I've run into several big-ish companies that are very "customer friendly".
Maglite. I had one of there flashlights and the switch broke. Looked them up on the web to get a replacement part and they sent it at no charge for the part or shipping.
LL Bean. I've had nothing but great interactions with them as well as others.
Crutchfield. Could they do more to make customers happy.
There are others, but not nearly as many as their should be. I think a lot of companies feel like they are abused by a small percentage of their customers and they feel they have to screw them all to make a profit, which is true when your profits are razor thin (think Wal-Mart and Best Buy).
I had a friend that decided that $100 worth in pennies was the best way to pay a fine to the local government for something he didn't agree with. They instituted mandatory garbage pickup for every home at $10 a month. My friend lived next door to the dump and would just collect his garbage in a barn and take it over to the dump each month for $5. He refused to pay extra money based on the principal of the thing. They fined him for refusing to pay for garbage collection. So, to pay the fine he went and got $100 worth of pennies from the bank and unwrapped all of them. Took them to the local government and poured them out on the collections desk. The lady behind the desk just laughed at him and refused to accept the pennies and he refused to pay with anything but the pennies.
Local sherrif hauls him into court a couple of weeks later for failure to pay. My friend contends he was willing to pay. The judge asks my friend to show him a dollar and has him read the front where it says, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Then he asked my friend to find that phrase on his pennies. It is not there. Judge then ordered my friend to pay the bill (plus court costs of $50) in cash or go to jail. My friend payed the fine plus the court costs in cash.
He then took the pennies back to the bank to get his $100 back and the bank refused to accept them unrolled, so my friend spent the next few days rolling pennies.
Please, please, please, please quit wasting our money on this kind of stuff. Protect the country, build roads, provide for the common good, protect the weak and model the beliefs of our founders (honor, courage, compassion, greatness).
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Do the things you were given the authority to do and leave the rest to us. You are supposed to work for us, not us work for you.
Remember, we the people made you and our founders believed we had the right to change you.
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
I'm not calling for an over throw of the government, I'm calling for you to serve us in only the fashion that our foundational documents declare.
We are not little children. Please stop treating us like we need to be taken care of. We are adults. We can take care of ourselves.
If what is said in the magazine articles is FUD, then just refute it. Show them the evidence (objective) that things in the article are incorrect. But be honest as well if there are items that are correct or have merit in the article. Tell your management about these things, but then let them know that you and your coworkers know how to deal with these issues or they can be dealt with by doing x.
But I fear from reading your posting, that you have an emotional attachment to implementing Linux in your workplace (using the word attacked) and believe they should not have an issue with Linux because you said so. Remember, your management's current pay and their future career are dependent upon the solutions that you implement and they fear that there will be no one to place the blame on if some worms ravages their environment because of some shareware (I know the difference, but many of your management don't) product was insecure. What is the saying, "No one ever got fired to choosing [IBM|Microsoft|Oracle|...]". There are people that your management can blame when something really bad happens, but telling the shareholders that the company lost $X millions because some coder in Hong Kong didn't fix the bug in his implementation of the network code you used to implement the accounting system won't cut it.
Be careful not to let your fondness for Linux cloud your judgement.
In the real world of technology, there is no perfect solution (read: every solutions has problems), there are just better solutions. Make sure that as a technologist you are recommending the best solutions, even if those might not be Linux. Business is a continual cost verse benefit analysis with a healthy shaking of risk in there. As a business person, if I can spend some money and buy what I perceive as an insurance policy for my company (or my career), then I want to transfer as much risk as I can.
Looks like the free iTools accounts will be going away. When I logged in today, it told me my trial account would expire in 75 days. Looks like I have to find another E-mail address.
Does you customer not have a support contract for the hardware with Sun? That would be the only reason they would need to purchase a Solaris 9 upgrade. All of Sun's system support contracts include "support" for Solaris, which gives you access to all releases of Solaris.
I was outside the house the other day and noticed that my electric coop had installed a new meter. Upon closer inspection I noticed a little red light on the meter. Curiousity was peaked so I called up a friend of my that works for the coop and he went into a long explaination about these new meters they are rolling out. He called them Turtle meters and a quick net search turned up http://www.turtletech.com/Products-Sales/standardt urtle.htm
To quote their website
It monitors kilowatt-hours and records peak and minimum demand. The data is time-stamped and is continuously transmitted across the utility's own power lines. As long as the meter has power, the Turtle transmitter can provide a count of short outages (blinks) and establish whether the transmitter is in power fail.
The Standard Turtle transmitter can be programmed to return one of eight different data transmission options. The time needed to transmit a complete packet varies from 13.9 to 27.2 hours depending on the amount of data being transmitted.
Which falls in line with my friend telling me that it can take a day to get a reading because they are using a super low frequency. So yeah, they can remotely read meters. But they have definite problems with lightning. My friend spends a lot of his time in the summer replacing the Turtle units in the meters because they fry very easily he says. But they are cheap enough that it is still cheaper than sending a meter reader to all the houses.
Hunt says they've been doing this since 1995, so its not new, but few people have seen it because it has taken a while to get them out.
This is only a good thing if all the Groups still using CDE with Unix (or VMS with Compaq) switch to GNOME. I admit that CDE is not the most functional window manager but it is standardized across all major Unix vendor platforms (Linux and BSD excluded). And standardized is so much nicer than pretty when it comes to end users using several different Unices.
I see that Win, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD all have new clients, but does anyone know when the updates for other platforms will be available. My x86 Solaris box at work is ready for a new client.
Slashdot Mirror
I've run into several big-ish companies that are very "customer friendly".
