I've had a couple of instances. Back in 1999, I bought a new HP Pavilion desktop machine. I was on dialup at the time and it had a Rockwell chipset modem on the same card as the sound. My phone line was not the best, 28.8 was obtainable on a very dry day in August, usually 26.4 was the usual connect speed, but I had no affordable alternatives. The HP modem would connect, but the call would be dropped within a minute. The two other computers in the house with different modems could stay connected for hours. I went through HP phone support with the techs there were reading from a script blaming the phone line. One of the guys even whispered "Read between the lines." I posted to their forums for my model and had my posts deleted where I criticized the modem. Finally, I wrote a very polite letter to the, then CEO, the one before Carly, describing the problem and why it was the modem, not the phone line or my setup. I mailed it from the Midwest on a Thursday. Monday I got a call from a gentleman in the CEO's office who said that if I bought whatever modem I thought would work and sent them a copy of the receipt via fax, they would immediately cut me a check for that amount. I bought the newest USR USB modem which sold for $239.95, faxed the receipt and got a check within 4 days.
Much more recently, I had trouble with a web site hosting company that I've had a site with for several years. They changed management and I started having serious trouble with the mail server where we have about 70 email accounts. For several days I tried to work through their phone support (Philippines - Very nice, Polite, easy to understand), but couldn't get the problem fixed with the server in Atlanta. I finally got escalated to email exchanges with a sysadmin, who wasn't getting the problem resolved either. I took a shot at guessing the email address of the CEO given that I now knew the pattern of their email addresses and got a quick response directly from him stating that I would be getting a phone call ASAP from their director of customer service and the head sysadmin. The calls came as promised and the problem got fixed quickly.
So sometimes getting to the top guy works, but I use it sparingly as it can be overdone, too.
from Engineering, not sales, jobs. The first time it was because I was the new guy without seniority. I found a better job before my termination pay ran out, although it was 1,000 miles away. The second time I was laid off because I was the senior higher paid guy. I changed careers for a few years and taught electronics instead of designing it, although I still kept my design hand in through consulting.
My point is that you can be laid off at either end of the spectrum. Feces occurs. There is no entitlement, and there shouldn't be. This isn't Soviet Russia....yet.
Be flexible. Roll with the punches. Have a "plan-B". Get used to it.
I wouldn't trade my career for anything. It's been good to me and allowed me to have a very good quality of life.
Doesn't anyone else see this as a simple way to generate more income for the USPTO? It sure looks like it to me. More patents, more fees. "Prior art? We ain't got no prior art. We don't need no prior art. I don't have to show you any stinking prior arts!" (Apologies to Alfonso Bedoya, AKA "Gold Hat" in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948))
No, that's not the Boy Scouts, it's the "Business Software Association", AKA Microsoft's enforcers. Of course they've got even deeper pockets behind them than the AA's.
My guess is that this is another attack/FUD piece for which he was well paid by Microsoft. He has zero credibility with people who know and understand OS's. It's those pesky PHBs that this is oriented toward, unfortunately.
When I get pricing online and go to a store to get an item, I print out the webpage to take with me. Best Buy is the last place I go to get electronics/appliances/music, anyway.
I have a web site that is hosted at web.com (used to be Interland) and their overnight upgrade of the iMail mail server had a few glitches. Their first tier tech support is no longer in Atlanta, but is handled from the Philippines. The young lady I got on the phone tonight was quite easy to understand, polite, did not fib about where she was located when I asked and got my trouble ticket upgraded after working with me for about 20 minutes doing logical tests on her end. Would I still rather be talking to Jim with a genuine Georgia accent? You bet, but I can't complain too much about tonight's experience. I hope its not the exception.
he's a novelist. He's also an attorney so his novels have authentic background information, but, yes, it's fiction.
I, too, cannot imagine a workable legal system without tort law and class action, but it doesn't hurt to point out the flaws in what we're working with. Read the book as I suggested, it's very interesting.
by John Grisham. It's about how class-action suits work, or don't, at least for the members of the class. Very interesting reading. Be prepared to be angry whenever you hear the term class-action. The only winners are the lawyers. I wish, as another poster commented, that they were paid with Microsoft coupons.
