If a peace officer puts handcuffs on you, you're under arrest, period.
I didn't read about the arraignment. That's what matters, because the arrestee either was accused of a crime or has it in writing that the police arrested him without any cause, which is assault.
Where is the line between "being able to list this job on my resume" and "not being allowed to discuss this job at all"?
I think they are trying to constrain an employee to disclose *facts* about his work environment. Taken to an extreme interpretation, it means he's not allowed to answer questions at a job interview. Bingo, first amendment challenge. Get a legal definition that makes a meaningful distinction between a job interview dialog and a blog posting, and have that definition somehow pass First Amendment muster. I don't believe this is possible.
On the other hand, the special agreement probably doesn't change anything, since you probably already agreed to reasonably abide by company policies. If it's legal for them to ask you to do it, it's legal for them to fire you for refusing, at least in non-contract right-to-work situations.
"I cannot agree to this contract because without consideration it is not valid."
Consideration for new contract terms cannot be the same consideration that you accepted for your original terms.
This is important. Without consideration, it's not a contract. If it's not a contract, it's not an enforceable agreement. If they can enforce this agreement, it's only because they *already* have your agreement to abide by company policies that are already subject to change. In other words, they don't need you to accept anything, really, they just need an instrument to show that you were given notice of the policy. By "declining" it, you've really given them what they need - a record that shows you were given notice.
>At work, we would routinely have to deal with 5-10 hard drives a day and probably would order 40-60 a month.
We did this too, until we realized that an LTO4 Autoloader was much less expensive and also turned out to be significantly faster. I didn't expect it to be faster.
I was thinking more of a lunar calendar than of body parts or the "human's body clock speed"
It's pretty hard to make a case that there's anything but 4 seasons and 12 lunar cycles throughout them.
So there's a natural perception of the synodic calendar.
When your civilization invents the Sundial, the angle of 15 degrees derives naturally from it.
Measurement systems based on the numbers 60 tend to be quite easy to construct. You don't need superstition and numerology to come up with a rationale for sexagesimal subdivision. It's probably no more mysterious than "12 is easily divided into various segments."
I suspect that early civilizations were far more interesting in divining *direction* than *time*. If you know the time of day within 4 hours, and the season within a few weeks, you'll be fine. But knowing what direction to walk (or sail!) is a much bigger deal. And when you're working that out with sticks and strings, lots and lots of things divide by 60 and factors of 60.
I didn't make clear what I meant by "human proportions."
>Shoulda thrown them on his lawn since he clearly has no problem with it, he surely would enjoy two copies twice as much as one!
He was feeble-minded, and too innocent to be a jerk. It wouldn't have been satisfying, since he didn't have the intelligence to understand my issue in the first place. Definitely wouldn't have appreciated anything like irony.
What I hate is seeing backups take forever because of people's entertainment content, porn or otherwise. I also hate the fact that I'm putting this stuff on LTO-4 tape (not cheap) and sending it offsite for archival storage (even less cheap.)
>Umm.. corporates justify filtering by saying "if we don't do this we could be sued".
I'm in charge of the policy in my shop, and I justify filtering based on the difference in cost of an OC48 versus and OC12. But then, we don't filter based on content, but based on bandwidth. We're also not saying "no streaming media, no bittorrent, no running your public website on our wire." We're just making it impossible to increase our costs by doing so. I don't want to get into the business considerations of having so many people using the internet so heavily that you need more than a T3. But when they started impacting our voice network, we had to put the fist down.
You don't get a geek badge until after you're the one making policy decision. Web filter? Heh. You should see my acls for movie streaming. The people subject to them don't know. The people who do get to connect, get QOS'd to oblivion. Anyone who complains about not being able to stream movies at the office gets a lecture, and sees our monthly bill for the OC12, with the strong hint that their department will be the one getting the bill if they don't stfu about not being able to stream movies. Movie streaming is just one example, we block some things and throttle others, but the objective isn't censorship, it's keeping our goddamned internet costs down to a level that doesn't affect our profit margins.
