Had the same problem with mother-in-law. She had Earthlink dial-up service and after she got DSL she ended up paying for both services. I had a hard time convincing her that she no longer needed Earthlink. She did finally cancel the service and transferred her email to her ISP.
Another friend (older guy -- sixties) went from Earthlink to local DSL service, and then was somehow convinced to buy Earthlink DSL service on top of that. Earthlink sent him a router identical to the one he already had which he happily swapped out. I pointed out that Earthlink wasn't providing anything he didn't already have, but he never really got it.
Yes but... there are less expensive options for dial-up than AOL. I think the point is that the people in question don't realize that all the "extras" they're paying for are available for free with any internet connection.
I think you're right, there is some of that, but even in situations where the American company stands to lose big, there's a tendency to eat the cost and placate, rather than get militant about lead in the paint or nails used as fasteners.
> Seriously, I can't understand how you could possibly think someone else's phone call is any different than someone else having a conversation with someone sitting beside them.
Seriously, I used to work for a cell company, got interested in this and did some research. There is a difference. People tend to talk louder into cell phones than they would people next to them. Interestingly enough, the older the user, the louder they talk into the phone.
There should be some way to add: "The feature film of Burrough's 'A Princess of Mars', in development hell for 70 (that's seventy) years is just 2 - 3 years away."
My understanding is that China generally gets a free ride in these cases because China holds most of the US debt. We can't afford to make more than token complaints without risking our country's solvency. It's a pretty big stick.
We openly admit that it is common practice in this country not to pay MicroSoft's predatory pricing if another avenue presents itself. However, we'd like to assure you that we're getting tired of the damned bluescreens, the most annoying of which occurred at the Beijing Olympics, right in front of God and everybody, if we believed in God, and we have decided to return all of our bootleg copies and what few legitimate copies we could scrape together. The crates should be arriving soon. We will be switching to Linux. We wish your company good fortune and hope you sell many more copies of Windows to the US military.
Sounds like the first person to reverse-engineer the screwdriver and offer it for a reasonable price will make a hansom profit. I expect every parts store to include one in their kits within a year.
I mean, really, proprietary screws? Does the iScrew have a sexy white finish?
I guess I could see older folks still staring mindlessly at live TV while they cut up their Swanson salsbury steak on the tv tray. But these are the people who wouldn't go out on Fridays anyway.
For anyone born after 1980, there's DVR and network tv.
I only watch 3 or 4 shows a week (life is too short for mediocre tv) but if you put a gun to my head, I couldn't tell you what day they air or even what channel. Any effect this "time slot" thing still has is diminishing rapidly.
But... let's assume for the sake of argument that everything they said is true, and moving Fringe to Fridays was an attempt to increase viewership in the young demographic on a day that's traditionally dead in that age group.
Then what? Just for a moment, let's try to think less like geeks. Do the network flunkies really think that Joe Teenager will blow off his chance to get to second base with Jill Cheerleader because Fringe is on? Seriously?
Thanks for documenting this. I had a similar experience with cable a few years ago and I regret I didn't document it at the time. In my case we were renting a house next to a vacant lot, and on the other side of the lot was the curbside cable box that the installer had decided to use.
They ran the cable straight across the vacant lot in the grass and into one of our ventilation conduits to get under the house. Then, one day the cable stopped working. I could see that they were starting to develop the lot next door and a tractor had run across the cable laying on the ground. I called the provider, they came out and strung another cable across the lot, on the ground.
This was a regular occurrence in the weeks ahead. Once or twice a week I'd call that the cable was broken again, and someone would come out and patch it and drop it back in the dirt.
Then one day it stopped working again and I called again and then watched what the guy would do when he came out. They had poured concrete next door, and the cable now went from the box down into a fresh sidewalk never to emerge on the other side.
He scratched his head on that one, and just when I thought he was going to stretch a replacement cable across the new driveway, he instead went to the other side of my house, connected a new cable to the cable box over there, stretched it across part of my neighbor's lawn, diagonally across my lawn, and back through a different vent to the underside of the house, where he patched it in.
