How do these things compare with some of the prepaid legal plans out there? Actually that looks just like the Legal Club of America version... pretty much the same.
You know, being as Slashdot is supposedly about nerds and techie stuff, you'd think they'd go a little further than Firefox and Safari for new features... Opera, note that it's gecko indeed, etc...
Mmm, As I recall from my Criminal Justice 101 class (so not a nuanced education by any means, and feel free to correct me), traffic fines (like speeding) are called Violations, which are under Misdemenaors. They are criminal, but usually they are treated almost like a slap on the wrist - maximum 14 day jail sentance etc - fines limited to less than ~ $3,000 or some such.
The worst part is #4 is likely to stay under their radar anyway, as you say, they know how to make it difficult to track them down. #5 may or may not be able to hide, but likely some of them will be as savvy or overlap with #4. So they will skew towards finding #1-3, hence bad publicity.
Even more so, if they do find a #4, it's likely they will cough up $4k settlement as cheaper than the retail cost of the media they have anyway, so you STILL won't hear about it on the news.
Computers have not nearly been as revolutionary as people claim they are.
Computers have been plenty revolutionary. Information Technology - literally the technology and methods to deal with information more efficiently allows both research, reference, and reporting in ways nearly impossible before computers existed. The PC revolution has brought those powers to almost anyone in developed countries. The idea and implementation of linking all these machines together into the internet allows communication and data transfer at an unimaginable level compared to previous technologies.
Computers may not help education, but they do help a critical part of education, libraries. CD based journal archives are far more space effective than bound editions. They allow school libraries to have journal archives that would be impossible traditionally. The Online versions allow even larger archives as well as instantenaous updates - something basically impossible without the internet.
The rest of the internet provides reference archives beyond any traditional mechanism - you can search a large percentage of the worlds news outlets, not just the huge papers and magizines as before. You can search for keywords in seconds vs hours of manually scanning microfilm.
Finally, computers allow simulation of driving, flying and more that provides far safer initial traning and experiance compared to traditional book learning and then doing it for real.
I was replying to your comment about being lucky with Epson printers. For your needs, they may well be a good fit, but I bought 5 epson inkjets from the C82 - C220?? over about 3 years. I had each warrenty replaced within 6 months regardless of whether I used Espon or 3rd party inks. That's 10 printers, the replacements each died within a year. Mind you, this was for myself and several family members, but as I've said elsewhere, the last good experiance I had with an Epson inkjet was a SC400 I got in 1997.
That one lasted 4 years. Every one since lasted months before clogging so bad I had to get it replaced (as the printhead is not user servicable. It may well be the environment, but I've seen 2 people (you and one other person in this discussion) in all the internet conversations as well as my F2F conversations who haven't consistantly had to do the cleaning cycle "dance" with their inkjet after a few months.
I will agree, there are some situations where an inkjet makes sense, but they don't happen very often. How many home users need photo quality printing? I still maintain most would be better served by Winkflash(or whoever), in paper quality, printing quality, and cost.
For most everything else a B&W laser will look better than an inkjet - certainly text comes out clearer on standard/cheap paper.
I suppose the grey area is color documents, but I'm a) still not really certain how often that comes up and b) not sure that a low end $300-$400 color laser wouldn't also be more economical for color and certainly less PITAish wrt banding and clogging.
As I've said elsewhere, Canon's might be much better, but after fighting many Epson's, several Lexmarks, and a Radio Shack branded inkjet, I lost the will to keep fighting and got a laser.
Well, I'm pretty happy letting someone else deal with all that for less money than the ink and paper would be to me, say from Winkflash or mpix. Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper and equal quality to the highest end inkjet I would buy anyway, likely better as they can do full page bleed withotu me messing with special paper etc.
Well, it may be because apparently we haven't been able to find the perfect inkjet printer you have. I've tried Radio Shack, Lexmark, and Epson heavily over about 8 years and 7 printers, and I got each one because the last one stopped printing, even with new carts. I've seen issues with HPs as well in inkjets. Epson was by far the worst - every one after the Stylus Color 400 era seemed to always clog up if I didn't use it every day, and even then I'd need to do alignments, cleaning cycles etc. It was a huge PITA. And it was a PITA EVERY TIME I PRINTED.
