As a side note, I remember my first working experience with Dell. Back in 98, I worked for a phone support company called "Stream" We were going to do a small contract that handled overflow of customer service calls.
The Dell trainer made a big deal about Dell going for "quality instead of quantity" stating they will never sell a sub $1000 system. But then after working as a CSR then moving to their tech support, it really looked like the opposite with how little they were paying for support.
Still, I got a copy of Windows 98 for free. Still have it too.
Humm. I think it also affected Quadro line of cards too. I had to replace allot of those, but generally only hospitals had the Precision line that had that video card model. Heck, went in with a big box of 40 cards and told to just "replace them all" at one location.
I thought it was weird there was just a cheap aluminum heat sink on it rather than have a fan.
Eh, if it was HP everyone would bash them. Dell just so royally screwed up recently that they deserve our ire:)
To be really honest, I would subscribe to consumer reports for some data and make a judgment call based off experience. There is just so much anecdotal one off stories (My Dell works great! Mine works like crap!) that its imposable to rate an entire product line of one. I swapped out thousands of GX270/280 boards. However, except for that flood, there just wasn't that kind of volume on other systems. Laptop's or otherwise.
My perspective, after working with Dell and talking with other enterprise vendors, is that Dell is no worst/better than its competitors when it comes to support but all vary greatly in the quality of the products year to year.
Just an example, IBM laptops T43 are a solid rock that Nokia still uses allot of. But the updated model the year after, T60, just had a slue of driver issues.
Judge by what your needs are, what some professional "trusted" reviewers say and look to see if the company will still be around for your support contract. (Poor MPC Users:P)
If the US wants to view corporation as a living entity, they should have corporal punishment.
Baring that, I think fines should be levied agents a corporation in percentages instead of flat numbers. Fining BP 75 million is nothing. Fining them 20% of gross profit each year till the spill clears up? It will be done in a week.
Just one of many Dell related storied I can tell.... The one with them moving Gold support to India with no warning was another fun one..
Oh GOD don't get me started on that one. They moved part's dispatch the same day. It went from talking with a previous field technician to talking with someone with less experience in computers than a bag of rocks.
I think they moved it back to Austin, but it was a good year or so before that.
PS - I am not faulting the phone support in India. They just have the same 60% turnover rate we do here so you never have experienced staff that you expect to pay for on Gold support:P
But if you order Platinum support, it will always be FANTASTICO! (The extra O only comes with Platinum.)
Its Dells fault, sure, but they got this wall between the Sales rep's and the tech support for a reason. I don't think there is one vendor out there that has ever had competent sales staff.
A Sales rep would send us out to "check customers system because its broken" with no parts on a same day call. We would show up and find either the issue has been fixed or we need one simple part that we have to wait 2 hours to get there. Hell, I was even told by one customer that they go though the sales guy they have ALL the time so they don't have to "wait in the que" for tech support. Even though they paid out the nose for Gold 4 hour "We ship everything under the sun(tm)" phone support.
I think it changed around 2005 as we stopped getting allot of those sales dispatches. I just wish Dell had sales people who worked in the field a little bit first.
On my knees under a desk, up under a cabinet, upside down behind a shelf, etc. I used to think its more work moving it from the location its in to a table. Amazing what 5 years teaches you:P
I hate it when customers ask me to "reimburse you for the lost productivity" Its what lawsuits are for:P
Everyone makes mistakes, systems go down, things catch fire. Its why allot of companies that care about this don't do a single vendor. Why, even though they bought a million dollar EMC array, they have it backed up nightly with another million dollar tape robot.
Even at home, I make sure every computer I care about has a raid 1 array. There is nothing Dell, HP or even EMC can do when your drives fail. If you want to be reimbursed, you better be able to prove, in a court of law, that it was due to the incompetence of the Vendor.
It was more a problem with their supply chain. They never had a way to tag the boards as "good cap" or "old cap". Once they were sent to be refurbished, you had to go by the visual inspection (K instead of X at the top of the caps themselves) once you got it out of the box at the customers site.
