Which companies are dead to you?

[Japhet]

Procter & Gamble. Massive amounts of unnecessary animal testing and a global mountain of plastic pollution.

[Woodinblack]

3 hours ago, Jean-Luc Pickguard said:

The one built into my Ashdown ABM 600 EVO VI doesn't get any use at all.

 

Mine neither. But I do like the ABM600 - just not the compressor.

[prowla]

3 hours ago, lozkerr said:

I have rather too many memories of Xenix. It should have been strangled at birth. SCO was a lot better until the company sued itself into the ground. I used to run a SCO-based Usenet news server as part of my BBS set-up back in the 90s.

 

Never knew Solaris ran on PCs though - I thought it was SPARC only?

Sun purchased another company (begins with a I but can’t remember)(searched - Interactive) for the PC product and then rebranded it. 
I’ve still got a set of SCO on floppy disk media in a box somewhere. 

Edited February 27 by prowla

[chriswareham]

1 hour ago, prowla said:

Sun purchased another company (begins with a I but can’t remember)(searched - Interactive) for the PC product and then rebranded it. 
I’ve still got a set of SCO on floppy disk media in a box somewhere. 

 

That was Interactive Unix, which was completely separate from Sun's port of Solaris to the x86 architecture.

 

They had another product that would run Windows under Solaris which I played around with in the 1990s. Then Sun bought Star Division, who made the office suite StarOffice, and the easy availability of that negated any need I had to run Windows applications on a Unix platform. StarOffice became OpenOffice, which after Oracle mucked it about following their acquisition of Sun was, ahem, eclipsed by being splitting off to become LibreOffice.

[chriswareham]

5 hours ago, Paul S said:

 

if you think that is bad, every time I see the thread 'playing in church' my mind says 'farting in church'.  

 

When I first saw that thread I thought it was about the bass playing in rather excellent Anglo-Australian band The Church.

[Shaggy]

More curmudgeoness- 

 

Nestle - for taking over and degrading the formerly wonderful Rowntrees and Terrys chocolate.   Have you seen a coffee flavoured Walnut Whip lately, WITH a walnut on top?  No, neither have I. 🙁

 

Amazon - I accept them (and eBay) as the unpleasant but unfortunately useful face of capitalism.  But can’t they be told just ONCE that I don’t want their feckin’ Prime, rather than EVERY single time?

 

Hotpoint - my son as a toddler used to love sitting and watching the washing going around.   Until the machine literally caught fire.   As with cars, have stuck with German products ever since.

 

So-called “Craft” beer in unsatisfyingly tiny cans; massively, massively overpriced.  Just why?

 

Rossi’s Fish and chip restaurant, Swansea.   Frequented for best part of 30 years, although I felt I while back that they’d lost their crown as best in the area.   However, called in last summer with the missus after a fatiguing morning of shopping and wilting with hunger, ordered 2 cod & chips.   There were 4 nice big cod in the display warmer over the counter, so figured it wouldn’t be long.   Watched with an increasing feeling of dismay over the next 20 mins as they were given to people behind us in the queue.  At 25 mins asked when our order might be ready.  Given a blank look, then told “oh, we’ll put a couple on to fry now”.  Asked for refund, never ever again. 🤬

 

 

 

 

[lozkerr]

31 minutes ago, chriswareham said:

That was Interactive Unix, which was completely separate from Sun's port of Solaris to the x86 architecture.

I never knew they'd ported it! Every day's a school day on BC. 

 

I last worked with Solaris during the NHS National Programme for IT. All the Spine components ran on yuuge Sun boxes. I quite liked it.

[chriswareham]

3 minutes ago, lozkerr said:

I last worked with Solaris during the NHS National Programme for IT. All the Spine components ran on yuuge Sun boxes. I quite liked it.

 

I just posted in another thread about my time as a contract programmer for a big press agency (there seems to be a surprising number of IT related threads on Basschat this week). One of the agency's permanent staff was an utter bodger, and bizarrely proud of it, who went off to do PHP programming on the bit of that NHS system developed by British Telecom. Made me fear for the health of the nation.

[prowla]

1 hour ago, chriswareham said:

 

That was Interactive Unix, which was completely separate from Sun's port of Solaris to the x86 architecture.

 

They had another product that would run Windows under Solaris which I played around with in the 1990s. Then Sun bought Star Division, who made the office suite StarOffice, and the easy availability of that negated any need I had to run Windows applications on a Unix platform. StarOffice became OpenOffice, which after Oracle mucked it about following their acquisition of Sun was, ahem, eclipsed by being splitting off to become LibreOffice.

Ah yes - I had one of those cards; might still be somewhere around. 

[chriswareham]

12 minutes ago, prowla said:

Ah yes - I had one of those cards; might still be somewhere around. 

 

I've still got an old SparcStation 5 in the loft. If you come across that card then I'd love to have it to see if it I can get it up and running - I seem to recall it was essentially a single board computer with a 386 or 486 processor on it.

[Norris]

Cadbury post-Kraft takeover

 

Take your Oreo cookies and shove them where they look like they came from, rather than crumbling them up into what used to be a nice chocolate bar! 

[lozkerr]

2 hours ago, chriswareham said:

One of the agency's permanent staff was an utter bodger, and bizarrely proud of it, who went off to do PHP programming on the bit of that NHS system developed by British Telecom. Made me fear for the health of the nation.

