Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Copyright advocacy group violates copyright (scienceblogs.com)

Submitted by
word munger
word munger writes: "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermark and all — without paying for their use! Clearly their agenda is simply to make using copyrighted materials inconvenient and expensive for everyone but THEMSELVES."
Windows

Submission + - Mark Russinovich about Vista network slowdown 1

Submitted by koro666
koro666 writes: In his latest blog post, Mark Russinovich analyzes the network slowdown experienced by some users when playing multimedia content. "Tests of MMCSS during Vista development showed that [...] heavy network traffic can cause enough long-running DPCs to prevent playback threads from keeping up with their media streaming requirements, resulting in glitching. MMCSS' glitch-resistant mechanisms were therefore extended to include throttling of network activity. It does so by issuing a command to the NDIS device driver [...] [to] pass along, at most 10 packets per millisecond (10,000 packets per second)."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Want American Tech Support from Dell? Pay $100 (dell.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "I was looking for a new PC from Dell today and noticed the following choices:

Standard Celeron
Dual-Core Package
Productivity Package with 19" Flat Panel Monitor
North American Based Phone Tech Support Package

So, for an additional $100 or so and no monitor, you can get American tech support. Great."
Communications

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Lenovo Customer Service Tragedy (ripoffreport.com)

Submitted by
L Collins
L Collins writes: "I have been through the most nerve wracking and hellish experience with Lenovo over the purchase of a shiny new T60 Thinkpad Laptop. My initial experience was that Lenovo sent me out a laptop sans battery and power cord, and when I tried to return said laptop to them in favor of purchasing one locally at a retail store, I was given incorrect information as to how to go about returning said laptop. This ended up leaving me without a tracking number and lo & behold, Lenovo claims they never received the laptop back. Lenovo blames UPS, UPS blames the UPS store that it was dropped off at and the UPS store it was dropped off blames Lenovo. (Further details can be had at: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/269/RipOff02 69581.htm)

At this point, Lenovo has told me that I'm simply out my laptop AND the money used to purchase said laptop, leaving me with a $1600 credit card bill with nothing to show for it.

I guess my question to Slashdot, is: Has anyone else out there had any similar experiences with the customer service, and how have they been able to get them resolved? I've already tried the BBB, filing a dispute with my credit card company, Executive Customer Relations @ Lenovo and contacting the VP of Sales & Marketing @ Lenovo, all with no success. Does anyone have any insight as to what can be done past this point to recoup my money or my laptop?"
Businesses

Submission + - Buy.com overcharges thousands after making mistake

Submitted by matt
matt writes: On August, 7, 2007, Buy.com made a price mistake on a recent promotion that offered customers $15 off any item on their website. Many customers often collaborate and share "hot deals" with each other on websites, chat rooms, and forums. As a result, Buy.com was flooded with orders on August 7-9, 2007 from opportunistic customers ready to take advantage of this coupon. While Buy.com tried to stop many of the orders from shipping, they could not stop thousands of orders from leaving the warehouse. Many customers received their products, but they also received unauthorized charges on their credit cards for an additional $15. I personally, would not have purchased anything from Buy.com if I knew I would be paying $22.00 for an item instead of $7.00. Even though I only authorized a credit card transaction for $7.00, I was charged $22.00. Many internet forums and chat rooms are buzzing about Buy.com's unethical practices after they made an internet boo boo.

Feed Engadget: Systemax turns to VIA for new energy efficient PCs (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Desktops

VIA's already helped Everex pump out what they claim to be the "world's most energy efficient notebook," and it now looks to be trying to do the same for Systemax, with VIA's low-power processors finding a home in the company's latest desktop PC. While they aren't going so far as to claim that they're the "world's most energy efficient," they are promising a significant cut in your power bills, thanks largely to the VIA pc2500G motherboard at the heart of the system and the low-power 1.5GHz VIA C7-D processor attached to it. Otherwise, for $300 you'll get a barely adequate 512MB of RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, and a plain old DVD-ROM drive, with Windows XP Home serving as the OS. If that's not quite enough for you, an extra $100 will get you a combo optical drive and Windows XP Professional.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Businesses

