That his company's policies lost him a $600+ sale on a new stereo.
My wife had purchased a DVD for me and it was defective (it was actaully physically damaged); we were unable to find the receipt, but decided to take it back anyways.
Far from just telling us that we had to have the receipt (in order to exchange for the exact same item, the "customer service" agent I spoke to explained to us that they had a lot of problems with theft and people trying to return items that had been stolen without a receipt. She went on to explain that as I didn't have a receipt, she had to assume I had stolen this disc and thus was not able to exchange it for an identical replacement.
We drove straight over to Circuit City and purchased our stereo. Larry, a hint for you - calling your customers thieves does NOT endear you to them. Just ask RIAA.
I subscribe to LJ and have purchased Linux Format locally on several occasions - I find the tutorials in LF tend to be much more relevant to the things I use Linux for.
LJ is a good magazine, don't get me wrong (if it wasn't, I wouldn't subscribe), but I don't think the two bear an apples-to-apples comparison because they target different users.
ARRL relates specifically to amateur radio, so it wouldn't get involved in something involving commercial spectrum space. Causing harmful interference (in any part of the spectrum) is against FCC rules at a minimum and against the law at the maximum. As others have pointed out, this isn't "pirate radio", but merely causing interference with commercial radio stations.
Causing harmful interference even on a small scale can get you into trouble with the FCC if someone gets upset enough about it, though. There was an amateur radio repeater in the Minneapolis area that was receiving harmful interference from some sort of RF-enabled price scanner (probably a device for taking inventory) at a Walgreens down the street from the repeater site, and after repeated attempts to have the problem dealt with, the local amateurs had to get the FCC involved, and they cited Walgreens for not fixing the problem.
The problem did ultimately get fixed, but not until the FCC were involved in the problem.
Oh, it costs me, believe me, it costs. A lot less time with my family, a lot of time eating not-so-good airline food, and a lot of time in hotel rooms.
I also don't have to hunt for parking, though - just drop the rental car off everywhere except my home airport, and there I get dropped off rather than leave my car there.
Yep, and I've done it on more than one occasion. I do training, and sometimes they schedule my flight for just after the end of class on the last day of class rather than the next morning.
Now, as much as I fly (and on a single airline at that), I do get priority access to security lines in many airports already, so that perhaps is a difference.
Have done that at DFW - in fact, have been to DFW about 4 times in the last 18 months. I spend about 26 weeks a year on the road in lots of different cities.
I do generally try in cities other than my home city to be there about 60 to 90 minutes ahead of the flight, just in case there's a problem. Only times I've missed a flight was in Boston - got stuck in traffic for almost 2 hours due to construction, and once in SLC where I had the time of the flight wrong.
Maybe even more ironically, saving a half hour at an airport would be impossible for me - you have to check in at the kiosks 30 minutes before the flight departs, boarding starts 30 minutes before, and as I recall, you have to be on the plane 10 minutes prior to departure at most airports for domestic travel in the US.
Given that I get to the airport 35-40 minutes ahead of the flight's departure time and make it through security in a comfortable amount of time (at least at SLC airport, but most others aren't much different), saving 30 minutes isn't really possible in my experience.
Re:why ham radio isn't popular
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I have used ham radio quite a lot - I've been licensed for over 10 years. Sounds like you're the one who needs to get a grip, not all amateur radio operators bitch about Clinton and Reno, in fact, the vast majority of them aren't even in the US.
Re:Interesting coincidence (to me at least)
on
Wired on McBride
·
· Score: 1
Is it Senator Hollings, or Senator Hatch to whom you refer? Hatch has been in the news recently with his copyright modification bill that would effectively reverse the Sony Betamax suit and remove fair use from consumers' reach.
Re:why ham radio isn't popular
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 1
If that's what you think amateur radio is all about, then clearly you don't understand it at all. So please stop dumping on a hobby you know nothing about.
Amateur radio is about radio technology - its uses and implementations. A lot of good comes out of the hobby. Thousands of lives are saved every year by storm chasers - something I used to do years ago living on the north edge of tornado alley. Amateur weather spotters are trained to spot tornado formation well before the funnel actually touches down, and the radio network that passes that information back to NOAA provides a life-saving service by allowing warning sirens to sound well before they might otherwise have been noticed. Radar picks up this type of meteorological activity, sure, but generally a lot later than a trained spotter will recognize the symptoms.
