I'm not about to spend $2000+ on a small HDTV. It's just not worth it. But if a decent sized one with a low cost is available that also doesn't suck balls, I'm so there.
Someone doing this is a problem in so many ways. He's open himself up for lawsuits out the wazoo. First, Defamation of Character leaps to mind. Secondly, he CANNOT withhold your paycheck. If he doesn't pay you, sue his ass!
I'm sorry, but this makes "small business" owners look bad. And quite frankly, were I you, I'd bail, request my paycheck before I leave, and just be done with it. It's hard enough for small business owners to find good help for what they can afford to pay without having to deal with former employers that pulled this kind of crap.
Time and time again slashdot reports about a Microsoft commissioned look into Redhat or Suse running Apache vs. Windows with IIS. These are a waste of people's time. Plain and simple. Speaking from an ISP/Webhost that switched from Win2k3 to Linux (notice no redhat and suse mentionting) and apache I get much higher performance from linux and apache than windows/IIS could ever provide.
On that note,/. wasting front page space for something like this is literally insulting to those of us (and I think you know who you are) that know the truth.
I mean...IF, god forbid, windows with IIS was able to out perform linux/apache it's either because of....
A) poor configuration on the linux admin(s) part b) using nothing BUT MS proprietary stuff that runs all through "integrated" programs and thus becomes kernel level which is unsafe as hell c) Jaded results looking at ONLY what IIS does better than apache.
I'm tired of this "debate" and having seen both sides of it, I know the truth. Which is why I'll stick with my linux servers running apache....
Maybe you should have read further before getting on your high horse with your comment. As I said later in the post, what works good for you might not work good for me. It also stands to reason that it goes the other way around.
Just because _I_ got a performance boost doesn't mean you will. There's all kinds of different factors here. Hardware, things installed and running. Code OF those things running. I just stated a fact as _I_ see it.
And for what it's worth, you don't snort speed. You POP speed. Cocaine is the snorting drug.
Aside from the fact that all the trolls seem to be the first person(s) to post here. I'll leave my thoughts about their.....short-comings that make them feel the need to state the things that they doout of this.
As a former Slackware and Redhat that is now a Gentoo user, I have to say this is a great thing. The one thing about Gentoo that I dislike is the length of time for installation. Granted, it's a great thing for a newbie to do to really learn about how their system works and how it comes together. But it should be an OPTION to do it that way. Many users don't want to have to go throught all that mess.
As for those of you that seem to think that Gentoo ISN'T faster. I have news for you, it is. I went from Redhat on 8 machines to Gentoo on 5 and I'm doing about 10% more work than I originally was with the SAME systems that were originally running redhat.
But let's face it. Everyone has their own opinions when it comes to what linux distro is best. NOONE is really wrong in their opinion. Do you know why? BECAUSE LINUX IS ABOUT FREEDOM IN THE FIRST PLACE! You're free to choose what distro you want to use. You're free to choose to roll your own, you're even free to use any software package out there you want and not use what's supplied with the distro.
So I say to ANYONE who's 'holier than thou' about their distro of choice. Bugger off. Just because you like it and it works great for you doesn't mean everyone else will think the same. I don't cram down people's throats that they should use Gentoo, but I'm a Gentoo user. Which brings to mind, do you know what has been the cause of every major civilization since the dawn of time? Internal fighting. So why are linux people fighting when we should be joining against Redmond?
Anyone that I speak with about "alternative" products are either
A) Friends who ask my opinion B) Family who ask my opinion C) Customers who are on my network
Therefor we "recommend" that certain products be used. Because we have been around since 1991 and have proven ourselves to be HONEST above all else we don't have to do too much other than recommend a product and people will atleast try it.
We will flat out tell them things like "why don't you try OpenOffice instead of Office. It's free so if you don't like it or it doesn't fit your needs you can go buy Office. If it does, that just saved you $300."
