had their direct deposits delayed by a day or more."
Wait till your bank holds onto your payroll checks for 2 weeks.
Once a bank of mine made an addition mistake, i wrote a pile of checks that all bounced. The bank acknowledged their mistake, and restored funds in my account, but refused to help out with all the check-bouncing fees.
I'm having a hard enough time just finding a simple cell phone that doesn't have neon lights, cameras, built-in video games or vaccum cleaner attachments.
It's just one of the oddest cultural phenomenons out there. No wonder America is slipping in science and tech, when it's cool to be a "dummy" but terribly uncool to be smart.
You know, i read a lot of your comments (easily identifiable by your sig), and i like them all. This lil bit is way too true. Add in Television as The Drug Of The Nation and therein lies the foundations of all the problems in the U.S., IMHO.
You don't have to agree with me 100% on this, btw. You do get to gloat in that you've made it into my lucrative and highly coveted "friends" section, though. This will make you irresistable to all those "tee hee hee i dunno" smart chicks;)
hat's the viewpoint (same broad brush) of a lot of people who -- let's say -- aren't the ones rushing to upgrade their heatsink and overclock their RAM,
This is fine and well, but what about those of us that are rushing ot overclock our BIOS, upgrade our cases and install heatsinks on our cdrom drives?
We can't be in any more a niche market than those pesky heatsink-and-RAM proponents!
Isn't this eventually what got Kevin Mitnick? Not the hax0ring, per se, but more identity theft and credit card fraud?
Not the first couple of times, i'm talking the last one that required Markoff and Shimomira to chase him from SoCal to NC and resulted in his multi-year incarceration.
Is that like sex? I read about that in a book once. It was the Commodore Plus/4 Programer's Manual. It goes into great detail about such licentious things as POKE and PEEK.
Maybe they should fork over that money to the *current situation* and give the troops some bullet-proof vests NOW!
I ask that question all the time. Why not bulletproof vests? I hear all the arguments of "too much money" "foot soldiers are disposable" to "they're not really bulletproof" and all sorts of other crap. Sure they don't help in all situations (my buddy's helicopter crashed while avoiding ground fire), but i would think that it'd make more sense on every level. Especially the financial one.
When I was working in phone support for a major ISP one of the biggest problems we had was people wouldn't call in about spyware problems until their machines were SO hosed they couldn't even GET to the sites to download removal tools. So eventually I started bugging my supervisor and various higher ups until we put spybot in a small public ftp that we all memorized the IP adress of. That way when the users called in, what we'd do is have them open a command prompt, and walk them through an ftp on the command line to get the file. Sure it'd take 5 minutes to explain all the crap to type in...
Egads that is so true- they won't call until the machine is borked. I've got one behind me i've been working on for 3 days because something has completely jacked the socket and TCP/IP stacks.. You get about 7 minutes to work with it before all the memory leaks of all the programs (i counted 37 in the Add/Remove Programs) use up the available mem and crash the machine. This one's probably just going to get re-imaged (which is a whole nuther bucket of snakes), as the bossman has negotiated to repair this machine for free. It's so jacked that i can't FTP anything with it either, and it doesn't have a floppy drive, and i don't have a CD burner on my workstation, sooo....
Thanks for the suggestion (about FTP dir) but i've already got that going;)
I actually need to talk to my bossman because i'm using *my* FTP directory for this. I don't have a disk quota (it's a perk) but i've still got almost 200MB of MS service packs, virus removal tools, adware removal products, Mozilla and Firebird (gotta update that) browsers, Thunderbird mail client, etc etc.... all the crap that people *really* should be able to figure out how to find and download on their own but either can't or won't.
We're one of the few ISPs that actually give a shit and *try* to help people but it's getting harder and harder. These days i don't blame some of the other ISPs that won't spend any time on people, much less the ones that are a stone in your shoe every other week.