Amateur radio networks are also used a lot in Search & Rescue operations, providing critical communications and coordination of S&R teams involved in large scale searches in the middle of nowhere - no cell phone coverage, no internet. A good 2m radio will provide more than adequate coverage for most search areas.
Sunspots? Sunspots can be a problem, but not on all frequencies. If you knew anything about the principles of radio, you'd know that. Two-way voice medium? Try one-to-many medium, unlike your precious cell phone, which is only a two-way voice medium.
So - are you a troll, or a truth-teller? I guess that depends on whether or not you're willilng to admit that there are aspects to the hobby you didn't know about or perhaps weren't willing to acknowledge. A "truth-teller" would be willing to accept that they could be wrong. A troll will just keep beating the same drum regardless of the information presented.
Persisting in the same view when faced with contradictory information to that view is a form of zealotry.
Re:I'm interested but...
on
Field Day 2004
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You can use it for data - I have used it that way off and on for over 10 years.
Packet radio has been around a long time, in fact, that was my first connectivity to the Internet.
Reverse engineering is quite a bit different than stealing code. For one thing, proper reverse engineering does not involve forcefully taking the code, because it doesn't involve the original code at all - just the end results of what that code does.
Using reverse-engineered technology also has some pretty specific rules involved. If you look at the history of computer-based reverse engineering, look back to the days of Compaq's reverse-engineering of IBM's BIOS. The way they accomplished that was by looking at how IBM's BIOS worked, and then writing up a specification.
Then they passed that specification to developers who had never seen IBM's BIOS and said "Give me something that does what's described in this documentation".
I imagine it'd have been a hell of a lot easier if Compaq had just stolen the IBM BIOS code. True reverse engineering takes a significant amount of time, and shouldn't be confused with theft. When done properly, it's not theft.
Perfect example of how not to do customer service. Get out of sales, you don't entice or encourage or anything. Name calling and insults don't really make you endearing to your potential customer.
You know nothing about where I visit (apart from/.), what I like, what I dislike, yet you presume to know what's of use to me and what's not? That's sad. You think I'm "scared", you have no idea who you're talking about.
If I had had a use for your products, I certainly wouldn't look to you now. You are pompous, arrogant, and presumptious. I don't need a supplier or a vendor like that.
your browser wont work worth crap on the mapserver websites I make.
Cool, tell us what sites they are so we don't waste our time.
They require the features you would disable, which i am using to your benefit
If I enable these features, they make my machine less secure. That's not benefitting me.
not to feed you ads, not to hack you, not to send you viruses.
Not to be rude, but I don't know you. So what assurance do I have that you're not doing things like this? The single biggest problem with the Internet today is that people are too trusting of - well anything and everything. Why should I trust you or your application to behave well on my machine?
the features you disablearen't always the unneeded gps receiver, sometimes they are the damn spark plug wires.
Hardly. The spark plug wires would be the rendering engine - or maybe more appropriately to the metaphor, they're the code that links the engine to the UI.
But I guess you'll never know what you are missing, while you sit there enjoying the site of your tires spinning while getting nowhere.
Why should I care? There's enough content on the web that doesn't require plugins to the browser that I can fill my lifetime surfing and accomplish just what I want. Customer service is not (contrary to popular opinion) delivering content using the latest gee-whiz tool (or toy) on the internet - it's about delivering the content the customers want in a way they can use. If I can't use your site, that's not my problem, that's YOUR problem if you want me as a customer. Don't pretend to be doing me any favors, if I'm the one looking to become one of your customers, I'm the one doing you a favor - and don't you forget that.
Would the ones that promote disabling features really want to go back to the crappy featureless, tool-less, mostly text internet that we had only 7 or 8 years ago?
Add "unbloated" to that and remove "crappy" (just because you don't use Java/Flash/Javascript doesn't mean it's crappy), and your list is complete. I'm there.
There are far, far too many bloated websites out there that engage in very poor design that use animated this and flash that ineffectively.
In general, there is far far too much bloat in applications these days.
Belson, not Adams, as I recall, Ms. Belson did not take Adams' name when they married.
