Rebates are a SCAM. And they bloody well know it. It's actually a very simple scheme: the majority of people will never send it in.
Nobody is forcing you to buy an item with a rebate. If you don't like it then buy something else. Personally I love rebates and have always gotten my money back, but I consider it more of an unexpected suprise. I fill out the rebate, send in the receipts and barcodes, etc. I never bother to really photocopy anything unless I remember to take it to work and use the copier there, but I usually forget. Stuff it all in an envelope, drop it in the mail, and forget about it. If it comes, hey, it's a check for $50. If it doesn't big whoop, I wasn't really expecting it anyway and $50 isn't going to mean the difference between eating that week or not. I always assume the rebate will never come so I'm always happy when it does. You just need to learn to be more pessimistic and assume you're not going to get the money. It seems like you're 90% of the way there though so keep up the good work.;-)
The middle class, for the most part, doesn't pay bounced check fees. Well, ok, it still happens to me every now and then, but it is very rare. Think about it, though... One of the largest and most profitable revenue streams for these mega corporations comes from assaulting the poorest people in America. It seems criminal.
Frankly his story seems a bit suspicious. Why didn't he just ask for store credit and buy another TV instead? Why didn't they just replace the broken TV with a working one? I've never had a problem taking back a broken item to Best Buy and getting another that works. Hell, I took a broken receiver back, they didn't have any more of that model in stock so they gave me a different brand that cost slightly more for the same price and apologized for the inconvenience. Just because the Best Buy you happen to shop at has horrible customer service doesn't mean they all do. Sure, I could've just returned it and walked away since I used a credit card for the transaction, but I really needed a receiver that weekend. I'm sure you could ask them for a gift card or something instead and just go to another Best Buy store and buy the TV there with the gift card. If you're not dicks to them they should work with you.
Take the money you were going to spend at Best Buy and open a checking account at the bank. You don't need to be spending money on luxury items (that's basically all Best Buy sells other than appliances) when you can't even afford to open a checking account. Once you have a checking account you can use a debit card to draw on the money in your account.
If that's really not an option and you don't like that policy then shop elsewhere. I would imagine the amount of people that pay for large ticket items with cash and then want a refund is pretty small. Use a credit card or debit card, or again, shop somewhere else.
Mail In rebates are a sham, in that it takes 8-12 weeks for the check to come in. I am not going to wait 3 months for a 2 dollar check.
I agree. Why not just lower the price the cost of the rebate or offer an "instant" rebate at the cash register? Why force people to go through the trouble of waiting months for their money when you've promised it to them anyway. Rebates are definitely scummy, but that doesn't stop me from taking advantage of them. I bought a $180 Hitachi 250GB drive Thursday and I'll be sending in the two $40 mail in rebates next week. Usually I don't bother if it's just a couple of bucks... I let my wife fill those out and send them in. Then when the $5 check comes it's like a suprise. $80 on the other hand is well worth the time it takes to fill out the forms, make photocopies, and cut out barcodes.
uhh.. isn't that pretty much the whole GOAL of debian, to be a solid base for building such distros around it? I see ubuntu as a huge win for debian.
I thought the goal of Debian was to see how long they could go between stable releases.:-) Remember Mozilla 1.0? No, not Mozilla Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.0... that's still the current browser in Debian stable which was released almost 3 years ago. No matter who gets elected, I really hope they light a fire under some asses and get the release schedules a little more in line with reality. 18 months between "stable" releases should be the max, but 12 months is more realistic. 36 months is just insane. I shouldn't have to run Debian testing just to get packages released in the last 2 years, but I do.
If you recall, their management made the (unconvincing) argument that 99% of the time people didn't need fluff like:
* referential integrity (pk & fk constraints)
* views
* triggers
* stored procedures
I would argue that 99% of the time people don't. I don't know much about databases, but I've never needed that stuff before so why would I need them now? My MySQL/PHP stuff works fine without views or triggers.. whatever that stuff is.
My 15" TiBook has 2 dead pixels, but I think it's because it's old enough (2002, IIRC) that they were more common then. How old is your iBook?
