Tha AC says: I work for a business who would like to do nothing more than play by the rules
Fine. (Her)His business plays by the rules. I assume it plays fairly and has never tricked anyone into buying products the reciever of the TM call had never though about buying before the call was placed. I assume that the company has never hung up a call when the reciever tried to get information about the company. I assume that every worker get a fair pay well above minimum wage. I assume that the company has never, ever done anything that remotely resembles any unfair business.
It does not change the fact that (s)he is the representative of an industry run wild, widly hated, given many chances and has been treated with a lot of patience until now. Yet this individal dares to complain about they having to follow the rules? Guess what; your spotless company could have contributed to chaning all this. But no. There's so much whining to do, so little time to change.
As for the assumptions; has anyone had a erally positive experience with telemarketeers? I mean, they called you around 17, just after work but before dinner to offer you a really good deal on something you needed and were helpful to compare it with your current offer? And said "Oh, well it was a pleasure anyway, enjoy your dinner, mr. Callee" when you kindly turned down the offer?
If telemarketeers had behaved remotly like medium-experienced store clerks, the legislation would have been unneccesary. They have dug their own grave, time to lie in it.
BTW: Since I live in Norway, I haven't recieved a single call, "Resident"-letter or locally sent spam since 1997 or so. And we don't have loopholes. If a business call me, without my permission, they get fined. Period. Same goes for churches and all that shit. I don't need to be told what to support. (I have just cancelled my Amnesty lifetime membership and will now join the HRW instead).
I know... I know... not a lot of sympathy, but still, I work for a business who would like to do nothing more than play by the rules, but all kinds of barriers have been put up in our way.
Actually, you do not get any sympathy from me. There are whole industries that are counter-productive and a pain in the ass for normal people like me. There are a thousand things you could have done to prevent people from getting really annoyed by your calls. You could have requested the permission to call and thus made a do-call-list. You could not scam elderly from giving up their life savings. You could have syncronized the lists to minimize the annoyance. In short, you could have de-sleazed the industry. You could offer support, not pushy salespeople. You could respect your workers more. But you didn't, so the people (the state) had to do it for you. Telemarketing is in the same category as pyramid-like MLM systems, they bend and stretch the rules, always complaining that the state is out to get them in different ways.
Sir, I have no sympathy for the added cost or work. It is your own damn fault.
This system has been in effect for some time in Norway, and it works quite well. We pay a small fee for the recycling, 5 USD or so, and turn in the computer for fre. Actually, yesterday I delivered two broken 17" CRTs, a 486, a Dell sparepart computer and an old Pentium that actually caught fire while on duty as a firewall. Guess the flames was too much.
Anyway, the only thing you pay after the 5 USD is the petrol for the trip to Brobekk in Oslo where the center is. As a private person, you can deliver 2,5 m3 of used computer equipment at the time. If you are or represent a business entity, the fee is 15 USD per delivery.
It's an investment. If I can save 2 minutes each day of staring into a boooting computer screen, by installing a fix that takes me 60 minutes to install, it pays off after one or two months.
This is also the primary reason I choose Linux or Apple MacOSX for work. Linux may have a steeper learning curve, and MacOSX may have some things done differently but they both save time. I convinced my mother to by a Mac, and after some initial phonecalls about "how do I cut and paste" etc, complete silence. Since her iBook Just Works (TM), she is more effective and doesn't have to call me. We both save time.
Always look at these things as an investment. Make an analysis of how much time you'll save versus how much time you'll spend fixing the damned thig som you'll save time. Usually it pays off, but if it doesn't, don't do it.
That is very true. A computer illiterate friend of mine thinks his Dell 2 GHz WinXP machine is so much faster than my old 266 MHz machine because it boots SO much faster. All this while he completley ignores the fact that is WinXP machine is soaked in spyware, slowing the much faster machine down to a crawl. I don't think he understands how my 5yr old computer can feel so much faster than his once it has booted...:D
---snip--- Let me tell you the wonderful story of the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse. I got hold of one of these right after Christmas and went home to try it out. As I was putting the CD in the computer, I noticed that i said "MS XP only". I was running 2000 at the time (Now running RedHat 8). OK, so I couldn't use the Bluetooth device on my computer without paying additional MS tax.
OK, so I gave it to a friends girlfriend who had XP on the computer. She couldn't install it, so I went up to her to install the device. I put the CD in the machine and was told that I needed XP SP1 to do this. Fuckin' L. OK. The XP SP1 CD was included was after 30 minutes, it was installed on her computer. Reboot, and try the Bluetooth driver CD again. It seemed to install something but it soon told me that since I did not use the English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish or Swedish language, the drivers could not be installed. (She had Norwegian installed) DAMN IT!
