It is a great job. I put myself through college being a security guard, this is leaps and bounds better than sitting around playing half life 2 for 12 hours straight...well ok, that was nice, but it did get old after awhile and I wanted to put my brains to work abit more.
Ask for the repeat queue call number, there's one where you can enter in an extention and get past all the phone menu's except for the first one. The guy in charge of our site mentioned that Dell used to have about 15,000 phone #'s and we've whittled it down to something like 8000. So yea, for the most part of the day when I'm looking at the queue though, at it's peak it gets to about 33 people waiting with around 3 minutes hold time, I've seen it get upto around 89 people waiting with about a 10 minute hold time which I still wouldn't consider bad since I've been on hold alot longer with operations much smaller than Dell.
Actually I work at Dell doing technical support. In fact I'm typing this from work right now while I'm between calls. What happened that made your experience so bad? I've only been here about 2 months but they've been hammering customer satisfaction into us like it was a cure for cancer. I guess they got t3h shitz from other outsource sites where basically working conditions sucked and nobody cared. However i work directly for Dell itself and I'm tellin you, we'll stay on the phone for like 3 hours if that's what it takes. All of my co-workers here are pretty hardcore geeks and techies since the area our site is located in had an economic downturn in the tech industry so the majority of us have programming diploma's and electronic engineering degree's.
I'm off topic so I figure this'll burn abit of karma. However I've noticed that even as webmail becomes more pervasive, it gets harder and harder for me to attatch certain files. Sometimes I need to send exe files around, and even if I put it into a zip file, or change the exe to a.dat file...it still buggers it and refuses to take the upload. I'm figuring that even if I find out some other way to start hiding my exe files, having a virus scanner go through it is going to make it just that much harder to send my work through.
I know one huge reason I'll never bother with console gaming. I CAN'T PLAY WITHOUT THE CD'S. Almost every single PC game comes with a no-cd crack so I don't have to haul around half life 2/doom3/every other blood cd with my laptop (i must have about 25 games on there). I can just pop it open between classes and start shooting down HL2 striders with no probz. A console is not portable (it requires a tv), it's only got one good use, you can't do software mods to your games, you can't put on no cd cracks, you can't upgrade your hardware most of the time (unless you do some rather obnoxious stuff to fiddle with it). The whole notion of a memory card is also super annoying. Consoles have only one good thing, they play games smoother than pcs, and they have a wider selection. However if you've seen the latest and greatest laptops, you'll realize that they outperform consoles hands down, are portable, do the mp3/dvd playing on it's own (and of course way more), don't need a tv, and in a few years time they'll cost about the same as a console does anyway (2nd hand).
Try closer to about 10 movies, your average movie squeezed down to 700 MB with codecs is still perfect quality. All that extra crap that comes on DVD's is usually just boring fluff anyhow, or worse, advertisements.
You may want to do what I did after getting crazy mad at that whole STEAM bs. There is a cracked copy of half life 2 you can download which is just a directory, no install required, and there is no steam in it, it tries to connect to the net, but you can just block it with a firewall to no ill effect. Just hunt around for emp_proper_hl2 and you should fix that retarded steam problem like I did. Makes the game a hell of alot more fun to know I'm not being spied on by some jackass. However it does loose it's multiplayer functionality.
And yes, I did buy the game, and never played it until I found this steamless copy because steam annoyed the living piss outa me.
The no cd patches which work on windows suddenly don't work on linux. I'm not going to install linux if I can't test drive it and play some games. That means I'm using knoppix, I even downloaded that game oriented knoppix version. The problem is IT DOESN'T PLAY ANY BLOODY GAMES. They all require the cd to be in there, like most people I don't have 2 cd drives. So what the hell is the point if I keep having to shove in cd after cd after cd when windows lets me do away with this garbage after a patch from gamecopyworld.com ?
