"If you can't get a full system built and perfectly configured in BIOS in less than 20 minutes while blindfolded, you should be turning in your geek card and surrendering that wonderfully low UID."
Even so, you can't get the OS installed any faster than the I/O of the filesystem that holds your ghost image.
You can't buy certain aircraft parts unless you are the documented owner of a specific airplane. This also has nothing to do with the fact that Dell will only sell to consumers with whom they have an existing business relationship.
>Sounds like a company begging to go down in flame to me.
No, it's a company that was basically one of the first to recognize that the medium-to-large business market is all that really matters, and no matter how good or bad their model is for the individual consumer, it's a drop in the bucket. So they limit the scope and scale of their consumer business. They make their real money in server room racks (Dell switches are a far better value proposition than Cisco, for most enterprises, for example), and in office environments (seriously, how often do you see large offices that *don't* deploy Dells?)
Even my office, which is a resolute Mac OSX shop, has Dell networking hardware and quite a few 1U Dell rack servers (Windows Servers[don't ask] and Redhat Linux). There are a few people who are beyond IT policies and a few of them have Dell notebooks. I don't disagree with their reasons. When you have a corporate account with Dell, they are very, very good with the on-site service, discount pricing, and so on.
As an individual I would never buy a Dell, unless maybe I got my company's discount. Having said that, I think I would like one of the dual quad-core 1U server machines in my audio production rack. Something about Dells, they tend to be very quiet machines -- "embarrassingly" so if you've spent money trying to make a silent PC.
But seriously I wouldn't want to be an individual customer of theirs, since the same factors that make them a very good choice for a corporate vendor, work against them on the consumer side.
Any negative impact to the resale market, contributes positively to the new computer market -- and when you're the size of Dell you can put real numbers on that stuff. I'd bet that when you do, you get larger numbers than the *entire volume* of smaller producers.
>Well no, he's not asking Alienware to fix anything for him (under warranty or paying >directly), he's just simply asking to buy a spare part from them so he can fix it himself.
Just order it "through your company's purchasing agent." Do it with a written PO. Then when they challenge you, which they won't, you've got the social engineering angle that you can work: "I don't know, somebody in the our Marketing department requests it."
>They are, however, treating him like a criminal because he is not the person who brought the >laptop from them in the first place.
Actually they aren't treating him like a criminal so much, as treating him like someone who is not a client in a private sales organization. It's not much different than the country club that doesn't let you eat at the restaurant.
From Dell's point of view, they really track their supply chain down to minuscule detail. If they don't limit their parts business to the known customer base, their whole supply chain model suffers. If you've ever done SCM, you know that what looks insignificant in a single detail, can add up to millions of dollars in waste, even at the nut-bolt-washer level.
So Dell doesn't sell spare parts to the general public. You have to have an existing, known, documented business relationship with them.
It might even be possible for someone like the OP to *create* that relationship, but probably not after screaming about how they accused him of being a thief, and posting on Slashdot about it... That's definitely not the way to go about it.
>Servicing a vehicle != "accepting" the vehicle | holding onto it.
Asserting the option to hold the vehicle under a mechanic's lien, however, can be construed this way. And it's quite common for service contracts to assert the right to hold the property if payment is not received.
Innocent shill buys a stolen vehicle from a car lot. Takes it to a mechanic for service. Does not pay. Mechanic asserts a lien on the vehicle. Vehicle is reported stolen and the lot owner is arrested. Complication: Lot owner is a relative or business partner of the mechanic. Now the mechanic and the innocent shill both appear to be in a conspiracy with the lot owner, dealing in stolen goods!
My state has a law that requires a vehicle title transfer. However, there is no law that requires me to take any action if I buy a toaster oven at a garage sale, or a computer on Ebay.
If I buy a toaster oven at a garage sale that turns out to be stolen, in order to accuse me of being in possession of stolen goods, you need evidence. You cannot just walk up and say "I think you maybe stole that or maybe bought it from someone who stole it." That's slander, at best. If you involve the police in your baseless accusation, that gets into heavy territory where you've lied to the police about the strength of your evidence, and it is possible for you to go to jail for this, in some places.