It's easier to get compliance on this kind of thing when you are open and show them the bills, than if you just make it a big blackbox rule. Of course, in my shop, *everybody* is painfully aware of profit and loss, since there's a one-to-one correspondence on everybody's paycheck. (It helps a lot to be able to say "When we allowed Hulu, it increased our costs to the point where we would have needed an OC48" -- show them what that costs, divide by the number of employees, and subtract... they get the picture.)
You have to throw them back *at* the person making the delivery, and you have to actually hit them. If they try to claim that throwing a newspaper at them is assault, then you've got the position that they threw first.
I had several newspapers being delivered to my lawn against my wishes.
My first response was to throw them back in the street, but then my neighbor complained, and was not able to understand my argument that I wasn't the one responsible for the garbage.
So then I threatened to complain to the city if they didn't stop using my lawn as a dump for their paper waste. I also pointed out that they were making me a target for crime, since I travel for business and don't have the opportunity to clean up the mess every day. In one of my C&D letters, I said that I would bill them for the professional service of cleaning up their trash.
Eventually, the papers stopped, but I'm more inclined to believe it's because they went extinct.
>Ok but, degrees, minutes, seconds or days minutes seconds are also kinda arbitrary.
More like an artifact of human proportions, than merely "arbitrary".
There is a case to be made for a natural tendency toward a twelve month calendar or a twenty-four hour day, even when people didn't represent such things.
Once I realized what was really going on, I recognized Dell's policy as *very* intelligent in terms of supply chain, inventory, and customer service. Basically they've created a dream scenario for ERP.
There are also certain risks that they avoid, by not getting into a parts business that's driven by consumer demand. Instead, they have a parts business whose demand is the service organization, not the consumer.
I can't believe I didn't see this immediately. From a SCM perspective, it's ingenious. It's probably essential. Dell probably came to this realization not by genius, though, but by recognizing waste. Or maybe it's a flavor of kaizen. In any case, they accomplish two strategic objectives:
1. Minimize waste in the supply chain for the service business. 2. Tightly control the demand against their upstream vendors (some of which would be internal manufacturing units).
#1 has direct ROI, and I'm sure is accounted for as a competitive advantage. #2 translates indirectly to improved customer service, OP's perception notwithstanding. (If he *was* the person with an existing business relationship, Dell wouldn't have sold his part to some random other person, or worse, *sold out* of those parts to many random other people.)
One naive way of looking at it would be "why turn down business? you can sell spare parts!" There's a much bigger picture though, and I'm sure it's the one they see in the C-Suite at Dell. Whether the front-line tech support rep in the call center sees it or cares, is neither here nor there. On the other hand, if I were a Dell exec, I'd see to it that this particular call center rep was made aware of the strategic reason for the situation, and also, was trained with a way to explain it to a person in the OP's situation without OP being persuaded to go tell the world Dell called him a thief.
But then, I don't know if I would ever be able to make an entry-level call center rep understand his role as part of a supply chain optimization problem, or care.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to nurse my weekly backup. I love BRU but I hate the BRU console, so I've written my own scheduler. Today is the first day I get to test it on the live system. Fingers crossed.
Right. I realize now, the "thief" stuff is his own interpretation of the company refusing to do business with him because he does not have an existing business relationship with the company.
The company doesn't give a damn about theft. The company has to minimize supply chain and inventory costs, and they do that by strictly limiting access to their service business to their customers.
I'm guessing the people in the call center don't understand the purpose of the policies. But then, maybe they do. Any slashdotters work at Dell? What do they call their optimization model? Some flavor of kaizen and/or Lean?
In the big picture, these policies that seem "anti-consumer" and "stupid" are actually very, very smart, and very much in the consumer's favor. I'm sure people at Dell work pretty hard to minimize waste and maintain any competitive advantage they can. And one really good place to look for waste is in inventory management, and avoiding any auxilliary demand-driven business units that aren't contributing to the core business.
Limiting access to the service business only to existing customers is ingenious. From an ERP perspective it's a dream. They can optimize inventories, forecast demand, negotiate with their vendors and internal manufacturing units, track in-service failures and respond in fine-grained ways, predict end-of-life dynamics, and examine the value proposition for say, a recall.