Or even things like "You may have noticed your computer slowing down lately. That's probably from spyware which several flaws in Internet Explorer allow it to be installed many times without your consent or knowledge. If you use Firefox which is just as good as IE if not better and doesn't have the flaws the IE has you won't have this kind of problem.
Of course, we don't recommend products we don't stand behind and we will also tell a customer. "I've never heard of it or used it so I can't tell you how good or bad it is". It all boils down to people trust us. As their ISP we send out announcements periodically to let people know about issues that might affect them and how to take care of themselves. We do this because we CARE about our customers.
When you're a hormone driven teenager porn is something that will somehow mysteriously find it's way to you. 2 out of 5 machines that were brought into my shop TODAY were here because of damage to the system. 1 was a 15 year old, the other 16. Both had P2P and "other" items on it. One machine literally had 90gigs of porn! Take about having his stroke material all planned out. Granted, I'm talking about the blockster and not the wallfly, but either is a great thing. it would even be better if they were in a package together since they both are kind of the same overall purpose.
Anyway, both parents were extremely upset as they had BOTH told their kids no P2P network crap but they did it anyway. Of course, if they didn't let them have their computers in their room that might have been a bit different, but what do I know?
Anyway, this is a great idea, in my humble opinion. I receive calls all the time from parents wanting to know how to stop their kids from getting into that kind of crap.
That SBC, and Comcast are the worst. Comcast literally being the worst. Not only due to poorly updated DNS servers, but the proxy servers also pose a bit of a problem.
As an ISP that's also a host, I can't tell you how many times I'll have a customer call up. "We just moved our website to you, but we can't see it. What's going on?" 99 times out of a hundred they are on SBC/Yahoo DSL or Comcast cable. I've even had some of our webhost resellers argue this point with me. Facts are facts, if I can see the site using my DNS servers, the TLD is pointing to MY DNS servers, it's there and working. If that customer pings their URL and comes back with some other IP than mine, it's obviously going to the wrong location.
This is only one of the MANY reasons I tell customers to pay a little more for service from a smaller company that pays attention to detail and cares more about quality of service than how much money is going into their pocket.
There are plenty of smaller providers out there that ARE knowledgable, with help desks in the US, and aren't "technically challenged" that think they can do it because they can work on their own computers without breaking them (which is often not the case anyway).
My advice before bothering to do any of this crap. Show them your disgust and find a local company. It might cost you $10 more a month, and it might even be cheaper. If you're cable, I'm sure it WILL be cheaper. Not only will you get better service, things will just work right. When you have a problem you'll talk to someone who can actually FIX it instead of making you take 2 days walking through stuff on your computer knowing full well it's a network problem on their end.
Basically, stop being a cheapskate, then complaining about the level of service you're getting. You get what you pay for.
I'm a qualified technician. I can vouche for the fact that there are quite a few out there that AREN'T qualified. But blanketing the entire industry like that. I'm quite insulted by being grouped with the majority of the "techs" out there.
People go elsewhere because "it's cheaper" but then they bitch about the quality of service they get. It's something I've been complaining about for a long time. I'm good, I know what I'm doing and if you want quality work, you're going to pay for it. But don't group me with the guys that are nothing more than hacks that were home geeks and thought they could turn a hobby into a living and screw people in the process.
They rebrand just about everything as it is. So what do they need to know about HDTV? Nothing. I can sell HDTVs as well. It's quite simple. Call up a vendor "Hi, I'd like 200 52" Plasma TVs and 400 40" LCD TV's please". Atleast I don't hide the fact that I'm buying my equipment from other sources. And I sure as HELL don't go buy Dell's and say they are mine like Dell buys Compaq and HP equipment then rebrand them. Yes...they do it.
BEWM, I just became an HDTV reseller. OH WAIT! I have several in my home already and I'm also building HTPC's and Home theaters for clients. I'll be damned, I guess I beat Dell to something.....again.
