A plastic one.

"By Grapthar's hammer... What a savings."

A few years ago, my primary bank (Wells Fargo) had a feature where you could log into your ebanking website and transfer money from your account to another account holder at the same bank. There was no fee for this service and it worked well. Recently, I checked again, and they have replaced that service with a "Transfer money to anyone with an email address" service. First you must "sign up". I don't know why I need to involve another party to transfer money to someone else at the same bank.....

Maybe the videos just weren't very good. For instance: Maybe the instructor did something that was not covered in the material, and failed to explain it... Or maybe the instructor failed to indicate WHY something was done.

This takes me back to the old Computer certification courses where the makers said "engaging the student helps them learn better", so they would pepper the lesson with multiple choice questions on a certain topic BEFORE it was covered (just to gauge your knowledge). This was most infuriating, because you would often choose the wrong answer and be presented with a message like "NO, you're WRONG!!!!*!" even before you were taught anything about it. What a way to keep students.... No wonder many of them didn't finish.

Yeah, but SIX MONTHS in the future?!?!?! That should tell you right there that their help desk is worthless.

Having a round LCD screen is stupid. There is just no reason for it. The image is displayed anyway as rows and columns, which is inherently rectangular. It's just a holdover from mechanical watches that rotate on a central axis. The circular LCD will never hold as much information as a same resolution rectangular LCD, plus the engineering to get it to work is a lot more complicated. I see round LCDs as a waste of perfectly good screen real estate, and technology. That engineering could be put to much better use than (almost literally) to cram a square peg into a round hole.

DEBUG?

How about FDISK /MBR and SYS C:?

I disagree.

For your company, remote users are the most expensive to support. It often takes several minutes to try to make the user understand what you want them to do, and to do it PROPERLY, where locally, you could just go to a user's desk and fix the problem in seconds.

When dealing with local users, you get to use *ALL* of your senses to diagnose a problem. Does the computer feel abnormally hot? Does it smell like something burning? Can you see that the little tab on the ethernet cable is broken off?

Likewise, users on the other end of the phone are trying to describe a problem to you using only their voice, and they don't know the jargon: "There is this THING on my browser and it won't go away."
What is this THING that they are talking about? A window? An icon? A toolbar?

All of these factors use up a lot of time, and time costs money.

Also, isolating yourself from the users limits the quality of your work. If you work with them, and see how they use their computers, it will give you a better overall view which helps you support them even better in the future.

Hey! That's *MY* mother's maiden name too! We must be brothers!

If he's such an advocate of online anonymity, then how do we know that it's really him?

Ash 3D?

"See this? This... is my BOOM STICK!"

The lawyers say no. They use FAX machines every day.

I hate the fact that so many members of the older generation call USB "thumb" drives, "ZIP drives". They don't seem to understand that a ZIP drive is a completely different thing, and is pretty much obsolete because of its relatively low capacity. I think they just like the "zip" buzzword. It's makes them feel cool.

...except for users who don't have a ctrl key. Damn you Blackberry!

How often will Windows 9 receive updates? I heard on the TWIT podcast that it would be once a month.

***NEWS FLASH***

Windows is ALREADY updated once a month, so I don't see how that is any more frequent.