After the failed attempt to get the Microsoft product to work on another Microsoft product, I went to my mother to have a look at her new iBook. I though that just for kicks, I could put the MS Bluetooth dongle in the Mac USB port. So I did, and......nothing. No dialogs, no driver installs. Then suddenly, a new icon on the screen! A Bluetooth icon. It worked. Flawlessly. It communicated with my Sony Ericsson t68i AND the Microsoft mouse.
Go figure. ---snip---
I also attended an MS press conference this Monday, where they presented some new stuff. The only thing new about it all was the fact that the scroll wheel tilted sideways as well as scrolled. It was annoying as hell, and the only use I could imagine was for use in Excel spreadsheets, but none of the computers I treid had Excel installed on them.
The rest of the press conference was embarassing, it was just a collection of ripped off ideas like Bluetooth PAN integration (Available in Q2 2004 with Windows SP2) and a new chip in the optical mice, that make them last 6 months on two AAs. Just as long as my Logitech optical, that is.
There is a beta out for PC, i saw it yesterday at an MS press conference. The press conference sucked big time, all MS presented was the side-tilting scrollwheel. And a fake imitation leather (sic!) keyboard and mouse.
Oh, yes. He get a minor role in the movie for being so pathetic and for acting like a dork in front of a camera. That's going to make it better.
If Lucas himself went out and said: "Hey son, that's some fine handling of the ol' lightsabre. We could really use someone like you in the movie!", that's one thing.
Getting a role because someone let out a video of you, being a complete dork and then whining all the time is not the way to get the respect of your peers. He could have dealt with this in a self-ironic way, thus getting more respect and handling it better than he did. But no.
"According to an article on Commentwire.com SCO has started sending invoices to Linux users.
Just what the fuck are you putting up with over there in the US? If a two-bit scheister company sent me a letter like that, they'd get a gimme-evidence-or-fuck you-reply from my lawyer plus an invoice from hum and me for wasting my time.
While some countries still use obsolete tech like creditcards, we use phones. Payment by SMS, that is. And I did not actually pay, since there was some kind of dumb lead-'em-into-it 5USD rebate. But I did not know about the rebate until after.
So, mr. Coward, sucks to be you with all that calling and stuff.
This is what a public broadcaster should do. Where I live, Norway, our public broadcaster has become more and more commercial. I'm starting to lose my belief in the license system because of all the crap that happens. The Norwegian public broadcaster demands that I pay 250 USD a year for having a TV. Before, this was OK but now this money goes to commercial crap and incredibly small target audiences.
What really pissed me off a couple of months ago was that they CHARGED ME MONEY (4 USD) for watching a 5-minute part rerun on the web. I sent them a big fuck you-mail and asked what the hell was going on with the property of the people. The broadcaster is owned by the state, ergo the public. No reply.
I don't know about you, but this virus thingy has so far earned me a little over 10 000 emails in my account. But who's counting?!
As for this line:
technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine
This is something I can relate to:
Hours spent on fixing machine (setting up rules and updating antivirus software): 1/2 @ 60 USD
Hours spent on home office trying to shuffle through and delete non-relevant email on a Novell Groupwise webmail connection: 2 @ 60 USD
150 USD is what my employer spent on my lost work time, and we did not record a single incident in our systems! That is what you pay for having a publicly widespread email address.
I can verifiy that. The virus spreading has MY email attatched to it, even though I haven't been anywhere near my job account. (I'm innocen, that is).
As a result, I have been deleting more or less 4000 - 6000 error emails bouncing to my account.
But what REALLY irritates me is the fucking autoreply from the mail scanners. I have not got this virus (I use Mac and Linux), some dolt with my email address in his phukking Outlook addressbook has it. Even so, I get tons and tons and tons of smug autoreplys saying that "You've got virus!". Haven't they understood that this method was obsolete a couple of years ago? AT LEAST insert a filter so the warning ONLY goes out on a virus that doesn't spoof the address.
Some even write by hand, one of the dozen or so emails was a death threat. Which just confirm my theory, 93% of all people are morons.
This virus will probably take a good part of my work day, and I wasn't even infected.
To the writer: Fuck you. Fuck you and the fucking ugly thypusridden bastard children you think are yours. And your MOMA!
Sounds like they're up to their dirty old tricks again. But then again, what are we to expect?