If I could do half of that for just one of our products, I'd be rich.
Don't underestimate the dollar value of waste in an enterprise the size of Dell.
>I almost all countries selling goes without reasonably availability of parts and service is >against the law.
Do you think the warranty is strictly to protect the consumer?
It does more to protect the producer. While giving legal assurances to the consumer, it also limits the responsibilities to the producer to a specific time frame. If you think there is a law that forces Dell to provide repair parts past the warranty period for a given unit, or if you think there is a law that requires Dell to operate a component exchange or a retail business for the sale of repair parts, or to be willing to sell repair parts to anyone who does not have an existing business relationship with Dell, cite that law here:
Dell's rationale for not operating a demand-driven service and repair enterprise is very clear to me now. This story forced me to read between the lines, injecting some things I know from the inside of a manufacturing business, and I now recognize something that I have no doubt amounts to a significant competitive advantage for Dell. At first glance it appears to be a stupid way to do business, and I'm guessing it looks that way to the call-center reps who have to follow the "stupid" policy. But it's not stupid. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it is *essential* to the sustainability of the company.
Run the idea past anybody with a few years of experience in industrial SCM and they should be able to explain it far better than I could. I'm not at liberty to talk about it in detail, but I could tell you a true story of a cotter pin (a part with no significant accounting value) cost a company a quarter of a million dollars. There are "stupid" policies that don't make a bit of sense until something like that gets billed to your department.
Now I realize Dell is doing neither. I now understand Alienware's (Dell's) position in terms of supply chain optimization and it makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that I can believe it is a significant competitive advantage for them. I'm also getting the picture that the ingenious choices made by the people who manage Dell manufacturing and their service supply chain, aren't being communicated very well at the consumer service level, which is no surprise of course. If the first line call-center employee or even a call-center manager understands the business at that level, his skills are being wasted. But I bet they *try* to communicate. I bet they have kaizen sessions and all kinds of training, even at the consumer tech support level. I also bet it's all dismissed as so much PHB hokum.
But it's crystal clear to me now, why Dell doesn't operate a demand-driven parts business. I'm seeing the big picture, both in terms of their own supply chain management, which I suspect is an enormous operation in its own right, and also in terms of Dell's relationship to the vendors that supply their components. In certain narrow frames of reference, "more sales is better" even if it was at the component/repair part level. But there are significant costs and consequences associated with that kind of operation.
I didn't get it before because I knee-jerked (stupid me, I took the OP at his word!)
Now I can see Dell's position, and I can recognize it as a form of kaizen / Lean manufacturing, and it boils down to this: 1. The number of units in service == the number of registered owners. 2. They can precisely track in-service failure and adjust repair inventory with precision.
It's a dream scenario for ERP.
Likely, they learned this lesson the hard way, and I bet it was tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to learn it.
"I don't get it. Isn't it harder to predict how many of a spare part are needed, if you're trying to base it on how many machines you think are still in the hands of their original owners, rather than how many machines are still in use by anyone?"
Those aren't two numbers. They are one in the same. Number of known customers == number of units in service. And by tracking service tickets, they know what breaks. I'm certain there is a serious effort to minimize the number of spare parts on hand, on order, and with active bids, and they are able to accomplish this because they are "servicing units deployed" and not "operating a component exchange."
Expanded to an enterprise the size of Dell, this is an enormous distinction.
When they start breeding, they develop an uncanny ability to work with motion picture media. In the old days, they'd put together slide shows and 8mm films to bore you. Now they produce DVDs with soundtracks and fading titles and overdubs and star wipes, and it's no less boring.
Believe me, the most technologically inept person, school teacher or not, somehow figures this stuff out, the instant they spawn a larva.
>Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the >clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.
Smart, resourceful teachers could persuade their educational institutions to produce their own, original education materials and create a profit center instead of incurring a cost.
Explain to me how any product represented by the MPAA is in any way essential to K-12 education, aside from perhaps some course that covers entertainment film?
