Mine was about the same. Had this error with a laptop...Sometimes when you plugged it in, the power LED would start flashing Yellow - Yellow - Green.
All I wanted to know was, what the hell does that mean? Ungrounded outlet? Charger fault? Failing power supply? Battery Error? A production engineer, or a maintenance technician could have told me in a second. A helpful chart could have done the same. I waited 45 minutes on the phone to talk to a person who had no clue, and passed me to a second person, who passed me to a third person, who talked to her manager, and came back with "It's not important, you don't need to know."
WHAT? I demanded to speak to someone who was knowledgable, and I got the dial tone. Apparently the dial tone is the most knowledgable person they've got.
I was pissed at Dell before that, and that was the last damn straw. I dumped my webhost because they used damn Dell computers. As far as I'm concerned buying a Dell is the same as paying someone to screw you over and laugh.
I actually got the response, "You don't need to know that" once. Sure, it was a relief after waiting almost an hour to get through, to ask a question that SHOULD have been available on the company website (Dell) anyway, and THEN have the individual on the other end tell me that I didn't need to know, but by that point I WANTED to know, and BADLY so I could jsutify the chunk of my life I'd wasted!
I still don't know, by the way. You'd think it'd be easier to figure out what an LED error code meant.
Seriously. I think if you're too dumb to be able to right click, select properties, click the permissions tab, and select "execute", apply, and ok, then you should not be able to install the latest "Hello Kitty" mouse pointer or whatever other crap you've managed to download.
Haha, yea. If he didn't know the answer, the smug bastard just made it up. There was a recorded case where he was confronted with a fossilized skeleton of a fish, and he proceded to explain that there were fish that lived in the ground, like in the ocean, and this was one of their skeletons.
However, while he may have sucked at some sciences, he defined others (biology leaps to mind). The problem was, he was the primary source for so many years that people got dogmatic about it. Scientific truths are not meant to be taken on faith.
Accountable means that the manufacturer should replace the product with a functional version, or refund the purchase price. What else could they possibly be liable for, assuming no gross property damage resulted from purchase and use of said product.
If I buy a toaster, and it burns my toast, I don't sue the company that made it.
If I buy a toaster, and it burns my HOUSE, then I sue the manufacturer.
If only common sense were more common. What kind of wanker do you have to be to make the leap of logic from, "This Xbox sucks, I wish I hadn't bought it" to "This Xbox sucks, and microsoft owes me a million bucks"?
Your Grandma knew her classics:...But though our present account is of this nature we must give what help we can. First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.
I think the thing that crystalized it for me was this review from PC Mag in '04.
The reviewer gave it a 4.5, and the dozens of users who reviewed it gave it an average of 1.5, where 1 is the lowest possible score. All the people who bothered to write opinions wrote vivid descriptions of the problems I was having. This means two things: 1) The reviewer was a dishonest whore, and 2) Despite the press, Norton is an inferior product.
Norton used to be great, but they seriously suck these days.
Well, if they move to being a service that allows for targeted ads on advertisers pages, that's semi-acceptable to me. No popups, mind. But relevant picture ads are certainly better than irrelevant picture ads. It's at least a decent goal.
The question is, can Claria be trusted to gather enough personal information to allow for accurately targeted ads, and not use that information for evil? I think the answer to that question is no. Gator/Claria has the soul of a whore, and they'll sell you out to anyone for a nickle. Look how little time it took them to transition from being semi-useful to being pure evil in the first place!
Given the opportunity for profit, they'll go pure evil again.
Actually, the systems insistence on NOT killing a service if it can't be sure it won't cause a crash is one of Windows' most grevious flaws.
I used to admin this damn win2k server with a shoddily written ASP application running on it. Every now and then the application would meltdown and the only way to restart it was to do a hard reboot on the machine because Windows wouldn't allow the service to be stopped or restarted.
Would. Not. Allow.
That is completely unacceptable. It's my job to be smarter than the computer. If the computer was actually smarter than me, I wouldn't HAVE a job. To have it decide that it is smarter than me, especially when it's already being extra special stupid is INTOLERABLE.
Just one more example of having to fight Windows to get it to behave correctly. People talk about stability, but the biggest problem I've always seen is all the assumptions the code makes without consulting you.
Bellsouth does this, and Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable, and all the other cable providers use their bully pulpit control of the tv to rake BellSouth over the coals, while at the same time promoting their cable/internet/voip bundles.
This is one of those places where Bellsouth CANNOT afford to be seen as inferior to the cable providers. I use Bellsouth myself (cheap static IP), but I've got zero customer loyalty, and if Bellsouth does anything APPROACHING this I'll drop them so fast they'll redshift...Just like I did Cox a few years ago.