I called and told the cable company about this, that I had to disconnect the cable in order for either me or my neighbor to mow the lawn, but they said there was "nothing they could do". They said it often, and eventually, when I got on their nerves, they said it at high volume.
So we canceled the cable. I disconnected it on my side and wrapped the excess around the box. To this day I regret not documenting the experience through photos.
Later we had DSL and then fiber optic service, which were quite satisfactory. I never got an indoor DSL box installed outdoors, but they did run the line along the ground on the side of the house before punching into the bedroom I was using as an office. I didn't notice it at the time, but did notice that the network failed about a month after the air conditioner was installed. The installers had poured a slab of concrete on the side of the house for the air conditioning unit and -- you guessed it -- the cable was now part of the slab. I'm surprised it worked for as long as it did.
When we had fiber installed, I had them run it to the corner of the house closest to the curbside box (which fortunately was on my property) made sure they TRENCHED it this time, had them mount the fiber modem and router on the inside wall of the garage, and then did the rest of the network myself. So far flawless.
What I learned from this is to be sure to meet the installer outside, be sure he's called the utilities and knows where to dig, be sure he intends to trench the cables he needs to run to the house, and make sure he intends to run all other cables either along the walls well above ground level, through the basement, or through the attic.
And if they don't do these things, call the salescreature back and cancel the service. You can do that within 30 days, even if you signed a multi-year contract. By telling them you're going to cancel up front and why, you are then in a position to negotiate from strength. But if they don't fix it in a week or so, cancel in earnest and look for another provider.
Under no circumstances should an installer be allowed to work unsupervised.
A former company of mine ran into this issue, and the issue was that over the years they had purchased from multiple VARs, some of which no longer existed. How do you ask your VAR to check your licenses, when the VAR has vanished from the earth?
This isn't even rare. Any company that has been in business for a significant amount of time (say, since Windows for Workgroups) will have gone through several VARs, had churn amongst all personnel who might know about licensing, and couldn't tell you where all their licenses are if you put a gun to their heads. I guess in that case you just re-purchase some subset of your licenses every few years. This must be the "rental" model I've been hearing about.
Even in cases where licenses were purchased directly from the vendor, the contract was sometimes vague as to exactly how many licenses of what type could be in use simultaneously. In the best of times it's a headache.
It's "showing intent" that's missing from the equation.
If the people hurt by the BSA were all scurrilous pirates, I'd agree and applaud. But what about the companies who made a good faith effort to keep in compliance with the twisty and not well documented little passages of company-wide server, desktop and portable licenses, and then got nailed anyway? What about a system that makes it easy to accuse and very difficult to prove innocence?
The killer apps for me are the Adobe suite. Port CS6 or even Lightroom to Android and my PC would gather dust. I can do pretty much everything else I need to do on either an Android or iPad tablet (admittedly with rare use of a bluetooth keyboard for the times when I have to pound out a lot of text in a short period of time). Microsoft Office? It is to laugh. The features of the latest Office may be of use to a professional administrator tightly connected to an all-Microsoft environment, (I find most of the Ribbon features to be incomprehensible or unimportant) but for the rest of us there's a bunch of free and easily acquired tools that are plenty good enough.
Yes, I know about Photoshop Express. It's useful enough for vacation photos, but what is needed is a complete solution.
Why CS6 on Android and not iPad? Because without an SD card slot or a USB port, or SOME way to get the images from the content capture device to the tablet, it's not much more than a browsing/entertainment device.
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Does your dad realize he can keep his AOL email address after he cancels the service?
Had the same problem with mother-in-law. She had Earthlink dial-up service and after she got DSL she ended up paying for both services. I had a hard time convincing her that she no longer needed Earthlink. She did finally cancel the service and transferred her email to her ISP.
Another friend (older guy -- sixties) went from Earthlink to local DSL service, and then was somehow convinced to buy Earthlink DSL service on top of that. Earthlink sent him a router identical to the one he already had which he happily swapped out. I pointed out that Earthlink wasn't providing anything he didn't already have, but he never really got it.
