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Comment Here's a VIN number, name and address (Score 1) 257

There's someone who seems to commonly use my email when purchasing products. She has the same first initial and last name. This has happened a bunch over the years. Often it's "We're happy you stopped in, please call us if you have any questions" type emails.

Last week I received an email with the VIN number of the new Ford she bought, along with instructions on how to install Ford Connect to locate the car and remotely lock and unlock it.

So I emailed the salesman (whose name was in the email). That email bounced (figured out later he'd left the dealer after the sale.) I just dropped it.

A week later Ford sent me a survey asking how satisfied I was. So I answered the survey (I did not receive an introduction to the service department!) I get to the end, and it asks me to confirm my contact information: name, address, and phone number. So I called her and left an message. No response. I emailed the dealer again, copying the General Manager's email this time. No response. I found the salesman's professional Facebook page and messaged him. No response.

So I put the story on the dealer's Facebook page. DING DING DING. I got an email within hours saying that they would remove the faulty contact information.

Comment Trying to defeat the stereotype (Score 1) 140

As a college professor, my students often do their projects and homework at odd hours. I try (as much as practical) to be responsive. That means checking my email and responding late at night and on weekends.

When I was in industry, we developed software used by chip designers. When they had a chip release coming up, they worked insane hours, so we tried to be there for them, and that meant checking email on weekends and late at night.

I always thought of it as part of being a professional.

Comment Done to me ... Verizon is the weakest link (Score 4, Insightful) 76

While I was out having dinner, Verizon called me three times to verify if I'd lost my phone. Each time I said no, the second time I was asked if I wanted to add a passcode and lock the account. I did. (It was Verizon, I checked later and they had the logs of all three calls to me, but I'm not sure if callers can spoof the Verizon internal caller ID)

Later that evening, I found myself locked out of my email accounts. I could see it happening in real time, but couldn't stop it. I called Verizon by landline and was told that they'd activated my spare iPhone after I dropped my phone in a pool. NO! I might have said a number of harsh words to them.

In the meantime, American Express had called my cell and emailed me to confirm a dodgy transaction, and the folks who had my phone number and email confirmed the transaction. By the time I called Amex, it was too late (although I ended up with no liability)

I tried to file a complaint with the local PD and was told "I don't have time for this" by the receptionist.

Comment Everything ... everything is conspiring. (Score 4, Interesting) 474

The gates are now so small that the electron wave function has a pretty high probability of being "on the other side" of the gate. As gates shrink, leakage power goes up very rapidly. Even when they're "off", the gates are consuming too much power (leaking it to ground.)

Also, think about 5 Ghz, IBM's fastest chips. At 5 Ghz, the clock speed is 200 picoseconds, and a 10 deep pipeline can allocate about 20 ps to each gate transition. That's a lot to ask, given that resistance and capacitance don't scale down linearly with dimensions. You also have to populate your chip with a lot of decoupling capacitors in order to hold the charge locally for each transition (because you can't get the power from off chip in 20 ps.) To fight the increased RC load (proportionally) you're putting in more buffers (big amplifiers).

As if that weren't enough, you have the fact that a 14 nm gate is about 20 silicon atoms across. When you start doping the substrate, your actual behavior is all over the place because one or two more dopant atoms represent a 10-20% shift, up or down (total shifts of 40-50%.)

So, your gates are too small, they all behave differently, they have to drive a relatively larger load, and the suckers are too hot.

Comment Tired of sellers begging for positive feedback (Score 1) 205

I hate ebay, in part because of the constant begging for positive feedback.

Now I'm getting it from Amazon's sellers. Every purchase that's not from Amazon itself results in emails asking me to leave positive feedback, reminders that if I haven't left feedback I still can. I got tired of that pretty quickly on ebay. "A+++++++++" seller ... gack. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but doing exactly what I paid you to do is actually "C" level work.

There's also the "used book scam" which has hit me twice. Find a relatively inexpensive copy of a rare book. Order said copy. Copy ships. Copy never arrives. "So sorry, it must have gotten lost in the mail." Next day the same seller has a copy available at 3X or even 10X the price you paid.

It appears that they get "seller's remorse" and pretend to ship you a book (with no tracking, of course) and then miraculously find another copy they can sell closer to the prevailing rate. Several sellers seem to have a lot of feedback that implies this is what's happening.

The third scam I've seen is the "I don't really have the book, but I'll have someone else ship you a copy" ... Order from seller "A", book arrives from seller "B". They offer a book at a slightly higher price and better quality than the other seller.

Comment Star Wars universe is "lived in" (Score 1) 359

This was seen as a huge difference when Star Wars came out. I'm old enough to remember the reviewers talking about how the universe looked lived in and worn, unlike the "just from the factory" cleanliness of Star Trek.

There were many comparisons between the Millennium Falcon and the Enterprise.

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