I hung out on a UK site called Monochrome from around 1991 to 1994. I *think* it's still around, though I've not been on for a few years.
What was special was the infamous 'Mono Meets' whereby we all descended on a particular location, ate, drank, laughed, copped off (with the Mono Babes, that is), forged friendships and the like...
You know, I had some great times on those 'meets'. I really miss them, sad but true...
Man, I'm being hit by a monster wave of nostalgia right now...:-)
Q: How was copper wire invented? A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny...
Well, I'm all Scottish and I just wanted to point out that, as a race, we have the proportionately highest incidence of philanthropy of any nation on the planet*. Look at folk like Carnegie. Don't get me started on inventions, for which we are also, as a race, reknowned...;)
John (haggis eating**, kilt wearing***, bagpipe loving**** Scotsman)
* Source: John's International Survey of Racial Philanthropy, August 2005; ** McSween's; *** Only at Weddings or when abroad; **** I lied about loving bagpipes. They are no less than weapons of mass distruction disguised as musical instruments...
Don't be fooled into thinking Apple customer service is necessarily any better than any other company. As I sit here writing this, I am wrangling with Apple's uncaring and ineffective UK Customer Service department, waiting for a refund of £540 (~$1000) which they took from my account in error*. That was in mid June. I am STILL waiting for my refund, even though Apple are knowingly in breach of UK distance selling regulations.
Am I pissed off? You betcha! But, hey, what can I do? I can stamp and spit and shout and cry, but short of suing the f**kers the ball is entirely in their court.
The moral here being: our own experiences of customer service (or lack of it) colour our viewpoint of a company. A good experience, such as yours, makes you feel great. A bad experience (like mine) makes you want to go down to their offices with a large axe and attack them. Or it would do if it weren't for the tablets.
John
* Potted history: bought a G5/dual 2.7; it had a defective video card which they agreed to replace. They sent out a replacement and I sent back the dud. They then kindly charged me for the replacement! £540 for a f**king 6800 Ultra!!! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask! They have admitted the error but seem in absolutely no hurry to get their collective fingers out of their asses and Do The Right Thing...
Don't be fooled into thinking Apple customer service is necessarily any better than any other company. As I sit here writing this, I am wrangling with Apple's uncaring and ineffective UK Customer Service department, waiting for a refund of £540 (~$1000) which they took from my account in error*. That was in mid June. I am STILL waiting for my refund, even though Apple are knowingly in breach of UK distance selling regulations.
Am I pissed off? You betcha! But, hey, what can I do? I can stamp and spit and shout and cry, but short of suing the f**kers the ball is entirely in their court.
The moral here being: our own experiences of customer service (or lack of it) colour our viewpoint of a company. A good experience, such as yours, makes you feel great. A bad experience (like mine) makes you want to go down to their offices with a large axe and attack them. Or it would do if it weren't for the tablets.
John
* Potted history: bought a G5/dual 2.7; it had a defective video card which they agreed to replace. They sent out a replacement and I sent back the dud. They then kindly charged me for the replacement! £540 for a f**king 6800 Ultra!!! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask! They have admitted the error but seem in absolutely no hurry to get their collective fingers out of their asses and Do The Right Thing...
I've got to agree. I currently have about 4 PCs (including one co-located homebrew pizza box server) and a PowerMac G5/2.7 plus a Powerbook G4 12".
Whilst I love the Apple experience, I previously had a Dell Inspiron with a lovely big, bright 1600x1200 screen, and had precisely NO problems with it in three years. I sold it when I decided to switch.
The Dell was a less attractive beast to look at, and much heavier and bulkier, but no less reliable. Sure, it was absolutely top of the line when I bought it in 2001 for £1800 ($3000ish), and so you could hardly consider it 'budget' but it worked fine all of those years, and all I ever needed to replace was the battery (once) due to simply wearing it out over time - which is to be expected.
The Powerbook- yeah, it's sexy and cute and has a cool Apple logo on the back which lights up and if I weren't already married, women would notice me in Starbucks, be impressed with my sensitivity and taste and I'd get laid more (ho hum)...