Maybe it's the climate, or other environmental factors, but in Upstate NY, inkjets are a constant PITA. Since I got a cheap laser, I've never had to change the toner in over a year (vs several ink carts a year, even if I didn't use them because they dried out), I've never had to do an "alignment", or a cleaning cycle. I've never gotten banding, or random colors not printing.
It just works - always. And I got duplexing.
Maybe there are some magical builds of inkjet printers that I've been unlucky to never get, but the last good inkjet was my SC400, and that was made in 1997. The rest have chips, expensive carts, and always clog inside of 6 months to where I have to get it warrenty replaced.
I will admit, maybe canons are better, but I've just gotten fed up.
Well, I used to use Epson printers. Realized I don't print the required page every 3 days or so (Epson told me this after the 3rd warrenty replacement printer they'd sent me cause the damn thing wouldn't print again). Got a $60 Samsung B&W laser(sale) with toner for ~1400 pages. I have since upgraded to a Color Samsung printer for $220 with toner for ~2200 pages and duplexing.
Find me something even in that price range for an inkjet + pages. Find me an inkjet that hasn't clogged up by the time I want to use it, every time I want to use which is once a month or so. Find me an inkjet for under $300 with duplexing. Find me a color inkjet that actually does 6PPM color or 20+ PPM B&W single sided.
The average going price for a home B&W laser is $100 - within $30 of most inkjets. Outside of photos, which has been agreed above in this thread as better done profesionally, what percentage of prints needs color? The majority of things I've seen printed out are reports, taxes, reciepts, web pages, etc.. Generally color isn't present or adds little to the print.
Even the starter toner for basic lasers does more than a full cartridge set for any consumer inkjet. We're talking well over a thousand sheets vs a couple hundered. Full carts rarely do less than 3,000 sheets.
It of course depends on your situation, but unless you need to print color documents, print at least once a week but not high volume, I can't see much of a reason to deal with inkjets anymore.
Simplicity is why I switched to Firefox and Opera from MSIE in the first place.
I get the Firefox part, but where did Opera ever claim to be simple? I didn't get that vibe on version 5.12 in 2001... Opera certainly hasn't become bloated compared to before, it's about the same while supporting more web standards. Opera's always been an internet suite, and has always had a lot of built in features and complexity.
Not true. Enterprise MS licensing is Upgrade license only. That is, you cannot get XP Pro VLK or Vista Enterprise except as an upgrade SKU, which means to be legal, you must have a qualifying existing license to upgrade from. So of course, luckily your OEM XP Pro or Vista Business qualifys.
But you still have to buy OEM licenses. This was described to me at Work by our DELL licensing representative and by Microsoft employees who gave a presentation on Vista...
Can you come up with a site that looks the same in Safari and Firefox, but looks broken in Opera? I really am not aware of Opera mimicking or copying IEs behavior at all in standards mode - it may in Quirks mode to work with broken pages, but I can't see that Quirks mode would work in FF or Safari without doing the same...
I had worked at Best Buy at the Geek Squad, and let me tell you, the service will vary a lot from store to store. Maybe trying a different store would have helped.
Any machine within the 14 day return policy can be returned. If someone brought in a laptop the day after they bought it, with that problem, we'd try plugging it in and if we couldn't boot it from AC power, the customer would get a new laptop (we had to remove anything from the box the customer didn't bring in with the broken one).
If we didn't have the exact model, the customer could exchange or get a refund and come back when it was back in stock. If it was going out of stock and the customer REALLY WANTED that laptop, we could send it out for service, but in your case, we'd just order the part over the parts hotline and the customer was supposed to recieve it in 5 business days by mail/UPS.
So retailers have to bake-in the support costs into their product and only provide the bare minimum of help.
I don't think this is the case anymore. The retailers have figured out that
a) customers don't want to pay for something they aren't going to use(or they think they won't use). b) Manufacturers often provide crap support from a customer standpoint because as shown from this article, it's damned hard to do tech support over the phone for a computer. c) They can differentiate their offerings from Dell et al by having in store and on site support.
