"they're *his* people, they will live as well or as poorly as he allows him to."
There's the rub... the masses are a helluva lot easier to "control" if they are so dirt-poor they can't even afford a pot to piss in, much less the resources to organize themselves against an oppressive government.
In that sorry predicament, one just has to take what they can get.
Personally, I long for the day when everyone has access to the ballot-box and is *uses* it!
Way, way, way too many of us US citizens have access to the box... and don't USE it!!!!
I reported here on Slashdot what I had observed personally when I went through this situation working at a former military contractor.
The really good guys we had with us were well known in the industry.
All it took for them to switch employers was a phone call to their future employer of choice.
They were working with us mostly out of loyalty and friendship, yet they have financial committments too, and they knew that often entire divisions get nixed and the people who know them often cannot do a damn thing about it.
We lost our top talent fast - like rats fleeing a burning building.
I was one of the laggards. I didn't know anybody outside of the company, and felt a little better that other people had already left, hoping that would ease the pressure for layoffs... despite the fact that those people did a lot of stuff I had no idea how to do. Viterbi encoder/decoders. Really sophisticated DSP, extremely low power yet robust spread-spectrum RF stuff. I mostly did power supplies and analog phaselock loops... nothing near as tricky as those guys did.
I soon got delegated work over my head, and failed miserably.
I had learned a lot of stuff from those old guys, and I could actually implement a lot of their ideas with their guidance, but I was too "wet behind the ears" to do what they could do.
I have not worked for a Military contractor since... nor do I even apply.
An employees "usefulness" ranges from damn near useless to damn near indispensable.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
In my case, I flat do not need a machine that just runs the OS. An analogy is being able to reboot your mind, and be reinitialized with your basic High-School education.
My machine and me go back close to twenty years, as I have taught it thing after thing after thing, and today its a very valuable assistant to me. ( I use "my machine" in the singular, but in practice it currently consists of five physical entities ).
Although I freely exchange data back and forth between these machines, and sometimes replace older hardware, their core essences remain damn near identical to what I trained them to be. I have Pentiums running DOS.
The machine itself is of minor concern to me, as I could lose any four of the five physical machines, and still be able to rebuild myself completely given access to nearly any computer dump for a few hours. But if I lose that training I have put into these machines, I have lost everything.
I don't want a new computer. I want the only ones that do what I need them to do... the ones I have spent years of my life programming them to do very special things for me.
For me, simply throwing the machine away is NOT an option.
For this reason, I have resisted the urge to go onto to more-and-more DRM-laden technologies and stayed with DOS and WIN95. Go ahead and laugh.. but my debuggers still work, I can fix any "rough edges" that show up in any of my software ( I do not need source code, as I work at the machine code level with SoftIce ), I can still reload my OS and all programs/data if things get too out of hand, and I am not constantly hounded by my system taking it on itself to act as a copyright enforcement agency as I move the programs I paid for amongst my family of machines during hardware changeouts or to insure I don't lose everything in the event of a crash.
Even then, its easy to detect any tampering of the core executables of my old WIN95 using "tripwire" integrity checking technologies.
I am currently in the midst of a discussion with the people who manufacture my printed circuit boards.
I email my whining to them, I haven't heard back.
They have installed stuff on their site which requires latest versions of IE or Netscape, with Java ON and Flash.
Geez, I just wanted to submit Gerber files and have them fabricate a PCB from those files.
As an old HTML, Perl, CGI programmer too, I know this is trivial... so why do commercial sites make such a big deal over requiring us, which often still use older machines, as well as nonmainstream machines, as we have lots of legacy designs to support, to run the latest proprietary whiz-bang software - often requiring known viral pathways to be open?
I find dealing with people who have had Business education very perplexing... if I want a job and I have to give them a resume, they will be extremely picky, and if I mention I REQUIRE anything, they are apt to ditch my resume upon seeing that word - they see me immediately as being "inflexible"... yet they seem to throw that word "required" around with reckless abandon if they are the ones marketing the service.
I have had viral attacks, and I see them all the time... even as I write this, my ports 1026 and 1027, along with numerous other ports - are being relentlessly pounded with God Knows What - from seemingly Everywhere! Thanks to some good firewall and proxy software, I have so far succeeded in stealthing myself so no-onw except the ones I am currently "doing business with" is aware of my existence on the web, verified with sniffer.
Problem is, everytime I get on the web - even on a dialup - with lightning speed people share my IP with "marketing partners", and within seconds of visiting certain sites ( unfortunately Slashdot is one of them too ), I will notice a marked increase of other systems trying to contact me, trying all sorts of various ports to see if their applet is in my machine and will respond to it.
Yes, I am aware of this hanky-panky, but how do I tell Business that Requiring me to use insecure technologies or disabling my firewalls is unacceptable to me? They only appear to see me as a whiner.
The Corporate Executive and his Webmaster appear to sit in plush environs totally insulated from the problems we techie guys have when we have viral intrusions, or have to use legacy stuff on new machines, just for the sake of communications protocols.
They tell me I can trust the later software. Sure... we both have completely different opinions of what does "trust" mean? To me, it means that the TRUSTED is ACCOUNTABLE for its behaviour... if you have clauses in the EULA that deny responsibility for its actions, you expect me to TRUST it? Geez!!!
It makes me wonder if the printed circuit board vendor even remembers what his business exists for... is it to receive Gerber files from the customer and deliver printed circuit boards made from them, or are they "team partners" with some huge software firm intent on forcing everyone to upgrade their machines to communicate with the latest proprietary protocols?
What business schools teach these executives to invest millions of dollars in PCB fab technology, then bar the customers from their business by requiring them to jump through hoops?
This seems to me to be just as asinine as some shopping mall requiring people coming into their parking lot to arrive in a Lexus.
I find it amazing a lot of companies survive if they don't seem to know what they do....
Or possibly its that I *thought* the company existed to make PCB's, but the true reason for their existence is to transfer investor money to the executive pocket, with the whole PCB fab thingie being just a front.
I am pretty bitter over it... so I am loathe to name the company in thie post. But if you have had to deal with viruses on your own, and have these people in a "position of power" ramming you into what you felt was unsafe practices, completely
I take it then that all HD monitors *will* be all digital... i.e LCD or DLP.
Otherwise, we get beautiful RGB at the CRT Cathodes, and damn near any SMPS current transformer will easily pick a sample of the deflection coil current.