Anyway, I can quit dreaming now... my point, which is evasive as ever, is that the PB isn't really any better than the Dell in terms of reliability. Sure, it looks better, has better design and feels like more of a designed package - plus, crucially, it runs a proper, sorted OS (and not that Windows crap) but, still, let's be reasonable about it...
I've also bought a couple of pizza box servers from Dell in the past and they've been great. Also, I chose two 20" Dell 2001FP panels instead of 1 Apple 20" non rotating panel for the PowerMac - and have no regrets there.
So, I can't believe I'm writing this next sentence, but here goes...
Let's give Dell a break here, folks...
There. I did it. I need to lie down in a dark room now...
I'm currently in my sixth week of chasing Apple for a refund of £540 ($1000) which they charged me in error.
For the curious, basically I bought a new machine with a defective video card; they eventually sent a replacement and I sent the defective card back (as agreed). They received the card, and charged me for the replacement. Obviously this was an error, and they agree.
I'm at the stage of looking into suing Apple for my money. There's no question of whether they should have charged me - the answer is no - and they have agreed a refund. However, this is now six or seven weeks of chasing and still no money.
What we have here is a case of a Big Company (Apple) stomping all over the Common Man (me) with absolutely no consideration of the fact that this is (for me, as it would be for many) a considerable amount of money to simply have 'vanish'. They put up excuse after excuse for the non-refund, and yet it goes on and on and on. What makes it worse is my lack of foresight in paying for the original machine on a debit (as opposed to credit) card. This means that the first I knew of the payment was when the money was already gone.
Banks being banks, they're taking a very slow and ponderous stance on this. They would act more quickly if it was a wilful fraud - which in all fairness to Apple it isn't - so I am left with this long wait for my money. EVen despite Apple being in breach of UK consumer laws!
After around ten phone calls and a written complaint, I'm hoping this will get resolved soon. Maybe they'll also send me a free iPod or an iBook. That'd be a satisfactory end to this ordeal. Seems a lot to expect, but they've basically created a Whole World Of Financial Stress for me this past couple of months. Or would have done if I wasn't covered by my savings....
Anyway, I'm glad I got this off my chest. Apple, Master Of Customer Relations? No way!
They basically rely on morons walking into their catchy shops and buying something. The reason they're successful is because morons vastly outnumber informed consumers.
Or, as my dearly missed Uncle Frank of Zappa fame once said:
"The most plentiful element in the universe is stupidity"
...and it's rarely more plentiful than in the Dixons customer demographics. Sad, but true.
"If I'm at the bus stop, I can look at the sign and printed there it tells me that the bus will arrive at 9:53 am. I check my watch and at precisely 9:53, the bus pulls up. Every time."
You know, you nearly had me convinced, then I noticed the date...
Where I live, you wait forever and then two turn up at the same time. Or not. Just don't get me started on trains. And as for...
"Why is is to friggin' hard to just pay for music? There's a lot of people working hard to deliver an album, and they deserve to make a honest buck off it."
Very true. However, most of the online music stores' downloads are of fairly low quality - and by that I mean low-bitrate rather than any critique of the music itself.
Now, here in the UK it's around £8 to download an iTunes album. I grew up in the seventies and eighties. I own a shedload of albums, many of which are on vinyl and the remainder these days are on CD. For the greater part, downloaded music sounds noticeably inferior to the sound of the same music off of CD or vinyl. However, compared to buying the CD (or LP, if available) there isn't a great deal of saving to be made in purchasing sans media using the 'net. A bit of careful shopping can pull the same CDs in for around £8 or so and I can rip them myself, legally, using iTunes, whilst having the choice of the bitrate to use. I personally rip most things at either 256Kb/s or 320Kb/s stereo AAC, and find that that's the level which begins to sound 'right' to me. Others might well be happy with 128Kb/s, but not me.