What you need is some proper goverment action. The Norwegian goverment put its foot down when the telecomms wanted to regulate number porting themselves. The Gov said that "portability is to be free (as in beer) for the customers and easy to do. And don't try to fuck them over by doing something funny, we know that GSM portability is not complicated like brain surgery". Well, the last part was understated. Now the goverment is a neutral observer in the market and reporting the prices as they get them (Each operator has to disclose all their prices to the Norwegian FCC). The result: A much more liberated price enviroment and many small operators competing hard. Steep reduction on mobile phone prices and increase in quality.
Understanably, the site is in Norwegian, but if you peak around, the concept is probably clear to you. And interesting. Looking at the figures, I'm in for a 200 NOK (approx. 30 USD) save each month by switching from Telenor.
Telepriser.no and the national opt-out list for telemarketers is probably the things US Slashdotters could learn the most from us. The deregulation of the power grid is probably just as fucked as in California.
We have this feature in our system, and it has been there for some time now. The number porting system was a real boon to the smaller price-competing phone operators who previously had problem attracting customers. One of the companies, the price and service leader, has gone from 800 subscribers to well over 100 000 in just a year. I'm switching to them, so is my friends, mom, dad, girlfriend and her family. Left is the former state monopoloy, Telenor, which is hemmoraging customers.
With number portability in a free market, the greedy actors are exposed really fast.
There is also no fee for porting here, the only fee is an optional (for the company) connection fee. The very notion of having a fee is absurd in a GSM system, remember; it is made for quick portability. Porting your subscription is done in one step: Tell your new operator that you are switching to them and be sure to mention the phone # while you're at it. Done. The new SIM card arrives after a while and the porting date comes via email. Or snailmail if you want it to.
First, assuming Smartphone is like any other Microsoft os is stupid.
I'm not assuming that it is based on or identical to any other MS OS. What I AM assuming is that the SP OS is: Made by Microsoft. This has some qualities to it, as I have experienced. MS is a company that does not take security very seriously in my opinion. If they had, Outlook would never been released for example.
I have NEVER had a blue screen because there's no such thing on the platform.
I never said anything about a BSOD, but mobile phones tend to reboot or freeze instead of giving debug error messages to the user. We have the Qtek phone here in Europe. I have seen the Qtek crash when a store clerk gave me a demo, it reset itself while entering a name in the phonebook. Real sturdy, Microsoft.
As for the GPRS; not everyone lives in th US. I live in Norway, where the GPRS is metered. I use it A LOT and have a GPRS bill lower than the T-Mobile unlimited plan (with voice). But if a worm infected my SP and started trying to reach others, the low bills could be a thing of the past.
Really. The Qtek phone doesn't even get close to phones like Sony Ericsson P800, and even costs more.
The one thing that guarantees that I will never, ever, EVER own a MS-phone is the simple fact that I actually have to pay for services that originate from that phone. When the first SmartPhone get infected with a worm and causes several hundred dollars in GPRS bills, I'll kiss my t68i and thank it for not being an insecure piece of crap.
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Fine. (Her)His business plays by the rules. I assume it plays fairly and has never tricked anyone into buying products the reciever of the TM call had never though about buying before the call was placed. I assume that the company has never hung up a call when the reciever tried to get information about the company. I assume that every worker get a fair pay well above minimum wage. I assume that the company has never, ever done anything that remotely resembles any unfair business.
It does not change the fact that (s)he is the representative of an industry run wild, widly hated, given many chances and has been treated with a lot of patience until now. Yet this individal dares to complain about they having to follow the rules? Guess what; your spotless company could have contributed to chaning all this. But no. There's so much whining to do, so little time to change.
As for the assumptions; has anyone had a erally positive experience with telemarketeers? I mean, they called you around 17, just after work but before dinner to offer you a really good deal on something you needed and were helpful to compare it with your current offer? And said "Oh, well it was a pleasure anyway, enjoy your dinner, mr. Callee" when you kindly turned down the offer?
If telemarketeers had behaved remotly like medium-experienced store clerks, the legislation would have been unneccesary. They have dug their own grave, time to lie in it.
BTW: Since I live in Norway, I haven't recieved a single call, "Resident"-letter or locally sent spam since 1997 or so. And we don't have loopholes. If a business call me, without my permission, they get fined. Period. Same goes for churches and all that shit. I don't need to be told what to support. (I have just cancelled my Amnesty lifetime membership and will now join the HRW instead).
Actually, you do not get any sympathy from me. There are whole industries that are counter-productive and a pain in the ass for normal people like me. There are a thousand things you could have done to prevent people from getting really annoyed by your calls. You could have requested the permission to call and thus made a do-call-list. You could not scam elderly from giving up their life savings. You could have syncronized the lists to minimize the annoyance. In short, you could have de-sleazed the industry. You could offer support, not pushy salespeople. You could respect your workers more.
