Yes, but then, as I've been saying all along, you're paying for RMAs that you are not using. You, and some unspecified number of people, are paying for someone else's RMA shipping. You all chip in whether you want to or not.
It's called overhead. It gets amortized into the cost of every unit. If they're going to pay for RMA shipping on any RMA'd part, they're going to have to collect that cost somehow.
It's either:
$15 from the person requesting the RMA, at the time they issue the RMA, paying for their own shipping,
OR
$afewdollars from EVERYONE who buys the part, whether they actually RMA the part down the road or not, to cover the cost of the people who do get an RMA for which the manufacturer "pays" for the cost of the shipping.
Yes, but that's a very big "if". Like I said, every company that has that policy will have to pay for it, and they get their money from (guess where) their customers buying stuff from them. It might *look* like they have more faith in their product's quality if "they" pay for RMA shipping costs, but ultimately the cost is always born by the customer. I'd rather pay for only the RMAs that I actually need.
If you want them to pay the postage on the RMA, then you're going to end up getting that rolled into the up-front retail cost of the item. So you'll end up paying for an RMA on EVERY item, whether you actually need to RMA it or not. If you only pay for the RMAs that you actually NEED, then you'll end up coming out of it on top in the long term. $30 for RMA shipping is STILL cheaper than $100 to buy a brand new replacement.
I've had to RMA a failed Antec PSU, too, but I didn't find the process to be nearly so bad.
I went to their website from a working PC, downloaded the RMA form, filled it out, and faxed it back to them. Got an RMA number from them same day. Shipped the dead PSU to them, got a new one back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I installed a spare PSU I happened to have on hand and got the down system back up within hours.
It's not Antec's responsibility to minimize your downtime with their RMA process -- it's their responsibility to repair or replace their product under warranty if it fails. Systems that depend on their product are not their responsibility. If you're building your own systems, you should know that shipping isn't instantaneous, so if you want to have high reliability and low downtime, you'd better stock some spare parts.
You actually got very good customer service through Amazon, but because you don't understand what the expectation is, you're disappointed. You shouldn't be.
I'm not talking about ceding total control of the organization to IT, but allowing IT input into HR decisionmaking. If everyone in the company is my "customer" and I have to make them all happy in order for good "total customer service" to happen, then the head of IT ought to have the capability to hire/fire/promote all of these people. It's only fair.
Yes, there are people who have specialized skills, but that does not mean that their lack of IT skills is excusable. Either train them, get them a "seeing eye dog" IT monkey to follow them everywhere and do things for them, or fire them. We currently have too many "seeing eye dogs" in IT helpdesks, and not enough trained, competent employees. IT is sick of managing the burden of idiots who don't have a clue how their business tools work or how to do their work with their systems.
And, yes, I believe I could manage a risk portfolio. If I can figure out how to manage IT security risk, I can figure out how to manage a company's financial risk position. It's not really that different, just apply a the same types of reasoning and information gathering to a different set of scenario parameters and information.
Unlike a lot of these white-collar executives, I also know how to drive my own car, iron my own clothes, and buy my own groceries, too.
That is a good solution, when and where it does work, but frequently it does not work. There are people who can't and won't learn. If IT skills and knowledge are indeed important for their jobs, then they are unqualified and are in need of remediation -- whether that be training and education, transferral to a position where those skills are not essential, giving them an IT "seeing eye dog" to follow them around and explain and handhold every thing they do, or termination. Whatever works best should be done, but by and large the capability for IT to deny access to its clueless (l)users to corporate assets (such as higher positions in the company or even access to the company at all beyond "guest" level access) would be a smart thing.
Empower IT with HR's traditional roles of hiring, promotion, and termination. Allow IT to veto any hire or promotion decision, and to terminate employees who are completely techno-clueless.
This will aid the security mission greatly as well.
Another word for this arrangement is "meritocracy".
I can hardly wait for the next 18 months of C-SPAN, in which completely clueless congressional representatives and senators answer once and for all the question of "What is a blog?" It's not as though there's a clear line of demarkcation here. The definition they eventually settle on will necessarily be fundamentally broken, rife with false negatives as well as false positives.
For that matter, all speech is political speech. Politics isn't a partitionable category that you can draw a line around. Politics touches everything, and everything has its political aspects to it.
