That's also a distinct possibility... I wouldn't put it past the managers of the first location I worked. They were all quite batty. I still chuckle every time I think about the one who built a wall of VCR's in the top-stock between PCHO and HT (Video back then) and sat up there for hours to stare at the bathrooms in an attempt to kids who were ripping off CD's and stuffing the plastic cages in the trash can.
I have a problem with Best Buy at all times of the year but especially at Christmas when they block off lanes so you can only enter/exit in one spot. That way they have an easier time trapping you in there to tell you that they do not work on commissions but that they are happy to help you look for everything they offer.
I can't speak for your experience with having additional product shoved at you while in line, but surprisingly enough, there's a valid reason for using a single queuing line during high-volume periods. It goes faster. While I can't explain the reason (a holder of a masters degree in statistical mathmatics tried to explain it to me a few years back, but my eyes glassed over), it basically comes down to the adage of "it's easier to keep up than catch up." Somehow, by manually directing people to keep each register queue at 3 shoppers, the system as a whole functions more efficiently.
(duplicate for the subthread) Having seen a couple of comments similiar to this, I can only guess that either the kickbacks were limited to certain districts/regions, or that they were discontinued after my last winter season with them.
Having seen a couple of people post similar replies to yours, I can only guess that either the kickbacks were limited to certain regions/districts, or (more likely, I think) that they were discontinued after I left.
Having worked at an Ohio BBuy....
on
Best Buy Sued By Ohio
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I can say that the accusations are 100% true. How do I know this? Because on one occasion, I had a manager personally show me how to operate the shrink-wrap machine. Working in PCHO, the 'printer to push' routinely changed depending on how much ink we had in stock. Being told to sell Packard Bell computers was a hoot, when I knew them to be the shittiest things on the planet. PSP's (extended warranties) were drilled into our collective heads every day, and despite protestations to the contrary, the saleskids *DO* get a kickback from them. That's why they're paranoid about scribbling their employee number on the back of the form. What's incredibly amusing is that after having worked 2 winters and a summer with them, i was spit out by their automated interviewer for being unqualified. The manager wanted me badly, and even reset the program twice and told me which answers to choose, but alas, alack, the computer just knew too much.
Recovering BBuy lackey xxxxxx, stores xxx and xxx. (Wouldn't they like to know... afterall, I am an eyewitness to their illegal actions)
if you wouldn't mind greatly, i'd be interested in the new irc server... i miss oxo, ca, nightmeyr, raist, the picnics, and all the other fun stuff that used to be.
And yeah, you're right... the install they had was more insecure than windows. but I can't believe that it was so badly written that turning it open-source and letting everyone else clean it up wasn't a realistic option (unless Tom Grudner had some sort of patent/license attached that prevented it). Ah well... lordulkesh cat yahoo daht communists. That's my email:)
... for taking down the Cleveland FreeNet (CFN). The grand-daddy of all freenets, it was taken down something like 2 years ago this month, ostensibly because they couldn't continue to maintain the dialup banks, or some such rubbish. The CWRU cash fund is supposedly something in the billions (though this may just be heresay), and I can't imagine that CFN really sucked that many resources out. SO... while this is all fine and dandy for the CWRU students/faculty tromping around the museums, the rest of us Clevelanders remain in the lurch with no real community site anymore.
Innocent until proven guilty only applies to criminal actions brought by the state (ie. The People vs. Mr. Defendant). DirecTV is filing tort claims against the non-sheep, where the standards are much lower, and there isn't a innocent/guilty dichotomy.
It's really too bad I didn't buy one of these things. I'd love to get the EFF and ACLU to take my case, given that I don't even own a satellite dish of any sort. Can we say $10B USD countersuit for extortion? Seems from the article that several judges have been seeing through this shenanigan, and might actuallly be willing to sock it to DirecTV.
Curiously enough, "age" was something written into some of the earliest pencil-and-paper RPG's like 'Dungeons and Dragons'... the idea being that as you got older, you got smarter and wiser (INT and WIS bonus), but slower and weaker as well (STR, CON, DEX penalty). Why this has never made its way into the online realm (MUDs, MOOs, and MMORPG) hasn't found an answer yet.