Yes, it will have to be redigitized, but for my purposes, the resolution will still be far more than good enough.
One end of this area depicts a terribly unrobust design that should never have existed in the first place gone astray over a child's prank... like a child experimenting with fire and sets the neighborhood on fire. ( yeh, stuff like that is why we build houses out of stucco and have tile/metal roofs in our area ). We have seen this fire thing happen elsewhere, then we changed our designs so it doesn't happen here. No, no one castrated the kid - it was just something that got out of hand and previous bad design allowed the worst to happen.
The other end of the area depicts a kid doing something malicious, like going around loosening the lug nuts on other people's cars, with the kid knowing full good and well what the results would be when the car got up to freeway speeds and the tire rolls off.
No one has shown me yet the kids had no idea of how many problems their little prank would cause... and I am even of the opinion the people who design such unrobust systems, hiding behind the "hold harmless" clauses of EULA's, are more to blame than the kids are. We would think banks who keep my money in oaken safes in wooden shacks would be viewed with contempt when its well known that wood will easily succumb to fire. I don't care how much the banker hides behind clauses in his EULA that hold him harmless from loss by fire, I still question his intelligence by his choices of construction.
Personally, I think the kids did us a big favor by giving us a "head's up" on our poor design, before we got involved in some nasty intercontinental war and the enemy, knowing our vulnerability all along, releases this on us, paralyzing our computational infrastructure during the time we need it most.
Read some of Alexander the Great's techniques for bringing huge opponents to their knees... he would use tricks like poisoning the water supplies of huge armies by throwing dead livestock in the wells. Hell, we did the same thing against the Native American Indian in order to forcibly take ( err, eminent domain ) their land, using diseases we were immune to to make sure their warriors were "on the toilet" not in the battle.
Maybe you know the exact legal ins and outs of what people can and can not do, much as I know the ins and outs of electronic equipment.
I hold it just as serious for someone mimicking legal action against me as I would expect them to hold it against me if I wired up some pipe and batteries and timer, and used it to scare the bejeebies out of someone.
I might consider it "overreacting" if I handed the obviously ( to an electical engineer ) nonfunctional assembly to someone fluent in circuit design. But if I were to use that thing to extort payments from the general public? I would expect to be led away in cuffs and know I had one helluva lot of explaining to do. And I would consider anything they wanted to throw at me probably justified.
I consider anyone messing around with legal documents to be just as liable as I would be for messing around with other things that can hurt people- and threatening them with it - irregardless of how harmless it really is. Its what it appears to be that I feel I would be held accountable for it being.
Yes, I feel you should be just as accountable for holding up a liquor store with a fake gun as a real one.
The discussions in this topic have very much reinforced my discomfort with my personal information going into corporate databases, shared with others I have no business with - as its just too easy for them to decide on their own that I am doing business with them and send me bills and notices, knowing how much time I am going to have to spend to prove otherwise and hoping I will just pay the invoice to get them to go away.
These databases scare me, because once I am fingered, they will cross-reference me and all the data - which I did NOT give them - will match up.
I once even had a business threaten to sell my car at an auction sale for repair and storage charges not paid. I have never been in that city. My car was right outside my house. But according to the DMV letter, all the info in it was correct. Type of car, color, VIN code, tag... everything! If someone had have "bought" my car at that friggen auction, would he have actually came to my house to retrieve it? If he did, could I then hold a real-estate auction to sell the car dealership to recover my costs in recovering my car? A lot of lawyers could get rich pretty quick during the aftermath of all the confusion. Personally, I feel that the car dealership admitting they had made a mistake after I made my case to DMV was insufficient. They had rattled my cage with legal threats, which required my attention. I feel I should be paid at least $100/hour ( going rate for consultants ) for my time defending myself.
If there were a precedent for sending people groundless legal threats, just as there probably is a precendent for coercing people with perceived physical threats, people would think twice before sending legalese looking letters of this type.
I am pondering homeowner's insurance. It seems every time I have ever known anyone to make a claim, they weren't covered! The latest example being those Laguna Landslides.
I have no idea what calamity may befall me, and I buy insurance to help should the unlikely event occur. Like you say, I have no idea if the insurance is even useful until I need it. Statistically, I won't.
To find I have been paying on the order of $1,000 a year just for the "peace of mind" of having insurance, to discover its useless when I need it, geez, over the 20 years I've had insurance, it would have grown to well over $25,000 had I invested it in lieu of premium payments. Somehow I consider it highly unlikely the house burns to the ground. And it looks like other ways I will lose the place, via Earthquake, riot, flood, landslide, whatever, not covered anyway!
I feel so stupid paying so much for "peace of mind"... its hard to have peace of mind when I am suspicious the company is only there to accept my premium, and will likely give me the "We're sorry business-face" when I need them. Those super thick policies full of exceptions foster that distrust.
Having the insurance company constantly revising the policy does not help my confidence one iota either. I dropped State Farm for doing just that... it didn't seem a month went by without my getting some letter from them revising my policy - and I just don't have time to keep up with their printing press. I felt all I was doing with my policy dollar is financing all those office buildings I see with their company name on them... all filled with office workers scuttling about filling out papers and dreaming up yet more ways of modifying my policy and spin doctoring it so it sounds passable.
Yup... a marketing phrase.. they are selling "peace of mind".
I can't help but think of all those Laguna homeowners who had purchased "homeowner's insurance" for peace of mind knowing they were covered if something awful and completely out of their control happened to them... and it did... the Laguna Landslide ( Southern California ). News traveled fast that the homeowner policies did not include landslides.
I wonder more and more what the logic is in having insurance? That is perfectly good money I am paying in, and what I see is lots of buildings staffed full of office hens flitting to and fro charging their time against my policy. I wonder, statistically, would it be better to just drop insurance and simply invest those premiums elsewhere... with premiums at nearly $1000/year, and every year I get yet more modifications the Insurance company sends me clarifying under which circumstances I am covered - and it all seems so nebulous to me whether or not I would be covered for anything. I really ponder the economics of insurance. I see others sleeping soundly at night, *thinking* they are covered, but then when disaster strikes, the insurance companies hide behind the little clause they stuck in that exempts them from their side of the deal.
It just seems like I am getting the shaft when it comes to insurance. Anyone else have any insights?
Your observation that my ears and system aren't good enough is also true.
