I have found the BBB to be extremely useful. One thing to keep in mind is that they are local organizations & some are as bad as you claim, but many are much better. Warrantech and MicroCenter are both members. Warrantech actually seems to resolve complaints brought against them. While making a claim with the BBB shouldn't be the only action made, there's little reason not to.
I will say that the grandparent's suggestion to make this a threat is far too conservative. Poster has already been screwed around with & he should just complain now.
Finally, the advice to contact the legal department is very risky. Sometimes it works & works well. Many times, the legal department gets quite upset that you contacted them directly & quickly discover that you know absolutely nothing about law. I have seen people give up or end up getting nowhere after calling the legal dept. & being told about some legalese that invalidated the contract. In one case, a person was even told that complaining to the people he complained to invalidated the agreement. In short, lawyers are smart & can be shadier than others in the comapany.
I don't want to discourage people from contacting legal departments when that is what is needed--I have seen it work. But I have seen the BBB/FTC/attorney general/planetfeedback work much easier, quicker, and more consistently.
So far, I've gotten them to agree to give me 1200 bucks store credit, which is still 500 bucks shy of the purchase price. Is it worth fighting them for the last 500 bucks? Does anyone have success stories or tips for this situation? Should I just take the 1200 and be happy I got that much?"
You should fight for the $500, as you can do it with little effort very effectively. Here's what you do, regardless of what company is trying to screw you:
Dig out all paperwork--in this case the original warranty and receipt for the laptop. Also photocopy everything you mail off. If the warranty company answers emails and faxes, use these methods for rapid communication with some amount of papertrail. If not, call them. But log all phone calls & followup with letters. Also cc microcenter on everything. Unhappy customers might mean they lose their contract with microcenter, which they don't want! Hopefully you've done this, as it seems like you're not getting anywhere with them.
Because of this, you should start contacting consumer advocates. This is typically free, aside from postage & quite effective. File complaints against both Microcenter and the warranty company. File complaints with the BBB and the FTC. You should use the local BBB of both companies. Also use a service such as planetfeedback.com to send letters to reps at both companies who might actually have the power and the willingness to fix this for you. These are often addressed to the CEO & if not, you can always write to the CEO yourself. Also contact the attorney general of the state these companies are headquartered in. If applicable, also the US Postal Inspector. Sometimes states also have a Department of Consumer Affairs.
You can reuse your complaint letters for most of these. In the first paragrah, summarize your complaint & what resolution you want. In subsequent paragraphs, give a detailed history with names & dates. In the final paragraph, say again what it is you want. Try to make this about a page. Say that you have supporting paperwork & perhaps include the original warranty, as that seems to be the most relevant piece. But don't flood anyone with papers. Also try to be civil, but firm.
Submit these on the same day & wait about two weeks. You should start to see results in your favor.
I have almost always had success at this point with complaints on behalf of myself, my family, or friends. If not, you do have more options. You can contact the media if you are savvy or even setup your own microcentersucks.com website. This is typically cheap & these businesses do not want to lose business because of a squeaky wheel. This slashdot post is actually a decent start. If you have a friend who is a lawyer, have him send additional correspondance on his letterhead.
If none of this works, go to small claims court. This will cost a filing fee, but you will most likely win & be awarded the money they owe you plus the filing fee you paid. Many companies won't fight a small claim. Those that do in cases like these lose.
Perhaps the most important thing that all of these do is that they start or continue a trail of complaints about shady companies. Microcenter may choose to use a less shady warranty administrator or customers who see complaints to both Microcenter and the warranty administrator will think twice before getting the extended warranty. If you don't do it for the $500, do it for the rest of us!
You have often commented on windows being the right economic choice. You have argued that the support costs are lower and better than through companies like RedHat or SUSE. This is a tech-oriented audience, so I think we want to know how, if at all, you think that Windows is technologically superior to Linux?
