All true, but I think the theater experience is a big issue as well. "Back in the day" (before may Slashdetters where old enough to go to movies) theaters actually had screens that where significantly bigger than a big screen TV, hence the phrase "Big Screen Blockbuster" was often associated with a movie such as Lawrence of Arabia or something. But this isn't the case anymore with mega-plexes squeezing more and more smaller screens into the same space. Snacks have always been premium priced (a "rip-off") at theaters, so I don't think that comes into the equation that much, but over the years the theater experience has gone from a special night out to a lot less fun than just waiting and renting the DVD.
Our family of 5 will never go to a movie theater. At most 2 of us will (but not me, despite my love of movies: just-think-it.com/movies.htm). Way too expensive and most likely disappointing. The move to DVDs (and future higher quality formats) will be one way.
A lot of people blame poor quality films, but they have always been around, just turn on the TV and surf the cable channels late at night. For me at least, the quality of the theater experience keeps me out of the theater, not the movies themselves.
The last time I watched a movie in a theater was the very movie you mention above, Lawrence of Arabia -- in a retro theater with 400 true fans, what a great experience. Last night as my way to protest the Politically Correct Film awards I watched Lawrence of Arabia with my son (his first viewing). Almost 4 hours, yet he loved it.
The trends will be more DVDs, less theaters, more cheaper films, less blockbusters, more remakes, fewer great new movies, more politically correct garbage, less of what makes movies like Lawrence of Arabia timeless. So more and more people will create their own DVD libraries and re-watch the few good ones over and over.
My first Dell issue happened within hours of turning it on. Some application, that I have yet to isolate, insists on trying to load (twice a day) a non-existent file called "Timer.txt".
Windows is no Linux, even with a sizeable collection of free utilities, but you can at least make it palatable. Use filemon to find the offending process.
I shall give that a try. Thank you.
My second Dell issue concerns the USB ports...
You may be simply drawing too much power.
This possibility occurred to me a week or two ago on reading about USB issues online. I shall give this a try but it is a bit strange that a machine with 2 ports on front and 5 in back can't handle 6 devices plugged in.
The problem is that hard drive failure is so serious an issue that operating systems will understandably make it priority number one and other programs/operations will suffer performance problems or worse (or even worse).
It's not the priority, but the fact that things like the pagefile being on the hard drive and executable code being on the hard drive causes some operations (like memory accesses or simply trying to execute a chunk of code) to take incredibly long.
I can't agree here. I have a gig of RAM and never exceed 550MB of applications. I have even tweaked the registry so that the swappable parts of the XP kernel are in RAM at all times. The things you list are the normal state of an operating system -- pagefile and applications on drive c:. Hundreds of millions of people have no issues whatever with this setup. On the other hand, I've seen a hard drive going south in a NetWare server and exactly the same things started to happen -- the OS (and all related components) almost comes to a halt when it finds bad sectors. Access times become ten or a hundred times longer. Sound breaks up (people can't even log into an otherwise idle NetWare server) and generally it gives a completely unmistakable behavior.
Computers normally do a good job of faking "multi tasking" but NMI (non-maskable interrupts) rain on that parade.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a media read error will produce an NMI.
A media read error of an absolutely critical component will. I have had bad sectors found in the pagefile, another corrupted file caused XP to shut down System Restore (permanently, no effort of mine turns it back on), and for the past 3 or 4 months audio can not be played from c:, and file copies take 2 to 5 times longer, are accompanied by 50% CPU utilization (I have an Intel with HT) and during these copies playing audio even from a different drive/location will result in corrupted playback.
Why did they wait? No, really. Why have they waited until after releasing this report? Are they concerned the bugs might have been fixed too fast, thus making their attempt to paint OSS in a negative light that much less effective?
I dislike bugs as much as the next coder and always try to fix them as soon as possible. However the govt. was supposedly trying to measure something and if they had told the OSS coders what they were up to it would have distorted the results.
Greatest ACM article: http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm, demonstrating what I had thought from the beginning -- that the Mac is the opposite from how things should be done.
Sorry you had bad service at Dell. I've actually had the opposite experience...to my business to fix it...I'm definitely very happy with Dell's in home service.
The problem with this story is you talk about "home service" but someone comes to your business to fix your Dell. Sounds like what others are saying is true -- if you are a business, you get better Dell service. If you are a home user like myself, you are SOL.
HP, on the other hand, was a much worse experience with my wife's notebook about a month and a half after purchase when the video went bad.