Did you think Open Office was only for Linux? It works just fine on Windows, so no need to switch to Linux on that account. Check it out: http://openoffice.org/
Tube filaments were designed for a warm up time of 11 seconds. Since the resistance of the filaments varied as they heated, it was important, in a series string where the low voltage filaments operated from the 120 line, to keep the filament heating uniform so the voltage dropped across each tube stayed relatively constant as all the tubes got up to operating temperature.
I agree with the parent that there were sets where the filaments stayed on all the time for an "Instant-On" effect. Actually it was an always-on situation, but the B+ and high voltage wasn't applied until the set was "turned on". See http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_tvfaqd.html#TVFA QD_005
I've had three outages here at our house in the Midwest within the past 6 months that exceeded 12 hours. A category 2 tornado - no power for a full week and no broadband for 4 more days. One squirrel committing suicide in the substation - 13 hours outage, no broadband. Ice storm a couple weeks ago - 16 hours outage, and I'm one of the really lucky ones. In all cases there was no broadband until power was restored. I've got a generator and my computers worked, but the cable has nodes/repeaters that don't have backup power (dialup so sucks!). Oh, and I don't live out in the country. I'm in a residential area in the middle of town, between the state capital building and the mall.
Even if it's pretty cold outside, as was the case with this ice storm where the temps went into the single digits overnight, assuming you have a fairly well insulated house, it would probably take a couple days to get to freezing inside the house absent any heat. My son didn't get power for two days and it only got down to 39 degrees in their old house without very good insulation.
Here's what to do. When I was a kid and we lived in the country, we heated with a coal fired range in the kitchen and a coal space heater in the living room, if we'd go away in the winter for more than a day, we'd turn off the well pump, drain the water pipes via a valve in the cellar and put antifreeze in the toilet after flushing to empty the tank. It's the same thing you'd do to prepare an RV for Winter. That way, you don't have to worry about high tech not working. Besides, if you have monitoring and it goes off, what are you going to do if you're across the country and don't have family or friends in proximity to the house? If you did have people there, then just have them check the house. That's what we do for my mom who has a house here and spends the Winter in AZ.
during our power outage resulting from the ice storm last week. There's one in the home office, one in the kitchen at the other end of the house, one in the garage on the wall and one in the basement/storm shelter. Yes, I live in the Midwest.
Our phones have worked without a hitch through hits by two category 2 tornados and an ice storm. Thank goodness the phone lines are underground between us and the CO. Fortunately we do have a generator so that, although we were "off the grid" for about 15 hours, we weren't without power for long. I have absolutely no plans to do without POTS. I did miss my cable modem, but I still got my Internet/email/slashdot fix via dialup.
We were just having this conversation here at the office since one of the people had an almost discharged cell phone and no POTS at home when the ice storm hit. Her truck had 1/2 inch of ice all over it so it wasn't possible to get into it to charge the cell phone there. I suggested that she get one of those handcranked rechargable light/radio units with a lighter jack so a cell phone can be charged that way.
Other than the obvious "high tech" aspect to these pissoirs and having them only available at night which just doesn't make sense to me, since I occasionally have to urinate during daylight hours.
I've also seen these in North African countries that I've visited like Tunisia and Morocco. I'm guessing the French brought the concept.
actual benefits I might get from running this expensive resource hog called Vista versus XP-Pro behind my firewall with daily updated virus scanning and avoiding IE like the plague it is?
I was slow to move my Windows boxes from 98SE to XP and I'm in no hurry at all to move to Vista.
How long will we be able to buy machines with XP pre-installed? I'm about due for a new desktop Windows machine here at home to replace the venerable Athlon 1.333 GHz that has been my work horse for about four years, but I don't want to go to Vista. I'm thinking there will be some good buys to be had in a couple of months.