The games which don't require a cd to be inside are of such low quality, or so outdated that they're laughable and craptacular. I shop at EB, and they don't sell games just for linux, that means that I'm not using linux unless it's running windows games, and able to run them with functional no cd patchs. After that I'll see about doing other things with the operating system like office documents and other work related stuff.
The path called HALF.LIFE.2.V1.0.ENG.EMPORIO.BACKUPCD.ZIP
is available from megagames.com
The patch will allow the game to proceed and run without contacting steam every bloody time. Granted this doesn't really address the issue of having to connect to steam in the first place since you need some updates etc. However at least now you don't have to keep connecting when your playing a single player game.
I think cloning like anything else is all in how we use it. If it became cheap and easy, would we see armies etc like this? Yes we probably would. However once we get past a fear of manipulating flesh, it would probably usher in an age where the physical body is nothing more than a malleable shell for consciousness. I wouldn't think of it as something to be feared and hated and stomped out. More just as a transition period. We've had them before, they're rough, but in the end this would be something amazing for everyone. I doubt that with increased genetic sciences we'd ever have a problem of a stagnant gene base. Do you really think that the generation which would weild the technology would create nothing but conformist bodies? I think the genetic base of humanity would spiral into new and undreampt of depths due to our creativity. Just think of what your average art freak or goth kid would do to their physical form if given even half a chance. That's not to say that there wouldn't be an army of barbie so to speak, but just that not everyone would choose to take an off the shelf model.
I live up here in good old Canada. When more and more people sighned up to broadband it really enticed alot of new comers to the market as they saw they could make a profit and since that created more competition the prices of broadband here are rather reasonable with no caps. Any DSL service that starts capping bleeds customers almost immediatedly since even medium sized cities tend to have at least 20 broadband providers to choose from.
Thanks, I always did rather wonder about that, of course getting rid of the exe file itself means that almost all of the programs that annoyingly try to call it up without my consent come up empty handed. So for me it was still worth it to tear out the exe files.
Most of us here have already modified our systems knowing that having even the IE exe file or outlook express exe file could cause problems and have removed it (even in spite of the hidden little annoying backup). Remember to get rid of IE be sure to look in the folder/windows/system32/dllcache for those backup exe files that it uses to restore when you try and rip IE or outlook out yourself.
Actually while I do agree with you for the most part, an operating system should simply work and not require a bunch of tweaking, this is simply not the case with MS. Due to thier dominance, they are putting DRM in thier windows media player formats, they are trying to take data at the end of every video viewing session back to a MS server. They break standards with thier browsers and outlook is simply a viral infectious peice of trash. While thier products should work right out of the box, they're using the position they have acheived to lock consumers in and turn the computing experience into a nightmare. So perhaps some remedy before this activity follows it's logical course down the road (i'm sure if you think about the emerging trends I've described you can guess what sort of operating system people would be using) is in order, otherwise things could be very bleak indeed.
Dude, i've got over 500 movies, not to mention the over 100 gigs of tv shows, then the gig after gigs of games, programs, demo's, regular downloads, linux ISO files, game ISO files, and music. 400 gigs is big, but seriously, it's very fillable if your like me and you just set your connection to download shit 24/7 for months on end. After all, that's what always on broadband no caps connection is for, large continuous data transfer.
I'm your average 23 year old male college student. However TV is horrible lately, I just download the only 2 shows I like (angel and enterprise) and never go near the television itself. Maybe if the networks stopped with the reality shows and started putting back some well written high production value shows, i'd be more inclined to come back. As it is however, I'm not going to sit around and watch crap for days on end when I only really want to see 2 hours of programs per week.
Actually your forgetting that it only reads specific neurons, not your whole mind, and no, when you think about doing something, you don't automatically act, the thought of thinking about moving your arm is different from actually moving it. This is why the test animals can control the objects without moving. Your computer isn't going to go haywire because you think about a pretty girl, unless you suddenly very specifically concentrate on say, giving the thumbs up sign while thinking about a pretty girl, which isn't too likely. This system could get even better by going symbolic in nature which means that you would have to think an extremely specific thought like the letter A in order to have an A appear on a screen for word processing. It really could be a very good system and wouldn't neccessarily go nuts due to stray thoughts.
