I completely agree. My current ID says I'm a male with grey eyes that stands 6 foot tall. But I have no problem with it saying that I'm white on top of it. I don't see how that's racist. I am a white guy. So? At least I know another white guy around the same age has to be the thief before any damage could be done. It doesn't rule out all thieves, but it does prevent ones of a different color of grabbing it and using it. I don't think that's racist, I think that's trimming down the odds, even if it's just a little bit.
Time Warner by me used to charge $5 more if you didn't have cable service, but they also offered a basic (up to channel 13) package for the same price. They recently upped the price of the basic package to $8, but for years it worked out great. I wanted the super basic package anyways, because I couldn't even get in the local stations for news where I lived.
Of all things, you can't even seem to reach the normal police number where I live anymore. No matter what number you call, you end up with 911. Even the number for parking violations gets you 911, which then gets you a very irriated person on the line.
I know in most places they keep it such a secret, and I'm sure we don't know the "real" number here, but with something like 10 numbers that all go there...
I've had machines show up in my shop along with notes from Road Runner stating that they can't regain their service until they show proof the machine was repaired properly. These machines have always been so bad off, they were unusable, yet they were kept online constantly, to display popups and act as zombies.
One case it was actaully not the customers machines, but his neighbor who was taking a free ride on their wide open wireless network. Turning on WEP immediatly fixed the problem. The customer couldn't figure it out, because they were a household of Macs, and were sure they couldn't get hijacked like that. They never even thought of the wide open network.
I have a few clients who's companies are setup with a pager type device that constantly cycles through an ever changing PIN. The login in a combination of this, then a password, then whatever the PIN has changed to by that point. Hardest part was very slow typists who couldn't type in the PIN before it had changed too many times and was invalidated.
Note, I didn't setup this system, have just seen in it action for a few different companies.
I preper advertising to be tailored if I have to see it. I usually ignore it, but a good example of when it works was my better half wrote me an e-mail about some Hello Kitty stuff (she's a big collector)to my Gmail account. On the side where the ads are were a ton of things related to Hello Kitty, and I was in need of a present. I clicked, found a good deal, and made her very happy.
I have Time Warner where I live, and get a ton of inDemand stations for $4.95 (plus I'm sure a ton of taxes) a month. It's the best decision I made when adding in the services. I've been watching so many things I never saw before, and have found some great shows. Plus there's BBC on Demand, which saves me a ton of money on DVDs.
Now if my TW DVR only recorded HD broadcasts in HD, it'd be almost perfect.
Yeah, using the latest Firefox here, too. I didn't do anything special, either. The ows is configured with it's default look and feel, too. Maybe there's a version difference in ows itself between us. I'm running newest up to date blah blah of everything. E-mail server just went live about 1 1/2 ago.
I had to setup an Exchange server with outlook web access for one of my clients, and it actually works better in Firefox. It displays everything much faster, even on the first time in, and doesn't have a tendency to boot the user like it does on IE (even though I think that's more user error than anything.)
With most kids this is definetely the case. In my cousins case, it's not even a matter of being tired out, he can't focus on one thing for more than a few moments without spacing out or getting involved in something else. And he'll bounce around from one thing to another like this. But he's a definite severe case, considering he's like this at 24 yet.
I do agree with the urban areas thing, though. A friend of mine in high school was diagnosed as having ADHD as a child, and ended up in "baby rehab" for a ritalin (sp?) addiction at 10. More than likely he was just a hyper kid. I know I was, but I wasn't given drugs. Instead, I was given a bike and skateboard.
I have a cousin who really is ADHD, and has serious problems even as an adult. It always irritates the hell out of me when I hear everyone use this as an excuse to why their kids are brats. My cousin is the only person I've known that I can say truly has ADHD, and he deals with it the best way he can and tries to be as productive as possible.
People do like to make excuses, though, and look for any reason to say the problem isn't themselves. Sometimes taking responsibility is the only way out. I am a smoker, currently working on quitting. While I am addicted to nicotine, it is my own fault. If I had never started, I would not be in the situation of trying to quit. I understand it was my decision that has led me down this path, and it is my decision to stop paying to kill myself with cigarettes. And if I fail in quitting, it is still my fault. I will take responsibility if I fail, which gives me even more reason to suceed.