Why cable only wins in America...
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
is a no brainer. The telco's in the US are primarily concerned with keeping their monopoly at all costs. This isn't too surprising, considering that all of them were in the not-too-distant past just one company that was forced to break up. Unfortunately, by breaking them into regional monopolies, nothing was accomplished (Which is also why I, and several other insightful posters, were against breaking MS into an OS company, and an applications company.), because while they no longer had an iron grip on the whole nation, the smaller companies has iron grips on blocks of states, with no danger of competition from neighboring baby bells. True, the long distance market really took off, but the local/regional pie is still nothing but SBC, NYNEX, Bell South, and the rest. These smaller companies are the ones responsible for DSL's terrible acceptance in the US. A quick check while writing this post on dslreports.com shows that I can get 608/128 for $42 a month. I've hit speeds of 2000/128 with my cable modem, for $40 a month. Cable is faster, cheaper, AND IT WORKS. Yet with DSL, the happy people are happy, and the rest have nothing but horror stories of telcos missing appointments, not bringing the right equipment, damaging existing wiriring, and generally making it a royal pain. Sure, there's "competition" in the DSL market (again, the baby bells versus Covad, et al), but with prices being less attractive, and the installation/support headaches, it's not worth it unless you have a cable provider that spies on you (comcast) or blocks practically all useful services (cox).
While things like these Amazon "reviews" seem to be a rather blantent, MS "grassroots" style campaign, I'm more interested in how to hold electronics manufacturers and their reviewers accountable. About this time last year, with VIA's KT266A release, all the usual suspects (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, etc) were cranking out their reviews of the different motherboards. A year later, it seems like many of the "Editor's choice" award winners have turned out to be real dogs, with stability issues, broken drivers, botched BIOS releases, and in one case, a PCI latency problem that leaves 3 slots unusable! Yet these sites never go back and revoke their awards, nor do we ever really get much info on how the testing is done. I've asked both Tom's and Anandtech to publicly post their testing routine, but there has been nothing but silence. While I fully expect mobo makers to send review sites the sweetest of the "cream" samples, it would be nice to know that the testers are doing everything they possibly can to bring these boards to their knees, rather than just running stock settings with no add-in cards.
Actually, my profile states something quite similar to this. IIRC, it reads something like "If you modded an on-topic post as a troll, no matter how dumb/lame/clueless it was, you will be marked unfair."
Now here's the thing. The metamod process takes *much* longer to work through than the primary mod process (as it should), and I don't believe that points are added/subtracted to the post itself for an 'unfair' mod, only that the moderator's karma is adjusted accordingly (though I may be wrong about this).
Granted, IANAL, but I suspect that the loss of a high-profile, and high-profit ecommerce site like eBay could be used to send a message to the world that software/process patents are lame. Here's what you do...
First, stop accepting new auctions. Everything. Finish off whatever auctions are currently running, and then close shop. Next, liquidate all assets. All your routers, switches, servers, desk lamps, everything. Finally (and the whole reason this works), because eBay is publicly traded, announce one *MASSIVE* dividend. Pay out every last penny to your shareholders. They've been burned by dot-bomb, might as well make them feel a little better. Now, when the next bill comes in, declare bankruptcy. You've already protected your shareholders, given them every bit of money the company had (including the desk chairs), so when this guy comes around demanding millions in damages, you show him a balance sheet with nothing but red, and say "Take a number." Congratulations. You have successfully put a very large company out of business, honked off the free world, and (hopefully) taught the USPTO that first with the idea doesn't mean jack if you're not first to market.
Why do we call facial tissue "Kleenex"? Because the Kleenex company didn't defend their trademark, and their infringement case was thrown out because of that. The same should happen here. This guy didn't defend his patent. Too bad, it's now public domain.
And this time, ISO has probably learned its lesson and isn't going to let anybody sell a patent to a third party such as Forgent who plans to terminate the royalty-free license.