Yes but... there are less expensive options for dial-up than AOL. I think the point is that the people in question don't realize that all the "extras" they're paying for are available for free with any internet connection.
I think you're right, there is some of that, but even in situations where the American company stands to lose big, there's a tendency to eat the cost and placate, rather than get militant about lead in the paint or nails used as fasteners.
> Seriously, I can't understand how you could possibly think someone else's phone call is any different than someone else having a conversation with someone sitting beside them.
Seriously, I used to work for a cell company, got interested in this and did some research. There is a difference. People tend to talk louder into cell phones than they would people next to them. Interestingly enough, the older the user, the louder they talk into the phone.
As luck would have it, I still have my Matrox PowerVR card. I should be all set.
But I'm wondering about sound. Are we talking Sound Blaster 16 support? I dusted off my Gravis Ultrasound but can't find a slot for it.
You know, we may have to play this thing in a virtual instance of Windows 98...
There should be some way to add: "The feature film of Burrough's 'A Princess of Mars', in development hell for 70 (that's seventy) years is just 2 - 3 years away."
My understanding is that China generally gets a free ride in these cases because China holds most of the US debt. We can't afford to make more than token complaints without risking our country's solvency. It's a pretty big stick.
Dear Mr. Ballmer
We openly admit that it is common practice in this country not to pay MicroSoft's predatory pricing if another avenue presents itself. However, we'd like to assure you that we're getting tired of the damned bluescreens, the most annoying of which occurred at the Beijing Olympics, right in front of God and everybody, if we believed in God, and we have decided to return all of our bootleg copies and what few legitimate copies we could scrape together. The crates should be arriving soon. We will be switching to Linux. We wish your company good fortune and hope you sell many more copies of Windows to the US military.
Regards,
China
Sounds like the first person to reverse-engineer the screwdriver and offer it for a reasonable price will make a hansom profit. I expect every parts store to include one in their kits within a year.
I mean, really, proprietary screws? Does the iScrew have a sexy white finish?
iScrew is my new favorite word.
I guess I could see older folks still staring mindlessly at live TV while they cut up their Swanson salsbury steak on the tv tray. But these are the people who wouldn't go out on Fridays anyway.
For anyone born after 1980, there's DVR and network tv.
I only watch 3 or 4 shows a week (life is too short for mediocre tv) but if you put a gun to my head, I couldn't tell you what day they air or even what channel. Any effect this "time slot" thing still has is diminishing rapidly.
But... let's assume for the sake of argument that everything they said is true, and moving Fringe to Fridays was an attempt to increase viewership in the young demographic on a day that's traditionally dead in that age group.
Then what? Just for a moment, let's try to think less like geeks. Do the network flunkies really think that Joe Teenager will blow off his chance to get to second base with Jill Cheerleader because Fringe is on? Seriously?
I guess you can charge or bill them for anything but you would almost certainly have to go to court to collect.
These days it appears to be more productive to ridicule them in public.
This kind of reply makes me wonder what percentage of foreigners think we still ride horses on dirt streets.
It doesn't matter who does it as long as someone buries the cable comfortably inside 30 days, or I will cancel the service and go with a competitor.
Somebody without a stake in the answer needs to do the analysis.
I can't disagree with that.
So mow it. They'll have to come out and lay another cable, so mow it again. Keep mowing it until they get tired of replacing it.
Thanks for documenting this. I had a similar experience with cable a few years ago and I regret I didn't document it at the time. In my case we were renting a house next to a vacant lot, and on the other side of the lot was the curbside cable box that the installer had decided to use.
They ran the cable straight across the vacant lot in the grass and into one of our ventilation conduits to get under the house. Then, one day the cable stopped working. I could see that they were starting to develop the lot next door and a tractor had run across the cable laying on the ground. I called the provider, they came out and strung another cable across the lot, on the ground.
This was a regular occurrence in the weeks ahead. Once or twice a week I'd call that the cable was broken again, and someone would come out and patch it and drop it back in the dirt.
