But Amazon serves THIS customer WELL...
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 2
I've been using Amazon since, oh, 1995? 1996? when I placed my orders using the Lynx browser. I've used it, mostly, for books that I would never have found in a retail store. But I've also bought current bestsellers. And CD's.
My experience with them has been excellent, right up there with Land's End or L. L. Bean.
And, yes, I've dealt with their customer service representatives on the phone and via email. And gotten intelligent, responsive service.
I still feel grateful to Amazon for once helping me be a hero to my daughter. This was maybe in 1997 or '98. She called me, distraught, because the college bookstore had sold out of a textbook she needed and wasn't going to have any more in stock for six weeks. (The bookstore had screwed up someone--she said only about two-thirds of her class had their books). I ordered it from Amazon, second-day air, and she had it the same week. (Yes, it cost about $15 more than buying it at the store would have).
I've also used it to buy CD's by a Dutch group called the Beau Hunks... CD's of the Raymond Scott Sextette... CD's of authentic 30's recording of klezmer music. Try to find these in Tower!
I don't know whether Amazon can make money. And I certainly don't regard it as a way of SAVING money. I regard it as a way of paying a small amount extra for premium service--and easy access to hundreds of thousands of titles that get sent directly to my door.
I mean, they just have given ME very good service. Fast, reliable, no major screwups. Shipping is usually faster than promised. Credit cards are not charged until the item ships. And Amazon was the first company to keep me informed via email when the product actually shipped.
The WORST that's ever happened to me was one occasion when I got emails at approximately two-week intervals for about three months, each announcing another two-week delay in the availability of an item that supposedly "ships in 4-5 days." Eventually I cancelled the order, no problem.
And they're STILL one of the few places that give you an easy way to include a note when you're sending something as a gift.
I was a Mac user in February, 1984. Yeah, I know... I was really slow to "get it."
I used Word 1.x (good), Word 3.x (totally different from 1.x but good) (yes, the marketroids were already in full swing, there wasn't any version 2... well, I forget what the stupid reason was), Word 4.x (lackluster tweak to 3), Word 5.x (pretty good). I skipped 6 altogether. I've found and continue to find Office 98 very frustrating, though not as bad as 6. One of my frustrations is that the main thing that would tempt me to upgrade to the new Office would be a solid bug list that would convince me that the worst annoyances in 98 have actually been fixed...
...you had to pay a dollar a month FOREVER, a dollar-fifty if the phone was any color but black, two dollars if it had Touch-Tone. If you wanted a phone made by any manufacturer but Western Electric, you couldn't connect it. You couldn't connect any device to the phone line. Indeed, you couldn't even attach a mechanical muffler (the Hush-A-Phone) to the mouthpiece that made it harder for people to overhear your conversations.
You just rented "service," equipment and all, at a monthly rate, and you could do with it only what the telephone company wanted you to do with it.
It should be clear at this point that the pendulum is swinging back, and that the Tivos, the cable providers, and the software vendors of the world are trying to turn back the clock to that comfortable time when you didn't own and couldn't control ANYTHING in your house that was wired for communications.
It's only a matter of time before video recorders and computers are not sold at all. You simply get to choose the one that's provided free (or for a $1000 installation charge?) with your subscription service.
"In all we've made more than 1,000 performance improvements, updates, and fixes across the whole Officev.X suite. As a result, you'll find that Officev.X is faster, more stable, and more efficient."
Blah, blah... generic... It's new! improved! New package, same great taste!
What did we think? As a result of the fixes, Office would be slower, crash more and be less efficient?
OK, the announcement is not TOTALLY content-free, but one of the things I detest about Microsoft is the absence of any well-structured bug lists that would enable you to tell whether the specific issue that affects you has been fixed. "Previously, there were problems typing accented characters in certain fonts while the Formatting Palette was displayed. These problems have been fixed." What problems WERE they?
Where's the numbered list of 1000?
How do we know it's really 1,000 and not just some marketer's hyperbole for "lots and lots?"
And another thing I hate is Microsoft's continuing pigheaded refusal to call them "bugs."
2) Except, it isn't even an analog computer, because there is no analogy involved; no abstractions, nothing representing anything else in a simpler, faster, cheaper or more convenient way.
