As a long time shopper at HMV (10+ years now), I think this is great news. I think they've not only felt the blow from iTunes but also large on-line retailers like Amazon and Chapters. The Canadian stores regularly have much lower prices. Sometimes out of convenience, or wanting to listen to a CD right away, I'll go to HMV to buy the CD - I never minded. Retail space is the killer to this idea - but I wish they would have more 'sampling' booths for new music.
Its also the sign of a struggling retalier for sales when their sales never end. HMV has basically had the same sale on the same CDs and DVDs for the better part of one year. The boxing day sales were only slightly better.
I must say I was disappointed when they discontinued the frequent shopper card (buy 10 CD get one free up to $25) a few years back. This is kind of the equivalent. I'd like to see something similar come back.
Anyhow, I'm going to my local store today.... hope the new prices are in effect!!:) (I'd much rather support HMV than big box stores and Amazon to some extent).
That's the easy way out but probably not the best one. Often, is the case in government, the "officials" think they're always right on areas outside their expertise. The admin probably knows what he's doing but is having to convince people who don't know anything about anything to change their policies so that he can make the network work correctly. They don't see anything wrong with the way its setup - it was working well *before* the failure right? So, no need to change!
I think the better idea is to start first by thinking about build quality of houses. My house has had several repairs - things which were minor things to do right the first time end up costing thousands of dollars. The quality could easily extend to Woz's (Woz'z ?;) ) analogy of the computer.
If the goal of the energy efficient house is to save money on heating and cooling, my thought is we have to look at the expenditure of a house across its lifetime. The materials needed costs something in energy to manufacture, transport, etc - nails, screws, tiles, 2x4, shingles, etc. When these things are thrown away due to shoddy construction* - it leads to more energy demand and wastage to replace it.
*Its usually not the materials that fail except in natural disasters. In disasters. better construction practices, building to code or better codes would help. Again quality the issue.
I've worked for another company in the same industry and friends have worked for their competitors. We all found the respective telco company bills difficult to read - espcecially in the computer systems we were using. Its not always evident - on complex and long bills to find out what's going on. The comptuer system I used was so bad and difficult to read, I eneded up putting customers on hold sometimes, generating a bill in the computer system and printing it out.
So if ever you do call customer service trying to explain your bill, keep in mind many of the industry players have legacy or poorly made billing systems (usually poorly made) and its quite difficult to read.
I wholeheartedly agree. I am an iMac G5 owner and would love one of the Intel Macs. I sold a practically brand new PC at the time to go with an iMac. I love OS X.
I begrudge buying the iMac for a few reasons though. What to do if the monitor stops working and its outside Applecare warranty? I hate to think of repair costs. If I change systems I also cannot keep the screen. Upgrade of the video card, CPU or motherboard is impossible (no surprise there). Ditto the sound card. I'd love to hook up a Klipsch 5.1 system but incompatible. But mostly its storage space. I hate having to use an external caddy for the HDD drives. Firewire doesn't work as well as would SATA and I can't really take advantage with an External system of powersaving features whereas it would be on the mobo on new PCs. I also think the "Superdrive" is a piece-o-junk and had to buy an extra caddy for a real DVD-RW.
I really cannot justify buying a Mac Pro for personal use. The iMac though is not in contrast under powered... it is not upgradeable. For nearly $2000, I want more flexibility. I was really hoping Apple would see that some 'non-pro' users would spring $1500 to $1800 for a Core-2 or Quad core tower system. Instead we're stuck with the Xeons. Apple doesn't want to drive away Pro sales or iMac sales. And they're sticking with mobile and Xenon chips to keep development costs lower. There are more than a few 'power users' I've spoken to who are PC users and current Mac users on the web like myself that would love to buy another Mac, but the hardware choices are frustrating.
Sigh. Keeping my iMac (it makes a really nice desktop for surfing web, e-mail and such) but for gaming and SOHO use I think I'm going back to a PC. XP 64 was really nice and fast when I last tried it 2 years ago and no problems with software. Come on Apple!