I'm pretty sure they already cleared up the issue with telomeres. The problem resulted from using cells at the end of their division cycle (50 divisions) so that it wasn't active when they tore the nucleus out. It's been found though that the nucleus can be taken out at the beginning of this cycle resulting in an interesting phenomenon where the cloned cell then gets extra telomeres and is potentially superior to the original.
Every organism on earth does it at a cellular level, so what knob would think that we couldn't just replicate the machinery and do it ourselves? Obviously it's physically possible or none of us would be alive right now
Canada, having one of the most active e-governments in the world, is also being actively woo-ed by linux. At the chateau laurier in ottawa I attended the linux conference by IBM and while they did seem to ramble abit, they were being taken very seriously by the people in attendance. I guess the high amount of online government computers for vital functions probably plays a big part in most peoples minds about what sort of security and stability they want when it comes to their servers.
While this is a rather pathetic instance of a corporation buying thier way towards being number one (I hate this sort of propoganda for products). They did have a point about a few things, the NVIDIA card needed updates before it was anywhere near compedative, if NVIDIA had gotten thier technology correct the first time they wouldn't have had such an increadibly lousy showing. That still begs the question of wether or not the ATI card had it's latest drivers installed, in which case this was a complete and total waste of time on ATI's part as most people buying video cards are extremely savvy (unless your rich you don't put down 600 dollars for a video card in ignorance) about the latest developments and would find the real story behind such a blatent bullshitting about performance very quickly. I hate it when companies underestimate our intelligence, they can't get away with it with this crowd of people, and none of us are likely to forget thier little benchmarking crap fast (both ATI and NVIDIA)
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It is a great job. I put myself through college being a security guard, this is leaps and bounds better than sitting around playing half life 2 for 12 hours straight...well ok, that was nice, but it did get old after awhile and I wanted to put my brains to work abit more.
Nah, canadian site actually, we just opened up
Ask for the repeat queue call number, there's one where you can enter in an extention and get past all the phone menu's except for the first one. The guy in charge of our site mentioned that Dell used to have about 15,000 phone #'s and we've whittled it down to something like 8000. So yea, for the most part of the day when I'm looking at the queue though, at it's peak it gets to about 33 people waiting with around 3 minutes hold time, I've seen it get upto around 89 people waiting with about a 10 minute hold time which I still wouldn't consider bad since I've been on hold alot longer with operations much smaller than Dell.
I'm not that secret, and I'm not at work anymore, I'm loafing at home with a coke in hand, mmmmm acidy.
Actually I work at Dell doing technical support. In fact I'm typing this from work right now while I'm between calls. What happened that made your experience so bad? I've only been here about 2 months but they've been hammering customer satisfaction into us like it was a cure for cancer. I guess they got t3h shitz from other outsource sites where basically working conditions sucked and nobody cared. However i work directly for Dell itself and I'm tellin you, we'll stay on the phone for like 3 hours if that's what it takes. All of my co-workers here are pretty hardcore geeks and techies since the area our site is located in had an economic downturn in the tech industry so the majority of us have programming diploma's and electronic engineering degree's.
I'm off topic so I figure this'll burn abit of karma. However I've noticed that even as webmail becomes more pervasive, it gets harder and harder for me to attatch certain files. Sometimes I need to send exe files around, and even if I put it into a zip file, or change the exe to a .dat file...it still buggers it and refuses to take the upload. I'm figuring that even if I find out some other way to start hiding my exe files, having a virus scanner go through it is going to make it just that much harder to send my work through.