I said that they were shitting on their early adopters and the people that made redhat what it was back when they first started doing this crap. I'll also add, that not only because of the way they did it, but also the speed in which they did it, I stopped using Redhat about 2 years ago when I saw the writting on the wall.
Granted I had an advantage, I had friends that were RH employees. Even though they didn't out right tell me what was coming, I was able to read between the lines.
I'm not a cheapskate, and I would have been happy to stay with redhat...IF they hadn't moved the way they did.....
If you want always on, pay for it. That's how it works. Always on = business class DSL. Of course business class is going to cost more.
If you piggyback in on someone else's insecure wifi, not only is that theft of service (which is illegal), you're still not necessarily going to be using "always on" DSL.
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. People want cheap, but they want high quality. You can't have both people. If you want cheap, go to SBC or Verizon....but don't complain when you have to spend a month without DSL because they can't fix the problem. Or pay a little more for people who actually know how things work, make things work, and keep you working 24/7.
Our DSL is always on and Static IP. If people complain that paying $49.95 for something like that, well, go ask SBC what you have to do for their business class DSL...THAT still uses PPPoE to assign the IPs and everything else. Not to mention, when you have service problems, god forbid getting it working again.
Granted I wasn't on a win2k3 machine. But I'm sorry, 12 hacks in 3 months from a known security bug that wasn't patched. I just don't buy it. I switched to linux and that problem went away yet I could still see the constant attempts to get in the box again after the switch. And they switched to attempting linux 'sploits, but still nothing.
On top of that, my "home" server doesn't get handled the same as my production boxes. And Redhat's patches don't necessarily have a DAMN thing to do with Apache's patches.
I seem to recall a comparison I saw on/. around a year ago.
One business owner says to another. "My drivers only had 2 accidents last year. How many did yours have?"
"10"
"wow, sounds like your drivers need some training"
"Well, that depends, how many trucks do you have on the road?"
"12"
"I have 5000"
There's probably 1000 more software packages in redhat than there are in Windows. Of COURSE there's going to be more patches.
If you look at our website, you'll see lack of clutter. Imagine that! We've never believed that clutter will get people to your content. All the designs we've done have been clutterless. Granted some of them from way back in the day look rather....childish and I'm not exactly happy to have our names on them now since the client refuses to update, and things changed when I took over the company.
But alas, I've always wondered where having a busy site actually became what was "cool".
Oh, I also forgot to mention several other things. 50% of the Hummers sold are sold in CA. CA has the largest population of any state in the country, and EVERY family has atleast one large SUV in it, and many cases there's one for every family member.
The #1 problem with CA and "the roads" is a little organization called "Cal Trans". This is the organization that handles all the roadway projects. They have YET to be able to complete a project on time, or on budget. They also screw up roads and interstates with an alarmingly high ability.
Picture this, if you will. An on and off ramp (one of the combo ramps that serves as both, first on...then at the end it's an offramp) that's 2 lanes wide and 65' long. A full size rig, the trailer is 53' long which doesn't include the extra 10-15 feet for the distance from the back of the trailer to the front of the rig.
53'+15' = 68'.
How is a 68' rig suppose to manage going over 2 lanes to get on the interstate while he has to fight with buses, SUVs, and people who think they are the only person on the road AND manage to get it done in less room than his rig is long.
I'm right there with you. I live in CA and I moved out here 5 years ago from Indiana. I'll tell you right now. First chance I get I'm moving back home. I'm sick to death of these liberal/socialistic whinners out here that go beyond pushing the envelope, that they're cutting themselves when they lick it.
Personally, if this law were to pass (which I don't think it will) I'll be one of the first to move out of this state if I haven't already.
They already smog machines every so often. When it's being smogged they enter the milage. What's wrong with using that milage information? Give the people with classic cars a break (since real classics are usually babied and aren't on the road much anyway) and those with the smokey cars, well, they get reported and are soon no longer allowed to renew registration if they don't clean the car exhaust up anyway.