It is right that geeks tend to worship the "coolness/utility" factor at the expense of making good business decisions. However, the calculator business HP had was profitable. It is a valid question as to whether that would stay that way, as you point out: TI and PDAs could have cut into this heavily. But TI didn't have a monopoly on the market until Carly gave it to them. Despite the popularity of PDAs (and, indeed, many calculator-fans also happen to be early adopters), the calculator isn't dead either. Now people suspect that the cell phone business is going to continue to eat at PDA sales. But few are getting out of that business. Even if they were, a cell is even less suitable as a calculator than a PDA. In short, it was not for business reasons Carly made her decision.
Personally, I think she left a business that she personally didn't understand (professional research-grade electronics) to one she thought she did (consumer-level computer equipment). The truth was she didn't understand either the culture of HP or what the market wanted from HP.
The most crippling evidence that killing the calc line was a bad decision was that they are now back in the business! I do not know how much it cost them to change their minds. Obviously if HP shared your confidence that it was a good decision to abandon the calc-line, they would have stayed out.
I know they recently reaped a lot of money on the 33s, which was the only RPN calculator in production approved on various engineering exams. It was actually late to market & they ran out of stock, so they could have done better. Niche? perhaps. But a profitable niche.
Star Trek has been kept running on the popularity of the mythos, of the franchise. It has always been self-sustaining, through its own quality.
Not really--there have often been problems with ratings. The original series was saved through a letter-writing campaign. I see this as fans putting their money where their mouths were.
I'd rather see them stick to standards than implement hacks for every website's broken HTML.
Which standards do they not support which other browsers do? They have the resources to do more than just implement those.
A browser still needs to be flexible in what it renders. Perhaps there should be an extension to show how (in)valid the HTML on the page is, but the browser should accept malformed HTML. Particularly popular malformed HTML. This feature should not be confused with giving permission to sites to write poor HTML. When your HTML is poor, you have less of an idea of what it will look like on everyone else's browser, which is not a good thing.
Gnucash may be nifty, but try having a wide range of accounts in it, including your 401k/403b, credit cards, investment, and so on
I have about a half dozen CD accounts, a ROTH IRA account, two non-IRA brokerage accounts, two checking accounts, three credit card accounts, a half-dozen savings bonds I'm tracking, a student loan account and two credit union accounts in mine. I also have various accounts for what money I've borrowed/lended to specific people & of course the various types of income/expense accounts.
and have the ability to import all of it automagically from your financial institution.
Contrary to popular belief, MS Money/Quicken don't do this for all institutions either. I have never been a fan of automagic import--what's the point of tracking your finances if you can't catch bank screwups? An ego-trip of seeing your net worth? People did reconcile statments before the internet! In any case, GnuCash groks QIF and OFX and can download stock quotes. It doesn't have background banking for most banks, but if this is all you care about, why not use a free (as in beer) consolidation service such as yodlee?
Because it supports a standard that banks are only starting to open up to?
False. It supports ofx and qif, which is exactly what Quicken and Money use. You may be thinking of HBCI, which is used in Europe & not used much in the U.S. Or you may be thinking of the fact that banks don't share how to automatically retrieve statements with the gnucash developers, which is true.
It is a perfect solution for the *nix-using people. It has a lot of gnome dependencies & does not work well on the platforms which people buy Quicken on. But then the question is why not some other F/OSS program, such as jGnash?
It's so difficult to integrate with online banking?
Automatic background statement downloads typically don't work in the US because banks don't share the URLs where these come from. Those in Europe have a little more luck with HBCI. However, I don't do automatic downloads. I always record transactions as they occur (so I can double-check the bank--they DO make mistakes) & it is easy enough to either mark each transaction as verified when I get my statement or to manually download a QIF from my bank & dump it in. Both GnuCash and jGnash support QIF.