The OP doesn't know, but that's not the issue. The company doesn't know either, but has already set foot on the dangerous path of accusing someone of a crime while having no evidence to support the accusation.
"Now if the user bought the computer legally on e-Bay, he should have some kind of sales receipt, or at least know the name of the person he bought it from."
Blah blah blah. If you accuse me of a crime, you'd better be prepared to repeat the accusation to my attorney and to a judge. You'd also better have some evidence, or you might be headed down a dangerous road.
After you accuse me of a *crime*, the burden of proof is on YOU. You don't get to ask me for receipts, names of the people I know, or anything else. The police are going to be asking YOU for YOUR evidence, and when it turns out you have none, my case against you for slander and defamation will be simple to make.
That's all well and good, if the property is indeed stolen.
On the other hand, when someone falsely accuses you of a felony, that's a crime.
I'd be demanding that they either accuse me of the crime by way of notifying the proper authorities, or to admit to those same authorities that they falsely raised the accusation.
I'd be looking for tens of millions in damages, either way.
So you're in a position to make some money by selling your currently operating business.
You want to hire an attorney who has experience in mergers, acquisitions and sales, and you want to hire one or more business consultants to assist with the mechanics of the trade. You will probably want to enlist the help of one or more people with domain-specific experience in your field, if you want to ensure the success of the endeavor.
Slashdot is a good place to start if you want to get to the "First they laugh at you" stage of World Domination.
"This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC. Superior in a lot of qualities but largely ignored by the majority"
Show me a professional working in audio production who doesn't know about FLAC. FLAC is *anything* but ignored.
With a codec like FLAC, it's not a subjective question of "superiority" -- the question is more along the lines of "is this lossless compression better than, say, the hardware compression built into an HP LTO-4 Autoloader?"
The business decision comes down to something more like "Do I need twelve or sixteen of these $75 tapes, and do I need 20 or 60 hours to do the job?"
Well, if the damage hasn't already been done, there's a price tag on preservation: $1.6 million. Not much more than an equivalently sized residential property in the area.
>Companies have no business telling people where they can and cannot work.
In every one of these cases, both parties voluntarily signed the contract. The government has limited business telling people what they can and cannot agree to in a contract.
Yeah, they deleted the backups. They broke into the Iron Mountain facility, found the correct LTO-4 tapes, and burned them? Or was the State of Virginia negligent and didn't really *have* backups? A copy on a nearline array is nice, but it's not sufficient as a disaster recovery plan.
"A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?"
Or does it mean they laid off that much of the staff?
"Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?"
I have a Toshiba laptop that came with Vista Home. I tried to install XP on it. Turns out that drivers are not available, especially for the video device (!), so I easily made the decision to just wipe it and install Ubuntu, which works better than any linux laptop I've ever had (and I've had a lot of them). Windows XP under VMWare on this laptop works better than Vista did natively.
But my point is, what happens to the person who hits the wall when XP doesn't work on his hardware because there is no driver support? I approached the problem from the point of view of a programmer with 16 years of Linux experience. Not everybody thinks like me.
It was a product line with a variety of custom made animations, each of which represents dozens or hundreds of hours of work, and is by all means a tangible medium of expression and as such is subject to copyright law.
>What I don't understand, as an author who holds copyright in at least one book that is out of print, is: how can a lawsuit to which I am not a party give *my* rights under copyright >law to someone else?
It can't, and it hasn't.
>But in any case, why should I be the one who has to go and see if they've infringed rights?
How would anyone else know whether you, a copyright owner, has granted a license to someone?
Slashdot Mirror
"If you can't get a full system built and perfectly configured in BIOS in less than 20 minutes while blindfolded, you should be turning in your geek card and surrendering that wonderfully low UID."
Even so, you can't get the OS installed any faster than the I/O of the filesystem that holds your ghost image.
You can't buy certain aircraft parts unless you are the documented owner of a specific airplane. This also has nothing to do with the fact that Dell will only sell to consumers with whom they have an existing business relationship.
>Sounds like a company begging to go down in flame to me.