1) Ruin tourist attractions. Seeing the content of someone's stomach on the ground will ruin the nice smell and scenery of my vacation! If I see a pool of blood, I know someone is watching out for my security and well being. 2) Make me puke. Seeing someone else puke makes me feel like puking. A pool of blood, doesn't make motivate me to start bleeding.
Makes me wonder if Apple wasn't next in their suit. In any event it seems the name wasn't picked out of inconvenience. Mr. Jobs seems to be well liked in the tech industry/general public for his accomplishments. SCO was having a PR nightmare. There were rumors poster on the blog was Mr. Jobs. What better way to spin positive PR SCO's way by using a character well liked in the industry/public.
Use 5 1/4" floppies. Once the data is written to the disk put some tape over the write tab on the side of the disk. If people claim this is inefficient, double the efficiency buy punching a hole on other side of disk and flip it over.
They want an audit trail, they'll have it. A trail of floppies that no one will ever find the log file for!;)
I think this is probably their strategy. MS has said they're not working on SP3 for XP (they might be, but I think the aim at least is to leave the impression). This makes the task of corporate support more difficult.
WIth a lot of businesses using Windows 2000, I suppose if they're not going to upgrade to XP, might as well make 2 sales out of them. Upgrade them to XP while its still being supported and their machines still run it. Then pull XP from the market, with their next upgrade cycle they might have to buy Vista anyways (if nothing else, the support contract for Vista will be up longer).
Since much of the subject here is about importing, is there any luck in using a Japanese-market phone in the US/Canada (I'm in Canada)? I'm up for a contract renewal and a new phone. A friend came back from Japan last year and showed me the phone she used. Its still 2 years ahead on what's in the market here. The battery lasted longer, the camera had awesome res, and LED flashlight and tons of bells.
Someone mentionned GPS/e911 service as one hindrance. Any other pitfalls or reasons I could not use it?
I think its quite true about your point on the 'annoying' co-worker. I think it takes some/most people a while to warm up to and understand others. Those who don't mope and bicker about the annoying person in the office. I think a different attitude and approach (getting to know them) and point out casually the point of annoyance maintains the best and healthiest workplace. I don't think there's one company I'll ever work for where I will like/agree with everyone -and the key here - is at least initially.
Yep. I agree. A reader/writer unit for the minidisc isn't all that expensive to adapt to a PC. The size of the media is perfect to put in a pocket. Its already in protective case. And it seems to last a really long time. The amount of time I've spent playing some of the MDs, my CDs or DVDs would likely have a scratch on by now. I really wish selling MDs instead of CDs had caught on in NA as it has, i hear, in Japan.
Do we really have to take spinning optical discs to new levels? I think industry should concentrate on Flash or getting HDs super reliable so we can just buy a few extra HDs and backup all the information on it with some level of confidence. I hate backing up stuff on shiny, scratchable CDs or DVDs. I find Flash is much more reliable, but the drives/cards are so small they're easy to lose.
Working for a major telephone or cable provider is an experience, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Here, the sheer # of customers means you're going to have a significant amount of problem customers. Generally, companies are most generous about payment and billing (even forgiving about clauses in the contract) just to keep a customer and keep them happy. Here's but one example:
I worked for such a major telco/cable company. Its true, there are often billing problems with the computer system or in processing the payments. Or with how payment policies are laid-out, interpreted and followed up on (mostly, companies are overly generous in this regard). I think 99.9999% of these companies simply ask that customers pay their bills every month. If its a few days or a week late, they generally *never* cut you off, never charge interest, or follow up with sterner notices in the future. Just don't let your account get behind for more than a month (or not paying at all for that month). The problem comes when you have people on limited incomes (and I certainly can appreciate and don't deny the difficulties) who are repeatedly in arrears by several months. Or they just don't give a shit and never try to never pay for anything. They often order the latest and greatest of everything and then complain and threaten to cancel a service when you suggest their account will be cut-off. Even though they often admit they can't afford it or lie about being able to and refuse to cut back on services.