People on most platforms might want to try jGnash. This is Free/Open Source Software that works on any platform with java. I haven't used it, but it is somewhat patterned off of GnuCash, which I am a happy user of & which others have asked about in this forum and on others. (Unfortunately, for all practical purposes, GnuCash is Linux/BSD-only, but will run under OS X and possibly even windows if you work at it.) The advantages of using something like jGnash are:
It costs nothing (though you can usually get Money/Quicken Free After Rebate)[
It is cross-platform
It will import QIFs
It uses double-entry accounting (though this might take some time getting used to)
No features expire
All upgrades will also be free & occur more frequently than once a year if needed.
Upgrades haven't broken import/export from old files from older versions
Diadvantages
Somewhat new (1.0 release was in 2002)
Missing some features which can be found in commercial software (some of which can be added, some of which won't be)
This is not an option if you want to retain all of your features. MS Money only lets you perform online banking for two years:
First there is a new Internet Services Policy you must agree to. It starts out with "Microsoft® Money 2005 includes up to two (2) years of Internet-based Services. You will be able to use the Internet-based Services in Microsoft Money 2005 for a period of two (2) years from installation of the product or until September 1, 2007, whichever is earlier."
**** In two years you can not perform online banking!!!
You do often get a tax deduction, but the real reason to do it is that it is such a pleasure to pay for something that is free. The developers appreciate it (or, at least, I have when people have given me a token). The money and equipment I have given has usually cost less than what it would take to buy comparable commercial software, but I feel like I've gotten much more in return.
In many distros it is, actually. In my distro, you have to add your own runtimes. So, you set something like:slapd_flags='-h "ldapi://%2fvar%2frun%2fopenldap%2fldapi/ ldaps:///"'rather than:slapd_flags='-h "ldapi://%2fvar%2frun%2fopenldap%2fldapi/ ldap:///"' It is equivalently difficult to have it off or on when you install & neither are defaults.
It is certainly significantly easier to turn it on than it is to configure the directory (and this kludgey-aspect of using LDAP as authentication is a much more significant criticism than remarking on insecurity.)
Besides, LDAP via SSL protects the login session only. It does not provide any session keys that the application client and server can then use to protect their own conversations. Kerberos does do that.
Fair enough. You can use Kerberos with LDAP too. It is easy-enough to setup, but it isn't "shipped with," so certainly isn't "enabled by default."
Not only that but you can use two-factor auth (securID and so on) or PKI to replace some or all of the logins
You can easily do the same kind of thing with PAM and, as far as I can tell, PAM has more plugins & it is easier to write such plugins.
and any kerberised apps will still have cryptographic protection for their sessions.
This is actually the big caveat--a lot of apps aren't kerberised (and I would even say most that can be aren't by default), which means all bets are off for client-server communication beyond the login session anyway.
you've got it backwards with the exploits. If you look at the dates when Microsoft releases a major security update and when a worm/virus begins to exploit it (Blaster is a good example), you'll see that the worms come a few days after the patch. The most likely scenario is that virus writers reverse engineer the patch to figure out the problem and exploit it.
This is an interesting counterexample/theory. I was thinking of things like the known cryptographic weaknesses in Office, PPTP, etc. which still aren't patched. There have also been a lot of virii/worms where there was no patch. Unfortunately, due to lack of disclosure, it is often difficult to see when MS discovers some vulnerabilities. When such holes have been discovered by independent researches & made public, MS has often downplayed the threat & refused to patch. This is unheard of in F/OSS.
Linux:...Yes, it gets fixed soon after, but you still have the exploit before the patch.
Sometimes. But I've read a lot of bugzilla posts about gaping security holes that are fixed ASAP. Sometimes the exploits take as long or longer to write than the fix. I suppose this may happen in MS at times, but with their public refusal to patch some things, I am pessimestic.
A Windows machine with automatic download/installation of updates, that is reboot when its supposed to (yes, another fault that adds to the problem of users not updating when they should) has a tiny chance of being exploited - no more or less than a patched Linux box.