Its no excuse however. SOMEONE must of been seeing the rash of boards being sent in just in 2003 and should of created a rational response to it.
Depends. They went EOL years ago. The GX280, desktop and mini case version were effected as well. Still see allot of them at retail outlets and stores.
I always liked the design though, the way you could open the "hood" and replace the board quickly. Ironic that the 270 series had an easy to remove motherboard.
The issue was that when allot of the boards started failing at once, instead of calling the tech support who could DO something about it, companies would call their service rep.
Its all well and good when that rep is high up on the food chain and can do dispatch orders, but if he is clueless or just does the company line, you get these lawsuits. You have to tell the truth in a situation like this and the sales people didn't with AIT.
I am sure there are a few other lawsuits like this that were settled and your right, supply problems happen all the time. This story more of a failure of customer service and communication.
I cannot tell you how many times I have replaced the boards off an OptiPlex 270 and then the 280. It was just freaking insane. Dell's response was just horrid as well.
I mean, the sales people could blab all they want, but one look at the board and it was evident from a layperson that something was wrong. The best we could do as contractors is to just state its an "industry wide problem" (true) and that Dell will fix any system affected (partially true). I might like Dell, but I am not getting lynched by an irate manager because their sales team can't tell a straight lie.
I mean hell, there was not a DAY that went by that I didn't have 2 of those boards to be replaced. Not a week went by when the board sent that was "refurbished" didn't have the same issue. Toward the end, we started having motherboard swapping contests and I could do a 270 in under 5 min, if it was in front of me.
I do like what one client did. He apparently worked on the old XT systems and once he found out about the problem, he just replaced the affected caps himself
Gotta keep killing those fan games. You can't really ruin a good video game franchise with fans jumping in there and making better stuff.
No joke. The "partnership" with Square killed Supreme Commander 2. I never saw a game drop fro 59.99 to 7.50 (Discount off Stream) in under 3 months.
It just seems that these company's can't balance good game play WITH a wider audience. A RTS game is incredibly difficult to get the mainstream to play, but dumbing down the system for faster game play won't make it sell more.
Hell, I don't think I have seen a main stream developer make an adventure game in the last 5 years.
Going to dismiss you but then I thought of Everquest. I got this old Beta 2 CD I got years ago when I played it and I just realized how much the game has changed over the years. Does anyone remember the old crappy interface it had? The horrible stat/level system?
Hell, how do you even preserve something like WoW? Even assuming you can get the server code for some kind of emulation you still run into the problem the poster stated about emulation.
Makes me worry its all futile. With all the massive architecture changes Evey 5 years or so, how do you get the money or the people dedicated to keep emulators up to date. I am very much looking at all the DOS years to be lost:P
Hell, in 50 years when I tell my grand children about this little game I played, World of Warcraft, I doubt they will ever know what I as talking about.
Its more about policy, but your right, they keep on coming. Few surveys I read though is that they still like their health-care and free education. Just can't go down the street and shout "The king is a FINK" without getting shot. Oh and having no job prospects is another one:P
To be honest, I am torn. When you have good health-care insurance from your company, everything is dandy. But now that I am laid off, once its gone, Cuba is looking good:P
So your fine with killing him? Ban even treatment for him or kids that have this disease? How about people with cancer that can be managed, but just costs a bit more than a McDonald's burger a day?
We aren't talking about the daily cost of living here. Just do a damn Google search. Here is a nice link for you on the costs when they did a study in Italy
Our study provides evidence of the strikingly high amount of financial and medical resources absorbed for the care of hemophiliac patients with inhibitors.5,21 The average cost to care for a patient with inhibitor is estimated to be €18 000 per month. That is likely one of the highest burdens for a disease. This cost becomes less impressive when one calculates that, according to these figures and to the prevalence of hemophiliac patients with inhibitors in Italy, the cost of care met by each Italian citizen for all these patients is approximately €0.7 per year
There is NO way any person can afford that kind of money unless they were born with a gold crusted spoon. However, Italy can afford ALL of their Hemophiliac for LESS than those damn "Less than a dollar a day" food scam commercials. Hell, and this is just the MOST expensive treatment options they were studying. You can't just arbitrarily tell someone to suck it up and die and MAYBE we can use that money to save many more people.
