Large ISP I know the internals of.
One of the too many bosses complained: "The ideal scenario would be if our customers paid for our products and services regardless of whether they could get them to work"
This company also had a concept of customer service being run as a company within an enterprise and selling their service, support, to another company that dealt with the products. This could lead to such interesting scenarios as Product developers refusing to tell tech support about features of product because they were afraid tech support would implement a competing product and sell it cheaper..
Everything tech support did was about costs, or more exactly, how to bring costs down. Support people were measured on number of calls answered, not solved. A person who replied to 50 mails during a shift even though his answers were pointless and caused customers to resubmit the question got a reward in the form of vacation while seniors in department were forced to work a weekend dealing with the aftermath, although they could get Product company to pay a compensation for upset customers issues.
I'm no law person, but isn't the fact that Google is not intended to presume to be the hosting/copyright owner of sites it links to, but instead a catalogue of information of where to go to find information, mean that google isn't as bad as this company was in this case?
It's one thing to make a "yellow pages" (i.e. Google) and another to make someone elses content appear to be your own?
Google doesn't presume to offer a range of services and have you call them so they'll send you a plumber. They just point to the plumber and inform you of it. They might accidentally make too much information about how to do something available so you could get things done without having to call the plumber, but there was no intent...?
Whereas the company in TA pretended they were the owner of the content, and also refused to cooperate with the legal owners?
They are part of the "Geek Toolbox", a set of exchanges that two geeks must pass in order to be allowed to stay around uncontested I believe. It is part of the secret codes that belongs to their society.
[sarcasm] But.. but... Microsoft freed us from the eeeeevil IBeMpire! We must worship them for being the rebels they are and defending us from IBM vendor lock-in. If it wasn't for them, we'd only have 10 computers in the world. [/sarcasm]
There were outbursts here demanding Nokia recall one of their phone models after it burst into flames and hurt a young girls hand. Nokia refused and said they'd investigate instead, which caused some minor outrage about how they put income over safety.
Then it turned out that people were buying 3rd party batteries in the models that exploded, all bought at the same place. 6 phones exploded, each with a non-Nokia battery.
1) I can understand their wish to work overtime in offpeak seasons. Where I worked it was popular to work overtime during christmas, summer and easter, and its still popular to work overtime on weekends because there's less stress then.
2) This is bad. This implies that its difficult to get from the work place where they also seem to live, and to the town/city/entertainment facilities nearby. Where I worked, all cantinas were closed during weekends, and since the building is smack in a total industry area, there were no cafes, resturrants or anything nearby or that was open. I only had to or volunteered to work weekends occasionally. If I had had to live there, I'd gone crazy, or probably lived at work.
Disclaimer: I live in norway (non-eu) now. We have 40 hour work weeks usually, with 37,5 for those who work shifts + night time compensation after 8pm and double sallary after midnight. We are still allowed to work overtime. Some industries work longer, few work shorter. I've had to work weekends as well.
That said, the previous poster is just flamebaiting. And accusing whoever moded him for being "ghey" tells me a lot about his maturity.
We get many polish workers here who wants to work and european companies who think profits have abused them strongly, even to the level of beyond not giving them good pay even not granting them the level of security they should have (not providing helmets or appropriate tools on construction projects, not paying them until after their work contract runs out (and sometimes not even then *) making them effective prisoners in a country with a language they don't understand.
* a spanish company here won a bid on a bridge project for the state. When the norwegian labour authority investigated the workplace after tips from concerned union workers in the trade, and found a number of labour law violations, the spanish company declared itself bankrupt, stranding the polish workers with no pay after 6 weeks of work and disappeared
People with long commute who work even 10 hours a day loose a lot of time they would have or should have preferred to spend with family and children or friends.
I grew up on a farm. You don't necessarily "work" those hours from sun up to sun down. You take all the pauses you like, you work at your own tempo, its your home (usually) and work place in one, and most of the work is not very intensive or concentration demanding. After a full day there, I've never been thoroughly exhausted.