I have had the opposite HP laptop experience to yours. My UWXGA HP laptop as been exceptional except for burning out the power supply. I went to HP site, found and requested part, it was sent in a day or two for a total of about $35. I couldn't be happier with HP and bought an HP desktop for family at xmas.
HP doesn't offer any sort of in home service
Neither does Dell as far as I have experienced.
HP says they will always reimage your hard drive as part of servicing the computer.
I would have been more than happy if Dell had done this. Instead I will have to content myself with spreading the true experience of "Gettin' a Dell".
I would so like a technical support engineer in India who isn't trying to imitate a US accent. My problem isn't with the Indian accent, it is with the US/British accents that they try to imitate.
The nerve of those Indians. Several hundred years of British rule, English the official language, and they have the nerve to develop British accents.
Yes, outsourcing (to anywhere, locally or internationally) does result in poorer service. Why? Because someone who is not employed by you has less interest in the success of your company.
In Dell's case, outsourcing allows someone other than Dell to say "No, we are not going to send a techie, even though it is obvious we should be fixing this for you." Great way for Dell to try to keep their nose clean.
It means they bought a Dell, expected it to either to just work or be fixed by Dell, were disappointed and were then forced to go to a local shop to get the support they thought they would get from Dell.
My experience exactly.
But since this is nothing new and Dell continues to sell it also means that either this does't happen to a lot of people or people just don't learn.
Or that there is a sucker born every minute.
I buy from local shops...Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks...
Exactly what happened to me with my Dell, even though I had screen caps of the hundreds of Event Viewer "red stop sign" events to show them.
I predict that 90% of the comments will be against this article. And come from teen thru 20s males. People who are still children themselves and have not seen the principle of cause and effect at work with their offspring.
I am going to suggest something really strange and weird. How about parents taking responsability and get this, sit down with their kids and talk to them and explain to them why violent games are not real, or even why they shouldn't play violent games. Or better, don't buy them violent games until they reach an age they can easily realize that themselves.
Great idea, and of course good parents do precisely this.
Most parents are lazy fucks who want the state to enforce something they could easily do. Typical "But won't anyone think of the children!?" attitude.
This is a "misses by a country mile" comment. It is extremely difficult to regulate the games your child plays when they are at their friends home, for example.
I predict that 90% of the comments will be against this article. And come from teen thru 20s males. People who are still children themselves and have not seen the principle of cause and effect at work with their offspring.
Years ago in college I created a batch file that would flood other students screens with endless DOS windows with stupid messages during class (some Windows feature to send messages across the network, I don't recall the command).
Sounds more like the NetWare SEND command. I once did something similar to disrupt an Advanced Netware seminar.
So someone provides some original content to make money? whats the big deal... why is it looked down upon if someone simply is trying to get ad revenue and it is all altruistic if they do it for nothing.....does the content somehow differ. no it doesnt.
Actually the content differs drastically. For example, trying searching Google for "baby names". You will find hit after hit to pages that contain the top baby name books on Amazon, with an affiliate link to each book -- but no baby names!. Whereas "Super Baby Names" (http://www.just-think-it.com/sbn/sbn.htm), that offers 1,500,000 baby names -- more baby names than anyone else -- is almost invisible to Google.
How can we avoid this? I think that human rating of sites either by administrators or general users could vastly improve the situation. Imagine being able to rate a site based on how well it matched your search.
At least one big problem with this is if you are prejudiced against a web site. A democrat will vote down georgewbush.com, etc.
Dell support for XP is hopeless as well. When my hard drive started developing bad sectors, I should have had a Dell technician at my door in a matter of hours. Months later and I have officially given up on Dell but not before I published my tale of woe:
http://www.just-think-it.com/mydell.htm
It's really another example of the Canadian gov't showing the world what it's best at: taxing the shit out of its people:-)
Ain't that the truth, brother.
Get a firewall. Windows even includes one nowadays. When an application requests permission to send stuff out to the Internet, deny it. Problem solved.
Problem is that the Windows firewalls to date only filter incoming packets.
My UWXGA 3.2gHz 1.5GB RAM HP laptop runs super hot and tries to vent through the bottom even though there is just 1/8" clearance. My solution was to create an "H" shape out of LEGOs -- the 2 long sides run across the front and back, the center connector runs under the middle of the laptop (I removed one piece from the middle connector to promote cross flow). The advantage of LEGO was that I could build the shape I wanted without tools, it could be collapsed for travel, and at no point does it fit snug against the laptop so that air can flow away from the laptop in any direction.