And I think it was my parent's parent who made the claim that it's "recorded in the exact quality as you hear it", not me. ( With me, very few things are exact. )
My less-than-perfect fascimile is good enough for me. And I don't feel too bad because as I noted, even the big guys do it, and their own Lawyers and the Courts said it was OK.
Hell, I'm gonna convert it to the MP3 format anyway.
Its gonna go in any of the little MP3 players I have laying all over the place, and most likely be listened to on commodity headsets...
For this, resampled is fine by me.
As far as I am concerned, I have no problem honoring the exact bit patterns the Music Industry has Copyrighted. I won't use those bits... I will use other bits which do almost the same thing.
Same with the Video. Yes, the purchased disk has pure pristine factory perfect bits - and if thats what you want, please honor their copyright and buy their disk.
I don't really need all that resolution to watch on my (much) less than perfect system... a resampled XviD fascimile is fine by me, as it requires much less storage space.
If you read into this that I am justifying theft of content by creating derivatives of other's work, its nothing the entertainment industry hasn't already done anyhow. The latest glaring example in my mind was the story of Kimba, which became Simba in the Lion King.
Lawyers for the Industry have already looked into this, and decided it was OK, because it was not an EXACT copy. They did change the K to an S, and the color of the lion, so its NOT the same lion. I'll do better than that. I seriously doubt the file I make has *any* numerical correlation to the source file.
At $800 or so, I kinda expect a monster hard drive, built-in video recording capability, DVD read/write, surround sound, the works.
Basically a "Star Trek Tricorder" with a decent sized screen.
And, of course, using documented interfaces so it can be customized to whatever we want it to do.
Buying these precanned systems is often just about as useful as buying cured concrete - its already set in the way someone else molded it... not what I wanted it to be.
"Think about why technology spurred over the past few hundred years. It was all necessity. What's necessary now...? "
Ummm...A good mature public OS based on public standards that enables people to easily communicate with machines similar to the way we communicate amongst each other. This language should communicate with us in the vernacular of the region and of the day, and we would simply consider the ability to "speak" the language nothing more than part of the basic education all computers receive.
Such a system would have to be very tolerant of error, have basic intelligence and "ethics", as well as having basic structures known to all and taught in schools right along with languages such as English. No Cryptic System Calls, Please!
Another thing we need is more "secure" P2P methods, uncensorable by design, just as we are developing containers uncrackable by design to hold "secure" data. I note a big requirement for guaranteeing the preservation of Liberty is that the populace can not be allowed to fall under the tyranny of censorship ( aka "freedom of the press" ).
And we are just cracking open the Miracle of DNA! I see the world of Biology today much like I saw the world of computing in the 1970's... we were just getting the hang of having an operational CPU and what to do with it. There is so much we can do with DNA - I am quite confident we have barely cracked the door on what we can do once we know more how to program this thing!
To me, what NASA is doing appears to me to be damn near impossible, but they will probably do it.
Trying to ram a space probe into a comet at 23KMPH.. looks roughly as tricky as firing two rifles and so as to hit the bullets mid-flight several miles away.
I believe you could approximate the distortion curves of a tube using some really fancy analog techniques or DSP, but its not gonna be all that simple.
The problem is not in the "linear" areas, but as tubes approach cutoff and saturation, nonlinear attributes come into play.
There is a lot of quite difficult-to-replicate phenomena which occurs in the beam power tubes ( aka 6L6 and related ) that occurs as the plate voltages ( hence attractance to the electron stream ) drops as the tube approaches saturation. Interesting diversions of the electron flow occur as the stream from the cathode becomes more and more attracted to the beam forming plates ( known by some as the screen grid ) as the plate voltages plummet.
All my "test instrumentation", usually testing in the linear region, tell me both the solid state amp and vacuum tube amp have nearly identical specs and distortion... yet my ears report a completely different story. Although its quite true that I can not discern if you are giving me a 1KHz sine or square wave routed through a solid state or tube amp, I can definitely tell if you give me old-style mechanical instruments. I can tell you if something's wrong with the cymbals or guitar, but I don't know what the synthesizer is supposed to sound like - I take those for whatever the artist supposedly set it to sound like.
My difference in perception appears to me to be highly related to intermod artifacts - especially if a harmonic-rich signal is riding on a strong low bass note. The vacuum-tube circuit to me sounds much "warmer" ( now how's that for a technically descriptive term! ) , which is my lame attempt to describe how the somewhat logarithmic response of the vacuum tube amp to strong signals is minimizing upper harmonic intermod artifacts, which I percieve as "sharp", "bright" or "harsh" ( which are just as useless as technical descriptors ).
Yes, I have even built little 6CW4 nuvistors and UHF tuner-style "acorn" tubes into circuits just to to have them "flavor" the signal a bit, as what they do by the laws of physics which govern their operation would take me more work than its worth trying to do with the "perfect" op-amps at my disposal.
But from my personal experience, most of the effect of vacuum-tube amplifiers comes into play at the power output stage. It has been my personal experience that if the last thing that the audio signal "saw" on its way to the speaker was the vacuum tube power output stage - there wasn't all that much difference between just power output stage being vacuum tube, and the whole processing chain being vacuum tube.
My supporting evidence is that the preamplification is occurring in the middle of the linear region, hence both technologies produce remarkably similar results. Its where the energy swings become much greater is where the anomalies begin to show up.
I leave my observations open for comments from other tinkers of the trade.
I have toyed around using transistor/tube hybrids , using beam power tubes cascode with NPN darlingtons driven pushpull from the the differential outputs of 733 ( 592 ) style amplifiers ( which were common as read amps on the old style floppy disk drives ). I got some pretty neat amps that way that had the vacuum-tube distortions showing up in the right way.
Driving the tubes cascode also made it quite easy for me to set bias and drive individually so I could null out the imbalances of not-so-perfectly matched tubes. Yeh, I could see that. I might want, say 20 mA idle current running the tubes Class AB or so. It was my experience that for critical apps ( studio / home perfectionist ), tubes were rarely matched over their range, but would track pretty well once you compensated by individually adjusting their bias point and gain.
One note - watch your screen grid - don't hold it at DC, but couple some of the plate voltage swing to it... you want it going down with plate voltage -
"I know many of you don't like the idea of Bush choosing 5 justices (perhaps more, there are rumors of retirement), but that is better than letting these 5 sit on then court."
Ummm... could somebody who knows post how the "Bush 5" voted?
