This is simple and effective. If you suspect that the company who is calling you is not legitimate, ask the caller for their web site address.
If the call is a fraud attempt, the “agent” probably won’t be able to give it to you. One of these things will happen:
They won’t “remember” it. For extra bonus fun, ask them if their sales manager knows it.
They’ll give you a legitimate site that isn’t theirs. Ask them to hold on while you pop it up. If that doesn’t make them hang up, ask them where the information relating to their offer is. They might tell you it’s an exclusive offer that’s not available on the web, but if the site has nothing that seems to be related to the offer, it’s a big warning that they’re not telling the truth.
They’ll give you a fake site that is theirs. This would be pretty stupid on their part, since it would provide the authorities with a path back to them. Do a search on the site to see what the world has to say about them. If they’re not in the search index, then the site was probably set up a few days ago. More sophisticated users can do a whois lookup on them… look at the registration date. Also if the site owner is masked for privacy, you can be sure it’s not a large established company. Either way, report the site to your local authorities as soon as possible.
These fraud schemes depend on leaving the smallest possible trail back to them. Legitimate businesses want to open as many possible channels of communication with their potential customers as possible.
So it’s as easy as this: no web site equals no legitimacy. Protect yourself.
Earth Hour has come and gone. Overall it was pretty successful: the statistic I heard was that electricity consumption in Ontario was down by 8%.
What does that mean? From a pragmatic viewpoint, not a hell of a lot. From a political viewpoint, it’s pretty significant. I don’t have the numbers that project the percentage of the population that participated, based on an 8% reduction, but I’ll guess it’s somewhere between 15% and 25%.
That’s a lot of people sending a message. At this point it seems the big environmental problem is politicians. Most individuals get it, most corporations get it, but the politicians, who can actually manage the process of real change, just aren’t there yet.
Maybe having as many as one in four voters demonstrate their commitment to change through Earth Hour will be enough to wake them up. I’m not holding my breath though. (more…)
There was a time when the events unfolding in Tibet would have caused rapid worldwide outrage, followed shortly by a flood of withdrawals from the Olympics.
But that was when China was of little economic importance.
I am dismayed at how flexible our collective principles are when it comes to the economy. It seems that the only time when a political leader has to be concerned about minor trifles — say for example, killing off a few tens of thousands of people from that pesky tribe next door — is when they’re not either producing oil or keeping those same tribe members working 16 hour days to make cheap clothing.
So it is with China. Most of the West is enjoying a great standard of living(*) thanks to China. Their leaders know this well. They may even be rubbing it in our faces. Or maybe they’re just rubbing the 1938 games in our faces and laughing.
Are we going to actually support the principles of Human Rights and take a stand? What, and pay more for consumer goods as a result? In the pocketbook versus principles battle, it looks like pocketbook wins, no contest.
If politicians are unwilling or unable to act, it’s up to the people. A small step though it may be, I’m opting out of the Olympics this year. This summer I’ll be watching something else.
There’s also a few companies who have lost my business: Coca-Cola, GE, Johnson&Johnson, Lenovo Group, McDonalds, UPS, Panasonic, Swatch, Samsung… at this point, the Olympic logo on any product is an icon for “don’t buy me”.
Last but not least, there’s a Facebook group that expresses similar sentiments. I don’t agree with everything they say, but they’re close enough and are the largest of a handful of similar groups. Join them and be counted.
* I mean this in the “wow, this is inexpensive” sense, not in the formal economic sense.
In a lot of cases, you can’t even be sure if there was originally a marketing intent behind it.
Just about any business can wind up as the subject of a viral “buzz”.
That’s any business, even including a Sand Road Venture Capital firm. Take a look at this “Anti-Portfolio” from Bessemer Venture Partners.
I’ve had that link sent to me via IM twice today. That’s buzz.
Why does it work? It’s true, it’s funny, and it’s out of the box. Every VC I’ve met to date seems to like to put forward the image of near-prescient infallibility. Openly admitting to your mistakes, and naming names is an utter reversal of this image-making. It is so novel and unusual that it’s immedately worth passing along. Not only that but it instantly humanizes the entire firm and makes them seem like the sorts of people you’d like to pitch to first.
Its both superb and brilliant — be it intentional or not.
It’s interesting how often the question of online versus traditional shopping comes up. A friend asked me this earlier today and I gave him the same answer I’ve been providing for a decade now.
These days the response seems reasonable, but back in 1998 it was heresy. It used to be guaranteed to make a room full of start-ups and venture capitalists go dead quiet. Of course back then we were in the middle of the dot-com boom, when somehow geeks who don’t like daylight managed to convince everyone that their concept of a good shopping experience was somehow universal.
