Yep. Over 30 ISPs actually (though to be fair, many of these are simply resellers of another provider's service - if you eliminate those and just include the ones that actually have their own separate infrastructure, it's around 6 ADSL-based choices and another couple of VDSL-based ones).
No, I'm simply saying, if you're going to do it, it needs to be done properly (and fairly). Not that it necessarily needs to be done in the first place.
Seriously. Canada, Australia and the UK all currently have minority governments/hung parliaments. In Australia and the UK particularly, this is a very rare occurrence (at the national/Federal level). From what I've heard, it's a bit more common in Canada though.
Anyway I totally agree with the 'all as bad as each other' sentiment. In the Federal election last year here (Australia) I honestly found myself completely disliking EVERY candidate for one reason or another... first election I've ever felt that way. Apparently many in the UK and Canada feel the same.
Thing is, in the countries where metering is standard, there's also a choice of metered plans. So if 300 GB isn't enough for you, then no problems, pay another $5 or $10/month and upgrade to a higher-allowance plan.
For example my current ISP (in Australia, FWIW) has the following ADSL2+ (24 Mbps down/1 Mbps up) plans at the moment.
30 GB 150 GB 250 GB 350 GB 600 GB 1 TB
I'm currently on the 150 GB plan and am lucky to use more than half of that on an average month. But if my usage patterns changed I'd upgrade to the 250 or 350 GB plan, which aren't that much more expensive. (Incidentally, traffic from Steam and quite a few other popular sources is 'free' on my ISP, i.e. not counted towards my usage - as a gamer this makes a huge difference and is one of the reasons I picked this particular ISP).
Anyway, my point is that metered plans are fine provided you have the option to pick a plan that suits your natural usage of the Internet. From what I can tell though, what's happening in the US is that they are starting to meter plans but NOT offering a choice of different plans. They are basically doing a 'one size fits all, and if it doesn't suit your needs, tough luck' approach. Which sucks.:(
If it's anything like the metering done ubiquitously in many other countries, then yes, all traffic that hits the WAN side of your router is counted, solicited or not.
I'm in Australia on a metered plan. Metering is the norm here for the vast majority of plans - there are a couple of unlimited ones out there but most users don't need that much and choose a cheaper plan with an allowance that suits their usage (metered plans range from as little as a few GB/month, to over 1 TB/month, so only exceptionally heavy downloaders would find an unlimited plan better value).
Anyway, if AT&T is going to meter, they have to do it properly. The (good) ISPs here could probably give them some advice. The ISP I'm with seems to meter very accurately: their figures never vary more than ~0.5% from what my router reports (i.e. maximum of a couple of MB discrepancy every 1 GB, and it's not always in their favour). They provide usage statistics via their website and a number of other tools: downloadable desktop widgets, Android and iOS apps, and of course, email/SMS warnings when you hit 70%, 90% and 100% of your monthly allowance. Additionally, they publish the API for their stats server so anyone can write their own tools to monitor usage if they want. The stats are also fairly timely, generally lagging 30-90 minutes behind the actual usage.
In my experience, only a very negligible amount of my traffic can be attributed to port scans and the like - I get only a very minor amount of unsolicited traffic, generally = 1MB/day, so it's not a big deal. On the odd occasion that something weird happens (like you get DDoSed or something), the ISP can generally see this in their logs and will waive the usage (never happened to me personally though).
What's happening at AT&T sounds very much like what happened here 10-15 years ago when (metered) broadband started becoming common. Many ISPs had significant bugs in their metering systems. Accuracy of the stats was one problem, timeliness was another: some ISPs used to have huge lag times between the actual usage, and the reporting of that usage. Sometimes you'd get only tiny bits of recorded usage for a few days then all of a sudden, it would 'catch up' and you'd get a massive chunk land on one day. That's been ironed out now (at least for the reputable ISPs). At least part of the reason for this is Australia has very strong consumer protection laws, and various independent bodies you can complain to about this kind of issue that have the power to inflict penalties on the ISP for this kind of behaviour.