Another interesting thing i'm discovering, is that there is a small segment of ppl that get all sorts of crap on their computer (and spam), and *don't* call, they just jump ship to a different provider, thinking that will help. I'd say that in the last 50 customers i've set up, probably 35 of them had Blaster, or huge amounts of fuckware on their machine, or both. And *usually*, these are the people who don't say "thank you" after you've spent 3 hours cleaning up their machine for them.
They seem to just expect it to be done for $20.95/month.
Nah, just switch to using Macs. Life is much more...serene. Users are still stupid, but there isn't a huge spyware or virus problem there either.
I assume that you are a Mac User. I think you'd know just as well as anyone what kind of feat that is trying to explain to someone why their next computer should be a Mac.
For the record, the ISP i work at is very Mac-Centric, and I (myself) haven't used or owned a Windows machine since 1997
Problem is, we're talking about computers owned by the unwashed masses (at least in my tech support job). These are people that call up with a chip on their shoulder demanding that their ISP fix what has happened to their computer. Wonderful ads lik "Earthlink with a free Pop-Up blocker" etc. have now in the perception shifted the responsibility of parasite problems onto the ISP.
A lot of these people don't understand the basic directory structure or how to find something that's been downloaded onto their computer, and walking them through a download of a parasite removal tool, updating it, running it, and then guiding them through what to do with what it has found can EASILY turn into a 2-hour procedure. Most of us have more important shit to do than that. Double that amount of time if they don't have two phone lines and/or cannot be connected to the internet. Any coincidental problems are blamed on your removal tool.
Also, the latest trend i'm seeing, is people calling up to complain about all these popup ads and homepage hijackings/search pages thrown in. You start pointing to all the free games they've downloaded, bonzai buddy, Desktop Calendar, Weatherbug, etc, and you are met with "but i LIKE having my weather updates, i LIKE having my Calendar there" etc.
THEY WILL REFUSE TO LET YOU HELP THEM
Doesn't stop them from still calling you up "i'm still having a problem with all these popups..."
Most machines i've cleaned up (like HUNDREDS of parasites), i'll hand it back to them and tell them what not to do again, and they are in the exact same state in a week's time. They simply go and install all the same crap they had before.
I was warned by many that doing Tech Support for a living was a burnout job, and borderline emotional abuse. But the last couple years of parasites have made it pure insanity. Tech Support is at a whole new low...
Maybe it's because i haven't watched TechTV in a bit, but some years ago it seemed really basic and geared towards someone with minimal computer knowledge but wants to be a know-it-all. It seemed like the same marketing fluff that gets handed around by the armchair MCSEs.
Only once did i ever see them mention linux, and never any bsd's...
Though, looking over some of your folk's posts, perhaps i've been missing out.
I for one will say that 7/10 geeks do not get their RDA of breeding. I highly recommend a government program to help furnish quality breeding partners for our Smart Masses.
We can start with a gov't grant, and turn this into a whole industry.:oD
furthermore, many email clients are not equipped to deal with attachments to the tune of 30mb. Most notable examples are Outhouse/Outhouse Express. Their attachment limit is somewhere near 1.7mb (for a 36.6Kbps dialup connection) and around 5.4mb for most broadband (most mailservers capped at 128Kbps).
There is a hardcoded timeout interval in there that causes retrieval and sending of a message of that size to fail if it doesn't see EOF go by in a certain amount of time.
It's not only being marketed at women, it was completely designed by 'Team8' - an all-female project team created within Epson specifically for making a printer 'easy for women to use.'
What makes it "easy for women to use" as opposed to any other printer?
I swear.... with all the "women's rights" stuff, and women bantering on about how they want to be treated as equals, then why do we have "Lifetime, t.v. for women(tm)", or "Special K, A Cereal Designed For Women's Nutritional Needs", you know, "Strong enough for a man, made for a woman"
And finally the one that made me literally fall out of my chair when i heard it:
"Rogaine for women. Because women should not have to suffer from a man's problem."
