Well, it looks like somebody agreed with me, filed a class-action lawsuit, and won. Skype credits will no longer expire after six months, and anyone who lost credits prior to December 31 is owed $4.

I think this will be good for Skype long term because it will attract more casual paid users. The old terms certainly prevented me from giving them my money for quite a while. When you give a merchant money to hold prior to consuming their product, you expect they’re going to be able to actually hold onto it, you know?

Skype Will Stop Evaporating Its Customers’ Money is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

#2648: Feature request: Support Amazon S3 (closed)

#2741: Feature request: Amazon S3 (closed)

How many things are wrong with this? The fact that the person who shut down the feature request did so unilaterally, immediately, and with absolutely no discussion? The fact that the person used a pseudonym that doesn’t link back to any kind of profile or policy, so there is no way to get context on who this person is or why they made their decision? Or the arrogant tone of the response, which almost ensures that the people who took the trouble to file these feature requests will never do so for this project again?

For commercial products, feature requests are gold. Clearly, for some open-source projects, feature requests are an annoyance at best. It may be possible that FileZilla’s mission is “support dessicated IETF and W3C standards only,” but there’s no way for a civilian user to know that. Most civilians look at FileZilla’s mission as “transfer files from one place to another.” In that context, this kind of feature request is not unreasonable, particularly since many other file-transfer utilities (including the commercial product Transmit, which I use on OS X) have supported Amazon S3 for some time. If it’s really unreasonable to support a mode of file transfer because it wasn’t part of an IETF standard codified in the 1980s, then I have a new feature request for you: plugins. Just like Firefox does. Duh.

Ultimately, the technical solution to the problem isn’t really the issue here. Maybe providing this feature is too hard or outside the scope of the project’s mandate. But if that’s the case, then say that (and take a second to link to more information about your rationale). If somebody who worked for me provided such glib, dismissive responses to a feature request, they would be fired. The fact that we’re probably dealing with a volunteer here is not the issue. The fact that FileZilla is a free/open source project should also not make a difference. The snotty attitude (for this and many other open-source projects)  poisons the ecosystem and ensures that the software remains second-rate.

Your open-source project is not your fiefdom.

Nobody Said That Open Source Projects Were All About Customer Service is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Now, in this situation, you’d think that a little something might have gone wrong with the system update software, right? But Sony doesn’t think so. After calling Sony tech support, they wanted me to send them the PS3 and pay $150 to have it fixed, since, incredibly, there is no way for a civilian to reformat and reinstall system software on a PS3 that is in this state.

So I told the customer service rep (very politely) to cram it, and to provide a rationale why I should have to pay $150 to remedy an obvious fault in their system updater. Here are two of the most awesome excuses I got from Sony reps over the phone:

1) “The unit is out of warranty.”

So that’s fine, but it’s not like my two-year-old was jamming unwrapped slices of American cheese singles in the DVD slot — Sony’s software upgrade clearly caused the problem. Have you never heard of the phrase “you break it, you bought it”?

2) “There are no known issues with this update.”

Wrong, chuckles. There is at least one known issue with this update, and it’s going on right this effing minute on the PS3 in my living room. The fact that 10,000 other people haven’t complained to you doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. This is the same rationale as the fictitious auto maufacturer that Ed Norton worked for in Fight Club, the one that only does a product recall if the number of accidents times the number of insurance settlements exceeds the cost of a recall. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that if Sony ever gets into the automobile or heart-monitor business, we should all run screaming.

At one point I asked the customer service rep “Why would I send you $150 to fix a problem that was obviously caused by your software? I mean, is there any question in your mind that this problem is not my fault? Why wouldn’t I just put the PS3 on the curb, let the neighborhood kids ride their bicycles over it, and take photos to post on my blog as an art project?” (I am pretty sure that they didn’t have an answer for that one in their call center script, so I got sent to the assistant supervisor. Pro tip: to get escalated through customer support voice jail, be as surrealistic as possible.)