I've worked in quite a few Australian Govt. Departments (Commonwealth and State). In at least three-quarters of them, webmail such as Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail were ~already blocked~. So this recommendation I suppose is just to pull the few departments that haven't already blocked them, into line.
Same here. I'd love to buy music for my iPod from Amazon. But their MP3 store doesn't sell to Australia. (And before anyone asks, no, there isn't an amazon.com.au - the US one will happily ship here for books and CDs and stuff, but not the digital downloads).
There are kids (and adults) who not only don't know the constellations, but their jaws drop open when they see a non-light-polluted sky for the first time.
Hehe I was the opposite. Coming from Australia, the first time I went to the US as a 17 year old, my jaw dropped when I saw how ~few~ stars can be seen at night over there. I hadn't imagined it would be so bad, because even in the large cities in Australia you can usually still see a fair few stars. I realise now this is because in the US, you have towns and cities quite close to each other. In most of the eastern half of the country, there's not more than a few miles between one town and the next, so there's light coming from a vast area of land. Whereas in Australia, even in a large city throwing off a huge amount of light, the next significant settlement once you leave that city is generally hundreds or even thousands of km away. So it's not so much the intensity of the light in the US that causes the difference, it's the 'widespreadness' of it.
Oh yes, there are definitely some aspects of CDMA which are better than GSM. Not arguing that. But the point I was making is that all the technical brilliance in the world is not much use if the phone doesn't work when you're away from home. It's fine if you never go anywhere but many people travel for business or family reasons a lot, and for them, a GSM phone is the only choice. As I said, I'd prefer a technically inferior but 'works everywhere' standard to a bunch of different non-interoperable systems (even if they are technically superior). This is my mindset in many areas of technology and life, not just cell phones.
Well there's a continual scale there, it's not always one extreme or the other. Not ~all~ Westerners have the 'government should always be mistrusted' mindset. That particular attitude is prevalent in America, but many Europeans, or even Aussies or Canadian or New Zealanders, will disagree. To you it might seem that they have the Chinese view on the matter, but it's really somewhere inbetween that view and yours. They have a more central or moderate opinion than either.
I'm Australian. I personally think that the government here does generally do its job reasonably well by international standards and has the public's interest in mind ~most~ of the time (this doesn't mean they necessarily ~succeed~ in getting this right, but there are many passionate politicians I can think of that have a genuine drive to improve things). To me, the American attitude seems a little paranoid. In a way that's understandable given the difference in history between the two countries: the US was formed via violent rebellion against England and a rejection of overbearing government; Australia peacefully federated after asking permission from the UK to do so, and still retains the Queen as a head of state (though largely as an empty, symbolic figurehead rather than someone that actually does anything WRT running the country).
Also, the Westminster system genuinely does seem more open, more responsible and more transparent than the American system most of the time. There are much stricter laws against lobbying and corporate donations to political parties, FoI and transparency laws are tougher, and the proportional representation system used here means that third and fourth parties, and even completely independent candidates, can and do influence laws that pass. The flip side of this, however, is that the American system is technically more democratic/representative: we don't directly vote for the Prime Minister and most other top positions in government are filled based on the winning parties internal votes, rather than publicly elected. Judicial roles are appointed rather than elected as well. So there are pros and cons to each system.
Anyway that was a bit of a tangent. My point is that I and many other Westerners have a position somewhere in between the Chinese view and your view. Government needs a close eye kept on it, and must be accountable to the people, of course. But I don't 'distrust' it. Skeptical of the views of some particular politicians or parties, sure... but the system as a whole is sound and trustworthy with the checks and balances that exist. Sometimes there's blatant incompetence on display, but generally speaking it does a decent job. The country I live in is prosperous and successful as a result. If I were to grade it on having the people's interests at heart, it'd be getting a B- or something like that:)
Agreed. For all its many flaws, iTunes does media indexing and retrieval by a huge number of fields very well. I have a pretty huge iTunes library and typing anything in the search box at the top right immediately filters the list by what you're typing (no need to pick which fields to look for, it's pretty intelligent about that). Very very fast too, as in 'as quick as I can type, each keypress instantly filters the list with no need to wait for it to 'think''.
