Tuesday, June 24, 2008
LCD screen burn in
I just finished reading an article about doing a way with screen savers. While the poster of the article states that LCD screens do not develop burn in the existence of image persistence does. Where I work the computers are on and used 24/7 and image persistence does happen. It takes a lot longer than burn in but has the same basic effect. Just something to keep in mind before you ditch those screen savers.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Mac's get hacked?
A new article speaks about a recent Trojan that steal passwords and disables security on Mac OS 10.4 or 10.5. Seems to be a growing trend as the more popular Macs get the more they will draw the attention of hackers.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Best Buy warranty service: The worst customer service I've ever experienced.
I've bought several appliances over the years and always get a service contract. For years I bought from Sears and whenever I needed service done I would call them up, explain the problem and they would show up the next day. Unfortunately when I was looking for a new washer/dryer set Sears did not have the one I wanted so we bought from Best Buy instead. Everything went fine until this week when the washing machine started to leak out of the bottom.
I checked all the lines running in and out of the machine and determined the problem must be internal so I called Best Buy's service department. I spoke to a female with a foreign accent but was able to understand her pretty well. She looked up my account, documented my problem and said she would contact the local service guys while I waited on hold. She came back to say the service company wasn't open yet so she would contact them when they open and I would hear from them later that day.
Around noon I still hadn't heard anything so I called back to make sure she didn't forget. This time I got a different rep who was much easier to understand and explained the situation. She then advised me that it would take up to 2 business days for the service guy to call me back and that since it was Friday I wouldn't hear anything until Monday. Needless to say I wasn't happy.
After going to the laundrymat all weekend Monday finally came and the family's frustration was high. While I was at work my mother-in-law called Best Buy for me only to be told that it could take up to 5 days to hear from the service people. She advised the rep that I had been told 2 days and basically was told that I'm a lier. She gave the rep a peice of her mind and suddenly the rep called me at work to tell me that the service guys would be calling me later that day. I advised her that they should contact the house instead as m mother-in-law would be available if they could respond today. She took the house number again and said she would fax the paperwork to the service company.
A little while later the service company (a local appliance business) called me at work to say they would be out the next day but couldn't give me a time frame. They told me to wait by the phone all day and the tech would call when he was responding to the house. Again I advised that they should contact my mother-in-law as she is home all day and can let them in and gave her the house number. My mother in law also called the company to give them her cell phone in case she needed to leave the house for a minute.
The next day at about 2pm the tech calls me at work to say he is going to the house. I asked him why he didn't call my mother in law as requested and was advised that he had 4 different numbers on the paperwork and didn't know who to call. I called my mother in law and she met him at the house.
The tech advised advised that the hot and cold water valves inside the washing machine were broken (very rare he advised) and that he would order the parts. When asked how long that will take her replied that he had no idea and left.
It seems funny that a large corporation would hire out the small business they are crushing to do the service calls and expect them to give quality service. It is even more puzzling that the different Best Buy employees didn't know thier own policy and procedure on how long it would take for a call back. The real kicker was being told I was lying about what I was told and the fact that they find the time it
takes to fix things acceptable.
6/23/2008 09:35 EST
UPDATE: Well I'm still waiting for a part that was ordered last Tuesday. I called the appliance shop and they say it is shipped but they have no estimated date of arrival.
6/25/2008 20:00 EST
Hey wouldn't you know the part suddenly showed up and they fixed the washing machine today. I still think that over a week and a half is way too long. Next time I'll buy at Sears again, there is something to be said for great customer service.
I checked all the lines running in and out of the machine and determined the problem must be internal so I called Best Buy's service department. I spoke to a female with a foreign accent but was able to understand her pretty well. She looked up my account, documented my problem and said she would contact the local service guys while I waited on hold. She came back to say the service company wasn't open yet so she would contact them when they open and I would hear from them later that day.
Around noon I still hadn't heard anything so I called back to make sure she didn't forget. This time I got a different rep who was much easier to understand and explained the situation. She then advised me that it would take up to 2 business days for the service guy to call me back and that since it was Friday I wouldn't hear anything until Monday. Needless to say I wasn't happy.
After going to the laundrymat all weekend Monday finally came and the family's frustration was high. While I was at work my mother-in-law called Best Buy for me only to be told that it could take up to 5 days to hear from the service people. She advised the rep that I had been told 2 days and basically was told that I'm a lier. She gave the rep a peice of her mind and suddenly the rep called me at work to tell me that the service guys would be calling me later that day. I advised her that they should contact the house instead as m mother-in-law would be available if they could respond today. She took the house number again and said she would fax the paperwork to the service company.
