Most of the problems with phone portability (and cell phone customer service in general) can probably be traced back to under-trained and over-worked staff trying to use slow and buggy software to process orders and set up accounts.
I did a brief stint at one cell phone company as a temp and noted that the sales people used a slow, buggy, web-based interface to process new accounts, change features, phone numbers etc. This interface would slow to a halt several times a day and there was no real way to know if your work actually went through until the customer reported problems with his service.
Everything else (billing adjustments, credit checks, etc) were performed using an AS/400 interface that could charitably be described as "confusing" and "cryptic" at first glance and even the more experienced people that I worked with made mistakes when trying to enter information.
I was always pleasantly shocked when something would work out right...
There are fees that are built into the base price of the books that aren't apparent on the surface. Used booksellers (and I've known many of them) usually won't bother putting books online that would sell for less than $10 in their store... and they typically add $5 - $15 to cover the "work" of typing up a description and cataloging the book... or just trying to be competitive with other sellers that have the book listed as well. If ten people are listing BOOK X for $50 and you sell it for $10, people will be suspicious of your book or another seller will buy it and up the price on their own listing.
I can't argue with you about books bought from overseas! A shipping fee is much cheaper than a plane ticket.
It's been my experience that used booksellers typically buy a book for $1 - $2 dollars and sell it for $10 to $20 + $5 to $10 in additional fees or adjustments. There are some sellers who are cheaper and others who are more expensive, but the work that goes into wrapping and shipping something out pushes the price of books up... and that artificially inflates the resale "value" of a book.
Some USED online bookselling group sites like ABEBooks and Alibris, also add their own fees or charge the bookseller for listing the books. Or at least they did the last time I looked into it.
Libraries might as well sell them online, as that's where most of the better books are destined to go anyway.
I'm a book collector (and reader) and on the MANY occasions that I went to library sales, there would always be a small cadre of used booksellers grabbing up everything potentially interesting and adding it to their stock, both online and off. Unless you were aggressive and quick, the chances of being able to find something interesting was minimal and I eventually stopped bothering. It's the same reason I stopped borrowing books from libraries. The most interesting ones get stolen or are marked "reference" and are not loaned out.
I even knew of one unscrupulous bookseller who would volunteer to help sort the books the night before so his partner could swoop in and grab anything of value ahead of the pack.
Some libraries charged $3 - $5 dollars per book on the first day to give people who actually wanted to purchase books TO READ (remember reading books?) a chance. That would scare off some of the more virulent booksellers, or at least make them more picky. I found some amazingly rare things at those sales.
Mod me +1 Nostalgic if you like, but I can't stand buying books online. You pay a hefty handling and shipping markup... and you lose out on the experience of being surrounded by old books that you can actually touch.
I did not have a previous version of Windows Media Player installed on my Mac so I did not experience any of the upgrade annoyances that seem to be plaguing some of the posters. The reason for this is because the previous version's installer kept crashing and I never managed to get it to work. The current installer seems to actually install. Microsoft has already exceeded my expectations, which were not very high to begin with.
The Good: So far, it's played every single.wmp file that I've thrown at it without any problem whatsoever, and I can finally listen to the archived radio shows on my favorite radio station KEXP.ORG. Since I pretty much only use Safari now, the lack of support for Camino is not as irksome to me as it might be to others.
The Bad: It changes the file association for the files that it plays from the default (VLC on my Mac) to Media Player without asking. It also quits the application when you close the window that you're playing... rather than just closing the window and leaving the app open. Not very Mac-like behavior...
The Ugly: It's kind of ugly looking. I can hope that someone will come up with a skin that better approximates that OS X look pretty soon.
$19.95 a year for 50 megs of indefinite mail storage, 10 megs of file storage, and 5 "aliases" so you don't have to give out your real mail address and get unwanted spam.
No adverts, no spam after four months, and SSL/POP3/IMAP/WAP access.
There's also a $14 per year option with a few less features, but all of the above are standard.
In college, I took a course on the plays of Shakespeare and the text that we ABSOLUTELY HAD TO USE weighed in at about 10 lbs and took up quite a great deal of room.
Solution? I would photocopy the play that we working on that day/week and leave the text at home. I could write notes all over the photocopy, underline to my hearts content and I had a nearly flawless book to sell back at the end of the semester.
There were no PDFs back then and OCR software was still primitive and nearly unusable. Photocopies cause less back pain and cost only a dollar or two a week.
There's an administrative fee to cover costs of maintaining the transfered phone number.... but will my cell phone company charge me an extra fee to take my number with me when I leave it after November?