I'll never buy Norton again. Norton 2005 was like prison sex, but without the emotional fulfillment. McAfee was also annoying and stale. I just use AVG these days. May not have as many features, but I never want to take my own life after using it.
Heh. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Internet, where you can never be sure the file you're opening wasn't put there as a practical joke by someone into fecal fetish porn.
Ah, a spelling troll, how quaint. It may interest you to know that journalists are not especially good spellers. However, I am not a journalist.
I used to work at a biology lab without knowing any biology either. Worked for a glass company without learning how to make glass. Worked for a car dealership without ever touching a car. Worked for an architect without doing any architecture, worked for a pest control company without dealing with any pests (excepting people like yourself, of course). Even worked for a country club, without ever talking to a member.
In short, like everyone else here, I'm a techie. I work with computers. I write code. And despite what you seem to believe, I do this perfectly well, despite my obvious serious mental handicaps. Imagine...Having a spelling error. Gosh I hope all the journalists didn't see! My reputation will be ruined! How ever shall I go on? Clearly I am unfit to live.
Maybe I see certain strains of Christianity as harmful to society.
Maybe I feel that their agenda is responsible for an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, due to their utter refusal to consider educating children about sex.
Maybe I feel that their beliefs are responsible for failures in education which are causing the united states to lose its edge in the global information economy, due to their insistence that science has to conform to their religious dogma.
Maybe I see their beliefs as the root cause for hate crimes, due to the culture of intolerance they foster. It is not difficult to draw a connection between islamic fundamentalism and christian fundamentalism; the christians seem to conveniently forget that we've had two major terroist incidents on US soil: 9/11 and Oklahoma City.
Does that then mean that I can go on a crusade to have them eradicated from our society?
Ask yourself if you really want to take a step into a world where were are allowed to restrict the freedoms of others who use those freedoms to do things we don't agree with.
Blah blah. Any solution that requires any personal responsibility is clearly going to fail, because the number of people who are willing to take any responsiblity for their actions is vanishingly small.
If you have a child, and he gets into a bottle of your pills and kills himself, is it:
A) The childs fault, for not knowing better B) Your fault, for being careless C) The pharmaceutical companies fault, for making the pill in the first place D) The pharmacys fault, for making the pill bottle openable E) A & B F) C & D
The right answer is clearly 'B', but it seems like 'F' is the only popular option these days. It's got to be someone's fault, and obviously it couldn't be the parents fault, are you MAD?
Makes me sick. Not to bring up the Bush Corolary of Godwin's Law, but take 9/11. 1 day to happen, 5 years of finger pointing to follow. Why? We can't just say, "Okay, we all screwed up, let's learn something and move on." No no no, we've got to find out exactly whose fault it was that we didn't see it coming, so we can, I don't know, set them on fire or something.
It's getting hard to even blame the government for refusing to take responsibility. Jesus, look what we did to the tobacco companies! I missed the bit where they held people down and made them smoke, but it clearly happened at some point.
We've gotta stop the finger pointing, and man up to some responsiblity. It's freaking absurd.
Frankly, I'm all for the sale. Corporate journalism sucks. KR is a corporation filled with huge, unprofitable papers (Philly, Detroit(formerly), San Jose), being propped up by smaller papers that are getting squeezed like grapes to produce obscene profit margins (25+ percent), so that the shareholders can still get fat dividends so that the stock price stays high and the executive stock options are more lucrative. Chances are the papers'll just get bought up by other bloodsucking corporates, and the cycle will go on.
They just don't get it. A small paper in a saturated market can't grow revenue every year. In the market I'm in, we're bumping up against the effing LITERACY rate...We'd have to TEACH PEOPLE TO READ to sell more papers. But our budgeted profits are still targeted higher every year, so we have to cut and scrimp to make budget so we can make a 31% profit instead of a 29% profit, and squeezed to the bone, quality drops, and when quality drops, people stop subscribing, and then we have to cut yet still more to make 32% for next year.
Then magically, one day the company is in the toilet and they're trying to sell, and all the while the stockholders are complaining because the profits aren't big enough. Oy. If I could find a place to put my money where I'd make 25% a year, I'd do it and retire.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine was about the same. Had this error with a laptop...Sometimes when you plugged it in, the power LED would start flashing Yellow - Yellow - Green.
All I wanted to know was, what the hell does that mean? Ungrounded outlet? Charger fault? Failing power supply? Battery Error? A production engineer, or a maintenance technician could have told me in a second. A helpful chart could have done the same. I waited 45 minutes on the phone to talk to a person who had no clue, and passed me to a second person, who passed me to a third person, who talked to her manager, and came back with "It's not important, you don't need to know."