Don't get me wrong, i mean... i dig chicks, but I guess i just don't understand why women have to simultaneously prove that they're both equal and special. They're like that with a lot of other things too. I cannot rationalize that, but they refuse to see anything wrong with a lot of their logic.
But what do i know? I'm just an insensitive male clod!!
And don't even get me started on the transmission of scabies in shared upholstered swiveling office chairs...
Hah!! did that happen once? As often as I've seen the flu wipe out 2/3rds of an office building (within 10 days, mind you), I occasionally theorize about what would happen in a huge office if like *everyone* got infested with scabies....
(btw, getting scabies mites has nothing to do with cleanliness.. it is all about shared contact with objects)
I mean, how would individuals react? How would the company react? Would it still be *hush hush* embarrassing, or would the company just line everyone up at the giant Permathrin Handout Booth and shut the office down for a week to let the mites on the furniture die from starvation?
Would it be possible to *ever* eradicate them from a building of like 1500 employees?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe i won't have a popular opinion on this, but i'm happy they were caught.
I love all our priveleges and i dig our open source OSes and software, but i don't feel everything should be free.
Let the slashdot hypocracy follow:
I tried to RTFA but it's dead.
Are these ads specifically anti-linux? Just because they are an MS ad doesn't mean they are anti-linux. MS is just another software company.
Now, if they *do* list negative things about linux specifically, then yes i would question that as well.
It's just that sometimes the Linux Zealots fly off the handle too much lately. I'm trying to help things stay in check.
Disclaimer: I use Linux.
When that happens I hope Linux game support (including Windows emulation) is much further along.
:-D
Yeah, but why would you want to play a game that acts like the Windows Operating System game?
had their direct deposits delayed by a day or more."
Wait till your bank holds onto your payroll checks for 2 weeks.
Once a bank of mine made an addition mistake, i wrote a pile of checks that all bounced. The bank acknowledged their mistake, and restored funds in my account, but refused to help out with all the check-bouncing fees.
$25 X 17 Hurray.
I'm having a hard enough time just finding a simple cell phone that doesn't have neon lights, cameras, built-in video games or vaccum cleaner attachments.
Just a damn phone, that's all i want.
It's just one of the oddest cultural phenomenons out there. No wonder America is slipping in science and tech, when it's cool to be a "dummy" but terribly uncool to be smart.
;)
You know, i read a lot of your comments (easily identifiable by your sig), and i like them all. This lil bit is way too true. Add in Television as The Drug Of The Nation and therein lies the foundations of all the problems in the U.S., IMHO.
You don't have to agree with me 100% on this, btw. You do get to gloat in that you've made it into my lucrative and highly coveted "friends" section, though. This will make you irresistable to all those "tee hee hee i dunno" smart chicks
hat's the viewpoint (same broad brush) of a lot of people who -- let's say -- aren't the ones rushing to upgrade their heatsink and overclock their RAM,
This is fine and well, but what about those of us that are rushing ot overclock our BIOS, upgrade our cases and install heatsinks on our cdrom drives?
We can't be in any more a niche market than those pesky heatsink-and-RAM proponents!
Isn't this eventually what got Kevin Mitnick? Not the hax0ring, per se, but more identity theft and credit card fraud?
Not the first couple of times, i'm talking the last one that required Markoff and Shimomira to chase him from SoCal to NC and resulted in his multi-year incarceration.
foo.
....getting a nanodevice in your eye or under your fingernail?
Or nanobots replicating out of control until the earth is buried in grey goo? (yeah, i borrowed that one)..
Seriously though... There is a lot of good, and a lot of bad that can come out of nanodevices. Especially in the wartime or medical fields.
Is that like sex? I read about that in a book once. It was the Commodore Plus/4 Programer's Manual. It goes into great detail about such licentious things as POKE and PEEK.
Great pre-adolescent fun!
