Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told? 1314
i8msft writes "CIO published a guide on How To Cut Through Vendor Hype. While light, the article did prompt me to wonder what is the most outrageous lie ever told by a vendor? I mean, in person, face to face, preferably with witnesses (boss, coworkers, someone on your side of the fence). Forget press releases, trade show presentations and the like, where they lie like dogs! Specific examples only, please."
yawnmoth (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What is CIO? (Score:2, Insightful)
the purpose of a CIO is to advice and assist his/her supervisors and other senior managers to ensure that information technology is acquired and information resources are managed in a manner that implements the policies and procedures established by that corporation.
</learnin'>
Re:Uh, he is running windows. (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize I'm going to draw criticism for this, seeing as how apparently some people have issues with Win2k. My perspective on this is from being the assistant-administrator for my office of around 17 or so. Almost everybody is on Win2k, I think one person is on 98. Other than a minor issue with an old laptop having difficulty going into standby mode (a bios flash fixed this), I've had no Windows or even Microsoft related problems to report. The problems that do come up are nearly always the fault of the company making the software. Netscape, for example, doesn't like to stay running for an entire day without crashing at least once. That's not a Windows problem. Netscape has never been known for its stability on any platform.
In any case, MS certainly kept their promise of greater stability with Windows 2k, and I am very glad that we upgraded the whole office to it.
Let me give you a piece of advice, though. Do some research before you make a switch like that. Go to www.deja.com, for example, to see what people have to say about a product. If they say it sucks, then keep that in mind. Find out why. We didn't go to 2K until we had tested it on a few machines. We didn't buy it based on a vendor promise. We certainly aren't running MS servers, we're running Linux there. We know better because we looked into it. It is a lot harder to be succeptable to vendor lies when you do reasearch like this.
Re:Mandrake (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:You shoulda tried Windows 2000 then. (Score:1, Insightful)
"yeah. escept for the fact that windows fucking sucks to administer" -- Are you kidding? I don't even have to go to a command prompt to fix anybody's problem with 2K!
"you sell your soul to artificial boundaries they create" -- I've never said "Gee, I can't do that." in Win2k. Sounds like you've never used it.
"why do you think you have to reboot 8000 times?" -- With Windows NT, you had to reboot every time you did a network change etc, I agree with you there. 2k is not like that. I haven't rebooted my computers at home, or my computers at work (2 each) in over a week. Gee, I guess I'm not rebooting '8000 times'. I won't even reboot 800 times by the time the year is over.
Maybe you should try doing a little research before you spout off anti-MS garbage at me. So far, you just sound like an idiot.
Re:We make a secure Operating System (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good point.... (Score:3, Insightful)
While the PR scheme is a bit dodgy, what do you expect them to do? When a customer comes in to a shop and sees "2.2GHz!!!!!!!" for the P4 and "1.667Ghz" for the Athlon XP, which do you think they'll go for? Unless they're one of the clued in types, they'll fall for the larger number.
Sales culture is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me a sales rep who is patient enough to sit down and listen to the specifics of what a product does and doesn't. I have worked in sales for a long time, and I've seen one, maybe two who can. (Oddly enough, these guys were ENGINEERS before they become sales clowns.)
Too many sales reps thrive on the intangible: possibility, maybes, etc. Put them in front of an Excel sheet (or WORSE) a white board, and you're REALLY in for a doosy. I see my own people committing these atrocities in meetings with customers. I then have to then gracefully butt in and "clarify" what the assclown has just promised.
It's also sick to see them all assemble together. These fuckwads get drunk and there's no stopping the information warpage. I have seen sales goons literally gut a company that once had a bright future.
how about Oracle? They're pretty good liars (Score:5, Insightful)
Playstation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When service would be available. (Score:5, Insightful)
Limited NNTP Service. They dislike it when you run servers. They really dislike it when you have a NAT. Their mail service is pretty unreliable, sometimes working fine but sometimes taking hours to send or recieve a message.
They won't even talk to you if you dont have their software installed.
one of my calls with them went like so:
"Whats your mailserver address?"