No, it's a company that was basically one of the first to recognize that the medium-to-large business market is all that really matters, and no matter how good or bad their model is for the individual consumer, it's a drop in the bucket. So they limit the scope and scale of their consumer business. They make their real money in server room racks (Dell switches are a far better value proposition than Cisco, for most enterprises, for example), and in office environments (seriously, how often do you see large offices that *don't* deploy Dells?)
Even my office, which is a resolute Mac OSX shop, has Dell networking hardware and quite a few 1U Dell rack servers (Windows Servers[don't ask] and Redhat Linux). There are a few people who are beyond IT policies and a few of them have Dell notebooks. I don't disagree with their reasons. When you have a corporate account with Dell, they are very, very good with the on-site service, discount pricing, and so on.
As an individual I would never buy a Dell, unless maybe I got my company's discount. Having said that, I think I would like one of the dual quad-core 1U server machines in my audio production rack. Something about Dells, they tend to be very quiet machines -- "embarrassingly" so if you've spent money trying to make a silent PC.
But seriously I wouldn't want to be an individual customer of theirs, since the same factors that make them a very good choice for a corporate vendor, work against them on the consumer side.
Any negative impact to the resale market, contributes positively to the new computer market -- and when you're the size of Dell you can put real numbers on that stuff. I'd bet that when you do, you get larger numbers than the *entire volume* of smaller producers.
It's like, if you sell one of your cars, you have to transfer the title to ALL your cars.
>Well no, he's not asking Alienware to fix anything for him (under warranty or paying
>directly), he's just simply asking to buy a spare part from them so he can fix it himself.
Just order it "through your company's purchasing agent." Do it with a written PO. Then when they challenge you, which they won't, you've got the social engineering angle that you can work: "I don't know, somebody in the our Marketing department requests it."
>They are, however, treating him like a criminal because he is not the person who brought the
>laptop from them in the first place.
Actually they aren't treating him like a criminal so much, as treating him like someone who is not a client in a private sales organization. It's not much different than the country club that doesn't let you eat at the restaurant.
From Dell's point of view, they really track their supply chain down to minuscule detail. If they don't limit their parts business to the known customer base, their whole supply chain model suffers. If you've ever done SCM, you know that what looks insignificant in a single detail, can add up to millions of dollars in waste, even at the nut-bolt-washer level.
So Dell doesn't sell spare parts to the general public. You have to have an existing, known, documented business relationship with them.
It might even be possible for someone like the OP to *create* that relationship, but probably not after screaming about how they accused him of being a thief, and posting on Slashdot about it... That's definitely not the way to go about it.
>Servicing a vehicle != "accepting" the vehicle | holding onto it.
Asserting the option to hold the vehicle under a mechanic's lien, however, can be construed this way. And it's quite common for service contracts to assert the right to hold the property if payment is not received.
Innocent shill buys a stolen vehicle from a car lot. Takes it to a mechanic for service. Does not pay. Mechanic asserts a lien on the vehicle. Vehicle is reported stolen and the lot owner is arrested. Complication: Lot owner is a relative or business partner of the mechanic. Now the mechanic and the innocent shill both appear to be in a conspiracy with the lot owner, dealing in stolen goods!
>Alienware have no obligation to deal with this guy.
After they falsely accused him of theft, they may very well have an obligation to deal with the guy's lawyer and the judge.
It's one thing to refuse to do business with you. It's another thing to refuse to do business for an *illegal reason.*
My state has a law that requires a vehicle title transfer. However, there is no law that requires me to take any action if I buy a toaster oven at a garage sale, or a computer on Ebay.
If I buy a toaster oven at a garage sale that turns out to be stolen, in order to accuse me of being in possession of stolen goods, you need evidence. You cannot just walk up and say "I think you maybe stole that or maybe bought it from someone who stole it." That's slander, at best. If you involve the police in your baseless accusation, that gets into heavy territory where you've lied to the police about the strength of your evidence, and it is possible for you to go to jail for this, in some places.
The OP doesn't know, but that's not the issue. The company doesn't know either, but has already set foot on the dangerous path of accusing someone of a crime while having no evidence to support the accusation.
"Now if the user bought the computer legally on e-Bay, he should have some kind of sales receipt, or at least know the name of the person he bought it from."