I have also until last month worked in a callcenter where you're measured on how many and how long breaks you take, and I don't take many breaks (I'm terrible at it), we can log on to other queues if ours has low pressure, and we're expected to mulitask by answering customer email while talking to the customers (ideally) or between customers. After a workday there, I'm extremely exhausted and have had little energy left for private things. Working out has become a chore when I work late shifts which in itself is a bad circle.
My point is that there is a difference between what kind of work you do and even between people how much of a kind they can endure with full concentration for long periods of time.
Would you like to fly if you knew your pilot had worked 80 hours already this week? I would not.
I do testing and customer service guides for Mac, recreate customer issues etc. Dualbooting between OS X 10.3 and 10.4 on a Powerbook. So its not just PCs;)
Yes, I have images to recreate the mac, but rebooting quickly into either OS to test/fix something or to make a screenshot is practical.
I have to strongly disagree that.Net, IIS 7, WinFX and UAC are the major selling points. I attended a Microsoft IT Professional launch event. I did not leave that presentation with a feeling that MS is neglecting the business market at all. Rather the opposite. Source: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/defa ult.mspx
Yes, you have more versions for consumers than you have for business, but how many versions for businesses do you need. And Windows Ultimate contains everything of both versions. Its not unlikely that some businesses would choose that version if they need the bells, but most businesses want to turn off stuff not related to work.
Vista is released in 2 versions for business that sort of redo how they've done things but still is similar. Vista Business is like Windows2000 Pro/XP Pro in a business enviroment. The other, Vista Enterprise, is new as such but its really just the volume licence version of 2K/XP Pro with MUI built in (and not just as an extra), hardware encryption support and simplified deployment. Three important features they mention: Disk encryption, Virtual PC Express is just a limited edition of Virtual PC that allows you to run only one session at once and finally Unix subsystem built into it. You could get these features before from 3rd parties or as additional investments. Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb0 6/02-26WinVistaProductsPR.mspx
With all due respect, Office2007 is also a major product for Microsoft and it doesn't look even remotely like its going to be a failure. The Public Beta is very promising.
Now Vista still can get speed optimising. From an IT tech level, its WIM deployment format, WinPE,.Net and its development infrastructure looks really promising as well, so I doubt Vista will bomb that tremendously.
(And I love OS X...);)
Officeline operate a store on Aker Brygge. A huge open shop with stands where you can walk around and a "genius bar" in the style of the Apple Retail stores in the US. Their shop employees have always been really helpful and supporting and knowledgeable, and their prices have improved. I think Officeline today isn't what they were just 2-3 years ago. Also, I dropped by Eplehuset to ask some questions and the employee I met didn't know much of anything. Other times I have been there they have known. It depend on who you ask there too.
I think that can be true of many shops that unfortunately, to some extent, you can end up asking the wrong person on the wrong day. But I can't really say I have had worse experiences at Officeline than Eplehuset. I think both in general have been helpful and supportive. Sometimes not so much, but mostly good.
It's however true that Officeline is more expensive than Eplehuset, but my experience is that if you want something that isn't usually carried, Officeline are better at getting it. Eplehuset tend to carry what they're sure most people will buy and be hesitant to do special orders. Officeline will go that extra step and help you order something weird and unusual.
It's taken in good humour.:) We may not always be eloquent and nice about americans either in informal situations, without actually meaning something with it. And his/her line was kind of funny.;)
First of all. I will not accept a statement that we should just "shut up". We voted for these consumer laws to begin with. There's no reason we should just "shut up" if we disagree with how things are run. If they won't follow our laws, they can pack up and leave.
I fail to see how you can't make terms of transfer of song rights or similar part of the initial agreement the customer goes into buying the song? Why do you need to reserve the right to potentially declare that the customer cannot enjoy the product in the future? And isn't there already copyright regulations in place that prohibit people from using artistic work inappropriately that already cover this?
The concern isn't really about people using the songs in a "bad way" (or I might be completely misunderstanding what you meant here, if so I apologise), but what we are actually concerned about is that Apple reserve the right to say "As of this moment, you now owe us $1 for each of the songs you already purchased" or "We decided its no longer interesting to be in norway so we'll turn our server off. Your music won't work anymore as of now, whether you made backups of it or not."