...a giant horse water trough full of water and algae, on wheels? We read about Electric Algae yesterday on /., right? DO WE FORGET SO SOON? :oP
Algae Rawks!! :D
Maybe they should fork over that money to the *current situation* and give the troops some bullet-proof vests NOW!
I ask that question all the time. Why not bulletproof vests? I hear all the arguments of "too much money" "foot soldiers are disposable" to "they're not really bulletproof" and all sorts of other crap. Sure they don't help in all situations (my buddy's helicopter crashed while avoiding ground fire), but i would think that it'd make more sense on every level. Especially the financial one.
Oh well. I'm just a stupie-ayse liberal.
"SCO prides itself on..."
Soon will they say they've invented FUD and hold the IP rights to it?
Oh wait, that was IBM that started that...
When I was working in phone support for a major ISP one of the biggest problems we had was people wouldn't call in about spyware problems until their machines were SO hosed they couldn't even GET to the sites to download removal tools. So eventually I started bugging my supervisor and various higher ups until we put spybot in a small public ftp that we all memorized the IP adress of. That way when the users called in, what we'd do is have them open a command prompt, and walk them through an ftp on the command line to get the file. Sure it'd take 5 minutes to explain all the crap to type in...
;)
Egads that is so true- they won't call until the machine is borked. I've got one behind me i've been working on for 3 days because something has completely jacked the socket and TCP/IP stacks.. You get about 7 minutes to work with it before all the memory leaks of all the programs (i counted 37 in the Add/Remove Programs) use up the available mem and crash the machine. This one's probably just going to get re-imaged (which is a whole nuther bucket of snakes), as the bossman has negotiated to repair this machine for free. It's so jacked that i can't FTP anything with it either, and it doesn't have a floppy drive, and i don't have a CD burner on my workstation, sooo....
Thanks for the suggestion (about FTP dir) but i've already got that going
I actually need to talk to my bossman because i'm using *my* FTP directory for this. I don't have a disk quota (it's a perk) but i've still got almost 200MB of MS service packs, virus removal tools, adware removal products, Mozilla and Firebird (gotta update that) browsers, Thunderbird mail client, etc etc.... all the crap that people *really* should be able to figure out how to find and download on their own but either can't or won't.
We're one of the few ISPs that actually give a shit and *try* to help people but it's getting harder and harder. These days i don't blame some of the other ISPs that won't spend any time on people, much less the ones that are a stone in your shoe every other week.
Another interesting thing i'm discovering, is that there is a small segment of ppl that get all sorts of crap on their computer (and spam), and *don't* call, they just jump ship to a different provider, thinking that will help. I'd say that in the last 50 customers i've set up, probably 35 of them had Blaster, or huge amounts of fuckware on their machine, or both. And *usually*, these are the people who don't say "thank you" after you've spent 3 hours cleaning up their machine for them.
They seem to just expect it to be done for $20.95/month.
Yes -I- know this...
but convincing someone else this....
Nah, just switch to using Macs. Life is much more...serene. Users are still stupid, but there isn't a huge spyware or virus problem there either.
I assume that you are a Mac User. I think you'd know just as well as anyone what kind of feat that is trying to explain to someone why their next computer should be a Mac.
For the record, the ISP i work at is very Mac-Centric, and I (myself) haven't used or owned a Windows machine since 1997
Or adaware or hijack this, yadda yadda...
Problem is, we're talking about computers owned by the unwashed masses (at least in my tech support job). These are people that call up with a chip on their shoulder demanding that their ISP fix what has happened to their computer. Wonderful ads lik "Earthlink with a free Pop-Up blocker" etc. have now in the perception shifted the responsibility of parasite problems onto the ISP.
A lot of these people don't understand the basic directory structure or how to find something that's been downloaded onto their computer, and walking them through a download of a parasite removal tool, updating it, running it, and then guiding them through what to do with what it has found can EASILY turn into a 2-hour procedure. Most of us have more important shit to do than that. Double that amount of time if they don't have two phone lines and/or cannot be connected to the internet. Any coincidental problems are blamed on your removal tool.
