What wrecked it was the freaks who followed us. The moment they started with their fake Chinese and bible bashing, people ran. We actually gave away over a hundred Bibles that day, and people seemed pleased with what they got. These other idiots didn't get to base one.
I think you've got it in one there. These clowns have such heavily structured procedures for 'witnessing' or 'preaching' or 'evangelising' or 'missionaryising' (!) that they can't see that they're beating their heads against brick walls. The only real difference between the western folks and the Asian folks is that we won't hesitate to tell a religous freak where he can stick his $holy_book{$religion} if he goes all in-your-face on us, whereas Asian folks won't be so confrontational, and they'll tolerate them out (as opposed to *hear* them out). The religous freaks take the polite tolerance to mean acceptance, and extrapolate that to a point where they believe that their methods are actually working!
You're equally correct in drawing correlation between evangelistic methods for religion and operating systems. Wearing penguin/daemon t-shirts and neglecting personal hygiene makes people assume we're freaks - we might as well go and take a one-day course in the wrong language like the Mormons do. On the other hand, the install fests, and free Linux CDs and free 'The Open CD's actually do work, 'cos they're not confrontational, they're not silly, and the target audience gets something usefull out of it.
That's not to say that a good belly laugh as a result of some silly twat mispronouncing "You good?" at you in the wrong language isn't a good thing mind you!!!
I just got some hate mail in private email from one of the aforementioned 'Morons'. Poor guy seems a bit delusional. First up, he's of the perception that the aforementioned crash-course means of learning a new language works really really well. Well hey, if your foreign language skills were half as good as you think they are, I wouldn't be getting a kick out of watching native speakers laugh their guts up at you behind your back! Then, he somehow managed to establish that my discussion of culture and business was actually talk about religion!!! (go figure) and that I was attacking him. I guess that's why they're colloquially known as 'Morons'. Anyway Mister Joe Brower , I don't accept unsolicited mail from anyone, much less unsolicited hate mail from someone who has problems interpreting stuff in his native language whilst professing to be an excellent speaker of a bunch of other languages. What I *will* do is enter "jb_02_98@yahoo.com" on any web page that wants to know my email address for the next month or three. No, thank *you* for your time (and you're right, I'd like it if you kept your religion out of my slashdot).
And the Asian government reps just nod and smile and say
"Yes, yes, you Americans have very large penis!"
.. then duly ignore the stupid American who is trying to tell them how to run their country and go off and do precisely whatever it was that they intended to do before the stupid American started mouthing off.
I just love the way Asian folks do business. It varies a bit from country to country of course, but generally, they'll make a nice polite show of pretending to give a shit about the rubbish the stupid American is spouting, then go quietly back to whatever they were doing before, unmoved. It's fun to watch the religous types pushing their word in Chinatown anywhere. The victims listen politely, nod and smile, and go on their way. The religious types read the situation to mean that because (a) no-one told them to f*ck right off, and (b) someone nodded and smiled at them, that they're getting their message through. This is why Chinatown precincts are always more clogged with religous freaks than elsewhere in any given city.
Here in Sydney, Australia it's generally the Morons pushing their false religion with their stilted crash-course Chinese. They're incapable of picking what nationality any given Asian person is, so they try to talk to everyone in Mandarin Chinese (very few people actually speak Mandarin here in Sydney, it's a predominantly Cantonese thing here). It's amusing to wander along 10 metres behind them, watching them greet random people with their "Ni Hao" and a big cheesy smile and all the wrong intonations, and watch the victims return the greeting with a polite nod and smile, then crack up laughing once the Morons (mormons?) have passed!
Oh, and one copy of Netstumbler 0.4 (just released!) from http://www.netstumbler.com/. $0.00. Netstumbler works fine with the Netgear MA111 adaptor. I haven't tried it with the BSD scanning tools yet.
As I said already, I built one of these already. My shopping list ran to a bit more than $5.00 though....
