The tire-shine woman deserved it less, she was taking it to a detail place every month who was doing this to her, it wasn't us. I don't 100% recall if she accepted the "take your money back and go away" offer or not. I think once we figured out it was her detailer messing her up she went and kicked his ass and because a happy customer of ours.
The senile old bat's entire theme was "I'm so poor and pathetic how can you be ripping me off like this, I'm a real estate agent I'll tell everyone how evil you are" to the point that I just couldn't take it any more. Yes, I refunded every single stinking dime she gave me - parts, labor, tax, all of it. I think it was $500 - 600. I really, really wanted her to go away.
I always tried to be as honest, above board, and ethical as I could, in the extreme - that's an industry that has a really bad reputation.
But if it were really true, then there would be a Nordstrom on every corner instead of a Wal*Mart. People will SAY they want customer service, because it sounds like a smart answer, but what they mostly look at is price. And it's hard to compete on price and service both, because good customer service is expensive.
Me, I want price. I'm honest about it. I almost never have to call a company's customer service. When I do, I'm nice as pie and usually come away with what I want - or at least what I objectively deserve.
Heck, I just dealt with Dell's India-based tech support to get a new laptop keyboard sent out and had no problems. (Tip - use the chat on the web site instead of phoning - there's no accent to deal with in chat.) "Harold" was nice, quick, and helpful.
Why should I pay extra for what is essentially customer service insurance?
I agree that dropping someone who keeps calling because you can't get their billing right is absurd.
But in a former career, owning a couple auto repair places, I did fire at least a couple customers.
One was clearly either insane or senile. She couldn't get the concept that her Grand Prix was not the same as her (prior car) Cadillac DeVille - it would not automatically release the parking brake when she put it in gear. Just could not get it, and had these long, rambling, largely incoherent phone calls and conversations with us.
The other was back every month with brake squeek on her Diamante, that ultimately turned out to be tire shine going thru the wheels onto the brake parts.
In both cases, I refunded every dime they had ever given us, apologized for our inability to satisfy them, and sent them on their way. THAT is the right way to fire a customer, not this "go away" BS.
It is true that good communications skills don't necessarily correlate to good technical skills.
Good communications skills do, however, correlate with good communications skills.
Good communications skills are, in my opinion and experience, an important part of being a good technical employee - because there is more to being a technical employee than just the technical.
At least at the fortune-200-ish company where I work, the developers with the best language skills are the ones with the best future. Being able to communicate with non-technical people - both verbally and in writing - is a critical part of working in software, and one of the things that helps to KEEP your job from being outsourced to a foreign land.
Not to be rude, but what, exactly, is not to be trusted? Do you think they're going to steal your money? Go under? Did you live thru the depression, and are yet somehow currently enrolled in college? Were you raised by elderly parents or grandparents who did? Privacy concerns?
My opinion, your money is way safer in a reputable financial institution than in a pickle jar in your dorm room closet. WTF?
As for borrowing: get a loan from a bank. Borrowing on a credit card is madness, interest-wise.
I don't know, I routinely get offers from Chase for 1.99% for 9 months, or 4.99% forever. Exactly what bank will give me an unsecured loan for ten or twenty thousand dollars at that kind of rate except on a card?
- Fake invoices from "phone books" for ads (that said in tiny little print that it was not a bill, thereby making it legal rather than mail fraud.)
- Phone calls from someone claiming to be my regular supplier of printer or copier supplies, offering to sell them "before the price goes up"
- Similar phone calls to the last for air hoses and a variety of other industry-specific stuff.
The new thing here appears to be that, rather then profiting from the fraudulent billing, the goal is to get malware installed via the attachment. Interesting.
This slashdot article is about the Smart car coming to the US, a car that has been available in Europe for years.
The Loremo web site talks about (so far as I can make out, between BabelFish and high school german from 20 years ago) not bringing it to the US through 2009, and seeing about working on doing so then if the car is a success and US demand is sufficient.
I don't see how these topics are very related.
If we accept they are related, it's hard to get too excited about the "Loremo."
For the US readers, 160 km/h is 100 miles/hour. 0 - 100 kpg in less than 9 seconds is roughly the same as 0 - 60 mph. 9 seconds isn't very impressive. It's roughly comparable to an Chevy Aveo. $15,000 Euros is roughly $20,000 US. The LS sedan Aveo (not the cheapest) sells for around $12,000, and manages that "stellar" performance with a little 1.6L.
