Huh. Last time I walked into a sprint store to drop my service and take care of some weird billing, I just walked up to a sales rep and asked to speak with a manager about account issues I was having. They walked me over to the manager, and I got things taken care of. All without making myself look like a total jackass! It's amazing what being a decent person gets you every once in a while.
Unless you spend time working in that environment, you just don't understand it.
I worked in that environment for 3 years. I understand it quite well...and the only time you ever hang up on someone is if they are being a complete a-hole, or there's a connection problem. If there's a connection problem, I always tried to call them back.
You can ASK people "if you participate, please let us know".
Yes, because those phone numbers would NEVER be posted to say, a/., digg, etc thread (or headline/summary for that matter). Hell, I'd email everyone I could with the phone numbers (and yes, a link to TFA), but I doubt half of them that called would bother checking the site.
Well, as the above poster said, doing whatever you can to draw attention to yourself and get your point across. Gotta make sure it's done in a positive way though...somehow your message probably won't look so good as you're ranting it on the way to gitmo.
Seriously, if a senator (err, their assistant) starts reading a ton of mail saying "hey, this sucks, this is why, vote that sucker down" (word it better), they're going to take notice. While they are not likely reading their own messages, I would be willing to bet that their assistants would bring up issues that are getting a lot of notice. If this issue isn't terribly time-sensitive, send a snail mail to their office. If it is (like this one), send an email. Get your friends to send an email. Have your friends get their friends to send soem mail. That's how you get noticed. If you sit and do nothing, no one's going to notice. Gotta give those interns something to do. Just google your senator, you shouldn't have any trouble finding their contact infos.
Of course, if your senator kicked as much ass as mine does, all you'd have to do is send them a thank you note.
Honestly curious: For the artifacts and jittering, did you see that while watching HD on Comcast? Because they compress the hell out of everything, and in a given hour of watching TV the image will artifact and stall probably 3 or 4 times at least. Wouldn't surprise me to hear it from a demo setup at a store either, just wondering.
I do something similar...I use multiple DVD spindles to hold movies/tv seasons, but I just keep them in alphabetical order. I made up a spreadsheet with a listing of all the movies I've got, followed by sections for location (dvd rack for retail, spindles for uhhh movies without cases, cabinets for VHS), format (actual dvd, divx, etc), then genre and sub-genres. So when I want to watch a comedy, just use the auto-filter deal in excel to show only comedy movies.
This way saves on digging through spindles which saves some disk wear and tear trying to remember what you've got. It also gives you a nice way to inventory your movies (no more "I swear I had that movie"), and if you let a friend borrow a movie, you can mark down who has it. Great for sending to a friend if you want to swap movies for the weekend too.
Despite how much the man tried to keep this knowledge from him, he resisted the stranglehold, and was able to get that information. Definitely an example to all those in favor of true information freedom!
I dunno what the goal of it all is, but it sure does prove one thing: Google execs don't know jack.
Everyone knows that you skip past the Dalles! You have to get to the end of the trail before winter sets in, and Cindy's life is on the line here! There's no sense in restocking when there's only a few more days till you get to float down the river. They don't need two new data centers, they just need an Apple 2GS!
Genuine Advantage is entirely optional. I do not have it running on any of my XP boxes. It didn't even come preinstalled. The user has to explicity allow it to install (unless you set your settings to automatically download and install like an idiot...in which case you agreed to it anyway). Is it reasonable yet?
I guess I should have been even more specific. I was a student attending the university, and the university had a tech support group called "Ask5000". They employed something 15-20 students, paying them 6 to 7 dollars an hour (tax free, so it was decent enough deal for both parties). There are two service windows where a student can bring their laptop to get help done, they could call in (x5000, hence the name), or they could email their issue. When you have a student base of 7000, odds are there are going to be at least a couple people waiting to be helped out. So while you're waiting for those scans to get done, you're actually helping out several other students at the same time. It wasn't unusual to have shelves of laptops running antivirus/antispyware scans. So taking that long wasn't really a big deal. If the fix was going to take a while, we could issue out loaner laptops and transfer their class work over real quick before getting down to business. This allowed us the time we needed to take care of things. So no, we didn't actually spend those 5 hours staring at the same computer. We spent a lot of time honing in our multitasking skills.