I own a computer repair shop and Dell is horrible to customers when it comes to being a day or two past warranty. Yet if I call on their behalf, Dell will bend over backwards, maybe thinking we'll recommend people buy their systems. Of course I don't, we have our own systems we'd prefer to sell.
And I've seen so many Dell's fried for reasons like yours. Many times they're only a few months old, too!
Only company I can say I've never had a return issue with was Western Digital. I've had them take care of many drives past warranty as long as it wasn't too long past. Longest they went was 6 months, because the customer had no idea he even had such a warranty on the drive till I gave it a shot and call on his behalf.
I took an advanced history class, American History 103 to be exact, in high school. Our class had a total of 10 books, most of which were falling apart. On top of that, there was 2 seperate classes with 25 to 30 people in them. Our teacher spent her own money getting photocopies made for the class so we could do our homework. Our computer lab consisted of old Macs (none newer than 5 years old) and we even had some Apple II's floating around yet. This was about 12 years ago.
This was in Central NY, USA...
So I don't think you sound like a greedy American, because my old school upgraded not too long ago to some PII's and PIII's.
I have to agree. I have not seen a BSOD on my notebook or desktop, or any of the servers I maintain, in ages. On the other hand, the computers that came into my shop that are loaded up with spyware blue screen constantly. But it's understandable considering the amount of crap on them, I don't care what OS someone is running, if it's that loaded down with utter garbage it's not going to function properly.
The blue screens I do see at my shop are many times so useful, too. I've had a machine that is loaded down with spyware and has hardware failing. The stop code lets me know that it's hardware causing the crash and not the spyware.
My linux machines have also been stable, but I have managed one crash messing with the wireless on a notebook. But all in all, Windows stability has increased tenfold with the NT kernel being on more desktops.
My sig also seems a bit out of place right this second.
I remember playing around with Slackware around 94 and thinking how great it was. I could barely get anything to work at first. But the first time I managed to get something to work felt like it was worth all the trouble. I used to have a keep alive program running, and telnet into my box and place text based card games from school. But then, I was 15-16 when I was doing this, and seemed to have all the time in the world.
I stopped using Linux regulary about 97 because I just didn't have the time and everything I did seemed to involve Windows only software. I recently have gotten back into it, and was amazed the first time I installed Fedora and it found every piece of hardware in the machine. And it wasn't even old hardware. The advancements I've seen since I had last used Linux was amazing.
That's good to know, because my better half and myself have discussed moving to Denmark. Her family is originally from there, and I'm looking to get out of the US if things keep going the way they are. I like that kind of protection (and everything else I seem to see on/. about Denmark always seems to be positive, too.)
How is asking a serious question about the article, the mention of M$ dropping the X-Box hd, overrated? I'm seriously curious if they did drop the hd, because I haven't heard that anywhere else.
Sadly, they never went back to Sony. They just shipped PS2s back to our warehouse, who supposedly repaired them. These refurbished units were almost always defective out of the box when they came back. I think they just turned them on, and if they had a blue light, they sent them back. X-Boxes on the other hand were repaired at a M$ location, and those came back working (they normally just put new guts in the case. Refurbished X-Boxes were an excellent deal for a bit. They even had official boxes just for them.)
I'd say I worked about as far out of the biz as one could, though =D Sadly, it paid more than the position I had before it, which consisted of a company sucking my life blood keeping their servers up. Have to love the US economy. Did manage to build up a nice collection of older RPGs.
Neither system really looks better to me at this point, because I haven't actually played either. That is one of the largest factors for me, along with multiplayer abilities. But I have a feeling I will end up with both units. One of the big draws for a Sony system is the very large chance they'll have GTA again. I have played them, and I enjoyed them to an extent, but they weren't a system seller for me. My largest selling point is a system with strong multiplayer. Especially racing games.
I guess I really am trying to not take sides as much as I did last time. I was disapointed last time around, so I hope for a high quality system from both of them. More competition is hopefully better for all of us.
