Alston Grove

Companies tell little lies to get business, and people seem to be ignorant or forgiving, or maybe they have to accept it. I’ve written about the rebate scam that companies use to make prices appear lower and then they never honor the mail-in rebate. When Maxtor did this to me, I switched to Seagate drives, and I’m much happier with their reliability and quiet fluid dynamic bearing motors. Do honest companies produce better products?

How do dishonest companies stay in business? One reason is that they are practically monopolies. Ticketmaster seems to cross the line to get business with its practices. Some people, who ordered tickets but turned down a magazine offer, found they were charged for the subscription anyway. I recently purchased tickets using their online site. When you search for tickets, you get a lock on them for a couple minutes while you checkout. Unless you can quickly decide on the tickets and enter all your billing and shipping information, you lose the tickets. Instead of giving you more time, they want you to register beforehand for a quicker checkout. When I registered, I had to provide my e-mail address and answer whether I wanted to receive their spam. Even though I was careful to turn off their e-mail subscriptions, I started receiving them anyway. Logging into the site, the checkbox for the subscriptions was magically turned on again. But to order tickets again, what other choices do I have?

Other websites don’t force you to register, but require your e-mail address at checkout, so they can spam you relentlessly. I did this at macys.com, and not only does their spam not contain an opt-out link, but their website has no feature to turn off the spam. They have a form to sign-up for e-mail, but no form to opt-out.

The CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) that passed last year has had no effect. According to one study, less than one percent of spam they examined was in compliance. At least the Act lives up to its name (spammers “can spam”). In fact, spam has gotten worse. If you are bold enough to click on a “remove me” link, you’ll find you just get more spam instead. One clever spammer has an opt-out link that infects your machine, exploiting a JavaScript DragDrop bug and downloading malicious code (presumably to turn you into a spam relay).

All of these activities are illegal, but businesses do it anyway. Until laws are enforced to the point of making it too expensive to do business this way, it’s up to us give our business to honest companies … when that’s possible.

I was searching on images.google.com for diagrams about iterative software development, and I found this image. It’s a triangle with the vertices labeled as “schedule,” “functionality,” and “budget.” On each edge, a project meets its goals for two components, but lacks in the third one. It’s kind of like the Bermuda triangle of software development.

I think an agile development process would try to avoid this triangle, but would prefer to land on the edge of “on schedule and on budget, but reduced functionality.” The triangle misses another factor of software, which is quality. A project could deliver a full system on time at the right price, but be pretty buggy in production. I think quality is the worst sacrifice to make because it’s very frustrating to people when they aren’t given a chance to perform at levels that satisfy them. And it leaves developers with a code base that is expensive and painful to maintain. In other words, it reduces developers’ morale and costs more money in the long run when quality is sacrificed.

I just found out about Photo Stamps, which I think is a fun idea. You get to upload your own images that will be printed as legal US postage and sent to you. It is a little pricey, about twice as much as regular stamps, with a minimum order of a sheet of 20 stamps costing about $20. Of course, you can’t use copyrighted or objectional images:

You further agree not to use the Customized Postage website or service:
A. For any unlawful purposes
B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, unlawful, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, illegal or otherwise objectionable

The guy at Smoking Gun decided to find the limits of what stamps.com considers objectionable. He got some interesting photo stamps past the screening process and he posted them online.

I’ve been getting some interesting comments to the entries on this blog. Here is one of them:

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man’s suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Not exactly on-topic, and it sounds more like a quote from some old philospher. These quotes have been popping up in the comments across entries, and each one is from the same poster who conveniently leaves a link to their website — an online casino.

Obviously, it’s a scripted spam bot that knows how to blog. I tried to block its IP address, but it uses a different one each time. Finally I blocked the website name from the comments. I searched around and found lots of people have these problems on their blogs. This entry called Concerning Spam is a good summary of the measures to protect against spammers. The Security Code hack is my favorite. It puts an image like the one to the right on the comments page that the poster has to type it. Hopefully I won’t have to install that, but maybe I’ll do it just for fun.