Did you write them by Certified Mail? This way they can't deny having received your letter.
Yes, however that wasn't until about 2 months after I initially canceled over the phone and it took another month for them to process it. At one point I thought the problem had been resolved and then a year later a collections agency contacted me and told me that I not only still owed for those three months but also nearly $1000 in late fees. Looking back on it I should have sent the letter FIRST rather than trusting their support folks to do what they said they were doing.
I agree that tools should be simple, but if you use fat-client-based, opaque documents to store your information, you will not be able to easily grow your department (even temporarily), you will not be able to take vacations and hand off tasks to other people,
I think you'll have better luck getting a temp. employee to go into the "Systems Administration Documents" folder and open an appropriately named text file or pdf then bringing them up to speed on cvs. Anyone who has any business touching the systems can surely navigate the filesystem (using Explorer, Konqueror etc) from their desktop.
Versioning can be an issue but you can get "good enough" with a simple bash script run out of cron. Remote access can be achieved with ssh/scp or if you want you can make your Documentation directory readable from your web server. Of course you'll probably just keep a copy on your PDA/Laptop anyway which is a lot harder to do with your solution.
Many years ago I had a cell phone with them. When my year was up I tried to cancel but nothing I could do could get them to actually cancel the account. I called, I wrote letters etc. Sure they'd SAY they had taken care of it but next month I'd get another bill. I eventually gave up but I still get a call every year or two from some colletions agency hired by them (or that they've sold the debt to).
I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest that you not worry about finding specialized tools for various activities. The important thing is that you do document everything and if you have to spend much time learning new tools and trying to fit your existing data into them you'll find yourself putting it off. There's nothing wrong with having an array of text documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, diagrams, etc and in fact the real power of a PC is that it CAN deal with all this so why not take advangage of it? Just make sure your stuff is all in one place with descriptive names and a reasonable number of sub-dirs and you'll be fine.
The only problem I see with that is the very real problem of lack of space in CO's.
That sounds like something the market could probably deal with. If demand for space were high enough the folks running the plant would either expand the CO or forward calls over fiber to a new one. Also there would be demand for even smaller switches etc. This all assumes that the folks running the plant arn't also their own customer in which case they would just use the lack of space as a reason not to sell space to anyone else.
Just like everyone else here I realize that ISPs have no business trying to charge content providers for access to the network their customers are paying for. I even realize that using traffic shaping and other techniques to force customers to use the ISP's VOIP solutions rather than those of competitors is seriously anti-competitive but....
Our congress critters don't know the first thing about how this cyberweb thing works and I have zero confidence that whatever bill they settle on won't do more harm than good. The last thing we need is some law that effectively makes is impossible to responsibly admin a network. If they really want to help they should be focusing on the business side of things (many of these folks actually have some business experience) and help ensure that access to the last mile infrustructure is as open to competition as possible. As long as SpeakEasy and other ISPs have fair access to the end users the baby bells and cable companies won't be able to get away with the things they are proposing.
The "valid" uses of encryption you mentioned are largely commercial, and require an actual business to do things like get an SSL certificate. Very few people outside of paranoid the tinfoil hat wearing crowd do things like encrypt their e-mail traffic.
I don't think that has anything to do with the uses being "valid" or not but rather most home users simply don't have any idea how to encript an email and those who do don't know anyone who could decript it. Businesses on the other hand have geeks who set up (mostly transparent to the user) encripted VPNs and such for their users.
Evidently, there's no notice that the information is submitted or sent beyond your computer
Maybe I'm just beeing dense but if you're filling out a form wouldn't you pretty much expect that it'll be sent.... somewhere? I mean, it's not supposed to be some sort of practice for the REAL form or something right? I can see people being unhappy with the results showing up on a public web site but I can't imagine being surprised that the information was being "sent beyond your computer".
In this case, it is the fault of the developers for assuming that null@domain is invalid. They should have used a domain like example.com for testing.
My guess is that they didn't intend to assume null@vtext.com was valid, they just never checked for it. Most likely they are pulling the username part out of a db and just appending @vtext.com. Unfortunately if a particular db item is empty it may return "null" as the value for that item.....