I know one huge reason I'll never bother with console gaming. I CAN'T PLAY WITHOUT THE CD'S. Almost every single PC game comes with a no-cd crack so I don't have to haul around half life 2/doom3/every other blood cd with my laptop (i must have about 25 games on there). I can just pop it open between classes and start shooting down HL2 striders with no probz. A console is not portable (it requires a tv), it's only got one good use, you can't do software mods to your games, you can't put on no cd cracks, you can't upgrade your hardware most of the time (unless you do some rather obnoxious stuff to fiddle with it). The whole notion of a memory card is also super annoying. Consoles have only one good thing, they play games smoother than pcs, and they have a wider selection. However if you've seen the latest and greatest laptops, you'll realize that they outperform consoles hands down, are portable, do the mp3/dvd playing on it's own (and of course way more), don't need a tv, and in a few years time they'll cost about the same as a console does anyway (2nd hand).
well...what the hell is so special about this thing then, I've already got a USB plugin memory stick that's teeny tiny and holds 1GB
Try closer to about 10 movies, your average movie squeezed down to 700 MB with codecs is still perfect quality. All that extra crap that comes on DVD's is usually just boring fluff anyhow, or worse, advertisements.
You may want to do what I did after getting crazy mad at that whole STEAM bs. There is a cracked copy of half life 2 you can download which is just a directory, no install required, and there is no steam in it, it tries to connect to the net, but you can just block it with a firewall to no ill effect. Just hunt around for emp_proper_hl2 and you should fix that retarded steam problem like I did. Makes the game a hell of alot more fun to know I'm not being spied on by some jackass. However it does loose it's multiplayer functionality. And yes, I did buy the game, and never played it until I found this steamless copy because steam annoyed the living piss outa me.
The no cd patches which work on windows suddenly don't work on linux. I'm not going to install linux if I can't test drive it and play some games. That means I'm using knoppix, I even downloaded that game oriented knoppix version. The problem is IT DOESN'T PLAY ANY BLOODY GAMES. They all require the cd to be in there, like most people I don't have 2 cd drives. So what the hell is the point if I keep having to shove in cd after cd after cd when windows lets me do away with this garbage after a patch from gamecopyworld.com ? The games which don't require a cd to be inside are of such low quality, or so outdated that they're laughable and craptacular. I shop at EB, and they don't sell games just for linux, that means that I'm not using linux unless it's running windows games, and able to run them with functional no cd patchs. After that I'll see about doing other things with the operating system like office documents and other work related stuff.
The path called HALF.LIFE.2.V1.0.ENG.EMPORIO.BACKUPCD.ZIP is available from megagames.com The patch will allow the game to proceed and run without contacting steam every bloody time. Granted this doesn't really address the issue of having to connect to steam in the first place since you need some updates etc. However at least now you don't have to keep connecting when your playing a single player game.
I think cloning like anything else is all in how we use it. If it became cheap and easy, would we see armies etc like this? Yes we probably would. However once we get past a fear of manipulating flesh, it would probably usher in an age where the physical body is nothing more than a malleable shell for consciousness. I wouldn't think of it as something to be feared and hated and stomped out. More just as a transition period. We've had them before, they're rough, but in the end this would be something amazing for everyone. I doubt that with increased genetic sciences we'd ever have a problem of a stagnant gene base. Do you really think that the generation which would weild the technology would create nothing but conformist bodies? I think the genetic base of humanity would spiral into new and undreampt of depths due to our creativity. Just think of what your average art freak or goth kid would do to their physical form if given even half a chance. That's not to say that there wouldn't be an army of barbie so to speak, but just that not everyone would choose to take an off the shelf model.
Er, your sure there's no error in the exchange rate or anything? It's hard to believe that we get paid a full 40% less.
I live up here in good old Canada. When more and more people sighned up to broadband it really enticed alot of new comers to the market as they saw they could make a profit and since that created more competition the prices of broadband here are rather reasonable with no caps. Any DSL service that starts capping bleeds customers almost immediatedly since even medium sized cities tend to have at least 20 broadband providers to choose from.
Thanks, I always did rather wonder about that, of course getting rid of the exe file itself means that almost all of the programs that annoyingly try to call it up without my consent come up empty handed. So for me it was still worth it to tear out the exe files.