One 13 inch (the biggest one they had, basically!!!) Dumpling scoop thing from the 'Thai Kee' (chinese, not Thai!) supermarket on level 1 on the Market City shopping centre in Sydney's (Australia) chinatown. Turn right when you enter the shop, they're at the far end of the right-most aisle - AUD$15.85
One Netgear MA111 USB/802.11b adaptor from Dan at http://www.usbtech.com.au/ - AUD$69.00
One plastic hose joiner thing from Bunnings Hardware (Bunnings == direct copy of Home Depot) - AUD$0.80
One adhesive band-aid strip, to cover the gouge I put in my finger trying to cut the hose joiner up the side - AUD$0.00 (stolen from the office medical cabinet)
I didn't shop around for best price, etc, etc, 'cos I knew that once this thing hit slashdot, there was gonna be a worldwide stockout on the chinese cookware. I could have gotten things a bit cheaper if I had shopped around, but short of an AUD$1200+ aeroplane ticket to Guangzhou and buying direct from manufacturers, there was no way this setup would cost $5.00 of anyone's money. With time and petrol and driving around, I guess it cost AUD$100.00. Good fun tho, and worth every cent.
I already built one of these things after the site first surfaced a couple of weeks ago. The neat thing about it is that it's modular insofar as your choice of radio goes. Unplug the 802.11b tranceiver, replace it with a usb Bluetooth tranceiver, aim at the nearest bus stop, and wa-la, bluejack city.
Want to use 802.11g, or heaven forbid, 802.11a, plug one in! It's the ultimate in modular l33+ hax0r radio toys. Why, I reckon you could even plug an usb IrDA adaptor in there...
I'm convinced that Pringles can antennas are an
uban myth. First up, the cans are made of cardboard, and aren't reflective. Second, they're the wrong size for 2.4GHz. All you actually get is a mismatched-for-size flat metal plate that will offer some vague semblance of directionality, but if anything, a pringles 'can' is going to work as an attenuator, not a waveguide.
Still, placebos work on a substantial portion of folks, so if you feel that your pringles can antenna works for you, far be it from me to tell you otherwise.
For something that actually *does* work, have a look at Super Cantenna --- that one *is* the right size for 2.4GHZ, and it *is* reflective, and it *is* a waveguide and it *does* work. USD$20 for an actual tuned waveguide antenna beats a cardboard tube laced with monosodium glutamate anyday!
It's nice to see new gadgets, sure, but this new products every few months thing is a real PITA from a commercial point of view. I've been caught out by Sony several times in the last few months... I buy a laptop or a projector or a tape recorder or something for someone at work. A month later, someone comes to me and says "I need a tape recorder" so I say "Go and check out what Bill got, and if you like it, I'll get you one. When I go to Sony and say "Giz another one of those", they do what is effectively the old bait-n-switch... "Sorry Sir, that product has been discontinued, but we have this new model, only $100 extra".
They've done it to me with a tape recorder and a laptop in the last couple of weeks. Numerous other crap before. It's reaching the point where I'm discouraging folks from choosing Sony, 'cos they can't even keep stock of a product for the lifetime of their 'Sony Style' magazine/catalog thing that they have here in Australia.
The first is that if a new company starts up, they have to find a way to get their name out there to businesses in some way.
Yes, that's fine and all, but the bit that I have trouble with is, these people know they're being offensive, they've gotta know that they're pissing off their customer base.
Maybe I'm crediting them with way too much intelligence, but as I see it, you'd have to be pretty dumb not to see that what you're doing is...
1. Irritate potential customers
2. Irritate potential customers more
The bit that I just don't understand is, given that step 1 and step 2, how the hell do these morons end up with
3. Profit!!!
The second is that by refusing to do business with a company because they called you is a little silly.