Submission + - Dell begins their largest layoff ever. 3

Submitted by cyphercell
cyphercell writes: Dell has begun their largest series of layoffs ever. This morning at about 10:00am more than two hundred employees at Dell's Roseburg Oregon Call center found out that they no longer had jobs. Sparking what appears to be the beginning of year long run of layoffs for the company. http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070802/NEWS/7 0802014

Refuting local suspicions of malice Dell spokesman David Frink states:

... the closure has nothing to do with a lawsuit filed by employees of the Roseburg center in February, claiming Dell violated federal and state wage and hour laws.
http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070213/NEWS/7 0213020

and later says

...plans to reduce employment worldwide by 10 percent at the end of May.


Their plans to reduce employment can be found here:
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business /stories/technology/06/01/1dell.html

Here are some highlights:

Dell set to shed 8,800 workers...

Dell has 82,200 permanent workers, including 18,000 in Central Texas, and 5,300 temporary workers worldwide. The layoffs are expected to affect both groups...

In its last large-scale layoffs, Dell cut more than 5,000 jobs in Austin after the high-tech bust in 2001.

...many of the layoffs could come in Central Texas, where Dell is headquartered. In a March 29 report to clients, Goldman Sachs analysts said Dell might reduce the work force at its test and assembly facilities in the U.S. and Malaysia.

Feed The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Gadget of the Year (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Announcements, Misc. Gadgets

This is it, the moment you've been waiting for. After all these long months you can finally cast your ballot for the 2006 Gadget of the Year! Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you've got until 11.59PM EST on Wednesday, April 18th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best gadget in all of 2006 win! The nominees: Apple MacBook Pro, Dell 3007WFP-HC, HTC Hermes / 8525, Nintendo Wii, SanDisk Sansa E280R, Slingbox PRO, and Sony PlayStation 3.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Communications

Submission + - FCC: continue cell phone ban on flights

Submitted by
jcatcw
jcatcw writes: "Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman, wants to end consideration of cell phone use on airplanes. The cell phone industry has raised concerns that a single call from an airplane might connect to several towers at once. That could potentially lead to interference and network problems. A vote by the Commission could happen at any time and would leave in place existing rules that prohibit using cell phones once planes are off the ground."
Businesses

Submission + - Flying the Airbus A380

Submitted by
FloatsomNJetsom
FloatsomNJetsom writes: "So the largest passenger airplane in the world actually is pretty large inside — Popular Mechanics has a great article and video from their test flight on the brand new double-decker Airbus A380, including footage of takeoff, interviews with the pilot and test engineer, the bar, the two staircases, and an attempt to walk down a crowded aisle from one end of the plane to the other without stopping to say "excuse me.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Mossberg on Office 2007: Better but a Tough Switch

Submitted by
Carl Bialik from WSJ
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes: "Office 2007, coming out Jan. 30, is a 'radical revision,' writes the Wall Street Journal's Walter S. Mossberg. 'The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone — every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.' He adds, 'It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher. But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid.'"
Programming

Submission + - Practical examples of using Ajax and Ruby on Rails

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This article takes you through the steps of building a Rails application. It then dives right into using the Ajax features to build the JavaScript code that reads and writes data from the server. Even if you don't envision yourself shipping a Rails application, I recommend that you download one of the Instant Rails or Locomotive applications and try it out. You will have a lot of fun and learn a lot.
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - PC Games as Live-CDs?

Submitted by
fccoelho
fccoelho writes: "PC Gaming have been plagued by the diversity of platforms that make it costly for game developers to maximize their customer base. Maintaining complex code bases for windows, Mac, and sometimes Linux is a major hassle involving having to maintain separate developing teams specialized in each platform. In the last five years, we have seen an explosion of Linux Live CDs and DVDs that vary widely in purpose: from demonstration to installation disks, and complete multimedia systems that run off these disks, etc. Why can't PC games follow this trend? Develop all games for Linux/OpenGL and sell to anyone that has a device that can boot from a CD/DVD, be it a computer, a Xbox, A PS3, etc. As a side benefit, gamers would not have to fill their hard-drives with huge amounts of game-related files. Linux supports just about any hardware platform you can imagine, and is a very capable development platform for games. So I ask Slashdotters: What do you think about this?"

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close