Anybody here use Linux?

Ruel Smith (Big Daddy) wrote:
on Sun January 25 2004 12:05 pm, Conor decided to enlighten us with:


In article ,
says...


Cheers on you decision to avoid French products. I started to go back to
Red Hat possibly due to the whole deal with the French/German/Russian
thing, but I thought I'd wait for Fedora to mature a bit before I tried
it. Maybe by Core 3 I'll give it a look. Besides, I really like SuSE...

"I started to go back to Red Hat possibly due to the whole deal with
the French/German/Russian thing"

....err better forget SuSE then because its a German distribution.


That was my point. I have been a SuSE user, but I've considered going to Red
Hat/Fedora because of the whole debacle. However, Fedora Core 1 is in its
infancy, and I do like SuSE a lot.

What French/German/Russian deal thing?

Anon wrote:
In other words, pay a hundred bucks for a sixty buck drive, mail in the
rebate, do EVERYTHING RIGHT, get the rebate rejected, end up paying

forty

bucks more than you should. No thanks. -Dave

What is this whole rebate thing? I live in the UK, I'm guessing its a US
thing right?

Steve


It's a marketing scam. Many consumer items in the U.S. (especially
electronics and computer components) are advertised as costing $____ "after
rebate". Let's say a DVD player is $30 US after rebate. So you pay sixty
bucks for it, and then you have to mail in for the rebate. To send away for
the rebate, you need an ORIGINAL sales receipt, and an ORIGINAL UPC CODE
(cut off the box). Plus, you need to fill in a form of course. You have to
send all this information away by mail. It's a scam, as most rebates are
rejected, even if they are claimed correctly. The most common scam is that
you did everything right, but the rebate processing company will claim
(incorrectly) that you didn't send in the UPC code. Thus the rebate is
rejected.

What it boils down to is that it is a way to trick U.S. consumers into
paying more for certain items by promising to give them a discount AFTER
THEY BUY something, and then deliberately failing to honor that promise.

You'll see lots of people claim that they have no problem claiming rebates.
These are the same people who SHOULD be purchasing lottery tickets on a
regular basis. When more than 50% of rebates are automatically rejected,
someone who's never had a problem claiming a rebate obviously has luck on
their side. -Dave



You know not whereof you write.

Please list some of your vast experience with rebates. Of particular
interest would be experience with rebates on computer hardware from say
Office Max, Best Buy, etc.

Dave C. wrote:
Simpler for a newbie to just buy a second disk drive. Office Max has
80G Western Digitals today for $20 after rebate.



In other words, pay a hundred bucks for a sixty buck drive, mail in the
rebate, do EVERYTHING RIGHT, get the rebate rejected, end up paying forty
bucks more than you should. No thanks. -Dave



Where can you buy that drive for $60? You can't.

Yesterday I paid $80 plus sales tax for a WD800JBRTL (retail box, 1 year
warranty) at OM. You send in forms for two $30 rebates. If they don't
come through (although they WILL come through with no problems), I will
have lost maybe $15 over the newegg price.

I got a drive that I know hasn't been banged around. The retail
packaging is very protective and will show damage if the drive is
damaged. You don't know whether the mailorder packer has dropped your
bulk-packaged drive or rapped it on the countertop for fun.

If the drive is DOA there is no RMA'ing or repackaging or reshipping
required.

Office Max has an department that handles rebate problems, and I know
from experience that they do not let the manufacturer defraud the customer.

Actually I am slightly ticked at OM because they advertised the Special
Edition (3 year warranty) but actually had only drives with 1 year
warranties.

Newegg wants around $70 for the bulk drive shipped with 3-year warranty.

To me the retail packaging outweighs the longer warranty.

After rebate I will get the drive for about $26 including tax and stamps.

I don't mind the little bit of work to save about $45.

Dave C. wrote:
* Don't believe anybody who says that running linux nowadays is easy.


WTF are you talking about? Linux is only hard if you think running windows
is hard. In fact, a lot of hard-core linux advocates are really ****ed that
linux is so much like windoze now. Some of them are afraid that (gasp!)
computer newbies might start choosing linux as a primary OS.

Linux is harder to run if you want to customize things. But most major
distros need no tweaking to run just fine at the default settings. That is,
unless your hardware is a bit iffy. -Dave

Here is WTF I am talking about, friend:

It's often hard to set up, mainly when you run it on hardware that is
less than a year old.

Eg it took more than a year for the DMA code for the Intel 845 chipsets
to find its way into kernels in standard distros. I shouldn't have to
'tweak' or 'customize' my OS to get disk I/O better than 3 MB/sec, and I
have trouble with the idea that the 845 chipset is or was some kind of
oddball hardware.

Eg there were no drivers for the 845's audio, so I had to install a
separate card to get sound.

Eg as far as I know there is no driver to use the on-chip ethernet of
the NForce2. It was easier to spend $10 on a PCI NIC that I shouldn't
need. That is not pretty. Do I conclude that the NForce2 chipset is
"iffy"?