Now I'm gonna disagree with you there. See, I don't like people who cold call me. If I'm at my desk, I'm usually trying very hard to concentrate on something. If you break my concentration, I'm probably not going to be feeling all that neigbourly. this may come as something of a surprise to you, but I'm actually not nearly as enthusiastic about whatever widget it is that you want to sell me as you are.
A lot of companies cold call for new leads.
... with the misguided impression that cold calls generate actual sales. Maybe it worked, way back when. I'm telling you, it has become such a problem, that it doesn't ever work on me, even if I'm shopping right now for whatever it is you're selling.
It is widely accepted that the only way to stop spammers is for them to realise that spamming is unprofitable. The only way they're gonna figure that out is if no-one, ever, buys from them.
If I'm shopping for widgets, I'll google for widgets, I'll look in the yellow pages, the white pages and the classifieds. I'll ask colleagues and friends "Do you know anyone who sells good widgets?". I will not, ever, buy from a cold calling widget salesdroid.
if you have better suggestions on how to get new clients, I'd love to hear them, though!
Depends on the product I s'pose. If it's something IT, buy google ads, attend trade shows, give good demos at the trade shows, and try to hide that air of desperation that seems to cloud the presentation of many first timers. Submit your product for review at reputable review sites, ones that tell it how it is, like Dan's Data, and not those dodgy reviews for hire places that make it all stardust and rainbows.
I block banner ads, pretty much the only thing I actively look at are google ads, and other plain text ads. I pretty much always google for "widget reviews". I do two passes at trade shows, one in t-shirt and jeans - being invisible makes it easier to check everything out, then I go back in some sort of corporate wear and talk to the folks whose products I spotted yesterday. (maybe that means you shouldn't write off the folks in t-shirts and torn jeans, I dunno). Don't *ever* spam. Don't ever do anything that looks like spam. If you're on slashdot or usenet giving advice on a similar subject to what you're selling, say "Caveat: I work for company X, and I sell these things" along with your advice. There's a company in Australia called "Underdog Leathers" - they make pretty decent leathers for motorcyclists, but they have issues making sales with usenet folks, 'cos one of their guys spent a lot of time on usenet saying "Check out underdog leathers, I heard they're great" without ever divulging his interest. He got caught out, he lost a lot of sales. No-one minds you combining advice and a feww plug, so long as you're honest about it. All in all, I think it's probably a lot cheaper to market in a customer friendly way than it is to be a spamming cold calling bastard!
Finally, know this: If you fax me, or call me, or put glossy brochures in my snailmail box, and I didn't ask you to do that, I'm not gonna buy your product from you, ever. In fact, I'm such a spitefull prick that if I like your product, I'll go and source the same thing from someone else.
Oh, I tell them it's only for a year:-) The way I see it, in my own kooky little frame of reference, is that if I tell them "not ever", they'll write me off as a kook but keep spamming me out of spite anyway. If I tell them "one year" there is light at the end of the tunnel, and they might get it in their heads that if they play nice, they might get some of my money one day. Now if I was just a little Mum-and-Dad company, it probably wouldn't count for a whole lot, but I work for a big big company with lots of money, and most of them are really keen to get some of that money!
Some of them just can't help themselves though. Those morons at the printer-pushing company seem to be able to make it to about 10 months, then they let another round of spam fax fly!
I have a minor problem with junk fax and cold
calling (call it voice-spam if you will) here in Sydney, Australia.
One of the most persistent offenders is a two-bit little box-pushing laser printer and supplies company in the north of Sydney called 'IT Imaging' (sales@itimaging.com.au). Their business practises are pretty suspect at the best of times, for eg I called them for a quote on a printer once (that I didn't go through with - too expensive) and they started calling my contemporaries in other departments saying "We're doing business with him, maybe you want to buy from us too?". They're big on junk faxes too.
When I get cold calls or junk faxes, I just add them to my "don't buy from these arseholes" list, and they stay there for a year. A polite email/fax to the effect of "As a direct and specific consequence of your decision to send me junk [mail|spam|call], I have added your company to my department's do-not-buy list, and your company will not be considered for any [insert product here] requirements for one year from this date]".
