Comment What? (Score 1) 642
I'm sorry, I thought it was March 1st, not April 1st.
Submission + - Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Sub (techdirt.com) 1
suraj.sun writes: Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Subpoena To Get An Itemized Bill:
A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information.
Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon to hand over the itemized bill info.
It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.
The judge has also suggested Verizon should be fined $1,000 for its failure here, and that suggestion will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.
Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110715/02212815101/verizon-tells-customer-to-get-lawyer-subpoena-to-get-itemized-bill.shtml
A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information.
Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon to hand over the itemized bill info.
It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.
The judge has also suggested Verizon should be fined $1,000 for its failure here, and that suggestion will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.
Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110715/02212815101/verizon-tells-customer-to-get-lawyer-subpoena-to-get-itemized-bill.shtml
Comment I don't care.. (Score 1) 1
I'm buying it anyway.
Oblivion was fantastic and I have no doubt Skyrim will bring the goods.
Submission + - Happy 30th anniversary, Donkey Kong (technologizer.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: 30 years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong--an iconic arcade machine that put the company on the video game map and introduced Mario. Technologizer's Benj Edwards celebrated the anniversary by rounding up some of the game's odder sidelights. For instance, it was originally going to be a game about Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl--and among its stranger offshoots was a pocket-sized game in which Donkey Kong and Mario faced off in hockey.
Comment Sometimes it pays to pay... (Score 1) 127
We are using Continuent's m/cluster. Costs a little bit (still loads cheaper than Oracle) but so far delivers the goods with little setup or maintenance.
It is for a web application so read performance is where it's at. It distributes the writes across all the nodes, so write performance actually takes a slight hit, but read performance is load balanced.
We are running three dual processor nodes and the performance is fantastic. It's shared nothing, so all data is on disk on all three machines. Supposedly we can add up to 12 more nodes (just buy the licenses) to dramatically increase our read performance.
We looked at all the different open source clustering solutions and they were still a little too "roll your own" for our production environment.