I currently live in the Chicago area; all power is in conduits. I assume it's a code requirement - I have heard that Chicago has some very stringent fire-related codes. It's either that the suburbs have picked up the Chicago code, or the builders just follow the Chicago code in the suburbs, because the people moving out of Chicago expect conduit.
I grew up a couple hours south of Chicago; I don't think any new construction there has power in conduits; it's just Romex. This is cheaper at construction time, but, of course, if something like a lightning strike happens and you have to replace all your wires, you get the added bonus of getting to replace somewhat over half of your drywall!
I really think people need to stop busting GM's balls over cars from 30 years ago. Do you remember the late 70's Toyotas or Hondas? They weren't really very impressive cars either.
At least you probably know what DOS is and how it isn't the same thing as the command line under Windows XP.
At work, we have around 70,000 DOS systems deployed across our company running POS. It took me a while to convince a young guy at one of our vendors that MS-DOS and Windows CMD.EXE are NOT the same thing.
It's interesting. I started out saying I know it's significantly different than a normal office job, and I got two replies saying "but it's nothing like a normal office job, and your office is not controlling your access when you're home."
Actually, re-reading it, you said, they don't "while you're off-duty at the office." Well, yeah, they do; if I'm at work, but I'm not actually working, I still can't get to sites about video games. That probably isn't what you meant, though, and I do understand that, so let's not get into some sort of pissing contest.
To me, this policy is fairly understandable; the video sites take up a ton of bandwidth that is probably coming in via satellite to the base. Satellite bandwidth can be very restricted; my company has around 2000 locations going through Hughes, and I think they have a total bandwidth to all of them of 64Mbit/s. (At least, that's the number I heard, I'm not very involved with it. I know that when a store manager started pulling down MP3s from the internet he tanked the rest of the stores' credit card processing.)
This was obviously a cost-cutting measure that wouldn't apply to an organization that probably owns its own satellites.
That's real cute, but to me, the more interesting question is, will IBM wade in? They are heavy supporters of FOSS.
I would guess that Microsoft probably infringes on some number of IBM patents - but then, pretty much everyone does. The thing I don't know is, does Microsoft already hve some patent license agreement (presumably some sort of blanket agreement) with IBM to cover them?
I understand that being deployed military is quite a bit different from working in an office, but there are many, many sites I can't get to from my desk at work that I can get to at home. If I try to go to somewhere the network gods say I shouldn't, I get a big Websense error message instead.
Gaming sites? Filtered. Hacking sites? Filtered. Gambling and porn as well (I assume, haven't tried those.) Recently, they've figured out how to filter the google cache of pages sometimes, too.
Unfortunately, sometimes the hacker sites have been the sites with the info I need for work, but the guy two cubes down has a VPN to his home up most of the time, or I just wait until I go home and look stuff up there.
As far as I can tell, there are two or three "new" things here:
Something called "homogeneous charge compression ignition" or HCCI, which apparently causes a uniform fuel-air mix, presumably uniform through the cylinder.
The folks at Purdue are building a one-of-a-kind engine with fully controllable, fully independent valves. Based on info from others in this/. article, I'd guess perhaps an engine with a whole bunch of rotary valves, each computer controlled.
One of the folks at Purdue, a Prof Shaver, recently developed a new mathematical model to help develop the homogeneous charge compression ignition system. In order for HCCI to work, it is critical to track changing engine performance from one combustion cycle to the next. The mathematical model Shaver has developed is the first of its kind to precisely track this dynamic cycle-to-cycle performance and other data. (This point is mostly a direct quote from the article.)
Depending on the connection type, there may be no requirement that the stream into the A/P be encrypted. For example, it might be a dedicated circuit from TJX's data center to the A/P data center. In that case, as in the case of a dial-up connection to the A/P, I don't believe PCI requires encryption.
I don't believe PCI requires encryption on a private network, either. It might be recognized as a "compensating control" but I don't think it's required.
I of a system that is considered PCI compliant with no encryption of cardholder data on the retail LAN.
Are there personal penalties for doing it? I honestly have no idea. Maybe you should spend $100 for a half hour of a lawyer's time.
If you're going to do it, get the request in writing, on paper, with a real signature, from the highest ranking person in the company telling you to do it. Take it home with you. Insist on explicit wording.