One morning, while attempting to unplug my TiBook's power adaptor, I noticed that it was incredibly hot... far more so than usual. I unplugged it, let it sit on the corner to cool down, and noticed that the cord had actually melted near the base of the adaptor!
After it cooled down, it refused to function so having a few months left on my 1 year Apple Care, I took it into one of the retail stores for replacement. They were very nice about it and didn't give me any guff about it, but the warranty replacement took about a week and a half to arrive.
I've seen lots of complaints about power adaptor failures so I would totally recommend picking up an extra adaptor just in case.
I think the meltdown was caused by my accidentally plugging the adaptor in upside down on a powerstrip... very easy to do as it doesn't have a protective guard like 99% of plugs out there.
Even if your plug doesn't die on you, it's very handy to keep an extra one in your laptop case in case you find yourself in a coffeehouse with free WiFi and plugs near each table (ah... Seattle...)
Looking at the specs makes me wince a little. We Mac folk will probably have to buy a G5 to play this baby... when (if) it's ported over.
Seriously... while some people will gladly upgrade to be able to play, I wonder if this is the sort of thing that drives people to console systems. At least I know that when I buy a Playstation 2 game, it won't have to replace a section of it to be able to use it to its full potential.
This could become a big problem as Apple applications become more and more power-hungry. If G5s run hotter than G4s, it's going to make the thin streamlined metal cases highly impractical. I can already almost cook breakfast on my G4 TiBook now! I don't want to have to wear gloves to use a G5!
Furthermore, if we have a situations where the most useful software runs better only on desktops, it's going to irritate the many Mac users who find desktops impractical. For example, electronic musicians are unlikely to lug around a large G5 from gig to gig. It's been noted that Apple's new musical offering, Soundtrack, will only work on G4s. What happens when Soundtrack 2 or 3 comes out?
This explains the occasional feelings of nostalgia that I get for life before everyone was always on. I used to read more books and paint... and now there's always an email to respond to, or another web site to check out... or some new game to play.
I loved to buy a few magazines and sit in a cafe and read them and write in my journal or sketch someone. People talked to people that they didn't know in public places. Now I choose my cafes according to the speed and expense of their WiFi connections and the top floor of my favorite cafe in Seattle resembles a computer lab. I don't often buy magazines as I usually already read the content online.
The last time I tried to spend an afternoon in a cafe without my laptop and a good book by an author I enjoyed, I found myself quickly getting very bored and cut the afternoon short. You can't go back I guess.
Slashdot itself is a perfect example of pseudo-attention deficit disorder. As I often post comments to stories late in the life of the story, I rarely think that many people read what I have to write as their focus has already passed on to the newer story. You can see it in how quickly people scramble to post their half-formed thoughts... which often get modded up higher than they deserve by virtue of being there first.
I'm very amused by how a file system that's a colaboration of the US Government, Microsoft, and American corporations could possibly be considered a beneficial thing.
This will only increase the speed at which foreign governments adopt open source software and (eventually) hardware.
I'm SO GLAD I own a Mac.
The cell phone connection
on
Pac-Man Reloaded
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder how much of this is due to the reappearance of old classic arcade games on cell phones? The games that I download on my sprint phone wouldn't have been out of place in an arcade in the 80's.
Studios love a film like the Matrix Reloaded because it makes them far more money than something that takes time to build up an audience. Why? It's really simple.
They get 75 - 90% of the theater take during the opening weekend.
This figure drops down to 50% the next weekend and keeps going down week after week... IF the film lasts that long.
They are desperate for you to go see a film immediately so they can get the largest possible cut of your $10, get you out the door and get that new "blockbuster" in the theater two weeks later.
Think about it! Not only do they get less and less the longer a film is in the theaters... but something that builds slowly and sticks around for a long time keeps NEW product from coming out in as many locations.
As a result, quality, complexity, and artistry suffers... and the marketing of the film becomes the most important part of the process. A film has to be flashy enough to get them in but not good enough to make them stick around.
Why do YOU think theater chains are going broke even though they charge $5 for a small soda that contains 10 cents worth of product?
Not to advocate DVD duplication or anything but... has anyone else noticed the tendency to pad out mediocre film releases on DVD with extras in order to make it impossible to fit a copy into a standard DVD-R?
But most serious or alternative work that I've come across concentrates on the film and not the fluff and fits just fine
I'm there with you. I'm selling my TV next time I change apartments. Intelligent shows have a short life span now... imagine TV in eight years... it will be wall to wall "Reality TV" and demographically perfect family sitcoms with fart jokes.
Funny how it all works out... radio deregulation led to bland, safe radio, which forced many people to find alternatives. Some of us were lucky enough to have indie radio stations in our cities (KFAI in Seattle in my case)... most others discover new music through downloading.