Perhaps now--I really don't know. Of all of the studies of out-of-the-box lifetime-before-exploited studies I've seen, Windows has lost. I would argue that it is this kind of out-of-the-box security that we should shoot for. With automatic updates & the security center of SP2, I do grant that MS has begun to be more intelligent about this.
If they could do things like fix the Administrator-by-default problem (and, worse, the fact that many programs/dlls are run with escalated privs), turn off a lot of unneeded services, and improve their firewall, I'd be much more willing to agree with you that it wasn't significantly worse than most *nix boxes.
I just think MS isn't yet in the position to criticize Linux on this front. Perhaps with Longhorn or some other update, they can say that the insecurity of windows is a myth. I don't think they can make that claim now.
If they were running XP Pro, I think they should still be able to "take ownership" of it & then change permissions. If they were running XP Home, I know you actually have to boot into safe-mode to handle this.
You can actually do some very strange things with ACLs under Linux too.
but I really don't think it is as good (and certainly no better than) PAM. Well, yes it is.
The whole point of PAM is that you can plugin the authentication mechanisms you want for each individual service that supports it. You can force checks against libcrypt to ensure that users of a specific service have better passwords than some service you care less about. You can authenticate to different LDAP servers or only the local machine, depending on the service. My (admittedly limited) experience with ActiveDirectory is that it just doesn't have this flexibility that is so easy to use.
I know you can run as a non-Administrator. I do & I force those on machines I manage to do as well. I also agree that the work needed to not run as Administrator is the fault of applications developers. However, when you install windows, your account is automatically an Administrator. Compare this to OS X or any commercial *nix where the first task during a default install is usually to create a non-root account. Applications developers should write better installers (the fault normally lies in the fact that they don't give read/execute privs to non-admins), but they don't feel accountable because most windows users DO run as Administrators, in part because that is what is default.
Any OS/app you install should have a reasonably secure config out of the box. You don't get that with Windows.
Linux is not ready for mission-critical computing. There are fundamental things missing. For example, there is no single development environment for Linux as there is for Microsoft, neither is there a single sign-on system.
Strange--my LDAP server seems to be doing me fine. And with Samba serving as a PDC, even windows users are authenticated to the same system. Indeed, I think authentication under *nix is a HUGE advantage. PAM doesn't exist on windows. I can say exactly what authentication methods are used for which servers & have consistent user/pass for many of them. You can KIND of do this with ActiveDirectory & other "enterprise-level" features, but I really don't think it is as good (and certainly no better than) PAM.
Linux is not ready for mission-critical computing. There are fundamental things missing. For example, there is no single development environment for Linux as there is for Microsoft
What does this mean? Sure, there is Anjuta, KDevelop, Eclipse, GNU/X-Emacs, etc. But there are a ton of development environments on windows too. Is this supposed to be the age-old KDE/gnome debate?
If so, isn't a huge advantage of using ANY *nix in production that you don't have to have the overhead of running a graphical desktop environment if you don't need to?
"In Microsoft's world customers are confidant that we take responsibility. They know that they will get their upgrades and patches."
And Linux users get patches from their distros (though the original source might be further upstream). The key that McGrath misses is that many F/OSS projects try to make smart decisions in advance & embrace them. MS still has everyone running as Administrator. Another important thing is to fix known bugs before there is an exploit. MS's track record on either of these two points isn't exactly great.
And the radio drama or the books on tape are really the greatest incarnations of the series. Douglas Adams really had a very good grasp of how things should sound & there is actually quite a bit of richness that you can get from listening to it. His live performances of the material were particularly great.
Slashdot Mirror
I have found the BBB to be extremely useful. One thing to keep in mind is that they are local organizations & some are as bad as you claim, but many are much better. Warrantech and MicroCenter are both members. Warrantech actually seems to resolve complaints brought against them. While making a claim with the BBB shouldn't be the only action made, there's little reason not to.