This sounds like a small company (the controller in a big company wouldn't be dealing with software licenses like this.) I'm a cog at a fortune-200 company right now, but when I've worked at small companies, I could walk into the owner's office with a knock on the door frame and a "Hey, are you busy? Can I get a minute?" In that case, especially if the owner is a decent person, make sure they know about this, and that they understand the issue, and the possible consequences.
Do you know WHY the auto places don't want to take people who walk in's old oil?
Because they have no real control over what is in that bottle. The person carrying it says it's oil. It looks like oil. But if there's a high enough water content, it can contaminate the waste oil holding tank, which makes it expensive to get it hauled away.
I was in auto repair a few years ago. We could get waste oil hauled away for free - nobody paid us for it, but we didn't pay to get rid of it, either. If the water content was over some percentage (tested before they started pumping) then we would be charged by the gallon to be rid of it.
A colleague at work has been doing some work related to getting a MS-DOS application running in a virtual machine on a Windows host. Unlike a lot of companies, we have a big QA department that takes their job very seriously - QA typically takes longer than development by a significant amount.
What they've found is that VirtualPC, at least for this purpose, sucks. It locks up after running for a few days. This is essentially an embedded application, so locking up isn't acceptable.
Virtual Server, and VMWare Server, on the other hand, are stable. But Virtual PC just isn't there.
I have an MFC-4800, that's a "laser" (may really be LED) Brother multi-function device - print/fax/scan/copy.
This is one of the printers that has a separate toner and drum. The one time I bought non-Brother toner for it, I had to buy a new drum to get it printing well again.
Of course, the toner cartridge only costs $30 or so for real Brother, so it isn't a real hardship.
I doubt the ISPs care about copyright infringement; they have "common carrier" status, as far as I know in the US. (Is that the correct term? Not sure.)
What they DO care about is the high percentage and high volume of traffic that is P2P, and they want to slow it down so the network remains usable for those people trying to use it in an interactive manner.
The only reason for P2P to be encrypted is to hide what it is - nothing else. It isn't like the contents are sensitive - by definition - you're giving it to anyone who wants it!
There's no question the current "SCO Group" is a bunch of worthless weasels.
But the REAL Santa Cruz Operation products were quite relevent in their day - but their day is gone. Until the various BSDs and Linux got themselves sorted out, SCO Unix was the only viable Unix or Unix-like system for commodity x86 hardware.
They're probably idealistic kids who are hoping to actually change the world in some small way, make it better. The money is a nice perk, but it really may not be the prime motivation.
Slashdot Mirror
The tire-shine woman deserved it less, she was taking it to a detail place every month who was doing this to her, it wasn't us. I don't 100% recall if she accepted the "take your money back and go away" offer or not. I think once we figured out it was her detailer messing her up she went and kicked his ass and because a happy customer of ours. The senile old bat's entire theme was "I'm so poor and pathetic how can you be ripping me off like this, I'm a real estate agent I'll tell everyone how evil you are" to the point that I just couldn't take it any more. Yes, I refunded every single stinking dime she gave me - parts, labor, tax, all of it. I think it was $500 - 600. I really, really wanted her to go away. I always tried to be as honest, above board, and ethical as I could, in the extreme - that's an industry that has a really bad reputation.
I agree that this sounds like a good idea.
But if it were really true, then there would be a Nordstrom on every corner instead of a Wal*Mart. People will SAY they want customer service, because it sounds like a smart answer, but what they mostly look at is price. And it's hard to compete on price and service both, because good customer service is expensive.
Me, I want price. I'm honest about it. I almost never have to call a company's customer service. When I do, I'm nice as pie and usually come away with what I want - or at least what I objectively deserve.
Heck, I just dealt with Dell's India-based tech support to get a new laptop keyboard sent out and had no problems. (Tip - use the chat on the web site instead of phoning - there's no accent to deal with in chat.) "Harold" was nice, quick, and helpful.
Why should I pay extra for what is essentially customer service insurance?
I agree that dropping someone who keeps calling because you can't get their billing right is absurd.
But in a former career, owning a couple auto repair places, I did fire at least a couple customers.
One was clearly either insane or senile. She couldn't get the concept that her Grand Prix was not the same as her (prior car) Cadillac DeVille - it would not automatically release the parking brake when she put it in gear. Just could not get it, and had these long, rambling, largely incoherent phone calls and conversations with us.
The other was back every month with brake squeek on her Diamante, that ultimately turned out to be tire shine going thru the wheels onto the brake parts.
