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Comcast Typo Penalizes Wrong Customer For Data Usage (arstechnica.com)
ShaunC writes: Soon after Comcast implemented its data caps in Tennessee, one customer began getting calls warning that he was approaching his monthly usage limit. The company's data cap meter was ticking up rapidly, even attributing 120GB of use — almost half of the monthly cap — to a period of time when he was out of the country. After months of back and forth and troubleshooting by the customer, Comcast finally admitted that a typo in a MAC address was causing another customer's usage to appear on his account. With data caps like Comcast's carrying a real financial cost in terms of overage fees, how can we trust providers to accurately track customers' bandwidth usage?
I hate wired broadband caps with a passion, but this has to be the absolute worst reason not to have them. Somehow electricity companies, water companies, phone companies (traditional and mobile), et al, have survived for decades (centuries perhaps?) despite occasional billing mishaps.
There's nothing particularly new about this as a problem.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Comcast won't let me activated the modem that I purchased brand new from Amazon and used to have active on a Comcast account in another state. They say they own it. I have the box and receipt from the purchase. After a couple of hours talking with various people they admitted that perhaps they had made a mistake, but couldn't fix it as it involved two different 'regions' of their service. They said it might be fixable in a customer service center, but at that point I was disgusted with it and instead bought a new modem.
It took them more than three months and required essentially a "research project" on the part of the customer combined with contact and assistance from a tech publication site to get them to "discover" the typo and admit it was their fault. What would I want? To not have to bludgeon tech and billing support people with data and connections to get a proper response.
Qwerty was not deliberately made hard to use, there were two dominant factors is the design.
1) Engineering. Letters with high adjacent usage in words were placed in locations so that the hammers they were attached to would have a safe minimum number of other hammers in between. This is the part to prevent jamming.
2) Sales. During the layout wars, a salesman had a strong advantage if they could impress the potential user. This lead to certain long and relevant words being parsed and analyzed so that their lettering could appear nice and simple. Things like having a salesman be able to type "secretary" with their left hand while pointing to various details with their right hand during a demonstration.
Dvorak is slightly superior in certain usage cases, but the numbers you are likely to find are published by Dvorak advocates and show a severe selection bias when analyzed. Average typing speeds will show a benefit to Dvorak, but professional typist speeds will be nearly identical between Dvorak and Qwerty. This is largely due to the casual typist speed being lumped in to the Qwerty number but nearly nonexistent on the Dvorak side.
As with all forms of UI, use what you like, but stop trying to convince people that you're better than they are because you use what you like and they don't use what you like.