Yes, I do already have Linux boxes under my desk hooked to the 4 port KVM switch, SuSE, Ubuntu and Freespire. I'm thinking that, hopefully, I'll never feel the need to use Vista since Linux just keeps getting better and better.
I couldn't pass it up. It's got 256 Megs of RAM OS-X 10.3. I use it, too, for checking how sites I design look on a Mac. Even given that it's old and a bit slow, the experience is not bad at all. I think a Mac Mini is in my future, too.
I'd have to run a new cable connection to the Internet version 2.0.
According to Wikipedia, "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[citation needed], refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword amongst certain technical and marketing communities."
Ill-defined hardly describes it. If it's that nebulous, don't bother me with it, especially if it's from that guy on Fox or some marketing dweebs.
On Friday, October 13, 1307 (a date possibly linked to the origin of the Friday the 13th legend), Philip had all French Templars simultaneously arrested, charged with numerous heresies, and tortured by French authorities nominally under the Inquisition until they allegedly confessed. This action released Philip from his obligation to repay huge loans from the Templars and justified his looting of Templar treasuries. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
Eudora 5.1 reluctantly. The only reason I switched was that I migrated my mail to gmail via POP and the older version wasn't compatible.
I've been using Eudora since around 1997 and it's been just fine for me. One great thing about it is that it's completely portable. Back in the 20th century, I ran it from a zip disk that I carried from home to the office and back. I had all my mail with me and it worked great. With the advent of USB flash drives a few years ago, I ditched the zip.
I've never been infected with a virus, although lots of them have appeared in my mailbox. Automatically opening attachments as a default is a huge no-no, but all you/. folks already knew that.
That said, I've used Thunderbird here at the office for work email and think it's a great client, so I'm pleased to see this development.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a couple of instances. Back in 1999, I bought a new HP Pavilion desktop machine. I was on dialup at the time and it had a Rockwell chipset modem on the same card as the sound. My phone line was not the best, 28.8 was obtainable on a very dry day in August, usually 26.4 was the usual connect speed, but I had no affordable alternatives. The HP modem would connect, but the call would be dropped within a minute. The two other computers in the house with different modems could stay connected for hours. I went through HP phone support with the techs there were reading from a script blaming the phone line. One of the guys even whispered "Read between the lines." I posted to their forums for my model and had my posts deleted where I criticized the modem. Finally, I wrote a very polite letter to the, then CEO, the one before Carly, describing the problem and why it was the modem, not the phone line or my setup. I mailed it from the Midwest on a Thursday. Monday I got a call from a gentleman in the CEO's office who said that if I bought whatever modem I thought would work and sent them a copy of the receipt via fax, they would immediately cut me a check for that amount. I bought the newest USR USB modem which sold for $239.95, faxed the receipt and got a check within 4 days.
Much more recently, I had trouble with a web site hosting company that I've had a site with for several years. They changed management and I started having serious trouble with the mail server where we have about 70 email accounts. For several days I tried to work through their phone support (Philippines - Very nice, Polite, easy to understand), but couldn't get the problem fixed with the server in Atlanta. I finally got escalated to email exchanges with a sysadmin, who wasn't getting the problem resolved either. I took a shot at guessing the email address of the CEO given that I now knew the pattern of their email addresses and got a quick response directly from him stating that I would be getting a phone call ASAP from their director of customer service and the head sysadmin. The calls came as promised and the problem got fixed quickly.
So sometimes getting to the top guy works, but I use it sparingly as it can be overdone, too.
the loudspeakers are augmented, for the public good, with servo controlled sedative dart guns?
from Engineering, not sales, jobs. The first time it was because I was the new guy without seniority. I found a better job before my termination pay ran out, although it was 1,000 miles away. The second time I was laid off because I was the senior higher paid guy. I changed careers for a few years and taught electronics instead of designing it, although I still kept my design hand in through consulting.
My point is that you can be laid off at either end of the spectrum. Feces occurs. There is no entitlement, and there shouldn't be. This isn't Soviet Russia....yet.