In both cases, I refunded every dime they had ever given us, apologized for our inability to satisfy them, and sent them on their way. THAT is the right way to fire a customer, not this "go away" BS.
It is true that good communications skills don't necessarily correlate to good technical skills.
Good communications skills do, however, correlate with good communications skills.
Good communications skills are, in my opinion and experience, an important part of being a good technical employee - because there is more to being a technical employee than just the technical.
Do you not actually work in a real business?
At least at the fortune-200-ish company where I work, the developers with the best language skills are the ones with the best future. Being able to communicate with non-technical people - both verbally and in writing - is a critical part of working in software, and one of the things that helps to KEEP your job from being outsourced to a foreign land.
Not to be rude, but what, exactly, is not to be trusted? Do you think they're going to steal your money? Go under? Did you live thru the depression, and are yet somehow currently enrolled in college? Were you raised by elderly parents or grandparents who did? Privacy concerns?
My opinion, your money is way safer in a reputable financial institution than in a pickle jar in your dorm room closet. WTF?
I don't know, I routinely get offers from Chase for 1.99% for 9 months, or 4.99% forever. Exactly what bank will give me an unsecured loan for ten or twenty thousand dollars at that kind of rate except on a card?
When I was a small business owner, I used to get:
- Fake invoices from "phone books" for ads (that said in tiny little print that it was not a bill, thereby making it legal rather than mail fraud.)
- Phone calls from someone claiming to be my regular supplier of printer or copier supplies, offering to sell them "before the price goes up"
- Similar phone calls to the last for air hoses and a variety of other industry-specific stuff.
The new thing here appears to be that, rather then profiting from the fraudulent billing, the goal is to get malware installed via the attachment. Interesting.
This slashdot article is about the Smart car coming to the US, a car that has been available in Europe for years.
The Loremo web site talks about (so far as I can make out, between BabelFish and high school german from 20 years ago) not bringing it to the US through 2009, and seeing about working on doing so then if the car is a success and US demand is sufficient.
I don't see how these topics are very related.
If we accept they are related, it's hard to get too excited about the "Loremo."
For the US readers, 160 km/h is 100 miles/hour. 0 - 100 kpg in less than 9 seconds is roughly the same as 0 - 60 mph. 9 seconds isn't very impressive. It's roughly comparable to an Chevy Aveo. $15,000 Euros is roughly $20,000 US. The LS sedan Aveo (not the cheapest) sells for around $12,000, and manages that "stellar" performance with a little 1.6L.
That's a fairly local thing.
I currently live in the Chicago area; all power is in conduits. I assume it's a code requirement - I have heard that Chicago has some very stringent fire-related codes. It's either that the suburbs have picked up the Chicago code, or the builders just follow the Chicago code in the suburbs, because the people moving out of Chicago expect conduit.
I grew up a couple hours south of Chicago; I don't think any new construction there has power in conduits; it's just Romex. This is cheaper at construction time, but, of course, if something like a lightning strike happens and you have to replace all your wires, you get the added bonus of getting to replace somewhat over half of your drywall!
I really think people need to stop busting GM's balls over cars from 30 years ago. Do you remember the late 70's Toyotas or Hondas? They weren't really very impressive cars either.
At least you probably know what DOS is and how it isn't the same thing as the command line under Windows XP.
At work, we have around 70,000 DOS systems deployed across our company running POS. It took me a while to convince a young guy at one of our vendors that MS-DOS and Windows CMD.EXE are NOT the same thing.
It's interesting. I started out saying I know it's significantly different than a normal office job, and I got two replies saying "but it's nothing like a normal office job, and your office is not controlling your access when you're home."
Actually, re-reading it, you said, they don't "while you're off-duty at the office." Well, yeah, they do; if I'm at work, but I'm not actually working, I still can't get to sites about video games. That probably isn't what you meant, though, and I do understand that, so let's not get into some sort of pissing contest.
To me, this policy is fairly understandable; the video sites take up a ton of bandwidth that is probably coming in via satellite to the base. Satellite bandwidth can be very restricted; my company has around 2000 locations going through Hughes, and I think they have a total bandwidth to all of them of 64Mbit/s. (At least, that's the number I heard, I'm not very involved with it. I know that when a store manager started pulling down MP3s from the internet he tanked the rest of the stores' credit card processing.)