From a purely practical point of view, because we live in a "Windows World," it would serve the kids best to know their way around it. It would be a disservice to them to make them use Macs or Linux boxes and breed ignorance to the real world.
I couldn't disagree more. K-12 isn't trade school and the sorts of things that are specific to Windows today are likely to be obsolete in 5 - 10 years when these kids enter the workforce anyway. At this age they should be exploring and learning the sorts of things that are common to most modern PCs and learning how to figure out the rest. They should have access to lots of different programs including several that do the same thing so they can get a gut feel for what sorts of things are common to all and what sorts of things tend to be different. Linux is great for schools because:
A. It's easier to set up a system that kids can explore without fear of breaking things. B. Schools have access to a much wider variety of free software than they could otherwise afford. C. Those few students that show an interest in digging in and seeing how things work can actually do so.
It turns out that POS systems are used even by mom-and-pop shops and you have to be nuts if you think those are any more complicated than they absolutely have to be to get the job done. They hire fly-by-night consultants to come in and do these installs and they're as basic as anything you've ever seen.
Agreed, and when there is a problem they want it fixed for $100 rather than re-engineered for $1000.
For that matter, I have done consulting for some pretty large and well-known companies who supposedly took security pretty seriously and you could still just walk in and plug a laptop into their net. I could tell you stories about companies whose names you know.
I've even seen it at government agencies... Even large corps who arn't short on cash like the small ones above are pretty averse to change because even small changes can have surprising side effects. No one wants to be responsible for some little change that takes a dozen branch offices off line for a couple of days or more.
Finally, to bring this whole conversation around full circle, a lot of businesses rely on a number of black box devices like the one that the poster of this Ask Slasdot is complaining about, that are supplied and serviced by some third party and there are a lot of things the customer just can't do without making the service contract worthless. In some of these businesses it seems like each device on the network has been installed by a different contractor and there's basically no one really taking responsibility for the network as a whole. I was at a branch office for one major company who had 10 years worth of old equipmet piled up right next to the racks. It would have been trivial to hide a wireless AP in the pile and it probably would have been years before it was discovered.
For me, even more helpful would be a more open platform. Pelco (and all DVR vendors) lock you into their hardware platform, and if you so much as add or replace one of their $2000 120GB hard drives, they will discontinue your support.
No kidding. I'm about to take over support for a couple of similar units because the vendor, even for an absurd yearly fee, is completely inflexable. For example, every time a drive dies they swap the entire machine thus losing all the old video. Of course adding an sort of monitoring software, backup software or anything else is against the rules. For the cost of one year of support for just one location I was able to pick a couple of used machines to use for parts and getting more famailar with the system. I may not be the expert the the vendor is but at least I take the customers data seriously which is more than I can say for the current support folks.
First, if you havn't already you should head on over to www.cctvforum.com . It's not Linux focused but there are lots of folks there who know their DVRs.
Second, there are several "Linux on a DOM" solutions and I think one of the more popular is called VPON.
Third, are you sure you really want a PC based DVR rather than a dedicated solution. Many of the dedicated dvrs run Linux and even the ones that run Windows have striped it down to the point where it should be pretty safe.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone. I'm probably not typical, but I'm certain cell phones aren't as harmless as most folks (and regulatory agencies) think.
I wonder if it could be something about the audio compression that's bothering you rather than the RF. Some people have similar reactions to things like monitor flicker etc.
Agreed, their stores are just too small and they have too many of them to be a profitable consumer electronics chain. They need to get back to selling stuff that you cannot get at just any WalMart and stuff where having a knowledgeable staff actually matters.
FWIW I've set up a few clients with phpgroupware which I think OpenGroupware spun off of. The web mail isn't the slickest one around but it has been reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain.
MythTV is great, but it still lacks some of the Wife Acceptance Factor that Media Center Edition has.