Remember the map of England in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno?" Well, I'm not sure I remember it, but, IIRC it was at a scale of one inch to the inch, so it was extremely accurate, but very annoying when unfolded and spread out.
Sounds like you could have the ultimate finger-pointing nobody-is-responsible multivendor nightmare. Everything works fine for the first couple of years when there isn't much of the stuff around... and then a few more years down the road nothing quite works because the spectrum has been polluted...
and the "cause" is twenty thousand different devices in your vicinity, two thousand of which aren't quite up to standard?
Thank goodness for college radio stations.
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 2
Universities played an extremely important role in the start of radio, as they did in the Internet. Like the Internet, radio originally began as a noncommercial domain, but commercial interests persuaded Congress to change that. As a sop to the universities, they reserved some quantities of spectrum for "educational" broadcasting in the FM band at the low end of the spectrum.
These days it's very rare for my FM tuner to show a reading higher than my body temperature...
Lost his edge, lost his focus--LITERALLY
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 2
After about a century of watching movies filmed on 35 mm film at an effective resolution of about 4000x3000, Lucas thinks that after schlepping out to the gigaplex and shelling out $8.50, people are going to watch 1920x1080 and feel satisfied?
Yes, they'll do it, and they probably won't complain, just as most won't complain about dim projection or dirty prints. But will they notice or care about a slight softening of the image? Not consciously perhaps, but subconsciously they will feel that the image looks less real than they have been accustomed to. They'll know something's WRONG, even if they can't say what it is, and in a subtle way they will feel cheated.
Lucas has lost his edge and lost his focus--LITERALLY.
Today's digital technology might be up to the demands of a straight drama or a romantic chick flick, where most of the interest is in the characters and dramatic elements. It is NOT up to the task of delivering immersive, spectacular, widescreen excitement.
It's a darn shame nobody has the courage to try making an action/fantasy/sci-fi picture in 70mm. It will be a decade before the quality of theatre digital approaches 70mm. It will be three or four years before it approaches plain old 35mm--longer, at the present rate of adoption.
Too bad so few of us can still remember what "2001" REALLY looked like on its first run.
"Stop this Progress! Stop it, I say!" --the character Theotocopulos in the screenplay of H. G. Wells' Things to Come. And later:
Passworthy: "Oh, God, is there ever to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"
Cabal: "Rest enough, for the individual. Too much and too soon and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and waves. And then all laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last, out across immensity... to the stars.
And when he has conquered all the deeps of Space and all the mysteries of Time [quietly, broodingly] still, he will be beginning.
The concerns about igniting the atmosphere are mentioned in just about every history of the atomic bomb. Here's one link, which as it's to LANL is presumably authoritative:
"When Teller raised the possibility that an atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere, however, he kindled a worry that was not entirely extinguished until the Trinity test, even though Bethe showed, theoretically, that it couldn't happen."
The Bravo shot having a yield two or three times greater than expected is also well-known, e.g.
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap12_ 3. html
"The Bravo shot was detonated on Bikini at 6:45 a.m. on March 1, 1954. Its yield was substantially greater than expected"
but I'm afraid I can't find a source for the quotation I read once, in which some scientists watching the blast thought momentarily that it might never stop.
...when the first atomic bombs were tested, there was a serious question as to whether they could ignite a self-sustaining reaction in the earth's atmosphere, destroying it. The scientists literally took a calculated risk--their calculations showed the probability was low, so they went ahead. But they didn't know the answer for sure, until they went ahead and exploded a bomb, and the atmosphere didn't ignite.
One of the early hydrogen-bomb tests, Bravo in 1954, turned out to have a yield 2-1/2 times higher than expected. Observers watched the fireball grow and grow. Some of them thought it wasn't going to stop and thought that perhaps the atmosphere had been ignited after all. But it hadn't; it didn't destroy the world ( it just contaminated the Marshall Islands and poisoned some Japanese fisherman).
When it comes to tagging EXPLOSIVES to identify the source, oh, no, it would cost money and it wouldn't work ( http://www.speedsite.com/~ccohen/taggants.htm ; http://www.speedsite.com/~ccohen/taggants.htm ). But when it comes to stopping kiddies from copying MUSIC, no effort should be spared...