I realize this was in a college environment, so things were done a bit differently from an IT perspective. However, since graduating I had a short job for a furniture manufacturer, and now currently at a large corporating (not doing tech support anymore however). Both companies had a similar approach to their tech support though. Go out to the users cube/office, attempt to fix the issue. If it could take a while, get the user a loaner laptop and take the broken stuff back to the lab to fix it. Since AD is in use, when the user logs on the appropriate scripts are run, and access is granted to the majority of things they need to do their job. Issue solved.
And of course, I encourage you to re-read my previous post, as it explains why I didn't just hand out ghost images like candy. Mainly, second paragraph. Think of the support I did like support done at say, Best Buy. If you brought in your personal computer to fix a problem, and they said "sorry, gonna have to reinstall windows" after 10 minutes of looking at it, wouldn't you be pissed? We treated the people we were helping as paying customers, which makes you look at the whole tech support thing from a different view.
I guess I should have been more specific. I used to work tech support for a university that had a "laptop program", which kinda kills most of your points relating to my experience in tech support (no offense). We had no (directly) paying customers, idle time due to computer problems for students had no affect on any bottom lines (related to our department/university), and our policies clearly stated what the students would receive from us. We had site licenses for Windows XP, Office, Adobe Acrobat/Photoshop, etc. Out of the couple thousand laptops we had deployed, there were only 2 configurations in circulation. Students with their own computers obviously did not receive our images, but could use most of the software we had licenses for. New software was not deployed, it was chosen to be installed by the students. Anti-virus upgrades occurred only when the student hopped on the university network. They would first pull an IP from our reg server, which ran a script to check to ensure their defs/windows updates were ok.
I do not prefer to start over. I have no training from Microsoft. They have not tried to tell me anything regarding fixing or starting over. Years of computer use has taught me to be exceptionally thorough. To me imaging is a very very last resort, and only when I had spent several hours on a system. I'm generally driven by finding and fixing the problem, so it just wasn't in my nature to do so. Plus our general policy that imaging a computer was frowned upon, especially by the students staring you in the face when you have to tell them you need to wipe their drive. Not many people like losing a couple semesters worth of class work (as well as all those videos and mp3s they spent so much time downloading). Imaging a problem away = bad.
My personal method of cleaning a system was probably a bit more zealous than other people I worked with, but I wanted to be able to say with full confidence that a students computer was clean. I hated having a student come back saying "I just had this in, and they said it was fixed." I made sure none of those types of tickets were signed by me. We had very little in the way of official tools to use for cleaning, it was more "use what you can find for free". We had a corporate license for Symantec, but obviously if a virus was on their laptop, it wasn't working anyway. We didn't have anyone to write us scripts to automate cleanups and scans. Our training regarding troubleshooting was non-existent. As a result, troubleshooting was all up to you.
All that said, it's amazing what a drunken college student will install on their computer! Not to mention how long they'll let the spyware build up on their computer. This wasn't like your standard corporate environment where (most) people (sort of maybe a little) follow corporate policies. Most people I know where I work at now wouldn't even think of installing Kazaa, limewire, that pretty pony font, etc. A lot of the stuff we encountered required actual registry removals that even Ad-Aware/etc. wouldn't pick up. Deep cleanings were needed quite often. You were lucky of a standard scan would take care of problems!
Hmm, after a fresh install, changing a few settings, reinstalling a couple apps, and updates, I'm looking at a 2 hour turn around time. While everything isn't perfect, it is most definitely workable.
Cleaning a computer, at least in my book, requires the following (not necessarily in order): Backup important files, Windows update, add/remove programs for p2p and other annoyances (with reboots), spyware scan, reboot, spyware scan, hijackthis, virus scan, (if virus found, reboot and scan again), registry inspection, reboot with chkdsk. And that's all I did if they just had some popups. Hopefully all that cleaning didn't cause the machine to loop BSODs at boot-up too! A truely thorough cleaning takes at least 5 hours, and that's assuming everything goes well.
So, in my expert opinion (5+ years in tech support), reinstalling usually is much faster. Of course a good ol' Ghost image only takes about 10 minutes, and if you ghosted properly, it'll have all your precious settings!