I'm not sure what makes you think that. My wife is about as non-technical as they come and she loves MythTV. This isn't just some recent development either, she basically took it over a year or two ago. Now if I had asked her to buy the parts and set it up then I could see your point (once I finished stringing ethernet cable out to the dog house) but once it's set up Myth is as friendly and easy to use as ANYTHING out there including Tivo. Subjectivly MCE still feels more like "TV on a computer" to me.
Do you have digital cable? How do you handle changing channels automagically to record with one of those boxes?
If you're lucky you can run a serial cable from the computer to the cable box and use that to change channels (that's what I do with my MythTV + DirecTV setup). Otherwise you get an IR transmitter and plug that into a serial or usb port and train lirc to act like your cable box remote.
They apparently won't ship to a different address than the billing address, or another address registered with the credit card company (or so I've been told).
Sure they will. My billing address is a P.O. box and I order from them all the time. You do have to have the alternate address listed with the CC company but that's pretty much how it works everywhere.
-- Ray
Re:Not representative of most people's experience
on
A Look Inside Newegg
·
· Score: 1
But CA buy UPS is either 4 or 5 days, Fedex is 5 or 6 days.
But they don't even offer UPS Ground. Their bottom end shipping option is UPS 3 Day. If your packages are taking longer than that you really should complain and get your shipping fees refunded.
Are you sure you're talking about Newegg? I probably bought $10,000 worth of stuff from them last year and have NEVER seen them claim an item was in stock when it really wasn't. Also every order has gone out either the same day or the next day. You're right about the warehouse issue, probably 80% of my orders come from the closest warehouse (typically 1 - 2 day delivery) but the rest can come from all over. Given that their basic shipping is a 3 day service though it's not nearly as big of a deal as it would be if they were shipping via UPS Ground.
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You really should consider reading the setup guide. If you were running incompatable hardware then I could see how it would be difficult but otherwise it's really pretty easy. In short, if it's taking you weeks with supported hardware then you really need to stop thinking you already know it all and try just following the instructions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's about 30 million VW Beetles (by volume). Better?
Did you write them by Certified Mail? This way they can't deny having received your letter.
Yes, however that wasn't until about 2 months after I initially canceled over the phone and it took another month for them to process it. At one point I thought the problem had been resolved and then a year later a collections agency contacted me and told me that I not only still owed for those three months but also nearly $1000 in late fees. Looking back on it I should have sent the letter FIRST rather than trusting their support folks to do what they said they were doing.
I agree that tools should be simple, but if you use fat-client-based, opaque documents to store your information, you will not be able to easily grow your department (even temporarily), you will not be able to take vacations and hand off tasks to other people,
I think you'll have better luck getting a temp. employee to go into the "Systems Administration Documents" folder and open an appropriately named text file or pdf then bringing them up to speed on cvs. Anyone who has any business touching the systems can surely navigate the filesystem (using Explorer, Konqueror etc) from their desktop.
Versioning can be an issue but you can get "good enough" with a simple bash script run out of cron. Remote access can be achieved with ssh/scp or if you want you can make your Documentation directory readable from your web server. Of course you'll probably just keep a copy on your PDA/Laptop anyway which is a lot harder to do with your solution.
You too?
Many years ago I had a cell phone with them. When my year was up I tried to cancel but nothing I could do could get them to actually cancel the account. I called, I wrote letters etc. Sure they'd SAY they had taken care of it but next month I'd get another bill. I eventually gave up but I still get a call every year or two from some colletions agency hired by them (or that they've sold the debt to).
I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest that you not worry about finding specialized tools for various activities. The important thing is that you do document everything and if you have to spend much time learning new tools and trying to fit your existing data into them you'll find yourself putting it off. There's nothing wrong with having an array of text documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, diagrams, etc and in fact the real power of a PC is that it CAN deal with all this so why not take advangage of it? Just make sure your stuff is all in one place with descriptive names and a reasonable number of sub-dirs and you'll be fine.
The only problem I see with that is the very real problem of lack of space in CO's.
That sounds like something the market could probably deal with. If demand for space were high enough the folks running the plant would either expand the CO or forward calls over fiber to a new one. Also there would be demand for even smaller switches etc. This all assumes that the folks running the plant arn't also their own customer in which case they would just use the lack of space as a reason not to sell space to anyone else.