Schools and school districts tend to be quite conspicuous and diligent when it comes to copyright law, as any band nerd should know. You didn't just photocopy music sheets. You probably leased them. Why would the same school treat motion picture media any differently?
I hate to be the devil's advocate in this area, but I do need to separate concerns, the technical issues related to the storage media, versus compliance with the license granted by the content creator. The MPAA and the DMCA conflate these concerns, and I see that as the central issue.
The more intelligent and motivated university graduates tend to be the least likely to enter K-12 education.
The more intelligent and motivated school teachers tend to be the least likely to seek positions with decision making authority.
The teachers I know rarely acknowledge any of this as their own failures or shortcomings. They also tend to portray themselves as victims of an unfair system.
If you've been reading me on slashdot, you know I'm fairly consistent in my view that a person in a position with limited authority who complains about the authority he is under, should accept some responsibility for being in that position.
Don't tell me about what an idiot your boss is. Explain why he's up there and you're down here, in terms of what you're doing to resolve that problem.
I've worked in education, and I've worked in IT, so don't try to tell me I don't know what it's like.
>Alienware are quite within their rights to refuse to sell parts to anyone -- although this >seems like a very stupid policy.
It's a very smart policy but it's not obvious unless you understand it in terms of Supply Chain Management.
If they allowed their spare parts business to be demand driven, it's impossible to forecast it, and it's incredibly wasteful. Their choices are basically to create a whole enterprise that does nothing but manufacture and sell spare parts, or, to plan the spare parts demand while planning the rest of the production.
Knowing a thing or two about the manufacturing supply chain, I can see how it amounts to a competitive advantage for Dell. I can imagine they translate this policy into significant amounts of money. I have no difficulty at all with it, knowing how much my company spends on nuts, bolts, washers, and cotter pins, or rather knowing how much (MUCH) we save by literally micro-managing that stuff. There's another aspect: Selling spare parts to you makes you into their competition on the parts market, even though they are the seller. It's not a matter of competing on price, it's a matter of demand on a finite resource. It doesn't make any sense when you just think about the one hinge/bracket/plastic bit. But when you look at the big picture, it makes a lot of sense.
That's what's going on with Dell. They aren't selling spare parts. They are selling parts for specific units they manufactured, forecasting demand and tracking it, and I'm willing to bet they are measuring returns on that strategy in millions of dollars of waste avoided. Whether or not they call it a kaizen or a Lean thing, that's what it is.
On the other hand, they shouldn't have sales people telling callers they are thieves. I'm also willing to bet a call center operator in Banglore or Manila knows and cares nothing about supply chain management, inventory control, or kaizen manufacturing...
But I'm sure I understand why Dell doesn't just sell parts in an open marketplace. I'd say it was ingenious except that it is a pretty standard practice in many industries.
Well, I can do a certain amount of surface mount soldering, but dense component layouts are beyond my tools (toaster oven). I have no idea how to make multi-layer PC boards. I do have access to a CNC machine shop, but a one-off job for a notebook case would be incredibly costly. I think there are both patents and trade secrets involved in the manufacture of TFT displays, and that's certainly beyond my tools in any case. In the old days I could make ribbon cables but I don't know how to make the new mylar ones.
I could probably build you a decent switching power supply but making it small enough for a notebook computer or efficient enough to not be a space heater, that's beyond my design skill.
On the other hand, if you funded the operation with, say, a hundred million dollars and gave me a couple of years of lead time, I'm sure I could build you a fucking computer.
"It might be that the real issue is just the lookup of the correct part number."
The real issue is the way Dell's supply chain is managed. They don't manufacture enough spare parts to allow them to be sold to a broader market than their known customers. Their supply chain is not demand-driven, that's waste they've eliminated, and I am sure, measured in millions of dollars a year.
Slashdot Mirror
If a peace officer puts handcuffs on you, you're under arrest, period.
I didn't read about the arraignment. That's what matters, because the arrestee either was accused of a crime or has it in writing that the police arrested him without any cause, which is assault.
Where is the line between "being able to list this job on my resume" and "not being allowed to discuss this job at all"?
