Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1191655780.199858.40510@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 4, 5:10 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But do you want to deal with the world as it should be (GG works
perfectly) or the world as it is (sometimes GG's interface loses
your text)? And the fact that it works perfectly most of the
time -- well, it's another of those cost/benefit/risk tradeoffs,
isn't it?

TBH I should have some say in Google's QA since I'm a user and have no
decent alternative to boot.

"TBH"? there would seem to be a number of possibilities:

http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/TBH

but I'm guessing "to be honest".

I find the idea that Google is obligated to provide you with
anything at all rather baffling. They're a business, not a
charitable or governmental organization, so why should they be
obligated to do anything that doesn't increase their profits?
Are they making money from you somehow? Maybe they are, if somehow
your use of their services increases what they can charge the
advertisers who as I understand it are their source of income,
but is your indirect contribution to their bottom line enough
to economically justify their providing good service? I'd hope
that an organization that, as I understand it, has adopted
"don't be evil" as its motto would try to be a good corporate
citizen, and maybe overall they do, but demanding it .... I dunno.

I think we need a Bill of Users' Rights online, standardized and
eventually adhered to by any software company or web site that wants
any interaction deeper than just browsing and reading from its user
base. Not only are onerous terms and conditions commonplace, but
there's nothing very standardized save that users may be treated like
dirt at any time and for no good reason and have no recourse. :P This,
by the way, applies even to *pay* sites AFAICT.

"Even to pay sites" -- huh. I'd have said "especially to pay sites".

I'd expect such a Bill
of Rights to at minimum require: nobody can be banned except for
specific cause; decisions like that must be made impartially and
fairly; downtime should be minimized and unavoidable, never
gratuitous, and that means proper change management and backup
management policies server-side; users should not be treated like
mushrooms regarding bugs, downtime, etc. especially when they
explicitly enquire; there must be a place where questions and feedback
about the site's operation will be accepted and answered honestly and
fairly; and there must be a good faith effort to fix bugs in a
reasonably timely manner, with "bugs" including any behavior a
majority of users find undesirable that is not required by a standard,
and any standard-violating behavior, relative to applicable standards
(e.g. HTTP, HTML, and NNTP for Google Groups). In particular, if the
site is IE only it is in violation. (This obviously means no ActiveX
allowed. Good riddance, I say.)

I'm not sure whether to call this idealism or .... No, all the
other words I can think of would suggest something negative about
you, and we can't have that.

[ snip ]

(Paypal is notorious for dubious security, several god-awful self-
serving policies, spamming (though that seems to have stopped a few
months ago), and ripping people off with exorbitant transaction fees.
Don't suggest it again. :P)

I'd have said I wasn't so much suggesting or recommending PayPal as
speculating about whether it was possible to buy something online
without a credit card. But maybe it comes to the same thing.

Now that I think about it, I'd think a debit card would work, and
that anyone with a bank account should be able to get one of those.
But there are security risks there too. <shrug>

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.

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