Bought it in October of 2002. Thankfully the worst stuck pixel is on the border between the top menubar and the main desktop so I don't even really notice it unless I'm watching something fullscreen. I guess I can't say I've been 100% satisfied with my iBook (G3 800MHz) since I've had a motherboard failure after 11 months, and then a few months later I had video problems with the LCD backlight, and before all that an AC adapter brick died on me. I've really wanted a Powerbook, but these quality issues with the iBook have held me back. I only paid $1300 for the iBook plus another $250 or so for Applecare, but if I'm going to drop around $2600 for a Powerbook and Applecare I would hope it's a little better quality.:-/
I did have a Samsung desktop LCD with a dead pixel which they wouldn't replace. It irritated me so much that I gave it to a friend and just pretend that I had accientally flushed the $500 down the toilet or something.
That's a bit extreme. Now, if you had the situation my mother-in-law's LCD is in I would understand getting rid of it. She's got an entire vertical column of stuck blue pixels down about 40% in from the left side of the display. It drives me absolutely nuts whenever I have to work on her computer. To top it off, they've been like that since 2 months after she got the monitor and she never got it replaced under warranty. *sigh*
Anybody actually been in a Blockbuster since they instituted the No Late Fees? The only thing this promotion did was make it so there are no movies in stock.
I think this forced our Giant Eagle's "Iggle Video" stores to make everything a 7 day rental instead of the previous 1 day rental for new stuff and 5 days for older stuff. As a result there is never anything new in stock. I wish they'd go back to the 1 day rental for new movies.
And this is important to Slashdot readers who probably download their entertainment because...
Do you really waste hours of time downloading television programs and movies from the Internet? I've found it's much easier to just go rent a movie than to spend hours downloading some 8 gig DVD rip only to find it's gay porn some jackass put up with the same name as the movie I was looking for (which was not gay porn BTW). I guess I'm just getting old, but I have more money than time these days.
How much thicker and heavier and uglier is that Dell? How long does its battery last?
My Dell Inspiron 4000 is about the same size and weight as a 14" iBook. The battery lasts a little over 4 hours, or 8 hours with the two batteries in it.
The iBook is, like most consumer elctronics today, not intended to be serviced by the user. When was the last time you upgraded your TV, VCR, CD or DVD player?
I don't consider a $1500 computer to be a disposable consumer electronics device like a VCR. I've had the same 20" TV for 15 years now and it still works fine. If it died tomorrow I would've long since got my $250 out of it. If a hard drive in my iBook dies after the warranty is up at 3 years and 1 month I'm supposed to just throw the whole computer away instead of just replacing the $100 hard drive in it? All I'm asking for is to make the iBook's internals a little more user-accessible instead of requiring you to remove dozens of screws and panels to get at anything. You've already said the Powerbook allows that, so why not the iBook?
Oh come on now, they're only about 1.5 times the price of a generic PC based laptop. The quality of the system and OS is well worth the premium price you pay. If you want to gripe about something then gripe about the fact that the hardware seems to be hard as hell to upgrade. I was looking into what it would entail to replace my iBook's 30GB hard drive with a new 80GB drive and it seems like you have to practically take the entire thing apart including dozens of screws (phillips and hex). It's pretty daunting to say the least. The process to replace the hard drive on my Dell Inspiron however is to remove a single phillips screw, slide out the drive tray, replace the drive, slide the tray back in, screw the screw back in and voila. I really really wish Apple would include this nice feature in their next revision of the powerbooks. The other thing they really need to consider adding is modular bays. I should be able to slide out my DVD drive for a second battery for example like I can with my Dell. These are my two biggest gripes with Apple. Sure, I can add an external firewall drive, but that kind of negates the point of a laptop.;-)
Myth does not work with my DirecTV unit.....so TIVO it is until they do
Your DirecTV unit doesn't have any video or audio outputs? How do you display the image on the TV? Sounds like your DirecTV unit is broken somehow.. have you considered trying a different brand? There are tons of people using MythTV with DirecTV and Dish as well as digital and analog cable.
If I download a linux ISO to install on my research machine, I just performed an academic activity. I need a machine that works well to do my research.
But there's absolutely no reason you need to use BitTorrent to download that Linux ISO image. An FTP or HTTP site will work equally well, if not better, without using up the university's upstream bandwidth. BitTorrent is just a bad protocol from an IT manager's point of view because you end up serving more content than you're downloading, thus wasting bandwidth.
I hope the next star trek is a good one, set a few years in the future of TNG, so we can still have cameo's. Maybe enough in the future so we get some Voyager cast members.
The next Star Trek (if there ever is one again) will be 5-10 years down the road at least, so the cameos will be limited. Probably something similar to Scotty appearing on TNG as a tired old engineer caught in some time loop.