I'm not a tin foil kind of guy either, but damnit, this flat out ticks me off and it gets WAY too far/close to this whole big brother thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not about to spend $2000+ on a small HDTV. It's just not worth it. But if a decent sized one with a low cost is available that also doesn't suck balls, I'm so there.
It's Mr. Pot on line 2 and wishes to speak with you.
Someone doing this is a problem in so many ways. He's open himself up for lawsuits out the wazoo. First, Defamation of Character leaps to mind. Secondly, he CANNOT withhold your paycheck. If he doesn't pay you, sue his ass!
I'm sorry, but this makes "small business" owners look bad. And quite frankly, were I you, I'd bail, request my paycheck before I leave, and just be done with it. It's hard enough for small business owners to find good help for what they can afford to pay without having to deal with former employers that pulled this kind of crap.
Time and time again slashdot reports about a Microsoft commissioned look into Redhat or Suse running Apache vs. Windows with IIS. These are a waste of people's time. Plain and simple. Speaking from an ISP/Webhost that switched from Win2k3 to Linux (notice no redhat and suse mentionting) and apache I get much higher performance from linux and apache than windows/IIS could ever provide.
/. wasting front page space for something like this is literally insulting to those of us (and I think you know who you are) that know the truth.
On that note,
I mean...IF, god forbid, windows with IIS was able to out perform linux/apache it's either because of....
A) poor configuration on the linux admin(s) part
b) using nothing BUT MS proprietary stuff that runs all through "integrated" programs and thus becomes kernel level which is unsafe as hell
c) Jaded results looking at ONLY what IIS does better than apache.
I'm tired of this "debate" and having seen both sides of it, I know the truth. Which is why I'll stick with my linux servers running apache....
Maybe you should have read further before getting on your high horse with your comment. As I said later in the post, what works good for you might not work good for me. It also stands to reason that it goes the other way around.
Just because _I_ got a performance boost doesn't mean you will. There's all kinds of different factors here. Hardware, things installed and running. Code OF those things running. I just stated a fact as _I_ see it.
And for what it's worth, you don't snort speed. You POP speed. Cocaine is the snorting drug.
Aside from the fact that all the trolls seem to be the first person(s) to post here. I'll leave my thoughts about their.....short-comings that make them feel the need to state the things that they doout of this. As a former Slackware and Redhat that is now a Gentoo user, I have to say this is a great thing. The one thing about Gentoo that I dislike is the length of time for installation. Granted, it's a great thing for a newbie to do to really learn about how their system works and how it comes together. But it should be an OPTION to do it that way. Many users don't want to have to go throught all that mess. As for those of you that seem to think that Gentoo ISN'T faster. I have news for you, it is. I went from Redhat on 8 machines to Gentoo on 5 and I'm doing about 10% more work than I originally was with the SAME systems that were originally running redhat. But let's face it. Everyone has their own opinions when it comes to what linux distro is best. NOONE is really wrong in their opinion. Do you know why? BECAUSE LINUX IS ABOUT FREEDOM IN THE FIRST PLACE! You're free to choose what distro you want to use. You're free to choose to roll your own, you're even free to use any software package out there you want and not use what's supplied with the distro. So I say to ANYONE who's 'holier than thou' about their distro of choice. Bugger off. Just because you like it and it works great for you doesn't mean everyone else will think the same. I don't cram down people's throats that they should use Gentoo, but I'm a Gentoo user. Which brings to mind, do you know what has been the cause of every major civilization since the dawn of time? Internal fighting. So why are linux people fighting when we should be joining against Redmond?
Anyone that I speak with about "alternative" products are either
A) Friends who ask my opinion
B) Family who ask my opinion
C) Customers who are on my network
Therefor we "recommend" that certain products be used. Because we have been around since 1991 and have proven ourselves to be HONEST above all else we don't have to do too much other than recommend a product and people will atleast try it.