Most of us here have already modified our systems knowing that having even the IE exe file or outlook express exe file could cause problems and have removed it (even in spite of the hidden little annoying backup). Remember to get rid of IE be sure to look in the folder /windows/system32/dllcache for those backup exe files that it uses to restore when you try and rip IE or outlook out yourself.
Actually while I do agree with you for the most part, an operating system should simply work and not require a bunch of tweaking, this is simply not the case with MS. Due to thier dominance, they are putting DRM in thier windows media player formats, they are trying to take data at the end of every video viewing session back to a MS server. They break standards with thier browsers and outlook is simply a viral infectious peice of trash. While thier products should work right out of the box, they're using the position they have acheived to lock consumers in and turn the computing experience into a nightmare. So perhaps some remedy before this activity follows it's logical course down the road (i'm sure if you think about the emerging trends I've described you can guess what sort of operating system people would be using) is in order, otherwise things could be very bleak indeed.
Dude, i've got over 500 movies, not to mention the over 100 gigs of tv shows, then the gig after gigs of games, programs, demo's, regular downloads, linux ISO files, game ISO files, and music. 400 gigs is big, but seriously, it's very fillable if your like me and you just set your connection to download shit 24/7 for months on end. After all, that's what always on broadband no caps connection is for, large continuous data transfer.
I'm your average 23 year old male college student. However TV is horrible lately, I just download the only 2 shows I like (angel and enterprise) and never go near the television itself. Maybe if the networks stopped with the reality shows and started putting back some well written high production value shows, i'd be more inclined to come back. As it is however, I'm not going to sit around and watch crap for days on end when I only really want to see 2 hours of programs per week.
Actually your forgetting that it only reads specific neurons, not your whole mind, and no, when you think about doing something, you don't automatically act, the thought of thinking about moving your arm is different from actually moving it. This is why the test animals can control the objects without moving. Your computer isn't going to go haywire because you think about a pretty girl, unless you suddenly very specifically concentrate on say, giving the thumbs up sign while thinking about a pretty girl, which isn't too likely. This system could get even better by going symbolic in nature which means that you would have to think an extremely specific thought like the letter A in order to have an A appear on a screen for word processing. It really could be a very good system and wouldn't neccessarily go nuts due to stray thoughts.
I'm pretty sure they already cleared up the issue with telomeres. The problem resulted from using cells at the end of their division cycle (50 divisions) so that it wasn't active when they tore the nucleus out. It's been found though that the nucleus can be taken out at the beginning of this cycle resulting in an interesting phenomenon where the cloned cell then gets extra telomeres and is potentially superior to the original.
Every organism on earth does it at a cellular level, so what knob would think that we couldn't just replicate the machinery and do it ourselves? Obviously it's physically possible or none of us would be alive right now
Canada, having one of the most active e-governments in the world, is also being actively woo-ed by linux. At the chateau laurier in ottawa I attended the linux conference by IBM and while they did seem to ramble abit, they were being taken very seriously by the people in attendance. I guess the high amount of online government computers for vital functions probably plays a big part in most peoples minds about what sort of security and stability they want when it comes to their servers.
While this is a rather pathetic instance of a corporation buying thier way towards being number one (I hate this sort of propoganda for products). They did have a point about a few things, the NVIDIA card needed updates before it was anywhere near compedative, if NVIDIA had gotten thier technology correct the first time they wouldn't have had such an increadibly lousy showing. That still begs the question of wether or not the ATI card had it's latest drivers installed, in which case this was a complete and total waste of time on ATI's part as most people buying video cards are extremely savvy (unless your rich you don't put down 600 dollars for a video card in ignorance) about the latest developments and would find the real story behind such a blatent bullshitting about performance very quickly. I hate it when companies underestimate our intelligence, they can't get away with it with this crowd of people, and none of us are likely to forget thier little benchmarking crap fast (both ATI and NVIDIA)