My point with all of this is that at least where conventional CD is concerned, I can both have my cake and eat it - quality and convenience - without having to accept someone else's arbitrarily enforced bitrate. This is why I don't pay for downloads. I'd rather have the original, or higher quality downloads at close to the originals' price, or settle for the lower quality download if it was substantially cheaper.
You can already buy systems like this - check out this link for an example (no connection to me, incidentally). They work on total internal reflection and they're pretty simplistic beasts. I think the 'new' system is simply extending this concept - but it's hardly new.
Dearie me, yesterday's news for nerds indeed - architects have been using these systems for at least a few years now...
I've got a mobile (cell) 'phone and it's personal. If work want to call me out of hours, they supply a paid-for mobile. They haven't done so, so my own free time is my own.
A cell phone, like a home computer and a microwave oven - just part of the investment in yourself that a person makes in order to be a productive member of society.
Nonsense. There are any number of reasons why one might choose not to have any of these items. As it happens, I have all of these items but the only thing driving me to have them is me. If work want to dictate what things I should have, then they are welcome to provide them.
Equally, why should a 'programmer' (sic) have to have their own computer? Surely what marks them as a programmer is their ability to program - whether or not they have the facilities to do this at home.
As an aside, however, I know where you're coming from: I would personally find it unusual to have someone claiming to be a programmer or developer without having at least enough interest in computers to have acquired one, but then they may have particular reasons to not have one.
"That is, if Google continues with their philosophy of "do no evil"."
Hmmmm... I think they abandoned that philosophy a while back. Look at the way they abuse their position of power by diluting 'meritocratic' searches by skewing results based in favour of advertisers. I think they've become the MS of the Search Engine world, without a doubt. Wish it weren't so, but that's how I see it...
I'm on a 2Mb DSL here in Scotland, and I have a 'lite' version which limits me to 2Gb/month (with extra Gb being charges as I use them). Without purposefully trying to use up the bandwidth, I'm finding that for my purposes 2Gb seems about right. If I go over, that's cool, it's less than the price of a beer extra for another Gb - a kind of 'pay as you go'.
Now, my use isn't holding back either - as a sad Apple spod I watched the Jobs webcast (300Mb?) and downloaded loads of audio over the past month, including a lot of remote server admin, ftp uploads/downloads (inc. db backups) and yet I only just scraped 1.8Gb.
So, I think for most people 500Gb is more than enough. Heck, my server pops out 200k+ pages each month (mainly text, it has to be said) and has only once exceeded 5Gb worth of bandwidth in a given month.
I'd definitely be interested in a 'lite' version of the 8Mb service with, say, 5Gb/month. I pay £20 all-in for the 2Mb/2Gb, plus £2 for each extra Gb. I'd pay a bit more for an 8Mb.
Having said *all* of that, I'd quite like to trade a bit of download for a bit of upload - say, a 4Mb/1Mb ADSL rather than 8Mb/256Kb or whatever the upstream rate is.
Slashdot Mirror
I hung out on a UK site called Monochrome from around 1991 to 1994. I *think* it's still around, though I've not been on for a few years.
:-)
What was special was the infamous 'Mono Meets' whereby we all descended on a particular location, ate, drank, laughed, copped off (with the Mono Babes, that is), forged friendships and the like...
You know, I had some great times on those 'meets'. I really miss them, sad but true...
Man, I'm being hit by a monster wave of nostalgia right now...
john aka cthulhu on Mono circa '91-94
But it was delightfully on-topic 'til someone deleted the parent (troll) post.
:-(
Sigh, there goes the Karma...
John
"bill gates you lick bull scrotums" (sic)
Now there's an image I'd rather you hadn't conjured... you've put me off my lunch, you fool!
John
You know, I just read that as:
"Scottish Police Pervert to Microsoft Office"
And suddenly it all made sense...
Aha, the new MS OS development team has been revealed: an infinite number of honeymonkeys at an infinite number of typewriters...
Explains a lot...
Well done. Are there no beginnings to your talents? ;-)
John
"popularity of heroine"
;-)
Yes, the entire Glasgow police force has its hands tied protecting the very popular heroine from the Hooded Claw......