Failing that I don't see why you need any particular software solution for your problem. Most modern OSes have a pretty damn good indexed file system search thingy. The Windows XP one sucked donkey balls and was a huge resource hog, so I always turned indexing off. But the Win 7 one is nice... you can restrict it to indexing particular folders and I don't see much of a performance hit. And I can find any index file/program/whatever instantly by hitting Win Key followed by the first few letters of what I'm after. It's very fast and I almost never browse through folders anymore (or the Start Menu for that matter).
Thankfully IPv6 offers the opportunity for this practice, along with other hacky stuff* like NAT, to go the way of the dodo. Soon everyone will have more IPs than they will ever know what to do with (even your plain old residential connection at home will have a/64 or/56 allocated to it by the ISP).
Of course, merely because IPv6 may present an opportunity for these things to be fixed does not mean that that will actually happen;)
* (NB. I do not say 'hacky' in a derogatory fashion: IP-sharing-virtual-hosts and NAT are both things that address a real need and for the most part work very well... but they weren't really ever intended to be the way things were done when the Internet and its protocols were designed).
Frankly I think it is still slower. Even massive sites like Gmail I notice load substantially slower using the 'always use HTTPS' option. Not a huge deal, but the difference is noticeable.
I don't live in America but a similar thing is happening here in Australia. There is very little broadcast in 1080p here. Most is broadcast either in 1080i, 720p or increasingly, standard def (576i on most channels, 576p on a couple).
I say 'increasingly' standard def because what's happening over here is that most TV networks have looked at the spectrum granted to them and made the decision they'll make more money from broadcasting, say, four or five SD channels in that multiplex, than they would from broadcasting one or two HD channels. So you see networks with half a dozen SD channels playing endless reruns of old stuff, rather than concentrating on one good HD channel with new content.
Which isn't all bad: it does give you a lot more choice when you're flipping channels. But all those people that bought 1080p sets really aren't getting use out of them unless they have it hooked up to a bluray player or HTPC. A few years ago when I was shopping for a TV I was on a limited budget, and consciously bought a high end 720p set rather than a low end 1080p set. Haven't regretted the choice once to be honest.
Well as an 'average Slashdotter' that isn't particularly familiar with this field, but has a general knowledge of science, the tidbits of information I remember are:
- The primary SI units are greys, indicating the actual amount of ionising radiation, and sieverts, indicating the ~effect~ of that radiation on a human being. The latter is based directly on the former after it's had some multiplication factors/coefficients applied. Sieverts are thus the main unit used when reporting a threat to human health (note that they are calculated with respect to a human, and the same figures can't be applied to other animals or plants etc).
- I have a vague recollection that the old units rads and rems are related in the same way: rads are the actual quantity of radiation and rems are the effective dosage of that radiation on a person.
- Roentgens, if I recall, only relate to gamma radiation rather than any ionising radiation. Other than that I don't know a thing about them.
- Curies and Becquerels: haven't even the slightest clue what these measure. I have a funny feeling that one or both of them might be related to the radiation present within a ~quantity of material~, rather than being a measure of the external radiation actually received at a point. Again, I'm going on very vague recollections here so I might be utterly wrong. No idea if these are instantaneous measurements, cumulative totals, or what...
Even if CDMA 'wins' in the US and GSM loses, CDMA still loses. It's utterly pathetic for frequent travellers since the rest of the world is standardised on GSM. Even if CDMA was superior (which it isn't, really), I'd prefer a standardised system that works everywhere, over a slightly superior system that's only used in one place.
Which is why this acquisition truly sucks! T-Mobile the only major US carrier that allowed you to bring your own GSM phone and easily pop a SIM in it and use it on a (cheaper) plan which didn't include the cost of paying off a phone over 2 years (i.e. the way it's done most other places on earth!)