But being escalated through the hypothetical chain of command sadly didn’t do anything. Each time I asked to talk to someone who could describe to me why I had to pay $150 for Sony’s messed-up software, each person said “That’s our policy, I don’t have the authority to change it.” If that’s the case, then why am I talking to you? You’re wasting your time and mine.

In years past, I’d stuck with Sony components because they were fairly indestructable and they weren’t too expensive. (Our stereo and standard-def TV have always been all Sony and we’ve been pretty happy with them.) I hate to feel like I’m the old guy with his pants hiked up waving a garden rake at the neighborhood kids on his front lawn, but seriously, I’m going to avoid Sony products (all of them) for at least the next few years because of the excreable customer service experience I had today.

Breaking up with Sony is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

If it’s really the case that airlines can’t make money in the current environment without resorting to these pricing practices, how come Southwest, one of the most consistently profitable airlines in the country, doesn’t charge anything to check a second bag? And how is it that Continental can possibly get away with serving free meals on its flights?

Also: Fifty bucks to check a second bag, Delta? Seriously? Seven bucks for a fruit plate, Northwest? You guys are douches.

Tacking on all these little charges is cheesy. It’s yet another thing (in addition to abusive airport security and interminable delays) that makes me not want to fly at all. Anytime you can’t express the price of something in a sentence or less, there’s nearly always something predatory and possibly crooked going on.

People accept these charges because they have to; by the time you get to the airport, you don’t have any choice but to pay them if you want to get on your plane. But if all these charges were applied at the time you purchased your ticket instead of at the airport, my guess is that we’d see them evaporate (folded into the regular cost of a ticket) pronto.

I actually don’t mind what United and other airlines do with upsells at the airport — they let you pay a few extra bucks (typically under $20) for an exit row seat, which is sometimes worth it to me since I’m a big guy. But this is an option, not a requirement they force on you at the last minute.

This table shows a handy list of a few dozen major airlines and the fees they charge for stuff they used to do for free.

Update: I just booked a flight to London in November and paid an extra $100 out of my own pocket to fly Virgin Atlantic instead of United, la la la.

Handy Table of Airline Fees is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

“It’s the end of an era,” said Robert W. Mann Jr., an airline industry consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. Referring to the range of fees that customers face, Mr. Mann added, “Soon, like freight, we will pay by the pound for passenger air travel.”

Horse hockey. Only the amateurs and unfortunates who are for some reason forced to fly American will have to put up with this. Airlines try this kind of stuff all the time; it only sticks if the other airlines follow suit. So if customers remove American from the list of airlines they’re willing to subject themselves to (as I plan to), the other airlines won’t emulate this predatory pricing tactic and we won’t have to put up with it.

I should mention that last week when I was traveling to Florida and New York I flew Continental and it was terrific.

American, Cutting Back, Plans $15 Bag Fee is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

The page that generates these buttons does not work. It redirects to something that says "Page Not Found".

Please to fix.

Cheers,

Jeffrey

P.S. I know there used to be a way to kick off the PayPal payment flow with a simple URL instead of a form submit. Why is this buried in your documentation? I’m sure I’ve done this before but now I can’t find the instructions on how to do it.

Update: Looks like the page works now. Kudos!

Dear Paypal, is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Today on a lark I tried to make a call to a U.S. based land line using Skype, just to see what the experience would be like. To make calls from Skype to a land line, you have to pay Skype. They’ve given this the challenging monicker "SkypeOut".