A little while later the service company (a local appliance business) called me at work to say they would be out the next day but couldn't give me a time frame. They told me to wait by the phone all day and the tech would call when he was responding to the house. Again I advised that they should contact my mother-in-law as she is home all day and can let them in and gave her the house number. My mother in law also called the company to give them her cell phone in case she needed to leave the house for a minute.
The next day at about 2pm the tech calls me at work to say he is going to the house. I asked him why he didn't call my mother in law as requested and was advised that he had 4 different numbers on the paperwork and didn't know who to call. I called my mother in law and she met him at the house.
The tech advised advised that the hot and cold water valves inside the washing machine were broken (very rare he advised) and that he would order the parts. When asked how long that will take her replied that he had no idea and left.
It seems funny that a large corporation would hire out the small business they are crushing to do the service calls and expect them to give quality service. It is even more puzzling that the different Best Buy employees didn't know thier own policy and procedure on how long it would take for a call back. The real kicker was being told I was lying about what I was told and the fact that they find the time it
takes to fix things acceptable.
6/23/2008 09:35 EST
UPDATE: Well I'm still waiting for a part that was ordered last Tuesday. I called the appliance shop and they say it is shipped but they have no estimated date of arrival.
6/25/2008 20:00 EST
Hey wouldn't you know the part suddenly showed up and they fixed the washing machine today. I still think that over a week and a half is way too long. Next time I'll buy at Sears again, there is something to be said for great customer service.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
A car that runs on water?
A Japanese company named Genepax has created a prototype vehicle that runs on water. While currently the engine alone costs over $18,000 they expect to drop that to under $5000 when they mass produce.
Monday, June 9, 2008
SpursEngine proven to be twice as fast as 3Ghz Core 2 Quad for editing video.
I've been watching the announcements on Toshiba's SpursEngine and waiting to see if it would be a viable option for decoding and encoding video. TG Daily posted an article from Computex 2008 where Corel tested the PCI express 1.0 card against a Core 2 Quad at transcoding 1080p H.264 video to a smaller resolutions such as 480p. The SpursEngine is basically a Cell processor with only half the power (1/2 speed, 1/2 the memory and 1/2 the SPE units) and the Core 2 Quad was a 3GHz version. The SpursEngine finished in half the time of the Quad and only uses 10 to 20 watts.
Unfortunately they still haven't announced a price. Too bad Dell isn't paying attention to my idea, maybe someone else is paying attention and building one into a notebook.
Unfortunately they still haven't announced a price. Too bad Dell isn't paying attention to my idea, maybe someone else is paying attention and building one into a notebook.Sunday, June 8, 2008
Will they ever learn? Companies asking for customer feedback.
Lately more and more companies have launched websites asking their customers to give them ideas on how they can improve. Asking for feedback is nothing new as companies have done this with feedback cards for decades. What is new is creating specialized websites or using social media websites to accomplish the task.
I threw away comment cards in the past as I always envisioned them ending up in the shredder, maybe it was because no matter what I said on them I never heard back from the company. Then on February 16 of 2007, while trolling the web for articles on technology, I stumbled across one about how Dell was reaching out to customers by asking them to submit ideas on how they could improve. I knew Dell had been declining for a few years due to customer service issues so it seemed like a logical move to try and turn things around. Seeing how I had been buying Dell computers for years I typed in the website address http://www.dellideastorm.com/ to check it out.
I spend about an hour on the site that day looking through the ideas and comments but was afraid to post something (I can be a bit shy at times). The next day I decided to post something since nobody would really know who I was anyway. Creating an account was easy enough, email address and create a user name and password. I'm not all that great with making creative user names so I used my last name, year I was married and topped it off with the number 1. My first post was a bit of a feeling out process so I kept it simple, Show the Vista performance rating during system configuration. It wasn't a ground breaking idea but it was something I thought would be useful when buying a system. I felt a bit more confident after someone voted for my idea and decided to be more bold and posted a second idea that day. I figured why not tackle Dell's problems head on and posted 6 major issues to be fixed by Dell. I voted on several ideas that day and left some comments on other people's ideas as well. Watching my ideas get voted on and conversing with my new acquaintances was fun but Dell was silent on the site.