Let's agree to let the analog sets go dark, and by doing so, Congress and the Courts hold us harmless for substitution of signal by any means of P2P sharing, rights infringements, whatever.
Holding this agreement null and void also holds any other agreements that make obligations for one thing dependent on one doing another also null and void.
So, in essence, when our sets go dark, they AGREED!!!
Why is it I have to honor their "click agreements" if they won't honor mine?
You do have a quite valid point on a lot of WalMart's practices... I have heard that they are tough-as-nails on their suppliers. I don't know enough facts to nail them on anything, but I have heard stories down the line of WalMart claiming, say, 10% of product shipped as being defective and witholding payment as such. The truth is somewhere in between, as I have seen WalMart's customers "ripping off WalMart" in the same way by bringing merchandise home, damaging it, then returning it. It's likely WalMart is just passing the loss up the line. This is *really* debatable...
It seems like Fedco, Gemco, and Costco started all this "Club Card" stuff... then it caught on and it seemed every grocery store in town insisted we carry their card... Ralph's, Vons, Albertson's - the big chains. As each store became a Card store, I shifted my business to other stores that did not require The Card.
There are now three large grocery stores in town left that do not require these cards. Stater Brothers Grocery, Big Saver Foods, and WalMart.
Of the remaining non-Card requiring stores, WalMart is closest to me, but to get there, I drive past the Ralph's, Von's, and Albertson's.
I just kept going further and further out as each merchant became a Card Merchant. I made an ass of myself just one time at each business location, noisily whining my displeasure at being charged "outsider" prices - especially at the Albertson's store when they did it - as I had been shopping there for about twenty years.
I had to realize that my patronage isn't what they wanted, it was my obedience to their demand that I carry their card. You know, out of force of habit, I still find myself pulling into the Albertson's parking lot before I suddenly remember I can't shop there anymore without paying "outsider price". I pull out and proceed on to WalMart.
I was quite happy with the previous three stores, but I was not gonna stand for having to carry walletfuls of cards and paraphanalia just to avoid surcharges for not doing so, when other stores would simply sell me what I wanted without playing games with me. If I am not careful, I can easily end up with 30 to 100 cards in my wallet! Just to be allowed to buy at the WalMart everyday price. WalMart just gets the business the other stores, by their pricing tactics, said they didn't want!
So, I figure all the "little old ladies" can gather around the Cash Register like the sewing circles of old, and negotiate coupons, rebates, Card Prices, and whatever. I figure its a modern-day reincarnation of Bingo as a way to involve much negotiation over a trivial matter as purchasing a roll of toilet paper. I take it as a given that if I'm not gonna jump through all those 'Simon Says' hoops, they are gonna ding me pretty hard.
If their "Club Card Price" with double couponing adjustments is right around the same as the WalMart price, why even mess with the Card and coupons? Why are all these "outsiders" - who have absolutely nothing to do with the manufacture or logistics of the products I want to buy - allowed to insert themselves into the sales procedure? Why does the merchant - who supposedly understands he is in business to fulfill his customer's need for his products - allow these guys to hinder that process?
Sam Walton seems to be one of a dying breed who knows what his customers want, and gets it for us.
I know my reference to Wal Mart is flammatory, as my Marketing professor in College claims to hate their practices with a purple passion.
Here, my Marketing professor is showing us many ways of using "promotional tools" and "lock-in" techniques of couponing, bundling, contigencies, and spin-doctoring the whole shebang so it sounds good.
I see through it and am infuriated. I hate it when marketers do these things to me in the store.
Dammit, I come into the store with money and I want a roll of toilet paper, and I am in absolutely no mood to play games and get charged more for not playing.
Its especially infuriating to me to see all these people who have inserted themselves into the flow so as they don't produce a thing, they just get in the way of my getting what I want, and even get paid ( as part of the product price I end up paying ) to do this.
Its also infuriating to be the guy behind the person who lengthens line wait time negotiating coupons. You know, its like the person at a traffic signal that doesn't go when cleared because they they are taking care of other business at the time. On the road, its customary to honk, but how do you handle line hangups over negotiation of needless deliberately-created pricing anamolies?
My feeling is if a merchant thinks so little of my dollar and so much of the expiration dates and conditions of his coupons, go ahead and let him print up, distribute, sort, verify, whatever to the thouseands of little slips of paper we are all supposed to hoard and redeem, let him play his little "businessman" game,,, while I go somewhere else cause I have a roll of toilet paper to buy.
I know there are companies out there who search through public discussion posts such as Slashdot to garner public reaction to business trends.
My main point of posting is to try to reach those people and get my statistic in, as I can't do anything to steer business if I can't give them feedback. I have used some specific company names to trigger their data-mining bots. Hopefully, if my pleas are mentioned in a Professional Marketing Research Report, Paid for by Business, it will be taken more seriously than the whining of a customer who is probably never returning.
I only state this here on Slashdot, because as a public blogging area, it lets customers like me give one last bit of feedback to many businesses.
Once they run me out of their stores, they never hear from me again.
I always hear businesses complain that Wal Mart kills their business. As a former customer of many of those businesses I hear complaining, I only wanted to say why, because I often never go in their stores anymore.
Example, I haven't been to a Sav-On drugs now in years... and it was a prime place for me at one time - until they got on this Albertson's Preferred Card bandwagon. I walked in there one day, tried to buy some batteries as I picked up a prescription, and noted the price was a buck higher than normal, but if I used the Card, it was back at normal price. Mental Note: Next time I'm in Wal Mart for catfood, check the battery price. Yup. The old price Sav-On used to charge me. Action: Get batteries at WalMart and check prices of prescription medicine at the WalMart pharmacy so if they are the same price it is at Sav-On, then if I move my prescription refills over to Wal-Mart, this will completely eliminate trips to Sav-On to pick up just one item. It was. Done. Sav-On is now completely out of my picture. They are now another non-descript building I pass by on the way to Wal Mart.
I still get my batteries, and my prescriptions filled.
And the important highly paid executive of Sav-On got his hand shook by an important Marketing Professional that convinced him of the value of forcing his customers to play unwanted games.
If Sav-On wants me back, they now have to wait for Sam Walton to screw up and drive away his customer base.
What it takes to drive a customer away - often forever - may be nothing more than an argument over a 30 cent coupon that expired yesterday.
What it takes to GET a customer is a completely different story. I can say customers are a lot harder to get than they are to run away, as you have to coax them away from where they are doing business now.