This was obviously a cost-cutting measure that wouldn't apply to an organization that probably owns its own satellites.
That's real cute, but to me, the more interesting question is, will IBM wade in? They are heavy supporters of FOSS.
I would guess that Microsoft probably infringes on some number of IBM patents - but then, pretty much everyone does. The thing I don't know is, does Microsoft already hve some patent license agreement (presumably some sort of blanket agreement) with IBM to cover them?
I understand that being deployed military is quite a bit different from working in an office, but there are many, many sites I can't get to from my desk at work that I can get to at home. If I try to go to somewhere the network gods say I shouldn't, I get a big Websense error message instead.
Gaming sites? Filtered. Hacking sites? Filtered. Gambling and porn as well (I assume, haven't tried those.) Recently, they've figured out how to filter the google cache of pages sometimes, too.
Unfortunately, sometimes the hacker sites have been the sites with the info I need for work, but the guy two cubes down has a VPN to his home up most of the time, or I just wait until I go home and look stuff up there.
As far as I can tell, there are two or three "new" things here:
Depending on the connection type, there may be no requirement that the stream into the A/P be encrypted. For example, it might be a dedicated circuit from TJX's data center to the A/P data center. In that case, as in the case of a dial-up connection to the A/P, I don't believe PCI requires encryption.
I don't believe PCI requires encryption on a private network, either. It might be recognized as a "compensating control" but I don't think it's required.
I of a system that is considered PCI compliant with no encryption of cardholder data on the retail LAN.
Is what you're being told illegal? Absolutely.
Are there personal penalties for doing it? I honestly have no idea. Maybe you should spend $100 for a half hour of a lawyer's time.
If you're going to do it, get the request in writing, on paper, with a real signature, from the highest ranking person in the company telling you to do it. Take it home with you. Insist on explicit wording.
This sounds like a small company (the controller in a big company wouldn't be dealing with software licenses like this.) I'm a cog at a fortune-200 company right now, but when I've worked at small companies, I could walk into the owner's office with a knock on the door frame and a "Hey, are you busy? Can I get a minute?" In that case, especially if the owner is a decent person, make sure they know about this, and that they understand the issue, and the possible consequences.
As the other response says, it's because people are careless and stupid. The ones who aren't careless and stupid don't realize it matters.
Do you know WHY the auto places don't want to take people who walk in's old oil?
Because they have no real control over what is in that bottle. The person carrying it says it's oil. It looks like oil. But if there's a high enough water content, it can contaminate the waste oil holding tank, which makes it expensive to get it hauled away.
I was in auto repair a few years ago. We could get waste oil hauled away for free - nobody paid us for it, but we didn't pay to get rid of it, either. If the water content was over some percentage (tested before they started pumping) then we would be charged by the gallon to be rid of it.
A colleague at work has been doing some work related to getting a MS-DOS application running in a virtual machine on a Windows host. Unlike a lot of companies, we have a big QA department that takes their job very seriously - QA typically takes longer than development by a significant amount.
What they've found is that VirtualPC, at least for this purpose, sucks. It locks up after running for a few days. This is essentially an embedded application, so locking up isn't acceptable.
Virtual Server, and VMWare Server, on the other hand, are stable. But Virtual PC just isn't there.
I have an MFC-4800, that's a "laser" (may really be LED) Brother multi-function device - print/fax/scan/copy. This is one of the printers that has a separate toner and drum. The one time I bought non-Brother toner for it, I had to buy a new drum to get it printing well again. Of course, the toner cartridge only costs $30 or so for real Brother, so it isn't a real hardship.
I doubt the ISPs care about copyright infringement; they have "common carrier" status, as far as I know in the US. (Is that the correct term? Not sure.)
What they DO care about is the high percentage and high volume of traffic that is P2P, and they want to slow it down so the network remains usable for those people trying to use it in an interactive manner.
The only reason for P2P to be encrypted is to hide what it is - nothing else. It isn't like the contents are sensitive - by definition - you're giving it to anyone who wants it!
There's no question the current "SCO Group" is a bunch of worthless weasels. But the REAL Santa Cruz Operation products were quite relevent in their day - but their day is gone. Until the various BSDs and Linux got themselves sorted out, SCO Unix was the only viable Unix or Unix-like system for commodity x86 hardware.
Remember being in high school?
They're probably idealistic kids who are hoping to actually change the world in some small way, make it better. The money is a nice perk, but it really may not be the prime motivation.