But you didn't, so the people (the state) had to do it for you. Telemarketing is in the same category as pyramid-like MLM systems, they bend and stretch the rules, always complaining that the state is out to get them in different ways.
Sir, I have no sympathy for the added cost or work. It is your own damn fault.
Worst case:
1. Play the CD in your normal CD player, record it on your computer digitally via the S/PDIF input.
2. ???
3. Distribute.
(Not that ours has)
Anyway, the only thing you pay after the 5 USD is the petrol for the trip to Brobekk in Oslo where the center is. As a private person, you can deliver 2,5 m3 of used computer equipment at the time. If you are or represent a business entity, the fee is 15 USD per delivery.
It's an investment. If I can save 2 minutes each day of staring into a boooting computer screen, by installing a fix that takes me 60 minutes to install, it pays off after one or two months.
This is also the primary reason I choose Linux or Apple MacOSX for work. Linux may have a steeper learning curve, and MacOSX may have some things done differently but they both save time. I convinced my mother to by a Mac, and after some initial phonecalls about "how do I cut and paste" etc, complete silence. Since her iBook Just Works (TM), she is more effective and doesn't have to call me. We both save time.
Always look at these things as an investment. Make an analysis of how much time you'll save versus how much time you'll spend fixing the damned thig som you'll save time. Usually it pays off, but if it doesn't, don't do it.
That is very true. A computer illiterate friend of mine thinks his Dell 2 GHz WinXP machine is so much faster than my old 266 MHz machine because it boots SO much faster. All this while he completley ignores the fact that is WinXP machine is soaked in spyware, slowing the much faster machine down to a crawl. I don't think he understands how my 5yr old computer can feel so much faster than his once it has booted... :D
I will quote my favourite MS Story here:
...nothing. No dialogs, no driver installs. Then suddenly, a new icon on the screen! A Bluetooth icon. It worked. Flawlessly. It communicated with my Sony Ericsson t68i AND the Microsoft mouse.
---snip---
Let me tell you the wonderful story of the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse. I got hold of one of these right after Christmas and went home to try it out. As I was putting the CD in the computer, I noticed that i said "MS XP only". I was running 2000 at the time (Now running RedHat 8). OK, so I couldn't use the Bluetooth device on my computer without paying additional MS tax.
OK, so I gave it to a friends girlfriend who had XP on the computer. She couldn't install it, so I went up to her to install the device. I put the CD in the machine and was told that I needed XP SP1 to do this. Fuckin' L. OK. The XP SP1 CD was included was after 30 minutes, it was installed on her computer. Reboot, and try the Bluetooth driver CD again. It seemed to install something but it soon told me that since I did not use the English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish or Swedish language, the drivers could not be installed. (She had Norwegian installed) DAMN IT!
After the failed attempt to get the Microsoft product to work on another Microsoft product, I went to my mother to have a look at her new iBook. I though that just for kicks, I could put the MS Bluetooth dongle in the Mac USB port. So I did, and...
Go figure.
---snip---
I also attended an MS press conference this Monday, where they presented some new stuff. The only thing new about it all was the fact that the scroll wheel tilted sideways as well as scrolled. It was annoying as hell, and the only use I could imagine was for use in Excel spreadsheets, but none of the computers I treid had Excel installed on them.
The rest of the press conference was embarassing, it was just a collection of ripped off ideas like Bluetooth PAN integration (Available in Q2 2004 with Windows SP2) and a new chip in the optical mice, that make them last 6 months on two AAs. Just as long as my Logitech optical, that is.
There is a beta out for PC, i saw it yesterday at an MS press conference. The press conference sucked big time, all MS presented was the side-tilting scrollwheel. And a fake imitation leather (sic!) keyboard and mouse.
Oh, yes. He get a minor role in the movie for being so pathetic and for acting like a dork in front of a camera. That's going to make it better.
If Lucas himself went out and said: "Hey son, that's some fine handling of the ol' lightsabre. We could really use someone like you in the movie!", that's one thing.
Getting a role because someone let out a video of you, being a complete dork and then whining all the time is not the way to get the respect of your peers. He could have dealt with this in a self-ironic way, thus getting more respect and handling it better than he did. But no.
If he's 18 and virgin, he fits snugly into the world average but is two years behind the rest of the US average... Source: BBC and Durex
Just what the fuck are you putting up with over there in the US? If a two-bit scheister company sent me a letter like that, they'd get a gimme-evidence-or-fuck you-reply from my lawyer plus an invoice from hum and me for wasting my time.