Didn't you even READ the article? The guy was saying that money can't solve this cost issue. Only science and innovation can. Making the specialists easier get a hold of. Finding out about drugs and new treatments in a more effective way. Hemophilia is mainly expensive because of the drugs and plasma involved, but just 20 years ago you had a life expediency of 10 years costing MUCH MUCH more in hospital costs. The more research and treatment we do, the more likely we will find a cure/treatment for many of these conditions.
Besides, its by far politically easier and cheaper to find medical cures for people than feeding the world. Unless someone is willing to do some serious political change in some of those starving country's, my dollar is going to health-care.
What I thought was more intresting was he wasn't caught telling him on AIM. You would thing all text/chat would be logged for key words going out of Iraq unless the Army didn't want that generaly to be known.
If he DID spill the beans to me on AIM, the first thing I would do is contact the FBI in a heart beat. Something like this over an unencrypted channel is stupid:P
Thought its odd that he didn't "open the encrypted email" and sent them straight to the FBI. Whats the freaking point of having your key out there if you don't bother to read it?
Honestly I don't believe that's true. Numbers on those 2D web games have always been low. People never took flash games seriously and the numbers reflected that. Sure you could always FIND someone to play any game you wanted on the yahoo games site, but you didn't see mmorg numbers, sometimes when you see it now.
I am not saying the market wasn't there before the wee. Like you said, Uno on XBox live is big. I just think if the Wii AND the software that Nintendo put out, I don't think the industry would of became stronger as it is now. There is just something "friendly" about the games Nintendo puts out that makes people like to play them.
Though, to be honest, It also makes it hard for Nintendo to get out of the "we are a family game company" brand. Though, when you think about it, almost all their popular first party games are like that. They always say G rated movies pulls in the most overall money.
But I agree that while the Wii ushered it in faster than it might of been, I think Halo did more for the industry than Nintendo. It made first person shooters popular again. It proved that you CAN play one on a console. It was even simple enough that it made it cliche that a girlfriend would start playing just to spend more time with her boyfriend:P I mean, I was following the game before the hype and while the "buggy" car physics were cool, I didn't see what the big deal was, but eveyone was going nuts. Halo brought hardcore fps' to the masses and THATS far more impressive than bringing casual gaming to an already ready demographic.
I just wish they didn't think of us as "hardcore" and just as people who "like to play a hard game"
I just burned though Super Mario Galaxy 2. It is, more or less, a rebuild of the first game, but the "star" levels don't really fell that hard. Hell, I burn though the entire thing, racking up all the stars up to bosser usually in one pass per, atleast till the ones after the last bozer fight. Those were fun, but that was 15 hours in and even those didn't last long.
At-least you didn't have to replay the entire game like 1 to get the "extra" stars. You just had to burn though the levels quick to find the green ones.
In either case, I just want a "hard game option" Sure I can do a "perfect run" of all the levels on my own time, but I want some kind of in game accomplishment for it. Humm. I wonder if Nintendo will have some sort of achievement system for the 3DS or the new Wii.
Reminds me of Supreme Commander 2. Its was 10.99 on stream this last weekend but the game has only been out a few months. All the revews I have read says it was good 80/100 and that its a good upgrade from the old version.
Its crap. The price drop even confirms this more than any IGN review can.
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note, I remember my first working experience with Dell. Back in 98, I worked for a phone support company called "Stream" We were going to do a small contract that handled overflow of customer service calls.
The Dell trainer made a big deal about Dell going for "quality instead of quantity" stating they will never sell a sub $1000 system. But then after working as a CSR then moving to their tech support, it really looked like the opposite with how little they were paying for support.
Still, I got a copy of Windows 98 for free. Still have it too.
