People who expect to mail-order a home PC from one of the big vendors, then get decent tech support are like people who order a Big Mac, and expect to get an attractive, witty wait-person who comes to their table, remembers their name and can suggest a good merlot to go with that. It's just not going to happen.
Back in the day, I paid my tech support dues at an ISP at around the time that a lot of people were getting interested in the Internet. Most people had Win3.1 and 14.4 modems, and most of them knew approximately diddly about what an ISP was or what their monthly fees were paying for. ("Modem? What's that? Nobody told me I had to buy a whatever-you-call-it... I want my money back!"). We tried to help EVERYBODY who called, whether it was a simple password change, or the dreaded "I just installed Win95, now I can't get connected" call. If the call took 2 hrs, it took 2 hrs, and if we couldn't help them on the first call, we would call them back later with some kind of answer.
The result was that when this ISP I worked for lowered the monthly fee from $35 to $25/mo (for dial-up, yeah you read that right), our regular customers complained (!) because they were worried that we were going to turn into just another one of those cheap ISP's with crappy tech support. After all, they knew perfectly well that if they wanted bad service, they could use one of those 3.5" AOL floppies they got in the mail every week and pay less.
Point is, support is expensive. HP, Dell, et al, just can't sell you a $500 PC, then teach you how to use it for free. You ought to be able to get someone on the phone when you get your new Dell home and the HD won't spin up, but people call tech support indignantly resolute in their belief that their $500 has earned them the right to expect Dell to teach them how to create a desktop shortcut... which means that legitimate support needs just have to wait.
When people ask me whether they should get a Dell or a Compaq or whatever, I tell them that there are several reputable, LOCAL shops that can put together a PC for them and support it. It costs more, but as always, you get what you pay for.
These big companies are on those lists because they risk commerce by not reducing spam.
Dude, see my previous post. The problem isn't that you're being victimized by the blacklists, you're being victimized by the customers who get you put on those lists.
Make the lists work for you: put your own dynamic IP's on the lists so that spammers can't use your dial-up accounts as throw-aways, and when you assign static IP's to a customer, make sure those IP's resolve either to a domain of yours which you have voluntarily blacklisted, or to the customer's domain so that they can be listed without taking down your other customers.
If one of your customers has an open relay, and you get a warning from the blacklist maintainers, don't wait around and let them add you to their lists, send them your customers' IP block and let your customer fight to get off.
...can you really expect them to always keep *every* user with an open-relay off of their network?
Earthlink (or any of the big ISP's) could go a long way towards keeping their legitimate emails from slipping down a blackhole if they were willing to do this:
Voluntarily submit all of their dynamic IP pools to the blacklists.
Insure that static IP's assigned to customers resolve either to the customer's domain, or to a default domain that Earthlink has voluntarily submitted to the blacklists.
...the Palladium paranoia is getting out of hand. Among my friends and family who actually use MS products, I have sensed a growing mistrust and sense of frustration with Microsoft. (I know quite a few ppl who have converted to Macs or they've asked me to help them get into Linux).
M$ is right to worry about their (well-deserved) bad rep on security. But from where I sit, people aren't thinking, "I can't trust my operating system," people are thinking, "I can't trust Microsoft." Microsoft, despite what seems like an unshakeable monopoly, just doesn't have the credibility (yes, among the general populace, not just among us slashdotters) to make this draconian Palladium/Trustworthy Computing progrom work.
There are more than just market forces at work here, folks... there are those ever present Darwinistic survival-of-the-fittest forces at play, too. I think the article (the original poster is right, show it to your boss) underscores the fact that although M$ has a monopoly, it is not without competition. Individuals, corporations and organizations who give themselves room to DIY, and don't get too locked-in by M$ and others, have big advantages over those who do.
You don't have to be a cranky paranoid slashdotter to see that a printer cartridge you can refill is better than one you can't, even if you don't have the sense to be indignant about evil lock-in tactics. Sheep are sheep, but you can't drive them over a cliff.
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People who expect to mail-order a home PC from one of the big vendors, then get decent tech support are like people who order a Big Mac, and expect to get an attractive, witty wait-person who comes to their table, remembers their name and can suggest a good merlot to go with that. It's just not going to happen.
Back in the day, I paid my tech support dues at an ISP at around the time that a lot of people were getting interested in the Internet. Most people had Win3.1 and 14.4 modems, and most of them knew approximately diddly about what an ISP was or what their monthly fees were paying for. ("Modem? What's that? Nobody told me I had to buy a whatever-you-call-it... I want my money back!"). We tried to help EVERYBODY who called, whether it was a simple password change, or the dreaded "I just installed Win95, now I can't get connected" call. If the call took 2 hrs, it took 2 hrs, and if we couldn't help them on the first call, we would call them back later with some kind of answer.
The result was that when this ISP I worked for lowered the monthly fee from $35 to $25/mo (for dial-up, yeah you read that right), our regular customers complained (!) because they were worried that we were going to turn into just another one of those cheap ISP's with crappy tech support. After all, they knew perfectly well that if they wanted bad service, they could use one of those 3.5" AOL floppies they got in the mail every week and pay less.
Point is, support is expensive. HP, Dell, et al, just can't sell you a $500 PC, then teach you how to use it for free. You ought to be able to get someone on the phone when you get your new Dell home and the HD won't spin up, but people call tech support indignantly resolute in their belief that their $500 has earned them the right to expect Dell to teach them how to create a desktop shortcut... which means that legitimate support needs just have to wait.
When people ask me whether they should get a Dell or a Compaq or whatever, I tell them that there are several reputable, LOCAL shops that can put together a PC for them and support it. It costs more, but as always, you get what you pay for.
These big companies are on those lists because they risk commerce by not reducing spam.
Dude, see my previous post. The problem isn't that you're being victimized by the blacklists, you're being victimized by the customers who get you put on those lists.
Make the lists work for you: put your own dynamic IP's on the lists so that spammers can't use your dial-up accounts as throw-aways, and when you assign static IP's to a customer, make sure those IP's resolve either to a domain of yours which you have voluntarily blacklisted, or to the customer's domain so that they can be listed without taking down your other customers.
If one of your customers has an open relay, and you get a warning from the blacklist maintainers, don't wait around and let them add you to their lists, send them your customers' IP block and let your customer fight to get off.
Earthlink (or any of the big ISP's) could go a long way towards keeping their legitimate emails from slipping down a blackhole if they were willing to do this:
...Transmeta :)