I think they are trying to constrain an employee to disclose *facts* about his work environment. Taken to an extreme interpretation, it means he's not allowed to answer questions at a job interview. Bingo, first amendment challenge. Get a legal definition that makes a meaningful distinction between a job interview dialog and a blog posting, and have that definition somehow pass First Amendment muster. I don't believe this is possible.
On the other hand, the special agreement probably doesn't change anything, since you probably already agreed to reasonably abide by company policies. If it's legal for them to ask you to do it, it's legal for them to fire you for refusing, at least in non-contract right-to-work situations.
"I cannot agree to this contract because without consideration it is not valid."
Consideration for new contract terms cannot be the same consideration that you accepted for your original terms.
This is important. Without consideration, it's not a contract. If it's not a contract, it's not an enforceable agreement.
If they can enforce this agreement, it's only because they *already* have your agreement to abide by company policies that are already subject to change. In other words, they don't need you to accept anything, really, they just need an instrument to show that you were given notice of the policy. By "declining" it, you've really given them what they need - a record that shows you were given notice.
>At work, we would routinely have to deal with 5-10 hard drives a day and probably would order 40-60 a month.
We did this too, until we realized that an LTO4 Autoloader was much less expensive and also turned out to be significantly faster.
I didn't expect it to be faster.
I was thinking more of a lunar calendar than of body parts or the "human's body clock speed"
It's pretty hard to make a case that there's anything but 4 seasons and 12 lunar cycles throughout them.
So there's a natural perception of the synodic calendar.
When your civilization invents the Sundial, the angle of 15 degrees derives naturally from it.
Measurement systems based on the numbers 60 tend to be quite easy to construct. You don't need superstition and numerology to come up with a rationale for sexagesimal subdivision. It's probably no more mysterious than "12 is easily divided into various segments."
I suspect that early civilizations were far more interesting in divining *direction* than *time*. If you know the time of day within 4 hours, and the season within a few weeks, you'll be fine. But knowing what direction to walk (or sail!) is a much bigger deal. And when you're working that out with sticks and strings, lots and lots of things divide by 60 and factors of 60.
I didn't make clear what I meant by "human proportions."
>Shoulda thrown them on his lawn since he clearly has no problem with it, he surely would enjoy two copies twice as much as one!
He was feeble-minded, and too innocent to be a jerk. It wouldn't have been satisfying, since he didn't have the intelligence to understand my issue in the first place. Definitely wouldn't have appreciated anything like irony.
What I hate is seeing backups take forever because of people's entertainment content, porn or otherwise. I also hate the fact that I'm putting this stuff on LTO-4 tape (not cheap) and sending it offsite for archival storage (even less cheap.)
>Umm.. corporates justify filtering by saying "if we don't do this we could be sued".
I'm in charge of the policy in my shop, and I justify filtering based on the difference in cost of an OC48 versus and OC12.
But then, we don't filter based on content, but based on bandwidth. We're also not saying "no streaming media, no bittorrent, no running your public website on our wire." We're just making it impossible to increase our costs by doing so. I don't want to get into the business considerations of having so many people using the internet so heavily that you need more than a T3. But when they started impacting our voice network, we had to put the fist down.
You don't get a geek badge until after you're the one making policy decision.
Web filter? Heh. You should see my acls for movie streaming. The people subject to them don't know. The people who do get to connect, get QOS'd to oblivion. Anyone who complains about not being able to stream movies at the office gets a lecture, and sees our monthly bill for the OC12, with the strong hint that their department will be the one getting the bill if they don't stfu about not being able to stream movies. Movie streaming is just one example, we block some things and throttle others, but the objective isn't censorship, it's keeping our goddamned internet costs down to a level that doesn't affect our profit margins.
It's easier to get compliance on this kind of thing when you are open and show them the bills, than if you just make it a big blackbox rule.
Of course, in my shop, *everybody* is painfully aware of profit and loss, since there's a one-to-one correspondence on everybody's paycheck. (It helps a lot to be able to say "When we allowed Hulu, it increased our costs to the point where we would have needed an OC48" -- show them what that costs, divide by the number of employees, and subtract... they get the picture.)