"Install our software and it will set all that up for you, in addition make some highly technical changes to your system to improve the performance of our software"
"is that what i asked you?"
"Its all we can tell you."
I explained to them that I am the only person i want making changes to my system.. as i was irritated.
Ugh.. i want an ISP with a clue. I'll get DSL once i find a new job. anyone know where i can find a new job?
Maybe i'll start my own ISP.. with a advanced support option over the phone that says "If you have a clue, press the digit corresponding to the difference of the number of layers in the OSI Model and the DOD model. Otherwise, press one to speak to our customer support center."
Comcast's local support number actually has the audacity to state: "If you have not installed the comcast software press 1. If you have installed the software, press 2."
If you press one, it says "Please install the software, downloadable from www.comcast.net/connectioncenter/, and call back *hangup*".
thats just wrong on so many different levels.
Well.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This was, of course, bullshit. I tried to return it, but they would only give me store credit, and I didn't want anything else from them (mainly they had printers and full systems, very little in the way of parts).
I also had massive difficulty with the driver disk they gave me, so I mailed the company, and was informed that the card they gave me was an OEM edition specifically designed for use in certain systems, never intended to be sold separately.
At the time I didn't know this was standard procedure for the computer industry (I don't by anything but OEM, and most of it isn't meant for use outside pre-built boxes) so I ratted the store out for selling me that card.
Really, I feel kinda sleazy about it - the store was gone within a month, I wonder if it was my fault? Still, they did it to themselves, trying to rip off a middle schooler.
Whatever, that's the closest thing I know to the subject.
Re:Good point.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Intel is (for better or worse) the benchmark for CPU speeds these days. Athlon is not selling the 2200 as a 2200mz processor, they're selling it as the equivalent to a 2200Mz P4. In terms of informing a customer of how (relatively) fast their CPU will run quake, this is accurate.
Anybody who knows enough to build and install a wall-mount CPU clock meter that actually measures the clock speed is likely to know that the AMD really is equivalent to the 2.2Gz Intel. For the rest of us, the AMD rating is both more informative for the average customer, and less un-flattering to AMD.
For an equivalent to this argument: Imagine if people bragged about what RPM their wheels span at rather then the speed that their car drove at. If you wanted to really brag, you'd get a 1/4" wheel and run it at 2200RPM (a whopping 1.6 miles/hour). One could argue that this is not unlike what Intel has been doing with the P4 vs the P3/athlon.
Think about it -- they're trying to sell a 1GZ P4 an an entry leve system about a year after the P3/800 was out -- but the year-old P3 (which would have normally been the entry level system by now) would have been faster than the P4 if intel hadn't 'de-emphasized' the P3.
This is why people came out with the dhrystone, whetstone and other benchmarks [netlib.org] back in the '80s -- to get comparisons of the relative cpu power across various CPU architectures for which one-for-one CPU clock speeds were entirely inappropriate (e.g. a 4Mz Z80 was about the same speed as a 1Mz 6502 -- mostly becasuse the Z80 took 4 clock cycles to grab a byte of memory while a 6502 only took one).
The fast computer (Score:5, Insightful)
So she bought an IBM PC AT with a 286 and 512 KB of RAM. "Why?!?!?" I asked.
"Well, the salesman told me it was the fastest computer they made." Okay, the AT he sold her was an 8 MHz 286, not the usual 6 MHz 286, and that did in fact make it the fastest PC AT that IBM ever made. But any 386 would have smoked it, and been able to run real software as well.
Not a vendor lie story, but still interesting, is the postscript to this story. After a year or so, the power supply in her AT died. As it died, it fried her motherboard too. We contacted IBM, and they informed us that we would have to ship the computer to them, then wait 6 to 8 weeks, for a repair; there would be no guarantee of any sort on the repair; and it would cost $X00 (I don't remember exactly how much but it was a lot). And of course after all this she would still have a 286 running at 8 MHz.
We went down to a friendly local computer shop. They installed a new power supply, a new motherboard with a 386SX and 2 MB of RAM, and a new VGA-compatible display adapter. They burned it in overnight to make sure all was working, and we picked it up the next day. Total cost was less than IBM had wanted to repair the AT.