I will say that the grandparent's suggestion to make this a threat is far too conservative. Poster has already been screwed around with & he should just complain now.
Finally, the advice to contact the legal department is very risky. Sometimes it works & works well. Many times, the legal department gets quite upset that you contacted them directly & quickly discover that you know absolutely nothing about law. I have seen people give up or end up getting nowhere after calling the legal dept. & being told about some legalese that invalidated the contract. In one case, a person was even told that complaining to the people he complained to invalidated the agreement. In short, lawyers are smart & can be shadier than others in the comapany.
I don't want to discourage people from contacting legal departments when that is what is needed--I have seen it work. But I have seen the BBB/FTC/attorney general/planetfeedback work much easier, quicker, and more consistently.
Dig out all paperwork--in this case the original warranty and receipt for the laptop. Also photocopy everything you mail off. If the warranty company answers emails and faxes, use these methods for rapid communication with some amount of papertrail. If not, call them. But log all phone calls & followup with letters. Also cc microcenter on everything. Unhappy customers might mean they lose their contract with microcenter, which they don't want! Hopefully you've done this, as it seems like you're not getting anywhere with them.
Because of this, you should start contacting consumer advocates. This is typically free, aside from postage & quite effective. File complaints against both Microcenter and the warranty company. File complaints with the BBB and the FTC. You should use the local BBB of both companies. Also use a service such as planetfeedback.com to send letters to reps at both companies who might actually have the power and the willingness to fix this for you. These are often addressed to the CEO & if not, you can always write to the CEO yourself. Also contact the attorney general of the state these companies are headquartered in. If applicable, also the US Postal Inspector. Sometimes states also have a Department of Consumer Affairs.
You can reuse your complaint letters for most of these. In the first paragrah, summarize your complaint & what resolution you want. In subsequent paragraphs, give a detailed history with names & dates. In the final paragraph, say again what it is you want. Try to make this about a page. Say that you have supporting paperwork & perhaps include the original warranty, as that seems to be the most relevant piece. But don't flood anyone with papers. Also try to be civil, but firm.
Submit these on the same day & wait about two weeks. You should start to see results in your favor.
I have almost always had success at this point with complaints on behalf of myself, my family, or friends. If not, you do have more options. You can contact the media if you are savvy or even setup your own microcentersucks.com website. This is typically cheap & these businesses do not want to lose business because of a squeaky wheel. This slashdot post is actually a decent start. If you have a friend who is a lawyer, have him send additional correspondance on his letterhead.
If none of this works, go to small claims court. This will cost a filing fee, but you will most likely win & be awarded the money they owe you plus the filing fee you paid. Many companies won't fight a small claim. Those that do in cases like these lose.
Perhaps the most important thing that all of these do is that they start or continue a trail of complaints about shady companies. Microcenter may choose to use a less shady warranty administrator or customers who see complaints to both Microcenter and the warranty administrator will think twice before getting the extended warranty. If you don't do it for the $500, do it for the rest of us!
You have often commented on windows being the right economic choice. You have argued that the support costs are lower and better than through companies like RedHat or SUSE. This is a tech-oriented audience, so I think we want to know how, if at all, you think that Windows is technologically superior to Linux?
It is right that geeks tend to worship the "coolness/utility" factor at the expense of making good business decisions. However, the calculator business HP had was profitable. It is a valid question as to whether that would stay that way, as you point out: TI and PDAs could have cut into this heavily. But TI didn't have a monopoly on the market until Carly gave it to them. Despite the popularity of PDAs (and, indeed, many calculator-fans also happen to be early adopters), the calculator isn't dead either. Now people suspect that the cell phone business is going to continue to eat at PDA sales. But few are getting out of that business. Even if they were, a cell is even less suitable as a calculator than a PDA. In short, it was not for business reasons Carly made her decision.
