Quoting from the letter: We regret to inform you, that we were unable to charge your credit card on file. This maybe due to a payment processing falure, a billing system overload, or an invalid credit card number.
Read that and think about it for a second. It just said that we couldn't charge your credit card because 'it failed' or 'we need to upgrade our systems' or 'the credit card we have on file is wrong'. Now you're a multi-million dollar company, are you going to send out letters that 1) state the obvious with 'it failed, perhaps because it failed' 2) Tip you hand as to the state of your equipment/network... why I think not! No, you're immediately going to blame the customer for the problem, in a shining example of great customer service! 3) Easy to miss, but 'failure' is misspelled.
Moving on...
If you do not verify your billing information by July 14th 2004, your EarthLink account will be SUSPENDED.
The words 'suspended' and 'canceled' appear to be a common theme here, usually followed closely by a helpful link where you can update all of your personal information. Aside from that, this sentence is just a bit off, not incorrect, just not business-like.
Finally, one I just noticed:
Dear Earthlink valued customer,
To me, that screams non-native speaker. The cadence is just all wrong, it doesn't flow properly. Personally, I would have said 'Dear valued Earthlink customer,' or better yet, put in the person's actual name.
Up until a couple months ago I was a tech at Best Buy. Every 6 months or so we had this survey we had to fill out to gage employee satisfaction. My store ended up near the bottom of the rankings company wide, so naturally, our managers wanted to know why. So they called us in for group meetings.
Anyhow, during the meeting we brought up several concerns and issues we had, not the least of which that we had 2 phillips head screw drivers and one flathead in our tool box... and that was pretty much it, everything else had been 'borrowed' (read: stolen) by the other employees. There were also a whole host of other issues that were brought up, schedules not being published until the day before it went into effect and so on... and all of our issues were met with either 'There is nothing we can do about that' or 'We'll rectify that immediately'. Just before the end, my supervisor, seeing that we wern't getting anywhere, mentioned something about people not cleaning up after themseleves in the break room.
When the end of the meeting came about, we were told to fill out a whole new survey and to write down our store's 'Action Plan'. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of 'Employees will clean up after themselves in the break room and this will help to boost store morale'. I put in my notice about a week later, and now, almost 3 months after that meeting, nothing has changed (I still have several friends there).
The moral of the story? I've no idea, just relating my experience of talking to management and the dismal results. But in your situation, I'd wager you've got a better shot of management actually listening and being responsive. Just one thing I would recommend, try and keep things positive, like say: 'Yes, these servers are working ok for now, but I think we could increase such and such by upgrading them'. Sounds a lot better than 'These servers suck, we need new ones'... and it's less likely to come back and bite you:).
You're right on most, if not all, counts. However, I think with a little modification, E-Machines's higher end offerings could actually prove to be decent little gaming machines (granted, no contest against a home built rig). They are starting to include AGP slots on the motherboard, which they hadn't until about 4 months ago. At any rate, you're dead on with everything else. These aren't the e-machines of 4 years ago that came free with internet service. They are perfect little machines for about 90% of the population.
As a side note, I worked as a tech for Best Buy for the last two years. My store was right across from a place affectionally known as 'Seizure World'... a rather large retirement community. The residents of said community regularly bought E Machines because of their low cost... naturally we also sold many Compaqs and HPs. Now obviously, as a tech, I delt with computers that needed to be fixed. We saw Compaqs come back quite often... same with HP's. E-machines OTOH we hardly ever saw for any hardware related failures (with the exception of a bad batch of mice and the plastic springs on some of the power buttons would break if abused by kids) But by and large, drives and electronics tended to last until the computer was hopelessly out of date. Matter of fact, I like them so much I talked my brother into buying one instead of an HP/Compaq. They haven't had an issue since... which means fewer phone calls to me late at night:)
It won't happen. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. M$ can still make life miserable for AOL, and I'm not just talking about removing the lovely AOL icons from the desktop.
The real reason AOL bought Netscape was for the web portal... netscape.com and my.netscape.com. Think about it, does a free browser make any money? Nope. On the other hand, ad sales on the website make quite a bit... --
Dan B.
