Author: Amit Schreiber

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HP Is An Evil Company

Hewlett-Packard is simply an evil company. In Israel, their customer support has been so awful that Israeli customers united and contacted the global management about the quality lack of service. That alone says a lot – Israeli customers rarely unite. Online forums are full with disappointed customers, who could not get their devices fixed for one reason or another. It has come to the point where I simply recommend friends not to buy HP products because there will be no support for them.

Another thing is the well-known high cost of HP Inkjet printer cartridges. The European Parliament even forced HP to remove “smart chips” from their cartridges in order to get their prices lower (link to a 2002 news article). I haven’t bought an HP product in years… I wonder if that actually worked.

Why do I talk about this now? Because an HP former employee just revealed 14 Hewlett-Packard “Company Secrets”, all of them infuriating if you ever had problems with HP customer support. The one that left me with my jaws open wide was this one:

Many HP Printers, like their laser printers, have a built-in page-count after which they won’t work.

Yes, you read it right. Your printer might stop working just because you printed a certain number of pages already. Later on, another 9 more “fun HP facts” like these were published.

There is only one simple conclusion – HP is an evil company. I recommend you to not buy their products and let them rot. (via Digg)

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I Got Ace Spayed

On Friday I took Ace to the vet. She was very quiet on the way there. She’s always quiet and sleepy in car rides… just like me, actually :) Anyway, she was pretty calm on the table when we got her out of her carrying box. The vet was supposed to give her a shot first and then use sleeping gas. Since Ace behaved so well, he decided not to use a restraining cage, being a very unpleasant experience to the cat.

When the vet touched Ace with the needle, the tiger inside of her woke up. She forced herself out of his lock and scratched him and me (I was standing close). Then she ran away to a corner, while creating a big mess on her way. I was scratched and proud. Luckily, some of the stuff in the shot did get into her system and she became dizzy enough after 10 minutes for us to grab hold of her. He still needed to use the restraining cage for the rest of the shot.

I took Ace home after the surgery. She was still wobbly and confused. Seeing her like this was really painful to me. She tried to climb onto her favorite places like the bed and the table, but failed to do so as it probably hurt too much and she didn’t get her strength back yet. So I helped her a few times but that too seemed painful to her. By evening time she started eating again and looked much better. On Saturday she was still recuperating but I could see that she regained her vitality and even tried to play a little (I didn’t cooperate – she must rest for a week).

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Yahoo! Pipes – What A Great Idea

Yahoo! proves once again that there’s still innovation left in them, this time with Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes lets a user define a pipe, which is a way to customize the web to your needs. A simple example would be “take the latest articles in New York Times and find related pictures on flickr”. The number of possibilities is enormous. Here’s an article about 5 ways to use Yahoo! Pipes.

I’m really impressed with the idea. This can be used to create very nice, dynamic content by users. You can also check out the main Yahoo! Pipes website for some selected pipes. (via Digg)

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Why You Should Care About RSS

I wrote before about Google’s RSS reader (previous post link) but I always wanted to educate about RSS. I just couldn’t find the right way to explain it, so that it will be perfectly clear how anyone can use RSS for consuming content faster and better. Luckily for me, Download Squad (main website link) took the time to write an article called “why do you care about RSS?”, which does the explaining work. They include both sides – the reader and the website owner, which is also nice.

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I Only Care About The Company That Much

This has happened to me more than a few times. A problem is found in code that I’m responsible for on a customer’s site. There’s always rush and there’s always concern. This is good. While I have concern for my employer’s name and reputation, one of the first things I do is go check if the problem was caused by something that I did. When I tell colleagues that I’m happy it wasn’t my fault, the usual response is “it doesn’t matter. The customer thinks we [the company] suck.”

Well, I only care about the company I work for that much. I truthfully care more about whether or not my code, which I wrote with my own 10 fingers, is responsible for the problem. Not only do I think this is a good thing, I also think this is the better approach. Employees who claim they “see the big picture” may consequently think they can write crappy code and get away with it thinking that, as long as things work, it’s ok.