The product itself was OK (mainly Thinkpads, the good, old ones) and Toshiba laptops (not as good as IBM (then!), but still not bad). But if a 'repair engineer' has a few screws left over after a 'repair' and/or screws in the wrong places and/or the wiring of the WiFi and BT just laying around inside, I can't call it a repair. And often the original fault was not properly taken care of either.
One of my tasks under the manager before this one was quality control and I have seen all the afore mentioned, and it were always the same people. I am still wondering why those were kept working there, but they were the guys who became 'employee of the month' under this manager,, because they did the most 'repairs' on a day. Competent techs were berated, because their production rate was behind those of the incompetents.
And owning stock in the company??? Nah...just wage slaves at work, but increasing the number of unsatisfied customers is never a good idea. We had enough work as it was, and most of us wanted to do it well. But explaining this 'manager' why a good repair takes more time than a bad one and how a good, definitive repair would positively affect the name of IBM/Toshiba, was useless. All that counted was the number of computers that you ticked off in a week, and an 80% recall rate (under warranty!) was just an increased number of repairs.
(A few months later, IBM, who had taken over this shop, decided to sell it to another company in GB that closed our shop in the Netherlands. If that had not happened, I think it would have tanked on its own under this management).

So did we. But this guy (called Peter, there is no such thing as coincidence), was literally just interested in numbers. If you handled 15 laptops a day you were, in his eyes, better than when you repaired 10, because 15 > 10. How well you did it didn't interest him.
Why do you think the competent repair engineers who put efford in their work to REPAIR and deliver good work (which takes more time, thus less repairs per week), hated this guy?

You might be right if the repairs were not under warranty. But most were, so they cost the company money. And even if the repairs were not under warranty, bad repairs leads to unsatisfied customers and an unsatisfied customer will think twice before buying that brand ever again and will tell everyone to avoid it, while a good repair will lead to a better image and more sales. On the long term, the last will work better.

I have had a manager like that, in a computer repair firm. Before he was thrust upon us by IBM (Incredible Bureaucratic Machine), morale on the workfloor was excellent, but he managed to get it down to far below zero in no time. He literally told us that 'He did not know what happened on the workfloor, he did not need to know and he did not want to know.' All he looked at was figures: the more repairs one wrote up, the better.
So, someone who just slammed the parts of a laptop together, had a few screws left and just looked if it did switch on after that, got a better qualification than someone who carefully reassembled one and tested the machine before sending it back to the customer. The first did more 'repairs' on a day (but most of those came back because the machines were still broken), the last hardly ever had a re-repair, but trying to explain that on a performance review was totally useless.
Needless to say that every competent repair engineer in the shop hated the guy's guts...

You won't find me in favour of the European Union in its current form, rather the contrary. The EU as it is now, is totally in favour of Big Business, with 'Teh Holey EconoME' as an excuse to break down the excellent systems many of the individual countries had in place, to enable poorer and thouroughly corrupt states like Italy and some former East block states to partake in the system, making it possible to play out workers against each other and sucking funds from richer countries.
I am for European coöperation, but not in its current form, which threatens to go the way you describe in your last paragraph.

...Says the AC...

It's not 'I'll pay more if someone else worries about it', It is 'we all CARE about each other and we all contribute to each other's wellbeing'. But that concept is apparently totally strange to right-wingers, who have only one thought: ME, ME, ME! and their only concern is about Me, Myself and I.

If a party promises (before elections) to keep things as they are and to defend the good things and people vote for that party based on those promises, the voters clearly signal that they are happy with things as they are. If said party turns around a 180 degrees after elections, their voters are duped.

If the voters had been a bit smarter they could have seen it coming but said party *had* a lot of traditional voters. It is now (rightfully) going down the drain. Alas, the party will probably have two more years to go to demolish our formerly so nice country.

Here in Europe, we used to have this little thing called 'Solidarity'. Sharing the costs that everybody risked to have to make and yes, some of it (or hopefully most of it) you'd never need. But IF you came in a situation, it would not cost you two arms, a leg and half your ribcage, but you'd be covered and everybody would be happy.
The American inspired 'ME, ME, ME, MEEEEE!!!!'-culture is taking over now, and the total costs are going up for everybody (as I said in my previous post), while service levels are dropping. Not, of course, if you have shovelfulls of money, than you can pay extra for the levels of service that used to be reachable for all and better

Yes, things were subsidized then, but if you really believe taxes went down after delivering us to commercial interests, keep on dreaming... (Except of course for those poor super-rich schmuks, after all, you can't stop subsidizing their million-Euro villa's which costs just twice as much as all subsidized rent for minimum wages combined)..

No, they were not. They were duped by parties who promised to do A but did Z when elected. Those parties told everyone that everything had to be left to the market by command of the European Union, while they knew that not to be the case. It was pushed through by the right wing parties with the help of some semi left wing and centre parties, where the first mentioned mostly talk left wing at election time but act right wing inbetween elections and support the right wing shit.
Problem is the electorate is so stupid they remember only the rethorics spewed from at most two month before elections and forget about the actual actions of the parties involved. And the rich keep laughing, since most things are going their way for the last decade...

I live in the Netherlands. In your opinion a far left, almost commie country if I read your comment well. We used to have a good health insurance system, good public transport and an excellent mail service, all state financed. Until some of our right wing bastards decided to leave all that to 'the market'. Services would improve and tariffs would decrease under the pressure of all the competitors in The Great Free Market, is what they told us.
The result? As to be expected with companies trying to deliver the least possible service for the highest amount of money (which IS the thing 'Free Market" is all about), health insurance prices are rising through the ceiling while coverage goes through the floor, public transport is more crappy than ever with higher prices and mail delivery goes the same way.
The blessings of Free Market and its Invisible Hand, as touted by right wing parties, are only blissfull for the Big Companies and their filthy rich owners. And taxes? Gone up anyway, except for the richest.

So, i will take a bit higher taxes in exchange for better services anytime. Here we see what your Holy Free Market does, and very, very few people like it. (Why they keep believing the shit the right wingers here spout and keep voting for them against their own interest keeps baffling me,)

And believing in a deity means accepting on faith that something or someone incredibly more complicated than the universe came into existence without any universe at all to help it come into existence, to create the universe and write a book about it that nobody really understands. Good luck with that one!

(Since this subthread is not really on topic I will just drop this comment and will not go into discussion.)

Unless you manage to miss the ground.

First: how long would this have lasted when the source had not been open? Three years? Four? Ten?
Second: The article you mention is from 2008, SIX years old so no longer relevant,
Third: Open Source is not ideal, nor is Closed Source. But WHEN a fault is found in OSS, as a rule it will be fixed. Failures may exist in CSS for long times, and be exploited, without anyone but the exploiter knowing about it. And when such a failure is exposed, you have to wait if and when the maker of the software fixes it.
So, OSS is, as a rule, safer then CSS. Maybe Linux is not THE answer, Windows should not even be asked for.

Breach of ethics is not possible for Microsoft: They never had any to break in the first place.

A poster before me in this thread has already answered that one. See http://news.slashdot.org/comme...