Bottom line? AOL users like that crap. They're simple enough that it's necessary for their computing experience. They won't notice if the machine happens to be sluggish.
Actually, a question I tend to hear from AOL users looking into buying a new computer or upgrading... 'Will my AOL go faster?'
While I agree that there is too little privacy... errr... anonymity as it were, there does have to be some way to track down people who *are* breaking the law. Just think about it, would you like it if someone was going around in a public forum calling you a pedophile or worse? It's not all that hard to doctor pictures to 'prove' that you are one.
Having seen people fall to attacks *similar* to this, I can bet that you would want a way to stop this. With *total* anonymity you would be screwed. Basically what I am suggesting is that there has to be some middle ground as it were. Perhaps the ISP's do basically what they are doing now by logging who is on what IP at what time, and then requiring a court order to release that info. Of course a court order is a mere formality these days, so I'd suggest that the burden or proof rests on the 'plaintiff' to order the release of the info. Then of course you run into the problem of proving a positive...
My point? Increase the difficulty to gather info on a person using the I-net, make it so only a court order can access it, further, make it a pain in the arse to get that court order. Total anonymity can be a good thing or a bad thing, now do you really believe that *everyone* will use it as a *good* thing? -- Dan B.
Hehe... I'm still carrying a baby brick. Sure the thing is like 30 pounds, and four feet long. Doesn't do digital, the battery dies in about 3 hours... but I'll be damned if you can find anything that will break it. I've dropped it four floors straight down onto concrete and ended up with a little scuff mark in the plastic... 'accidently' drove over it with my suburban and yet the thing refuses to die!
Aside the Motorola flip phones (of any type) they are by far the best cell phone on the market, indestructible and feature rich.
Anyone who belives that companies don't cook the books when it come to priated software and loss ROI is a fool.
My point exactly. The software company says.. 'Ok, we are going to lose (or not make depending on your POV) money due to 20% of the market buying pirated software. So we need to raise our price by x ammount of dollars to cover that loss.'
No matter how you look at it the consumer gets the pointy end of the stick.
My sole problem with this - Do you really think that they are going to drop the price of the software if everyone buys it at the inflated price?
The recording industry said that CD prices were only going to be high until the technology was adopted by more people. Though CD's are cheaper to manufacture than cassettes, you can still expect to pay several dollars more for the CD.
The exact same thing is happenning with the transition from VHS to DVD. DVD's are more expensive because they're "new, and there isn't a large market for them yet". Do you really think DVD movies are going to get cheaper as time goes by?
CD Prices have dropped. Yeah they are still more expensive than tapes, but the actual price of CDs has dropped considerably. Just a few years ago a new CD would run about $20 -$25. Now I go and they average about $13. Pretty big drop. Same deal with software, it does get cheaper. And here is the short reason why: you make more money when you sell more of the product, even at a lower price.
And there are other reasons to drop the price.. take the example of getting people to upgrade from win95 to win98. Not that much of an improvement software wise, especially when you hold 98 up against 95osr2. So what is the incentive to switch, especially for Mr. Joe Budget user? He may want the extra bells and whistles, but he doesn't want or maybe even have the $90 to spend for it. So they roll it out at $90 a pop, and when they make their money back they start to lower the price.. sure it might be outdated by a couple of months, but the price does come down. Same deal with games.. personally I am in no rush to buy the most current game.. I like to sit back, wait for any bugs to get worked out, and often enough the price drops quite a bit after a couple of months.
The bottom line is that any business student can tell you that not everyone will pay the initial price. Many people do exactly what I do, wait until the price comes down. And since there is still money to be made by selling to that market, you bring the price down.. albeit slowly.
I avoid pirating software, except when it comes to Microsoft. I refuse to purchase anything they make, and I make it a point to only use their OS products. I won't pay a Microsoft tax to run the software I want to use.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an M$ lover, but my business relies on selling M$ software. When you and 5000 of your closest buddies go out and pirate *any* software it pushes up the cost for everyone else. You see, if they do not make enough money from the product then they have to charge more to make up the difference. And by pirating software you help that along. (sarcasm)Thanks buddy, thanks a bunch!(/sarcasm)
They've come by here in MN, busting places that pirate Windows wholesale, and their explanation is that they're "protecting consumers". They can't even admit they're doing it to protect their bottom line. I'm a consumer, and I prefer pirated copies.