We will flat out tell them things like "why don't you try OpenOffice instead of Office. It's free so if you don't like it or it doesn't fit your needs you can go buy Office. If it does, that just saved you $300."
Or even things like "You may have noticed your computer slowing down lately. That's probably from spyware which several flaws in Internet Explorer allow it to be installed many times without your consent or knowledge. If you use Firefox which is just as good as IE if not better and doesn't have the flaws the IE has you won't have this kind of problem.
Of course, we don't recommend products we don't stand behind and we will also tell a customer. "I've never heard of it or used it so I can't tell you how good or bad it is". It all boils down to people trust us. As their ISP we send out announcements periodically to let people know about issues that might affect them and how to take care of themselves. We do this because we CARE about our customers.
When you're a hormone driven teenager porn is something that will somehow mysteriously find it's way to you. 2 out of 5 machines that were brought into my shop TODAY were here because of damage to the system. 1 was a 15 year old, the other 16. Both had P2P and "other" items on it. One machine literally had 90gigs of porn! Take about having his stroke material all planned out. Granted, I'm talking about the blockster and not the wallfly, but either is a great thing. it would even be better if they were in a package together since they both are kind of the same overall purpose.
Anyway, both parents were extremely upset as they had BOTH told their kids no P2P network crap but they did it anyway. Of course, if they didn't let them have their computers in their room that might have been a bit different, but what do I know?
Anyway, this is a great idea, in my humble opinion. I receive calls all the time from parents wanting to know how to stop their kids from getting into that kind of crap.
That SBC, and Comcast are the worst. Comcast literally being the worst. Not only due to poorly updated DNS servers, but the proxy servers also pose a bit of a problem.
As an ISP that's also a host, I can't tell you how many times I'll have a customer call up. "We just moved our website to you, but we can't see it. What's going on?" 99 times out of a hundred they are on SBC/Yahoo DSL or Comcast cable. I've even had some of our webhost resellers argue this point with me. Facts are facts, if I can see the site using my DNS servers, the TLD is pointing to MY DNS servers, it's there and working. If that customer pings their URL and comes back with some other IP than mine, it's obviously going to the wrong location.
This is only one of the MANY reasons I tell customers to pay a little more for service from a smaller company that pays attention to detail and cares more about quality of service than how much money is going into their pocket.
There are plenty of smaller providers out there that ARE knowledgable, with help desks in the US, and aren't "technically challenged" that think they can do it because they can work on their own computers without breaking them (which is often not the case anyway).
My advice before bothering to do any of this crap. Show them your disgust and find a local company. It might cost you $10 more a month, and it might even be cheaper. If you're cable, I'm sure it WILL be cheaper. Not only will you get better service, things will just work right. When you have a problem you'll talk to someone who can actually FIX it instead of making you take 2 days walking through stuff on your computer knowing full well it's a network problem on their end.
Basically, stop being a cheapskate, then complaining about the level of service you're getting. You get what you pay for.
I'm a qualified technician. I can vouche for the fact that there are quite a few out there that AREN'T qualified. But blanketing the entire industry like that. I'm quite insulted by being grouped with the majority of the "techs" out there. People go elsewhere because "it's cheaper" but then they bitch about the quality of service they get. It's something I've been complaining about for a long time. I'm good, I know what I'm doing and if you want quality work, you're going to pay for it. But don't group me with the guys that are nothing more than hacks that were home geeks and thought they could turn a hobby into a living and screw people in the process.
They rebrand just about everything as it is. So what do they need to know about HDTV? Nothing. I can sell HDTVs as well. It's quite simple. Call up a vendor "Hi, I'd like 200 52" Plasma TVs and 400 40" LCD TV's please". Atleast I don't hide the fact that I'm buying my equipment from other sources. And I sure as HELL don't go buy Dell's and say they are mine like Dell buys Compaq and HP equipment then rebrand them. Yes...they do it.