What about the insane real estate expenses they might have?;) At least we have some competition in Oslo now. I doubt Officeline can continue as they have, but then they also sell a lot to companies who are not always all that concerned with the price depending on service agreements, support agreements etc.
Aftenposten seems to try to work with the Norwegian Tourist board... somewhat.;) (www.visitnorway.com)
You can always read www.norwegianpost.com who are slightly better.:)
Does the price difference include VAT, US sales taxes where appropriate, shipping, handling, repackaging with (in my case) norwegian keyboard and software and so on?
For me, the price have never been that grossly different. But that might also be the weak dollar.;)
Rather have the law and our rights on our side than Apple Music Store, even though I've spent a good 4 Gb of money on it by now and I love Macs.
Apple won't give up on norway though. Their partners are not doing at all bad, there's just opened 2 new stores in Oslo, in very important noticeable neighbourhoods. Apple sells software and computers like never before.
It's not completely impossible that another online store here would offer music according to norwegian terms if it became an issue. If France, UK and Norway decide the terms aren't reasonable, I doubt Apple wants to just "give up" on UK and France. They are huge markets.
And one more thing....;) To me, while Apple face the brunt of it, I still don't necessarily see Apple as entirely to blame. There's still the topic of the huge demands and tolls that the record companies demand of Apple, combined maybe with a little of Apples own opportunity searching. I am all for showing the record companies that they can't do whatever they like to us, even if, unfortunately, Apple is hurt a little bit by it in the process.
I would think that the "EULA"s that comes with music CDs with copy protection now, given the Sony Rootkit issue for example, warrants a check by the Consumer Ombud in itself...
Ah, good comment. However, it is quite a natural and logical demand to have all of the EULA available in norwegian, and not just that but good norwegian.
I cannot find it now, but I recall that there was a similar conflict about Microsoft always writing their EULA in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR PARAGRAPHS THAT WENT ON FOR AGES and that was potentially not good practice by norwegian law because it made more than reasonably hard to read.
Language matters to most people in a country. Personally, while I am Mac fangrrl, I find it unforgiveable of Apple to not have their terms and agreements completely and fully translated.
Slashdot Mirror
Large ISP I know the internals of. One of the too many bosses complained: "The ideal scenario would be if our customers paid for our products and services regardless of whether they could get them to work" This company also had a concept of customer service being run as a company within an enterprise and selling their service, support, to another company that dealt with the products. This could lead to such interesting scenarios as Product developers refusing to tell tech support about features of product because they were afraid tech support would implement a competing product and sell it cheaper.. Everything tech support did was about costs, or more exactly, how to bring costs down. Support people were measured on number of calls answered, not solved. A person who replied to 50 mails during a shift even though his answers were pointless and caused customers to resubmit the question got a reward in the form of vacation while seniors in department were forced to work a weekend dealing with the aftermath, although they could get Product company to pay a compensation for upset customers issues.
I'm no law person, but isn't the fact that Google is not intended to presume to be the hosting/copyright owner of sites it links to, but instead a catalogue of information of where to go to find information, mean that google isn't as bad as this company was in this case?
It's one thing to make a "yellow pages" (i.e. Google) and another to make someone elses content appear to be your own?
Google doesn't presume to offer a range of services and have you call them so they'll send you a plumber. They just point to the plumber and inform you of it. They might accidentally make too much information about how to do something available so you could get things done without having to call the plumber, but there was no intent...?
Whereas the company in TA pretended they were the owner of the content, and also refused to cooperate with the legal owners?
I find riding into the sunset a romantic idea though... ;)
They are part of the "Geek Toolbox", a set of exchanges that two geeks must pass in order to be allowed to stay around uncontested I believe. It is part of the secret codes that belongs to their society.
[sarcasm] But.. but... Microsoft freed us from the eeeeevil IBeMpire! We must worship them for being the rebels they are and defending us from IBM vendor lock-in. If it wasn't for them, we'd only have 10 computers in the world. [/sarcasm]
;)
--
No OS should need less than 640Mb of RAM
Vista defrags in the background on idle according to this: http://winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5365.asp
There were outbursts here demanding Nokia recall one of their phone models after it burst into flames and hurt a young girls hand. Nokia refused and said they'd investigate instead, which caused some minor outrage about how they put income over safety.
