I just have to say, this is possibly the saddest thing I've ever seen posted to/. in the 2 years I've been coming here. Is this TRULY the only news we have to post? A semantic debate over one alternate spelling?
(-1, Troll...)
Are you seriously suggesting that I shouldn't be able to get a broken modem replaced just because I don't run Windows? Or my account reactivated if it has been deactivated for some unknown reason?
No, I wasn't, and if you thought I was I would suggest you didn't read what was written too carefully. Hint: in the original post, he specified talking about rebooting after changing network settings. This would suggest (DING DING) it wasn't a simple modem failure. And, for that matter, even RR didn't care what sort of setup you have if the problem was that the Cable Link light was out.
Every time a "retro" gaming article posts, there're hundreds of posts lamenting the passage of the "golden age" of video games, when it wasn't about blowing $20 million photo-rendering a Japanese villiage, and when solitary geniuses could write the next greatest game ever made without corporate backing. Then this comes out, and everyone immediately starts complaining about the system speed and tech specs.
From their FAQ:"The processing power of the XGameStation is approximately 10x that of the Super Nintendo (SNES), and it's graphical capabilities are approximately 50-200% more advanced than the SNES."
Now, assuming that this isn't advertising doublespeak (I'm curious if that means it can handle Mode-7 equivilent equivilent graphics and what the exact specs on the output are), doesn't that sound reasonable? If this is a box for hobbyists and amateur enthusiasts, can you really conceive of much more power being necessary? Once you get past the SNES era, you start REALLY needing lots of people to use the console effectively. And for (according to the site) less than $100 for the entire package?
This sounds like a great idea, and if the geeks embrace it could be one of the hot toys for gamers who want to get away from the Microsoft-Sony-Nintendo trifecta. But ultimately that's going to decide it, how much the people embrace the system. It sounds like the specs are fine for those of us with fond memories of Bionic Commando and Sonic the Hedgehog. The question is whether anyone will pick up on this and make it worth having.
Yep. Because the output of their marketing division can always counter the gripes of a few individual customers.
My roommate works as a data analyst at a major customer research firm. (a reputable one, I'll add, that primarily focuses on coordinating cust-sat surveys) He has all sorts of horror stories of MAJOR corporations (I really can't be specific, he violates his NDA just telling *me* about it) who consider customer service to be the most expendable division of the company. In one case, they ended up dealing with a client who had just fired their entire customer service staff and replaced them in toto with a push-button system. I'm not kidding. The Cust-sat numbers plummeted. The client demanded they tell why this was. (they really didn't see the correlation) The roomie's data team did, in excrutiating detail. The client retaliated by cancelling their contract with them.
Amen brother! I worked over in RoadRunner. (I think you know what I mean.:-) ) I could never, for the life of me, figure out how a customer could have a computer for a year, turn it on every morning, watch it boot up, and still be unable to answer "What version of Windows do you have? 98? ME? XP?"
I did whip out that car analogy a couple times with extremely angry stupids.
"Ma'am, I need to know what kind of computer this is."
"You're the tech here! NOT ME! I don't have to know these things! JUST FIX MY COMPUTER!"
"... Ma'am, if you called the car shop and were unable to tell them what brand car you have, would you expect them to fix it?"
"..."
That usually got a hangup, but it felt so good.
The other thing is that the customers would have these fanciful ideas in their head about How Things Should Work and be utterly unwilling to listen to an explanation to the contrary. It was just me lying to cover for the company and not doing my job. Every time Yahoo or CNN or any other major site went down, we'd get a few calls about it. They fully believed we controlled the entire Internet, and refused to be disuaded otherwise. And don't even talk about the Kazaa users who discovered the TCP/IP limitations when your upload speed is maxed out. I got to the point I quit even bothering trying to explain that one.
Or the ones who had the attention span of a ferret. Nothing like guiding someone who sounds like an adult through processes while using a tone of voice that would be insulting for a 5 year old.
"Oh! There's a button here! It says 'Click Here' Should I push it?"
"No! Don't push anything."
"I pushed it. My computer went dark."
"Sigh. Turn the system back on, and this time, DO NOT PUSH that button."
"Ok. (time passes) My computer's dark again."
"What did you do?"
"I pushed the button."
"The one I specifically told you NOT to push?"
