You can only withdraw the conditional offer until they accept it. IANAL (merely a law student), but from my understanding of contract law, Vonage is on ROCK-SOLID legal ground to go after the people who aren't paying for their IPO allocations. Whether they want to risk the public-relations mess is another question entirely.
Not true. It does require a firewire card (as little as $30 for a PC), but I have my iPod happily working with my non-apple PC thanks to the engineers over at Mediafour. It's by far the best mp3 player available imho.
Other considerations need to be thought about as well. In some countries, children play a role of water carriers. Go in and start pumping water with solar panels, and you've changed the social aspects of the community. The children must be given some other role to play.
Ummm... How about they play the role of going to school? One of the benefits of rural electrification in the developing world is to reduce the amount of manual labor needed by a family so that their children have a better chance of getting educated.
Remember, before elementary and secondary schooling became compulsory in the US, the role of children in many rural societies was that of farm laborers. I would say that changing the roles of children in this case wasn't a bad thing.
I think most of the problem is one of expectations.
I agree. However, rather than expectations being set too high, I believe the problem originates with expectations that are too low. The software industry has gotten customers used to dealing with malfunctioning software as a matter of course. Work with technology for any length of time, and you expect things to be buggy and for support to be ineffectual.
I agree with you that people with overly high expectations of tech support are just setting themselves up to be disappointed, and people who continue to set their expectations unrealistically high might not be the brightest folks. However, I think we're selling ourselves short if we continue to let companies slide with regards to supporting their buggy products. If people begin to demand better service, and speak with their wallets, we will see improvement. If we continue to reward companies for producing crappy software and providing crappy support, things will continue to worsen.
The fact that "serious users" can solve problems on their own using a google search or an O'Reilly book does not excuse companies from providing service to average or novice users.
Yes, there are plenty of stupid qestions asked by users, but it is incredibly elitist to assume that anyone who complains about poor customer support is a "clueless luser".
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You can only withdraw the conditional offer until they accept it. IANAL (merely a law student), but from my understanding of contract law, Vonage is on ROCK-SOLID legal ground to go after the people who aren't paying for their IPO allocations. Whether they want to risk the public-relations mess is another question entirely.
Not true. It does require a firewire card (as little as $30 for a PC), but I have my iPod happily working with my non-apple PC thanks to the engineers over at Mediafour. It's by far the best mp3 player available imho.
Other considerations need to be thought about as well. In some countries, children play a role of water carriers. Go in and start pumping water with solar panels, and you've changed the social aspects of the community. The children must be given some other role to play.
Ummm... How about they play the role of going to school? One of the benefits of rural electrification in the developing world is to reduce the amount of manual labor needed by a family so that their children have a better chance of getting educated.
Remember, before elementary and secondary schooling became compulsory in the US, the role of children in many rural societies was that of farm laborers. I would say that changing the roles of children in this case wasn't a bad thing.
Ummm... Mod this up! It contains some of the best suggestions I've seen for improving the patent process, rather than merely complaining about it.
I think most of the problem is one of expectations.
I agree. However, rather than expectations being set too high, I believe the problem originates with expectations that are too low. The software industry has gotten customers used to dealing with malfunctioning software as a matter of course. Work with technology for any length of time, and you expect things to be buggy and for support to be ineffectual.
I agree with you that people with overly high expectations of tech support are just setting themselves up to be disappointed, and people who continue to set their expectations unrealistically high might not be the brightest folks. However, I think we're selling ourselves short if we continue to let companies slide with regards to supporting their buggy products. If people begin to demand better service, and speak with their wallets, we will see improvement. If we continue to reward companies for producing crappy software and providing crappy support, things will continue to worsen.
The fact that "serious users" can solve problems on their own using a google search or an O'Reilly book does not excuse companies from providing service to average or novice users.
Yes, there are plenty of stupid qestions asked by users, but it is incredibly elitist to assume that anyone who complains about poor customer support is a "clueless luser".
Note the orange box in the picture -- clearly there to hold his huge balls.