The companies marketing all this club card and coupon apparatus make it their business to target well-paid corporate executives who are not likely to relate with their customer base, which has nowhere near their level of income. They know how a corporate-level guy is likely to really underestimate the value of his customer base, and consider it just another expendible tool to be used as an economic prybar. They know we want a roll of toilet paper, so they start making us jump through hoops to get it.
Its my belief that most of the executive types that make these decisions are so high up the corporate ladder that they no longer hear the anguished cry of some poor woman pleading with some sales clerk over a 30 cent coupon.
Slashdot Mirror
There's the rub... the masses are a helluva lot easier to "control" if they are so dirt-poor they can't even afford a pot to piss in, much less the resources to organize themselves against an oppressive government.
In that sorry predicament, one just has to take what they can get.
Personally, I long for the day when everyone has access to the ballot-box and is *uses* it!
Way, way, way too many of us US citizens have access to the box... and don't USE it!!!!
Prior to July 4, 1776, all these people we know today as "patriots" were the worst form of Terrorists to the Crown.
Yup, we were among the worst law-breakers on Earth.
Completely dis-respectful of ones who claimed authority over us!
They wouldn't listen.
We had to.
Does History Repeat Itself?
The really good guys we had with us were well known in the industry.
All it took for them to switch employers was a phone call to their future employer of choice.
They were working with us mostly out of loyalty and friendship, yet they have financial committments too, and they knew that often entire divisions get nixed and the people who know them often cannot do a damn thing about it.
We lost our top talent fast - like rats fleeing a burning building.
I was one of the laggards. I didn't know anybody outside of the company, and felt a little better that other people had already left, hoping that would ease the pressure for layoffs... despite the fact that those people did a lot of stuff I had no idea how to do. Viterbi encoder/decoders. Really sophisticated DSP, extremely low power yet robust spread-spectrum RF stuff. I mostly did power supplies and analog phaselock loops... nothing near as tricky as those guys did.
I soon got delegated work over my head, and failed miserably.
I had learned a lot of stuff from those old guys, and I could actually implement a lot of their ideas with their guidance, but I was too "wet behind the ears" to do what they could do.
I have not worked for a Military contractor since... nor do I even apply.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
My machine and me go back close to twenty years, as I have taught it thing after thing after thing, and today its a very valuable assistant to me. ( I use "my machine" in the singular, but in practice it currently consists of five physical entities ).
Although I freely exchange data back and forth between these machines, and sometimes replace older hardware, their core essences remain damn near identical to what I trained them to be. I have Pentiums running DOS.
The machine itself is of minor concern to me, as I could lose any four of the five physical machines, and still be able to rebuild myself completely given access to nearly any computer dump for a few hours. But if I lose that training I have put into these machines, I have lost everything.
I don't want a new computer. I want the only ones that do what I need them to do... the ones I have spent years of my life programming them to do very special things for me.
For me, simply throwing the machine away is NOT an option.
For this reason, I have resisted the urge to go onto to more-and-more DRM-laden technologies and stayed with DOS and WIN95. Go ahead and laugh.. but my debuggers still work, I can fix any "rough edges" that show up in any of my software ( I do not need source code, as I work at the machine code level with SoftIce ), I can still reload my OS and all programs/data if things get too out of hand, and I am not constantly hounded by my system taking it on itself to act as a copyright enforcement agency as I move the programs I paid for amongst my family of machines during hardware changeouts or to insure I don't lose everything in the event of a crash.
Even then, its easy to detect any tampering of the core executables of my old WIN95 using "tripwire" integrity checking technologies.
I email my whining to them, I haven't heard back.
They have installed stuff on their site which requires latest versions of IE or Netscape, with Java ON and Flash.
Geez, I just wanted to submit Gerber files and have them fabricate a PCB from those files.
As an old HTML, Perl, CGI programmer too, I know this is trivial... so why do commercial sites make such a big deal over requiring us, which often still use older machines, as well as nonmainstream machines, as we have lots of legacy designs to support, to run the latest proprietary whiz-bang software - often requiring known viral pathways to be open?
I find dealing with people who have had Business education very perplexing... if I want a job and I have to give them a resume, they will be extremely picky, and if I mention I REQUIRE anything, they are apt to ditch my resume upon seeing that word - they see me immediately as being "inflexible"... yet they seem to throw that word "required" around with reckless abandon if they are the ones marketing the service.
I have had viral attacks, and I see them all the time... even as I write this, my ports 1026 and 1027, along with numerous other ports - are being relentlessly pounded with God Knows What - from seemingly Everywhere! Thanks to some good firewall and proxy software, I have so far succeeded in stealthing myself so no-onw except the ones I am currently "doing business with" is aware of my existence on the web, verified with sniffer.
Problem is, everytime I get on the web - even on a dialup - with lightning speed people share my IP with "marketing partners", and within seconds of visiting certain sites ( unfortunately Slashdot is one of them too ), I will notice a marked increase of other systems trying to contact me, trying all sorts of various ports to see if their applet is in my machine and will respond to it.
Yes, I am aware of this hanky-panky, but how do I tell Business that Requiring me to use insecure technologies or disabling my firewalls is unacceptable to me? They only appear to see me as a whiner.
The Corporate Executive and his Webmaster appear to sit in plush environs totally insulated from the problems we techie guys have when we have viral intrusions, or have to use legacy stuff on new machines, just for the sake of communications protocols.
They tell me I can trust the later software. Sure... we both have completely different opinions of what does "trust" mean? To me, it means that the TRUSTED is ACCOUNTABLE for its behaviour... if you have clauses in the EULA that deny responsibility for its actions, you expect me to TRUST it? Geez!!!
It makes me wonder if the printed circuit board vendor even remembers what his business exists for... is it to receive Gerber files from the customer and deliver printed circuit boards made from them, or are they "team partners" with some huge software firm intent on forcing everyone to upgrade their machines to communicate with the latest proprietary protocols?
What business schools teach these executives to invest millions of dollars in PCB fab technology, then bar the customers from their business by requiring them to jump through hoops?
This seems to me to be just as asinine as some shopping mall requiring people coming into their parking lot to arrive in a Lexus.
I find it amazing a lot of companies survive if they don't seem to know what they do.... Or possibly its that I *thought* the company existed to make PCB's, but the true reason for their existence is to transfer investor money to the executive pocket, with the whole PCB fab thingie being just a front.