Sorry, couldn't resist
John
Q: How was copper wire invented?
;)
A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny...
Well, I'm all Scottish and I just wanted to point out that, as a race, we have the proportionately highest incidence of philanthropy of any nation on the planet*. Look at folk like Carnegie. Don't get me started on inventions, for which we are also, as a race, reknowned...
John (haggis eating**, kilt wearing***, bagpipe loving**** Scotsman)
* Source: John's International Survey of Racial Philanthropy, August 2005;
** McSween's;
*** Only at Weddings or when abroad;
**** I lied about loving bagpipes. They are no less than weapons of mass distruction disguised as musical instruments...
0.0000000000006 of a person, to be precise.
I make that one of PC Murdoch's hairs.
John (a true Scot)
Sorry about this, folks. Having a pre-coffee brain fart - please ignore the parent post as I thought I'd previewed but I must have submitted...
;-))
Doh!
John (about to go get a 'coop of char' before I end up doing something like "delete from Users" (forgetting the clausal part, of course
Don't be fooled into thinking Apple customer service is necessarily any better than any other company. As I sit here writing this, I am wrangling with Apple's uncaring and ineffective UK Customer Service department, waiting for a refund of £540 (~$1000) which they took from my account in error*. That was in mid June. I am STILL waiting for my refund, even though Apple are knowingly in breach of UK distance selling regulations.
Am I pissed off? You betcha! But, hey, what can I do? I can stamp and spit and shout and cry, but short of suing the f**kers the ball is entirely in their court.
The moral here being: our own experiences of customer service (or lack of it) colour our viewpoint of a company. A good experience, such as yours, makes you feel great. A bad experience (like mine) makes you want to go down to their offices with a large axe and attack them. Or it would do if it weren't for the tablets.
John
* Potted history: bought a G5/dual 2.7; it had a defective video card which they agreed to replace. They sent out a replacement and I sent back the dud. They then kindly charged me for the replacement! £540 for a f**king 6800 Ultra!!! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask! They have admitted the error but seem in absolutely no hurry to get their collective fingers out of their asses and Do The Right Thing...
Don't be fooled into thinking Apple customer service is necessarily any better than any other company. As I sit here writing this, I am wrangling with Apple's uncaring and ineffective UK Customer Service department, waiting for a refund of £540 (~$1000) which they took from my account in error*. That was in mid June. I am STILL waiting for my refund, even though Apple are knowingly in breach of UK distance selling regulations. Am I pissed off? You betcha! But, hey, what can I do? I can stamp and spit and shout and cry, but short of suing the f**kers the ball is entirely in their court. The moral here being: our own experiences of customer service (or lack of it) colour our viewpoint of a company. A good experience, such as yours, makes you feel great. A bad experience (like mine) makes you want to go down to their offices with a large axe and attack them. Or it would do if it weren't for the tablets. John * Potted history: bought a G5/dual 2.7; it had a defective video card which they agreed to replace. They sent out a replacement and I sent back the dud. They then kindly charged me for the replacement! £540 for a f**king 6800 Ultra!!! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask! They have admitted the error but seem in absolutely no hurry to get their collective fingers out of their asses and Do The Right Thing...
I've got to agree. I currently have about 4 PCs (including one co-located homebrew pizza box server) and a PowerMac G5/2.7 plus a Powerbook G4 12".
Whilst I love the Apple experience, I previously had a Dell Inspiron with a lovely big, bright 1600x1200 screen, and had precisely NO problems with it in three years. I sold it when I decided to switch.
The Dell was a less attractive beast to look at, and much heavier and bulkier, but no less reliable. Sure, it was absolutely top of the line when I bought it in 2001 for £1800 ($3000ish), and so you could hardly consider it 'budget' but it worked fine all of those years, and all I ever needed to replace was the battery (once) due to simply wearing it out over time - which is to be expected.