Now let's see.. you sell me a fake copy of windows or some other program. You neglect to inform me that said software is pirated... it's a crappy burn or I have some other problem with it.. I call up MS for tech support, whoops, I have a fake copy, tough luck! Or how about keeping the costs down, there are just a whole slew of reasons that piracy *is* bad for the consumer. Of course, M$ is protecting their bottom line at the same time, but it is still protecting the consumer.
I've seen the quality of posts deteriorate and I totally approve of the moderation system.
I see a number of things we could attribute this to. AOL, Web-TV, and basically anything that makes computers easier: 'I can't even wurk my toaster but I can send thousands of 'get rich quick' emails at a time'. The fact is that when ever you make a forum easy enough to access and post to, you *will* get idiots who spew their tripe. Unfortuantely there is no easy way to fix this, and I can only see it getting worse, much worse.
The only thing I have a problem with is the fact that moderators can't post and moderate in the same thread. I think this is kind of self-defeating to/. because it prevents the very people who should be posting in a thread from posting.
Sorry for the 'mee33e t000ooo!@@111!', but I really agree with this issue. IMO a better way to handle it would be to make it so they can't mod their own posts. But at least with the new system it appears as though the moderators will have to waste fewer points trying to slay the trolls.
Did the creators of the link law ever stop to think about people with so called 'free for all' link pages? Or how about when someone has a link and the content of the site being linked to changes? So because someone puts up something that I may or may not approve of I get the jail sentence?? Sounds like someone needs to pull their head out of their rear and get a kl00. The cybersquatting law IMO is right on the money.. so long as it protects the rights of people to parody and protest, something that there appears to be a provision for.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's not Toyota saying 'Americans are too stupid', it's 'Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association'.
Still an interesting, though way off topic read.
Quoting from the letter:
We regret to inform you, that we were unable to charge your credit card on file. This maybe due to a payment processing falure, a billing system overload, or an invalid credit card number.
Read that and think about it for a second. It just said that we couldn't charge your credit card because 'it failed' or 'we need to upgrade our systems' or 'the credit card we have on file is wrong'. Now you're a multi-million dollar company, are you going to send out letters that 1) state the obvious with 'it failed, perhaps because it failed' 2) Tip you hand as to the state of your equipment/network... why I think not! No, you're immediately going to blame the customer for the problem, in a shining example of great customer service! 3) Easy to miss, but 'failure' is misspelled.
Moving on...
If you do not verify your billing information by July 14th 2004, your EarthLink account will be SUSPENDED.
The words 'suspended' and 'canceled' appear to be a common theme here, usually followed closely by a helpful link where you can update all of your personal information. Aside from that, this sentence is just a bit off, not incorrect, just not business-like.
Finally, one I just noticed:
Dear Earthlink valued customer,
To me, that screams non-native speaker. The cadence is just all wrong, it doesn't flow properly. Personally, I would have said 'Dear valued Earthlink customer,' or better yet, put in the person's actual name.
Up until a couple months ago I was a tech at Best Buy. Every 6 months or so we had this survey we had to fill out to gage employee satisfaction. My store ended up near the bottom of the rankings company wide, so naturally, our managers wanted to know why. So they called us in for group meetings.
:).
:)
Anyhow, during the meeting we brought up several concerns and issues we had, not the least of which that we had 2 phillips head screw drivers and one flathead in our tool box... and that was pretty much it, everything else had been 'borrowed' (read: stolen) by the other employees. There were also a whole host of other issues that were brought up, schedules not being published until the day before it went into effect and so on... and all of our issues were met with either 'There is nothing we can do about that' or 'We'll rectify that immediately'. Just before the end, my supervisor, seeing that we wern't getting anywhere, mentioned something about people not cleaning up after themseleves in the break room.
