I have purchased *more expensive equivalents* and simply postponed purchasing a non-game product to avoid purchasing Microsoft products. I use Linux for things that it would be easier to use a pirated copy of Windows for. I use a MacAlly Q-BALL (and waited years to buy one) because the functional alternative was a Microsoft product.
You may be right that the majority of pirates do not feel this way. However, I do. I consider it an ethical mandate to avoid giving my money to Microsoft, and if I want something and there is no alternative to and the software cannot be pirated, I simply go without. This does not apply to any other company, but my wallet my own small way of expressing my unhappiness with Microsoft.
I even build systems in a day and age when OEM computers are price-competitive with home-built machines to avoid giving money to Microsoft.
And you aren't just trying to justify your actions to yourself?
You ever considered that the reason production values aren't higher is because Mac users don't produce enough of an influx of money due to...heh...piracy?
All I have to say is let the buyer beware. And in addition, we really need reviewers who can bring themselves to comment on HORRIBLE stability bugs. I always read the reviews before getting a game, and they never mention bugs, even if the game is so buggy that it doesn't hardly run, the reviewer will never mention that little tidbit. Don't you think that is maybe more relevant than anything else?
I'd like to see a "cumulative stability rating" for developers and publishers, based on (a) whether their games are stable out-of-box, and (b) how long it takes them to patch problems that *are* present, and (c) the severity and frequency of exibition of any such problems. This is the only way I can think of to properly encourage game developers and publishers to release stable games. The problem is that, at the time the review is produced, the reviewer has no idea whether the game will be patched in the future. Lots of reviewers informally mention stability issues ("company blargh has a history of buggy games") but there is not numerical, cumulative rating that companies can compete for.
If GameSpot would do this, I think we'd see a much more solid collection of games.
[snicker].
Don't get me wrong. I dislike game programmers that write their systems in DirectX too. However, they certainly aren't "shitty programmers". It's a pain in the ass to get games working on different video cards (anyone who would argue with this has probably never done more than lightweight 3d coding), forget about different operating systems.
So, it's Bungie's fault that Apple has been selling grossly underspeced machines for the last 3 years?
Halo doesn't exactly run peppily on the PC side of things, either. It takes a lot of disabling features to get it going at a decent clip.
Regardless of whether Bungie (Borg Bungie) still deserves love from Mac users, it does suck that MacSoft gets screwed over.
Were you playing on Legendary?
There's a rather large difference between Legendary and other modes.
I liked Halo. I'd never pay for it, given that it was published by Microsoft. (I've played a pirated version and one purchased at employee discount by a friend of a friend working at Microsoft.)
The performance does suck, have to agree. The enemy variation isn't so bad, because the AI plays out each battle quite differently -- it isn't just "run, see enemy, shoot enemy" that Doom provides. If you were fighting human soldiers in real life, I doubt you'd get tired of fighting human soldiers.
There's only one area where I found the cut-and-pasting of maps to become egregious, and that was the Library. That being said, more level designers would not have been a bad thing.
Umm...you're crabby about the interscene movies in Neverwinter Nights? C'mon, that's just silly. Cinematics are neat for about the first time you see them, then are just another time-waster. Yanking 'em hardly impacts gameplay.
You sold out, you're now putting out Mac games through the 2004 equivalent of Lion Entertainment, the least you can do is STFU and get back to making Halo 2 (...for XBox) and suckling at the teat of your overlord Mr. Gates.
Note that Lion Entertainment has to their credit the Mac Warcraft II port, one of the best ports in the history of game ports. The port itself is rock solid. Plus, during they port, they also added (because it seemed like something that would be neat) TCP/IP networking and 3d audio.
Yes, it does run on XP, with sound and all that. It's not *that* old...
Yeah -- I was talking about the browser. I didn't really read the grandparent, just the parent. :-)
Though, to be honest, HTML was designed to be a markup language, works best as a markup language, and is now generally used as a flawed layout language due to "features" like pixel-level positioning.
Let's suppose that your thesis is correct. If people can't handle creating a directory and placing files into it, why are you so confident that they'll be able to create and manage invisible "metadata"?
Actually, NTFS does. At one point, I thought that it was only hardlinks, but it does symlinks as well.
However, Windows is not capable of exposing said functionality.
The problem is that many innocent improvements *do* break compatibility.
However, Microsoft has intentionally broken compatbility or leveraged incompatibility so many times in the past that they have simply lost the ability to break compatibility and be given the benefit of the doubt any more.
What the hell are you talking about?
"data outside the file"? That's what metadata *is*!
Second that. God, I hate Windows XP. Windows 2000 was annoying -- it was Windows, had a lousy terminal emulator, didn't have the POSIX utils, had that stupid file and directory locking that Windows is stuck with, yadda yadda yadda. However, it wasn't as if it were designed to be actively offensive. Windws Xp starts out with that lousy color scheme, makes you click on a talking dog's window to do each search, pops up useless speech bubbles constantly to give the user status information, has Explorer set up to silently fail on a number of file operations...argh.