The Powerbook- yeah, it's sexy and cute and has a cool Apple logo on the back which lights up and if I weren't already married, women would notice me in Starbucks, be impressed with my sensitivity and taste and I'd get laid more (ho hum)...
Anyway, I can quit dreaming now... my point, which is evasive as ever, is that the PB isn't really any better than the Dell in terms of reliability. Sure, it looks better, has better design and feels like more of a designed package - plus, crucially, it runs a proper, sorted OS (and not that Windows crap) but, still, let's be reasonable about it...
I've also bought a couple of pizza box servers from Dell in the past and they've been great. Also, I chose two 20" Dell 2001FP panels instead of 1 Apple 20" non rotating panel for the PowerMac - and have no regrets there.
So, I can't believe I'm writing this next sentence, but here goes...
Let's give Dell a break here, folks...
There. I did it. I need to lie down in a dark room now...
John
Hmmmm... not so sure I agree with that.
I'm currently in my sixth week of chasing Apple for a refund of £540 ($1000) which they charged me in error.
For the curious, basically I bought a new machine with a defective video card; they eventually sent a replacement and I sent the defective card back (as agreed). They received the card, and charged me for the replacement. Obviously this was an error, and they agree.
I'm at the stage of looking into suing Apple for my money. There's no question of whether they should have charged me - the answer is no - and they have agreed a refund. However, this is now six or seven weeks of chasing and still no money.
What we have here is a case of a Big Company (Apple) stomping all over the Common Man (me) with absolutely no consideration of the fact that this is (for me, as it would be for many) a considerable amount of money to simply have 'vanish'. They put up excuse after excuse for the non-refund, and yet it goes on and on and on. What makes it worse is my lack of foresight in paying for the original machine on a debit (as opposed to credit) card. This means that the first I knew of the payment was when the money was already gone.
Banks being banks, they're taking a very slow and ponderous stance on this. They would act more quickly if it was a wilful fraud - which in all fairness to Apple it isn't - so I am left with this long wait for my money. EVen despite Apple being in breach of UK consumer laws!
After around ten phone calls and a written complaint, I'm hoping this will get resolved soon. Maybe they'll also send me a free iPod or an iBook. That'd be a satisfactory end to this ordeal. Seems a lot to expect, but they've basically created a Whole World Of Financial Stress for me this past couple of months. Or would have done if I wasn't covered by my savings....
Anyway, I'm glad I got this off my chest. Apple, Master Of Customer Relations? No way!
They basically rely on morons walking into their catchy shops and buying something. The reason they're successful is because morons vastly outnumber informed consumers.
...and it's rarely more plentiful than in the Dixons customer demographics. Sad, but true.
Or, as my dearly missed Uncle Frank of Zappa fame once said:
"The most plentiful element in the universe is stupidity"
John
Best I saw was in a sorting algorithm. It had some nested loops going on, and two of the variables named as such:
...and...
// Count variables.
bela
lugosi
Puzzled, I dug a little deeper and found the curious explanation:
Boom boom, the children of the night, what music they make...
John
"If I'm at the bus stop, I can look at the sign and printed there it tells me that the bus will arrive at 9:53 am. I check my watch and at precisely 9:53, the bus pulls up. Every time."
You know, you nearly had me convinced, then I noticed the date...
Where I live, you wait forever and then two turn up at the same time. Or not. Just don't get me started on trains. And as for...
"Apple payed for a nice chunk of college :)"
Hmmmmm... college didn't work out, huh?
[big grin]
John (who is about to ditch his PC heritage completely and add a full monty PowerMac and a big Apple LCD to his shopping list).
"Why is is to friggin' hard to just pay for music? There's a lot of people working hard to deliver an album, and they deserve to make a honest buck off it."
Very true. However, most of the online music stores' downloads are of fairly low quality - and by that I mean low-bitrate rather than any critique of the music itself.
