Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Real-life Merlin (Score 1) 86

He certainly has the wrong business plan. You can never just go to the President with your new-fangled thing. Presidents don't have time for that. Geeks will like it first. He should perhaps try to lure a few geeks with some cash -- preferably geeks who go on TV. While he is correct that he is established, he probably hasn't been anybody's focus in twenty years. Like all things business, networking will be key.

Comment Re:Lameness filter (Score 1) 274

Firefox tries to reflow the text. It fails when sites either let the text panel become twice as wide as the screen or let the navigation panels expand to fill the screen. Then you get a little tiny column of text in the middle. Slashdot does that a lot. The navigation panel on the left and the info panels on the right like to squash the stories. The current version of Slashdot is much better than the one from a couple of years ago in that respect at least.

Comment Re:Firest a ground zero mosque now this whats next (Score 1) 671

I always thought there could be some fun in an al-Qaeda game where you have to bypass a pile of security and pull off the biggest possible terrorist attack. It could be a co-op multiplayer game where your friends take on different terrorist roles. It would need to be cleverly designed for infiltration that doesn't involve constantly shooting people to be fun.

Comment Re:any number of things (Score 1) 663

Add in things kids do. Too much caffeine, too much alcohol, too many late-night gaming sessions, probably some drugs, etc. Stressing yourself out with fun can hurt during crunch time. I was bad at that in high school until half way through grade 11 when I decided to go to bed at midnight every day no matter what. That oftne meant I got a bit less homework done or played fewer games, but I felt a lot better. The things in your list mix in nasty ways with the things in mine.

Comment Re:It's down to the cost of one disk? (Score 1) 551

Dell learned the hard way about cutting out the discs. They never shipped one-button recovery discs like Compaq used to. Instead it was always the Windows disc, the "Dell Resource CD" and some more driver/software discs.

In 2005 or 2006, I forget which year, they stopped shipping the discs by default because they decided the built-in recovery worked well enough. I started working there in 2006 and they realized they needed to start shipping discs again. We used them for fixing problems or of course just reinstalling when all was lost, so we ended up sending them out like candy. If we needed to use one and we realized the customer had an old version of the XP disc without the latest service packs we would send a new one. We also sent them if the customer asked.

Why Dell didn't also supply discs that did what the recovery partition did I can't guess accurately. They never seemed to mind sending out endless replacements for the numerous discs you needed to do everything manually (assuming they had discs available).

I haven't used a new Dell machine since 2008, so I can't say anything accurate about what they include now.

Comment When working for Dell... (Score 2, Interesting) 173

I always encouraged customers to call their credit card company's fraud number as soon as they were done with me if I learned they purchased one of those scams. How many followed up I don't know.

My friend's dad also bought a rogue antivirus one day. He refused to believe it was fake. We quietly removed it and decided to let him deal with the consequences of giving his card number to con artists. Some people are just too much effort.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart

Working...