When the end of the meeting came about, we were told to fill out a whole new survey and to write down our store's 'Action Plan'. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of 'Employees will clean up after themselves in the break room and this will help to boost store morale'. I put in my notice about a week later, and now, almost 3 months after that meeting, nothing has changed (I still have several friends there).
The moral of the story? I've no idea, just relating my experience of talking to management and the dismal results. But in your situation, I'd wager you've got a better shot of management actually listening and being responsive. Just one thing I would recommend, try and keep things positive, like say: 'Yes, these servers are working ok for now, but I think we could increase such and such by upgrading them'. Sounds a lot better than 'These servers suck, we need new ones'... and it's less likely to come back and bite you
Good luck
You're right on most, if not all, counts. However, I think with a little modification, E-Machines's higher end offerings could actually prove to be decent little gaming machines (granted, no contest against a home built rig). They are starting to include AGP slots on the motherboard, which they hadn't until about 4 months ago. At any rate, you're dead on with everything else. These aren't the e-machines of 4 years ago that came free with internet service. They are perfect little machines for about 90% of the population.
:)
As a side note, I worked as a tech for Best Buy for the last two years. My store was right across from a place affectionally known as 'Seizure World'... a rather large retirement community. The residents of said community regularly bought E Machines because of their low cost... naturally we also sold many Compaqs and HPs. Now obviously, as a tech, I delt with computers that needed to be fixed. We saw Compaqs come back quite often... same with HP's. E-machines OTOH we hardly ever saw for any hardware related failures (with the exception of a bad batch of mice and the plastic springs on some of the power buttons would break if abused by kids) But by and large, drives and electronics tended to last until the computer was hopelessly out of date. Matter of fact, I like them so much I talked my brother into buying one instead of an HP/Compaq. They haven't had an issue since... which means fewer phone calls to me late at night
It won't happen. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. M$ can still make life miserable for AOL, and I'm not just talking about removing the lovely AOL icons from the desktop.
The real reason AOL bought Netscape was for the web portal... netscape.com and my.netscape.com. Think about it, does a free browser make any money? Nope. On the other hand, ad sales on the website make quite a bit...
--
Dan B.
Bottom line? AOL users like that crap. They're simple enough that it's necessary for their computing experience. They won't notice if the machine happens to be sluggish.
Actually, a question I tend to hear from AOL users looking into buying a new computer or upgrading... 'Will my AOL go faster?'
Just my two pennies.
--
Dan B.
While I agree that there is too little privacy... errr... anonymity as it were, there does have to be some way to track down people who *are* breaking the law. Just think about it, would you like it if someone was going around in a public forum calling you a pedophile or worse? It's not all that hard to doctor pictures to 'prove' that you are one.
Having seen people fall to attacks *similar* to this, I can bet that you would want a way to stop this. With *total* anonymity you would be screwed. Basically what I am suggesting is that there has to be some middle ground as it were. Perhaps the ISP's do basically what they are doing now by logging who is on what IP at what time, and then requiring a court order to release that info. Of course a court order is a mere formality these days, so I'd suggest that the burden or proof rests on the 'plaintiff' to order the release of the info. Then of course you run into the problem of proving a positive...
My point? Increase the difficulty to gather info on a person using the I-net, make it so only a court order can access it, further, make it a pain in the arse to get that court order. Total anonymity can be a good thing or a bad thing, now do you really believe that *everyone* will use it as a *good* thing?
--
Dan B.
Hehe... I'm still carrying a baby brick. Sure the thing is like 30 pounds, and four feet long. Doesn't do digital, the battery dies in about 3 hours... but I'll be damned if you can find anything that will break it. I've dropped it four floors straight down onto concrete and ended up with a little scuff mark in the plastic... 'accidently' drove over it with my suburban and yet the thing refuses to die!
Aside the Motorola flip phones (of any type) they are by far the best cell phone on the market, indestructible and feature rich.
Anyone who belives that companies don't cook the books when it come to priated software and loss ROI is a fool.