That plus Ed Victor's comment "You nailed it" are the two things that give me hope that this will work. I'll be interested in their comments after they've seen the completed project.
I'd say for calling into the office, the best bet would be to set up a toll free number that goes to the receptionist or (if you don't have one) to a voice response menu that lets you dial an extension.
This can get really expensive for the company - 800 numbers are not cheap to implement.
Well, I think it's quite prudent to consider carefully the history of the company in question - they have a very long and varied history of acquisitions and how they have dealt with those aquired companies over the years has been....shall we say "interesting"?
Given that they have rather suddenly 'seen the light' for open source, it's only prudent to be cautious, especially given their other corporate relationships.
So there you have it....I didn't ask you, and you didn't ask me. So we're even.
When I was in college back in 89-93, we replaced an aging IBM mainframe with some brand new Sun equipment; one of the classes was a database class, and after the 4361 was retired, we put Ingres on SunOS 4.2 for that class.
The thing kept falling over when the CS students would try to work with it - in any given time period, if there were more than 2 or 3 students using it, it would just shrivel up and die.
It was so notorious for this that when we obtained source code to DikuMUD and implemented our own MUD server, we created a character called "Ingres". If you attacked it with any of the vast array of weaponry available, you could never cause any damage. It would never damage back (as it was harmless), but there was one way to kill it:
Actually, with the eDirectory Redistribution Kit, you can get 250,000 user licenses for free for any of the supported platforms. (This is the offer you were referring to, and yes, the RDK is still available)
eDirectory is plumbing, and Novell understands that - the value of eDirectory comes by having:
1. Wide adoption of it as the core of identity management solutions, and
2. Services that effectively leverage eDirectory to provide the value.
Selling eDirectory doesn't make a lot of sense, but providing the services to help (a) implement it effectively, (b) support it effectively, and (c) understand how to implement services that utilize the identity store effectively is where revenue can be generated.
If I purchase the SCO IP license, I can only use their IP in binary format only?
But I can use GPL'ed IP that isn't theirs in source format?
Seems like in order to sell a license, they have to explicitly state - with specificity - what code it is that their license applies to. Isn't that how licensing works, that you have to state what exactly the customer paid for a license to?
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, just after I submitted my post, I thought "along with RIAA suing their customers, there's SCO as well". Interesting connection there.
That his company's policies lost him a $600+ sale on a new stereo.
My wife had purchased a DVD for me and it was defective (it was actaully physically damaged); we were unable to find the receipt, but decided to take it back anyways.
Far from just telling us that we had to have the receipt (in order to exchange for the exact same item, the "customer service" agent I spoke to explained to us that they had a lot of problems with theft and people trying to return items that had been stolen without a receipt. She went on to explain that as I didn't have a receipt, she had to assume I had stolen this disc and thus was not able to exchange it for an identical replacement.
We drove straight over to Circuit City and purchased our stereo. Larry, a hint for you - calling your customers thieves does NOT endear you to them. Just ask RIAA.
Linux Format comes in a DVD edition as well.
I subscribe to LJ and have purchased Linux Format locally on several occasions - I find the tutorials in LF tend to be much more relevant to the things I use Linux for.
LJ is a good magazine, don't get me wrong (if it wasn't, I wouldn't subscribe), but I don't think the two bear an apples-to-apples comparison because they target different users.
ARRL relates specifically to amateur radio, so it wouldn't get involved in something involving commercial spectrum space. Causing harmful interference (in any part of the spectrum) is against FCC rules at a minimum and against the law at the maximum. As others have pointed out, this isn't "pirate radio", but merely causing interference with commercial radio stations.
Causing harmful interference even on a small scale can get you into trouble with the FCC if someone gets upset enough about it, though. There was an amateur radio repeater in the Minneapolis area that was receiving harmful interference from some sort of RF-enabled price scanner (probably a device for taking inventory) at a Walgreens down the street from the repeater site, and after repeated attempts to have the problem dealt with, the local amateurs had to get the FCC involved, and they cited Walgreens for not fixing the problem.
The problem did ultimately get fixed, but not until the FCC were involved in the problem.
Oh, it costs me, believe me, it costs. A lot less time with my family, a lot of time eating not-so-good airline food, and a lot of time in hotel rooms.