I mean Phoenix was a bird of fire, maybe ESA should name it after something that does not soar across the sky in fire?
So, mr. Coward, sucks to be you with all that calling and stuff.
What really pissed me off a couple of months ago was that they CHARGED ME MONEY (4 USD) for watching a 5-minute part rerun on the web. I sent them a big fuck you-mail and asked what the hell was going on with the property of the people. The broadcaster is owned by the state, ergo the public. No reply.
So kudos to the BBC, crap to NRK.
Cool! Source?
Glock gun: Point away from face. (Aaahhh. So THAT'S what I've been doing wrong)
As for this line:
technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine
This is something I can relate to:
Hours spent on fixing machine (setting up rules and updating antivirus software): 1/2 @ 60 USD
Hours spent on home office trying to shuffle through and delete non-relevant email on a Novell Groupwise webmail connection: 2 @ 60 USD
150 USD is what my employer spent on my lost work time, and we did not record a single incident in our systems! That is what you pay for having a publicly widespread email address.
I can verifiy that. The virus spreading has MY email attatched to it, even though I haven't been anywhere near my job account. (I'm innocen, that is).
As a result, I have been deleting more or less 4000 - 6000 error emails bouncing to my account.
But what REALLY irritates me is the fucking autoreply from the mail scanners. I have not got this virus (I use Mac and Linux), some dolt with my email address in his phukking Outlook addressbook has it. Even so, I get tons and tons and tons of smug autoreplys saying that "You've got virus!". Haven't they understood that this method was obsolete a couple of years ago? AT LEAST insert a filter so the warning ONLY goes out on a virus that doesn't spoof the address.
Some even write by hand, one of the dozen or so emails was a death threat. Which just confirm my theory, 93% of all people are morons.
This virus will probably take a good part of my work day, and I wasn't even infected.
To the writer: Fuck you. Fuck you and the fucking ugly thypusridden bastard children you think are yours. And your MOMA!
What you need is some proper goverment action. The Norwegian goverment put its foot down when the telecomms wanted to regulate number porting themselves. The Gov said that "portability is to be free (as in beer) for the customers and easy to do. And don't try to fuck them over by doing something funny, we know that GSM portability is not complicated like brain surgery". Well, the last part was understated. Now the goverment is a neutral observer in the market and reporting the prices as they get them (Each operator has to disclose all their prices to the Norwegian FCC). The result: A much more liberated price enviroment and many small operators competing hard. Steep reduction on mobile phone prices and increase in quality.
See; goverment isn't always bad.
Understanably, the site is in Norwegian, but if you peak around, the concept is probably clear to you. And interesting. Looking at the figures, I'm in for a 200 NOK (approx. 30 USD) save each month by switching from Telenor.
Telepriser.no and the national opt-out list for telemarketers is probably the things US Slashdotters could learn the most from us. The deregulation of the power grid is probably just as fucked as in California.
With number portability in a free market, the greedy actors are exposed really fast.
There is also no fee for porting here, the only fee is an optional (for the company) connection fee. The very notion of having a fee is absurd in a GSM system, remember; it is made for quick portability. Porting your subscription is done in one step: Tell your new operator that you are switching to them and be sure to mention the phone # while you're at it. Done. The new SIM card arrives after a while and the porting date comes via email. Or snailmail if you want it to.
I'm not assuming that it is based on or identical to any other MS OS. What I AM assuming is that the SP OS is: Made by Microsoft. This has some qualities to it, as I have experienced. MS is a company that does not take security very seriously in my opinion. If they had, Outlook would never been released for example.
I have NEVER had a blue screen because there's no such thing on the platform.
I never said anything about a BSOD, but mobile phones tend to reboot or freeze instead of giving debug error messages to the user. We have the Qtek phone here in Europe. I have seen the Qtek crash when a store clerk gave me a demo, it reset itself while entering a name in the phonebook. Real sturdy, Microsoft.
As for the GPRS; not everyone lives in th US. I live in Norway, where the GPRS is metered. I use it A LOT and have a GPRS bill lower than the T-Mobile unlimited plan (with voice). But if a worm infected my SP and started trying to reach others, the low bills could be a thing of the past.
Really. The Qtek phone doesn't even get close to phones like Sony Ericsson P800, and even costs more.
The one thing that guarantees that I will never, ever, EVER own a MS-phone is the simple fact that I actually have to pay for services that originate from that phone. When the first SmartPhone get infected with a worm and causes several hundred dollars in GPRS bills, I'll kiss my t68i and thank it for not being an insecure piece of crap.
A link could be useful... Sorry!