Be flexible. Roll with the punches. Have a "plan-B". Get used to it.
I wouldn't trade my career for anything. It's been good to me and allowed me to have a very good quality of life.
Doesn't anyone else see this as a simple way to generate more income for the USPTO? It sure looks like it to me. More patents, more fees. "Prior art? We ain't got no prior art. We don't need no prior art. I don't have to show you any stinking prior arts!" (Apologies to Alfonso Bedoya, AKA "Gold Hat" in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948))
No, that's not the Boy Scouts, it's the "Business Software Association", AKA Microsoft's enforcers. Of course they've got even deeper pockets behind them than the AA's.
We have the best government that money can buy.
I control the "OFF" switch. TV is less and less important to me with each passing day.
My guess is that this is another attack/FUD piece for which he was well paid by Microsoft. He has zero credibility with people who know and understand OS's. It's those pesky PHBs that this is oriented toward, unfortunately.
When I get pricing online and go to a store to get an item, I print out the webpage to take with me. Best Buy is the last place I go to get electronics/appliances/music, anyway.
It's only 4 digits!! That's seriously OLD. Well, in Internet years, anyway.
I have a web site that is hosted at web.com (used to be Interland) and their overnight upgrade of the iMail mail server had a few glitches. Their first tier tech support is no longer in Atlanta, but is handled from the Philippines. The young lady I got on the phone tonight was quite easy to understand, polite, did not fib about where she was located when I asked and got my trouble ticket upgraded after working with me for about 20 minutes doing logical tests on her end. Would I still rather be talking to Jim with a genuine Georgia accent? You bet, but I can't complain too much about tonight's experience. I hope its not the exception.
he's a novelist. He's also an attorney so his novels have authentic background information, but, yes, it's fiction.
I, too, cannot imagine a workable legal system without tort law and class action, but it doesn't hurt to point out the flaws in what we're working with. Read the book as I suggested, it's very interesting.
Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting.
by John Grisham. It's about how class-action suits work, or don't, at least for the members of the class. Very interesting reading. Be prepared to be angry whenever you hear the term class-action. The only winners are the lawyers. I wish, as another poster commented, that they were paid with Microsoft coupons.
Strikingly well preserved mummies from the Takla Makan desert region have strongly European characterstics such as red hair and blue eyes dating from as far back as 3800 BP. DNA analysis on these mummies indicates Indo/European origin. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/chinamum/taklamakan.h tml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies
Did you think Open Office was only for Linux? It works just fine on Windows, so no need to switch to Linux on that account. Check it out: http://openoffice.org/
Tube filaments were designed for a warm up time of 11 seconds. Since the resistance of the filaments varied as they heated, it was important, in a series string where the low voltage filaments operated from the 120 line, to keep the filament heating uniform so the voltage dropped across each tube stayed relatively constant as all the tubes got up to operating temperature.
A QD_005
I agree with the parent that there were sets where the filaments stayed on all the time for an "Instant-On" effect. Actually it was an always-on situation, but the B+ and high voltage wasn't applied until the set was "turned on". See http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_tvfaqd.html#TVF
I've had three outages here at our house in the Midwest within the past 6 months that exceeded 12 hours. A category 2 tornado - no power for a full week and no broadband for 4 more days. One squirrel committing suicide in the substation - 13 hours outage, no broadband. Ice storm a couple weeks ago - 16 hours outage, and I'm one of the really lucky ones. In all cases there was no broadband until power was restored. I've got a generator and my computers worked, but the cable has nodes/repeaters that don't have backup power (dialup so sucks!). Oh, and I don't live out in the country. I'm in a residential area in the middle of town, between the state capital building and the mall.
Even if it's pretty cold outside, as was the case with this ice storm where the temps went into the single digits overnight, assuming you have a fairly well insulated house, it would probably take a couple days to get to freezing inside the house absent any heat. My son didn't get power for two days and it only got down to 39 degrees in their old house without very good insulation.