The Apple Centre in Taylor Square are another junk faxer of note here in Sydney, and they're pretty much a permanent resident on the "do not buy" list too!
Got a call from a girlie trying to be all official sounding, "calling on behalf of sales executive Mister Sales Droid from Fuji Xerox, wondering if you want to buy printers, blah blah". "We like Fuji Xerox as a company, here, because FX sustainable business practices are something we like, BUT, as a direct and specific result of your call...". They get off the phone real quick when you tell them that. I guess they want their year to start as soon as possible, so it will be over ASAP!:-)
Admittedly, this doesn't help with the anon and hard to contact fax spammers, but it seems to work pretty well on the ones who actually want to do quasi-legitimate business with you.
the police will have to tell the parents they couldn't get the license number because the perv you kidnapped their kid had one of those things on his car.
Yeah, and lemme guess, the only people who have anything to worry about are those who have something to hide, right?
Yah, I dunno. I re-read the site again yesterday, and saw no mention of the pass being revoked. The last time I read it was maybe three or four weeks ago, and it was there then. She said something to the effect that she did a burnout in front of someone official-like, and they didn't like it!
she can only go certain places because she uses a pass card she got from her dad.
IIRC, on one of her more recent updates to the site, she mentioned something about having had the pass card taken off her. Something to do with a revved engine, a dropped clutch, and a humourless gate guard! Bit of a shame really, her web site is probably one of the best (as in most touching, informative, interesting) web sites I've ever seen, a welcome change from most of the crud on the net.
FTA: My first stop was Epson's free printer raffle... Interesting to see that they cared about Linux and driver support.
Drivers are nice and all, but you still get an Epson printer. A printer that dries up the print heads in a few days and uses half a cartridge of ink cleaning itself, a printer that cleans itself even if it isn't 'dirty', a printer that uses multi-colour cartridges that need to be replaced when you run out of just one colour, a printer with chipped cartridges that can't be refilled without much mucking around, a printer that interrogates the print cartridges to make sure that Epson got their pound of flesh out of you today, and a pricing model that says "Here take this free printer, we'll screw you later on consumables".
Yup, it sure is interesting to see that Epson like the money that comes out of linux users' pockets just as much as they like Windows users' money.
I've seen a *lot* of dead and dying IBM PC equipment in my time, and the *only* time that death was customer caused was the day we were all playing silly buggers in the office and I frisbeed a CD across the room and it hit a laptop screen fah-and-sqah in the middle and smashed it.
Every other dead IBM I've seen was your classic faulty workmanship and/or materials.
Right now I have a fleet of about a few hundred Thinkpads and Desktops. Some moron sold out to IBM, probably got a free PC or two for his kids, and left us with a corporate directive to purchase IBM, and only IBM. Four years later, I'm still cleaning up the mess. I'm convinced that IBM equipment is designed to last for two years and eleven months. It is so bad, that if you tell me a particular model of thinkpad or ibm desktop, I'll tell you how it will fail, and when.
Let me count the ways...
IBM 600E/600X - Between 18 and 24 months of age, the charging circuit will fail, and it won't charge the battery. Machine will only work when plugged into a power outlet
Thinkpad T21 - Screen dies at about 30 months of age - It either develops black spots (no signal) in the corners, or an array of blue lines scattered across the centre of the screen - messed up signal
Thinkpad T21 - in about 40% of machines, the ethernet port will fail. requires mobo replacement
Desktop 300 series - power supplies die at 38-40 months of age
Desktop 300 series - if the power supply doesn't go first, the plastic moulding surrounding the power on/off switch becomes brittle with age and falls out inside the machine
Early model Pentium 4 desktops - IDE/ATA interfaces die and give repeated false SMART errors with disks - IBM refuse to fix these ones under warranty
All machines fitted with IBM Deathstar hard disks... you know the drill there!