Maglite. I had one of there flashlights and the switch broke. Looked them up on the web to get a replacement part and they sent it at no charge for the part or shipping.
LL Bean. I've had nothing but great interactions with them as well as others.
Crutchfield. Could they do more to make customers happy.
There are others, but not nearly as many as their should be. I think a lot of companies feel like they are abused by a small percentage of their customers and they feel they have to screw them all to make a profit, which is true when your profits are razor thin (think Wal-Mart and Best Buy).
I had a friend that decided that $100 worth in pennies was the best way to pay a fine to the local government for something he didn't agree with. They instituted mandatory garbage pickup for every home at $10 a month. My friend lived next door to the dump and would just collect his garbage in a barn and take it over to the dump each month for $5. He refused to pay extra money based on the principal of the thing. They fined him for refusing to pay for garbage collection. So, to pay the fine he went and got $100 worth of pennies from the bank and unwrapped all of them. Took them to the local government and poured them out on the collections desk. The lady behind the desk just laughed at him and refused to accept the pennies and he refused to pay with anything but the pennies.
Local sherrif hauls him into court a couple of weeks later for failure to pay. My friend contends he was willing to pay. The judge asks my friend to show him a dollar and has him read the front where it says, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". Then he asked my friend to find that phrase on his pennies. It is not there. Judge then ordered my friend to pay the bill (plus court costs of $50) in cash or go to jail. My friend payed the fine plus the court costs in cash.
He then took the pennies back to the bank to get his $100 back and the bank refused to accept them unrolled, so my friend spent the next few days rolling pennies.
Please, please, please, please quit wasting our money on this kind of stuff. Protect the country, build roads, provide for the common good, protect the weak and model the beliefs of our founders (honor, courage, compassion, greatness).
Do the things you were given the authority to do and leave the rest to us. You are supposed to work for us, not us work for you.
Remember, we the people made you and our founders believed we had the right to change you.
I'm not calling for an over throw of the government, I'm calling for you to serve us in only the fashion that our foundational documents declare.
We are not little children. Please stop treating us like we need to be taken care of. We are adults. We can take care of ourselves.
Sincerely,
The Citizens of the United States of America
If what is said in the magazine articles is FUD, then just refute it. Show them the evidence (objective) that things in the article are incorrect. But be honest as well if there are items that are correct or have merit in the article. Tell your management about these things, but then let them know that you and your coworkers know how to deal with these issues or they can be dealt with by doing x.
But I fear from reading your posting, that you have an emotional attachment to implementing Linux in your workplace (using the word attacked) and believe they should not have an issue with Linux because you said so. Remember, your management's current pay and their future career are dependent upon the solutions that you implement and they fear that there will be no one to place the blame on if some worms ravages their environment because of some shareware (I know the difference, but many of your management don't) product was insecure. What is the saying, "No one ever got fired to choosing [IBM|Microsoft|Oracle|...]". There are people that your management can blame when something really bad happens, but telling the shareholders that the company lost $X millions because some coder in Hong Kong didn't fix the bug in his implementation of the network code you used to implement the accounting system won't cut it.
Be careful not to let your fondness for Linux cloud your judgement.
In the real world of technology, there is no perfect solution (read: every solutions has problems), there are just better solutions. Make sure that as a technologist you are recommending the best solutions, even if those might not be Linux. Business is a continual cost verse benefit analysis with a healthy shaking of risk in there. As a business person, if I can spend some money and buy what I perceive as an insurance policy for my company (or my career), then I want to transfer as much risk as I can.
Looks like the free iTools accounts will be going away. When I logged in today, it told me my trial account would expire in 75 days. Looks like I have to find another E-mail address.
Does you customer not have a support contract for the hardware with Sun? That would be the only reason they would need to purchase a Solaris 9 upgrade. All of Sun's system support contracts include "support" for Solaris, which gives you access to all releases of Solaris.
I was outside the house the other day and noticed that my electric coop had installed a new meter. Upon closer inspection I noticed a little red light on the meter. Curiousity was peaked so I called up a friend of my that works for the coop and he went into a long explaination about these new meters they are rolling out. He called them Turtle meters and a quick net search turned up http://www.turtletech.com/Products-Sales/standardt urtle.htm
To quote their website
It monitors kilowatt-hours and records peak and minimum demand. The data is time-stamped and is continuously transmitted across the utility's own power lines. As long as the meter has power, the Turtle transmitter can provide a count of short outages (blinks) and establish whether the transmitter is in power fail.
The Standard Turtle transmitter can be programmed to return one of eight different data transmission options. The time needed to transmit a complete packet varies from 13.9 to 27.2 hours depending on the amount of data being transmitted.
Which falls in line with my friend telling me that it can take a day to get a reading because they are using a super low frequency. So yeah, they can remotely read meters. But they have definite problems with lightning. My friend spends a lot of his time in the summer replacing the Turtle units in the meters because they fry very easily he says. But they are cheap enough that it is still cheaper than sending a meter reader to all the houses.
Hunt says they've been doing this since 1995, so its not new, but few people have seen it because it has taken a while to get them out.
This is only a good thing if all the Groups still using CDE with Unix (or VMS with Compaq) switch to GNOME. I admit that CDE is not the most functional window manager but it is standardized across all major Unix vendor platforms (Linux and BSD excluded). And standardized is so much nicer than pretty when it comes to end users using several different Unices.
Everytime I setup a new Solaris box I install most of the GNU software. Does this mean I have to call it GNU/Solaris?
I see that Win, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD all have new clients, but does anyone know when the updates for other platforms will be available. My x86 Solaris box at work is ready for a new client.