Sigh. I wish more reps were more upfront about it.
"I want all new computers!" was a common line that I just got tired of answering.
"Farmers are to busy for war."
Forgot who quoted it, but I think it applies :P
Humm. I think it also affected Quadro line of cards too. I had to replace allot of those, but generally only hospitals had the Precision line that had that video card model. Heck, went in with a big box of 40 cards and told to just "replace them all" at one location.
I thought it was weird there was just a cheap aluminum heat sink on it rather than have a fan.
Eh, if it was HP everyone would bash them. Dell just so royally screwed up recently that they deserve our ire:)
To be really honest, I would subscribe to consumer reports for some data and make a judgment call based off experience. There is just so much anecdotal one off stories (My Dell works great! Mine works like crap!) that its imposable to rate an entire product line of one. I swapped out thousands of GX270/280 boards. However, except for that flood, there just wasn't that kind of volume on other systems. Laptop's or otherwise.
My perspective, after working with Dell and talking with other enterprise vendors, is that Dell is no worst/better than its competitors when it comes to support but all vary greatly in the quality of the products year to year.
Just an example, IBM laptops T43 are a solid rock that Nokia still uses allot of. But the updated model the year after, T60, just had a slue of driver issues.
Judge by what your needs are, what some professional "trusted" reviewers say and look to see if the company will still be around for your support contract. (Poor MPC Users:P)
I fully agree.
If the US wants to view corporation as a living entity, they should have corporal punishment.
Baring that, I think fines should be levied agents a corporation in percentages instead of flat numbers. Fining BP 75 million is nothing. Fining them 20% of gross profit each year till the spill clears up? It will be done in a week.
Just one of many Dell related storied I can tell.... The one with them moving Gold support to India with no warning was another fun one..
Oh GOD don't get me started on that one. They moved part's dispatch the same day. It went from talking with a previous field technician to talking with someone with less experience in computers than a bag of rocks.
I think they moved it back to Austin, but it was a good year or so before that.
PS - I am not faulting the phone support in India. They just have the same 60% turnover rate we do here so you never have experienced staff that you expect to pay for on Gold support:P
But if you order Platinum support, it will always be FANTASTICO! (The extra O only comes with Platinum.)
Its Dells fault, sure, but they got this wall between the Sales rep's and the tech support for a reason. I don't think there is one vendor out there that has ever had competent sales staff.
A Sales rep would send us out to "check customers system because its broken" with no parts on a same day call. We would show up and find either the issue has been fixed or we need one simple part that we have to wait 2 hours to get there. Hell, I was even told by one customer that they go though the sales guy they have ALL the time so they don't have to "wait in the que" for tech support. Even though they paid out the nose for Gold 4 hour "We ship everything under the sun(tm)" phone support.
I think it changed around 2005 as we stopped getting allot of those sales dispatches. I just wish Dell had sales people who worked in the field a little bit first.
I know the Dell side, but I am curious, did it effect allot of the HP desktops as well?
Anecdotal evidence only goes so far.
This is slashdot. If my system worked fine for 5 years, the vendor is golden and cannot be touched by mere mortal hands!
As opposed to where exactly?
On my knees under a desk, up under a cabinet, upside down behind a shelf, etc. I used to think its more work moving it from the location its in to a table. Amazing what 5 years teaches you:P
I hate it when customers ask me to "reimburse you for the lost productivity" Its what lawsuits are for:P
Everyone makes mistakes, systems go down, things catch fire. Its why allot of companies that care about this don't do a single vendor. Why, even though they bought a million dollar EMC array, they have it backed up nightly with another million dollar tape robot.
Even at home, I make sure every computer I care about has a raid 1 array. There is nothing Dell, HP or even EMC can do when your drives fail. If you want to be reimbursed, you better be able to prove, in a court of law, that it was due to the incompetence of the Vendor.
Witch AIT did:)
It was more a problem with their supply chain. They never had a way to tag the boards as "good cap" or "old cap". Once they were sent to be refurbished, you had to go by the visual inspection (K instead of X at the top of the caps themselves) once you got it out of the box at the customers site.