Other carriers may let you do it after some whining, but it's not economical to do it because they will charge you the same monthly rate if you bring your own phone, as if you were paying off a phone you bought from them! It eliminates the whole point of buying your own, outright-purchased, non-contracted phone. Which as an Australian who happened to move to the US, I like to do, because it's how I did it at home and I hate contracts.
For company -> consumer directions, it's more like a broadcast. By acknowledging a problem up front (or answering a question that many people may have) in a public forum such as Twitter, it potentially saves many, many extra calls/emails to customer service.
For consumer -> company direction there's no real difference, other than if someone else is having the same issue they can see your communication (and the response), and potentially avoid having to contact the company themselves. Plus it seems to be quicker than email my experience (in terms of how quick the company responds).
Ok I had to Google it but I found the setting. I swear I've looked through Chrome's options dozens of times and never seen it! > Thanks for the heads up.
Well for simple things like finding opening hours on a well-designed website, I agree with you.
However a lot of sites are awful and it takes a while to find the bit with the opening hours (if they are even listed at all), or the sites rely on flash too much and you happen to be browsing from an iPhone, or they simply are impractical to use on small-screen mobile devices etc. I can think of some scenarios where it's useful. But yeah if I'm sitting at home and I know the info will be on a website, I'll do it that way obviously.
Don't know why, but it always is much faster in the times I've used it (compared to dealing with the same company via other means). I agree that this ~shouldn't~ actually be happening this way. But it seems to be the reality.
Some possible explanations:
- Because it's informal, it might not have the same issue tracking requirements etc. as other means. Thus being quicker and more likely for a customer service rep to take the 5 seconds required to answer it; or
- It's handled by a different team, and because only a minority of customers use the Twitter option, the pool of issues dealt with by that team is smaller and thus they get around to you quicker.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing, except they fact that they didn't have a candidate running for office in my area :P Or in most areas, for that matter.
Yep. Over 30 ISPs actually (though to be fair, many of these are simply resellers of another provider's service - if you eliminate those and just include the ones that actually have their own separate infrastructure, it's around 6 ADSL-based choices and another couple of VDSL-based ones).
No, I'm simply saying, if you're going to do it, it needs to be done properly (and fairly). Not that it necessarily needs to be done in the first place.
Seriously. Canada, Australia and the UK all currently have minority governments/hung parliaments. In Australia and the UK particularly, this is a very rare occurrence (at the national/Federal level). From what I've heard, it's a bit more common in Canada though.
Anyway I totally agree with the 'all as bad as each other' sentiment. In the Federal election last year here (Australia) I honestly found myself completely disliking EVERY candidate for one reason or another ... first election I've ever felt that way. Apparently many in the UK and Canada feel the same.
Thing is, in the countries where metering is standard, there's also a choice of metered plans. So if 300 GB isn't enough for you, then no problems, pay another $5 or $10/month and upgrade to a higher-allowance plan.
For example my current ISP (in Australia, FWIW) has the following ADSL2+ (24 Mbps down/1 Mbps up) plans at the moment.
30 GB
150 GB
250 GB
350 GB
600 GB
1 TB
I'm currently on the 150 GB plan and am lucky to use more than half of that on an average month. But if my usage patterns changed I'd upgrade to the 250 or 350 GB plan, which aren't that much more expensive. (Incidentally, traffic from Steam and quite a few other popular sources is 'free' on my ISP, i.e. not counted towards my usage - as a gamer this makes a huge difference and is one of the reasons I picked this particular ISP).
Anyway, my point is that metered plans are fine provided you have the option to pick a plan that suits your natural usage of the Internet. From what I can tell though, what's happening in the US is that they are starting to meter plans but NOT offering a choice of different plans. They are basically doing a 'one size fits all, and if it doesn't suit your needs, tough luck' approach. Which sucks. :(
If it's anything like the metering done ubiquitously in many other countries, then yes, all traffic that hits the WAN side of your router is counted, solicited or not.