No, I didn't have the unit vertical. I saw way too many units damage discs because of it. I just had a bad unit all around the first time. I just saw so many units come back, and it wasn't only the original releases. They did use a really low quality drive in them.
With taking advantage of return policies, when it came down to regular customers, we used to let them return them for a new unit if it was obvious they didn't abuse it. It was one of the few things we sold that I honestly thought the warranty was worth it. That was also before they changed our warranty policies and started replacing units with "refurbished" replacements. That was one of the final straws that actually got me out of there and into a real job, too, though.
I bought a PS2 on release. At the time, I was working at a large video game reseller. It at the time was one of the worst gaming decisions I made. It destroyed my games (nice circular burns. And I saw countless other units do the same thing), didn't have a very decent release selection, and didn't play the one PSX game that I hadn't had a chance to play (my PSX broke less than a week before release, only reason I bought one when I did.)
I also bought an X-Box at release. Yes, the game selection yet again wasn't that great. But I found the system just more enjoyable. I was very anti-XB before it's release. Got caught up in my own M$ hating a bit too much. Then it came in, and I played DOA, and I fell in love.
Now I own a mini-PS2 (my first failed, and I refused to buy another one for ages), my original X-Box, and a Gamecube. Most played system? The X-Box, then probably the Gamecube. I almost never touch the PS2. And why? I work, a lot. When I want to play a game, it's usually with friends. So I toss in Burnout 3 in my X-Box, or Mario (varios sport/racing) game into the cube. I have a 51" HDTV, and the X-Box takes advantage of that. PS2 is actually scary looking on it. And the Gamecube, well, Nintendo will have a special spot in my heart. What other company could get a bunch of mid 20's to 30's people together and have them yelling and laughing over a turtle shell knocking into a go-cart.
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Yep, I charge $39 an hour, but that's only at my shop. House calls are extra, depending on mileage and the kind of job.
I completely agree. My current ID says I'm a male with grey eyes that stands 6 foot tall. But I have no problem with it saying that I'm white on top of it. I don't see how that's racist. I am a white guy. So? At least I know another white guy around the same age has to be the thief before any damage could be done. It doesn't rule out all thieves, but it does prevent ones of a different color of grabbing it and using it. I don't think that's racist, I think that's trimming down the odds, even if it's just a little bit.
Time Warner by me used to charge $5 more if you didn't have cable service, but they also offered a basic (up to channel 13) package for the same price. They recently upped the price of the basic package to $8, but for years it worked out great. I wanted the super basic package anyways, because I couldn't even get in the local stations for news where I lived.
Not sure what it will officially go down in history as, but when it was first out there, it came up different depending on the virus scanner.
Of all things, you can't even seem to reach the normal police number where I live anymore. No matter what number you call, you end up with 911. Even the number for parking violations gets you 911, which then gets you a very irriated person on the line.
I know in most places they keep it such a secret, and I'm sure we don't know the "real" number here, but with something like 10 numbers that all go there...
Answer to "Is Jeeves gay?" http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/isjeevesgay.html
I liked the old answer that used to go to a fake 404 error page. "Error 404, none of your business"
And yes, I know that search is immature. But I was hoping for the fake error message page to still be around.
I've had machines show up in my shop along with notes from Road Runner stating that they can't regain their service until they show proof the machine was repaired properly. These machines have always been so bad off, they were unusable, yet they were kept online constantly, to display popups and act as zombies.
One case it was actaully not the customers machines, but his neighbor who was taking a free ride on their wide open wireless network. Turning on WEP immediatly fixed the problem. The customer couldn't figure it out, because they were a household of Macs, and were sure they couldn't get hijacked like that. They never even thought of the wide open network.
I have a few clients who's companies are setup with a pager type device that constantly cycles through an ever changing PIN. The login in a combination of this, then a password, then whatever the PIN has changed to by that point. Hardest part was very slow typists who couldn't type in the PIN before it had changed too many times and was invalidated.
Note, I didn't setup this system, have just seen in it action for a few different companies.