I am pretty bitter over it... so I am loathe to name the company in thie post. But if you have had to deal with viruses on your own, and have these people in a "position of power" ramming you into what you felt was unsafe practices, completely
Otherwise, we get beautiful RGB at the CRT Cathodes, and damn near any SMPS current transformer will easily pick a sample of the deflection coil current.
Yes, it will have to be redigitized, but for my purposes, the resolution will still be far more than good enough.
One end of this area depicts a terribly unrobust design that should never have existed in the first place gone astray over a child's prank... like a child experimenting with fire and sets the neighborhood on fire. ( yeh, stuff like that is why we build houses out of stucco and have tile/metal roofs in our area ). We have seen this fire thing happen elsewhere, then we changed our designs so it doesn't happen here. No, no one castrated the kid - it was just something that got out of hand and previous bad design allowed the worst to happen.
The other end of the area depicts a kid doing something malicious, like going around loosening the lug nuts on other people's cars, with the kid knowing full good and well what the results would be when the car got up to freeway speeds and the tire rolls off.
No one has shown me yet the kids had no idea of how many problems their little prank would cause... and I am even of the opinion the people who design such unrobust systems, hiding behind the "hold harmless" clauses of EULA's, are more to blame than the kids are. We would think banks who keep my money in oaken safes in wooden shacks would be viewed with contempt when its well known that wood will easily succumb to fire. I don't care how much the banker hides behind clauses in his EULA that hold him harmless from loss by fire, I still question his intelligence by his choices of construction.
Personally, I think the kids did us a big favor by giving us a "head's up" on our poor design, before we got involved in some nasty intercontinental war and the enemy, knowing our vulnerability all along, releases this on us, paralyzing our computational infrastructure during the time we need it most.
Read some of Alexander the Great's techniques for bringing huge opponents to their knees... he would use tricks like poisoning the water supplies of huge armies by throwing dead livestock in the wells. Hell, we did the same thing against the Native American Indian in order to forcibly take ( err, eminent domain ) their land, using diseases we were immune to to make sure their warriors were "on the toilet" not in the battle.
I hold it just as serious for someone mimicking legal action against me as I would expect them to hold it against me if I wired up some pipe and batteries and timer, and used it to scare the bejeebies out of someone.
I might consider it "overreacting" if I handed the obviously ( to an electical engineer ) nonfunctional assembly to someone fluent in circuit design. But if I were to use that thing to extort payments from the general public? I would expect to be led away in cuffs and know I had one helluva lot of explaining to do. And I would consider anything they wanted to throw at me probably justified.
I consider anyone messing around with legal documents to be just as liable as I would be for messing around with other things that can hurt people- and threatening them with it - irregardless of how harmless it really is. Its what it appears to be that I feel I would be held accountable for it being.
Yes, I feel you should be just as accountable for holding up a liquor store with a fake gun as a real one.
The discussions in this topic have very much reinforced my discomfort with my personal information going into corporate databases, shared with others I have no business with - as its just too easy for them to decide on their own that I am doing business with them and send me bills and notices, knowing how much time I am going to have to spend to prove otherwise and hoping I will just pay the invoice to get them to go away.
These databases scare me, because once I am fingered, they will cross-reference me and all the data - which I did NOT give them - will match up.
I once even had a business threaten to sell my car at an auction sale for repair and storage charges not paid. I have never been in that city. My car was right outside my house. But according to the DMV letter, all the info in it was correct. Type of car, color, VIN code, tag... everything! If someone had have "bought" my car at that friggen auction, would he have actually came to my house to retrieve it? If he did, could I then hold a real-estate auction to sell the car dealership to recover my costs in recovering my car? A lot of lawyers could get rich pretty quick during the aftermath of all the confusion. Personally, I feel that the car dealership admitting they had made a mistake after I made my case to DMV was insufficient. They had rattled my cage with legal threats, which required my attention. I feel I should be paid at least $100/hour ( going rate for consultants ) for my time defending myself.
If there were a precedent for sending people groundless legal threats, just as there probably is a precendent for coercing people with perceived physical threats, people would think twice before sending legalese looking letters of this type.
What are you gonna do then, sue them?
They face pissed-off people all the time and have the right tools ( legal tactics ) to handle them.
I am pondering homeowner's insurance. It seems every time I have ever known anyone to make a claim, they weren't covered! The latest example being those Laguna Landslides.
I have no idea what calamity may befall me, and I buy insurance to help should the unlikely event occur. Like you say, I have no idea if the insurance is even useful until I need it. Statistically, I won't.
To find I have been paying on the order of $1,000 a year just for the "peace of mind" of having insurance, to discover its useless when I need it, geez, over the 20 years I've had insurance, it would have grown to well over $25,000 had I invested it in lieu of premium payments. Somehow I consider it highly unlikely the house burns to the ground. And it looks like other ways I will lose the place, via Earthquake, riot, flood, landslide, whatever, not covered anyway!
I feel so stupid paying so much for "peace of mind"... its hard to have peace of mind when I am suspicious the company is only there to accept my premium, and will likely give me the "We're sorry business-face" when I need them. Those super thick policies full of exceptions foster that distrust.
Having the insurance company constantly revising the policy does not help my confidence one iota either. I dropped State Farm for doing just that... it didn't seem a month went by without my getting some letter from them revising my policy - and I just don't have time to keep up with their printing press. I felt all I was doing with my policy dollar is financing all those office buildings I see with their company name on them... all filled with office workers scuttling about filling out papers and dreaming up yet more ways of modifying my policy and spin doctoring it so it sounds passable.
I can't help but think of all those Laguna homeowners who had purchased "homeowner's insurance" for peace of mind knowing they were covered if something awful and completely out of their control happened to them... and it did... the Laguna Landslide ( Southern California ). News traveled fast that the homeowner policies did not include landslides.
I wonder more and more what the logic is in having insurance? That is perfectly good money I am paying in, and what I see is lots of buildings staffed full of office hens flitting to and fro charging their time against my policy. I wonder, statistically, would it be better to just drop insurance and simply invest those premiums elsewhere... with premiums at nearly $1000/year, and every year I get yet more modifications the Insurance company sends me clarifying under which circumstances I am covered - and it all seems so nebulous to me whether or not I would be covered for anything. I really ponder the economics of insurance. I see others sleeping soundly at night, *thinking* they are covered, but then when disaster strikes, the insurance companies hide behind the little clause they stuck in that exempts them from their side of the deal.