"Uh... yeah."
"(breaks down sobbing)"
This conversation happened more often than most people would be comfortable knowing about. And the customer really did sound like a confused child. Yet was an adult. And could not retain a commnd like "Do NOT PUSH the pretty 'CLICK HERE' button!" for more than a few seconds.
Although I think the funniest, in terms of "what was this guy smoking?" was this one kid who, during a reboot, felt the burning need to ask:
"So, know any good warez sites?"
But no matter what you tell them, they refuse to put down their precious script and accept that maybe, just maybe, I'm not running windows.
You do realize you're the sort of customer that techs complain about, right? (sarcastic, snotty, refuses to take instruction, would rather argue for five minutes than do a one-minute process)
Horse's mouth here - I worked RR for two years. The techs didn't have much choice about following the script, and Linux was absolutely unsupported. This wasn't the tech's fault, had they actually attempted to help you with Linux they would have gotten in disciplinary trouble if the call was monitored.
And beyond that, looking at it financially, why would RR train its techs on Linux? You know how many Linux users I got who couldn't dual-boot into Windows? About one every THREE MONTHS. Now, consider the cost of training a workforce that numbered in the thousands between the various centers on how to use an entirely new and different Operating System. How to use both Gnome and KDE. Terminal commands. Drivers issues. Etc. It would be a week of training just to get a tech to the point he had some idea what was going on, and huge amounts of money spent doing so. For a customer base that numbers well less than 1% of RR's total tech calls?
If you were running a BeOS system, would you expect them to support that too? Hmmm?
Like it or not, by going with a Linux-only system, you are marking yourself as a statistical outlyer. If a company chooses to support Linux to be nice, that's great. But to EXPECT major corporations to support it, and to rudely deride the techs for not being taught it, would indicate you have not thought through the consequences of being a computer rebel and pioneer. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either accept Linux support is going to be marginal for a long time and find ways to deal with it, or crawl back to Windows so you can get back in the manstream. But making sarcastic jokes about the techs, who were simply doing their jobs as contracted, because of the perceived failures of their company in your mind, is just sad. Pick a better target; you're kicking the dead horse.
That's a really interesting, and not bad, idea. It'd be neat to see it attempted, anyway. I'd be afraid, however, that the corporations would start asking outrageous prices for the IP rights. Most seem more inclined to sit on something and let it die than let someone else make money off it.
And who knows, maybe they're right, at least from their POV. Who woulda thought Nintendo would come up with a novel way to repackage and resell 1st generation NES games for a modern platform?
Sad to say, yes. At least RR did, but I see no reason to think that it's different at other ISPs. (once AT&T forced me to pay a slightly-overdue bill (and by slightly I mean a couple days) before they would admit their entire cable system was down) One time the e-mail for the entire city of Houston went down for three days. Somehow they managed to lose the entire password database. And it took them three days to fess up to this and tell us what to do for the customers. In the mean time, we just strung them along, said there was a problem, and didn't do jack. And don't even SPEAK of high-level problems like incorrect DNS entries or routing errors - if there was someone in the organization who could fix those AND who the customer could talk to, I never heard about it.
I worked Road Runner tech support for two years. (cue the groans) Unless you got actually cursed out by a tech, chances are whatever they did, it was on orders. Our support boundaries were defined by what we COULD do, not what we couldn't. And we couldn't confirm an outage without it going through about three levels of high mucky-mucks, which could sometimes take more than an hour. So even if we, the techs, knew an entire city was out, we'd still be forced to drag you, the customer, through half an hour of fruitless troubleshooting. (and by forced, I do mean "or else we're risking termination") This was intentional, BTW. If the local engineers could fix the problem before RR officially announced there WAS a problem, no outage went on the record and their service performance looked better.
So if a tech is being unreasonably beaurocratic or telling you he's not allowed to do something, he's almost certainly not making it up. Quit arguing with him, ask for his supervisor (POLITELY!), and hope you can complain your way up the chain of command.
That's possibly it, but given how much of a discount our government can get buying things in bulk, I have a hard time believing the cost of paper and ink would be THAT much of a deterrent.
But for the love of god and all that is holy, WHY are they fighting so hard against paper records? It makes no sense. (unless you are conspiracy-minded) Seriously. I just can't come up with any decent reason that Diebold et al would be so strongly against hooking a printer up to the system to produce a physical record. Much less why our elected officials would buy into such an idea.