Now, here in the UK it's around £8 to download an iTunes album. I grew up in the seventies and eighties. I own a shedload of albums, many of which are on vinyl and the remainder these days are on CD. For the greater part, downloaded music sounds noticeably inferior to the sound of the same music off of CD or vinyl. However, compared to buying the CD (or LP, if available) there isn't a great deal of saving to be made in purchasing sans media using the 'net. A bit of careful shopping can pull the same CDs in for around £8 or so and I can rip them myself, legally, using iTunes, whilst having the choice of the bitrate to use. I personally rip most things at either 256Kb/s or 320Kb/s stereo AAC, and find that that's the level which begins to sound 'right' to me. Others might well be happy with 128Kb/s, but not me.
My point with all of this is that at least where conventional CD is concerned, I can both have my cake and eat it - quality and convenience - without having to accept someone else's arbitrarily enforced bitrate. This is why I don't pay for downloads. I'd rather have the original, or higher quality downloads at close to the originals' price, or settle for the lower quality download if it was substantially cheaper.
Just my own personal viewpoint, of course...
You can already buy systems like this - check out this link for an example (no connection to me, incidentally). They work on total internal reflection and they're pretty simplistic beasts. I think the 'new' system is simply extending this concept - but it's hardly new.
Dearie me, yesterday's news for nerds indeed - architects have been using these systems for at least a few years now...
[shuffles off back under his stone...]
I've got a mobile (cell) 'phone and it's personal. If work want to call me out of hours, they supply a paid-for mobile. They haven't done so, so my own free time is my own.
A cell phone, like a home computer and a microwave oven - just part of the investment in yourself that a person makes in order to be a productive member of society.
Nonsense. There are any number of reasons why one might choose not to have any of these items. As it happens, I have all of these items but the only thing driving me to have them is me. If work want to dictate what things I should have, then they are welcome to provide them.
Equally, why should a 'programmer' (sic) have to have their own computer? Surely what marks them as a programmer is their ability to program - whether or not they have the facilities to do this at home.
As an aside, however, I know where you're coming from: I would personally find it unusual to have someone claiming to be a programmer or developer without having at least enough interest in computers to have acquired one, but then they may have particular reasons to not have one.
John
"That is, if Google continues with their philosophy of "do no evil"."
Hmmmm... I think they abandoned that philosophy a while back. Look at the way they abuse their position of power by diluting 'meritocratic' searches by skewing results based in favour of advertisers. I think they've become the MS of the Search Engine world, without a doubt. Wish it weren't so, but that's how I see it...
John
Forgot to say that the cost is £20/month all-in, and there's no activation fee IIRC. I don't work for them, by the way - just a satisfied customer.
John
www.plus.net, who I use, do 2Mb/256Kb 50:1 home ADSL with 2Gb bandwidth - their 'lite' service - and you pay £2 for each Gb over and beyond the 2Gb.
Ideal for me (a light user by the standards of most around here) and a really fair and decent company to deal with.
John
Hmmmmm.... not sure.
I'm on a 2Mb DSL here in Scotland, and I have a 'lite' version which limits me to 2Gb/month (with extra Gb being charges as I use them). Without purposefully trying to use up the bandwidth, I'm finding that for my purposes 2Gb seems about right. If I go over, that's cool, it's less than the price of a beer extra for another Gb - a kind of 'pay as you go'.
Now, my use isn't holding back either - as a sad Apple spod I watched the Jobs webcast (300Mb?) and downloaded loads of audio over the past month, including a lot of remote server admin, ftp uploads/downloads (inc. db backups) and yet I only just scraped 1.8Gb.
So, I think for most people 500Gb is more than enough. Heck, my server pops out 200k+ pages each month (mainly text, it has to be said) and has only once exceeded 5Gb worth of bandwidth in a given month.
I'd definitely be interested in a 'lite' version of the 8Mb service with, say, 5Gb/month. I pay £20 all-in for the 2Mb/2Gb, plus £2 for each extra Gb. I'd pay a bit more for an 8Mb.
Having said *all* of that, I'd quite like to trade a bit of download for a bit of upload - say, a 4Mb/1Mb ADSL rather than 8Mb/256Kb or whatever the upstream rate is.
Cheers,
John