You see this from Circuit City's Firedog and Best Buy's Geek Squad. They sell the extra warrenty which includes in store checks and hardware fixes. You also offer walk in service for up to X minutes to fix simple configuration problems.
These are things that is hard for mail order to provide.
I'm sure many customers like being able to walk in to where they bought the PC and ask questions, or have it looked at - or even call a local place where you can then see the person you called when you come in.
Dell can't really do that. And some customers are willing to pay that extra $70-$300 for support and hardware coverage. Those who don't want it save the money, those who do, spend the money.
I would think to some extent, manufacturers could try and see how many support contracts Best Buy et al are selling to see if maybe there is a large enough base who would pay more for better support. Then again, better support in that case probably doesn't mean over the phone.
What's bad is when I can understand them (I had indian roommates in college) but they can't understand me... I would think understanding spoken english would be a requirement for tech support for english users, but what do I know. I don't have a particularly strong accent of any sort (fingerlakes area NY, USA - pretty generic, but even most of the mild accents found in much of the US)and should be easy enough to understand.
Obviously, Firefox doesn't "just work" for a number of people. That's why they use IE, Opera or Safari or Konquerer or others. The above is as bad as saying "Firefox is just not a worthy cause, IE is already free, good and just works" (for various values, but few pages don't function properly in IE6).
Indeed, the web should not force users into a platform or a browser choice. If Firefox works great for you - great, but I find Opera works much better for me, and others will like Safari. The original designs of the web strived to let people focus on the user agent UI that works for them in competition, but all show the content in some manner.
I'd like to continue pushing for that. Otherwise, we all will be pushed back to Windows and IE (well, some browser/os combo).
Ehh, having Opera available on many platforms hasn't helped much in getting devs to test in it. I have some reservations this will be used by more than people who are currently targetting iPhones...
Slashdot Mirror
How do these things compare with some of the prepaid legal plans out there? Actually that looks just like the Legal Club of America version... pretty much the same.
You know, being as Slashdot is supposedly about nerds and techie stuff, you'd think they'd go a little further than Firefox and Safari for new features... Opera, note that it's gecko indeed, etc...
Mmm, As I recall from my Criminal Justice 101 class (so not a nuanced education by any means, and feel free to correct me), traffic fines (like speeding) are called Violations, which are under Misdemenaors. They are criminal, but usually they are treated almost like a slap on the wrist - maximum 14 day jail sentance etc - fines limited to less than ~ $3,000 or some such.
On windows there is something called Core Force that tries to do something like this, but I don't think it's ready for prime time yet.
IDK, there's an aweful lot of people with SDTV. Now whether those people would be interested in a box like this... I have no idea.
Well, I would think booting a liveCD would be though - similar result - use a flash drive for tripwire results... and scans ...
The worst part is #4 is likely to stay under their radar anyway, as you say, they know how to make it difficult to track them down. #5 may or may not be able to hide, but likely some of them will be as savvy or overlap with #4. So they will skew towards finding #1-3, hence bad publicity.
Even more so, if they do find a #4, it's likely they will cough up $4k settlement as cheaper than the retail cost of the media they have anyway, so you STILL won't hear about it on the news.
The PR campaign is impossible to win.
Computers have not nearly been as revolutionary as people claim they are.
Computers have been plenty revolutionary. Information Technology - literally the technology and methods to deal with information more efficiently allows both research, reference, and reporting in ways nearly impossible before computers existed. The PC revolution has brought those powers to almost anyone in developed countries. The idea and implementation of linking all these machines together into the internet allows communication and data transfer at an unimaginable level compared to previous technologies.
Computers may not help education, but they do help a critical part of education, libraries. CD based journal archives are far more space effective than bound editions. They allow school libraries to have journal archives that would be impossible traditionally. The Online versions allow even larger archives as well as instantenaous updates - something basically impossible without the internet.
The rest of the internet provides reference archives beyond any traditional mechanism - you can search a large percentage of the worlds news outlets, not just the huge papers and magizines as before. You can search for keywords in seconds vs hours of manually scanning microfilm.
Finally, computers allow simulation of driving, flying and more that provides far safer initial traning and experiance compared to traditional book learning and then doing it for real.