I also proposed to my wife in LEGO duplo letters that covered the dining room table but that is another therapy session.
Flash has many basic weaknesses. #1 - when you hover over a flash "thing" you can not see where you will be clicking to, #2 - you can't open a flash click in a new window via shift-click, etc., #3 - you can't copy a flash link into the clipboard (to save or send to someone). Equally annoying, you can't stop flash effects (animated GIFs can be stopped by pressing ESCape).
Of all programs that Linux should snub, Flash ranks highest in my books.
When governments step in, OS wars become religious wars. And maybe this is what it will take to dethrone Windows. Apple has their fanatics and Linux needs them as well. What about creating a Linux country that geek crusaders move to? Or we could take over one of those small celebrity-owned islands in the South Pacific? I'm heading to the passport office just in case.
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Our family of 5 will never go to a movie theater. At most 2 of us will (but not me, despite my love of movies: just-think-it.com/movies.htm). Way too expensive and most likely disappointing. The move to DVDs (and future higher quality formats) will be one way.
A lot of people blame poor quality films, but they have always been around, just turn on the TV and surf the cable channels late at night. For me at least, the quality of the theater experience keeps me out of the theater, not the movies themselves.
The last time I watched a movie in a theater was the very movie you mention above, Lawrence of Arabia -- in a retro theater with 400 true fans, what a great experience. Last night as my way to protest the Politically Correct Film awards I watched Lawrence of Arabia with my son (his first viewing). Almost 4 hours, yet he loved it.
The trends will be more DVDs, less theaters, more cheaper films, less blockbusters, more remakes, fewer great new movies, more politically correct garbage, less of what makes movies like Lawrence of Arabia timeless. So more and more people will create their own DVD libraries and re-watch the few good ones over and over.
Windows is no Linux, even with a sizeable collection of free utilities, but you can at least make it palatable. Use filemon to find the offending process.
I shall give that a try. Thank you.
My second Dell issue concerns the USB ports...
You may be simply drawing too much power.
This possibility occurred to me a week or two ago on reading about USB issues online. I shall give this a try but it is a bit strange that a machine with 2 ports on front and 5 in back can't handle 6 devices plugged in.
The problem is that hard drive failure is so serious an issue that operating systems will understandably make it priority number one and other programs/operations will suffer performance problems or worse (or even worse).
It's not the priority, but the fact that things like the pagefile being on the hard drive and executable code being on the hard drive causes some operations (like memory accesses or simply trying to execute a chunk of code) to take incredibly long.
I can't agree here. I have a gig of RAM and never exceed 550MB of applications. I have even tweaked the registry so that the swappable parts of the XP kernel are in RAM at all times. The things you list are the normal state of an operating system -- pagefile and applications on drive c:. Hundreds of millions of people have no issues whatever with this setup. On the other hand, I've seen a hard drive going south in a NetWare server and exactly the same things started to happen -- the OS (and all related components) almost comes to a halt when it finds bad sectors. Access times become ten or a hundred times longer. Sound breaks up (people can't even log into an otherwise idle NetWare server) and generally it gives a completely unmistakable behavior.
Computers normally do a good job of faking "multi tasking" but NMI (non-maskable interrupts) rain on that parade.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a media read error will produce an NMI.
A media read error of an absolutely critical component will. I have had bad sectors found in the pagefile, another corrupted file caused XP to shut down System Restore (permanently, no effort of mine turns it back on), and for the past 3 or 4 months audio can not be played from c:, and file copies take 2 to 5 times longer, are accompanied by 50% CPU utilization (I have an Intel with HT) and during these copies playing audio even from a different drive/location will result in corrupted playback.
I dislike bugs as much as the next coder and always try to fix them as soon as possible. However the govt. was supposedly trying to measure something and if they had told the OSS coders what they were up to it would have distorted the results.
Greatest ACM article: http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm, demonstrating what I had thought from the beginning -- that the Mac is the opposite from how things should be done.
The problem with this story is you talk about "home service" but someone comes to your business to fix your Dell. Sounds like what others are saying is true -- if you are a business, you get better Dell service. If you are a home user like myself, you are SOL.
HP, on the other hand, was a much worse experience with my wife's notebook about a month and a half after purchase when the video went bad.
I have had the opposite HP laptop experience to yours. My UWXGA HP laptop as been exceptional except for burning out the power supply. I went to HP site, found and requested part, it was sent in a day or two for a total of about $35. I couldn't be happier with HP and bought an HP desktop for family at xmas.