I imagine that the latest round of "relaxation" will have the same effect on many people's TV watching. With less people to compete against, TV will become safer and more predictable... and people will swap their old favorite shows, ripped from the DVD releases, over some yet to be developed P2P network. It's inevitable... if you take away a person's choice, they will come up with alternatives that you won't like.
Always choose the penny phone
on
Nokia 5100 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When you start a cell phone plan, just pick the cheapest phone that they offer. Often it's free. It has the fewest features but as a result, it tends to have a longer battery life, the sound quality is usually indistinguishable from the more expensive phones and if it breaks, the company won't mind giving you a free replacement, since it's only the "penny phone". Heck, most of the time they'll swap it out for you on the spot if you're polite to the sale assistant.
I used to work for a cell phone company and the we had far more defective returns on higher end phones than anything else... and it's much harder to explain to your manager why you swapped out a $400 phone than a $20 phone.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a brief stint at one cell phone company as a temp and noted that the sales people used a slow, buggy, web-based interface to process new accounts, change features, phone numbers etc. This interface would slow to a halt several times a day and there was no real way to know if your work actually went through until the customer reported problems with his service.
Everything else (billing adjustments, credit checks, etc) were performed using an AS/400 interface that could charitably be described as "confusing" and "cryptic" at first glance and even the more experienced people that I worked with made mistakes when trying to enter information.
I was always pleasantly shocked when something would work out right...
There are fees that are built into the base price of the books that aren't apparent on the surface. Used booksellers (and I've known many of them) usually won't bother putting books online that would sell for less than $10 in their store... and they typically add $5 - $15 to cover the "work" of typing up a description and cataloging the book... or just trying to be competitive with other sellers that have the book listed as well. If ten people are listing BOOK X for $50 and you sell it for $10, people will be suspicious of your book or another seller will buy it and up the price on their own listing.
I can't argue with you about books bought from overseas! A shipping fee is much cheaper than a plane ticket.
It's been my experience that used booksellers typically buy a book for $1 - $2 dollars and sell it for $10 to $20 + $5 to $10 in additional fees or adjustments. There are some sellers who are cheaper and others who are more expensive, but the work that goes into wrapping and shipping something out pushes the price of books up... and that artificially inflates the resale "value" of a book.
Some USED online bookselling group sites like ABEBooks and Alibris, also add their own fees or charge the bookseller for listing the books. Or at least they did the last time I looked into it.
I'm a book collector (and reader) and on the MANY occasions that I went to library sales, there would always be a small cadre of used booksellers grabbing up everything potentially interesting and adding it to their stock, both online and off. Unless you were aggressive and quick, the chances of being able to find something interesting was minimal and I eventually stopped bothering. It's the same reason I stopped borrowing books from libraries. The most interesting ones get stolen or are marked "reference" and are not loaned out.
I even knew of one unscrupulous bookseller who would volunteer to help sort the books the night before so his partner could swoop in and grab anything of value ahead of the pack.
Some libraries charged $3 - $5 dollars per book on the first day to give people who actually wanted to purchase books TO READ (remember reading books?) a chance. That would scare off some of the more virulent booksellers, or at least make them more picky. I found some amazingly rare things at those sales.
Mod me +1 Nostalgic if you like, but I can't stand buying books online. You pay a hefty handling and shipping markup... and you lose out on the experience of being surrounded by old books that you can actually touch.
I did not have a previous version of Windows Media Player installed on my Mac so I did not experience any of the upgrade annoyances that seem to be plaguing some of the posters. The reason for this is because the previous version's installer kept crashing and I never managed to get it to work. The current installer seems to actually install. Microsoft has already exceeded my expectations, which were not very high to begin with.
The Good: So far, it's played every single .wmp file that I've thrown at it without any problem whatsoever, and I can finally listen to the archived radio shows on my favorite radio station KEXP.ORG. Since I pretty much only use Safari now, the lack of support for Camino is not as irksome to me as it might be to others.
The Bad: It changes the file association for the files that it plays from the default (VLC on my Mac) to Media Player without asking. It also quits the application when you close the window that you're playing... rather than just closing the window and leaving the app open. Not very Mac-like behavior...
The Ugly: It's kind of ugly looking. I can hope that someone will come up with a skin that better approximates that OS X look pretty soon.
2. Vampire Pixie-Stix
3. Profit!
These commercials are creepy and repulsive. I thought I was watching a commercial for rape awareness.
$19.95 a year for 50 megs of indefinite mail storage, 10 megs of file storage, and 5 "aliases" so you don't have to give out your real mail address and get unwanted spam.
