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Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
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if the client wanted to have an up-to-date, respectable website, it must have pull-down menus;
- if they wanted pull-down menus, they must do it in Macromedia Flash; and
- if they wanted Flash to work on their website, they must switch to Cold Fusion Server.
The vendor was a Macromedia shop with over a dozen employees; they are now out of business.I had to write a special app just to get it to work on terminal server. Running it over a Point to Point T1 line was too slow, so even the folks in customer's biggest remote office (connected via the FULL point-to-point T1) have to use terminal services.
Same company: oh, sure the database is stable. And the ODBC driver works well.
FEH
Can't complain too much - their bugs keeps my company busy and hence well paid.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
And who can forget the Ashton-Tate PR guy who stated for the press that DBase IV would be out "Real soon now". Didn't come out for another 18 months. Unwittingly coined a classic description of vapourware. In fact I gotta feeling that debacle was also one of the first instances of the term "vapourware". ... even if its in writing.
Basic lesson , don't trust them
Bitter and proud of it.
It is partially true, on a mhz per mhz comparison. I found a Lightwave benchmark site at http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/index.html , it shows that in nearly all cases the Mac was significantly more efficient, mhz wise, to the PC. But what it doesn't show is the price per performance ratio. 1gig Macs just recently showed up at a time when PC's were at 2 gigz. They perform roughly the same.
Figure Athlon into this, and the benchmarks get more interseting. An Athlon 4 1.2 gig rendered a scene in 130 seconds, a Macintosh 867 took 271 seconds. I think both those processors came out about the same time, but that's a big difference, dontcha think?
In any case, I agree with you. Marketing has a way of twisting the numbers to their favor. It's funny how if you narrow a perspective a bit, you seem a lot more favorable.
"Derp de derp."
"Our product will integrate seamlessly into your system. Just tell your developers to read the documentation and within minutes they'll modify it to match your needs"
Licence agreement says: Any modification of code is prohibited. Use of external code to modify databases created by our program is prohibited.
Remember to send at least 10 copies of that line to the purchaser in the company. It's important they read it prior to signing the million dollar deal. It's your ass on the line, not theirs.
internet like monkeys'
Then there's the software support service contract. It took me months to get them to bill us, then they send a bill for $16K, we send it in, then when it's time to place a service call it's "who are you again?". Our $16,000 is missing, no one knows where it is, even though I have a copy of the canceled check they cashed. We are now getting dunning letters demanding payment at the same time getting a cancellation notice on another contract we had with them along with a credit invoice. So now THAT system is up-in-the-air.
They are the most screwed up company I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. I won't even go into the crap software they use. Their linux fiber HBA drivers use sg version 3.0.16 for lk 2.2. When I tried to update it, everything broke. Turns out, and this was told to me from the driver's author no less, that sg version 3.0 was a development branch only, and that every minor release changed the interface and that EMC had *NO* business putting this crap into production. I ended up getting EMC code out of it (thank god I had source) and folding it into sg rev 3.1x under lk 2.4.
The site engineer I have is the only bright spot in the entire company. He's trying to get my contract issues resolved. It's time critical, because I've heard they are farming out their higher ed contracts to Dell (which actually may be a good thing).
EMC may be good to megacorps that spend 10s of millions a year on their "frames", but if you only spend a half a mil (which we did), from my perspective at least, it seems like they could care less about you...
The place I live sells accounts to rooms, single port in a room, you call in, 30 dollars to sign up, and 20 for a month, sounds good, right? .4k
So I call them up, ask them, what's the service, the plan, the billing, etc...
don't worry, its 2.2 mbps down, and 384kbps upload!
Ok, sounds good... sign me up.
well, aside from a quick little problem with the router attaching itself to your mac address,
it turns out that its sharing one road runner account through the whole apartment complex.
I call up tech support "can you tell me why my internet connection sucks so badly?"
re: "because its a sucky connection on sucky routers" (that's what tech support said, at least THEY were being honest).
well, can you fix it?
Sure, let us kick some other people off the network...
eeee!
Right now, I download at about 20-30k, and my upload is around the ballpark of
I can't play CS, because my choke is at 100 and my ping is 2000.
Give me a 36.6k modem! Pleaasseeee...
Disclaimer:The "Human" attached to this account is unresponsible for anything unless it wants responsibility.
See Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot. This comment, also containing the OT III, was removed. I wonder if they'll notice it this time, now it isn't posted in a Co$-related story.
The Christmas-before-last, I told my parents I wanted a GeForce2 video card and a stick of RAM for Christmas. Well, they went down to CompUSA, and came back with a video card, 256MB RAM (like I had asked for) also they came back with TV-tuner card, an Ethernet cable (25ft) and a monitor switching hub. We took everything back except for the video card and RAM, and demanded a refund for the stuff, because according to my parents, the salesman told them I had to have the other stuff in order to install the video card and RAM. They were this close to getting my parents to buy software to go along with it. Good thing their budget just ran out.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
A friend of mine was supporting a group of a few hundred Wintendos boxes, and he ran into a problem where Excel was corrupting files on a semi-regular basis. When he took this to his assigned MS support rep, he was repeatedly told (over a number of months) "It must be something that you're doing wrong because I haven't been able to find anybody else with the same problem.
