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#51
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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? |
#52
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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. |
#53
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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. |
#54
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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. |
#55
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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... |
#56
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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... |
#57
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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... |
#58
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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... |
#59
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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... |
#60
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