WHAT? I demanded to speak to someone who was knowledgable, and I got the dial tone. Apparently the dial tone is the most knowledgable person they've got.
I was pissed at Dell before that, and that was the last damn straw. I dumped my webhost because they used damn Dell computers. As far as I'm concerned buying a Dell is the same as paying someone to screw you over and laugh.
Microsoft I can see...Not like they're error free to begin with.
But Intel? Didn't they learn anything?
Time to buy some more AMD stock.
I actually got the response, "You don't need to know that" once. Sure, it was a relief after waiting almost an hour to get through, to ask a question that SHOULD have been available on the company website (Dell) anyway, and THEN have the individual on the other end tell me that I didn't need to know, but by that point I WANTED to know, and BADLY so I could jsutify the chunk of my life I'd wasted!
I still don't know, by the way. You'd think it'd be easier to figure out what an LED error code meant.
Yea, but since apple is bsd based, the file extension doesn't actually MEAN anything, so why display it?
Sure it would. Just don't tell them how to do it.
Seriously. I think if you're too dumb to be able to right click, select properties, click the permissions tab, and select "execute", apply, and ok, then you should not be able to install the latest "Hello Kitty" mouse pointer or whatever other crap you've managed to download.
It won't be unstoppable until it masters: "u wnt to cyb3r?"
Haha, yea. If he didn't know the answer, the smug bastard just made it up. There was a recorded case where he was confronted with a fossilized skeleton of a fish, and he proceded to explain that there were fish that lived in the ground, like in the ocean, and this was one of their skeletons.
However, while he may have sucked at some sciences, he defined others (biology leaps to mind). The problem was, he was the primary source for so many years that people got dogmatic about it. Scientific truths are not meant to be taken on faith.
Ever see a medicine where it's listed as a possible side-effect? Now that is freaky.
"May cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pains, depression, suicide...Ask your doctor about it today!"
*cue old people frolicking on the beach*
Accountable means that the manufacturer should replace the product with a functional version, or refund the purchase price. What else could they possibly be liable for, assuming no gross property damage resulted from purchase and use of said product.
If I buy a toaster, and it burns my toast, I don't sue the company that made it.
If I buy a toaster, and it burns my HOUSE, then I sue the manufacturer.
If only common sense were more common. What kind of wanker do you have to be to make the leap of logic from, "This Xbox sucks, I wish I hadn't bought it" to "This Xbox sucks, and microsoft owes me a million bucks"?
Your Grandma knew her classics: ...But though our present account is of this nature we must give what help we can. First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.
--Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics.
I think the thing that crystalized it for me was this review from PC Mag in '04.
The reviewer gave it a 4.5, and the dozens of users who reviewed it gave it an average of 1.5, where 1 is the lowest possible score. All the people who bothered to write opinions wrote vivid descriptions of the problems I was having. This means two things: 1) The reviewer was a dishonest whore, and 2) Despite the press, Norton is an inferior product.
Norton used to be great, but they seriously suck these days.
Sure the products work, but the significant performance overhead and the annoying liscensing checks pretty much kill the deal for me.
The 8th century AD.
Didn't last very long though.
Yea, we tried to patent it, but the prior art was overwhelming.
Hmmmm.
Lets take a struggling print company: Knight Ridder, Inc. KRI
And compare it to Slashdot's parent company: LNUX
Evidence would seem to suggest that, in fact, being dead may be better than being Slashdot
Well, if they move to being a service that allows for targeted ads on advertisers pages, that's semi-acceptable to me. No popups, mind. But relevant picture ads are certainly better than irrelevant picture ads. It's at least a decent goal.
The question is, can Claria be trusted to gather enough personal information to allow for accurately targeted ads, and not use that information for evil? I think the answer to that question is no. Gator/Claria has the soul of a whore, and they'll sell you out to anyone for a nickle. Look how little time it took them to transition from being semi-useful to being pure evil in the first place!
Given the opportunity for profit, they'll go pure evil again.
Actually, the systems insistence on NOT killing a service if it can't be sure it won't cause a crash is one of Windows' most grevious flaws.
I used to admin this damn win2k server with a shoddily written ASP application running on it. Every now and then the application would meltdown and the only way to restart it was to do a hard reboot on the machine because Windows wouldn't allow the service to be stopped or restarted.
Would. Not. Allow.
That is completely unacceptable. It's my job to be smarter than the computer. If the computer was actually smarter than me, I wouldn't HAVE a job. To have it decide that it is smarter than me, especially when it's already being extra special stupid is INTOLERABLE.
Just one more example of having to fight Windows to get it to behave correctly. People talk about stability, but the biggest problem I've always seen is all the assumptions the code makes without consulting you.