No adverts, no spam after four months, and SSL/POP3/IMAP/WAP access.
There's also a $14 per year option with a few less features, but all of the above are standard.
Solution? I would photocopy the play that we working on that day/week and leave the text at home. I could write notes all over the photocopy, underline to my hearts content and I had a nearly flawless book to sell back at the end of the semester.
There were no PDFs back then and OCR software was still primitive and nearly unusable. Photocopies cause less back pain and cost only a dollar or two a week.
Great resolution, very portable, very cheap.
Problem solved!
They want to "discover" who uses newsgroups and how often they come back. Hmm...
One morning, while attempting to unplug my TiBook's power adaptor, I noticed that it was incredibly hot... far more so than usual. I unplugged it, let it sit on the corner to cool down, and noticed that the cord had actually melted near the base of the adaptor!
After it cooled down, it refused to function so having a few months left on my 1 year Apple Care, I took it into one of the retail stores for replacement. They were very nice about it and didn't give me any guff about it, but the warranty replacement took about a week and a half to arrive.
I've seen lots of complaints about power adaptor failures so I would totally recommend picking up an extra adaptor just in case.
I think the meltdown was caused by my accidentally plugging the adaptor in upside down on a powerstrip... very easy to do as it doesn't have a protective guard like 99% of plugs out there.
Even if your plug doesn't die on you, it's very handy to keep an extra one in your laptop case in case you find yourself in a coffeehouse with free WiFi and plugs near each table (ah... Seattle...)
Seriously... while some people will gladly upgrade to be able to play, I wonder if this is the sort of thing that drives people to console systems. At least I know that when I buy a Playstation 2 game, it won't have to replace a section of it to be able to use it to its full potential.
Furthermore, if we have a situations where the most useful software runs better only on desktops, it's going to irritate the many Mac users who find desktops impractical. For example, electronic musicians are unlikely to lug around a large G5 from gig to gig. It's been noted that Apple's new musical offering, Soundtrack, will only work on G4s. What happens when Soundtrack 2 or 3 comes out?
If clicking on a link to an advert added another 10 minutes of talk time to my phone, it might be worth it.
Not exactly the most exciting release, but I suppose you have to start somewhere...
I loved to buy a few magazines and sit in a cafe and read them and write in my journal or sketch someone. People talked to people that they didn't know in public places. Now I choose my cafes according to the speed and expense of their WiFi connections and the top floor of my favorite cafe in Seattle resembles a computer lab. I don't often buy magazines as I usually already read the content online.
The last time I tried to spend an afternoon in a cafe without my laptop and a good book by an author I enjoyed, I found myself quickly getting very bored and cut the afternoon short. You can't go back I guess.
Slashdot itself is a perfect example of pseudo-attention deficit disorder. As I often post comments to stories late in the life of the story, I rarely think that many people read what I have to write as their focus has already passed on to the newer story. You can see it in how quickly people scramble to post their half-formed thoughts... which often get modded up higher than they deserve by virtue of being there first.
That's not a dig... just an observation.
This will only increase the speed at which foreign governments adopt open source software and (eventually) hardware.
I'm SO GLAD I own a Mac.
They get 75 - 90% of the theater take during the opening weekend.
This figure drops down to 50% the next weekend and keeps going down week after week... IF the film lasts that long.
They are desperate for you to go see a film immediately so they can get the largest possible cut of your $10, get you out the door and get that new "blockbuster" in the theater two weeks later.
Think about it! Not only do they get less and less the longer a film is in the theaters... but something that builds slowly and sticks around for a long time keeps NEW product from coming out in as many locations.
As a result, quality, complexity, and artistry suffers... and the marketing of the film becomes the most important part of the process. A film has to be flashy enough to get them in but not good enough to make them stick around.
Why do YOU think theater chains are going broke even though they charge $5 for a small soda that contains 10 cents worth of product?
But most serious or alternative work that I've come across concentrates on the film and not the fluff and fits just fine
Funny how it all works out... radio deregulation led to bland, safe radio, which forced many people to find alternatives. Some of us were lucky enough to have indie radio stations in our cities (KFAI in Seattle in my case)... most others discover new music through downloading.
I imagine that the latest round of "relaxation" will have the same effect on many people's TV watching. With less people to compete against, TV will become safer and more predictable... and people will swap their old favorite shows, ripped from the DVD releases, over some yet to be developed P2P network. It's inevitable... if you take away a person's choice, they will come up with alternatives that you won't like.
I used to work for a cell phone company and the we had far more defective returns on higher end phones than anything else... and it's much harder to explain to your manager why you swapped out a $400 phone than a $20 phone.
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