Years ago I just didn't believe we'd really see volumetric 3D because the jump from (say) 640x480 to 640x480x480 just seemed too wide.
If we can get a stationary image 400 x 400 x 400 image for $20,000, it doesn't seem all that much of a stretch to 400 x 400 x 400 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second for $200.
And disk speeds and Internet speeds are coming along just fine...
...The time to declare the Moon a scientific preserve is BEFORE there are serious vested interests trying to develop it.
We already have some litter and junk up there... it took less than thirty years for junk orbiting Earth to become a serious problem.
I am sure there are corporations reading "The Man Who Sold The Moon" right now and wondering whether Heinlein's scheme for putting a visible corporate logon on the Moon is feasable.
The specs _I_ want to know are: how thick a rug can it run on? Can it go over a 3/4"-high threshold? How is it at navigating obstacles? How resistant to floor dirt is it (hint: some of us have Newfoundland dogs, they shed, the hair is long enough to wind around a vacuum cleaner beater bar and jam it...)?
What about stair-climbing?
Looks like it's only useful in a space that has a single, flat, clean floor. How many readers live in a space that fits that description?
Now, as a way of ferrying parts around a factory floor like those big "Pronto" systems...
Wow! They bought SIXTY vans? At TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOU each? Why, that's 16.2 MILLION dollars! Big bucks for sure!
They're spending a whopping 0.025% of their revenue (67.2 billion) or $0.52 per customer (31 million wireless customers) to see whether their customers are actually getting what are paying for.
Be still my heart!
(Say, I wonder how much they spent on the television advertising showing those technicians?)
Hayden Planetarium's list?
on
Window or Aisle?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When I was a kid, I signed my name and address in a book at t the Hayden Planetarium in New York indicating that I was interested in being a passenger on the first commercial passenger flight into space (or possibly to the Moon, I forget which).
I wonder if they still have that list? I wonder if they maintain it? I wonder what the names on a mailing list of "middle-aged geeks interested in being space tourists" are worth?
I wonder if I need to contact them and ask to have my name removed?
I wonder what sort of junk mail I can expect to get if I don't?
I'm trying to remember when it began. Which version of Windows was it that detected the presence of OS/2 on the hard drive and offered to remove it "to free up disk space?"
I'm sick to death of competitive installations. When I put my mouse over an "upgrade software now" button I feel like I'm playing Russian roulette and am just about to pull the trigger.
What are the chances that I'm going to disable something else I use? Yes, there's a huge grey area: sometimes the effect is innocently (bad SQA). Sometimes it's semi-intentional, the software equivalent of the car rental clerk saying "sign here" over a page of 50%-gray type on a 33%-grey background. You know, what does this gobbledegook about 'making the the default application for opening your media files' mean? I guess I'll just push the return key and take the default....
Sometimes I think it's intentional. Hey, we're just sharp, competitive businessmen, kicking competitors in the groin is what made this country great...
I think needs at the very least to be a "truth-in-installation" law. The installer should disclose clearly, in plain language, EVERYTHING it's going to do in terms that are meaningful to the consumer. ("Increase stability, and, oh, yes, enforce the license agreement by technical means and, by the way, send information to us over the Internet which, according to our just-changed privacy policy we can share with our trusted partners...)
Re:the beauty of credit cards--worked for me, too
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Agreed. I have TWICE encountered similar problems in the past with ISP's. In my case, the problems were with billing continuing after I had told them to cancel the service. Each time, contacting the credit card company got the issue resolved quickly and almost painlessly.
Once you contact the credit card company and tell them the charge is unauthorized, the monkey is on the VENDOR's back.
Anyone remember certain HP2600-series terminals which had a key labeled AIDS? Brought up the setup menus or something...
These terminals were popular just in the early days when the news started to come in about this mysterious disease that was showing up in "gay men and Haitians."
We had a student assistant in our computer center and one day for a gag he came in wearing rubber gloves. He would wait for people to ask why he was wearing them and then he'd say "because I don' t want to contact any keyboard with AIDS," pointing to the HP key...
Apple Knowledge Base article #106882 confirms the problem with "certain copy-protected audio discs, which resemble Compact Discs (CD) but technically are not," and says Apple will not pay for repairs even if you have a service contract.
http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/k ba se.woa/116/wa/query?searchMode=Expert&type=id&val= KC.106882
The note suggests a number of things you can "try" or "attempt" which "may" solve the problem.