Personally, I think she left a business that she personally didn't understand (professional research-grade electronics) to one she thought she did (consumer-level computer equipment). The truth was she didn't understand either the culture of HP or what the market wanted from HP.
The most crippling evidence that killing the calc line was a bad decision was that they are now back in the business! I do not know how much it cost them to change their minds. Obviously if HP shared your confidence that it was a good decision to abandon the calc-line, they would have stayed out.
I know they recently reaped a lot of money on the 33s, which was the only RPN calculator in production approved on various engineering exams. It was actually late to market & they ran out of stock, so they could have done better. Niche? perhaps. But a profitable niche.
They use LibOFX, available under the GPL
This brings back memories
A browser still needs to be flexible in what it renders. Perhaps there should be an extension to show how (in)valid the HTML on the page is, but the browser should accept malformed HTML. Particularly popular malformed HTML. This feature should not be confused with giving permission to sites to write poor HTML. When your HTML is poor, you have less of an idea of what it will look like on everyone else's browser, which is not a good thing.
- It costs nothing (though you can usually get Money/Quicken Free After Rebate)[
- It is cross-platform
- It will import QIFs
- It uses double-entry accounting (though this might take some time getting used to)
- No features expire
- All upgrades will also be free & occur more frequently than once a year if needed.
- Upgrades haven't broken import/export from old files from older versions
DiadvantagesA-A-P, led by Bram Moolenaar (of vim fame) looks promising too.
I know this is a joke, but I've actually gotten into the habit of paying for open source.
You do often get a tax deduction, but the real reason to do it is that it is such a pleasure to pay for something that is free. The developers appreciate it (or, at least, I have when people have given me a token). The money and equipment I have given has usually cost less than what it would take to buy comparable commercial software, but I feel like I've gotten much more in return.
It is equivalently difficult to have it off or on when you install & neither are defaults.
It is certainly significantly easier to turn it on than it is to configure the directory (and this kludgey-aspect of using LDAP as authentication is a much more significant criticism than remarking on insecurity.)Fair enough. You can use Kerberos with LDAP too. It is easy-enough to setup, but it isn't "shipped with," so certainly isn't "enabled by default."You can easily do the same kind of thing with PAM and, as far as I can tell, PAM has more plugins & it is easier to write such plugins.This is actually the big caveat--a lot of apps aren't kerberised (and I would even say most that can be aren't by default), which means all bets are off for client-server communication beyond the login session anyway.
If they could do things like fix the Administrator-by-default problem (and, worse, the fact that many programs/dlls are run with escalated privs), turn off a lot of unneeded services, and improve their firewall, I'd be much more willing to agree with you that it wasn't significantly worse than most *nix boxes.
I just think MS isn't yet in the position to criticize Linux on this front. Perhaps with Longhorn or some other update, they can say that the insecurity of windows is a myth. I don't think they can make that claim now.
If they were running XP Pro, I think they should still be able to "take ownership" of it & then change permissions. If they were running XP Home, I know you actually have to boot into safe-mode to handle this.
You can actually do some very strange things with ACLs under Linux too.
I know you can run as a non-Administrator. I do & I force those on machines I manage to do as well. I also agree that the work needed to not run as Administrator is the fault of applications developers. However, when you install windows, your account is automatically an Administrator. Compare this to OS X or any commercial *nix where the first task during a default install is usually to create a non-root account. Applications developers should write better installers (the fault normally lies in the fact that they don't give read/execute privs to non-admins), but they don't feel accountable because most windows users DO run as Administrators, in part because that is what is default.
Any OS/app you install should have a reasonably secure config out of the box. You don't get that with Windows.
If so, isn't a huge advantage of using ANY *nix in production that you don't have to have the overhead of running a graphical desktop environment if you don't need to?
And the radio drama or the books on tape are really the greatest incarnations of the series. Douglas Adams really had a very good grasp of how things should sound & there is actually quite a bit of richness that you can get from listening to it. His live performances of the material were particularly great.