I was replying to your comment about being lucky with Epson printers. For your needs, they may well be a good fit, but I bought 5 epson inkjets from the C82 - C220?? over about 3 years. I had each warrenty replaced within 6 months regardless of whether I used Espon or 3rd party inks. That's 10 printers, the replacements each died within a year. Mind you, this was for myself and several family members, but as I've said elsewhere, the last good experiance I had with an Epson inkjet was a SC400 I got in 1997.
That one lasted 4 years. Every one since lasted months before clogging so bad I had to get it replaced (as the printhead is not user servicable. It may well be the environment, but I've seen 2 people (you and one other person in this discussion) in all the internet conversations as well as my F2F conversations who haven't consistantly had to do the cleaning cycle "dance" with their inkjet after a few months.
I will agree, there are some situations where an inkjet makes sense, but they don't happen very often. How many home users need photo quality printing? I still maintain most would be better served by Winkflash(or whoever), in paper quality, printing quality, and cost.
For most everything else a B&W laser will look better than an inkjet - certainly text comes out clearer on standard/cheap paper.
I suppose the grey area is color documents, but I'm a) still not really certain how often that comes up and b) not sure that a low end $300-$400 color laser wouldn't also be more economical for color and certainly less PITAish wrt banding and clogging.
As I've said elsewhere, Canon's might be much better, but after fighting many Epson's, several Lexmarks, and a Radio Shack branded inkjet, I lost the will to keep fighting and got a laser.
Well, I'm pretty happy letting someone else deal with all that for less money than the ink and paper would be to me, say from Winkflash or mpix. Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper and equal quality to the highest end inkjet I would buy anyway, likely better as they can do full page bleed withotu me messing with special paper etc.
Well, it may be because apparently we haven't been able to find the perfect inkjet printer you have. I've tried Radio Shack, Lexmark, and Epson heavily over about 8 years and 7 printers, and I got each one because the last one stopped printing, even with new carts. I've seen issues with HPs as well in inkjets. Epson was by far the worst - every one after the Stylus Color 400 era seemed to always clog up if I didn't use it every day, and even then I'd need to do alignments, cleaning cycles etc. It was a huge PITA. And it was a PITA EVERY TIME I PRINTED.
Maybe it's the climate, or other environmental factors, but in Upstate NY, inkjets are a constant PITA. Since I got a cheap laser, I've never had to change the toner in over a year (vs several ink carts a year, even if I didn't use them because they dried out), I've never had to do an "alignment", or a cleaning cycle. I've never gotten banding, or random colors not printing.
It just works - always. And I got duplexing.
Maybe there are some magical builds of inkjet printers that I've been unlucky to never get, but the last good inkjet was my SC400, and that was made in 1997. The rest have chips, expensive carts, and always clog inside of 6 months to where I have to get it warrenty replaced.
I will admit, maybe canons are better, but I've just gotten fed up.
Well, I used to use Epson printers. Realized I don't print the required page every 3 days or so (Epson told me this after the 3rd warrenty replacement printer they'd sent me cause the damn thing wouldn't print again). Got a $60 Samsung B&W laser(sale) with toner for ~1400 pages. I have since upgraded to a Color Samsung printer for $220 with toner for ~2200 pages and duplexing.
Find me something even in that price range for an inkjet + pages. Find me an inkjet that hasn't clogged up by the time I want to use it, every time I want to use which is once a month or so. Find me an inkjet for under $300 with duplexing. Find me a color inkjet that actually does 6PPM color or 20+ PPM B&W single sided.
The average going price for a home B&W laser is $100 - within $30 of most inkjets. Outside of photos, which has been agreed above in this thread as better done profesionally, what percentage of prints needs color? The majority of things I've seen printed out are reports, taxes, reciepts, web pages, etc.. Generally color isn't present or adds little to the print.
Even the starter toner for basic lasers does more than a full cartridge set for any consumer inkjet. We're talking well over a thousand sheets vs a couple hundered. Full carts rarely do less than 3,000 sheets.
It of course depends on your situation, but unless you need to print color documents, print at least once a week but not high volume, I can't see much of a reason to deal with inkjets anymore.
Well, your problem must be your AV - try NOD32 or Antivir ...