I'm in Australia on a metered plan. Metering is the norm here for the vast majority of plans - there are a couple of unlimited ones out there but most users don't need that much and choose a cheaper plan with an allowance that suits their usage (metered plans range from as little as a few GB/month, to over 1 TB/month, so only exceptionally heavy downloaders would find an unlimited plan better value).
Anyway, if AT&T is going to meter, they have to do it properly. The (good) ISPs here could probably give them some advice. The ISP I'm with seems to meter very accurately: their figures never vary more than ~0.5% from what my router reports (i.e. maximum of a couple of MB discrepancy every 1 GB, and it's not always in their favour). They provide usage statistics via their website and a number of other tools: downloadable desktop widgets, Android and iOS apps, and of course, email/SMS warnings when you hit 70%, 90% and 100% of your monthly allowance. Additionally, they publish the API for their stats server so anyone can write their own tools to monitor usage if they want. The stats are also fairly timely, generally lagging 30-90 minutes behind the actual usage.
In my experience, only a very negligible amount of my traffic can be attributed to port scans and the like - I get only a very minor amount of unsolicited traffic, generally = 1MB/day, so it's not a big deal. On the odd occasion that something weird happens (like you get DDoSed or something), the ISP can generally see this in their logs and will waive the usage (never happened to me personally though).
What's happening at AT&T sounds very much like what happened here 10-15 years ago when (metered) broadband started becoming common. Many ISPs had significant bugs in their metering systems. Accuracy of the stats was one problem, timeliness was another: some ISPs used to have huge lag times between the actual usage, and the reporting of that usage. Sometimes you'd get only tiny bits of recorded usage for a few days then all of a sudden, it would 'catch up' and you'd get a massive chunk land on one day. That's been ironed out now (at least for the reputable ISPs). At least part of the reason for this is Australia has very strong consumer protection laws, and various independent bodies you can complain to about this kind of issue that have the power to inflict penalties on the ISP for this kind of behaviour.
Mod parent up +1 Informative. Would do it myself (I have points) but I already posted on this thread.
No way ... reading long numbers without thousands separators (whether dots or commas or spaces) is hard :(
I've worked in quite a few Australian Govt. Departments (Commonwealth and State). In at least three-quarters of them, webmail such as Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail were ~already blocked~. So this recommendation I suppose is just to pull the few departments that haven't already blocked them, into line.
Same here. I'd love to buy music for my iPod from Amazon. But their MP3 store doesn't sell to Australia. (And before anyone asks, no, there isn't an amazon.com.au - the US one will happily ship here for books and CDs and stuff, but not the digital downloads).
There are kids (and adults) who not only don't know the constellations, but their jaws drop open when they see a non-light-polluted sky for the first time.
Hehe I was the opposite. Coming from Australia, the first time I went to the US as a 17 year old, my jaw dropped when I saw how ~few~ stars can be seen at night over there. I hadn't imagined it would be so bad, because even in the large cities in Australia you can usually still see a fair few stars. I realise now this is because in the US, you have towns and cities quite close to each other. In most of the eastern half of the country, there's not more than a few miles between one town and the next, so there's light coming from a vast area of land. Whereas in Australia, even in a large city throwing off a huge amount of light, the next significant settlement once you leave that city is generally hundreds or even thousands of km away. So it's not so much the intensity of the light in the US that causes the difference, it's the 'widespreadness' of it.
So you can't even see Sol then. That's pretty bad ;)
Oh yes, there are definitely some aspects of CDMA which are better than GSM. Not arguing that. But the point I was making is that all the technical brilliance in the world is not much use if the phone doesn't work when you're away from home. It's fine if you never go anywhere but many people travel for business or family reasons a lot, and for them, a GSM phone is the only choice. As I said, I'd prefer a technically inferior but 'works everywhere' standard to a bunch of different non-interoperable systems (even if they are technically superior). This is my mindset in many areas of technology and life, not just cell phones.