I preper advertising to be tailored if I have to see it. I usually ignore it, but a good example of when it works was my better half wrote me an e-mail about some Hello Kitty stuff (she's a big collector)to my Gmail account. On the side where the ads are were a ton of things related to Hello Kitty, and I was in need of a present. I clicked, found a good deal, and made her very happy.
I have Time Warner where I live, and get a ton of inDemand stations for $4.95 (plus I'm sure a ton of taxes) a month. It's the best decision I made when adding in the services. I've been watching so many things I never saw before, and have found some great shows. Plus there's BBC on Demand, which saves me a ton of money on DVDs.
Now if my TW DVR only recorded HD broadcasts in HD, it'd be almost perfect.
Yeah, using the latest Firefox here, too. I didn't do anything special, either. The ows is configured with it's default look and feel, too. Maybe there's a version difference in ows itself between us. I'm running newest up to date blah blah of everything. E-mail server just went live about 1 1/2 ago.
I had to setup an Exchange server with outlook web access for one of my clients, and it actually works better in Firefox. It displays everything much faster, even on the first time in, and doesn't have a tendency to boot the user like it does on IE (even though I think that's more user error than anything.)
With most kids this is definetely the case. In my cousins case, it's not even a matter of being tired out, he can't focus on one thing for more than a few moments without spacing out or getting involved in something else. And he'll bounce around from one thing to another like this. But he's a definite severe case, considering he's like this at 24 yet.
I do agree with the urban areas thing, though. A friend of mine in high school was diagnosed as having ADHD as a child, and ended up in "baby rehab" for a ritalin (sp?) addiction at 10. More than likely he was just a hyper kid. I know I was, but I wasn't given drugs. Instead, I was given a bike and skateboard.
I have a cousin who really is ADHD, and has serious problems even as an adult. It always irritates the hell out of me when I hear everyone use this as an excuse to why their kids are brats. My cousin is the only person I've known that I can say truly has ADHD, and he deals with it the best way he can and tries to be as productive as possible.
People do like to make excuses, though, and look for any reason to say the problem isn't themselves. Sometimes taking responsibility is the only way out. I am a smoker, currently working on quitting. While I am addicted to nicotine, it is my own fault. If I had never started, I would not be in the situation of trying to quit. I understand it was my decision that has led me down this path, and it is my decision to stop paying to kill myself with cigarettes. And if I fail in quitting, it is still my fault. I will take responsibility if I fail, which gives me even more reason to suceed.
I own a computer repair shop and Dell is horrible to customers when it comes to being a day or two past warranty. Yet if I call on their behalf, Dell will bend over backwards, maybe thinking we'll recommend people buy their systems. Of course I don't, we have our own systems we'd prefer to sell.
And I've seen so many Dell's fried for reasons like yours. Many times they're only a few months old, too!
Only company I can say I've never had a return issue with was Western Digital. I've had them take care of many drives past warranty as long as it wasn't too long past. Longest they went was 6 months, because the customer had no idea he even had such a warranty on the drive till I gave it a shot and call on his behalf.
I took an advanced history class, American History 103 to be exact, in high school. Our class had a total of 10 books, most of which were falling apart. On top of that, there was 2 seperate classes with 25 to 30 people in them. Our teacher spent her own money getting photocopies made for the class so we could do our homework. Our computer lab consisted of old Macs (none newer than 5 years old) and we even had some Apple II's floating around yet. This was about 12 years ago.
This was in Central NY, USA...
So I don't think you sound like a greedy American, because my old school upgraded not too long ago to some PII's and PIII's.
I have to agree. I have not seen a BSOD on my notebook or desktop, or any of the servers I maintain, in ages. On the other hand, the computers that came into my shop that are loaded up with spyware blue screen constantly. But it's understandable considering the amount of crap on them, I don't care what OS someone is running, if it's that loaded down with utter garbage it's not going to function properly.
The blue screens I do see at my shop are many times so useful, too. I've had a machine that is loaded down with spyware and has hardware failing. The stop code lets me know that it's hardware causing the crash and not the spyware.
My linux machines have also been stable, but I have managed one crash messing with the wireless on a notebook. But all in all, Windows stability has increased tenfold with the NT kernel being on more desktops.