I like to tell this story when people don't understand why I like my computers to be made from standard, easily-replaceable parts. (Apple's new iMac is cute, but I don't want one.)
My mom still has that computer, by the way, and it still works.
steveha
I cannot believe noone thought of this... (Score:1, Insightful)
heh.
Williw
I hardly call the truth FLAMEBAIT. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am dead serious this is what they said. I used to work for a game retailer. I used to sell those stupid things and the first run of them had a very high (1 in 4) defect rate! Couple that with a shortage, and you have a PR problem. Sony's response was 'The customers are mistreating the systems.'
I kid you not. I'm not exaggerating, that is what REALLY HAPPENED.
Re:CD burning for Audiophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
When you copy a CD you -are- changing the data. I know what you're about to say as a rebuttal - "CDs are Digital, therefore copying a CD means that I'm doing a digital copy, right?" Wrong.
If you rip a CD, copy the file to disk, and then burn ten copies of that digital File, then all of those CDs are identical.
Now, if you read in the CD, write it out, read in the new CD, write it out, and so on, you're changing the data, if the CD contains any small errors.
Due to interpolation (minor error), concealment (larger error), and muting (massive error), the data coming from the CD reader changes.
References:
Audio Compact Disc http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/CE/kuhn/cda
Re:Good point.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cyrix's CPUs were both inferior clock-for-clock and did not run as fast as Intel CPUs. Cyrix tried a PR scheme to fool stupid people into buying crap.
AMD's CPUs are superiour clock-for-clock but do not run as fast as Intel CPUs. AMD is using a PR scheme to prevent stupid people falling into the MHz pit. As far as I'm concerned, AMD is doing 'em a favor.
Re:His name was Xenu. (Score:3, Insightful)
Studies have shown that only about 2% of the general population are vulnerable to cult recruitment & indoctrination. It's only sensible to filter out the other 98% as efficiently as possible.
(There is another 1-2% who are basically psychotic and will do nasty things just for the asking, but you want to filter them out as well, since they won't follow orders later on.)
Everything you require for $8 Mil (Score:2, Insightful)
Now 2 years later and $17 Mil into it and we could do better with a room full of homeless people with abacuses.
Re:Sun Whoppers (Score:1, Insightful)
In Objective-C and Smalltalk this is trivial as neither are strictly typed languages.
In Java for an object (C) to hold a reference that could be one of a number of different classes you define an interface and ensure that objects A & B conform to that. The pointer type is the interface label. That way the pointer can reference objects that do not share a common super-class with the required methods.
Objective-C calls this mechanism protocols.
All of these languages Smalltalk, Objective-C and Java support instropection (reflection in Java-speak)
So you don't even need to use interfaces in Java if you don't want to. Although I'll admit looking at some reflection code just to call a method in Java is ugly. But some of the API classes require this strategy (JInternalPane and JFrame for example respond to a set of messages but don't specify a common interface)
As for having primatives. Just because a language does not treat everything as an object does not mean it is not OO.
Smalltalk is the only runtime system I know of in which everything is an object, so I guess that you use that.
Educating others about the virtues of the likes of Smalltalk and Objective-C is good. But not going about it like you have.
Remember a great many more people use C++ which is less of an object orientated language than Java.
For some reason I can't log in, I'm not anonymous I'm Senjaz.
Re:His name was Xenu. (Score:2, Insightful)
I doubt that statement.
Perhaps it is true if you mean that 2% of the
population at any given moment in time are vunerable to cult recruitment,
but in reality: We all have moments when we are weak or depressed, our self-esteem is low and we are vunerable.
IMHO, realizing this vunerability is an important step in protecting yourself from the dangers of cults.
Also, realize that people don't join cults.
They are invited to 'discussion groups' or 'councilling' or 'therapy' or some other cover.
Cult indoctrination is gradual, like the frog in boiling water. (Or, a bait-and-switch scam as it is known in con-man terms)
Re:We make a secure Operating System (Score:2, Insightful)