Also, the latest trend i'm seeing, is people calling up to complain about all these popup ads and homepage hijackings/search pages thrown in. You start pointing to all the free games they've downloaded, bonzai buddy, Desktop Calendar, Weatherbug, etc, and you are met with "but i LIKE having my weather updates, i LIKE having my Calendar there" etc.
THEY WILL REFUSE TO LET YOU HELP THEM
Doesn't stop them from still calling you up "i'm still having a problem with all these popups..."
Most machines i've cleaned up (like HUNDREDS of parasites), i'll hand it back to them and tell them what not to do again, and they are in the exact same state in a week's time. They simply go and install all the same crap they had before.
I was warned by many that doing Tech Support for a living was a burnout job, and borderline emotional abuse. But the last couple years of parasites have made it pure insanity. Tech Support is at a whole new low...
"i need to find a new job" is an understatement.
Maybe it's because i haven't watched TechTV in a bit, but some years ago it seemed really basic and geared towards someone with minimal computer knowledge but wants to be a know-it-all. It seemed like the same marketing fluff that gets handed around by the armchair MCSEs.
Only once did i ever see them mention linux, and never any bsd's...
Though, looking over some of your folk's posts, perhaps i've been missing out.
I don't care what anyone says... Computer nostalgia is coolio, y0...
Thanks for sharing!
I for one will say that 7/10 geeks do not get their RDA of breeding. I highly recommend a government program to help furnish quality breeding partners for our Smart Masses.
:oD
We can start with a gov't grant, and turn this into a whole industry.
30mb attachments? 1GB storage?
NO NO NO NO!!! Email was not designed for this.
furthermore, many email clients are not equipped to deal with attachments to the tune of 30mb. Most notable examples are Outhouse/Outhouse Express. Their attachment limit is somewhere near 1.7mb (for a 36.6Kbps dialup connection) and around 5.4mb for most broadband (most mailservers capped at 128Kbps).
There is a hardcoded timeout interval in there that causes retrieval and sending of a message of that size to fail if it doesn't see EOF go by in a certain amount of time.
It's not only being marketed at women, it was completely designed by 'Team8' - an all-female project team created within Epson specifically for making a printer 'easy for women to use.'
What makes it "easy for women to use" as opposed to any other printer?
I swear.... with all the "women's rights" stuff, and women bantering on about how they want to be treated as equals, then why do we have "Lifetime, t.v. for women(tm)", or "Special K, A Cereal Designed For Women's Nutritional Needs", you know, "Strong enough for a man, made for a woman"
And finally the one that made me literally fall out of my chair when i heard it:
"Rogaine for women. Because women should not have to suffer from a man's problem."
Don't get me wrong, i mean... i dig chicks, but I guess i just don't understand why women have to simultaneously prove that they're both equal and special. They're like that with a lot of other things too. I cannot rationalize that, but they refuse to see anything wrong with a lot of their logic.
But what do i know? I'm just an insensitive male clod!!
ACK!!!
:-( /me hides
I apologise profusely for closing my tags in such a failing way..
At least i didn't give you scabies, or anything!
And don't even get me started on the transmission of scabies in shared upholstered swiveling office chairs...
Hah!! did that happen once? As often as I've seen the flu wipe out 2/3rds of an office building (within 10 days, mind you), I occasionally theorize about what would happen in a huge office if like *everyone* got infested with scabies....
(btw, getting scabies mites has nothing to do with cleanliness.. it is all about shared contact with objects)
I mean, how would individuals react? How would the company react? Would it still be *hush hush* embarrassing, or would the company just line everyone up at the giant Permathrin Handout Booth and shut the office down for a week to let the mites on the furniture die from starvation?
Would it be possible to *ever* eradicate them from a building of like 1500 employees?
Like, what a fscking mess!