i'm going against my principles by saying this, but isn't every company or business out to make money? you offer a service or product so you can make money and be prosperous. i build computers because i enjoy it and it gets me extra money. if i didn't want the money, i wouldn't build computers for other people. how about you, dexter "Graphic"? i assume you work for yourself as a multimedia house or some such? why do you do it? money. and because you enjoy it (i hope...) i wouldn't be programming if there was MONEY in the kind of art i do.
i have to cut my warranty down to nothing if i install linux or other alternative OS's simply because i don't feel confident supporting them (my warranty includes free tech support over the phone and house calls if the owner is in town or can ship the system to me. I offer no parts warranty because i can't AFFORD it...) does that make me an evil nazi scum bag who only cares about money? Fry's actually sells linux distros and books. does that mean that they care about openness and liberty, freedom and all that? or does that mean that they've found another cash-cow? as a small business owner, i would expect the owner of PC Parts to avoid non-money making parts and OS's, especially in our current economic state. he has employees, rent, overhead, all that other shit to worry about. as linux becomes more popular and more people start asking for it, i expect he will include boxed distros in his inventory. and if he doesn't, i suppose it isn't called PC >PARTS< Express for nothing... -----Original Message----- From: Dexter Graphic [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 11:13 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [EUG-LUG:85] Re: Fry's I've talked to the owner of PC Parts Express about starting a Linux section and selling boxed distributions, but he made it clear that the only thing he cares about is making money and that principles such as openness and freedom were of no significance to him. Also his staff is very poorly trained and routinely give completely false information and misleading advice to trusting customers. The only difference between Fry's and PC Parts Express is the scale of the enterprise, both are based on the premise of greedy exploitation of people's ignorance rather than service of humanity and the building of a truly free (as in liberated) and open civilization based on honesty, integrity, and creativity (truth, beauty, and goodness.) As for PC Training Center, I appreciate the fact that Stan supports Linux, but the quality and service I have received there has been so poor that I will no longer recommend it to any of my customers. To give one example, I dropped off a customer's computer to have a Zip drive installed, Stan charged me $70 (they were selling for $49 everywhere else) and $30 more for installation. I figured that was fine because I was in a hurry and didn't have time to do it myself. Well, not only did it take them all day to get it installed (I was promised that I could pick it up in a couple of hours) but they said my Compaq case required a special (available from Compaq only) mounting bracket which they didn't have so they kludged something together using hard drive rails and a plastic face plate hack sawed to a size so it could be jammed into the front of the case with no screws to hold it in place. Not only that but they never got the thing to actually work, and they f**ked up the system so bad that it would no longer boot--even without the Zip drive. I ended up spending two days trying to get it working again: I had to call Compaq, download and reinstall a soft-bios that lives on the hard disk, reformat everything and reinstall windows. Installing the Zip drive, by the way, was no problem, I did it in 20 minutes using a standard 5.25 Zip drive mounting adapter which I bought at PC Parts Express for $5. It turns out that Stan had a few of these adapters too but that his guys could not figure out how to use them, they never thought to pop the Compaq's front cover off before trying to install the Zip drive assembly, and since the opening in the cover was smaller than the 5.25 drive bay-opening they figured it would never fit a standard size drive. Such incompetence is inexcusable for a computer sales/service business. I have to tell that when I explained all this to Stan he did say sorry and gave me $10 back. Dexter Graphic What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? ...I don't know and I don't care!