>But what percentage of commutes do you think are non-infringing?
On my commute, approaching zero, since the minimum observed speed is well over the posted limit, and the average speed is about 20% over.
>And what percentage of drivers have never broken any traffic law?
On my commute, very low. They all speed, except for the few in vehicles not capable of speeding.
You have to throw them back *at* the person making the delivery, and you have to actually hit them. If they try to claim that throwing a newspaper at them is assault, then you've got the position that they threw first.
>One person's free is another person's litter.
I had several newspapers being delivered to my lawn against my wishes.
My first response was to throw them back in the street, but then my neighbor complained, and was not able to understand my argument that I wasn't the one responsible for the garbage.
So then I threatened to complain to the city if they didn't stop using my lawn as a dump for their paper waste. I also pointed out that they were making me a target for crime, since I travel for business and don't have the opportunity to clean up the mess every day. In one of my C&D letters, I said that I would bill them for the professional service of cleaning up their trash.
Eventually, the papers stopped, but I'm more inclined to believe it's because they went extinct.
>Ok but, degrees, minutes, seconds or days minutes seconds are also kinda arbitrary.
More like an artifact of human proportions, than merely "arbitrary".
There is a case to be made for a natural tendency toward a twelve month calendar or a twenty-four hour day, even when people didn't represent such things.
Once I realized what was really going on, I recognized Dell's policy as *very* intelligent in terms of supply chain, inventory, and customer service. Basically they've created a dream scenario for ERP.
There are also certain risks that they avoid, by not getting into a parts business that's driven by consumer demand. Instead, they have a parts business whose demand is the service organization, not the consumer.
I can't believe I didn't see this immediately. From a SCM perspective, it's ingenious. It's probably essential. Dell probably came to this realization not by genius, though, but by recognizing waste. Or maybe it's a flavor of kaizen. In any case, they accomplish two strategic objectives:
1. Minimize waste in the supply chain for the service business.
2. Tightly control the demand against their upstream vendors (some of which would be internal manufacturing units).
#1 has direct ROI, and I'm sure is accounted for as a competitive advantage.
#2 translates indirectly to improved customer service, OP's perception notwithstanding. (If he *was* the person with an existing business relationship, Dell wouldn't have sold his part to some random other person, or worse, *sold out* of those parts to many random other people.)
One naive way of looking at it would be "why turn down business? you can sell spare parts!"
There's a much bigger picture though, and I'm sure it's the one they see in the C-Suite at Dell. Whether the front-line tech support rep in the call center sees it or cares, is neither here nor there. On the other hand, if I were a Dell exec, I'd see to it that this particular call center rep was made aware of the strategic reason for the situation, and also, was trained with a way to explain it to a person in the OP's situation without OP being persuaded to go tell the world Dell called him a thief.
But then, I don't know if I would ever be able to make an entry-level call center rep understand his role as part of a supply chain optimization problem, or care.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to nurse my weekly backup. I love BRU but I hate the BRU console, so I've written my own scheduler. Today is the first day I get to test it on the live system. Fingers crossed.
Right. I realize now, the "thief" stuff is his own interpretation of the company refusing to do business with him because he does not have an existing business relationship with the company.
The company doesn't give a damn about theft. The company has to minimize supply chain and inventory costs, and they do that by strictly limiting access to their service business to their customers.
I'm guessing the people in the call center don't understand the purpose of the policies. But then, maybe they do. Any slashdotters work at Dell? What do they call their optimization model? Some flavor of kaizen and/or Lean?
In the big picture, these policies that seem "anti-consumer" and "stupid" are actually very, very smart, and very much in the consumer's favor. I'm sure people at Dell work pretty hard to minimize waste and maintain any competitive advantage they can. And one really good place to look for waste is in inventory management, and avoiding any auxilliary demand-driven business units that aren't contributing to the core business.
Limiting access to the service business only to existing customers is ingenious. From an ERP perspective it's a dream. They can optimize inventories, forecast demand, negotiate with their vendors and internal manufacturing units, track in-service failures and respond in fine-grained ways, predict end-of-life dynamics, and examine the value proposition for say, a recall.