My sig also seems a bit out of place right this second.
I remember playing around with Slackware around 94 and thinking how great it was. I could barely get anything to work at first. But the first time I managed to get something to work felt like it was worth all the trouble. I used to have a keep alive program running, and telnet into my box and place text based card games from school. But then, I was 15-16 when I was doing this, and seemed to have all the time in the world.
I stopped using Linux regulary about 97 because I just didn't have the time and everything I did seemed to involve Windows only software. I recently have gotten back into it, and was amazed the first time I installed Fedora and it found every piece of hardware in the machine. And it wasn't even old hardware. The advancements I've seen since I had last used Linux was amazing.
That's good to know, because my better half and myself have discussed moving to Denmark. Her family is originally from there, and I'm looking to get out of the US if things keep going the way they are. I like that kind of protection (and everything else I seem to see on /. about Denmark always seems to be positive, too.)
How is asking a serious question about the article, the mention of M$ dropping the X-Box hd, overrated? I'm seriously curious if they did drop the hd, because I haven't heard that anywhere else.
Since when did M$ remove the hard drive from the X-Box? I haven't seen a unit without it!
Sadly, they never went back to Sony. They just shipped PS2s back to our warehouse, who supposedly repaired them. These refurbished units were almost always defective out of the box when they came back. I think they just turned them on, and if they had a blue light, they sent them back. X-Boxes on the other hand were repaired at a M$ location, and those came back working (they normally just put new guts in the case. Refurbished X-Boxes were an excellent deal for a bit. They even had official boxes just for them.)
I'd say I worked about as far out of the biz as one could, though =D Sadly, it paid more than the position I had before it, which consisted of a company sucking my life blood keeping their servers up. Have to love the US economy. Did manage to build up a nice collection of older RPGs.
Neither system really looks better to me at this point, because I haven't actually played either. That is one of the largest factors for me, along with multiplayer abilities. But I have a feeling I will end up with both units. One of the big draws for a Sony system is the very large chance they'll have GTA again. I have played them, and I enjoyed them to an extent, but they weren't a system seller for me. My largest selling point is a system with strong multiplayer. Especially racing games.
I guess I really am trying to not take sides as much as I did last time. I was disapointed last time around, so I hope for a high quality system from both of them. More competition is hopefully better for all of us.
No, I didn't have the unit vertical. I saw way too many units damage discs because of it. I just had a bad unit all around the first time. I just saw so many units come back, and it wasn't only the original releases. They did use a really low quality drive in them.
With taking advantage of return policies, when it came down to regular customers, we used to let them return them for a new unit if it was obvious they didn't abuse it. It was one of the few things we sold that I honestly thought the warranty was worth it. That was also before they changed our warranty policies and started replacing units with "refurbished" replacements. That was one of the final straws that actually got me out of there and into a real job, too, though.
I bought a PS2 on release. At the time, I was working at a large video game reseller. It at the time was one of the worst gaming decisions I made. It destroyed my games (nice circular burns. And I saw countless other units do the same thing), didn't have a very decent release selection, and didn't play the one PSX game that I hadn't had a chance to play (my PSX broke less than a week before release, only reason I bought one when I did.)
I also bought an X-Box at release. Yes, the game selection yet again wasn't that great. But I found the system just more enjoyable. I was very anti-XB before it's release. Got caught up in my own M$ hating a bit too much. Then it came in, and I played DOA, and I fell in love.
Now I own a mini-PS2 (my first failed, and I refused to buy another one for ages), my original X-Box, and a Gamecube. Most played system? The X-Box, then probably the Gamecube. I almost never touch the PS2. And why? I work, a lot. When I want to play a game, it's usually with friends. So I toss in Burnout 3 in my X-Box, or Mario (varios sport/racing) game into the cube. I have a 51" HDTV, and the X-Box takes advantage of that. PS2 is actually scary looking on it. And the Gamecube, well, Nintendo will have a special spot in my heart. What other company could get a bunch of mid 20's to 30's people together and have them yelling and laughing over a turtle shell knocking into a go-cart.