It just seems like I am getting the shaft when it comes to insurance. Anyone else have any insights?
Your observation that my ears and system aren't good enough is also true.
And I think it was my parent's parent who made the claim that it's "recorded in the exact quality as you hear it", not me. ( With me, very few things are exact. )
My less-than-perfect fascimile is good enough for me. And I don't feel too bad because as I noted, even the big guys do it, and their own Lawyers and the Courts said it was OK.
Just don't make an EXACT copy. (IANAL).
Its gonna go in any of the little MP3 players I have laying all over the place, and most likely be listened to on commodity headsets...
For this, resampled is fine by me.
As far as I am concerned, I have no problem honoring the exact bit patterns the Music Industry has Copyrighted. I won't use those bits... I will use other bits which do almost the same thing.
Same with the Video. Yes, the purchased disk has pure pristine factory perfect bits - and if thats what you want, please honor their copyright and buy their disk.
I don't really need all that resolution to watch on my (much) less than perfect system... a resampled XviD fascimile is fine by me, as it requires much less storage space.
If you read into this that I am justifying theft of content by creating derivatives of other's work, its nothing the entertainment industry hasn't already done anyhow. The latest glaring example in my mind was the story of Kimba, which became Simba in the Lion King.
Lawyers for the Industry have already looked into this, and decided it was OK, because it was not an EXACT copy. They did change the K to an S, and the color of the lion, so its NOT the same lion. I'll do better than that. I seriously doubt the file I make has *any* numerical correlation to the source file.
Why re-invent the wheel when its so easy to just use the off-the-shelf solution?
When you don't want everyone to know how it works, you just wanna sell it: Windows.
When you are trying to make something and wanna make it so that others can modify it to fit whatever they wanna make with it: Open-Source.
And that just about covers the gamut.
Now, I do a netstat and find I have these connections open, despite my firewall ( zonelabs ) supposedly having them closed.
I am not running any IM clients.
My Grisoft AVS does not detect anything amiss, nor does AdAware nor Spybot S&D, but my gut feeling is telling me I *am* compromised.
I have not been routinely running with ports left open.
Is anyone else out there experiencing this?
Basically a "Star Trek Tricorder" with a decent sized screen.
And, of course, using documented interfaces so it can be customized to whatever we want it to do.
Buying these precanned systems is often just about as useful as buying cured concrete - its already set in the way someone else molded it... not what I wanted it to be.
Such a system would have to be very tolerant of error, have basic intelligence and "ethics", as well as having basic structures known to all and taught in schools right along with languages such as English. No Cryptic System Calls, Please!
Another thing we need is more "secure" P2P methods, uncensorable by design, just as we are developing containers uncrackable by design to hold "secure" data. I note a big requirement for guaranteeing the preservation of Liberty is that the populace can not be allowed to fall under the tyranny of censorship ( aka "freedom of the press" ).
And we are just cracking open the Miracle of DNA! I see the world of Biology today much like I saw the world of computing in the 1970's... we were just getting the hang of having an operational CPU and what to do with it. There is so much we can do with DNA - I am quite confident we have barely cracked the door on what we can do once we know more how to program this thing!
Trying to ram a space probe into a comet at 23KMPH.. looks roughly as tricky as firing two rifles and so as to hit the bullets mid-flight several miles away.
And get it right on the first try.
I believe you could approximate the distortion curves of a tube using some really fancy analog techniques or DSP, but its not gonna be all that simple.
The problem is not in the "linear" areas, but as tubes approach cutoff and saturation, nonlinear attributes come into play.
There is a lot of quite difficult-to-replicate phenomena which occurs in the beam power tubes ( aka 6L6 and related ) that occurs as the plate voltages ( hence attractance to the electron stream ) drops as the tube approaches saturation. Interesting diversions of the electron flow occur as the stream from the cathode becomes more and more attracted to the beam forming plates ( known by some as the screen grid ) as the plate voltages plummet.
All my "test instrumentation", usually testing in the linear region, tell me both the solid state amp and vacuum tube amp have nearly identical specs and distortion... yet my ears report a completely different story. Although its quite true that I can not discern if you are giving me a 1KHz sine or square wave routed through a solid state or tube amp, I can definitely tell if you give me old-style mechanical instruments. I can tell you if something's wrong with the cymbals or guitar, but I don't know what the synthesizer is supposed to sound like - I take those for whatever the artist supposedly set it to sound like.
My difference in perception appears to me to be highly related to intermod artifacts - especially if a harmonic-rich signal is riding on a strong low bass note. The vacuum-tube circuit to me sounds much "warmer" ( now how's that for a technically descriptive term! ) , which is my lame attempt to describe how the somewhat logarithmic response of the vacuum tube amp to strong signals is minimizing upper harmonic intermod artifacts, which I percieve as "sharp", "bright" or "harsh" ( which are just as useless as technical descriptors ).
Yes, I have even built little 6CW4 nuvistors and UHF tuner-style "acorn" tubes into circuits just to to have them "flavor" the signal a bit, as what they do by the laws of physics which govern their operation would take me more work than its worth trying to do with the "perfect" op-amps at my disposal.
But from my personal experience, most of the effect of vacuum-tube amplifiers comes into play at the power output stage. It has been my personal experience that if the last thing that the audio signal "saw" on its way to the speaker was the vacuum tube power output stage - there wasn't all that much difference between just power output stage being vacuum tube, and the whole processing chain being vacuum tube.
My supporting evidence is that the preamplification is occurring in the middle of the linear region, hence both technologies produce remarkably similar results. Its where the energy swings become much greater is where the anomalies begin to show up.
I leave my observations open for comments from other tinkers of the trade.
I have toyed around using transistor/tube hybrids , using beam power tubes cascode with NPN darlingtons driven pushpull from the the differential outputs of 733 ( 592 ) style amplifiers ( which were common as read amps on the old style floppy disk drives ). I got some pretty neat amps that way that had the vacuum-tube distortions showing up in the right way.
Driving the tubes cascode also made it quite easy for me to set bias and drive individually so I could null out the imbalances of not-so-perfectly matched tubes. Yeh, I could see that. I might want, say 20 mA idle current running the tubes Class AB or so. It was my experience that for critical apps ( studio / home perfectionist ), tubes were rarely matched over their range, but would track pretty well once you compensated by individually adjusting their bias point and gain.