Here's what to do. When I was a kid and we lived in the country, we heated with a coal fired range in the kitchen and a coal space heater in the living room, if we'd go away in the winter for more than a day, we'd turn off the well pump, drain the water pipes via a valve in the cellar and put antifreeze in the toilet after flushing to empty the tank. It's the same thing you'd do to prepare an RV for Winter. That way, you don't have to worry about high tech not working. Besides, if you have monitoring and it goes off, what are you going to do if you're across the country and don't have family or friends in proximity to the house? If you did have people there, then just have them check the house. That's what we do for my mom who has a house here and spends the Winter in AZ.
during our power outage resulting from the ice storm last week. There's one in the home office, one in the kitchen at the other end of the house, one in the garage on the wall and one in the basement/storm shelter. Yes, I live in the Midwest.
Our phones have worked without a hitch through hits by two category 2 tornados and an ice storm. Thank goodness the phone lines are underground between us and the CO. Fortunately we do have a generator so that, although we were "off the grid" for about 15 hours, we weren't without power for long. I have absolutely no plans to do without POTS. I did miss my cable modem, but I still got my Internet/email/slashdot fix via dialup.
We were just having this conversation here at the office since one of the people had an almost discharged cell phone and no POTS at home when the ice storm hit. Her truck had 1/2 inch of ice all over it so it wasn't possible to get into it to charge the cell phone there. I suggested that she get one of those handcranked rechargable light/radio units with a lighter jack so a cell phone can be charged that way.
Other than the obvious "high tech" aspect to these pissoirs and having them only available at night which just doesn't make sense to me, since I occasionally have to urinate during daylight hours.
I've also seen these in North African countries that I've visited like Tunisia and Morocco. I'm guessing the French brought the concept.
actual benefits I might get from running this expensive resource hog called Vista versus XP-Pro behind my firewall with daily updated virus scanning and avoiding IE like the plague it is?
I was slow to move my Windows boxes from 98SE to XP and I'm in no hurry at all to move to Vista.
How long will we be able to buy machines with XP pre-installed? I'm about due for a new desktop Windows machine here at home to replace the venerable Athlon 1.333 GHz that has been my work horse for about four years, but I don't want to go to Vista. I'm thinking there will be some good buys to be had in a couple of months.
Yes, I do already have Linux boxes under my desk hooked to the 4 port KVM switch, SuSE, Ubuntu and Freespire. I'm thinking that, hopefully, I'll never feel the need to use Vista since Linux just keeps getting better and better.
I couldn't pass it up. It's got 256 Megs of RAM OS-X 10.3. I use it, too, for checking how sites I design look on a Mac. Even given that it's old and a bit slow, the experience is not bad at all. I think a Mac Mini is in my future, too.
I'd have to run a new cable connection to the Internet version 2.0.
According to Wikipedia, "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004[citation needed], refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since 2004 it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword amongst certain technical and marketing communities."
Ill-defined hardly describes it. If it's that nebulous, don't bother me with it, especially if it's from that guy on Fox or some marketing dweebs.
On Friday, October 13, 1307 (a date possibly linked to the origin of the Friday the 13th legend), Philip had all French Templars simultaneously arrested, charged with numerous heresies, and tortured by French authorities nominally under the Inquisition until they allegedly confessed. This action released Philip from his obligation to repay huge loans from the Templars and justified his looting of Templar treasuries. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
Eudora 5.1 reluctantly. The only reason I switched was that I migrated my mail to gmail via POP and the older version wasn't compatible.
/. folks already knew that.
I've been using Eudora since around 1997 and it's been just fine for me. One great thing about it is that it's completely portable. Back in the 20th century, I ran it from a zip disk that I carried from home to the office and back. I had all my mail with me and it worked great. With the advent of USB flash drives a few years ago, I ditched the zip.
I've never been infected with a virus, although lots of them have appeared in my mailbox. Automatically opening attachments as a default is a huge no-no, but all you
That said, I've used Thunderbird here at the office for work email and think it's a great client, so I'm pleased to see this development.