Simplicity is why I switched to Firefox and Opera from MSIE in the first place.
I get the Firefox part, but where did Opera ever claim to be simple? I didn't get that vibe on version 5.12 in 2001... Opera certainly hasn't become bloated compared to before, it's about the same while supporting more web standards. Opera's always been an internet suite, and has always had a lot of built in features and complexity.
Not true. Enterprise MS licensing is Upgrade license only. That is, you cannot get XP Pro VLK or Vista Enterprise except as an upgrade SKU, which means to be legal, you must have a qualifying existing license to upgrade from. So of course, luckily your OEM XP Pro or Vista Business qualifys.
But you still have to buy OEM licenses. This was described to me at Work by our DELL licensing representative and by Microsoft employees who gave a presentation on Vista...
Can you come up with a site that looks the same in Safari and Firefox, but looks broken in Opera? I really am not aware of Opera mimicking or copying IEs behavior at all in standards mode - it may in Quirks mode to work with broken pages, but I can't see that Quirks mode would work in FF or Safari without doing the same...
I had worked at Best Buy at the Geek Squad, and let me tell you, the service will vary a lot from store to store. Maybe trying a different store would have helped.
Any machine within the 14 day return policy can be returned. If someone brought in a laptop the day after they bought it, with that problem, we'd try plugging it in and if we couldn't boot it from AC power, the customer would get a new laptop (we had to remove anything from the box the customer didn't bring in with the broken one).
If we didn't have the exact model, the customer could exchange or get a refund and come back when it was back in stock. If it was going out of stock and the customer REALLY WANTED that laptop, we could send it out for service, but in your case, we'd just order the part over the parts hotline and the customer was supposed to recieve it in 5 business days by mail/UPS.
So retailers have to bake-in the support costs into their product and only provide the bare minimum of help.
I don't think this is the case anymore. The retailers have figured out that
a) customers don't want to pay for something they aren't going to use(or they think they won't use).
b) Manufacturers often provide crap support from a customer standpoint because as shown from this article, it's damned hard to do tech support over the phone for a computer.
c) They can differentiate their offerings from Dell et al by having in store and on site support.
You see this from Circuit City's Firedog and Best Buy's Geek Squad. They sell the extra warrenty which includes in store checks and hardware fixes. You also offer walk in service for up to X minutes to fix simple configuration problems.
These are things that is hard for mail order to provide.
I'm sure many customers like being able to walk in to where they bought the PC and ask questions, or have it looked at - or even call a local place where you can then see the person you called when you come in.
Dell can't really do that. And some customers are willing to pay that extra $70-$300 for support and hardware coverage. Those who don't want it save the money, those who do, spend the money.
I would think to some extent, manufacturers could try and see how many support contracts Best Buy et al are selling to see if maybe there is a large enough base who would pay more for better support. Then again, better support in that case probably doesn't mean over the phone.
What's bad is when I can understand them (I had indian roommates in college) but they can't understand me... I would think understanding spoken english would be a requirement for tech support for english users, but what do I know. I don't have a particularly strong accent of any sort (fingerlakes area NY, USA - pretty generic, but even most of the mild accents found in much of the US)and should be easy enough to understand.
On windows, there's also proxomitron.
Or, IDK, get a subscription to http://www.browsercam.com/ or try out the free http://browsershots.org/ ...
Obviously, Firefox doesn't "just work" for a number of people. That's why they use IE, Opera or Safari or Konquerer or others. The above is as bad as saying "Firefox is just not a worthy cause, IE is already free, good and just works" (for various values, but few pages don't function properly in IE6).
Indeed, the web should not force users into a platform or a browser choice. If Firefox works great for you - great, but I find Opera works much better for me, and others will like Safari. The original designs of the web strived to let people focus on the user agent UI that works for them in competition, but all show the content in some manner.
I'd like to continue pushing for that. Otherwise, we all will be pushed back to Windows and IE (well, some browser/os combo).
Part of it seems to be that Safari has some bugs that break benchmarks:l
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/safaribenchmarks.htm
Ehh, having Opera available on many platforms hasn't helped much in getting devs to test in it. I have some reservations this will be used by more than people who are currently targetting iPhones...