One note - watch your screen grid - don't hold it at DC, but couple some of the plate voltage swing to it... you want it going down with plate voltage -
Ummm... could somebody who knows post how the "Bush 5" voted?
Let's agree to let the analog sets go dark, and by doing so, Congress and the Courts hold us harmless for substitution of signal by any means of P2P sharing, rights infringements, whatever.
Holding this agreement null and void also holds any other agreements that make obligations for one thing dependent on one doing another also null and void.
So, in essence, when our sets go dark, they AGREED!!!
Why is it I have to honor their "click agreements" if they won't honor mine?
It seems like Fedco, Gemco, and Costco started all this "Club Card" stuff... then it caught on and it seemed every grocery store in town insisted we carry their card... Ralph's, Vons, Albertson's - the big chains. As each store became a Card store, I shifted my business to other stores that did not require The Card.
There are now three large grocery stores in town left that do not require these cards. Stater Brothers Grocery, Big Saver Foods, and WalMart.
Of the remaining non-Card requiring stores, WalMart is closest to me, but to get there, I drive past the Ralph's, Von's, and Albertson's.
I just kept going further and further out as each merchant became a Card Merchant. I made an ass of myself just one time at each business location, noisily whining my displeasure at being charged "outsider" prices - especially at the Albertson's store when they did it - as I had been shopping there for about twenty years.
I had to realize that my patronage isn't what they wanted, it was my obedience to their demand that I carry their card. You know, out of force of habit, I still find myself pulling into the Albertson's parking lot before I suddenly remember I can't shop there anymore without paying "outsider price". I pull out and proceed on to WalMart.
I was quite happy with the previous three stores, but I was not gonna stand for having to carry walletfuls of cards and paraphanalia just to avoid surcharges for not doing so, when other stores would simply sell me what I wanted without playing games with me. If I am not careful, I can easily end up with 30 to 100 cards in my wallet! Just to be allowed to buy at the WalMart everyday price. WalMart just gets the business the other stores, by their pricing tactics, said they didn't want!
So, I figure all the "little old ladies" can gather around the Cash Register like the sewing circles of old, and negotiate coupons, rebates, Card Prices, and whatever. I figure its a modern-day reincarnation of Bingo as a way to involve much negotiation over a trivial matter as purchasing a roll of toilet paper. I take it as a given that if I'm not gonna jump through all those 'Simon Says' hoops, they are gonna ding me pretty hard.
If their "Club Card Price" with double couponing adjustments is right around the same as the WalMart price, why even mess with the Card and coupons? Why are all these "outsiders" - who have absolutely nothing to do with the manufacture or logistics of the products I want to buy - allowed to insert themselves into the sales procedure? Why does the merchant - who supposedly understands he is in business to fulfill his customer's need for his products - allow these guys to hinder that process?
Sam Walton seems to be one of a dying breed who knows what his customers want, and gets it for us.
Here, my Marketing professor is showing us many ways of using "promotional tools" and "lock-in" techniques of couponing, bundling, contigencies, and spin-doctoring the whole shebang so it sounds good.
I see through it and am infuriated. I hate it when marketers do these things to me in the store.
Dammit, I come into the store with money and I want a roll of toilet paper, and I am in absolutely no mood to play games and get charged more for not playing.
Its especially infuriating to me to see all these people who have inserted themselves into the flow so as they don't produce a thing, they just get in the way of my getting what I want, and even get paid ( as part of the product price I end up paying ) to do this.
Its also infuriating to be the guy behind the person who lengthens line wait time negotiating coupons. You know, its like the person at a traffic signal that doesn't go when cleared because they they are taking care of other business at the time. On the road, its customary to honk, but how do you handle line hangups over negotiation of needless deliberately-created pricing anamolies?
My feeling is if a merchant thinks so little of my dollar and so much of the expiration dates and conditions of his coupons, go ahead and let him print up, distribute, sort, verify, whatever to the thouseands of little slips of paper we are all supposed to hoard and redeem, let him play his little "businessman" game,,, while I go somewhere else cause I have a roll of toilet paper to buy.
I know there are companies out there who search through public discussion posts such as Slashdot to garner public reaction to business trends.
My main point of posting is to try to reach those people and get my statistic in, as I can't do anything to steer business if I can't give them feedback. I have used some specific company names to trigger their data-mining bots. Hopefully, if my pleas are mentioned in a Professional Marketing Research Report, Paid for by Business, it will be taken more seriously than the whining of a customer who is probably never returning.
Once they run me out of their stores, they never hear from me again.
I always hear businesses complain that Wal Mart kills their business. As a former customer of many of those businesses I hear complaining, I only wanted to say why, because I often never go in their stores anymore.
Example, I haven't been to a Sav-On drugs now in years... and it was a prime place for me at one time - until they got on this Albertson's Preferred Card bandwagon. I walked in there one day, tried to buy some batteries as I picked up a prescription, and noted the price was a buck higher than normal, but if I used the Card, it was back at normal price. Mental Note: Next time I'm in Wal Mart for catfood, check the battery price. Yup. The old price Sav-On used to charge me. Action: Get batteries at WalMart and check prices of prescription medicine at the WalMart pharmacy so if they are the same price it is at Sav-On, then if I move my prescription refills over to Wal-Mart, this will completely eliminate trips to Sav-On to pick up just one item. It was. Done. Sav-On is now completely out of my picture. They are now another non-descript building I pass by on the way to Wal Mart.
I still get my batteries, and my prescriptions filled.
And the important highly paid executive of Sav-On got his hand shook by an important Marketing Professional that convinced him of the value of forcing his customers to play unwanted games.
If Sav-On wants me back, they now have to wait for Sam Walton to screw up and drive away his customer base.
What it takes to drive a customer away - often forever - may be nothing more than an argument over a 30 cent coupon that expired yesterday.
What it takes to GET a customer is a completely different story. I can say customers are a lot harder to get than they are to run away, as you have to coax them away from where they are doing business now.
The companies marketing all this club card and coupon apparatus make it their business to target well-paid corporate executives who are not likely to relate with their customer base, which has nowhere near their level of income. They know how a corporate-level guy is likely to really underestimate the value of his customer base, and consider it just another expendible tool to be used as an economic prybar. They know we want a roll of toilet paper, so they start making us jump through hoops to get it.
Its my belief that most of the executive types that make these decisions are so high up the corporate ladder that they no longer hear the anguished cry of some poor woman pleading with some sales clerk over a 30 cent coupon.