I felt sorry for some of them. But when the problem is *theirs* and not the company's, from a business perspective it only makes sense to get rid of these customers. Their are many business costs associated with this problem. And as I worked in commissioned sales, dealing with these people (whom I often spent longer on the phone with) instead of doing sales, affected my income.
Let your competitor handle them and bear the cost.
I've only seen a few customers 'fired' while I worked in Customer service for 5 years while a student. Worst was one customer whom I will only say needed the company's legal team to get invovled. Said customer probably wasted thousands of dollars of company money per month in billing/support calls - probably 99% of which had no relation to the service which was being paid, no billing or technical issues.
I'm not surprised. Not saying this because I anticipated a lot of problems, just that with any product there will always be problems be it software, hardware or that the widget just doesn't work.
As a student, I've worked in Customer Service before for a big carrier/media company (not AT&T) and know others who have worked similar roles for other companies (again not AT&T). With the companies that my friends and I are familiar with, the general emphasis has always been on providing great service. Its not that the CSRs aren't trying to do a good job but of the ones who do a really bad job (like you'd write an article about) they tend to be the real sticklers for company policy (on the *excessive* side) which I don't think any manager would support or frankly, they aren't all that smart. Most of these companies pay out fairly hefty bonuses or commissions so that there's a real incentive to keep customers and provide great service. I was making close to $50k with bonuses in under a year - full time. (Yeah, this might explain the service charges!).
When oil runs out, what is to replace plastic? There are specific applications (perhaps food safety), durability, outdoor exposure, etc where plastics seem to be quite handy. The biodegradable replacements I'm not sure will meet those requirements.
Whale researching is fun. Only one thing explains it: Whale farts..... light them up. I think they could have been mistaken a few times for weapons testing. An army of Whales has considerably more military might than a team of sharks with "lasers" anyday!
Easy solution to this: add black tape to the camera portion of the iPhone. There no company secrets will be stolen via camera.
What kind of IT rule is this? Most phones have a sync cable or bluetooth to hook into a PC, can store data on flash card. A camera would be the LEAST of my worries.
These multi-core CPUs are a great direction for the industry. The real question is, when is the 10 CPU processor coming out?
I think this will be a great option for people who get in early at the office. The original Pentium is able to cook an egg on top of the CPU. With 4 cores comes complete breakfast for one person: 2 eggs and 2 toast. I suppose the real key is a workgroup CPU with 10 cores would be useful each is used to cook in total 4 eggs, 4 toast and 2 cups of coffee (you do have to feed your co-worker... I think).
If this technology is cheaper than a car to buy...then I know what I'm buying next for transport. They only need to give me a free CD player and 0% interest.:)
Future Shop, the Canadian retailer BB just bought has been doing the same thing before BB bought them out.
The other day, I went to FS to buy Satellite radio receiver and a home kit. FS didn't have the cheaper but good SkyFi 2 receiver I wanted. It had it on sale in the flyer but there was probably only one in the store. They say the Skyfi 3 is on sale and much better. They offer to me to use their computer to look up the product. Great! Go on newegg.com... its *blocked*. Ditto Amazon.com. 10 popup windows and a command prompt pop up to execute a script to shut down the competitor's site. Seems like they forgot about Google cache... Oops! Turns out the Skyfi 3 sucked so I didn't but it. The very fact no one could honestly help me and tried to deceive me made me walk out the door and I'll never go back.
I would recount that BB staff spent 35 minutes looking for a radio saying it was in stock, couldn't find it, offered a raincheck and never called me back. But that's another story....
Oh! That base...... Well, I'm not supposed to be posting this, but its where my boss, Red Skull, is hiding so Captain America can't find him..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Skull
Don't you feel smart now. Your conspriacy theory and Hollywood blockbuster story will not work. You'll need to shoot a documentary or a biography episode for A&E.
I don't think this would be the case. Its an expensive game to play to find the source of the leak. I don' think shareholders will appreciate the tactic if true.
