Direct Marketing
I absolutely hate Direct Marketing by telephone. I have no objections to anything through normal snail mail (Direct Marketing through email is just simply SPAM and they should shoot every one of them), but being called three times in one morning by people who want to sell me some adspace on a (unused) search-site or anything should find themselves a real job where they don’t have to annoy other people. I’m getting more and more impolite when I talk to those people. Normally, I just kept in mind that the person on the other end of the telephone is just doing his or her job, but lately, I get so many phonecalls that I’m getting ruder and ruder. When I finally have a working Asterisk installation, I’ll block any and all telephone calls that do not display their return number. And of course, I’ll keep a list of all numbers from those friggin’ marketing folks. Maybe they’ll stop harrassing me then. I doubt it, though.
There should be more voices raised against those unethical practises. They cost me time and time is money. I’m usually not as strict about the “time is money” thing, but when it comes to Direct Marketeers, I am. I really think they should make it illegal to bother people with such rubbish.
Do you think the same about Direct Marketing? Do as I do, tell them you won’t ever buy something from a company that resorts to telephone marketing. Ever. Even when you like the offer, don’t buy anything. Nothing at all. If a lot of people say that, maybe they’ll stop. It’s the same as spam, if everyone would just ignore it, it wouldn’t be profitable for spammers to invest time in it.
Mandriva is out to get me, today
Well, apparantly, my computer wanted to screw me real good today. After the rant I wrote this afternoon about the trouble I’m having with Mandriva 2005LE, I’ll add some stuff which I just encountered. Actually, I encountered it before, but then I didn’t want to write it down, because I thought it was all kinda minor. Now, when I have the full picture, it seems a lot of trouble from a distribution that worked so nicely…
- I’m running the NVidia kernel from Mandrivaclub‘s commercial packages. Yes, I actually payed Mandrake for their software (a while ago, since then I’ve been VIP). When booting, though, I’m getting an error message about nvidia being unable to install. After that, nvidia runs normally, so it seems like a bogus message. Still annoying and unnecessary. Also, there seems to be no place to report bugs in those commercial packages.
- Every other boot, Alsa doesn’t start properly. And when I say every other boot, I mean every other boot. The first boot everything is okay, the second the emu10k1 isn’t recognised, the third time everything is okay, the fourth time the emu10k1 isn’t recognised, etc. Annoying, to say the least. I have no idea why it does this.
- Also, when the soundcard is detected, when I log in, all sound is muted by default. I need to manually open KMix and unmute the sound. Again, annoying.
- My Netgear WA311 isn’t detected properly. It gives an error during startup. I manually added “rmmod orinoco_pci; modprobe orinoco_pci” to /etc/rc.local to make it work without having to go to a prompt each boot. Note: This piece of hardware worked perfectly under Mandrake 10.1. Actually, that’s why I bought two of them!
- This might not be Mandriva-specific (maybe the others aren’t either, but still, it’s worth mentioning here), but when I have a lot of traffic over my pci wifi card (the netgear wa311 from the precious point), the kernel stops working. Usually, it takes a while before it hangs and my screen is blanked when I notice it. I think it’s an error in the orinoco_pci-drivers or something, not sure. It’s been around since Mandrake 10.0, though.
- Klipper doesn’t start automatically! Why did they disable this? Klipper kicks ass!
Some of these problems might not be Mandriva specific. I’m not sure about that. But the problems I experience make me want to switch to another distro. And I will, one of these days. Probably to Ubuntu, since it works so flawlessly on my laptop.
I’m dissappointed in Mandriva, I really thought they would improve stuff, but it seems all downhill since 10.0. Too bad.