IBM 240 laptops - backlight fails in the displays at about 36 months of age
It gets worse... When you're on a corporate IBM account, and you keep calling IBM about these problems, they go deaf. Once they realise that somewhere between 70% and 90% of the fleet of computers that they sold you is dead or dying, they stop returning your phone calls.
I made this list by gazing around the room in which I sit and ticking off the list of carcasses of dead, not-economic-to-repair, can't-discard-'cos-it's-an-assett IBM branded equipment that I have piled up all around me.
IBM equipment is high workload for techo's. Schools either don't have technical folks, or spread them very thin on the ground. They're going to be very busy cleaning up this mess. I wonder just how many parents are going to end up paying for dead IBM equipment that the mighty IBM repair department puts down to 'user abuse' to hide their crapola manufacturing!
It is a huge deal (well, large-ish, maybe not huge) from the POV of those little portable external drive cases. I'm using a bunch of the firewire (AUD$60) version of this and also these. The 60Gb and 80Gb drives (Fujitsu from memory) that I'm using now draw just a little bit more power than USB1.1 and USB2.0 can supply, so I need to use a plugpack power supply or one of those silly little parasite cables that draw keyboard port power to provide the extra poofteenth of an amp that they need to spin up and run.
OK, so it's not a big deal, but I'm a fan of bus powered devices. One less cable to lose! If the new Toshiba drive is at a point where they can run off a USB or firewire bus (ack that 4 pin firewire doesn't have power), then yeah, I'm interested.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've got it in one there. These clowns have such heavily structured procedures for 'witnessing' or 'preaching' or 'evangelising' or 'missionaryising' (!) that they can't see that they're beating their heads against brick walls. The only real difference between the western folks and the Asian folks is that we won't hesitate to tell a religous freak where he can stick his $holy_book{$religion} if he goes all in-your-face on us, whereas Asian folks won't be so confrontational, and they'll tolerate them out (as opposed to *hear* them out). The religous freaks take the polite tolerance to mean acceptance, and extrapolate that to a point where they believe that their methods are actually working!
You're equally correct in drawing correlation between evangelistic methods for religion and operating systems. Wearing penguin/daemon t-shirts and neglecting personal hygiene makes people assume we're freaks - we might as well go and take a one-day course in the wrong language like the Mormons do. On the other hand, the install fests, and free Linux CDs and free 'The Open CD's actually do work, 'cos they're not confrontational, they're not silly, and the target audience gets something usefull out of it.
That's not to say that a good belly laugh as a result of some silly twat mispronouncing "You good?" at you in the wrong language isn't a good thing mind you!!!
I just got some hate mail in private email from one of the aforementioned 'Morons'. Poor guy seems a bit delusional. First up, he's of the perception that the aforementioned crash-course means of learning a new language works really really well. Well hey, if your foreign language skills were half as good as you think they are, I wouldn't be getting a kick out of watching native speakers laugh their guts up at you behind your back! Then, he somehow managed to establish that my discussion of culture and business was actually talk about religion!!! (go figure) and that I was attacking him. I guess that's why they're colloquially known as 'Morons'. Anyway Mister Joe Brower , I don't accept unsolicited mail from anyone, much less unsolicited hate mail from someone who has problems interpreting stuff in his native language whilst professing to be an excellent speaker of a bunch of other languages. What I *will* do is enter "jb_02_98@yahoo.com" on any web page that wants to know my email address for the next month or three. No, thank *you* for your time (and you're right, I'd like it if you kept your religion out of my slashdot).
"Yes, yes, you Americans have very large penis!"
.. then duly ignore the stupid American who is trying to tell them how to run their country and go off and do precisely whatever it was that they intended to do before the stupid American started mouthing off.