How exactly is this any different than fingerprints except being a heck of a lot more accurate? A lot of our fingerprints are already in databases and they're scanned by AFIS every day. They're a heck of a lot less accurate than a DNA sample would be at ruling you out as a suspect. What exactly are people afraid of, that they can't commit a crime anymore and get away with it?
It may be less than the original development, but porting a large software product from VB6 to any other language could easily cost upwards of a million dollars.
If you spent a million dollars on a Visual Basic application you need to have your head examined. For a million bucks you could've hired a team of 10 coders to write it in a proper language like C++ and then archive the source code should you have to modify or upgrade it to meet new standards.
We're looking at a ground-up, OOP redesign of everything our shop uses. Plus testing. Plus retraining of all our users. Plus figuring out a whole new security model, vis-a-vis the web services. It's going to be PAINFUL.
So you're saying you're not capable of writing a VB.Net app that looks and operates exactly the same as your old VB6 app? Why not? It's a bunch of Windows forms... if you just make them identical to the old app why would your users even notice any difference at all?
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Ding ding ding, we have a winnaahh. Pick a cupie doll for the little lady.
Nobody is forcing you to buy an item with a rebate. If you don't like it then buy something else. Personally I love rebates and have always gotten my money back, but I consider it more of an unexpected suprise. I fill out the rebate, send in the receipts and barcodes, etc. I never bother to really photocopy anything unless I remember to take it to work and use the copier there, but I usually forget. Stuff it all in an envelope, drop it in the mail, and forget about it. If it comes, hey, it's a check for $50. If it doesn't big whoop, I wasn't really expecting it anyway and $50 isn't going to mean the difference between eating that week or not. I always assume the rebate will never come so I'm always happy when it does. You just need to learn to be more pessimistic and assume you're not going to get the money. It seems like you're 90% of the way there though so keep up the good work. ;-)
Frankly his story seems a bit suspicious. Why didn't he just ask for store credit and buy another TV instead? Why didn't they just replace the broken TV with a working one? I've never had a problem taking back a broken item to Best Buy and getting another that works. Hell, I took a broken receiver back, they didn't have any more of that model in stock so they gave me a different brand that cost slightly more for the same price and apologized for the inconvenience. Just because the Best Buy you happen to shop at has horrible customer service doesn't mean they all do. Sure, I could've just returned it and walked away since I used a credit card for the transaction, but I really needed a receiver that weekend. I'm sure you could ask them for a gift card or something instead and just go to another Best Buy store and buy the TV there with the gift card. If you're not dicks to them they should work with you.
If that's really not an option and you don't like that policy then shop elsewhere. I would imagine the amount of people that pay for large ticket items with cash and then want a refund is pretty small. Use a credit card or debit card, or again, shop somewhere else.
I agree. Why not just lower the price the cost of the rebate or offer an "instant" rebate at the cash register? Why force people to go through the trouble of waiting months for their money when you've promised it to them anyway. Rebates are definitely scummy, but that doesn't stop me from taking advantage of them. I bought a $180 Hitachi 250GB drive Thursday and I'll be sending in the two $40 mail in rebates next week. Usually I don't bother if it's just a couple of bucks... I let my wife fill those out and send them in. Then when the $5 check comes it's like a suprise. $80 on the other hand is well worth the time it takes to fill out the forms, make photocopies, and cut out barcodes.
Microsoft suing 117 Phish fans is not a joke?
No, it's April Fool's Day. It's probably best to find another site that doesn't participate in the Tomfoolery until tomorrow.
Why do you assume it's a joke? It could be an adoption. Though talking about it in the open like that is kind of lame.
uhh.. isn't that pretty much the whole GOAL of debian, to be a solid base for building such distros around it? I see ubuntu as a huge win for debian.
I thought the goal of Debian was to see how long they could go between stable releases.
I would argue that 99% of the time people don't. I don't know much about databases, but I've never needed that stuff before so why would I need them now? My MySQL/PHP stuff works fine without views or triggers.. whatever that stuff is.