A good friend has a titanium iBook. He treats it like glass to avoid mars and shattering the display (because the lid bends and flexes so much, it is possible to shatter the LCD display), but a hinge on the thing still broke. He tried to get a replacement, but because Apple ships the things all glued together, he was told that he could not obtain the part from Apple short of a $600 replacement display. He ended up spending hours and hours fabricating a new hinge, and disassembling and reassembling the computer to get the parts into place. The back of the display also seems to have fallen off.
I've been stunningly underwhelmed with the general sturdiness of Apple's laptops.
On the up side, Apple laptops had chronic problems for *years* with the port-covering panel breaking off. Apple seems to have fixed this, as the panel is firmly attached on his Mac.
OS X is usable without being incredibly irritating, a la Windows, but it still isn't Linux. You are stuck with a single mouse button trackpad, and you should be aware that purchasing a Mac is more than the initial purchase price -- software and hardware from Apple is pricy and a lot of software that Linux folks take for granted as free are quite expensive packages on the Mac. Finally, the PowerPC isn't what it once was -- the PPC used to be an incredibly cool (thermally cool) processor back in the day, but it's steadily consumed more and more power.
It all depends on what you like in a computer. I would *definitely* use a friend's Apple computer for a while before buying an Apple machine, unless the money really doesn't even measure on your financial radar. You may like the thing. It has plenty of eye candy, a much better UI than Windows, better commercial software support than Linux (well, for typical cubicle-worker stuff), and is fairly straightforward.
While it *does* have a CLI, it lacks the GNU utilities, which is *incredibly* annoying to anyone who has gotten familiar with them. If Solaris or BSD (well, sans GNU utils) drives you nuts with the more limited featureset in the CLI utilities, you are going to be equally irritated with the Mac OS.
If you're aware of what you're getting into, Macs can be a good deal.
Note that, before people get crabby about me bashing Apple, I have a Mac right next to me at the moment, and I've used and coded on Macs for years in the past. I think Apple's done some good stuff, but that people also tend to get an overly rosy view of their products.
When we want feedback from you we want it on a couple of slides. We don't want to know how you tweaked your code to get 1% performance increase. We want to know how we're progressing and if there are any show-stopping problems.
Okay. This raises the question of why, if the primary task of a manger is to simply take in input and regurgitate an obvious yes or no based on some simply risk and profit analysis that *anyone* could do, we need more than one manager per twenty engineers.
I just don't see a hell of a lot of functionality provided by most managers, aside from possibly information hiding -- which you could argue really is a useful service.
That doesn't mean that managers are unnecessary (collecting and summarizing information and handing it up the chain *is* a necessary task), just that there are a lot more of them than there should be.
You know, at one point I would have felt that your argument was weighty and official-sounding and something that's worth stepping aside for.
The problem is that I've run into an inordinate number of utterly incompetent corporate IT people who throw out lines that read *exactly* like the ones that you just wrote, and are utterly wrong. That doesn't necessarily reflect on your own abilities, but I've found that it's really amazing how often giving people non-sanitized communications with honest and in-depth information seems to make them much happier.
At one point, I thought that corporatespeak, the sort of truly zero-content material that appears on the websites of holding companies, groups of companies, and most investment-related firms was professional and respected by people reading it. Then I discovered that no, it's generally made fun of among everyone. Nobody, not even the PHBs, are in the least intrigued by a webpage that says that a company can promote "knowledge management producing synergy" or similar.
I just read Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line", and have decided that he has an excellent point. Users are *tired* of being fed sanitized, contentless information telling them that the product they have purchased is working fine and has no problems, that they have an "issue", not a "bug", and that the company is glad to continue to provide valuable and useful services to the customer. They don't want to see more stock business clipart of mindlessly grinning models sitting in front of keyboards wearing a telephone headset.
Note that Dell is pretty to-the-point for a company, probably because their primary interface to customers is through their website and if they dick around too much, they lose customers.
Here's a random exerpt from one of those content-free pages:
Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Techieindex
1. How is Business Objects planning to focus on the Global 2000 companies and other packaged application software vendors who have a proactive strategy to reach customers, prospects, partners, and employees using the Internet especially in a global economy that has not yet shown signs of picking up from the slump it has been in for the past two years?
Global 2000 leaders understand that they can use information and the Internet to service customers better, drive cost out of the business and improve their business performance and velocity. This is the fundamental value proposition of Business Intelligence software - helping organizations of all sizes to more effectively track, understand and manage their business. Business Objects will continue to add capability to our best-of-breed BI stack, including the next major release of our product later this year, and help our global customer base of more than 17,000, utilize enterprise BI to see rapid business return.
This sort of crap doesn't actually appeal to *anyone*.
Wow. *That* is an impressive rarity. Kudos to their web designer.