Just because they don't intend to doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. How long did it take Forgent to realize it even had a possible patent claim... 10 years? More? As to the rest of your comment, that's getting nitpicky. It's good enough for the general net-surfing populace. Who cares if the picture grows an extra 5% because it lacks a certain dithering algorithm? Compared to the massive growth (and IP problems) that would come from using GIF or BMP, the lack of your pet quantizer is largely irrelvant. Perv Sixpack on his wimpy dialup won't notice the extra 2 seconds it takes to download porn with PNG, but will scream bloody murder for the minute involved with GIF (Though admittedly, this could be useful in accelerating the growth of broadband, a whole new can of worms). JP2 would be nice, but I've yet to see it in the wild.
The existence of a defacto standard doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to improve on that standard.
Of significant irony is that JPG itself may soon be revoked as a standard (lame software patents tick me off), and PNG *appears* to be the only legitimate replacement candidate. GIF's are CompuServe (AOL/TW now) proprietary, and too big to use for much more than banners). JPG is (likely) dying (Sheesh... makes me sound like the *BSD trolls), while TFF and TGA are relatively unknown outside engineering and photoediting. Don't even think about suggesting BMP, either. MegaShaft worries aside, the files are friggin' massive.
IIRC, the pattern you laid out is exactly what RAMBUS did to JEDEC (only swap high speed RAM for 3D graphics), and you'll notice that they've been slammed with an antitrust suit. Given the amount of time, money, and migraines the present suit has caused Megashaft, one would hope that they wouldn't repeat the same mistake made by RB.
Then again, Hitler didn't learn from Napoleon that attacking the Russians in winter was a bad idea....
In the States, the federal trade commission has set up a special "spam-fighting" email address (uce@ftc.gov) to forward your spam to. Now it's not like I expect my single emails to really do much, so I take a different approach... You'll notice that almost all spam emails have a "click here to unsubscribe" link. Rather than click on that link directly, I copy it to the clipboard, and tweak it so that instead of linking *my* email address, it contains the FTC's address. So while the sites that honor their unsub requests have no trouble, the ones that use the request as a confirmation flag now pipe their spam directly into the FTC's anti-spam taskforce. For the same reason, any webform email request gets that same uce@ftc.gov address. I'll also track down the "I'd like to subscribe" forms for spammers (online casinos especially) that don't have an "opt-out" link. If my tax money is going to go towards fighting this stuff, I might as well give the good guys the cleanest data possible:)
What kinds of things typically get your creativity moving, and how do they push you towards a given "type" of series... In essence, what would tickle you to create 'Mode', rather than expand on 'Xanth' or 'Ogre'?
that because the Balkans are relatively "stable" now, that NATO just doesn't care if someone's watching? Milosevic is on trial in the Netherlands, there aren't mass riots against right-wing government candidtates (eg. LePen in France), and while their economy isn't anything near that of mainstream Europe, they're not starving in lines or causing problems, either (Even Quaddafi learned to keep quiet back in '86). Granted, this whole Afghanistan thing has got to be chewing up a lot of satellite space, but I really doubt it's eating *all* of it. Especially when you think about how many satellites are up there (Take the ones we know about, then double or triple to taste to count for the ones we don't)
or are we going to end up a straight-to-video world?
While the cost of production is certainly lower, and lets the studios get movies out the door faster, I really doubt that even in a purely digital world, the theater as we know it would cease to exist, and my reasoning is quite simple... Movies like 'Star Wars', 'The Matrix', and 'Independence Day' lose a lot when they're taken off a 100+ foot screen and put onto even a 6 foot home television. Yeah, watching things in a home theater can be a lot of fun, but the sheer SIZE of something like the Death Star is gone when it's barely more than an arm's length.
Forgive the flight of fancy here, but did anybody notice that in the Matrix, *EVERYBODY* was using cell phones, and the only people interested in land lines were Neo and his gang? Perhaps there's a reason for this...