Well there's a continual scale there, it's not always one extreme or the other. Not ~all~ Westerners have the 'government should always be mistrusted' mindset. That particular attitude is prevalent in America, but many Europeans, or even Aussies or Canadian or New Zealanders, will disagree. To you it might seem that they have the Chinese view on the matter, but it's really somewhere inbetween that view and yours. They have a more central or moderate opinion than either.
I'm Australian. I personally think that the government here does generally do its job reasonably well by international standards and has the public's interest in mind ~most~ of the time (this doesn't mean they necessarily ~succeed~ in getting this right, but there are many passionate politicians I can think of that have a genuine drive to improve things). To me, the American attitude seems a little paranoid. In a way that's understandable given the difference in history between the two countries: the US was formed via violent rebellion against England and a rejection of overbearing government; Australia peacefully federated after asking permission from the UK to do so, and still retains the Queen as a head of state (though largely as an empty, symbolic figurehead rather than someone that actually does anything WRT running the country).
Also, the Westminster system genuinely does seem more open, more responsible and more transparent than the American system most of the time. There are much stricter laws against lobbying and corporate donations to political parties, FoI and transparency laws are tougher, and the proportional representation system used here means that third and fourth parties, and even completely independent candidates, can and do influence laws that pass. The flip side of this, however, is that the American system is technically more democratic/representative: we don't directly vote for the Prime Minister and most other top positions in government are filled based on the winning parties internal votes, rather than publicly elected. Judicial roles are appointed rather than elected as well. So there are pros and cons to each system.
Anyway that was a bit of a tangent. My point is that I and many other Westerners have a position somewhere in between the Chinese view and your view. Government needs a close eye kept on it, and must be accountable to the people, of course. But I don't 'distrust' it. Skeptical of the views of some particular politicians or parties, sure ... but the system as a whole is sound and trustworthy with the checks and balances that exist. Sometimes there's blatant incompetence on display, but generally speaking it does a decent job. The country I live in is prosperous and successful as a result. If I were to grade it on having the people's interests at heart, it'd be getting a B- or something like that :)
Agreed. For all its many flaws, iTunes does media indexing and retrieval by a huge number of fields very well. I have a pretty huge iTunes library and typing anything in the search box at the top right immediately filters the list by what you're typing (no need to pick which fields to look for, it's pretty intelligent about that). Very very fast too, as in 'as quick as I can type, each keypress instantly filters the list with no need to wait for it to 'think''.
Failing that I don't see why you need any particular software solution for your problem. Most modern OSes have a pretty damn good indexed file system search thingy. The Windows XP one sucked donkey balls and was a huge resource hog, so I always turned indexing off. But the Win 7 one is nice ... you can restrict it to indexing particular folders and I don't see much of a performance hit. And I can find any index file/program/whatever instantly by hitting Win Key followed by the first few letters of what I'm after. It's very fast and I almost never browse through folders anymore (or the Start Menu for that matter).
Thankfully IPv6 offers the opportunity for this practice, along with other hacky stuff* like NAT, to go the way of the dodo. Soon everyone will have more IPs than they will ever know what to do with (even your plain old residential connection at home will have a /64 or /56 allocated to it by the ISP).
Of course, merely because IPv6 may present an opportunity for these things to be fixed does not mean that that will actually happen ;)
* (NB. I do not say 'hacky' in a derogatory fashion: IP-sharing-virtual-hosts and NAT are both things that address a real need and for the most part work very well ... but they weren't really ever intended to be the way things were done when the Internet and its protocols were designed).
Frankly I think it is still slower. Even massive sites like Gmail I notice load substantially slower using the 'always use HTTPS' option. Not a huge deal, but the difference is noticeable.
I don't live in America but a similar thing is happening here in Australia. There is very little broadcast in 1080p here. Most is broadcast either in 1080i, 720p or increasingly, standard def (576i on most channels, 576p on a couple).