Eg you have to do considerable research to find a reasonably-priced
printer to work with Linux.

Eg good luck getting your scanner or digital camera to work with linux
before the device is obsolete.

Most people do not want to make a career of tracking down immature buggy
drivers or writing drivers themselves.

Now do you understand WTF I am talking about? Or are things like this
some kind of surprise to you?

The kernel and most of the surrounding free software are outstanding,
and they are eventually going to take Windows down. The problem is
drivers.

DRIVERS.

Using an OS includes setting it up.

Now please cut the crap about Linux being as easy to use as Windows.

on Mon January 26 2004 11:22 am, JAD decided to enlighten us with:

Features "lost/lamed"? Give evidence...

your kidding right? your knowledgeable in nux, why are you asking for
evidence...that's a common "give' when using full featured
hardware with nux, something's don't work. What? you want a list of all
hardware that doesn't have all its features available? You can work on
that yourself.

No, I'm not kidding. Believe this or not, some hardware actually has more
options available to the user in Linux. My printer preferences dialog
yields far more control over the printer than the factory drivers in
Windows 98 ever did. Many open source hardware drivers actually do a better
job than OEM ones, yet many are crippled.

Secondly, OpenGL is not DirectX. Some things that exist in Windows exist
because of DirectX libraries. That doesn't mean the the OpenGL standard has
those same features because gaming is a big deal in Windows and not a big
deal in *nix. It's not that GL is inferior, but just different.

Nothing is a common 'give', as you say. While some hardware like
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum boxes may suffer from feature deprivation,
other hardware thrives in Linux.



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
5:13pm up 7:49, 2 users, load average: 0.10, 0.05, 0.01

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

on Mon January 26 2004 3:08 pm, Matt decided to enlighten us with:

Dave C. wrote:
Simpler for a newbie to just buy a second disk drive. Office Max has
80G Western Digitals today for $20 after rebate.



In other words, pay a hundred bucks for a sixty buck drive, mail in the
rebate, do EVERYTHING RIGHT, get the rebate rejected, end up paying forty
bucks more than you should. No thanks. -Dave



Where can you buy that drive for $60? You can't.

At Best Buy, just before Christmas, I purchased a WD 120GB 7200rpm 8MB cache
ATA100 drive for $59 after rebates. I use it for backup in my Windows
system. There were lots of crazy sales like that this Christmas shopping
season. As a matter of fact, my brother and best friend both built new
systems by shopping smart and getting a lot of items like these. They both
got a genuine Ati Radeon 9600 video card for $50, hard drives similar in
size and everything, except Maxtor, for the same price, LiteOn 52X CD
burners for $20, and more. Hell, they even bought eMachines computers with
a monitor, 2.6GHz Celerons, 80GB HDD, CD burner, DVD and everything for
$299 after rebates and gave them as gifts. You just have to get out of bed
early to get to those "6 hour" sales and get them.



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
5:19pm up 7:55, 2 users, load average: 0.17, 0.13, 0.05

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

on Mon January 26 2004 4:08 pm, Matt decided to enlighten us with:

Dave C. wrote:
* Don't believe anybody who says that running linux nowadays is easy.


WTF are you talking about? Linux is only hard if you think running
windows
is hard. In fact, a lot of hard-core linux advocates are really ****ed
that
linux is so much like windoze now. Some of them are afraid that (gasp!)
computer newbies might start choosing linux as a primary OS.

Linux is harder to run if you want to customize things. But most major
distros need no tweaking to run just fine at the default settings. That
is,
unless your hardware is a bit iffy. -Dave

Here is WTF I am talking about, friend:

It's often hard to set up, mainly when you run it on hardware that is
less than a year old.

Eg it took more than a year for the DMA code for the Intel 845 chipsets
to find its way into kernels in standard distros. I shouldn't have to
'tweak' or 'customize' my OS to get disk I/O better than 3 MB/sec, and I
have trouble with the idea that the 845 chipset is or was some kind of
oddball hardware.

Eg there were no drivers for the 845's audio, so I had to install a
separate card to get sound.

Eg as far as I know there is no driver to use the on-chip ethernet of
the NForce2. It was easier to spend $10 on a PCI NIC that I shouldn't
need. That is not pretty. Do I conclude that the NForce2 chipset is
"iffy"?

Eg you have to do considerable research to find a reasonably-priced
printer to work with Linux.

Eg good luck getting your scanner or digital camera to work with linux
before the device is obsolete.

Most people do not want to make a career of tracking down immature buggy
drivers or writing drivers themselves.

Now do you understand WTF I am talking about? Or are things like this
some kind of surprise to you?

The kernel and most of the surrounding free software are outstanding,
and they are eventually going to take Windows down. The problem is
drivers.

DRIVERS.

Using an OS includes setting it up.

Now please cut the crap about Linux being as easy to use as Windows.

First of all, this isn't the fault of Linux. This is the OEM's fault. Bitch
to them.