That aside, I thought that unregulated speech was the American way. Check out the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Oh wait, I guess we've been misreading the Constitution these last 220+ years. Laws disrespecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abrdiging the freedom of speech, or of the press, etc. is apparently kosher.
Hold on, what about R&D costs? What about advertising? What about support, warranty, and RMA costs? I bet that 50% over manufacturing costs doesn't actually go all that far...
LSB may be fundamentally broken, but just wait for LSC, which will almost work. And then, emerging from the smoking ashes of LSC, after much pain and labor, we'll have LSD. And LSD is going to be faaaaaar out.
I don't know much about MythTV, yet. Is it possible to get MythTV running on TiVo hardware? That would be great, since you'd have an all-in-one, inexpensive appliance-like solution, but with the level of control that actually makes having such a thing desirable. Can this be done?
RAID0 should properly be called an AID. But people will just call it an "AID Array", which is redundant as the A in AID already stands for Array. So then the R becomes appropriate again.
AOL has a huge customer base, but has been steadily eroded as telecoms roll out broadband to the sticks, and this is not really going to change. AOL has a reputation for sucking, and google has a reputation for being both smart and effective. Microsoft buying AOL just combines the strengths of two successful, or should I say "suckcessful" companies who have more or less reached their apex and do not have the same potential for rapid, sustainable growth as they did when they were rising stars in the industry. They're now bloated, hulking monstrosities desperately clinging to their marketshare and experiencing problems trying to remain relevant.
If this is google's biggest threat, they have little to fear.
The idea with open source is that if someone discovers and fixes a bug, that they share the fix with everyone else who uses the software. That way, it gets merged back into the main application, and you don't have to maintain a forked version indefinitely. Of course, merging changes back in doesn't happen automatically, and if the development work isn't quite as open as the source is, it can take some doing to get a third-party's bugfix into the mainstream version.
Slashdot Mirror
If applications exist on the owner's server, and aren't installed and run locally, then how am I going to be able to pirate them?
It's a TRAP!
You obviously haven't seen my awesome 6.8GHz laptop with 1 Terabyte of RAM. Eats those dual Xeons for lunch!
The 56" widescreen is a bit difficult to fold, or use outside on a windy day, though... still, it's worth it to be mobile!
It's just marketing.
The least slashdot could do is get a kickback.
Yes, but then, as I've been saying all along, you're paying for RMAs that you are not using. You, and some unspecified number of people, are paying for someone else's RMA shipping. You all chip in whether you want to or not.
It's called overhead. It gets amortized into the cost of every unit. If they're going to pay for RMA shipping on any RMA'd part, they're going to have to collect that cost somehow.
It's either:
$15 from the person requesting the RMA, at the time they issue the RMA, paying for their own shipping,
OR
$afewdollars from EVERYONE who buys the part, whether they actually RMA the part down the road or not, to cover the cost of the people who do get an RMA for which the manufacturer "pays" for the cost of the shipping.
Yes, but that's a very big "if". Like I said, every company that has that policy will have to pay for it, and they get their money from (guess where) their customers buying stuff from them. It might *look* like they have more faith in their product's quality if "they" pay for RMA shipping costs, but ultimately the cost is always born by the customer. I'd rather pay for only the RMAs that I actually need.
If you want them to pay the postage on the RMA, then you're going to end up getting that rolled into the up-front retail cost of the item. So you'll end up paying for an RMA on EVERY item, whether you actually need to RMA it or not. If you only pay for the RMAs that you actually NEED, then you'll end up coming out of it on top in the long term. $30 for RMA shipping is STILL cheaper than $100 to buy a brand new replacement.
I've had to RMA a failed Antec PSU, too, but I didn't find the process to be nearly so bad.
I went to their website from a working PC, downloaded the RMA form, filled it out, and faxed it back to them. Got an RMA number from them same day. Shipped the dead PSU to them, got a new one back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I installed a spare PSU I happened to have on hand and got the down system back up within hours.
It's not Antec's responsibility to minimize your downtime with their RMA process -- it's their responsibility to repair or replace their product under warranty if it fails. Systems that depend on their product are not their responsibility. If you're building your own systems, you should know that shipping isn't instantaneous, so if you want to have high reliability and low downtime, you'd better stock some spare parts.