Its no excuse however. SOMEONE must of been seeing the rash of boards being sent in just in 2003 and should of created a rational response to it.
Depends. They went EOL years ago. The GX280, desktop and mini case version were effected as well. Still see allot of them at retail outlets and stores.
I always liked the design though, the way you could open the "hood" and replace the board quickly. Ironic that the 270 series had an easy to remove motherboard.
Don't Forget the Techs!:
I worked on those systems and Dell didn't know what they were doing!
I worked on those systems and Dell replaced the parts quickly!
My sales rep fucked me in the ass with the same day warranty upgrade. Twenty same day service calls in the last month, I just about fucked him back.
The issue was that when allot of the boards started failing at once, instead of calling the tech support who could DO something about it, companies would call their service rep.
Its all well and good when that rep is high up on the food chain and can do dispatch orders, but if he is clueless or just does the company line, you get these lawsuits. You have to tell the truth in a situation like this and the sales people didn't with AIT.
I am sure there are a few other lawsuits like this that were settled and your right, supply problems happen all the time. This story more of a failure of customer service and communication.
I cannot tell you how many times I have replaced the boards off an OptiPlex 270 and then the 280. It was just freaking insane. Dell's response was just horrid as well.
I mean, the sales people could blab all they want, but one look at the board and it was evident from a layperson that something was wrong. The best we could do as contractors is to just state its an "industry wide problem" (true) and that Dell will fix any system affected (partially true). I might like Dell, but I am not getting lynched by an irate manager because their sales team can't tell a straight lie.
I mean hell, there was not a DAY that went by that I didn't have 2 of those boards to be replaced. Not a week went by when the board sent that was "refurbished" didn't have the same issue. Toward the end, we started having motherboard swapping contests and I could do a 270 in under 5 min, if it was in front of me.
I do like what one client did. He apparently worked on the old XT systems and once he found out about the problem, he just replaced the affected caps himself
Gotta keep killing those fan games. You can't really ruin a good video game franchise with fans jumping in there and making better stuff.
No joke. The "partnership" with Square killed Supreme Commander 2. I never saw a game drop fro 59.99 to 7.50 (Discount off Stream) in under 3 months.
It just seems that these company's can't balance good game play WITH a wider audience. A RTS game is incredibly difficult to get the mainstream to play, but dumbing down the system for faster game play won't make it sell more.
Hell, I don't think I have seen a main stream developer make an adventure game in the last 5 years.
Going to dismiss you but then I thought of Everquest. I got this old Beta 2 CD I got years ago when I played it and I just realized how much the game has changed over the years. Does anyone remember the old crappy interface it had? The horrible stat/level system?
Hell, how do you even preserve something like WoW? Even assuming you can get the server code for some kind of emulation you still run into the problem the poster stated about emulation.
Makes me worry its all futile. With all the massive architecture changes Evey 5 years or so, how do you get the money or the people dedicated to keep emulators up to date. I am very much looking at all the DOS years to be lost:P
Hell, in 50 years when I tell my grand children about this little game I played, World of Warcraft, I doubt they will ever know what I as talking about.
It looks like it too
Its more about policy, but your right, they keep on coming. Few surveys I read though is that they still like their health-care and free education. Just can't go down the street and shout "The king is a FINK" without getting shot. Oh and having no job prospects is another one:P
To be honest, I am torn. When you have good health-care insurance from your company, everything is dandy. But now that I am laid off, once its gone, Cuba is looking good:P
So your fine with killing him? Ban even treatment for him or kids that have this disease? How about people with cancer that can be managed, but just costs a bit more than a McDonald's burger a day?