My point exactly. The software company says.. 'Ok, we are going to lose (or not make depending on your POV) money due to 20% of the market buying pirated software. So we need to raise our price by x ammount of dollars to cover that loss.'
No matter how you look at it the consumer gets the pointy end of the stick.
My sole problem with this - Do you really think that they are going to drop the price of the software if everyone buys it at the inflated price?
The recording industry said that CD prices were only going to be high until the technology was adopted by more people. Though CD's are cheaper to manufacture than cassettes, you can still expect to pay several dollars more for the CD.
The exact same thing is happenning with the transition from VHS to DVD. DVD's are more expensive because they're "new, and there isn't a large market for them yet". Do you really think DVD movies are going to get cheaper as time goes by?
CD Prices have dropped. Yeah they are still more expensive than tapes, but the actual price of CDs has dropped considerably. Just a few years ago a new CD would run about $20 -$25. Now I go and they average about $13. Pretty big drop. Same deal with software, it does get cheaper. And here is the short reason why: you make more money when you sell more of the product, even at a lower price.
And there are other reasons to drop the price.. take the example of getting people to upgrade from win95 to win98. Not that much of an improvement software wise, especially when you hold 98 up against 95osr2. So what is the incentive to switch, especially for Mr. Joe Budget user? He may want the extra bells and whistles, but he doesn't want or maybe even have the $90 to spend for it. So they roll it out at $90 a pop, and when they make their money back they start to lower the price.. sure it might be outdated by a couple of months, but the price does come down. Same deal with games.. personally I am in no rush to buy the most current game.. I like to sit back, wait for any bugs to get worked out, and often enough the price drops quite a bit after a couple of months.
The bottom line is that any business student can tell you that not everyone will pay the initial price. Many people do exactly what I do, wait until the price comes down. And since there is still money to be made by selling to that market, you bring the price down.. albeit slowly.
I avoid pirating software, except when it comes to Microsoft. I refuse to purchase anything they make, and I make it a point to only use their OS products. I won't pay a Microsoft tax to run the software I want to use.
Don't get me wrong, I am not an M$ lover, but my business relies on selling M$ software. When you and 5000 of your closest buddies go out and pirate *any* software it pushes up the cost for everyone else. You see, if they do not make enough money from the product then they have to charge more to make up the difference. And by pirating software you help that along. (sarcasm)Thanks buddy, thanks a bunch!(/sarcasm)
They've come by here in MN, busting places that pirate Windows wholesale, and their explanation is that they're "protecting consumers". They can't even admit they're doing it to protect their bottom line. I'm a consumer, and I prefer pirated copies.
Now let's see.. you sell me a fake copy of windows or some other program. You neglect to inform me that said software is pirated... it's a crappy burn or I have some other problem with it.. I call up MS for tech support, whoops, I have a fake copy, tough luck! Or how about keeping the costs down, there are just a whole slew of reasons that piracy *is* bad for the consumer. Of course, M$ is protecting their bottom line at the same time, but it is still protecting the consumer.
But AFAIK no one has said anything about even 2 so far. ANy more info out there I don't know about?
According to AMD you can expect to see them sometime next spring or summer. At least that was the word about a month ago...
I see a number of things we could attribute this to. AOL, Web-TV, and basically anything that makes computers easier: 'I can't even wurk my toaster but I can send thousands of 'get rich quick' emails at a time'. The fact is that when ever you make a forum easy enough to access and post to, you *will* get idiots who spew their tripe. Unfortuantely there is no easy way to fix this, and I can only see it getting worse, much worse.
Sorry for the 'mee33e t000ooo!@@111!', but I really agree with this issue. IMO a better way to handle it would be to make it so they can't mod their own posts. But at least with the new system it appears as though the moderators will have to waste fewer points trying to slay the trolls.
Did the creators of the link law ever stop to think about people with so called 'free for all' link pages? Or how about when someone has a link and the content of the site being linked to changes? So because someone puts up something that I may or may not approve of I get the jail sentence?? Sounds like someone needs to pull their head out of their rear and get a kl00.
The cybersquatting law IMO is right on the money.. so long as it protects the rights of people to parody and protest, something that there appears to be a provision for.