Actually, it's like this:
Bellsouth does this, and Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable, and all the other cable providers use their bully pulpit control of the tv to rake BellSouth over the coals, while at the same time promoting their cable/internet/voip bundles.
This is one of those places where Bellsouth CANNOT afford to be seen as inferior to the cable providers. I use Bellsouth myself (cheap static IP), but I've got zero customer loyalty, and if Bellsouth does anything APPROACHING this I'll drop them so fast they'll redshift...Just like I did Cox a few years ago.
I'll never buy Norton again. Norton 2005 was like prison sex, but without the emotional fulfillment. McAfee was also annoying and stale. I just use AVG these days. May not have as many features, but I never want to take my own life after using it.
Heh. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Internet, where you can never be sure the file you're opening wasn't put there as a practical joke by someone into fecal fetish porn.
...and redirect surfers onto porn sites.
Fix? It's not a bug, it's a feature. Maybe IE is improving!
Ah, a spelling troll, how quaint. It may interest you to know that journalists are not especially good spellers. However, I am not a journalist.
I used to work at a biology lab without knowing any biology either. Worked for a glass company without learning how to make glass. Worked for a car dealership without ever touching a car. Worked for an architect without doing any architecture, worked for a pest control company without dealing with any pests (excepting people like yourself, of course). Even worked for a country club, without ever talking to a member.
In short, like everyone else here, I'm a techie. I work with computers. I write code. And despite what you seem to believe, I do this perfectly well, despite my obvious serious mental handicaps. Imagine...Having a spelling error. Gosh I hope all the journalists didn't see! My reputation will be ruined! How ever shall I go on? Clearly I am unfit to live.
Maybe I see certain strains of Christianity as harmful to society.
Maybe I feel that their agenda is responsible for an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, due to their utter refusal to consider educating children about sex.
Maybe I feel that their beliefs are responsible for failures in education which are causing the united states to lose its edge in the global information economy, due to their insistence that science has to conform to their religious dogma.
Maybe I see their beliefs as the root cause for hate crimes, due to the culture of intolerance they foster. It is not difficult to draw a connection between islamic fundamentalism and christian fundamentalism; the christians seem to conveniently forget that we've had two major terroist incidents on US soil: 9/11 and Oklahoma City.
Does that then mean that I can go on a crusade to have them eradicated from our society?
Ask yourself if you really want to take a step into a world where were are allowed to restrict the freedoms of others who use those freedoms to do things we don't agree with.
Blah blah. Any solution that requires any personal responsibility is clearly going to fail, because the number of people who are willing to take any responsiblity for their actions is vanishingly small.
If you have a child, and he gets into a bottle of your pills and kills himself, is it:
A) The childs fault, for not knowing better
B) Your fault, for being careless
C) The pharmaceutical companies fault, for making the pill in the first place
D) The pharmacys fault, for making the pill bottle openable
E) A & B
F) C & D
The right answer is clearly 'B', but it seems like 'F' is the only popular option these days. It's got to be someone's fault, and obviously it couldn't be the parents fault, are you MAD?
Makes me sick. Not to bring up the Bush Corolary of Godwin's Law, but take 9/11. 1 day to happen, 5 years of finger pointing to follow. Why? We can't just say, "Okay, we all screwed up, let's learn something and move on." No no no, we've got to find out exactly whose fault it was that we didn't see it coming, so we can, I don't know, set them on fire or something.
It's getting hard to even blame the government for refusing to take responsibility. Jesus, look what we did to the tobacco companies! I missed the bit where they held people down and made them smoke, but it clearly happened at some point.
We've gotta stop the finger pointing, and man up to some responsiblity. It's freaking absurd.
Frankly, I'm all for the sale. Corporate journalism sucks. KR is a corporation filled with huge, unprofitable papers (Philly, Detroit(formerly), San Jose), being propped up by smaller papers that are getting squeezed like grapes to produce obscene profit margins (25+ percent), so that the shareholders can still get fat dividends so that the stock price stays high and the executive stock options are more lucrative. Chances are the papers'll just get bought up by other bloodsucking corporates, and the cycle will go on.
They just don't get it. A small paper in a saturated market can't grow revenue every year. In the market I'm in, we're bumping up against the effing LITERACY rate...We'd have to TEACH PEOPLE TO READ to sell more papers. But our budgeted profits are still targeted higher every year, so we have to cut and scrimp to make budget so we can make a 31% profit instead of a 29% profit, and squeezed to the bone, quality drops, and when quality drops, people stop subscribing, and then we have to cut yet still more to make 32% for next year.
Then magically, one day the company is in the toilet and they're trying to sell, and all the while the stockholders are complaining because the profits aren't big enough. Oy. If I could find a place to put my money where I'd make 25% a year, I'd do it and retire.