I just love the way Asian folks do business. It varies a bit from country to country of course, but generally, they'll make a nice polite show of pretending to give a shit about the rubbish the stupid American is spouting, then go quietly back to whatever they were doing before, unmoved. It's fun to watch the religous types pushing their word in Chinatown anywhere. The victims listen politely, nod and smile, and go on their way. The religious types read the situation to mean that because (a) no-one told them to f*ck right off, and (b) someone nodded and smiled at them, that they're getting their message through. This is why Chinatown precincts are always more clogged with religous freaks than elsewhere in any given city.
Here in Sydney, Australia it's generally the Morons pushing their false religion with their stilted crash-course Chinese. They're incapable of picking what nationality any given Asian person is, so they try to talk to everyone in Mandarin Chinese (very few people actually speak Mandarin here in Sydney, it's a predominantly Cantonese thing here). It's amusing to wander along 10 metres behind them, watching them greet random people with their "Ni Hao" and a big cheesy smile and all the wrong intonations, and watch the victims return the greeting with a polite nod and smile, then crack up laughing once the Morons (mormons?) have passed!
Oh, and one copy of Netstumbler 0.4 (just released!) from http://www.netstumbler.com/. $0.00. Netstumbler works fine with the Netgear MA111 adaptor. I haven't tried it with the BSD scanning tools yet.
I didn't shop around for best price, etc, etc, 'cos I knew that once this thing hit slashdot, there was gonna be a worldwide stockout on the chinese cookware. I could have gotten things a bit cheaper if I had shopped around, but short of an AUD$1200+ aeroplane ticket to Guangzhou and buying direct from manufacturers, there was no way this setup would cost $5.00 of anyone's money. With time and petrol and driving around, I guess it cost AUD$100.00. Good fun tho, and worth every cent.
Bluejack
I already built one of these things after the site first surfaced a couple of weeks ago. The neat thing about it is that it's modular insofar as your choice of radio goes. Unplug the 802.11b tranceiver, replace it with a usb Bluetooth tranceiver, aim at the nearest bus stop, and wa-la, bluejack city. Want to use 802.11g, or heaven forbid, 802.11a, plug one in! It's the ultimate in modular l33+ hax0r radio toys. Why, I reckon you could even plug an usb IrDA adaptor in there...
No, wait... :-)
Still, placebos work on a substantial portion of folks, so if you feel that your pringles can antenna works for you, far be it from me to tell you otherwise.
For something that actually *does* work, have a look at Super Cantenna --- that one *is* the right size for 2.4GHZ, and it *is* reflective, and it *is* a waveguide and it *does* work. USD$20 for an actual tuned waveguide antenna beats a cardboard tube laced with monosodium glutamate anyday!
So, how long have you been working for JBoss now?
So what does Janet Jackson have to do with this?
Actually, for completeness, while I'm discussing hardware, I should mention the Cat-5 o' nine tails. I *need* one of those!
That would be the, er, etherkiller! (Also AUI killer, VGA killer, BNC killer, etc, etc, etc on that link!)
Well, I'm glad to see that you and the Baja Beach Club agree on that one. Geez folks, doesn't anyone here ever read the article?
They've done it to me with a tape recorder and a laptop in the last couple of weeks. Numerous other crap before. It's reaching the point where I'm discouraging folks from choosing Sony, 'cos they can't even keep stock of a product for the lifetime of their 'Sony Style' magazine/catalog thing that they have here in Australia.
Yes, that's fine and all, but the bit that I have trouble with is, these people know they're being offensive, they've gotta know that they're pissing off their customer base.
Maybe I'm crediting them with way too much intelligence, but as I see it, you'd have to be pretty dumb not to see that what you're doing is...
1. Irritate potential customers
2. Irritate potential customers more
The bit that I just don't understand is, given that step 1 and step 2, how the hell do these morons end up with
3. Profit!!!
The second is that by refusing to do business with a company because they called you is a little silly.