HP doesn't offer any sort of in home service
Neither does Dell as far as I have experienced.
HP says they will always reimage your hard drive as part of servicing the computer.
I would have been more than happy if Dell had done this. Instead I will have to content myself with spreading the true experience of "Gettin' a Dell".
The nerve of those Indians. Several hundred years of British rule, English the official language, and they have the nerve to develop British accents.
My best friend is from northern India ...but my Dell still sucks http://www.just-think-it.com/mydell.htm
In Dell's case, outsourcing allows someone other than Dell to say "No, we are not going to send a techie, even though it is obvious we should be fixing this for you." Great way for Dell to try to keep their nose clean.
My Dell sucks, does your Dell suck too? http://www.just-think-it.com/mydell.htm
My experience exactly.
But since this is nothing new and Dell continues to sell it also means that either this does't happen to a lot of people or people just don't learn.
Or that there is a sucker born every minute.
I buy from local shops...Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks...
Exactly what happened to me with my Dell, even though I had screen caps of the hundreds of Event Viewer "red stop sign" events to show them.
All of which prompted me to post an article entitled "My Dell sucks, does your Dell suck too?" (http://www.just-think-it.com/mydell.htm)
I am going to suggest something really strange and weird. How about parents taking responsability and get this, sit down with their kids and talk to them and explain to them why violent games are not real, or even why they shouldn't play violent games. Or better, don't buy them violent games until they reach an age they can easily realize that themselves.
Great idea, and of course good parents do precisely this.
Most parents are lazy fucks who want the state to enforce something they could easily do. Typical "But won't anyone think of the children!?" attitude.
This is a "misses by a country mile" comment. It is extremely difficult to regulate the games your child plays when they are at their friends home, for example.
I predict that 90% of the comments will be against this article. And come from teen thru 20s males. People who are still children themselves and have not seen the principle of cause and effect at work with their offspring.
Sounds more like the NetWare SEND command. I once did something similar to disrupt an Advanced Netware seminar.
Actually the content differs drastically. For example, trying searching Google for "baby names". You will find hit after hit to pages that contain the top baby name books on Amazon, with an affiliate link to each book -- but no baby names!. Whereas "Super Baby Names" (http://www.just-think-it.com/sbn/sbn.htm), that offers 1,500,000 baby names -- more baby names than anyone else -- is almost invisible to Google.
At least one big problem with this is if you are prejudiced against a web site. A democrat will vote down georgewbush.com, etc.
Dell support for XP is hopeless as well. When my hard drive started developing bad sectors, I should have had a Dell technician at my door in a matter of hours. Months later and I have officially given up on Dell but not before I published my tale of woe: http://www.just-think-it.com/mydell.htm
It's really another example of the Canadian gov't showing the world what it's best at: taxing the shit out of its people :-)
Ain't that the truth, brother.
Problem is that the Windows firewalls to date only filter incoming packets.
There's a good case to be made that Pixar just bought Disney in much the same way that NeXT bought Apple. I think this is quite true.
Without Pixar, Disney is nothing. Without iPod, Apple is nothing.
My UWXGA 3.2gHz 1.5GB RAM HP laptop runs super hot and tries to vent through the bottom even though there is just 1/8" clearance. My solution was to create an "H" shape out of LEGOs -- the 2 long sides run across the front and back, the center connector runs under the middle of the laptop (I removed one piece from the middle connector to promote cross flow). The advantage of LEGO was that I could build the shape I wanted without tools, it could be collapsed for travel, and at no point does it fit snug against the laptop so that air can flow away from the laptop in any direction. I also proposed to my wife in LEGO duplo letters that covered the dining room table but that is another therapy session.
Flash has many basic weaknesses. #1 - when you hover over a flash "thing" you can not see where you will be clicking to, #2 - you can't open a flash click in a new window via shift-click, etc., #3 - you can't copy a flash link into the clipboard (to save or send to someone). Equally annoying, you can't stop flash effects (animated GIFs can be stopped by pressing ESCape). Of all programs that Linux should snub, Flash ranks highest in my books.
When governments step in, OS wars become religious wars. And maybe this is what it will take to dethrone Windows. Apple has their fanatics and Linux needs them as well. What about creating a Linux country that geek crusaders move to? Or we could take over one of those small celebrity-owned islands in the South Pacific? I'm heading to the passport office just in case.