Any other company would have spent the allocated marketing millions for buying ad space
Honestly, I've seen more 1and1 advertisements than any other hosting company, except maybe godaddy. They regularly take out 6 page spreads in PCWorld, as well as other tech magazines.
That said, I use their 5 dollar/month package, and I haven't ever had any real problems with their service. Some of their administrative stuff can get a bit wacky now and again, but that's about it. Then again, I'm a fairly lite user. I only use it to host a small webpage with very little traffic. I use it more to host files to send to friends / family. Speeds have always been fast, which is all I really care about. I haven't heard the greatest things about their CS department, but if you're a low maintenance type of user 1and1 would probably be a good fit.
Beta means that it's almost ready to ship, but that not enough people have had their hands on it to truly iron out all the bugs.
You're thinking of a "release candidate". Beta software is generally functional to an extent, but it doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready. Ever been in the first phase of a beta? It's a great deal of fun with the constant crashes, reboots, etc. Thanks to public beta offerings such as gmail, people forget that not all beta software is a walk in the park. And remember, beta testing is all about finding out what/doesn't/ work, so it can be fixed.
No, you're coming off as a complete dick. Do you honestly think that Vincecate was wondering if they could replace his quad Opteron server and couple TB RAID with a 1500 dollar laptop and an external USB hard drive??? He's obviously not doing 2000 transactions a second if his power goes out constantly. Remember what happens when the power goes out? Your Internet connection goes down. No connection to the outside world (or outside your "server" room for that matter) to process transactions. If his Internet connection goes down for a day, I'm guessing those 172800000 lost transactions would have a slight impact on business. Not to mention his question clearly states server load is pretty light.
I can probably safely assume that Vincecate is sick of power going off on a server without safely shutting down. I'd also guess he's not there to take care of their servers 24/7, so the laptop staying up for a full day would be ideal...they can just leave it and forget about it. Hell, he's probably like me, and is just plain lazy. So judging by his requirements (staying up with no AC source for longer than 10 minutes, handling a light server load), a laptop would work out just fine. My laptop handled it's basic server duties just fine when I used it for that.
Well, as far as I can tell, I wasn't responding to what you're interested in...I was criticizing the OPs idea that:
1. You can spend the extra $ and get a Mac that "just works" or
2. You can save a bit of $ by building, but then end up wasting time. Since time = money, you pay for it in the end. And then they are under the assumption that PCs don't "just work".
I counter-claimed saying that you can't compare the two, because they aren't related to each other. Point 2 is not a valid alternative to point 1. Either you replace point #1 with "you can spend the extra $ and build a mac" (which obviously you can't), or replace #2 with "you can save a lot of $ by purchasing a prebuilt PC (dell, hp, etc) which is guaranteed to "just work". There was absolutely no mention of how the OP was going to use the end result. So "we" are discussing process here. The process of obtaining a working, functional, operating computer. So please, take your smugness to another conversation, because no, there is not room enough for both schools of thought here.
Your example is absolutely terrible for the point you're trying to prove. You're talking about building a computer from scratch vs buying a prebuilt computer. You should be comparing buying an apple to buying a dell. And from that point of view, I know for a fact that you can buy a dell (with everything you need) for much cheaper than any mac.
And btw...your friend tried to save a few bucks by purchasing everything at Frys? Good lord! Do you buy your discount clothes at Macys too? My friend priced out his computer at frys, went home, in 15 minutes had priced it out on newegg, and saved about $350. Ordered it, came one day later, and in two hours we had a system built from the ground up, and completely operational.
There's a little options thing under search. After tweeking the options, all I have to do is Win+F, type *.foo, and hit enter. No clicking, tabbing, registry editing, etc.
But don't most types of cases like these get thrown out? I was of the understanding that if a patent holder knows that their patent is being infringed on, they only have a limited amount of time to sue the infringer. Waiting for a long time wouldn't fly in court, would it?
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The GP took the quick road to getting results
Huh. Last time I walked into a sprint store to drop my service and take care of some weird billing, I just walked up to a sales rep and asked to speak with a manager about account issues I was having. They walked me over to the manager, and I got things taken care of. All without making myself look like a total jackass! It's amazing what being a decent person gets you every once in a while.