Now I'm gonna disagree with you there. See, I don't like people who cold call me. If I'm at my desk, I'm usually trying very hard to concentrate on something. If you break my concentration, I'm probably not going to be feeling all that neigbourly. this may come as something of a surprise to you, but I'm actually not nearly as enthusiastic about whatever widget it is that you want to sell me as you are.
A lot of companies cold call for new leads.
It is widely accepted that the only way to stop spammers is for them to realise that spamming is unprofitable. The only way they're gonna figure that out is if no-one, ever, buys from them.
If I'm shopping for widgets, I'll google for widgets, I'll look in the yellow pages, the white pages and the classifieds. I'll ask colleagues and friends "Do you know anyone who sells good widgets?". I will not, ever, buy from a cold calling widget salesdroid.
if you have better suggestions on how to get new clients, I'd love to hear them, though!
Depends on the product I s'pose. If it's something IT, buy google ads, attend trade shows, give good demos at the trade shows, and try to hide that air of desperation that seems to cloud the presentation of many first timers. Submit your product for review at reputable review sites, ones that tell it how it is, like Dan's Data, and not those dodgy reviews for hire places that make it all stardust and rainbows.
I block banner ads, pretty much the only thing I actively look at are google ads, and other plain text ads. I pretty much always google for "widget reviews". I do two passes at trade shows, one in t-shirt and jeans - being invisible makes it easier to check everything out, then I go back in some sort of corporate wear and talk to the folks whose products I spotted yesterday. (maybe that means you shouldn't write off the folks in t-shirts and torn jeans, I dunno). Don't *ever* spam. Don't ever do anything that looks like spam. If you're on slashdot or usenet giving advice on a similar subject to what you're selling, say "Caveat: I work for company X, and I sell these things" along with your advice. There's a company in Australia called "Underdog Leathers" - they make pretty decent leathers for motorcyclists, but they have issues making sales with usenet folks, 'cos one of their guys spent a lot of time on usenet saying "Check out underdog leathers, I heard they're great" without ever divulging his interest. He got caught out, he lost a lot of sales. No-one minds you combining advice and a feww plug, so long as you're honest about it. All in all, I think it's probably a lot cheaper to market in a customer friendly way than it is to be a spamming cold calling bastard!
Finally, know this: If you fax me, or call me, or put glossy brochures in my snailmail box, and I didn't ask you to do that, I'm not gonna buy your product from you, ever. In fact, I'm such a spitefull prick that if I like your product, I'll go and source the same thing from someone else.
I hope that lot helps!
Oh, I tell them it's only for a year :-) The way I see it, in my own kooky little frame of reference, is that if I tell them "not ever", they'll write me off as a kook but keep spamming me out of spite anyway. If I tell them "one year" there is light at the end of the tunnel, and they might get it in their heads that if they play nice, they might get some of my money one day. Now if I was just a little Mum-and-Dad company, it probably wouldn't count for a whole lot, but I work for a big big company with lots of money, and most of them are really keen to get some of that money!
Some of them just can't help themselves though. Those morons at the printer-pushing company seem to be able to make it to about 10 months, then they let another round of spam fax fly!
One of the most persistent offenders is a two-bit little box-pushing laser printer and supplies company in the north of Sydney called 'IT Imaging' (sales@itimaging.com.au). Their business practises are pretty suspect at the best of times, for eg I called them for a quote on a printer once (that I didn't go through with - too expensive) and they started calling my contemporaries in other departments saying "We're doing business with him, maybe you want to buy from us too?". They're big on junk faxes too.
When I get cold calls or junk faxes, I just add them to my "don't buy from these arseholes" list, and they stay there for a year. A polite email/fax to the effect of "As a direct and specific consequence of your decision to send me junk [mail|spam|call], I have added your company to my department's do-not-buy list, and your company will not be considered for any [insert product here] requirements for one year from this date]".
The Apple Centre in Taylor Square are another junk faxer of note here in Sydney, and they're pretty much a permanent resident on the "do not buy" list too!