Here in Baltimore, Verizon has had a terrible track record in keeping my land line running properly. On a good day with good luck, I MIGHT connect a dialup at 28.8. My line is often marred with static and other "artifacts". But since I'm in the great megacity of the eastern seaboard, there are so many cellphone companies competing that Verizon must figure I have one of those anyways, and don't really need good, consistent, and reliable POTS service. But without reliable POTS lines, there's nothing for DSL to carry over! So at least here, Verizon may very likely cheer and pat itself on the back for winning this ruling, then turn around and realize their equipment is so outdated (from neglect, afterall, everyone's using cell phones) and their users gone (Besides the @Home fiasco, my cable access has been the model of speed and reliability) that they no longer have a viable business from which to profit!
Doesn't necessarily point to the culprit. Just because the webserver is hitting/serving up whatever the ad of the hour is, doesn't mean the person getting the checks is the virus writer. How difficult would it be for instance, for a blackhat to write a virus, have it hit/serve a bazillion ads, but send the money to a certain John Ashcroft, who just happens to live in DC, with a job at the DOJ? Especially given the talents of a true blackhat, this wouldn't be difficult at all. Unfortunately, that's what these posts of "Follow the money trail" are doing... it's entirely possible the writer borked up bigtime, but more likely that someone's being made a stooge, and that the money is just a red herring.
Slashdot Mirror
That's also a distinct possibility... I wouldn't put it past the managers of the first location I worked. They were all quite batty. I still chuckle every time I think about the one who built a wall of VCR's in the top-stock between PCHO and HT (Video back then) and sat up there for hours to stare at the bathrooms in an attempt to kids who were ripping off CD's and stuffing the plastic cages in the trash can.
I can't speak for your experience with having additional product shoved at you while in line, but surprisingly enough, there's a valid reason for using a single queuing line during high-volume periods. It goes faster. While I can't explain the reason (a holder of a masters degree in statistical mathmatics tried to explain it to me a few years back, but my eyes glassed over), it basically comes down to the adage of "it's easier to keep up than catch up." Somehow, by manually directing people to keep each register queue at 3 shoppers, the system as a whole functions more efficiently.
(duplicate for the subthread)
Having seen a couple of comments similiar to this, I can only guess that either the kickbacks were limited to certain districts/regions, or that they were discontinued after my last winter season with them.
Having seen a couple of people post similar replies to yours, I can only guess that either the kickbacks were limited to certain regions/districts, or (more likely, I think) that they were discontinued after I left.
I can say that the accusations are 100% true. How do I know this? Because on one occasion, I had a manager personally show me how to operate the shrink-wrap machine. Working in PCHO, the 'printer to push' routinely changed depending on how much ink we had in stock. Being told to sell Packard Bell computers was a hoot, when I knew them to be the shittiest things on the planet. PSP's (extended warranties) were drilled into our collective heads every day, and despite protestations to the contrary, the saleskids *DO* get a kickback from them. That's why they're paranoid about scribbling their employee number on the back of the form. What's incredibly amusing is that after having worked 2 winters and a summer with them, i was spit out by their automated interviewer for being unqualified. The manager wanted me badly, and even reset the program twice and told me which answers to choose, but alas, alack, the computer just knew too much.
Recovering BBuy lackey xxxxxx, stores xxx and xxx.
(Wouldn't they like to know... afterall, I am an eyewitness to their illegal actions)
if you wouldn't mind greatly, i'd be interested in the new irc server... i miss oxo, ca, nightmeyr, raist, the picnics, and all the other fun stuff that used to be.
:)
And yeah, you're right... the install they had was more insecure than windows. but I can't believe that it was so badly written that turning it open-source and letting everyone else clean it up wasn't a realistic option (unless Tom Grudner had some sort of patent/license attached that prevented it). Ah well... lordulkesh cat yahoo daht communists. That's my email
... for taking down the Cleveland FreeNet (CFN). The grand-daddy of all freenets, it was taken down something like 2 years ago this month, ostensibly because they couldn't continue to maintain the dialup banks, or some such rubbish. The CWRU cash fund is supposedly something in the billions (though this may just be heresay), and I can't imagine that CFN really sucked that many resources out. SO... while this is all fine and dandy for the CWRU students/faculty tromping around the museums, the rest of us Clevelanders remain in the lurch with no real community site anymore.