What an incredible pain this was:

• They send you to a web page to set up payment. This page took about fifteen seconds to load on my machine.
• You can link your Skype account to your PayPal account, which seems like it would be good, although they inexplicably ask you to fill out a form providing your name/address/etc. which is dumb for a PayPal flow (if you have a PayPal account, they already have all this information or can get it from PayPal).
• At this point, you figure, my Skype account is linked to my PayPal account, tremendous, I can start making calls. But once you go to make a call, Skype says, sorry, can’t do that, you may think you’re done, but you first have to buy credit.
• Okay, swell, you think. I’ll buy some credit. Here’s what the form that lets you buy credit looks like:

Hey, wait a minute. I have to pay you ten bucks and the credit expires in six months? I thought Skype was supposed to be cheaper. Compared to my cel phone, that’s highway robbery. I’m trying to make a call that should cost me less than a dollar here, and you insist on charging me $10 in hopes that you can enjoy the float on my funds and I’ll forget about it within six months? This is bordering on scam-like behavior here.

When you link a Skype account to a PayPal account, why can’t it just debit funds from your PayPal account as you use the service, just like every other PayPal payee in the world, including eBay, does? I mean, if it’s somehow possible to pay iTunes for a $0.99 download using PayPal, it should be possible to pay Skype for a 15-minute toll call in the same way.

This is too much work. I’m reverting back to my cel phone and I’ll only use the free mode of Skype with other Skype users.

Skype: Making It Difficult For People To Give Them Money is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

It took a couple of days for administrators from The Well to even reach anyone at Comcast to talk to them about what was going on, and when they finally did reach someone, Comcast faulted The Well for receiving so much spam — in essence, blaming the victim. Elise Ackerman at the Merc did a story on this today which has more details.

Since Comcast is being intransigent about this, it seems like the smartest recourse is to switch ISPs if you can. (If you’re in Northern California, I can’t recommend Sonic.net highly enough.) You should kick Comcast to the curb even if you’re not affected by this particular problem, since Comcast has had this problem with other peers in the past, according to the article. If you’re using Comcast to handle your email, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they start routing your mail to the bit bucket.

We knew that Comcast was not what you’d call a center of excellence when they so badly bungled the TechTV acquisition a few years back, but keeping email going is pretty basic, guys.

Comcast: Not The Sharpest Tool in the Shed is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

The New Users Network, or NUN, is a group of experienced Ubuntu enthusiasts who help new Ubuntu users come to grips with the operating system.

Volunteer NUN mentors spend time on Ubuntu forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels looking for new user queries. The mentors have agreed to follow the NUN guidelines, which caution against the use of popular responses to newbie questions, such as RTFM, JFGI, and UTFS. Instead, they try to answer the queries in an easy-to-follow fashion, and point to online resources wherever possible, such as a wiki that explains things in details.

“At first the NUN was nothing more than an IRC channel (#ubuntu-nun on the freenode network) that we could bring a user from #kubuntu or #ubuntu into, for one-on-one work that couldn’t be done in the busier support channels. Since then, it has become a popular haven for geeks and new users alike,” says Rich Johnson, a NUN mentor.

But what really makes this team laudable is its aim to foster intelligent and knowledgeable users. Throwing commands isn’t encouraged, unless that’s all the user wants. The NUN guidelines call for mentors to exercise caution while pointing users to resources such as ubuntuguide.org that simply list the commands to get a task done, without much explanation.

It sounds like the Ubuntu guys are hitting all the right notes with this; I can think of a couple of platforms that aren’t getting the adoption that they should because they don’t consider support for noob users to be a priority. I wonder how well Ubuntu users in remote time zones are supported?

Ubuntu turns to NUN to help new users is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

This is Philippe Gardelle, chef/proprietor of Chapeau! restaurant, where we dined for our sixth wedding anniversary last night. Philippe rocks.

If you’re in San Francisco, you should make a point to dine at his place. The food is outstanding, the service is bar-none the best of any restaurant in the city, the wine list is terrific, and it’s extra fun to be greeted like a regular by the owner when you walk in the door and when you leave (even if you only eat there once every six months).

One time when we ate there we didn’t quite know the drill and we slipped out without shaking hands and chatting with Philippe — he literally chased us halfway down the street just so he could shake our hands and ask us how everything was. (Naturally my first thought was that I’d forgotten to pay or leave a tip, or I’d forgotten my coat or something.)

Chapeau! is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.