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As a long time shopper at HMV (10+ years now), I think this is great news. I think they've not only felt the blow from iTunes but also large on-line retailers like Amazon and Chapters. The Canadian stores regularly have much lower prices. Sometimes out of convenience, or wanting to listen to a CD right away, I'll go to HMV to buy the CD - I never minded. Retail space is the killer to this idea - but I wish they would have more 'sampling' booths for new music.
:) (I'd much rather support HMV than big box stores and Amazon to some extent).
Its also the sign of a struggling retalier for sales when their sales never end. HMV has basically had the same sale on the same CDs and DVDs for the better part of one year. The boxing day sales were only slightly better.
I must say I was disappointed when they discontinued the frequent shopper card (buy 10 CD get one free up to $25) a few years back. This is kind of the equivalent. I'd like to see something similar come back.
Anyhow, I'm going to my local store today.... hope the new prices are in effect!!
That's the easy way out but probably not the best one. Often, is the case in government, the "officials" think they're always right on areas outside their expertise. The admin probably knows what he's doing but is having to convince people who don't know anything about anything to change their policies so that he can make the network work correctly. They don't see anything wrong with the way its setup - it was working well *before* the failure right? So, no need to change!
I think the better idea is to start first by thinking about build quality of houses. My house has had several repairs - things which were minor things to do right the first time end up costing thousands of dollars. The quality could easily extend to Woz's (Woz'z ? ;) ) analogy of the computer.
If the goal of the energy efficient house is to save money on heating and cooling, my thought is we have to look at the expenditure of a house across its lifetime. The materials needed costs something in energy to manufacture, transport, etc - nails, screws, tiles, 2x4, shingles, etc. When these things are thrown away due to shoddy construction* - it leads to more energy demand and wastage to replace it.
*Its usually not the materials that fail except in natural disasters. In disasters. better construction practices, building to code or better codes would help. Again quality the issue.
I agree with parent poster.
I've worked for another company in the same industry and friends have worked for their competitors. We all found the respective telco company bills difficult to read - espcecially in the computer systems we were using. Its not always evident - on complex and long bills to find out what's going on. The comptuer system I used was so bad and difficult to read, I eneded up putting customers on hold sometimes, generating a bill in the computer system and printing it out.
So if ever you do call customer service trying to explain your bill, keep in mind many of the industry players have legacy or poorly made billing systems (usually poorly made) and its quite difficult to read.
I wholeheartedly agree. I am an iMac G5 owner and would love one of the Intel Macs. I sold a practically brand new PC at the time to go with an iMac. I love OS X.
... it is not upgradeable. For nearly $2000, I want more flexibility. I was really hoping Apple would see that some 'non-pro' users would spring $1500 to $1800 for a Core-2 or Quad core tower system. Instead we're stuck with the Xeons. Apple doesn't want to drive away Pro sales or iMac sales. And they're sticking with mobile and Xenon chips to keep development costs lower. There are more than a few 'power users' I've spoken to who are PC users and current Mac users on the web like myself that would love to buy another Mac, but the hardware choices are frustrating.
I begrudge buying the iMac for a few reasons though. What to do if the monitor stops working and its outside Applecare warranty? I hate to think of repair costs. If I change systems I also cannot keep the screen. Upgrade of the video card, CPU or motherboard is impossible (no surprise there). Ditto the sound card. I'd love to hook up a Klipsch 5.1 system but incompatible. But mostly its storage space. I hate having to use an external caddy for the HDD drives. Firewire doesn't work as well as would SATA and I can't really take advantage with an External system of powersaving features whereas it would be on the mobo on new PCs. I also think the "Superdrive" is a piece-o-junk and had to buy an extra caddy for a real DVD-RW.
I really cannot justify buying a Mac Pro for personal use. The iMac though is not in contrast under powered
Sigh. Keeping my iMac (it makes a really nice desktop for surfing web, e-mail and such) but for gaming and SOHO use I think I'm going back to a PC. XP 64 was really nice and fast when I last tried it 2 years ago and no problems with software. Come on Apple!
Bring back the guns, for puke will.....:
1) Ruin tourist attractions. Seeing the content of someone's stomach on the ground will ruin the nice smell and scenery of my vacation! If I see a pool of blood, I know someone is watching out for my security and well being.