Blah blah blah. If you accuse me of a crime, you'd better be prepared to repeat the accusation to my attorney and to a judge. You'd also better have some evidence, or you might be headed down a dangerous road.
After you accuse me of a *crime*, the burden of proof is on YOU. You don't get to ask me for receipts, names of the people I know, or anything else. The police are going to be asking YOU for YOUR evidence, and when it turns out you have none, my case against you for slander and defamation will be simple to make.
That's all well and good, if the property is indeed stolen.
On the other hand, when someone falsely accuses you of a felony, that's a crime.
I'd be demanding that they either accuse me of the crime by way of notifying the proper authorities, or to admit to those same authorities that they falsely raised the accusation.
I'd be looking for tens of millions in damages, either way.
Let me get that straight. Dell has falsely accused you of a felony -- theft of an Alienware PC.
You should be able to turn that into a comfortable retirement for yourself.
So you're in a position to make some money by selling your currently operating business.
You want to hire an attorney who has experience in mergers, acquisitions and sales, and you want to hire one or more business consultants to assist with the mechanics of the trade. You will probably want to enlist the help of one or more people with domain-specific experience in your field, if you want to ensure the success of the endeavor.
Slashdot is a good place to start if you want to get to the "First they laugh at you" stage of World Domination.
"This might not pose that much of a threat to H264, sounds like another OGG or FLAC. Superior in a lot of qualities but largely ignored by the majority"
Show me a professional working in audio production who doesn't know about FLAC. FLAC is *anything* but ignored.
With a codec like FLAC, it's not a subjective question of "superiority" -- the question is more along the lines of "is this lossless compression better than, say, the hardware compression built into an HP LTO-4 Autoloader?"
The business decision comes down to something more like "Do I need twelve or sixteen of these $75 tapes, and do I need 20 or 60 hours to do the job?"
>At around $100/tank of fuel, and a little less than 1 tank of fuel per week it comes to around $7k/year
Racing fuel?
>My loan payments were $650/month
Italian sports car?
>Insurance payments were another $450/month
Felony DUI convictions?
My boss doesn't spend this much on his airplane.
Well, if the damage hasn't already been done, there's a price tag on preservation: $1.6 million. Not much more than an equivalently sized residential property in the area.
What's the issue again?
>Companies have no business telling people where they can and cannot work.
In every one of these cases, both parties voluntarily signed the contract. The government has limited business telling people what they can and cannot agree to in a contract.
Yeah, they deleted the backups. They broke into the Iron Mountain facility, found the correct LTO-4 tapes, and burned them? Or was the State of Virginia negligent and didn't really *have* backups? A copy on a nearline array is nice, but it's not sufficient as a disaster recovery plan.
"A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?"
Or does it mean they laid off that much of the staff?
"Frankly, I don't know if it'll work. Windows XP works fine. It's an operating system. All it has to do is run applications and manage resources. It does that well enough for most people and corporations, so why switch?"
I have a Toshiba laptop that came with Vista Home. I tried to install XP on it. Turns out that drivers are not available, especially for the video device (!), so I easily made the decision to just wipe it and install Ubuntu, which works better than any linux laptop I've ever had (and I've had a lot of them). Windows XP under VMWare on this laptop works better than Vista did natively.
But my point is, what happens to the person who hits the wall when XP doesn't work on his hardware because there is no driver support? I approached the problem from the point of view of a programmer with 16 years of Linux experience. Not everybody thinks like me.
>Wow! They've productized cybersex?
It was a product line with a variety of custom made animations, each of which represents dozens or hundreds of hours of work, and is by all means a tangible medium of expression and as such is subject to copyright law.
I read that as "Gigabit WAN for $30/mo Canadian" and didn't understand why you wouldn't jump on it.
>What I don't understand, as an author who holds copyright in at least one book that is out of print, is: how can a lawsuit to which I am not a party give *my* rights under copyright >law to someone else?
It can't, and it hasn't.
>But in any case, why should I be the one who has to go and see if they've infringed rights?
How would anyone else know whether you, a copyright owner, has granted a license to someone?