Unfortunately, that would pretty clearly be illegal, unless you were prepared to pay for every single bottle of UberPrick pills you put in an order for. If you got caught at it, you'd be in violation of at least two different sets of laws.
Just FYI, the quote is: "Evil! Pure and simple from the 8th dimension!"
Re:What really bothers me about this? The hypocrac
on
Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 1
The fanatical religious leader, obviously. History, recent and ancient, bears that one out without much need for thought.
It's not like it takes more than a few minutes of searching to come up with instructions on making a homemade bomb, regardless of how many people the Feds lock up for posting links.
What really bothers me about this? The hypocracy.
on
Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 1
Could someone explain to me why linking to bomb-making instructions is a prison-worthy offense, while standing up on a pulpit and praying for God (or one of his little helpers) to smite specific members of the Supreme Court is perfectly acceptible? One could make a real Constitutional argument for the former by combining the 1st and 2nd amendments. The latter is a lot harder to justify, except of course, "Well, HE'S popular and too many people like him."
Here's the Snopes entry on it. Essentially, while it's technically true that this is the closest pass in 60,000 years or so, to most observers there won't be any appreciable difference between this pass and the semi-close passes it makes every 15 years or so. The interest lies mainly in how this makes it more easy to launch probes. (and note the similarity in wording between the Snopes version and the post. Hmmm...)
"You'll be of no use, Freelance Police! With the flip of a lever my ungrateful lunch date will be reduced to a half-cup of diorientated atomic mat-tahhh!"
"Should I confront, subdue, and pummel the suspected perpetrator, Sam?"
"Sick 'em up, little buddy!"
I think you were being funny, but I agree with you whole-heartedly. Wanna make a song sound REALLY frantic and driving? Have some bashing the hell out of a cowbell. It's great. I DO wish more bands would pick up on this.
Just out of curiosity, do you get tired of playing the victim? "Oh, it's not Linux's fault! The OEMs won't work with them!" This may well be true, but objectively, IN THE REAL WORLD, it makes no difference. If I have an nVidia card, just like most of the world, I install Linux, and it refuses to use my nVidia, I don't *care* what the background reason is. I'm going back to something that gives me 3D graphics.
Or do you seriously expect users with the same hardware woes that I had to just say, "Oh well, I didn't like playing Quake that much anyway."
In other words, *you* are part of the problem. Shout down people who have legitmate issues, and keep playing the "not our fault" card, and Linux won't get the acceptance it needs. Certainly not that 50%. And you sure won't have your pretty fantasy world where everyone buys boxes with Linux preinstalled and working perfectly. Have fun.
If you're not used to Windows' particular way of doing things, you wouldn't find Linux difficult.
Ah, yes, of course. The fact that I've been working on Intel machines since 1984, knew DOS inside and out, kept from using Windows as long as possible, and was finally forced to switch in '95, all prevented me from understanding Linux. It all makes sense now.
Come on, now. I'm not talking lack of intelligence or technical ability. If I wanted to spend a month digging through all the specs and documentation on kernal programming, I'm sure I could fix all my Linux problems easily. But I'd been hearing that Linux had finally gotten to the point of "plug and play," and I found it had not. You seem to be suggesting a hypothetical scenario where the boxes are customized by some Guru, set on my desk at work, and able to do everything required for a certain task in the workplace. That's not being "ready for the desktop."
I wanted something I could install, work through a few startup quirks and "leaving curve" problems, and then be able to make Just Work. There were elements I loved. The Kernal stability. SuSE's Yast. The superior multitasking. But come on, I had to do a *kernel hack* and modify the Source just to get it to recognize video card drivers from the most popular manufacturer out there. That took me a week to work out, and NO user without my level of prior experience would have managed it. They would have taken one look, seen they had no 3D graphics, and 2D that looks like a slideshow, and run screaming back to Windows.
And that's what I'm talking about. Maybe in another year or two.