A lack of responses from Dell was frustrating to users and led to many rebellions in the form of joke posts and ideas complaining about the lack of interaction on the site. Dell slowly began to participate more but for some it was too little too late as they left the site to move on to something else. Another problem with the site was the software running the site. In Dell's haste to get the site put together they chose to use a beta program from a business partner (SalesForce) which amounted to the site users becoming test subjects for the software. Many ideas were posted complaining about the lack of common features found on normal forum software such as spell check, site navigation and HTML editing tools. Unfortunately Dell couldn't fix the problems and some of them still exist today. Even though the issues are out of Dell's control the frustrations are still towards Dell as most people do not realize it is not their fault or feel they should change vendors if they really care.
Another problem from the combination of beta software and lack of early moderation is that the site was and still is being flooded with duplicate ideas. Dell tries to remedy the issue by merging the ideas together and combining the votes and comments into one location. Unfortunately this process does not notify the duplicate idea poster of the merge, makes the comments confusing to read and results in complaints from the idea poster as well as the other users who care about the idea. This has led to many discussions on how to properly merge duplicates, who should be awarded credit for an idea and other issues. Unfortunately no matter what Dell does to improve the site people end up complaining about it.
While IdeaStorm had and still has its issues they have made improvements in the software and participation they seem to learning from their mistakes. Dell has gotten more employees to participate but SalesForce is still taking far too long to fix the software. I have also checked out similar sites from Starbucks (run with SalesForce software) and Cisco (using software from Brightidea) find that they are facing similar issues to Dell's early problems. It seems no matter how many times they are warned companies seem surprised that so many people submit ideas and expect some form of feedback. Will companies ever learn how to make the customers happy or will these feedback sites just become an online version of the feedback card?
I threw away comment cards in the past as I always envisioned them ending up in the shredder, maybe it was because no matter what I said on them I never heard back from the company. Then on February 16 of 2007, while trolling the web for articles on technology, I stumbled across one about how Dell was reaching out to customers by asking them to submit ideas on how they could improve. I knew Dell had been declining for a few years due to customer service issues so it seemed like a logical move to try and turn things around. Seeing how I had been buying Dell computers for years I typed in the website address http://www.dellideastorm.com/ to check it out.
I spend about an hour on the site that day looking through the ideas and comments but was afraid to post something (I can be a bit shy at times). The next day I decided to post something since nobody would really know who I was anyway. Creating an account was easy enough, email address and create a user name and password. I'm not all that great with making creative user names so I used my last name, year I was married and topped it off with the number 1. My first post was a bit of a feeling out process so I kept it simple, Show the Vista performance rating during system configuration. It wasn't a ground breaking idea but it was something I thought would be useful when buying a system. I felt a bit more confident after someone voted for my idea and decided to be more bold and posted a second idea that day. I figured why not tackle Dell's problems head on and posted 6 major issues to be fixed by Dell. I voted on several ideas that day and left some comments on other people's ideas as well. Watching my ideas get voted on and conversing with my new acquaintances was fun but Dell was silent on the site.
A lack of responses from Dell was frustrating to users and led to many rebellions in the form of joke posts and ideas complaining about the lack of interaction on the site. Dell slowly began to participate more but for some it was too little too late as they left the site to move on to something else. Another problem with the site was the software running the site. In Dell's haste to get the site put together they chose to use a beta program from a business partner (SalesForce) which amounted to the site users becoming test subjects for the software. Many ideas were posted complaining about the lack of common features found on normal forum software such as spell check, site navigation and HTML editing tools. Unfortunately Dell couldn't fix the problems and some of them still exist today. Even though the issues are out of Dell's control the frustrations are still towards Dell as most people do not realize it is not their fault or feel they should change vendors if they really care.
Another problem from the combination of beta software and lack of early moderation is that the site was and still is being flooded with duplicate ideas. Dell tries to remedy the issue by merging the ideas together and combining the votes and comments into one location. Unfortunately this process does not notify the duplicate idea poster of the merge, makes the comments confusing to read and results in complaints from the idea poster as well as the other users who care about the idea. This has led to many discussions on how to properly merge duplicates, who should be awarded credit for an idea and other issues. Unfortunately no matter what Dell does to improve the site people end up complaining about it.
While IdeaStorm had and still has its issues they have made improvements in the software and participation they seem to learning from their mistakes. Dell has gotten more employees to participate but SalesForce is still taking far too long to fix the software. I have also checked out similar sites from Starbucks (run with SalesForce software) and Cisco (using software from Brightidea) find that they are facing similar issues to Dell's early problems. It seems no matter how many times they are warned companies seem surprised that so many people submit ideas and expect some form of feedback. Will companies ever learn how to make the customers happy or will these feedback sites just become an online version of the feedback card?
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