Got a call from a girlie trying to be all official sounding, "calling on behalf of sales executive Mister Sales Droid from Fuji Xerox, wondering if you want to buy printers, blah blah". "We like Fuji Xerox as a company, here, because FX sustainable business practices are something we like, BUT, as a direct and specific result of your call...". They get off the phone real quick when you tell them that. I guess they want their year to start as soon as possible, so it will be over ASAP! :-)
Admittedly, this doesn't help with the anon and hard to contact fax spammers, but it seems to work pretty well on the ones who actually want to do quasi-legitimate business with you.
No no, get it right... it's like this...
Yeah, I did that. This is the picture I got. Seems to work fine to me - what's your issue?
Yeah, and lemme guess, the only people who have anything to worry about are those who have something to hide, right?
Yah, I dunno. I re-read the site again yesterday, and saw no mention of the pass being revoked. The last time I read it was maybe three or four weeks ago, and it was there then. She said something to the effect that she did a burnout in front of someone official-like, and they didn't like it!
IIRC, on one of her more recent updates to the site, she mentioned something about having had the pass card taken off her. Something to do with a revved engine, a dropped clutch, and a humourless gate guard! Bit of a shame really, her web site is probably one of the best (as in most touching, informative, interesting) web sites I've ever seen, a welcome change from most of the crud on the net.
Drivers are nice and all, but you still get an Epson printer. A printer that dries up the print heads in a few days and uses half a cartridge of ink cleaning itself, a printer that cleans itself even if it isn't 'dirty', a printer that uses multi-colour cartridges that need to be replaced when you run out of just one colour, a printer with chipped cartridges that can't be refilled without much mucking around, a printer that interrogates the print cartridges to make sure that Epson got their pound of flesh out of you today, and a pricing model that says "Here take this free printer, we'll screw you later on consumables".
Yup, it sure is interesting to see that Epson like the money that comes out of linux users' pockets just as much as they like Windows users' money.
Every other dead IBM I've seen was your classic faulty workmanship and/or materials.
Right now I have a fleet of about a few hundred Thinkpads and Desktops. Some moron sold out to IBM, probably got a free PC or two for his kids, and left us with a corporate directive to purchase IBM, and only IBM. Four years later, I'm still cleaning up the mess. I'm convinced that IBM equipment is designed to last for two years and eleven months. It is so bad, that if you tell me a particular model of thinkpad or ibm desktop, I'll tell you how it will fail, and when.
Let me count the ways...
It gets worse... When you're on a corporate IBM account, and you keep calling IBM about these problems, they go deaf. Once they realise that somewhere between 70% and 90% of the fleet of computers that they sold you is dead or dying, they stop returning your phone calls.
I made this list by gazing around the room in which I sit and ticking off the list of carcasses of dead, not-economic-to-repair, can't-discard-'cos-it's-an-assett IBM branded equipment that I have piled up all around me.
IBM equipment is high workload for techo's. Schools either don't have technical folks, or spread them very thin on the ground. They're going to be very busy cleaning up this mess. I wonder just how many parents are going to end up paying for dead IBM equipment that the mighty IBM repair department puts down to 'user abuse' to hide their crapola manufacturing!
Yeah... laser light in the eye, chronic masturbation... it's easy to get those two mixed up.
It is a huge deal (well, large-ish, maybe not huge) from the POV of those little portable external drive cases. I'm using a bunch of the firewire (AUD$60) version of this and also these. The 60Gb and 80Gb drives (Fujitsu from memory) that I'm using now draw just a little bit more power than USB1.1 and USB2.0 can supply, so I need to use a plugpack power supply or one of those silly little parasite cables that draw keyboard port power to provide the extra poofteenth of an amp that they need to spin up and run.
OK, so it's not a big deal, but I'm a fan of bus powered devices. One less cable to lose! If the new Toshiba drive is at a point where they can run off a USB or firewire bus (ack that 4 pin firewire doesn't have power), then yeah, I'm interested.