The telling part is the last paragraph:
"If a disc with copyrighted protection technology remains inside the drive after following the procedures above, or if the computer does not start up normally, it is recommended that you contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) or Apple Technical Support. CD audio discs that incorporate copyright protection technologies do not adhere to published Compact Disc standards. Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to such standards. Apple computers are not designed to support copyright protected media that do not conform to such standards. Therefore, any attempt to use non standard discs with Apple CD drives will be considered a misapplication of the product. Under the terms of Apple's One-Year Limited Warranty, AppleCare Protection Plan, or other AppleCare agreement any misapplication of the product is excluded from Apple's repair coverage. Because the Apple product is functioning correctly according to its design specifications, any fee assessed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple for repair service will not be Apple's responsibility."
And they found germs? Oh, what a surprise. And I'll bet that if a computer industry association funded a study, they'd find that keyboards are perfectly healthy.
Unlike the Slashdot lead in, they did NOT say the bacteria were "health threatening." They did not say the "germs" were dangerous. They didn't say they had shown that they caused disease. They did not say they POTENTIALLY could cause disease. They did not say that the people using the antimicrobial wipes obtained any health benefits (fewer sicks days, etc).
All they said was, there were bacteria on your keyboard. Big deal. There are bacteria in cheese, in yogurt, in sauerkraut, in your own mouth right now, in your own gut right now, etc. There are not just bacteria but MITES in your eyelids.
Yes, it's true that colds in particular are spread more by hand contact than by droplets in the air. I'd bet that you are at far more risk when you shake hands then when you use someone else's keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Amazon since, oh, 1995? 1996? when I placed my orders using the Lynx browser. I've used it, mostly, for books that I would never have found in a retail store. But I've also bought current bestsellers. And CD's.
My experience with them has been excellent, right up there with Land's End or L. L. Bean.
And, yes, I've dealt with their customer service representatives on the phone and via email. And gotten intelligent, responsive service.
I still feel grateful to Amazon for once helping me be a hero to my daughter. This was maybe in 1997 or '98. She called me, distraught, because the college bookstore had sold out of a textbook she needed and wasn't going to have any more in stock for six weeks. (The bookstore had screwed up someone--she said only about two-thirds of her class had their books). I ordered it from Amazon, second-day air, and she had it the same week. (Yes, it cost about $15 more than buying it at the store would have).
I've also used it to buy CD's by a Dutch group called the Beau Hunks... CD's of the Raymond Scott Sextette... CD's of authentic 30's recording of klezmer music. Try to find these in Tower!
I don't know whether Amazon can make money. And I certainly don't regard it as a way of SAVING money. I regard it as a way of paying a small amount extra for premium service--and easy access to hundreds of thousands of titles that get sent directly to my door.
I mean, they just have given ME very good service. Fast, reliable, no major screwups. Shipping is usually faster than promised. Credit cards are not charged until the item ships. And Amazon was the first company to keep me informed via email when the product actually shipped.
The WORST that's ever happened to me was one occasion when I got emails at approximately two-week intervals for about three months, each announcing another two-week delay in the availability of an item that supposedly "ships in 4-5 days." Eventually I cancelled the order, no problem.
And they're STILL one of the few places that give you an easy way to include a note when you're sending something as a gift.
I was a Mac user in February, 1984. Yeah, I know... I was really slow to "get it."
I used Word 1.x (good), Word 3.x (totally different from 1.x but good) (yes, the marketroids were already in full swing, there wasn't any version 2... well, I forget what the stupid reason was), Word 4.x (lackluster tweak to 3), Word 5.x (pretty good). I skipped 6 altogether. I've found and continue to find Office 98 very frustrating, though not as bad as 6. One of my frustrations is that the main thing that would tempt me to upgrade to the new Office would be a solid bug list that would convince me that the worst annoyances in 98 have actually been fixed...
...you had to pay a dollar a month FOREVER, a dollar-fifty if the phone was any color but black, two dollars if it had Touch-Tone. If you wanted a phone made by any manufacturer but Western Electric, you couldn't connect it. You couldn't connect any device to the phone line. Indeed, you couldn't even attach a mechanical muffler (the Hush-A-Phone) to the mouthpiece that made it harder for people to overhear your conversations.