We aren't talking about the daily cost of living here. Just do a damn Google search. Here is a nice link for you on the costs when they did a study in Italy
Our study provides evidence of the strikingly high amount of financial and medical resources absorbed for the care of hemophiliac patients with inhibitors.5,21 The average cost to care for a patient with inhibitor is estimated to be €18 000 per month. That is likely one of the highest burdens for a disease. This cost becomes less impressive when one calculates that, according to these figures and to the prevalence of hemophiliac patients with inhibitors in Italy, the cost of care met by each Italian citizen for all these patients is approximately €0.7 per year
There is NO way any person can afford that kind of money unless they were born with a gold crusted spoon. However, Italy can afford ALL of their Hemophiliac for LESS than those damn "Less than a dollar a day" food scam commercials. Hell, and this is just the MOST expensive treatment options they were studying. You can't just arbitrarily tell someone to suck it up and die and MAYBE we can use that money to save many more people.
Didn't you even READ the article? The guy was saying that money can't solve this cost issue. Only science and innovation can. Making the specialists easier get a hold of. Finding out about drugs and new treatments in a more effective way. Hemophilia is mainly expensive because of the drugs and plasma involved, but just 20 years ago you had a life expediency of 10 years costing MUCH MUCH more in hospital costs. The more research and treatment we do, the more likely we will find a cure/treatment for many of these conditions.
Besides, its by far politically easier and cheaper to find medical cures for people than feeding the world. Unless someone is willing to do some serious political change in some of those starving country's, my dollar is going to health-care.
What I thought was more intresting was he wasn't caught telling him on AIM. You would thing all text/chat would be logged for key words going out of Iraq unless the Army didn't want that generaly to be known.
If he DID spill the beans to me on AIM, the first thing I would do is contact the FBI in a heart beat. Something like this over an unencrypted channel is stupid:P
Thought its odd that he didn't "open the encrypted email" and sent them straight to the FBI. Whats the freaking point of having your key out there if you don't bother to read it?
Honestly I don't believe that's true. Numbers on those 2D web games have always been low. People never took flash games seriously and the numbers reflected that. Sure you could always FIND someone to play any game you wanted on the yahoo games site, but you didn't see mmorg numbers, sometimes when you see it now.
I am not saying the market wasn't there before the wee. Like you said, Uno on XBox live is big. I just think if the Wii AND the software that Nintendo put out, I don't think the industry would of became stronger as it is now. There is just something "friendly" about the games Nintendo puts out that makes people like to play them.
Though, to be honest, It also makes it hard for Nintendo to get out of the "we are a family game company" brand. Though, when you think about it, almost all their popular first party games are like that. They always say G rated movies pulls in the most overall money.
But I agree that while the Wii ushered it in faster than it might of been, I think Halo did more for the industry than Nintendo. It made first person shooters popular again. It proved that you CAN play one on a console. It was even simple enough that it made it cliche that a girlfriend would start playing just to spend more time with her boyfriend:P I mean, I was following the game before the hype and while the "buggy" car physics were cool, I didn't see what the big deal was, but eveyone was going nuts. Halo brought hardcore fps' to the masses and THATS far more impressive than bringing casual gaming to an already ready demographic.
I just wish they didn't think of us as "hardcore" and just as people who "like to play a hard game"
I just burned though Super Mario Galaxy 2. It is, more or less, a rebuild of the first game, but the "star" levels don't really fell that hard. Hell, I burn though the entire thing, racking up all the stars up to bosser usually in one pass per, atleast till the ones after the last bozer fight. Those were fun, but that was 15 hours in and even those didn't last long.
At-least you didn't have to replay the entire game like 1 to get the "extra" stars. You just had to burn though the levels quick to find the green ones.
In either case, I just want a "hard game option" Sure I can do a "perfect run" of all the levels on my own time, but I want some kind of in game accomplishment for it. Humm. I wonder if Nintendo will have some sort of achievement system for the 3DS or the new Wii.
Reminds me of Supreme Commander 2. Its was 10.99 on stream this last weekend but the game has only been out a few months. All the revews I have read says it was good 80/100 and that its a good upgrade from the old version.
Its crap. The price drop even confirms this more than any IGN review can.
You just can't trust any reviews anymore:P