I've been watching Linux for ages, and about once a year or two, I'll get a copy of a distro and give it a shot. This year I actually tried two, which are supposed to be the more user-friendly ones: RedHat and SuSE. While for the first time I managed to quickly set up a Linux desktop environment which did everything I needed, I still found it a bear to work with. RedHat didn't like my soundcard, the forums weren't much help. It took me two weeks to get SuSE to accept nVidia's drivers (because ONE character in ONE source code was off), and then after a week, it decided to stop using the drivers again. Never got Quicktime and most other video formats working. Opera for Linux isn't as good, and I've never cared for Moz.
After a couple months of fighting with it, I finally gave up and went back to Windows. It's CLOSE to being desktop-ready, but barely a day went by that I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working. And this was, as I said, after trying to different distros.
Maybe next year...
(braces for flames telling him he's stupid and evil)
And.... Slashdotted.
on
United Nuclear
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Slashdot Mirror
I can't get the file to download. It keeps erroring out or resetting. It looks like they can't hold the connection. Wow. Just wow.
I just have to say, this is possibly the saddest thing I've ever seen posted to /. in the 2 years I've been coming here. Is this TRULY the only news we have to post? A semantic debate over one alternate spelling?
(-1, Troll...)
No, I wasn't, and if you thought I was I would suggest you didn't read what was written too carefully. Hint: in the original post, he specified talking about rebooting after changing network settings. This would suggest (DING DING) it wasn't a simple modem failure. And, for that matter, even RR didn't care what sort of setup you have if the problem was that the Cable Link light was out.
Troll better next time, AC.
From their FAQ:"The processing power of the XGameStation is approximately 10x that of the Super Nintendo (SNES), and it's graphical capabilities are approximately 50-200% more advanced than the SNES."
Now, assuming that this isn't advertising doublespeak (I'm curious if that means it can handle Mode-7 equivilent equivilent graphics and what the exact specs on the output are), doesn't that sound reasonable? If this is a box for hobbyists and amateur enthusiasts, can you really conceive of much more power being necessary? Once you get past the SNES era, you start REALLY needing lots of people to use the console effectively. And for (according to the site) less than $100 for the entire package?
This sounds like a great idea, and if the geeks embrace it could be one of the hot toys for gamers who want to get away from the Microsoft-Sony-Nintendo trifecta. But ultimately that's going to decide it, how much the people embrace the system. It sounds like the specs are fine for those of us with fond memories of Bionic Commando and Sonic the Hedgehog. The question is whether anyone will pick up on this and make it worth having.
Except that 95% of the customers would push "3". No one will admit they're stupid, and most (sadly) would honestly believe they're in the top 5%.
My roommate works as a data analyst at a major customer research firm. (a reputable one, I'll add, that primarily focuses on coordinating cust-sat surveys) He has all sorts of horror stories of MAJOR corporations (I really can't be specific, he violates his NDA just telling *me* about it) who consider customer service to be the most expendable division of the company. In one case, they ended up dealing with a client who had just fired their entire customer service staff and replaced them in toto with a push-button system. I'm not kidding. The Cust-sat numbers plummeted. The client demanded they tell why this was. (they really didn't see the correlation) The roomie's data team did, in excrutiating detail. The client retaliated by cancelling their contract with them.
Forget Darwin, it's survival of the mediocre.
I did whip out that car analogy a couple times with extremely angry stupids. "Ma'am, I need to know what kind of computer this is."
"You're the tech here! NOT ME! I don't have to know these things! JUST FIX MY COMPUTER!"
"... Ma'am, if you called the car shop and were unable to tell them what brand car you have, would you expect them to fix it?"
"..."
That usually got a hangup, but it felt so good.
The other thing is that the customers would have these fanciful ideas in their head about How Things Should Work and be utterly unwilling to listen to an explanation to the contrary. It was just me lying to cover for the company and not doing my job. Every time Yahoo or CNN or any other major site went down, we'd get a few calls about it. They fully believed we controlled the entire Internet, and refused to be disuaded otherwise. And don't even talk about the Kazaa users who discovered the TCP/IP limitations when your upload speed is maxed out. I got to the point I quit even bothering trying to explain that one.
Or the ones who had the attention span of a ferret. Nothing like guiding someone who sounds like an adult through processes while using a tone of voice that would be insulting for a 5 year old.
"Oh! There's a button here! It says 'Click Here' Should I push it?"
"No! Don't push anything."
"I pushed it. My computer went dark."
"Sigh. Turn the system back on, and this time, DO NOT PUSH that button."