One day he was talking to this rep when my friend mentioned that he was talking to person X at company Y.
"Oh, yeah, he's one of my asignees,' interrupted the rep. "I talk to him all the time."
"Oh," replied my friend rather acusingly, "then you know about the problem that they've been having".
(They had been having the same problem for monthes and had been fed the same line by their [this same] MS rep.).
[guilty silence]
Busted!
And for this 'service' we paid thousands of dollars a year on top of the license fees.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I use Onebox.com as my voicemail box. I used to pay a yearly fee to get my own phone number (despite what it says below about a "free trial"), then they decided to cut the "premium" service altogether, but I got to keep the number. Here's a copy of the Onebox Plus page that's been up for the past year:
We have concluded our free trial of our Onebox Plus premium service and, due to the acquisition of Onebox.com, we have decided not to offer a paid premium service plan to users of our service. As a thank you for participating in our trial you may keep your Onebox Plus service for free. We have deleted your payment information from our system completely and you will never be charged for the Onebox Plus service.
If you have any concerns or questions, please contact us using the support form in our Help Center.
Thank you for your participation,
The Onebox.com Team
And HERE is the email I just received from OneBox:
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO ONEBOX USERS
March 14, 2002
Dear Onebox customer,
Through the years, providing you with a reliable, high quality service has been our primary mission. In order to continue, Onebox will begin charging a nominal fee. If you would like to maintain your Onebox account, we require you choose a messaging package that best fits your needs no later than April 15, 2002. Unfortunately, if we do not receive your selection by this date we will discontinue your account.
If you have an account with Onebox, you will need to register for a paid subscription prior to this date. To subscribe, please click on the following link http://www.onebox.com/service/indexFounder.html . While registering, please update your profile information where necessary. To make the transition easier, your Onebox user name and password will remain the same and all your messages will stay in your account. However, you are required to change your phone number to a new, toll-free number.
Hmmmmm... What part of never didn't they understand? Bastards. I'd willingly pay them money to continue using my voicemail number, but they're not even giving me that option. Despite numerous emails asking about this, they haven't even responded. Bastards.
-Russ
Me
Me What's that?
S It's an e-meter. It tells you the state of your health, spirit, etc (I don't actually recall what she said) Do you want to try it?
Me Yes.
S OK, hold it like this...
Me Wow. I can make the meter move pretty much any way I like just by gripping it a little more tightly.
S Don't do that.
Me How do you know people aren't doing that subconsciously?
S You have to let go (or something like that). This was accompanied by a look that told me she knew I was a skeptic, she had dealt with us before, didn't really care, and simply wanted to move on to the next sheep. (it's amazing how much can be communicated with just one look sometimes).
The only other time I've ecountered a Scientologist was downtown. He asked me if I wanted to see a free movie. I figured there would be at least a half hour of propoganda with the movie, and I didn't feel like sitting through that so I declined.
The way I see it, Scientology is to the private sector what the lottery is to the public sector--a way to tax stupidity.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
His answer: "64-bit is SLOWER than 32-bit! With 64-bit there's DOUBLE the memory to go through, so it takes the program TWICE AS LONG to do anything!!!"
Well, he was partly sorta right. If your programmers misuse 64-bit data operands where 32-bit data would do just as well, the application is going to waste about half the memory cache space (at all levels), so it _will_ run much slower. 64-bit flat memory is useful, especially for large databases, but programmers still have to understand what they're doing (and what the compiler will do, how that will impact the processor, memory, etc.) or they can build programs that run slower than they did in 32-bits.
See the 64-bit computing faq that's up at AnandTech right now.
i saw this advertisement in the paper once... it said, 'last chance to send your $5 to '
... THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME YOU SEE THIS MESSAGE TO GET IN ON IT JUST SEND IN YOUR $5!'
... but again, i was also 6 years old... i had a hell of alot of fun with that one.
so me, being the copycat i am, i did the same in my local paper... in BIG bold print, i wrote, LAST CHANCE TO SEND YOU $5 TO
i got about $750
Runnin' On Empty
I'm posting this anonymous for a good reason - I know people who have been fired for even hinting at this stuff publically.
I work for the largest ISP in New Zealand - we are strongly associated with the largest Telco (who have a virtual monopoly on landlines)
We have been told to outright lie to customers relating to a number of issues, including
* Dropping port speeds to virtually 0 on a number of P2P applications
* Running out of IP addresses to give to paying DSL customers
* DSL network outages due to extremely poor design - we are not allowed to confirm these until "the word" comes through - even when half the country is without service.
We have to tell these lies every day - I don't think it will suprise anyone to know that Xtra (the ISP) has a content partnership with MSN.
The worst part is - half this stuff gets out in press-releases before we even get told at the helpdesk; and we're still meant to lie to customers even when the info is public!
Despicable if you ask me - I'm leaving as soon as I can.