As more Windows users cry “Help, I’ve been Vista whipped!”, I thought that the introduction of the oppressive Windows Vista was going to be a boon for Linux.
I got the first part right. As Vista subverts your computer into a Microsoft Peripheral, subject to whatever whim “Balmer and The Boys” cook up, users have resisted. A large number of not-so-technical people I’ve talked to want to avoid Vista like the plague. [And in my opinion, rightly so.]
My assumption was that given reasonably priced hardware from several suppliers and completely free Linux distributions like Ubuntu, the discomfort with Vista would be the kick that finally pushed Linux into the consumer mainstream.
It used to be that when one software company acquired another, it was frequently as much an acquisition of a customer base as it was one of technology. Often it was a “strategic acquisition” which frequently meant taking a competitor out.
These sorts of acquisitions are the worst: Some innovative company gives a major player a hard time by delivering a great product. It develops a fiercely loyal customer base. “Majorco” users start to ask “when are you going to implement feature X like ‘Smallco’ does”? Unfortunately feature X requires a complete re-write of the major company’s fragile solution, and being constantly reminded of this is no fun. So what does the major player do? Simple, acquire Smallco and throw their technology away. All the customers who hated you now really hate you, but they now have no choice and the customer bleed stops.
As a customer I’ve had this happen to me more than once, and it sucks. I’ve dropped entire lines of business partially because I couldn’t bear working with the purchaser’s sorry-ass excuse for a product.
The integration process must be something else in these situations too. The guys who run Smallco are now rich. They have a contract that makes them hang around and say nice things about Majorco for a couple of years. Then they can go off and do what they want. The rest of the staff, at least those who survive “cost efficiencies”, have a choice of working with a product they probably hate, or finding new employment.
In the open source era, customers are defended from this sort of thing. (more…)
Notification of the 1.0 release of OpenPrjoj came through my news feed recently. The contents were a typical press release. The release quickly gets to making the statement “Projity announced the initial OpenProj beta in the Fall, over 200,000 users joined the beta testing in over 132 countries.” Now this is interesting, because a news item just five days previous claims “OpenProj has now been downloaded over 200,000 times with deployments accelerating around the world.”
It seems to me that someone has drawn an equivalence between “downloads” and “beta testers”. What they can really claim is “200,000 tire kickers” or without the metaphor, “200,000 evaluations”.
I can speak to this because I’m one of the people who downloaded it. I have to say that I was impressed, both with the concept and with the obvious level of effort that’s been put into it.
I used it to import a Project file, with the intention of making some changes and printing a report. Although I was able to change the data, the report they produced was wholly inadequate. Butt-ugly, rasterized fonts, and so on. It sucked. I wound up exporting it to an OpenCalc file and reporting from there.
Now if I was a beta tester, I’d probably have provided some feedback to let them know about my experiences. If it was really a beta release (instead of just another one of thousands of projects with “v0.9” releases) you think it might have told me. After all user involvement is part of the “social contract” of open source.
I resent being placed in a group (or so it seems) that I never thought I belonged to. This press release smacks of the kind of marketing over-hype that isn’t — and shouldn’t — be associated with an open source project.
Here’s a crime for modern times: make the transmission of an intentionally false Caller-ID message a minor criminal offence.
There’s an established mechanism for blocking identity through caller ID, namely the “Private Number” message. Therefore the only conceivable use of false information is to mislead the person being called. Most of the fraudulent calls I receive use bogus, rather than private numbers.
But what should the penalty be? How about something proportional to the impact on the victim? In and of itself, direct victim impact is pretty small, so how about three hours in jail per occurrence?
What, you say that’s ridiculously low? Well then how about this: mandatory consecutive terms, no concurrent sentences. Fraudsters have to make a large number of calls in order to find victims (see footnote). Three hours in jail works out to about a year for every three thousand calls. These guys need to make tens of thousands of calls a day, so in a month or so they could easily rack up a sentence in excess of their entire lifespan.
A slap on the wrist for people who flirt with the idea, major hard time for the fraudsters. Works for me.
Footnote: One operation I led on started with an automated dialler, transfered to a “qualifier” who made sure I had a credit card, and then transfered to a “closer”, who was none too thrilled when I finally admitted that I was deliberately wasting their time, eight minutes in.
Although “It’s Fixed in the Next Release” is a mantra from software development (or rather technical support), the intent here is to apply the phrase to a broader context, for example, “It’s fixed in my next reincarnation.” This broad interpretation means that the entries here cover vastly unrelated subjects.
If you’re looking for a tightly focused blog with short, pithy entries, you are in the wrong place (although there are some). Here, blogging is about content.
I have done one thing to make things easier on non-technical readers. All of my comments that deal with specific aspects of software development are in a category that doesn’t show up in the main list. you have to select It’s a Code, Code World to see these posts.
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