Just like everyone else here I realize that ISPs have no business trying to charge content providers for access to the network their customers are paying for. I even realize that using traffic shaping and other techniques to force customers to use the ISP's VOIP solutions rather than those of competitors is seriously anti-competitive but....
Our congress critters don't know the first thing about how this cyberweb thing works and I have zero confidence that whatever bill they settle on won't do more harm than good. The last thing we need is some law that effectively makes is impossible to responsibly admin a network. If they really want to help they should be focusing on the business side of things (many of these folks actually have some business experience) and help ensure that access to the last mile infrustructure is as open to competition as possible. As long as SpeakEasy and other ISPs have fair access to the end users the baby bells and cable companies won't be able to get away with the things they are proposing.
The "valid" uses of encryption you mentioned are largely commercial, and require an actual business to do things like get an SSL certificate. Very few people outside of paranoid the tinfoil hat wearing crowd do things like encrypt their e-mail traffic.
I don't think that has anything to do with the uses being "valid" or not but rather most home users simply don't have any idea how to encript an email and those who do don't know anyone who could decript it. Businesses on the other hand have geeks who set up (mostly transparent to the user) encripted VPNs and such for their users.
Evidently, there's no notice that the information is submitted or sent beyond your computer
.... somewhere? I mean, it's not supposed to be some sort of practice for the REAL form or something right? I can see people being unhappy with the results showing up on a public web site but I can't imagine being surprised that the information was being "sent beyond your computer".
Maybe I'm just beeing dense but if you're filling out a form wouldn't you pretty much expect that it'll be sent
In this case, it is the fault of the developers for assuming that null@domain is invalid. They should have used a domain like example.com for testing.
My guess is that they didn't intend to assume null@vtext.com was valid, they just never checked for it. Most likely they are pulling the username part out of a db and just appending @vtext.com. Unfortunately if a particular db item is empty it may return "null" as the value for that item.....
From a purely practical point of view, because we live in a "Windows World," it would serve the kids best to know their way around it. It would be a disservice to them to make them use Macs or Linux boxes and breed ignorance to the real world.
I couldn't disagree more. K-12 isn't trade school and the sorts of things that are specific to Windows today are likely to be obsolete in 5 - 10 years when these kids enter the workforce anyway. At this age they should be exploring and learning the sorts of things that are common to most modern PCs and learning how to figure out the rest. They should have access to lots of different programs including several that do the same thing so they can get a gut feel for what sorts of things are common to all and what sorts of things tend to be different. Linux is great for schools because:
A. It's easier to set up a system that kids can explore without fear of breaking things.
B. Schools have access to a much wider variety of free software than they could otherwise afford.
C. Those few students that show an interest in digging in and seeing how things work can actually do so.
It turns out that POS systems are used even by mom-and-pop shops and you have to be nuts if you think those are any more complicated than they absolutely have to be to get the job done. They hire fly-by-night consultants to come in and do these installs and they're as basic as anything you've ever seen.
Agreed, and when there is a problem they want it fixed for $100 rather than re-engineered for $1000.
For that matter, I have done consulting for some pretty large and well-known companies who supposedly took security pretty seriously and you could still just walk in and plug a laptop into their net. I could tell you stories about companies whose names you know.
I've even seen it at government agencies... Even large corps who arn't short on cash like the small ones above are pretty averse to change because even small changes can have surprising side effects. No one wants to be responsible for some little change that takes a dozen branch offices off line for a couple of days or more.
Finally, to bring this whole conversation around full circle, a lot of businesses rely on a number of black box devices like the one that the poster of this Ask Slasdot is complaining about, that are supplied and serviced by some third party and there are a lot of things the customer just can't do without making the service contract worthless. In some of these businesses it seems like each device on the network has been installed by a different contractor and there's basically no one really taking responsibility for the network as a whole. I was at a branch office for one major company who had 10 years worth of old equipmet piled up right next to the racks. It would have been trivial to hide a wireless AP in the pile and it probably would have been years before it was discovered.
