Posts by Gary Gough

They seem to be getting smarter, the last one was only on the phone for seven minutes before he started swearing at me and hung up. My record is 45 minutes, "Someone is at the door, hang on" and going to make coffee was good for 15 minutes of that though. I consider it a public service to waste as much of their time as I can.

Horror stories

I've helped out friends with Dell systems too. I may not see the good ones as thier owners woun't be searching for help, but that said what I have seen has been a series of disasters. One defective modem, not a big issue in itself, but the year of "tech support" that hadn't identified that as the reason for the random blue screen errors seemed a bit much. Another system, supposedly new, that demanded payment for the anti-virus software as the free trial had expired, and a printer that printed one test sheet and then wouldn't respond to anything. That was a battle to get fixed under warrenty, finally returned for a refund. A laptop with a dead ccfl tube one month out of warrenty, with the only repair option being a new display for more money then an equivalent new laptop. In that case I replaced the tube.

I wonder how much it costs to advertise compared to the dammage negative word of mouth does them, and what it would cost to actually put some effort into customer support. Every manufacturer will have broken product, and there are going to be some bad examples of support too, we are dealing with humans at both ends after all. Dell does seem to stand out as a bad example though.

In contrast, while it's not a computer company, I've seen Black and Decker replace equipment that was three months out of warrenty, just gave a new unit and cut the cord off the old one. I go out of my way to buy from them now.

Ouch

I have to learn not to be drinking coffee when I read these stories, painfully funny. It does lend some credence to the rumour those pinky rings restrict the blood flow to engineer's brains.

Assuming the old e=1/2mv^2 approximation holds, and anyone would spend the time needed to come here, especially if the distances are intergalactic, they would control far more energy then our total planetary output just for propulsion.

Just to survive given that destructive potential you'd think they'd have to have cured thier own military in historical times.

But if you want to assume hostile intent then it would be far easier to just wait for our own military engineering crowd to clear the planet off anyhow.