I also don't have to hunt for parking, though - just drop the rental car off everywhere except my home airport, and there I get dropped off rather than leave my car there.
Yep, and I've done it on more than one occasion. I do training, and sometimes they schedule my flight for just after the end of class on the last day of class rather than the next morning.
Now, as much as I fly (and on a single airline at that), I do get priority access to security lines in many airports already, so that perhaps is a difference.
Have done that at DFW - in fact, have been to DFW about 4 times in the last 18 months. I spend about 26 weeks a year on the road in lots of different cities.
I do generally try in cities other than my home city to be there about 60 to 90 minutes ahead of the flight, just in case there's a problem. Only times I've missed a flight was in Boston - got stuck in traffic for almost 2 hours due to construction, and once in SLC where I had the time of the flight wrong.
Maybe even more ironically, saving a half hour at an airport would be impossible for me - you have to check in at the kiosks 30 minutes before the flight departs, boarding starts 30 minutes before, and as I recall, you have to be on the plane 10 minutes prior to departure at most airports for domestic travel in the US.
Given that I get to the airport 35-40 minutes ahead of the flight's departure time and make it through security in a comfortable amount of time (at least at SLC airport, but most others aren't much different), saving 30 minutes isn't really possible in my experience.
Actually, I have used ham radio quite a lot - I've been licensed for over 10 years. Sounds like you're the one who needs to get a grip, not all amateur radio operators bitch about Clinton and Reno, in fact, the vast majority of them aren't even in the US.
Is it Senator Hollings, or Senator Hatch to whom you refer? Hatch has been in the news recently with his copyright modification bill that would effectively reverse the Sony Betamax suit and remove fair use from consumers' reach.
If that's what you think amateur radio is all about, then clearly you don't understand it at all. So please stop dumping on a hobby you know nothing about.
Amateur radio is about radio technology - its uses and implementations. A lot of good comes out of the hobby. Thousands of lives are saved every year by storm chasers - something I used to do years ago living on the north edge of tornado alley. Amateur weather spotters are trained to spot tornado formation well before the funnel actually touches down, and the radio network that passes that information back to NOAA provides a life-saving service by allowing warning sirens to sound well before they might otherwise have been noticed. Radar picks up this type of meteorological activity, sure, but generally a lot later than a trained spotter will recognize the symptoms.
Amateur radio networks are also used a lot in Search & Rescue operations, providing critical communications and coordination of S&R teams involved in large scale searches in the middle of nowhere - no cell phone coverage, no internet. A good 2m radio will provide more than adequate coverage for most search areas.
Sunspots? Sunspots can be a problem, but not on all frequencies. If you knew anything about the principles of radio, you'd know that. Two-way voice medium? Try one-to-many medium, unlike your precious cell phone, which is only a two-way voice medium.
So - are you a troll, or a truth-teller? I guess that depends on whether or not you're willilng to admit that there are aspects to the hobby you didn't know about or perhaps weren't willing to acknowledge. A "truth-teller" would be willing to accept that they could be wrong. A troll will just keep beating the same drum regardless of the information presented.
Persisting in the same view when faced with contradictory information to that view is a form of zealotry.
You can use it for data - I have used it that way off and on for over 10 years.
Packet radio has been around a long time, in fact, that was my first connectivity to the Internet.
Reverse engineering is quite a bit different than stealing code. For one thing, proper reverse engineering does not involve forcefully taking the code, because it doesn't involve the original code at all - just the end results of what that code does.
Using reverse-engineered technology also has some pretty specific rules involved. If you look at the history of computer-based reverse engineering, look back to the days of Compaq's reverse-engineering of IBM's BIOS. The way they accomplished that was by looking at how IBM's BIOS worked, and then writing up a specification.
Then they passed that specification to developers who had never seen IBM's BIOS and said "Give me something that does what's described in this documentation".
I imagine it'd have been a hell of a lot easier if Compaq had just stolen the IBM BIOS code. True reverse engineering takes a significant amount of time, and shouldn't be confused with theft. When done properly, it's not theft.
Perfect example of how not to do customer service.