You actually got very good customer service through Amazon, but because you don't understand what the expectation is, you're disappointed. You shouldn't be.
I'm not talking about ceding total control of the organization to IT, but allowing IT input into HR decisionmaking. If everyone in the company is my "customer" and I have to make them all happy in order for good "total customer service" to happen, then the head of IT ought to have the capability to hire/fire/promote all of these people. It's only fair.
Yes, there are people who have specialized skills, but that does not mean that their lack of IT skills is excusable. Either train them, get them a "seeing eye dog" IT monkey to follow them everywhere and do things for them, or fire them. We currently have too many "seeing eye dogs" in IT helpdesks, and not enough trained, competent employees. IT is sick of managing the burden of idiots who don't have a clue how their business tools work or how to do their work with their systems.
And, yes, I believe I could manage a risk portfolio. If I can figure out how to manage IT security risk, I can figure out how to manage a company's financial risk position. It's not really that different, just apply a the same types of reasoning and information gathering to a different set of scenario parameters and information.
Unlike a lot of these white-collar executives, I also know how to drive my own car, iron my own clothes, and buy my own groceries, too.
That is a good solution, when and where it does work, but frequently it does not work. There are people who can't and won't learn. If IT skills and knowledge are indeed important for their jobs, then they are unqualified and are in need of remediation -- whether that be training and education, transferral to a position where those skills are not essential, giving them an IT "seeing eye dog" to follow them around and explain and handhold every thing they do, or termination. Whatever works best should be done, but by and large the capability for IT to deny access to its clueless (l)users to corporate assets (such as higher positions in the company or even access to the company at all beyond "guest" level access) would be a smart thing.
Empower IT with HR's traditional roles of hiring, promotion, and termination. Allow IT to veto any hire or promotion decision, and to terminate employees who are completely techno-clueless.
This will aid the security mission greatly as well.
Another word for this arrangement is "meritocracy".
For that matter, all speech is political speech. Politics isn't a partitionable category that you can draw a line around. Politics touches everything, and everything has its political aspects to it.
That aside, I thought that unregulated speech was the American way. Check out the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
Oh wait, I guess we've been misreading the Constitution these last 220+ years. Laws disrespecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abrdiging the freedom of speech, or of the press, etc. is apparently kosher.
Hold on, what about R&D costs? What about advertising? What about support, warranty, and RMA costs? I bet that 50% over manufacturing costs doesn't actually go all that far...
LSB may be fundamentally broken, but just wait for LSC, which will almost work. And then, emerging from the smoking ashes of LSC, after much pain and labor, we'll have LSD. And LSD is going to be faaaaaar out.
Still? Apple's new to the UNIX business. They weren't in it 12 years ago.
I don't know much about MythTV, yet. Is it possible to get MythTV running on TiVo hardware? That would be great, since you'd have an all-in-one, inexpensive appliance-like solution, but with the level of control that actually makes having such a thing desirable. Can this be done?
RAID0 should properly be called an AID. But people will just call it an "AID Array", which is redundant as the A in AID already stands for Array. So then the R becomes appropriate again.
AOL has a huge customer base, but has been steadily eroded as telecoms roll out broadband to the sticks, and this is not really going to change. AOL has a reputation for sucking, and google has a reputation for being both smart and effective. Microsoft buying AOL just combines the strengths of two successful, or should I say "suckcessful" companies who have more or less reached their apex and do not have the same potential for rapid, sustainable growth as they did when they were rising stars in the industry. They're now bloated, hulking monstrosities desperately clinging to their marketshare and experiencing problems trying to remain relevant.
If this is google's biggest threat, they have little to fear.
Shouldn't they just call it "alpha", then?
How many extensions are you running?
How many tabs do you have open?
IE IS more secure than Mozilla! On Linux... where it doesn't exist... Hmm.
Beta software is for testing. That being the case, isn't "pre-beta" vaporware? What exactly are they testing???
Stupid Flanders!
The idea with open source is that if someone discovers and fixes a bug, that they share the fix with everyone else who uses the software. That way, it gets merged back into the main application, and you don't have to maintain a forked version indefinitely. Of course, merging changes back in doesn't happen automatically, and if the development work isn't quite as open as the source is, it can take some doing to get a third-party's bugfix into the mainstream version.