2) Make me puke. Seeing someone else puke makes me feel like puking. A pool of blood, doesn't make motivate me to start bleeding.
Makes me wonder if Apple wasn't next in their suit. In any event it seems the name wasn't picked out of inconvenience. Mr. Jobs seems to be well liked in the tech industry/general public for his accomplishments. SCO was having a PR nightmare. There were rumors poster on the blog was Mr. Jobs. What better way to spin positive PR SCO's way by using a character well liked in the industry/public.
Use 5 1/4" floppies. Once the data is written to the disk put some tape over the write tab on the side of the disk. If people claim this is inefficient, double the efficiency buy punching a hole on other side of disk and flip it over.
;)
They want an audit trail, they'll have it. A trail of floppies that no one will ever find the log file for!
This announcement is a fake: a 'Leopard' has more than '7' spots!!
I think this is probably their strategy. MS has said they're not working on SP3 for XP (they might be, but I think the aim at least is to leave the impression). This makes the task of corporate support more difficult.
WIth a lot of businesses using Windows 2000, I suppose if they're not going to upgrade to XP, might as well make 2 sales out of them. Upgrade them to XP while its still being supported and their machines still run it. Then pull XP from the market, with their next upgrade cycle they might have to buy Vista anyways (if nothing else, the support contract for Vista will be up longer).
Since much of the subject here is about importing, is there any luck in using a Japanese-market phone in the US/Canada (I'm in Canada)? I'm up for a contract renewal and a new phone. A friend came back from Japan last year and showed me the phone she used. Its still 2 years ahead on what's in the market here. The battery lasted longer, the camera had awesome res, and LED flashlight and tons of bells.
Someone mentionned GPS/e911 service as one hindrance. Any other pitfalls or reasons I could not use it?
I think its quite true about your point on the 'annoying' co-worker. I think it takes some/most people a while to warm up to and understand others. Those who don't mope and bicker about the annoying person in the office. I think a different attitude and approach (getting to know them) and point out casually the point of annoyance maintains the best and healthiest workplace. I don't think there's one company I'll ever work for where I will like/agree with everyone -and the key here - is at least initially.
Yep. I agree. A reader/writer unit for the minidisc isn't all that expensive to adapt to a PC. The size of the media is perfect to put in a pocket. Its already in protective case. And it seems to last a really long time. The amount of time I've spent playing some of the MDs, my CDs or DVDs would likely have a scratch on by now. I really wish selling MDs instead of CDs had caught on in NA as it has, i hear, in Japan.
Do we really have to take spinning optical discs to new levels? I think industry should concentrate on Flash or getting HDs super reliable so we can just buy a few extra HDs and backup all the information on it with some level of confidence. I hate backing up stuff on shiny, scratchable CDs or DVDs. I find Flash is much more reliable, but the drives/cards are so small they're easy to lose.
Working for a major telephone or cable provider is an experience, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Here, the sheer # of customers means you're going to have a significant amount of problem customers. Generally, companies are most generous about payment and billing (even forgiving about clauses in the contract) just to keep a customer and keep them happy. Here's but one example:
I worked for such a major telco/cable company. Its true, there are often billing problems with the computer system or in processing the payments. Or with how payment policies are laid-out, interpreted and followed up on (mostly, companies are overly generous in this regard). I think 99.9999% of these companies simply ask that customers pay their bills every month. If its a few days or a week late, they generally *never* cut you off, never charge interest, or follow up with sterner notices in the future. Just don't let your account get behind for more than a month (or not paying at all for that month). The problem comes when you have people on limited incomes (and I certainly can appreciate and don't deny the difficulties) who are repeatedly in arrears by several months. Or they just don't give a shit and never try to never pay for anything. They often order the latest and greatest of everything and then complain and threaten to cancel a service when you suggest their account will be cut-off. Even though they often admit they can't afford it or lie about being able to and refuse to cut back on services.