"Ok. (time passes) My computer's dark again."
"What did you do?"
"I pushed the button."
"The one I specifically told you NOT to push?"
"Uh... yeah."
"(breaks down sobbing)"
This conversation happened more often than most people would be comfortable knowing about. And the customer really did sound like a confused child. Yet was an adult. And could not retain a commnd like "Do NOT PUSH the pretty 'CLICK HERE' button!" for more than a few seconds.
Although I think the funniest, in terms of "what was this guy smoking?" was this one kid who, during a reboot, felt the burning need to ask: "So, know any good warez sites?"
I weep for the species.
You do realize you're the sort of customer that techs complain about, right? (sarcastic, snotty, refuses to take instruction, would rather argue for five minutes than do a one-minute process) Horse's mouth here - I worked RR for two years. The techs didn't have much choice about following the script, and Linux was absolutely unsupported. This wasn't the tech's fault, had they actually attempted to help you with Linux they would have gotten in disciplinary trouble if the call was monitored.
And beyond that, looking at it financially, why would RR train its techs on Linux? You know how many Linux users I got who couldn't dual-boot into Windows? About one every THREE MONTHS. Now, consider the cost of training a workforce that numbered in the thousands between the various centers on how to use an entirely new and different Operating System. How to use both Gnome and KDE. Terminal commands. Drivers issues. Etc. It would be a week of training just to get a tech to the point he had some idea what was going on, and huge amounts of money spent doing so. For a customer base that numbers well less than 1% of RR's total tech calls?
If you were running a BeOS system, would you expect them to support that too? Hmmm?
Like it or not, by going with a Linux-only system, you are marking yourself as a statistical outlyer. If a company chooses to support Linux to be nice, that's great. But to EXPECT major corporations to support it, and to rudely deride the techs for not being taught it, would indicate you have not thought through the consequences of being a computer rebel and pioneer. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either accept Linux support is going to be marginal for a long time and find ways to deal with it, or crawl back to Windows so you can get back in the manstream. But making sarcastic jokes about the techs, who were simply doing their jobs as contracted, because of the perceived failures of their company in your mind, is just sad. Pick a better target; you're kicking the dead horse.
And who knows, maybe they're right, at least from their POV. Who woulda thought Nintendo would come up with a novel way to repackage and resell 1st generation NES games for a modern platform?
Sad to say, yes. At least RR did, but I see no reason to think that it's different at other ISPs. (once AT&T forced me to pay a slightly-overdue bill (and by slightly I mean a couple days) before they would admit their entire cable system was down) One time the e-mail for the entire city of Houston went down for three days. Somehow they managed to lose the entire password database. And it took them three days to fess up to this and tell us what to do for the customers. In the mean time, we just strung them along, said there was a problem, and didn't do jack. And don't even SPEAK of high-level problems like incorrect DNS entries or routing errors - if there was someone in the organization who could fix those AND who the customer could talk to, I never heard about it.
I worked Road Runner tech support for two years. (cue the groans) Unless you got actually cursed out by a tech, chances are whatever they did, it was on orders. Our support boundaries were defined by what we COULD do, not what we couldn't. And we couldn't confirm an outage without it going through about three levels of high mucky-mucks, which could sometimes take more than an hour. So even if we, the techs, knew an entire city was out, we'd still be forced to drag you, the customer, through half an hour of fruitless troubleshooting. (and by forced, I do mean "or else we're risking termination") This was intentional, BTW. If the local engineers could fix the problem before RR officially announced there WAS a problem, no outage went on the record and their service performance looked better. So if a tech is being unreasonably beaurocratic or telling you he's not allowed to do something, he's almost certainly not making it up. Quit arguing with him, ask for his supervisor (POLITELY!), and hope you can complain your way up the chain of command.
That's possibly it, but given how much of a discount our government can get buying things in bulk, I have a hard time believing the cost of paper and ink would be THAT much of a deterrent.
But for the love of god and all that is holy, WHY are they fighting so hard against paper records? It makes no sense. (unless you are conspiracy-minded) Seriously. I just can't come up with any decent reason that Diebold et al would be so strongly against hooking a printer up to the system to produce a physical record. Much less why our elected officials would buy into such an idea.