Then one day it stopped working again and I called again and then watched what the guy would do when he came out. They had poured concrete next door, and the cable now went from the box down into a fresh sidewalk never to emerge on the other side.
He scratched his head on that one, and just when I thought he was going to stretch a replacement cable across the new driveway, he instead went to the other side of my house, connected a new cable to the cable box over there, stretched it across part of my neighbor's lawn, diagonally across my lawn, and back through a different vent to the underside of the house, where he patched it in.
I called and told the cable company about this, that I had to disconnect the cable in order for either me or my neighbor to mow the lawn, but they said there was "nothing they could do". They said it often, and eventually, when I got on their nerves, they said it at high volume.
So we canceled the cable. I disconnected it on my side and wrapped the excess around the box. To this day I regret not documenting the experience through photos.
Later we had DSL and then fiber optic service, which were quite satisfactory. I never got an indoor DSL box installed outdoors, but they did run the line along the ground on the side of the house before punching into the bedroom I was using as an office. I didn't notice it at the time, but did notice that the network failed about a month after the air conditioner was installed. The installers had poured a slab of concrete on the side of the house for the air conditioning unit and -- you guessed it -- the cable was now part of the slab. I'm surprised it worked for as long as it did.
When we had fiber installed, I had them run it to the corner of the house closest to the curbside box (which fortunately was on my property) made sure they TRENCHED it this time, had them mount the fiber modem and router on the inside wall of the garage, and then did the rest of the network myself. So far flawless.
What I learned from this is to be sure to meet the installer outside, be sure he's called the utilities and knows where to dig, be sure he intends to trench the cables he needs to run to the house, and make sure he intends to run all other cables either along the walls well above ground level, through the basement, or through the attic.
And if they don't do these things, call the salescreature back and cancel the service. You can do that within 30 days, even if you signed a multi-year contract. By telling them you're going to cancel up front and why, you are then in a position to negotiate from strength. But if they don't fix it in a week or so, cancel in earnest and look for another provider.
Under no circumstances should an installer be allowed to work unsupervised.
> Other than money, can anyone cite an upside to working in IT?
The chicks, man. The chicks.
A former company of mine ran into this issue, and the issue was that over the years they had purchased from multiple VARs, some of which no longer existed. How do you ask your VAR to check your licenses, when the VAR has vanished from the earth?
This isn't even rare. Any company that has been in business for a significant amount of time (say, since Windows for Workgroups) will have gone through several VARs, had churn amongst all personnel who might know about licensing, and couldn't tell you where all their licenses are if you put a gun to their heads. I guess in that case you just re-purchase some subset of your licenses every few years. This must be the "rental" model I've been hearing about.
Even in cases where licenses were purchased directly from the vendor, the contract was sometimes vague as to exactly how many licenses of what type could be in use simultaneously. In the best of times it's a headache.
It's "showing intent" that's missing from the equation.
If the people hurt by the BSA were all scurrilous pirates, I'd agree and applaud. But what about the companies who made a good faith effort to keep in compliance with the twisty and not well documented little passages of company-wide server, desktop and portable licenses, and then got nailed anyway? What about a system that makes it easy to accuse and very difficult to prove innocence?
The killer apps for me are the Adobe suite. Port CS6 or even Lightroom to Android and my PC would gather dust. I can do pretty much everything else I need to do on either an Android or iPad tablet (admittedly with rare use of a bluetooth keyboard for the times when I have to pound out a lot of text in a short period of time). Microsoft Office? It is to laugh. The features of the latest Office may be of use to a professional administrator tightly connected to an all-Microsoft environment, (I find most of the Ribbon features to be incomprehensible or unimportant) but for the rest of us there's a bunch of free and easily acquired tools that are plenty good enough.
Yes, I know about Photoshop Express. It's useful enough for vacation photos, but what is needed is a complete solution.
Why CS6 on Android and not iPad? Because without an SD card slot or a USB port, or SOME way to get the images from the content capture device to the tablet, it's not much more than a browsing/entertainment device.