Innocent until proven guilty only applies to criminal actions brought by the state (ie. The People vs. Mr. Defendant). DirecTV is filing tort claims against the non-sheep, where the standards are much lower, and there isn't a innocent/guilty dichotomy.
It's really too bad I didn't buy one of these things. I'd love to get the EFF and ACLU to take my case, given that I don't even own a satellite dish of any sort. Can we say $10B USD countersuit for extortion? Seems from the article that several judges have been seeing through this shenanigan, and might actuallly be willing to sock it to DirecTV.
Curiously enough, "age" was something written into some of the earliest pencil-and-paper RPG's like 'Dungeons and Dragons'... the idea being that as you got older, you got smarter and wiser (INT and WIS bonus), but slower and weaker as well (STR, CON, DEX penalty). Why this has never made its way into the online realm (MUDs, MOOs, and MMORPG) hasn't found an answer yet.
is a no brainer. The telco's in the US are primarily concerned with keeping their monopoly at all costs. This isn't too surprising, considering that all of them were in the not-too-distant past just one company that was forced to break up. Unfortunately, by breaking them into regional monopolies, nothing was accomplished (Which is also why I, and several other insightful posters, were against breaking MS into an OS company, and an applications company.), because while they no longer had an iron grip on the whole nation, the smaller companies has iron grips on blocks of states, with no danger of competition from neighboring baby bells. True, the long distance market really took off, but the local/regional pie is still nothing but SBC, NYNEX, Bell South, and the rest. These smaller companies are the ones responsible for DSL's terrible acceptance in the US. A quick check while writing this post on dslreports.com shows that I can get 608/128 for $42 a month. I've hit speeds of 2000/128 with my cable modem, for $40 a month. Cable is faster, cheaper, AND IT WORKS. Yet with DSL, the happy people are happy, and the rest have nothing but horror stories of telcos missing appointments, not bringing the right equipment, damaging existing wiriring, and generally making it a royal pain. Sure, there's "competition" in the DSL market (again, the baby bells versus Covad, et al), but with prices being less attractive, and the installation/support headaches, it's not worth it unless you have a cable provider that spies on you (comcast) or blocks practically all useful services (cox).
While things like these Amazon "reviews" seem to be a rather blantent, MS "grassroots" style campaign, I'm more interested in how to hold electronics manufacturers and their reviewers accountable. About this time last year, with VIA's KT266A release, all the usual suspects (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, etc) were cranking out their reviews of the different motherboards. A year later, it seems like many of the "Editor's choice" award winners have turned out to be real dogs, with stability issues, broken drivers, botched BIOS releases, and in one case, a PCI latency problem that leaves 3 slots unusable! Yet these sites never go back and revoke their awards, nor do we ever really get much info on how the testing is done. I've asked both Tom's and Anandtech to publicly post their testing routine, but there has been nothing but silence. While I fully expect mobo makers to send review sites the sweetest of the "cream" samples, it would be nice to know that the testers are doing everything they possibly can to bring these boards to their knees, rather than just running stock settings with no add-in cards.
Actually, my profile states something quite similar to this. IIRC, it reads something like "If you modded an on-topic post as a troll, no matter how dumb/lame/clueless it was, you will be marked unfair."
Now here's the thing. The metamod process takes *much* longer to work through than the primary mod process (as it should), and I don't believe that points are added/subtracted to the post itself for an 'unfair' mod, only that the moderator's karma is adjusted accordingly (though I may be wrong about this).
Granted, IANAL, but I suspect that the loss of a high-profile, and high-profit ecommerce site like eBay could be used to send a message to the world that software/process patents are lame. Here's what you do...
First, stop accepting new auctions. Everything. Finish off whatever auctions are currently running, and then close shop. Next, liquidate all assets. All your routers, switches, servers, desk lamps, everything. Finally (and the whole reason this works), because eBay is publicly traded, announce one *MASSIVE* dividend. Pay out every last penny to your shareholders. They've been burned by dot-bomb, might as well make them feel a little better. Now, when the next bill comes in, declare bankruptcy. You've already protected your shareholders, given them every bit of money the company had (including the desk chairs), so when this guy comes around demanding millions in damages, you show him a balance sheet with nothing but red, and say "Take a number." Congratulations. You have successfully put a very large company out of business, honked off the free world, and (hopefully) taught the USPTO that first with the idea doesn't mean jack if you're not first to market.