Unfortunately, that would pretty clearly be illegal, unless you were prepared to pay for every single bottle of UberPrick pills you put in an order for. If you got caught at it, you'd be in violation of at least two different sets of laws.
Great ref! If I had Mod points I'd so give you some. The real question is whose mother's soul ends up in there.
Just FYI, the quote is: "Evil! Pure and simple from the 8th dimension!"
The fanatical religious leader, obviously. History, recent and ancient, bears that one out without much need for thought. It's not like it takes more than a few minutes of searching to come up with instructions on making a homemade bomb, regardless of how many people the Feds lock up for posting links.
Could someone explain to me why linking to bomb-making instructions is a prison-worthy offense, while standing up on a pulpit and praying for God (or one of his little helpers) to smite specific members of the Supreme Court is perfectly acceptible? One could make a real Constitutional argument for the former by combining the 1st and 2nd amendments. The latter is a lot harder to justify, except of course, "Well, HE'S popular and too many people like him."
Here's the Snopes entry on it. Essentially, while it's technically true that this is the closest pass in 60,000 years or so, to most observers there won't be any appreciable difference between this pass and the semi-close passes it makes every 15 years or so. The interest lies mainly in how this makes it more easy to launch probes. (and note the similarity in wording between the Snopes version and the post. Hmmm...)
"You'll be of no use, Freelance Police! With the flip of a lever my ungrateful lunch date will be reduced to a half-cup of diorientated atomic mat-tahhh!" "Should I confront, subdue, and pummel the suspected perpetrator, Sam?" "Sick 'em up, little buddy!"
I think you were being funny, but I agree with you whole-heartedly. Wanna make a song sound REALLY frantic and driving? Have some bashing the hell out of a cowbell. It's great. I DO wish more bands would pick up on this.
Or do you seriously expect users with the same hardware woes that I had to just say, "Oh well, I didn't like playing Quake that much anyway."
In other words, *you* are part of the problem. Shout down people who have legitmate issues, and keep playing the "not our fault" card, and Linux won't get the acceptance it needs. Certainly not that 50%. And you sure won't have your pretty fantasy world where everyone buys boxes with Linux preinstalled and working perfectly. Have fun.
If you're not used to Windows' particular way of doing things, you wouldn't find Linux difficult. Ah, yes, of course. The fact that I've been working on Intel machines since 1984, knew DOS inside and out, kept from using Windows as long as possible, and was finally forced to switch in '95, all prevented me from understanding Linux. It all makes sense now. Come on, now. I'm not talking lack of intelligence or technical ability. If I wanted to spend a month digging through all the specs and documentation on kernal programming, I'm sure I could fix all my Linux problems easily. But I'd been hearing that Linux had finally gotten to the point of "plug and play," and I found it had not. You seem to be suggesting a hypothetical scenario where the boxes are customized by some Guru, set on my desk at work, and able to do everything required for a certain task in the workplace. That's not being "ready for the desktop." I wanted something I could install, work through a few startup quirks and "leaving curve" problems, and then be able to make Just Work. There were elements I loved. The Kernal stability. SuSE's Yast. The superior multitasking. But come on, I had to do a *kernel hack* and modify the Source just to get it to recognize video card drivers from the most popular manufacturer out there. That took me a week to work out, and NO user without my level of prior experience would have managed it. They would have taken one look, seen they had no 3D graphics, and 2D that looks like a slideshow, and run screaming back to Windows. And that's what I'm talking about. Maybe in another year or two.
I've been watching Linux for ages, and about once a year or two, I'll get a copy of a distro and give it a shot. This year I actually tried two, which are supposed to be the more user-friendly ones: RedHat and SuSE. While for the first time I managed to quickly set up a Linux desktop environment which did everything I needed, I still found it a bear to work with. RedHat didn't like my soundcard, the forums weren't much help. It took me two weeks to get SuSE to accept nVidia's drivers (because ONE character in ONE source code was off), and then after a week, it decided to stop using the drivers again. Never got Quicktime and most other video formats working. Opera for Linux isn't as good, and I've never cared for Moz. After a couple months of fighting with it, I finally gave up and went back to Windows. It's CLOSE to being desktop-ready, but barely a day went by that I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working. And this was, as I said, after trying to different distros. Maybe next year... (braces for flames telling him he's stupid and evil)
Sigh.