I say 'increasingly' standard def because what's happening over here is that most TV networks have looked at the spectrum granted to them and made the decision they'll make more money from broadcasting, say, four or five SD channels in that multiplex, than they would from broadcasting one or two HD channels. So you see networks with half a dozen SD channels playing endless reruns of old stuff, rather than concentrating on one good HD channel with new content.
Which isn't all bad: it does give you a lot more choice when you're flipping channels. But all those people that bought 1080p sets really aren't getting use out of them unless they have it hooked up to a bluray player or HTPC. A few years ago when I was shopping for a TV I was on a limited budget, and consciously bought a high end 720p set rather than a low end 1080p set. Haven't regretted the choice once to be honest.
Well as an 'average Slashdotter' that isn't particularly familiar with this field, but has a general knowledge of science, the tidbits of information I remember are:
- The primary SI units are greys, indicating the actual amount of ionising radiation, and sieverts, indicating the ~effect~ of that radiation on a human being. The latter is based directly on the former after it's had some multiplication factors/coefficients applied. Sieverts are thus the main unit used when reporting a threat to human health (note that they are calculated with respect to a human, and the same figures can't be applied to other animals or plants etc).
- I have a vague recollection that the old units rads and rems are related in the same way: rads are the actual quantity of radiation and rems are the effective dosage of that radiation on a person.
- Roentgens, if I recall, only relate to gamma radiation rather than any ionising radiation. Other than that I don't know a thing about them.
- Curies and Becquerels: haven't even the slightest clue what these measure. I have a funny feeling that one or both of them might be related to the radiation present within a ~quantity of material~, rather than being a measure of the external radiation actually received at a point. Again, I'm going on very vague recollections here so I might be utterly wrong. No idea if these are instantaneous measurements, cumulative totals, or what...
Even if CDMA 'wins' in the US and GSM loses, CDMA still loses. It's utterly pathetic for frequent travellers since the rest of the world is standardised on GSM. Even if CDMA was superior (which it isn't, really), I'd prefer a standardised system that works everywhere, over a slightly superior system that's only used in one place.
Which is why this acquisition truly sucks! T-Mobile the only major US carrier that allowed you to bring your own GSM phone and easily pop a SIM in it and use it on a (cheaper) plan which didn't include the cost of paying off a phone over 2 years (i.e. the way it's done most other places on earth!)
Other carriers may let you do it after some whining, but it's not economical to do it because they will charge you the same monthly rate if you bring your own phone, as if you were paying off a phone you bought from them! It eliminates the whole point of buying your own, outright-purchased, non-contracted phone. Which as an Australian who happened to move to the US, I like to do, because it's how I did it at home and I hate contracts.
Gah!
For company -> consumer directions, it's more like a broadcast. By acknowledging a problem up front (or answering a question that many people may have) in a public forum such as Twitter, it potentially saves many, many extra calls/emails to customer service.
For consumer -> company direction there's no real difference, other than if someone else is having the same issue they can see your communication (and the response), and potentially avoid having to contact the company themselves. Plus it seems to be quicker than email my experience (in terms of how quick the company responds).
Ok I had to Google it but I found the setting. I swear I've looked through Chrome's options dozens of times and never seen it! > Thanks for the heads up.
Well for simple things like finding opening hours on a well-designed website, I agree with you.
However a lot of sites are awful and it takes a while to find the bit with the opening hours (if they are even listed at all), or the sites rely on flash too much and you happen to be browsing from an iPhone, or they simply are impractical to use on small-screen mobile devices etc. I can think of some scenarios where it's useful. But yeah if I'm sitting at home and I know the info will be on a website, I'll do it that way obviously.
Don't know why, but it always is much faster in the times I've used it (compared to dealing with the same company via other means). I agree that this ~shouldn't~ actually be happening this way. But it seems to be the reality.
Some possible explanations:
- Because it's informal, it might not have the same issue tracking requirements etc. as other means. Thus being quicker and more likely for a customer service rep to take the 5 seconds required to answer it; or
- It's handled by a different team, and because only a minority of customers use the Twitter option, the pool of issues dealt with by that team is smaller and thus they get around to you quicker.