You just rented "service," equipment and all, at a monthly rate, and you could do with it only what the telephone company wanted you to do with it.
It should be clear at this point that the pendulum is swinging back, and that the Tivos, the cable providers, and the software vendors of the world are trying to turn back the clock to that comfortable time when you didn't own and couldn't control ANYTHING in your house that was wired for communications.
It's only a matter of time before video recorders and computers are not sold at all. You simply get to choose the one that's provided free (or for a $1000 installation charge?) with your subscription service.
"In all we've made more than 1,000 performance improvements, updates, and fixes across the whole Officev.X suite. As a result, you'll find that Officev.X is faster, more stable, and more efficient."
Blah, blah... generic... It's new! improved! New package, same great taste!
What did we think? As a result of the fixes, Office would be slower, crash more and be less efficient?
OK, the announcement is not TOTALLY content-free, but one of the things I detest about Microsoft is the absence of any well-structured bug lists that would enable you to tell whether the specific issue that affects you has been fixed. "Previously, there were problems typing accented characters in certain fonts while the Formatting Palette was displayed. These problems have been fixed." What problems WERE they?
Where's the numbered list of 1000?
How do we know it's really 1,000 and not just some marketer's hyperbole for "lots and lots?"
And another thing I hate is Microsoft's continuing pigheaded refusal to call them "bugs."
OK, I feel better now.
1) Yeah, but it's an ANALOG computer. How passe!
2) Except, it isn't even an analog computer, because there is no analogy involved; no abstractions, nothing representing anything else in a simpler, faster, cheaper or more convenient way.
Remember the map of England in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno?" Well, I'm not sure I remember it, but, IIRC it was at a scale of one inch to the inch, so it was extremely accurate, but very annoying when unfolded and spread out.
Sounds like you could have the ultimate finger-pointing nobody-is-responsible multivendor nightmare. Everything works fine for the first couple of years when there isn't much of the stuff around... and then a few more years down the road nothing quite works because the spectrum has been polluted...
and the "cause" is twenty thousand different devices in your vicinity, two thousand of which aren't quite up to standard?
Universities played an extremely important role in the start of radio, as they did in the Internet. Like the Internet, radio originally began as a noncommercial domain, but commercial interests persuaded Congress to change that. As a sop to the universities, they reserved some quantities of spectrum for "educational" broadcasting in the FM band at the low end of the spectrum.
These days it's very rare for my FM tuner to show a reading higher than my body temperature...
After about a century of watching movies filmed on 35 mm film at an effective resolution of about 4000x3000, Lucas thinks that after schlepping out to the gigaplex and shelling out $8.50, people are going to watch 1920x1080 and feel satisfied?
Yes, they'll do it, and they probably won't complain, just as most won't complain about dim projection or dirty prints. But will they notice or care about a slight softening of the image? Not consciously perhaps, but subconsciously they will feel that the image looks less real than they have been accustomed to. They'll know something's WRONG, even if they can't say what it is, and in a subtle way they will feel cheated.
Lucas has lost his edge and lost his focus--LITERALLY.
Today's digital technology might be up to the demands of a straight drama or a romantic chick flick, where most of the interest is in the characters and dramatic elements. It is NOT up to the task of delivering immersive, spectacular, widescreen excitement.
It's a darn shame nobody has the courage to try making an action/fantasy/sci-fi picture in 70mm. It will be a decade before the quality of theatre digital approaches 70mm. It will be three or four years before it approaches plain old 35mm--longer, at the present rate of adoption.
Too bad so few of us can still remember what "2001" REALLY looked like on its first run.
"Stop this Progress! Stop it, I say!" --the character Theotocopulos in the screenplay of H. G. Wells' Things to Come. And later:
Passworthy: "Oh, God, is there ever to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"
Cabal: "Rest enough, for the individual. Too much and too soon and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and waves. And then all laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last, out across immensity... to the stars.
And when he has conquered all the deeps of Space and all the mysteries of Time [quietly, broodingly] still, he will be beginning.