If I could do half of that for just one of our products, I'd be rich.
Don't underestimate the dollar value of waste in an enterprise the size of Dell.
>I almost all countries selling goes without reasonably availability of parts and service is
>against the law.
Do you think the warranty is strictly to protect the consumer?
It does more to protect the producer. While giving legal assurances to the consumer, it also limits the responsibilities to the producer to a specific time frame. If you think there is a law that forces Dell to provide repair parts past the warranty period for a given unit, or if you think there is a law that requires Dell to operate a component exchange or a retail business for the sale of repair parts, or to be willing to sell repair parts to anyone who does not have an existing business relationship with Dell, cite that law here:
Dell's rationale for not operating a demand-driven service and repair enterprise is very clear to me now. This story forced me to read between the lines, injecting some things I know from the inside of a manufacturing business, and I now recognize something that I have no doubt amounts to a significant competitive advantage for Dell. At first glance it appears to be a stupid way to do business, and I'm guessing it looks that way to the call-center reps who have to follow the "stupid" policy. But it's not stupid. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it is *essential* to the sustainability of the company.
Run the idea past anybody with a few years of experience in industrial SCM and they should be able to explain it far better than I could. I'm not at liberty to talk about it in detail, but I could tell you a true story of a cotter pin (a part with no significant accounting value) cost a company a quarter of a million dollars. There are "stupid" policies that don't make a bit of sense until something like that gets billed to your department.
Now I realize Dell is doing neither. I now understand Alienware's (Dell's) position in terms of supply chain optimization and it makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that I can believe it is a significant competitive advantage for them. I'm also getting the picture that the ingenious choices made by the people who manage Dell manufacturing and their service supply chain, aren't being communicated very well at the consumer service level, which is no surprise of course. If the first line call-center employee or even a call-center manager understands the business at that level, his skills are being wasted. But I bet they *try* to communicate. I bet they have kaizen sessions and all kinds of training, even at the consumer tech support level. I also bet it's all dismissed as so much PHB hokum.
But it's crystal clear to me now, why Dell doesn't operate a demand-driven parts business. I'm seeing the big picture, both in terms of their own supply chain management, which I suspect is an enormous operation in its own right, and also in terms of Dell's relationship to the vendors that supply their components. In certain narrow frames of reference, "more sales is better" even if it was at the component/repair part level. But there are significant costs and consequences associated with that kind of operation.
I didn't get it before because I knee-jerked (stupid me, I took the OP at his word!)
Now I can see Dell's position, and I can recognize it as a form of kaizen / Lean manufacturing, and it boils down to this:
1. The number of units in service == the number of registered owners.
2. They can precisely track in-service failure and adjust repair inventory with precision.
It's a dream scenario for ERP.
Likely, they learned this lesson the hard way, and I bet it was tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to learn it.
"I don't get it. Isn't it harder to predict how many of a spare part are needed, if you're trying to base it on how many machines you think are still in the hands of their original owners, rather than how many machines are still in use by anyone?"
Those aren't two numbers. They are one in the same. Number of known customers == number of units in service. And by tracking service tickets, they know what breaks. I'm certain there is a serious effort to minimize the number of spare parts on hand, on order, and with active bids, and they are able to accomplish this because they are "servicing units deployed" and not "operating a component exchange."
Expanded to an enterprise the size of Dell, this is an enormous distinction.
When they start breeding, they develop an uncanny ability to work with motion picture media.
In the old days, they'd put together slide shows and 8mm films to bore you. Now they produce DVDs with soundtracks and fading titles and overdubs and star wipes, and it's no less boring.
Believe me, the most technologically inept person, school teacher or not, somehow figures this stuff out, the instant they spawn a larva.
>Teachers could carve each frame into a clay tablet and let it dry in the sun. Then mount the
>clay tablets on big wooden wheel and spin it real fast.
Smart, resourceful teachers could persuade their educational institutions to produce their own, original education materials and create a profit center instead of incurring a cost.