Bought it in October of 2002. Thankfully the worst stuck pixel is on the border between the top menubar and the main desktop so I don't even really notice it unless I'm watching something fullscreen. I guess I can't say I've been 100% satisfied with my iBook (G3 800MHz) since I've had a motherboard failure after 11 months, and then a few months later I had video problems with the LCD backlight, and before all that an AC adapter brick died on me. I've really wanted a Powerbook, but these quality issues with the iBook have held me back. I only paid $1300 for the iBook plus another $250 or so for Applecare, but if I'm going to drop around $2600 for a Powerbook and Applecare I would hope it's a little better quality. :-/
That's a bit extreme. Now, if you had the situation my mother-in-law's LCD is in I would understand getting rid of it. She's got an entire vertical column of stuck blue pixels down about 40% in from the left side of the display. It drives me absolutely nuts whenever I have to work on her computer. To top it off, they've been like that since 2 months after she got the monitor and she never got it replaced under warranty. *sigh*
My 12" G3 iBook has about 3 or 4 dead pixels. I don't even notice them anymore. I guess you're going to say Apple uses low quality LCDs?
I think this forced our Giant Eagle's "Iggle Video" stores to make everything a 7 day rental instead of the previous 1 day rental for new stuff and 5 days for older stuff. As a result there is never anything new in stock. I wish they'd go back to the 1 day rental for new movies.
Do you really waste hours of time downloading television programs and movies from the Internet? I've found it's much easier to just go rent a movie than to spend hours downloading some 8 gig DVD rip only to find it's gay porn some jackass put up with the same name as the movie I was looking for (which was not gay porn BTW). I guess I'm just getting old, but I have more money than time these days.
My Dell Inspiron 4000 is about the same size and weight as a 14" iBook. The battery lasts a little over 4 hours, or 8 hours with the two batteries in it.
The iBook is, like most consumer elctronics today, not intended to be serviced by the user. When was the last time you upgraded your TV, VCR, CD or DVD player?
I don't consider a $1500 computer to be a disposable consumer electronics device like a VCR. I've had the same 20" TV for 15 years now and it still works fine. If it died tomorrow I would've long since got my $250 out of it. If a hard drive in my iBook dies after the warranty is up at 3 years and 1 month I'm supposed to just throw the whole computer away instead of just replacing the $100 hard drive in it? All I'm asking for is to make the iBook's internals a little more user-accessible instead of requiring you to remove dozens of screws and panels to get at anything. You've already said the Powerbook allows that, so why not the iBook?
Oh come on now, they're only about 1.5 times the price of a generic PC based laptop. The quality of the system and OS is well worth the premium price you pay. If you want to gripe about something then gripe about the fact that the hardware seems to be hard as hell to upgrade. I was looking into what it would entail to replace my iBook's 30GB hard drive with a new 80GB drive and it seems like you have to practically take the entire thing apart including dozens of screws (phillips and hex). It's pretty daunting to say the least. The process to replace the hard drive on my Dell Inspiron however is to remove a single phillips screw, slide out the drive tray, replace the drive, slide the tray back in, screw the screw back in and voila. I really really wish Apple would include this nice feature in their next revision of the powerbooks. The other thing they really need to consider adding is modular bays. I should be able to slide out my DVD drive for a second battery for example like I can with my Dell. These are my two biggest gripes with Apple. Sure, I can add an external firewall drive, but that kind of negates the point of a laptop. ;-)
Your DirecTV unit doesn't have any video or audio outputs? How do you display the image on the TV? Sounds like your DirecTV unit is broken somehow.. have you considered trying a different brand? There are tons of people using MythTV with DirecTV and Dish as well as digital and analog cable.
Don't be a fool, Wil Wheaton is exploring the universe with the Traveller.
But there's absolutely no reason you need to use BitTorrent to download that Linux ISO image. An FTP or HTTP site will work equally well, if not better, without using up the university's upstream bandwidth. BitTorrent is just a bad protocol from an IT manager's point of view because you end up serving more content than you're downloading, thus wasting bandwidth.
The next Star Trek (if there ever is one again) will be 5-10 years down the road at least, so the cameos will be limited. Probably something similar to Scotty appearing on TNG as a tired old engineer caught in some time loop.
How exactly is this any different than fingerprints except being a heck of a lot more accurate? A lot of our fingerprints are already in databases and they're scanned by AFIS every day. They're a heck of a lot less accurate than a DNA sample would be at ruling you out as a suspect. What exactly are people afraid of, that they can't commit a crime anymore and get away with it?
That's all you had to say. I totally understand your situation then. ;-)
If you spent a million dollars on a Visual Basic application you need to have your head examined. For a million bucks you could've hired a team of 10 coders to write it in a proper language like C++ and then archive the source code should you have to modify or upgrade it to meet new standards.
So you're saying you're not capable of writing a VB.Net app that looks and operates exactly the same as your old VB6 app? Why not? It's a bunch of Windows forms... if you just make them identical to the old app why would your users even notice any difference at all?