Unless you spend time working in that environment, you just don't understand it.
I worked in that environment for 3 years. I understand it quite well...and the only time you ever hang up on someone is if they are being a complete a-hole, or there's a connection problem. If there's a connection problem, I always tried to call them back.
So which is it for you?
You can ASK people "if you participate, please let us know".
/., digg, etc thread (or headline/summary for that matter). Hell, I'd email everyone I could with the phone numbers (and yes, a link to TFA), but I doubt half of them that called would bother checking the site.
Yes, because those phone numbers would NEVER be posted to say, a
Well, as the above poster said, doing whatever you can to draw attention to yourself and get your point across. Gotta make sure it's done in a positive way though...somehow your message probably won't look so good as you're ranting it on the way to gitmo.
Seriously, if a senator (err, their assistant) starts reading a ton of mail saying "hey, this sucks, this is why, vote that sucker down" (word it better), they're going to take notice. While they are not likely reading their own messages, I would be willing to bet that their assistants would bring up issues that are getting a lot of notice. If this issue isn't terribly time-sensitive, send a snail mail to their office. If it is (like this one), send an email. Get your friends to send an email. Have your friends get their friends to send soem mail. That's how you get noticed. If you sit and do nothing, no one's going to notice. Gotta give those interns something to do. Just google your senator, you shouldn't have any trouble finding their contact infos.
Of course, if your senator kicked as much ass as mine does, all you'd have to do is send them a thank you note.
Honestly curious: For the artifacts and jittering, did you see that while watching HD on Comcast? Because they compress the hell out of everything, and in a given hour of watching TV the image will artifact and stall probably 3 or 4 times at least. Wouldn't surprise me to hear it from a demo setup at a store either, just wondering.
I do something similar...I use multiple DVD spindles to hold movies/tv seasons, but I just keep them in alphabetical order. I made up a spreadsheet with a listing of all the movies I've got, followed by sections for location (dvd rack for retail, spindles for uhhh movies without cases, cabinets for VHS), format (actual dvd, divx, etc), then genre and sub-genres. So when I want to watch a comedy, just use the auto-filter deal in excel to show only comedy movies.
This way saves on digging through spindles which saves some disk wear and tear trying to remember what you've got. It also gives you a nice way to inventory your movies (no more "I swear I had that movie"), and if you let a friend borrow a movie, you can mark down who has it. Great for sending to a friend if you want to swap movies for the weekend too.
Despite how much the man tried to keep this knowledge from him, he resisted the stranglehold, and was able to get that information. Definitely an example to all those in favor of true information freedom!
I dunno what the goal of it all is, but it sure does prove one thing: Google execs don't know jack.
Everyone knows that you skip past the Dalles! You have to get to the end of the trail before winter sets in, and Cindy's life is on the line here! There's no sense in restocking when there's only a few more days till you get to float down the river. They don't need two new data centers, they just need an Apple 2GS!
1. Verizon disables call forwarding on phone numbers with this feature active. 2. ? 3. Grounded
Not when you own the entire 207.46.*.* block. CIDR pretty much killed off traditional classful networking, probably over a decade ago.
Genuine Advantage is entirely optional. I do not have it running on any of my XP boxes. It didn't even come preinstalled. The user has to explicity allow it to install (unless you set your settings to automatically download and install like an idiot...in which case you agreed to it anyway). Is it reasonable yet?
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of [Taiwanese] Pride!
I guess I should have been even more specific. I was a student attending the university, and the university had a tech support group called "Ask5000". They employed something 15-20 students, paying them 6 to 7 dollars an hour (tax free, so it was decent enough deal for both parties). There are two service windows where a student can bring their laptop to get help done, they could call in (x5000, hence the name), or they could email their issue. When you have a student base of 7000, odds are there are going to be at least a couple people waiting to be helped out. So while you're waiting for those scans to get done, you're actually helping out several other students at the same time. It wasn't unusual to have shelves of laptops running antivirus/antispyware scans. So taking that long wasn't really a big deal. If the fix was going to take a while, we could issue out loaner laptops and transfer their class work over real quick before getting down to business. This allowed us the time we needed to take care of things. So no, we didn't actually spend those 5 hours staring at the same computer. We spent a lot of time honing in our multitasking skills.