Explain to me how any product represented by the MPAA is in any way essential to K-12 education, aside from perhaps some course that covers entertainment film?
Schools and school districts tend to be quite conspicuous and diligent when it comes to copyright law, as any band nerd should know. You didn't just photocopy music sheets. You probably leased them. Why would the same school treat motion picture media any differently?
I hate to be the devil's advocate in this area, but I do need to separate concerns, the technical issues related to the storage media, versus compliance with the license granted by the content creator. The MPAA and the DMCA conflate these concerns, and I see that as the central issue.
>How much longer before the MPAA becomes irrelevant and we can just ignore their antics?
You can do that now. Simply refrain from consuming any product represented by their organization.
The more intelligent and motivated university graduates tend to be the least likely to enter K-12 education.
The more intelligent and motivated school teachers tend to be the least likely to seek positions with decision making authority.
The teachers I know rarely acknowledge any of this as their own failures or shortcomings. They also tend to portray themselves as victims of an unfair system.
If you've been reading me on slashdot, you know I'm fairly consistent in my view that a person in a position with limited authority who complains about the authority he is under, should accept some responsibility for being in that position.
Don't tell me about what an idiot your boss is. Explain why he's up there and you're down here, in terms of what you're doing to resolve that problem.
I've worked in education, and I've worked in IT, so don't try to tell me I don't know what it's like.
>Alienware are quite within their rights to refuse to sell parts to anyone -- although this
>seems like a very stupid policy.
It's a very smart policy but it's not obvious unless you understand it in terms of Supply Chain Management.
If they allowed their spare parts business to be demand driven, it's impossible to forecast it, and it's incredibly wasteful. Their choices are basically to create a whole enterprise that does nothing but manufacture and sell spare parts, or, to plan the spare parts demand while planning the rest of the production.
Knowing a thing or two about the manufacturing supply chain, I can see how it amounts to a competitive advantage for Dell. I can imagine they translate this policy into significant amounts of money. I have no difficulty at all with it, knowing how much my company spends on nuts, bolts, washers, and cotter pins, or rather knowing how much (MUCH) we save by literally micro-managing that stuff. There's another aspect: Selling spare parts to you makes you into their competition on the parts market, even though they are the seller. It's not a matter of competing on price, it's a matter of demand on a finite resource. It doesn't make any sense when you just think about the one hinge/bracket/plastic bit. But when you look at the big picture, it makes a lot of sense.
That's what's going on with Dell. They aren't selling spare parts. They are selling parts for specific units they manufactured, forecasting demand and tracking it, and I'm willing to bet they are measuring returns on that strategy in millions of dollars of waste avoided. Whether or not they call it a kaizen or a Lean thing, that's what it is.
On the other hand, they shouldn't have sales people telling callers they are thieves. I'm also willing to bet a call center operator in Banglore or Manila knows and cares nothing about supply chain management, inventory control, or kaizen manufacturing...
But I'm sure I understand why Dell doesn't just sell parts in an open marketplace. I'd say it was ingenious except that it is a pretty standard practice in many industries.
>Build your own fucking computer.
Well, I can do a certain amount of surface mount soldering, but dense component layouts are beyond my tools (toaster oven). I have no idea how to make multi-layer PC boards. I do have access to a CNC machine shop, but a one-off job for a notebook case would be incredibly costly. I think there are both patents and trade secrets involved in the manufacture of TFT displays, and that's certainly beyond my tools in any case. In the old days I could make ribbon cables but I don't know how to make the new mylar ones.
I could probably build you a decent switching power supply but making it small enough for a notebook computer or efficient enough to not be a space heater, that's beyond my design skill.
On the other hand, if you funded the operation with, say, a hundred million dollars and gave me a couple of years of lead time, I'm sure I could build you a fucking computer.
"It might be that the real issue is just the lookup of the
correct part number."
The real issue is the way Dell's supply chain is managed. They don't manufacture enough spare parts to allow them to be sold to a broader market than their known customers. Their supply chain is not demand-driven, that's waste they've eliminated, and I am sure, measured in millions of dollars a year.