Soapbox

I just dropped out of a Cisco customer satisfaction survey, after realizing the six pages I already filled out represent only 20% of the entire survey. I don’t know why they think they can make such unreasonable demands on people’s time.

Like most clueless surveys, they feature multiple inane questions where you are supposed to answer vague and irrelevant questions several times on a scale of 1 to 5. There are open text fields for feedback, but the likelihood of actual humans reading them is so low, it just isn’t worth my time to fill them out.

The ideal survey should have only three fields:

1. one to say whether you are satisfied or not (and this is a binary field, not on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever).
2. a free-form text field for feedback. The company asking for the survey should commit to having an actual human read each feedback, and be empowered to take action. If it isn’t worth having a human read it, it’s not worth my filling it. Outsourcing a survey to SurveyMonkey or one of the myriad automated surveying firms just demonstrates that you are not really serious about feedback.
3. an optional field for an email address so you can ask follow-up questions.

Most programs now include an online version check. This is a mixed blessing – there has definitely been a loosening of QA standards since the days when software shipped on shiny discs and distributing updates was very expensive.

Another, more subtle issue is that most of these programs check or updates on startup. Guess what? That’s precisely when I least want to be interrupted by housekeeping administrivia. Just let me get on with my work already.

Others, like Java, arrogate to themselves the right to keep an application running just to periodically check for updates, even if you never use the application in question. This slows down system startup time for a task that will be useful for a few minutes per year at best, and only shows how arrogant and narcissistic these companies are with their assumption that the universe revolves around them and they have the right to steal other people’s time and computer resources.

The best solution would be for Apple and Microsoft to open up their respective software update systems to cover third-party software under a unified interface. Failing that, programs should be rewritten to check on exit or after an extended period of inactivity, to be less disruptive to the user’s flow.

Update (2009-02-02):

I tried to update Google Earth on my laptop and discovered that it installs the incredibly obnoxious Google updater. Well, at least Google Earth 5.0 has the decency to disclose this fact, unlike previous versions of the updater.

I refused to accept installation of the updater, and uninstalled Google Earth altogether. I generally distrus Google (my browser is set to reject their cookies, for instance) and this doesn’t help.

For some reason the audiophile electronics market is full of vendors selling wares with dubious claims supported with pseudo-scientific technobabble, in a way other expensive hobbies like photography are spared from. It’s one thing to charge a premium for overbuilt metal chassis that look good in a rack but do little for sound quality, another altogether to claim improvements in sound quality from tweaks that simply can’t make a difference.

“Audiophile” power cables are an example – somehow a $500 IEC power cord blessed with pixie dust will make up for the miles of bog-standard copper or aluminium power lines from the utility. Peter Aczel has made a convenient list of the top frauds perpetrated by the so-called industry. Of course, it would be unfair to tar an entire industry with a monster brush – there are ethical cable manufacturers like Blue Jeans Cables.

Audophiles who buy into those scams also tend to become rabid supporters (cognitive dissonance in action) and will get quite upset if you point out basic high-school science makes those claims unsupportable.

Usually these shady practices are limited to the ghetto of cable manufacturers, but when a supposedly reputable firm like Chord gets into the act with their “Indigo Plus Digital” digital S/PDIF coaxial digital interconnects, the only sane approach is to boycott the company altogether. I had considered their Chordette USB/Bluetooth DAC, but you’ve got to doubt any claim made by a company that will stoop to a transparent fraud like purportedly premium digital cables.

Despite my loathing for all things Sony, I purchased a Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-Ray player a few months ago. One of the reasons is specifically because it implements Profile 1.1 and not 2.0.

One thing you can be sure of – BD-Live will be used by the scumbags in Hollywood for tracking and spyware long before it is used to bring anything of value to the customer, just as TiVo was used to snoop on users’ watching habits.

I have been in Bombay for a week now. Traffic snarl-ups are a reality of life here, and enterprising hawkers flog magazines to passengers caught in traffic jams.

According to my wife, one of the publications they sell is “ee-keya” – Ikea catalogs. The thing is, Ikea does not (yet) have a presence in India. What people do is buy the catalog, then ask their carpenters to reproduce the furniture therein. It seems Ikea design is quite prestigious here…