For me, even more helpful would be a more open platform. Pelco (and all DVR vendors) lock you into their hardware platform, and if you so much as add or replace one of their $2000 120GB hard drives, they will discontinue your support.
No kidding. I'm about to take over support for a couple of similar units because the vendor, even for an absurd yearly fee, is completely inflexable. For example, every time a drive dies they swap the entire machine thus losing all the old video. Of course adding an sort of monitoring software, backup software or anything else is against the rules. For the cost of one year of support for just one location I was able to pick a couple of used machines to use for parts and getting more famailar with the system. I may not be the expert the the vendor is but at least I take the customers data seriously which is more than I can say for the current support folks.
First, if you havn't already you should head on over to www.cctvforum.com . It's not Linux focused but there are lots of folks there who know their DVRs.
Second, there are several "Linux on a DOM" solutions and I think one of the more popular is called VPON.
Third, are you sure you really want a PC based DVR rather than a dedicated solution. Many of the dedicated dvrs run Linux and even the ones that run Windows have striped it down to the point where it should be pretty safe.
Good Luck.
There's the possibility that wifi could be problematic, so he's playing safe.
Yeah, and there's absolutly no danger in stringing cat5 all over the place.
Anecdotally, I get a terrible headache that lasts for hours if I talk even 30 seconds on a cell phone. I'm probably not typical, but I'm certain cell phones aren't as harmless as most folks (and regulatory agencies) think.
I wonder if it could be something about the audio compression that's bothering you rather than the RF. Some people have similar reactions to things like monitor flicker etc.
Agreed, their stores are just too small and they have too many of them to be a profitable consumer electronics chain. They need to get back to selling stuff that you cannot get at just any WalMart and stuff where having a knowledgeable staff actually matters.
FWIW I've set up a few clients with phpgroupware which I think OpenGroupware spun off of. The web mail isn't the slickest one around but it has been reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain.
MythTV is great, but it still lacks some of the Wife Acceptance Factor that Media Center Edition has.
I'm not sure what makes you think that. My wife is about as non-technical as they come and she loves MythTV. This isn't just some recent development either, she basically took it over a year or two ago. Now if I had asked her to buy the parts and set it up then I could see your point (once I finished stringing ethernet cable out to the dog house) but once it's set up Myth is as friendly and easy to use as ANYTHING out there including Tivo. Subjectivly MCE still feels more like "TV on a computer" to me.
Do you have digital cable? How do you handle changing channels automagically to record with one of those boxes?
If you're lucky you can run a serial cable from the computer to the cable box and use that to change channels (that's what I do with my MythTV + DirecTV setup). Otherwise you get an IR transmitter and plug that into a serial or usb port and train lirc to act like your cable box remote.
They apparently won't ship to a different address than the billing address, or another address registered with the credit card company (or so I've been told).
Sure they will. My billing address is a P.O. box and I order from them all the time. You do have to have the alternate address listed with the CC company but that's pretty much how it works everywhere.
--
Ray
But CA buy UPS is either 4 or 5 days, Fedex is 5 or 6 days.
But they don't even offer UPS Ground. Their bottom end shipping option is UPS 3 Day. If your packages are taking longer than that you really should complain and get your shipping fees refunded.
Are you sure you're talking about Newegg? I probably bought $10,000 worth of stuff from them last year and have NEVER seen them claim an item was in stock when it really wasn't. Also every order has gone out either the same day or the next day. You're right about the warehouse issue, probably 80% of my orders come from the closest warehouse (typically 1 - 2 day delivery) but the rest can come from all over. Given that their basic shipping is a 3 day service though it's not nearly as big of a deal as it would be if they were shipping via UPS Ground.
You really should consider reading the setup guide. If you were running incompatable hardware then I could see how it would be difficult but otherwise it's really pretty easy. In short, if it's taking you weeks with supported hardware then you really need to stop thinking you already know it all and try just following the instructions.
It's really up to your capture hardware to worry about the broadcast flag. I don't think Myth knows or cares.