I realize this was in a college environment, so things were done a bit differently from an IT perspective. However, since graduating I had a short job for a furniture manufacturer, and now currently at a large corporating (not doing tech support anymore however). Both companies had a similar approach to their tech support though. Go out to the users cube/office, attempt to fix the issue. If it could take a while, get the user a loaner laptop and take the broken stuff back to the lab to fix it. Since AD is in use, when the user logs on the appropriate scripts are run, and access is granted to the majority of things they need to do their job. Issue solved.
And of course, I encourage you to re-read my previous post, as it explains why I didn't just hand out ghost images like candy. Mainly, second paragraph. Think of the support I did like support done at say, Best Buy. If you brought in your personal computer to fix a problem, and they said "sorry, gonna have to reinstall windows" after 10 minutes of looking at it, wouldn't you be pissed? We treated the people we were helping as paying customers, which makes you look at the whole tech support thing from a different view.
I guess I should have been more specific. I used to work tech support for a university that had a "laptop program", which kinda kills most of your points relating to my experience in tech support (no offense). We had no (directly) paying customers, idle time due to computer problems for students had no affect on any bottom lines (related to our department/university), and our policies clearly stated what the students would receive from us. We had site licenses for Windows XP, Office, Adobe Acrobat/Photoshop, etc. Out of the couple thousand laptops we had deployed, there were only 2 configurations in circulation. Students with their own computers obviously did not receive our images, but could use most of the software we had licenses for. New software was not deployed, it was chosen to be installed by the students. Anti-virus upgrades occurred only when the student hopped on the university network. They would first pull an IP from our reg server, which ran a script to check to ensure their defs/windows updates were ok.
I do not prefer to start over. I have no training from Microsoft. They have not tried to tell me anything regarding fixing or starting over. Years of computer use has taught me to be exceptionally thorough. To me imaging is a very very last resort, and only when I had spent several hours on a system. I'm generally driven by finding and fixing the problem, so it just wasn't in my nature to do so. Plus our general policy that imaging a computer was frowned upon, especially by the students staring you in the face when you have to tell them you need to wipe their drive. Not many people like losing a couple semesters worth of class work (as well as all those videos and mp3s they spent so much time downloading). Imaging a problem away = bad.
My personal method of cleaning a system was probably a bit more zealous than other people I worked with, but I wanted to be able to say with full confidence that a students computer was clean. I hated having a student come back saying "I just had this in, and they said it was fixed." I made sure none of those types of tickets were signed by me. We had very little in the way of official tools to use for cleaning, it was more "use what you can find for free". We had a corporate license for Symantec, but obviously if a virus was on their laptop, it wasn't working anyway. We didn't have anyone to write us scripts to automate cleanups and scans. Our training regarding troubleshooting was non-existent. As a result, troubleshooting was all up to you.
All that said, it's amazing what a drunken college student will install on their computer! Not to mention how long they'll let the spyware build up on their computer. This wasn't like your standard corporate environment where (most) people (sort of maybe a little) follow corporate policies. Most people I know where I work at now wouldn't even think of installing Kazaa, limewire, that pretty pony font, etc. A lot of the stuff we encountered required actual registry removals that even Ad-Aware/etc. wouldn't pick up. Deep cleanings were needed quite often. You were lucky of a standard scan would take care of problems!
Hmm, after a fresh install, changing a few settings, reinstalling a couple apps, and updates, I'm looking at a 2 hour turn around time. While everything isn't perfect, it is most definitely workable.
Cleaning a computer, at least in my book, requires the following (not necessarily in order): Backup important files, Windows update, add/remove programs for p2p and other annoyances (with reboots), spyware scan, reboot, spyware scan, hijackthis, virus scan, (if virus found, reboot and scan again), registry inspection, reboot with chkdsk. And that's all I did if they just had some popups. Hopefully all that cleaning didn't cause the machine to loop BSODs at boot-up too! A truely thorough cleaning takes at least 5 hours, and that's assuming everything goes well.
So, in my expert opinion (5+ years in tech support), reinstalling usually is much faster. Of course a good ol' Ghost image only takes about 10 minutes, and if you ghosted properly, it'll have all your precious settings!