I felt sorry for some of them. But when the problem is *theirs* and not the company's, from a business perspective it only makes sense to get rid of these customers. Their are many business costs associated with this problem. And as I worked in commissioned sales, dealing with these people (whom I often spent longer on the phone with) instead of doing sales, affected my income.
Let your competitor handle them and bear the cost.
I've only seen a few customers 'fired' while I worked in Customer service for 5 years while a student. Worst was one customer whom I will only say needed the company's legal team to get invovled. Said customer probably wasted thousands of dollars of company money per month in billing/support calls - probably 99% of which had no relation to the service which was being paid, no billing or technical issues.
I'm not surprised. Not saying this because I anticipated a lot of problems, just that with any product there will always be problems be it software, hardware or that the widget just doesn't work.
As a student, I've worked in Customer Service before for a big carrier/media company (not AT&T) and know others who have worked similar roles for other companies (again not AT&T). With the companies that my friends and I are familiar with, the general emphasis has always been on providing great service. Its not that the CSRs aren't trying to do a good job but of the ones who do a really bad job (like you'd write an article about) they tend to be the real sticklers for company policy (on the *excessive* side) which I don't think any manager would support or frankly, they aren't all that smart. Most of these companies pay out fairly hefty bonuses or commissions so that there's a real incentive to keep customers and provide great service. I was making close to $50k with bonuses in under a year - full time. (Yeah, this might explain the service charges!).
When oil runs out, what is to replace plastic? There are specific applications (perhaps food safety), durability, outdoor exposure, etc where plastics seem to be quite handy. The biodegradable replacements I'm not sure will meet those requirements.
Whale researching is fun. Only one thing explains it: Whale farts ..... light them up. I think they could have been mistaken a few times for weapons testing. An army of Whales has considerably more military might than a team of sharks with "lasers" anyday!
Easy solution to this: add black tape to the camera portion of the iPhone. There no company secrets will be stolen via camera.
What kind of IT rule is this? Most phones have a sync cable or bluetooth to hook into a PC, can store data on flash card. A camera would be the LEAST of my worries.
These multi-core CPUs are a great direction for the industry. The real question is, when is the 10 CPU processor coming out?
... I think).
I think this will be a great option for people who get in early at the office. The original Pentium is able to cook an egg on top of the CPU. With 4 cores comes complete breakfast for one person: 2 eggs and 2 toast. I suppose the real key is a workgroup CPU with 10 cores would be useful each is used to cook in total 4 eggs, 4 toast and 2 cups of coffee (you do have to feed your co-worker
If this technology is cheaper than a car to buy...then I know what I'm buying next for transport. They only need to give me a free CD player and 0% interest. :)
That one is easy .... You're always out!
Future Shop, the Canadian retailer BB just bought has been doing the same thing before BB bought them out.
... its *blocked*. Ditto Amazon.com. 10 popup windows and a command prompt pop up to execute a script to shut down the competitor's site. Seems like they forgot about Google cache... Oops! Turns out the Skyfi 3 sucked so I didn't but it. The very fact no one could honestly help me and tried to deceive me made me walk out the door and I'll never go back.
The other day, I went to FS to buy Satellite radio receiver and a home kit. FS didn't have the cheaper but good SkyFi 2 receiver I wanted. It had it on sale in the flyer but there was probably only one in the store. They say the Skyfi 3 is on sale and much better. They offer to me to use their computer to look up the product. Great! Go on newegg.com
I would recount that BB staff spent 35 minutes looking for a radio saying it was in stock, couldn't find it, offered a raincheck and never called me back. But that's another story....
Oh! That base...... Well, I'm not supposed to be posting this, but its where my boss, Red Skull, is hiding so Captain America can't find him ..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Skull
Don't you feel smart now. Your conspriacy theory and Hollywood blockbuster story will not work. You'll need to shoot a documentary or a biography episode for A&E.
Yeah but where do I buy one ..... and Where are do i find ye pirate treasure hidden 'yonder? There must be some maps ..... ;)
I don't think this would be the case. Its an expensive game to play to find the source of the leak. I don' think shareholders will appreciate the tactic if true.