Then it turned out that people were buying 3rd party batteries in the models that exploded, all bought at the same place. 6 phones exploded, each with a non-Nokia battery.
1) I can understand their wish to work overtime in offpeak seasons. Where I worked it was popular to work overtime during christmas, summer and easter, and its still popular to work overtime on weekends because there's less stress then.
2) This is bad. This implies that its difficult to get from the work place where they also seem to live, and to the town/city/entertainment facilities nearby. Where I worked, all cantinas were closed during weekends, and since the building is smack in a total industry area, there were no cafes, resturrants or anything nearby or that was open. I only had to or volunteered to work weekends occasionally. If I had had to live there, I'd gone crazy, or probably lived at work.
That said, the previous poster is just flamebaiting. And accusing whoever moded him for being "ghey" tells me a lot about his maturity.
We get many polish workers here who wants to work and european companies who think profits have abused them strongly, even to the level of beyond not giving them good pay even not granting them the level of security they should have (not providing helmets or appropriate tools on construction projects, not paying them until after their work contract runs out (and sometimes not even then *) making them effective prisoners in a country with a language they don't understand.
* a spanish company here won a bid on a bridge project for the state. When the norwegian labour authority investigated the workplace after tips from concerned union workers in the trade, and found a number of labour law violations, the spanish company declared itself bankrupt, stranding the polish workers with no pay after 6 weeks of work and disappeared
People with long commute who work even 10 hours a day loose a lot of time they would have or should have preferred to spend with family and children or friends.
I grew up on a farm. You don't necessarily "work" those hours from sun up to sun down. You take all the pauses you like, you work at your own tempo, its your home (usually) and work place in one, and most of the work is not very intensive or concentration demanding. After a full day there, I've never been thoroughly exhausted.
I have also until last month worked in a callcenter where you're measured on how many and how long breaks you take, and I don't take many breaks (I'm terrible at it), we can log on to other queues if ours has low pressure, and we're expected to mulitask by answering customer email while talking to the customers (ideally) or between customers. After a workday there, I'm extremely exhausted and have had little energy left for private things. Working out has become a chore when I work late shifts which in itself is a bad circle.
My point is that there is a difference between what kind of work you do and even between people how much of a kind they can endure with full concentration for long periods of time.
Would you like to fly if you knew your pilot had worked 80 hours already this week? I would not.
I do testing and customer service guides for Mac, recreate customer issues etc. Dualbooting between OS X 10.3 and 10.4 on a Powerbook. So its not just PCs ;)
Yes, I have images to recreate the mac, but rebooting quickly into either OS to test/fix something or to make a screenshot is practical.
You could always go there from another computer.. ;)
I have to strongly disagree that .Net, IIS 7, WinFX and UAC are the major selling points. I attended a Microsoft IT Professional launch event. I did not leave that presentation with a feeling that MS is neglecting the business market at all. Rather the opposite. a ult.mspx
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/def
Yes, you have more versions for consumers than you have for business, but how many versions for businesses do you need. And Windows Ultimate contains everything of both versions. Its not unlikely that some businesses would choose that version if they need the bells, but most businesses want to turn off stuff not related to work.
Vista is released in 2 versions for business that sort of redo how they've done things but still is similar. Vista Business is like Windows2000 Pro/XP Pro in a business enviroment.0 6/02-26WinVistaProductsPR.mspx
The other, Vista Enterprise, is new as such but its really just the volume licence version of 2K/XP Pro with MUI built in (and not just as an extra), hardware encryption support and simplified deployment. Three important features they mention: Disk encryption, Virtual PC Express is just a limited edition of Virtual PC that allows you to run only one session at once and finally Unix subsystem built into it. You could get these features before from 3rd parties or as additional investments.
Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb
With all due respect, Office2007 is also a major product for Microsoft and it doesn't look even remotely like its going to be a failure. The Public Beta is very promising. Now Vista still can get speed optimising. From an IT tech level, its WIM deployment format, WinPE, .Net and its development infrastructure looks really promising as well, so I doubt Vista will bomb that tremendously.
(And I love OS X...) ;)
What about Lewis Black?
Officeline operate a store on Aker Brygge. A huge open shop with stands where you can walk around and a "genius bar" in the style of the Apple Retail stores in the US. Their shop employees have always been really helpful and supporting and knowledgeable, and their prices have improved. I think Officeline today isn't what they were just 2-3 years ago. Also, I dropped by Eplehuset to ask some questions and the employee I met didn't know much of anything.
Other times I have been there they have known. It depend on who you ask there too.
I think that can be true of many shops that unfortunately, to some extent, you can end up asking the wrong person on the wrong day. But I can't really say I have had worse experiences at Officeline than Eplehuset. I think both in general have been helpful and supportive. Sometimes not so much, but mostly good.
It's however true that Officeline is more expensive than Eplehuset, but my experience is that if you want something that isn't usually carried, Officeline are better at getting it. Eplehuset tend to carry what they're sure most people will buy and be hesitant to do special orders. Officeline will go that extra step and help you order something weird and unusual.
It's taken in good humour. :) We may not always be eloquent and nice about americans either in informal situations, without actually meaning something with it. And his/her line was kind of funny. ;)
I believe its actually swedish?
I fail to see how you can't make terms of transfer of song rights or similar part of the initial agreement the customer goes into buying the song? Why do you need to reserve the right to potentially declare that the customer cannot enjoy the product in the future? And isn't there already copyright regulations in place that prohibit people from using artistic work inappropriately that already cover this?
The concern isn't really about people using the songs in a "bad way" (or I might be completely misunderstanding what you meant here, if so I apologise), but what we are actually concerned about is that Apple reserve the right to say "As of this moment, you now owe us $1 for each of the songs you already purchased" or "We decided its no longer interesting to be in norway so we'll turn our server off. Your music won't work anymore as of now, whether you made backups of it or not."
What about the insane real estate expenses they might have? ;) At least we have some competition in Oslo now. I doubt Officeline can continue as they have, but then they also sell a lot to companies who are not always all that concerned with the price depending on service agreements, support agreements etc.
Aftenposten seems to try to work with the Norwegian Tourist board... somewhat. ;) (www.visitnorway.com)
You can always read www.norwegianpost.com who are slightly better. :)
For me, the price have never been that grossly different. But that might also be the weak dollar. ;)
Rather have the law and our rights on our side than Apple Music Store, even though I've spent a good 4 Gb of money on it by now and I love Macs.
Apple won't give up on norway though. Their partners are not doing at all bad, there's just opened 2 new stores in Oslo, in very important noticeable neighbourhoods. Apple sells software and computers like never before.
It's not completely impossible that another online store here would offer music according to norwegian terms if it became an issue. If France, UK and Norway decide the terms aren't reasonable, I doubt Apple wants to just "give up" on UK and France. They are huge markets.
And one more thing.... ;) To me, while Apple face the brunt of it, I still don't necessarily see Apple as entirely to blame. There's still the topic of the huge demands and tolls that the record companies demand of Apple, combined maybe with a little of Apples own opportunity searching. I am all for showing the record companies that they can't do whatever they like to us, even if, unfortunately, Apple is hurt a little bit by it in the process.
I would think that the "EULA"s that comes with music CDs with copy protection now, given the Sony Rootkit issue for example, warrants a check by the Consumer Ombud in itself...
Ah, good comment. However, it is quite a natural and logical demand to have all of the EULA available in norwegian, and not just that but good norwegian.
I cannot find it now, but I recall that there was a similar conflict about Microsoft always writing their EULA in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR PARAGRAPHS THAT WENT ON FOR AGES and that was potentially not good practice by norwegian law because it made more than reasonably hard to read.
Language matters to most people in a country. Personally, while I am Mac fangrrl, I find it unforgiveable of Apple to not have their terms and agreements completely and fully translated.