The concerns about igniting the atmosphere are mentioned in just about every history of the atomic bomb. Here's one link, which as it's to LANL is presumably authoritative:
2 _b erkeley-summer.html
_ 3. html
http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/welcome/history/0
"When Teller raised the possibility that an atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere, however, he kindled a worry that was not entirely extinguished until the Trinity test, even though Bethe showed, theoretically, that it couldn't happen."
The Bravo shot having a yield two or three times greater than expected is also well-known, e.g.
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap12
"The Bravo shot was detonated on Bikini at 6:45 a.m. on March 1, 1954. Its yield was substantially greater than expected"
but I'm afraid I can't find a source for the quotation I read once, in which some scientists watching the blast thought momentarily that it might never stop.
...when the first atomic bombs were tested, there was a serious question as to whether they could ignite a self-sustaining reaction in the earth's atmosphere, destroying it. The scientists literally took a calculated risk--their calculations showed the probability was low, so they went ahead. But they didn't know the answer for sure, until they went ahead and exploded a bomb, and the atmosphere didn't ignite.
One of the early hydrogen-bomb tests, Bravo in 1954, turned out to have a yield 2-1/2 times higher than expected. Observers watched the fireball grow and grow. Some of them thought it wasn't going to stop and thought that perhaps the atmosphere had been ignited after all. But it hadn't; it didn't destroy the world ( it just contaminated the Marshall Islands and poisoned some Japanese fisherman).
When it comes to tagging EXPLOSIVES to identify the source, oh, no, it would cost money and it wouldn't work ( http://www.speedsite.com/~ccohen/taggants.htm ; http://www.speedsite.com/~ccohen/taggants.htm ). But when it comes to stopping kiddies from copying MUSIC, no effort should be spared...
I'm not going to try to hold my breath for 4-1/2 years (plus however long it takes to get the cost down by a factor of 100).
Actually I expect it to take longer than you do.
But I have a good chance of seeing it, not merely within my lifetime, but even before my retirement.
Considering that I once doubted that I would ever even own my own computer, that's not too bad!
I really am amazed.
Years ago I just didn't believe we'd really see volumetric 3D because the jump from (say) 640x480 to 640x480x480 just seemed too wide.
If we can get a stationary image 400 x 400 x 400 image for $20,000, it doesn't seem all that much of a stretch to 400 x 400 x 400 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second... or from there to 1600 x 1600 x 1600 x 30 frames per second for $200.
And disk speeds and Internet speeds are coming along just fine...
...The time to declare the Moon a scientific preserve is BEFORE there are serious vested interests trying to develop it.
We already have some litter and junk up there... it took less than thirty years for junk orbiting Earth to become a serious problem.
I am sure there are corporations reading "The Man Who Sold The Moon" right now and wondering whether Heinlein's scheme for putting a visible corporate logon on the Moon is feasable.
Forget "video capture resolution."
The specs _I_ want to know are: how thick a rug can it run on? Can it go over a 3/4"-high threshold? How is it at navigating obstacles? How resistant to floor dirt is it (hint: some of us have Newfoundland dogs, they shed, the hair is long enough to wind around a vacuum cleaner beater bar and jam it...)?
What about stair-climbing?
Looks like it's only useful in a space that has a single, flat, clean floor. How many readers live in a space that fits that description?
Now, as a way of ferrying parts around a factory floor like those big "Pronto" systems...
Wow! They bought SIXTY vans? At TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOU each? Why, that's 16.2 MILLION dollars! Big bucks for sure!
They're spending a whopping 0.025% of their revenue (67.2 billion) or $0.52 per customer (31 million wireless customers) to see whether their customers are actually getting what are paying for.
Be still my heart!
(Say, I wonder how much they spent on the television advertising showing those technicians?)
When I was a kid, I signed my name and address in a book at t the Hayden Planetarium in New York indicating that I was interested in being a passenger on the first commercial passenger flight into space (or possibly to the Moon, I forget which).
I wonder if they still have that list? I wonder if they maintain it? I wonder what the names on a mailing list of "middle-aged geeks interested in being space tourists" are worth?
I wonder if I need to contact them and ask to have my name removed?
I wonder what sort of junk mail I can expect to get if I don't?