Why do we call facial tissue "Kleenex"? Because the Kleenex company didn't defend their trademark, and their infringement case was thrown out because of that. The same should happen here. This guy didn't defend his patent. Too bad, it's now public domain.
IIRC, the pattern you laid out is exactly what RAMBUS did to JEDEC (only swap high speed RAM for 3D graphics), and you'll notice that they've been slammed with an antitrust suit. Given the amount of time, money, and migraines the present suit has caused Megashaft, one would hope that they wouldn't repeat the same mistake made by RB.
Then again, Hitler didn't learn from Napoleon that attacking the Russians in winter was a bad idea....
In the States, the federal trade commission has set up a special "spam-fighting" email address (uce@ftc.gov) to forward your spam to. Now it's not like I expect my single emails to really do much, so I take a different approach... You'll notice that almost all spam emails have a "click here to unsubscribe" link. Rather than click on that link directly, I copy it to the clipboard, and tweak it so that instead of linking *my* email address, it contains the FTC's address. So while the sites that honor their unsub requests have no trouble, the ones that use the request as a confirmation flag now pipe their spam directly into the FTC's anti-spam taskforce. For the same reason, any webform email request gets that same uce@ftc.gov address. I'll also track down the "I'd like to subscribe" forms for spammers (online casinos especially) that don't have an "opt-out" link. If my tax money is going to go towards fighting this stuff, I might as well give the good guys the cleanest data possible :)
What kinds of things typically get your creativity moving, and how do they push you towards a given "type" of series... In essence, what would tickle you to create 'Mode', rather than expand on 'Xanth' or 'Ogre'?
This isn't any different than the Americans using the native Cherokee language during WW2 to throw off the Germans :)
that because the Balkans are relatively "stable" now, that NATO just doesn't care if someone's watching? Milosevic is on trial in the Netherlands, there aren't mass riots against right-wing government candidtates (eg. LePen in France), and while their economy isn't anything near that of mainstream Europe, they're not starving in lines or causing problems, either (Even Quaddafi learned to keep quiet back in '86). Granted, this whole Afghanistan thing has got to be chewing up a lot of satellite space, but I really doubt it's eating *all* of it. Especially when you think about how many satellites are up there (Take the ones we know about, then double or triple to taste to count for the ones we don't)
Forgive the flight of fancy here, but did anybody notice that in the Matrix, *EVERYBODY* was using cell phones, and the only people interested in land lines were Neo and his gang? Perhaps there's a reason for this...
Here in Baltimore, Verizon has had a terrible track record in keeping my land line running properly. On a good day with good luck, I MIGHT connect a dialup at 28.8. My line is often marred with static and other "artifacts". But since I'm in the great megacity of the eastern seaboard, there are so many cellphone companies competing that Verizon must figure I have one of those anyways, and don't really need good, consistent, and reliable POTS service. But without reliable POTS lines, there's nothing for DSL to carry over! So at least here, Verizon may very likely cheer and pat itself on the back for winning this ruling, then turn around and realize their equipment is so outdated (from neglect, afterall, everyone's using cell phones) and their users gone (Besides the @Home fiasco, my cable access has been the model of speed and reliability) that they no longer have a viable business from which to profit!
Doesn't necessarily point to the culprit. Just because the webserver is hitting/serving up whatever the ad of the hour is, doesn't mean the person getting the checks is the virus writer. How difficult would it be for instance, for a blackhat to write a virus, have it hit/serve a bazillion ads, but send the money to a certain John Ashcroft, who just happens to live in DC, with a job at the DOJ? Especially given the talents of a true blackhat, this wouldn't be difficult at all. Unfortunately, that's what these posts of "Follow the money trail" are doing... it's entirely possible the writer borked up bigtime, but more likely that someone's being made a stooge, and that the money is just a red herring.