BEWM, I just became an HDTV reseller. OH WAIT! I have several in my home already and I'm also building HTPC's and Home theaters for clients. I'll be damned, I guess I beat Dell to something.....again.
I said that they were shitting on their early adopters and the people that made redhat what it was back when they first started doing this crap. I'll also add, that not only because of the way they did it, but also the speed in which they did it, I stopped using Redhat about 2 years ago when I saw the writting on the wall.
Granted I had an advantage, I had friends that were RH employees. Even though they didn't out right tell me what was coming, I was able to read between the lines.
I'm not a cheapskate, and I would have been happy to stay with redhat...IF they hadn't moved the way they did.....
If you want always on, pay for it. That's how it works. Always on = business class DSL. Of course business class is going to cost more.
If you piggyback in on someone else's insecure wifi, not only is that theft of service (which is illegal), you're still not necessarily going to be using "always on" DSL.
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. People want cheap, but they want high quality. You can't have both people. If you want cheap, go to SBC or Verizon....but don't complain when you have to spend a month without DSL because they can't fix the problem. Or pay a little more for people who actually know how things work, make things work, and keep you working 24/7.
Our DSL is always on and Static IP. If people complain that paying $49.95 for something like that, well, go ask SBC what you have to do for their business class DSL...THAT still uses PPPoE to assign the IPs and everything else. Not to mention, when you have service problems, god forbid getting it working again.
On top of that, my "home" server doesn't get handled the same as my production boxes. And Redhat's patches don't necessarily have a DAMN thing to do with Apache's patches.
I seem to recall a comparison I saw on
There's probably 1000 more software packages in redhat than there are in Windows. Of COURSE there's going to be more patches.
If you look at our website, you'll see lack of clutter. Imagine that! We've never believed that clutter will get people to your content. All the designs we've done have been clutterless. Granted some of them from way back in the day look rather....childish and I'm not exactly happy to have our names on them now since the client refuses to update, and things changed when I took over the company.
But alas, I've always wondered where having a busy site actually became what was "cool".
Of course Microsoft is going to want more evidence. I would say by now they are kind of tired of getting caught.
too many things can be found there. warez, porn, porn, warez, porn, porn, porn, porn.....You get the idea.
Oh, I also forgot to mention several other things. 50% of the Hummers sold are sold in CA. CA has the largest population of any state in the country, and EVERY family has atleast one large SUV in it, and many cases there's one for every family member.
The #1 problem with CA and "the roads" is a little organization called "Cal Trans". This is the organization that handles all the roadway projects. They have YET to be able to complete a project on time, or on budget. They also screw up roads and interstates with an alarmingly high ability.
Picture this, if you will. An on and off ramp (one of the combo ramps that serves as both, first on...then at the end it's an offramp) that's 2 lanes wide and 65' long. A full size rig, the trailer is 53' long which doesn't include the extra 10-15 feet for the distance from the back of the trailer to the front of the rig.
53'+15' = 68'.
How is a 68' rig suppose to manage going over 2 lanes to get on the interstate while he has to fight with buses, SUVs, and people who think they are the only person on the road AND manage to get it done in less room than his rig is long.
I'm right there with you. I live in CA and I moved out here 5 years ago from Indiana. I'll tell you right now. First chance I get I'm moving back home. I'm sick to death of these liberal/socialistic whinners out here that go beyond pushing the envelope, that they're cutting themselves when they lick it.
Personally, if this law were to pass (which I don't think it will) I'll be one of the first to move out of this state if I haven't already.
They already smog machines every so often. When it's being smogged they enter the milage. What's wrong with using that milage information? Give the people with classic cars a break (since real classics are usually babied and aren't on the road much anyway) and those with the smokey cars, well, they get reported and are soon no longer allowed to renew registration if they don't clean the car exhaust up anyway.
I'm not a tin foil kind of guy either, but damnit, this flat out ticks me off and it gets WAY too far/close to this whole big brother thing.