I'm trying to remember when it began. Which version of Windows was it that detected the presence of OS/2 on the hard drive and offered to remove it "to free up disk space?"
I'm sick to death of competitive installations. When I put my mouse over an "upgrade software now" button I feel like I'm playing Russian roulette and am just about to pull the trigger.
What are the chances that I'm going to disable something else I use? Yes, there's a huge grey area: sometimes the effect is innocently (bad SQA). Sometimes it's semi-intentional, the software equivalent of the car rental clerk saying "sign here" over a page of 50%-gray type on a 33%-grey background. You know, what does this gobbledegook about 'making the the default application for opening your media files' mean? I guess I'll just push the return key and take the default....
Sometimes I think it's intentional. Hey, we're just sharp, competitive businessmen, kicking competitors in the groin is what made this country great...
I think needs at the very least to be a "truth-in-installation" law. The installer should disclose clearly, in plain language, EVERYTHING it's going to do in terms that are meaningful to the consumer. ("Increase stability, and, oh, yes, enforce the license agreement by technical means and, by the way, send information to us over the Internet which, according to our just-changed privacy policy we can share with our trusted partners...)
Agreed. I have TWICE encountered similar problems in the past with ISP's. In my case, the problems were with billing continuing after I had told them to cancel the service. Each time, contacting the credit card company got the issue resolved quickly and almost painlessly.
Once you contact the credit card company and tell them the charge is unauthorized, the monkey is on the VENDOR's back.
...doing NOTHING BUT addressing security issues as part of their new security focus.
Do you suppose they need to do more?
Anyone remember certain HP2600-series terminals which had a key labeled AIDS? Brought up the setup menus or something...
These terminals were popular just in the early days when the news started to come in about this mysterious disease that was showing up in "gay men and Haitians."
We had a student assistant in our computer center and one day for a gag he came in wearing rubber gloves. He would wait for people to ask why he was wearing them and then he'd say "because I don' t want to contact any keyboard with AIDS," pointing to the HP key...
First they came for "More Fast and Furious," and I did not speak out because that's not my kind of music.
Then they came for Celine Dion, and I did not speak out because I'm lukewarm about Celine Dion.
Then they came for Episode 2, and I did not speak out because I'm not really a Star Wars fan.
But THEN they copy-protected that CD of "Richard Stallman sings Tom Lehrer..."
Apple Knowledge Base article #106882 confirms the problem with "certain copy-protected audio discs, which resemble Compact Discs (CD) but technically are not," and says Apple will not pay for repairs even if you have a service contract.
k ba se.woa/116/wa/query?searchMode=Expert&type=id&val= KC.106882
http://kbase.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/
The note suggests a number of things you can "try" or "attempt" which "may" solve the problem.
The telling part is the last paragraph:
"If a disc with copyrighted protection technology remains inside the drive after following the procedures above, or if the computer does not start up normally, it is recommended that you contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) or Apple Technical Support. CD audio discs that incorporate copyright protection technologies do not adhere to published Compact Disc standards. Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to such standards. Apple computers are not designed to support copyright protected media that do not conform to such standards. Therefore, any attempt to use non standard discs with Apple CD drives will be considered a misapplication of the product. Under the terms of Apple's One-Year Limited Warranty, AppleCare Protection Plan, or other AppleCare agreement any misapplication of the product is excluded from Apple's repair coverage. Because the Apple product is functioning correctly according to its design specifications, any fee assessed by an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple for repair service will not be Apple's responsibility."
And they found germs? Oh, what a surprise. And I'll bet that if a computer industry association funded a study, they'd find that keyboards are perfectly healthy.
Unlike the Slashdot lead in, they did NOT say the bacteria were "health threatening." They did not say the "germs" were dangerous. They didn't say they had shown that they caused disease. They did not say they POTENTIALLY could cause disease. They did not say that the people using the antimicrobial wipes obtained any health benefits (fewer sicks days, etc).
All they said was, there were bacteria on your keyboard. Big deal. There are bacteria in cheese, in yogurt, in sauerkraut, in your own mouth right now, in your own gut right now, etc. There are not just bacteria but MITES in your eyelids.
Yes, it's true that colds in particular are spread more by hand contact than by droplets in the air. I'd bet that you are at far more risk when you shake hands then when you use someone else's keyboard.