Any other company would have spent the allocated marketing millions for buying ad space
Honestly, I've seen more 1and1 advertisements than any other hosting company, except maybe godaddy. They regularly take out 6 page spreads in PCWorld, as well as other tech magazines.
That said, I use their 5 dollar/month package, and I haven't ever had any real problems with their service. Some of their administrative stuff can get a bit wacky now and again, but that's about it. Then again, I'm a fairly lite user. I only use it to host a small webpage with very little traffic. I use it more to host files to send to friends / family. Speeds have always been fast, which is all I really care about. I haven't heard the greatest things about their CS department, but if you're a low maintenance type of user 1and1 would probably be a good fit.
Beta means that it's almost ready to ship, but that not enough people have had their hands on it to truly iron out all the bugs.
/doesn't/ work, so it can be fixed.
You're thinking of a "release candidate". Beta software is generally functional to an extent, but it doesn't mean it's anywhere near ready. Ever been in the first phase of a beta? It's a great deal of fun with the constant crashes, reboots, etc. Thanks to public beta offerings such as gmail, people forget that not all beta software is a walk in the park. And remember, beta testing is all about finding out what
I know I'm coming off as rude
No, you're coming off as a complete dick. Do you honestly think that Vincecate was wondering if they could replace his quad Opteron server and couple TB RAID with a 1500 dollar laptop and an external USB hard drive??? He's obviously not doing 2000 transactions a second if his power goes out constantly. Remember what happens when the power goes out? Your Internet connection goes down. No connection to the outside world (or outside your "server" room for that matter) to process transactions. If his Internet connection goes down for a day, I'm guessing those 172800000 lost transactions would have a slight impact on business. Not to mention his question clearly states server load is pretty light.
I can probably safely assume that Vincecate is sick of power going off on a server without safely shutting down. I'd also guess he's not there to take care of their servers 24/7, so the laptop staying up for a full day would be ideal...they can just leave it and forget about it. Hell, he's probably like me, and is just plain lazy. So judging by his requirements (staying up with no AC source for longer than 10 minutes, handling a light server load), a laptop would work out just fine. My laptop handled it's basic server duties just fine when I used it for that.
Well, as far as I can tell, I wasn't responding to what you're interested in...I was criticizing the OPs idea that:
1. You can spend the extra $ and get a Mac that "just works"
or
2. You can save a bit of $ by building, but then end up wasting time. Since time = money, you pay for it in the end. And then they are under the assumption that PCs don't "just work".
I counter-claimed saying that you can't compare the two, because they aren't related to each other. Point 2 is not a valid alternative to point 1. Either you replace point #1 with "you can spend the extra $ and build a mac" (which obviously you can't), or replace #2 with "you can save a lot of $ by purchasing a prebuilt PC (dell, hp, etc) which is guaranteed to "just work". There was absolutely no mention of how the OP was going to use the end result. So "we" are discussing process here. The process of obtaining a working, functional, operating computer. So please, take your smugness to another conversation, because no, there is not room enough for both schools of thought here.
Your example is absolutely terrible for the point you're trying to prove. You're talking about building a computer from scratch vs buying a prebuilt computer. You should be comparing buying an apple to buying a dell. And from that point of view, I know for a fact that you can buy a dell (with everything you need) for much cheaper than any mac.
And btw...your friend tried to save a few bucks by purchasing everything at Frys? Good lord! Do you buy your discount clothes at Macys too? My friend priced out his computer at frys, went home, in 15 minutes had priced it out on newegg, and saved about $350. Ordered it, came one day later, and in two hours we had a system built from the ground up, and completely operational.
There's a little options thing under search. After tweeking the options, all I have to do is Win+F, type *.foo, and hit enter. No clicking, tabbing, registry editing, etc.
Pardon? M59 is owned by Near Death Studios.
How about you STFU and post your own god damn mods then instead of bitching?
if Zonk is such an Oblivion fan, why not just link us to his favorite mods right there in the Slashdot article
He did, right in TF summary.
psst! "moran" is a farkism
But don't most types of cases like these get thrown out? I was of the understanding that if a patent holder knows that their patent is being infringed on, they only have a limited amount of time to sue the infringer. Waiting for a long time wouldn't fly in court, would it?