/.), what I like, what I dislike, yet you presume to know what's of use to me and what's not? That's sad. You think I'm "scared", you have no idea who you're talking about.
Get out of sales, you don't entice or encourage or anything. Name calling and insults don't really make you endearing to your potential customer.
You know nothing about where I visit (apart from
If I had had a use for your products, I certainly wouldn't look to you now. You are pompous, arrogant, and presumptious. I don't need a supplier or a vendor like that.
Cool, tell us what sites they are so we don't waste our time.
If I enable these features, they make my machine less secure. That's not benefitting me.
Not to be rude, but I don't know you. So what assurance do I have that you're not doing things like this? The single biggest problem with the Internet today is that people are too trusting of - well anything and everything. Why should I trust you or your application to behave well on my machine?
Hardly. The spark plug wires would be the rendering engine - or maybe more appropriately to the metaphor, they're the code that links the engine to the UI.
Why should I care? There's enough content on the web that doesn't require plugins to the browser that I can fill my lifetime surfing and accomplish just what I want.
Customer service is not (contrary to popular opinion) delivering content using the latest gee-whiz tool (or toy) on the internet - it's about delivering the content the customers want in a way they can use. If I can't use your site, that's not my problem, that's YOUR problem if you want me as a customer. Don't pretend to be doing me any favors, if I'm the one looking to become one of your customers, I'm the one doing you a favor - and don't you forget that.
Add "unbloated" to that and remove "crappy" (just because you don't use Java/Flash/Javascript doesn't mean it's crappy), and your list is complete. I'm there.
There are far, far too many bloated websites out there that engage in very poor design that use animated this and flash that ineffectively.
In general, there is far far too much bloat in applications these days.
Jim
The patent application is two years old, the USPTO approved it less than a week ago.
Belson, not Adams, as I recall, Ms. Belson did not take Adams' name when they married.
That plus Ed Victor's comment "You nailed it" are the two things that give me hope that this will work. I'll be interested in their comments after they've seen the completed project.
I'd say for calling into the office, the best bet would be to set up a toll free number that goes to the receptionist or (if you don't have one) to a voice response menu that lets you dial an extension.
This can get really expensive for the company - 800 numbers are not cheap to implement.
Well, I think it's quite prudent to consider carefully the history of the company in question - they have a very long and varied history of acquisitions and how they have dealt with those aquired companies over the years has been....shall we say "interesting"?
Given that they have rather suddenly 'seen the light' for open source, it's only prudent to be cautious, especially given their other corporate relationships.
So there you have it....I didn't ask you, and you didn't ask me. So we're even.
When I was in college back in 89-93, we replaced an aging IBM mainframe with some brand new Sun equipment; one of the classes was a database class, and after the 4361 was retired, we put Ingres on SunOS 4.2 for that class.
The thing kept falling over when the CS students would try to work with it - in any given time period, if there were more than 2 or 3 students using it, it would just shrivel up and die.
It was so notorious for this that when we obtained source code to DikuMUD and implemented our own MUD server, we created a character called "Ingres". If you attacked it with any of the vast array of weaponry available, you could never cause any damage. It would never damage back (as it was harmless), but there was one way to kill it:
LOOK AT INGRES
Ah, the memories....
I have a couple friends who get 55-60 MPG out of their Prius'. But if you drive well over the speed limit, the efficiency drops dramatically.
Is the one where it disconnects randomly in supposedly good-coverage areas.
Actually, with the eDirectory Redistribution Kit, you can get 250,000 user licenses for free for any of the supported platforms. (This is the offer you were referring to, and yes, the RDK is still available)
eDirectory is plumbing, and Novell understands that - the value of eDirectory comes by having:
1. Wide adoption of it as the core of identity management solutions, and
2. Services that effectively leverage eDirectory to provide the value.
Selling eDirectory doesn't make a lot of sense, but providing the services to help (a) implement it effectively, (b) support it effectively, and (c) understand how to implement services that utilize the identity store effectively is where revenue can be generated.
If I purchase the SCO IP license, I can only use their IP in binary format only?
But I can use GPL'ed IP that isn't theirs in source format?
Seems like in order to sell a license, they have to explicitly state - with specificity - what code it is that their license applies to. Isn't that how licensing works, that you have to state what exactly the customer paid for a license to?