I work for a company that provides directory assistance to cellular providers, and I can say with confidence that a significant majority cell phone users don't even realize that cell phone numbers aren't listed. I can say this because barely a day goes by when I don't get a phone call from someone looking for their friend's cell phone number.
Also, having both sold wireless phones for a living, and now doing this, I can say without hesitation that they will give anyone a cell phone.
And I do mean anyone.
Most of whom are too vacant to realize what listing their cell phone number will mean.
As a former store manager for the Shack, I can tell you that we never, ever sold that info. It's very valuable, and one of the Shack's primary sources of product awareness. I personally ran a minimum of 95% name and address, and only rarely did I get complaints about it, because I was polite, and not insistent.
I, however, quit at around the time that they started wanting us to ask every customer (not because of it, necessarily, though I was relieved I didn't have to start hearing about it from the DM, who I didn't like anyway):
To subscribe to MSN.
Sign up for the in-house credit card.
Sign up for Sprint long distance.
Buy a cellphone.
Give us their name and address.
No, it was the sixty-hour weeks for about $23,000/yr that drove me away from the Shack. (I took a big pay cut going from assistant store manager to store manager -- there were a number of sales reps in my district who were avoiding management because they'd lose too much money.)
As someone who currently works in a call center, I can tell you that there's a very solid reason to follow a script.
Right now, the economy sucks. It is hard to get a job, especially in areas like where I live where the economy was a wreck before the recession hit. So, when you finally find a job (it took me almost a year to get employed), you don't want to rock the boat.
Call center quality controllers are both strict and not particularly creative, in my experience. You don't know when they're having a bad day, and you don't want to hit a trigger by treading into a gray area, then coming in the next day and being handed a pink slip. So you do what little you can, and, in the meantime, just shrug and move on.
It sucks, but it's a living, albeit a marginal one.
Emperor Linux sells a wide range of laptops preloaded with Linux; I don't have any direct experience with them, but it appears that they make a point of getting everything working under Linux.
They did get the camera in that Sony VAIO ultralite working, though, so they seem okay.
When I was in tech support, everybody thought USRobotics modems sucked. We spent a lot of time dealing with USRobotics problems, much more than any other modem. Then we realized that USRobotics modems were in 70-80% of the PCs on the market. That meant that if USR modems caused 60% of our problems, they were actually better than the average modem!
This is a straw man argument. When you're in tech support, you're dealing with things on a purely quantitative basis, and often dealing with the same problem many, many times. When I worked tech support for an ISP, there was a known problem with X2 USR modems, and a known workaround. A good 50% of our phone calls, for a span of time, had to do with that exact problem; we'd rattle off the instructions for the fix over the phone, and then take the next call, which would be either that problem or, most likely, one of two or three other common problems. As I recall, 95% of our calls were dealing with known issues; while our call volume was high, our actual workload was pretty small, since it was pretty much repetition.
The numbers we're seeing here, though, are tracking separate bugs, not repetitions of the same bugs (except, as noted, where those bugs are repeated across Linux distros). And, as I recall from reading the article off of OSNews yesterday, it's both servers and desktops. If anything, the article, as has been noted before, is heavily weighted towards showing that Linux is less secure by misrepresenting the numbers.
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I work for a company that provides directory assistance to cellular providers, and I can say with confidence that a significant majority cell phone users don't even realize that cell phone numbers aren't listed. I can say this because barely a day goes by when I don't get a phone call from someone looking for their friend's cell phone number.
Also, having both sold wireless phones for a living, and now doing this, I can say without hesitation that they will give anyone a cell phone.
And I do mean anyone.
Most of whom are too vacant to realize what listing their cell phone number will mean.
As a former store manager for the Shack, I can tell you that we never, ever sold that info. It's very valuable, and one of the Shack's primary sources of product awareness. I personally ran a minimum of 95% name and address, and only rarely did I get complaints about it, because I was polite, and not insistent.
I, however, quit at around the time that they started wanting us to ask every customer (not because of it, necessarily, though I was relieved I didn't have to start hearing about it from the DM, who I didn't like anyway):
No, it was the sixty-hour weeks for about $23,000/yr that drove me away from the Shack. (I took a big pay cut going from assistant store manager to store manager -- there were a number of sales reps in my district who were avoiding management because they'd lose too much money.)
Right now, the economy sucks. It is hard to get a job, especially in areas like where I live where the economy was a wreck before the recession hit. So, when you finally find a job (it took me almost a year to get employed), you don't want to rock the boat.
Call center quality controllers are both strict and not particularly creative, in my experience. You don't know when they're having a bad day, and you don't want to hit a trigger by treading into a gray area, then coming in the next day and being handed a pink slip. So you do what little you can, and, in the meantime, just shrug and move on.
It sucks, but it's a living, albeit a marginal one.
Emperor Linux sells a wide range of laptops preloaded with Linux; I don't have any direct experience with them, but it appears that they make a point of getting everything working under Linux.
They did get the camera in that Sony VAIO ultralite working, though, so they seem okay.
When I was in tech support, everybody thought USRobotics modems sucked. We spent a lot of time dealing with USRobotics problems, much more than any other modem. Then we realized that USRobotics modems were in 70-80% of the PCs on the market. That meant that if USR modems caused 60% of our problems, they were actually better than the average modem! This is a straw man argument. When you're in tech support, you're dealing with things on a purely quantitative basis, and often dealing with the same problem many, many times. When I worked tech support for an ISP, there was a known problem with X2 USR modems, and a known workaround. A good 50% of our phone calls, for a span of time, had to do with that exact problem; we'd rattle off the instructions for the fix over the phone, and then take the next call, which would be either that problem or, most likely, one of two or three other common problems. As I recall, 95% of our calls were dealing with known issues; while our call volume was high, our actual workload was pretty small, since it was pretty much repetition. The numbers we're seeing here, though, are tracking separate bugs, not repetitions of the same bugs (except, as noted, where those bugs are repeated across Linux distros). And, as I recall from reading the article off of OSNews yesterday, it's both servers and desktops. If anything, the article, as has been noted before, is heavily weighted towards showing that Linux is less secure by misrepresenting the numbers.