Secondly, are you saying you've _never_ had setup problems with Windows? If
you do, you're either very lucky or lying. I just put a system together for
a friend and we had a hell of a time trying to get an onboard Promise SATA
controller to work on his MSI Neo FIS2R board. Then, the whole system came
to a crawl and we had to start all over again with the Windows install.
Finally, it worked. It took 3 evenings to get it all sorted out. This,
despite there being an OEM Promise driver that came with the system.

Lastly, I do agree that for Linux to really hit the mainstream it needs to
solve the latest/greatest hardware problem. OEM's need to step up to the
plate. I think the corporate desktop boom that'll probably happen the next
2 to 3 years will certainly help, but I think mainstream Linux is at least
5 years away in getting really good OEM driver support for hardware.



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
5:27pm up 8:03, 2 users, load average: 0.30, 0.25, 0.13

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

on Mon January 26 2004 2:18 pm, Sally decided to enlighten us with:

That was my point. I have been a SuSE user, but I've considered going to
Red Hat/Fedora because of the whole debacle. However, Fedora Core 1 is in
its infancy, and I do like SuSE a lot.

What French/German/Russian deal thing?

Did you miss that whole Iraq/UN/France-Germany-Russia thing that happened
last year? You must live in a cave...



--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
5:33pm up 8:08, 2 users, load average: 0.17, 0.23, 0.15

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

Ruel Smith (Big Daddy) wrote:
on Mon January 26 2004 2:18 pm, Sally decided to enlighten us with:


That was my point. I have been a SuSE user, but I've considered going to
Red Hat/Fedora because of the whole debacle. However, Fedora Core 1 is in
its infancy, and I do like SuSE a lot.

What French/German/Russian deal thing?


Did you miss that whole Iraq/UN/France-Germany-Russia thing that happened
last year? You must live in a cave...

No, of course not but I don't see why it would affect your choice of
distro. I'm British and our forces were/are there as well you know. It
wouldnt make one bit of difference to the distro I choose, the make of
car I drive etc...

On 25 Jan 2004 21:46:13 -0800, (jamotto) wrote:
Here's what you need to do to ensure you'll get your rebate.
Take all the necessary items to be mailed off, i.e. the original
receipt, the box upc code and the form and scan them together as one
image. also scan the addressed envelope you will mail them in.
When you mail it send it registered/certified mail, so you can get a
signed receipt from whomever receives it at the rebate center.(This
alone is usually enough to let them know you are serious about getting
your rebate.)
I've had problems in the past with hardware/software manufacturers
trying to give me the brush off or a line of bull when I inquire why I
didn't recieve my rebate.
I just send them a legal notice with printed copies of the scans of I
took showing that I enclosed everything as well as a copy of the
return receipt with the employees signature stating that legal action
will promptly follow and that a grievance has already been filed with
the US attorney general's office and I always get my rebate within a
few days.
That having been said I agree that rebate offers are just scams of the
most obvious sort and are usually not worth the hassle and cost to
persue them.
What they count on is that the majority of consumers will not follow
through or that they'll lose their receipt and not be able to.
There's also the fine print clauses that are rife in the contract
aggreement. The print of which is so small that you'd need a 20 power
glass to even read it. Some limit you to a single rebate per household
or for US buyers only etc...
If they were truly up front and honest about honoring their rebate
offer they'd work it through the retailer who'd take it off at the
register and do the rebate through the store.
"Anon" wrote in message ws.com...
In other words, pay a hundred bucks for a sixty buck drive, mail in the
rebate, do EVERYTHING RIGHT, get the rebate rejected, end up paying
forty
bucks more than you should. No thanks. -Dave

What is this whole rebate thing? I live in the UK, I'm guessing its a US
thing right?

Steve

It's a marketing scam. Many consumer items in the U.S. (especially
electronics and computer components) are advertised as costing $____ "after
rebate". Let's say a DVD player is $30 US after rebate. So you pay sixty
bucks for it, and then you have to mail in for the rebate. To send away for
the rebate, you need an ORIGINAL sales receipt, and an ORIGINAL UPC CODE
(cut off the box). Plus, you need to fill in a form of course. You have to
send all this information away by mail. It's a scam, as most rebates are
rejected, even if they are claimed correctly. The most common scam is that
you did everything right, but the rebate processing company will claim
(incorrectly) that you didn't send in the UPC code. Thus the rebate is
rejected.

What it boils down to is that it is a way to trick U.S. consumers into
paying more for certain items by promising to give them a discount AFTER
THEY BUY something, and then deliberately failing to honor that promise.

You'll see lots of people claim that they have no problem claiming rebates.
These are the same people who SHOULD be purchasing lottery tickets on a
regular basis. When more than 50% of rebates are automatically rejected,
someone who's never had a problem claiming a rebate obviously has luck on
their side. -Dave
And here all this time I should have been buying Lotto tickets cause I
must be very lucky with all 10 out of 10 of my rebates honored :-)