Hmm... he and I might have crossed paths. Or perhaps swords. BT could only deliver the contract they'd won by employing a shed-load of contractors, many of whom were incompetent wastes of space. Some of them ended up in manglement positions where they did a hell of a lot of damage. Others were in more lowly positions where they hoarded their knowledge and became deliberately obstructive. I ended up spending a lot of time devising strategies to circumvent those guys so that their contracts would not be renewed as their knowledge had been secretly transferred to permies. I even came across what I still think was a deliberate attempt at sabotage. If it had succeeded, almost every NHS system in England and Wales would have gone down.

 

So yeah. The over-reliance on self-certifying chancers was a massive risk that TPTB were happy to take. I can well believe that an incompetent clown who was fluent in bullshit could have made (and in many cases did make) a packet at the expense of the British taxpayer.

Edited February 28 by lozkerr

[prowla]

9 hours ago, chriswareham said:

 

I've still got an old SparcStation 5 in the loft. If you come across that card then I'd love to have it to see if it I can get it up and running - I seem to recall it was essentially a single board computer with a 386 or 486 processor on it.

I think mine may have been a 286 - I'm needing to have a clear-out, so will see what I find.
I've still got some hard disks, keyboards, mice, cables in need of sorting out too.

[Doctor J]

Cadburys. What is this slop now offered under that name?

 

Edited February 28 by Doctor J

[Newfoundfreedom]

18 minutes ago, Doctor J said:

Cadburys. What is this slop now offered under that name?

 

 

I haven't had Cadbury chocolate for years. They don't sell it here. 

 

My wife's just gone back to the UK for a couple of weeks and I've put in an order for her to bring back loads of Cadbury chocolate that I've been craving.

 

Should I prepare to be disappointed? ☹️

[Lfalex v1.1]

1 minute ago, Newfoundfreedom said:

 

Should I prepare to be disappointed? ☹️

 

I'm afraid so.

 

Mondeléz have been running them into the ground in the name of increased profitability.

[prowla]

The bars have about halved in size too - halved in size & doubled in price = 400%, so really not worth buying.

[Marky L]

20 minutes ago, prowla said:

The bars have about halved in size too - halved in size & doubled in price = 400%, so really not worth buying.

Shrinkflation as they call it. It's very noticeable in a wide and varied selection of food products.

[Minininjarob]

On 22/02/2024 at 23:05, SumOne said:

eBay. Someone clicked to buy a £1.5k motorbike from me but never actually turned up to buy it, no money exchanged, but ebay insisted I owe them their %. I never got to speak to anyone, just stuck in some Kafkaesque loop of bureaucracy 'computer says no'. In hindsight there are probably processes to deal with that, but I gave up trying then ignored them. They closed my account, sent threatening letters, I moved house, years later they sent bailiff letters to my parents. In the end I gave up and paid them the money they basically bullied and robbed from me. 

 

To my shame, I've actually used ebay a few times since. I try not to though, unless it feels I'm particularly shooting myself in the foot not to. 

So you used their service, agreed to pay the fees, then when a problem occurred you couldn’t be bothered finding out how to sort it out and ran away from the problem and somehow it’s eBay’s fault?

The exact same issue has happended to me 4 or 5 times and each time the fees have been waived instantly when I contacted them. But then I follow their rules, strange that. 

[SumOne]

1 hour ago, Minininjarob said:

So you used their service, agreed to pay the fees, then when a problem occurred you couldn’t be bothered finding out how to sort it out and ran away from the problem and somehow it’s eBay’s fault?

The exact same issue has happended to me 4 or 5 times and each time the fees have been waived instantly when I contacted them. But then I follow their rules, strange that. 

 

Well, not exactly - I agreed to pay fees for a service, but they didn't proivide that service. And I tried to sort it out, but their systems didn't allow it. I don't know why you're quite so combative and presuming to know all the details and would immediately side with the big faceless money making corporation over the lived experience of an individual.

 

It was 15 years ago and was perhaps a different scenario to yours and perhaps eBay systems have changed since. To be honest, as it's from 15 years ago I hadn't remembered all the details correctly in my previous post but I just did a search on my emails and this is what I can find from 2009 sent to eBay:

 

"I sent a message explaining that there was no payment due to you - the 2 identical items 'sold' were the same listing and I have not received payment for both, something has gone wrong on your system and there is no obvious way for me to fix it or respond to you or speak to anyone. I sent the message over a month ago asking what action could be taken as 2 sales were not made, but I received no response until these messages today canceling my account and threatening debt collection unless I pay you. This is especially poor customer service- if I can discuss it with a human or get human to read these emails then it can be resolved - but you are just going direct to some automated response of  'cancel account and send in the debt collectors'."

 

That was my last correspondance with them, account cancelled, I moved house but a long time later debt collector letters were eventually sent to my parents. I can't remember the subsequent correspondance, but in the end I paid them for money that was not owed to them - so they basically used dodgy faceless beauracracy to bully and steal from me.

 

I don't know about you but that seems like some sort of Kafkaesque dystopian situation where faceless beauracracy and systems are used to erode the rights of individuals, like we are seeing from the Post Office from a similar time when people put too much faith in shoddy automated systems of big organisations and prefer to presume blame on the individual victims.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 28 by SumOne

[Rich]

Speaking of Cadbury, here's another company that would be dead to me if they weren't so completely unavoidable: Kraft.

Cadbury's had planned to close the Somerdale factory at Keynsham, but a key part of Kraft's bid for the company was a solemn pledge they made, over and over again, that the factory would remain open, not a single job lost, blah blah blah. A week after they took over, suddenly it became 'financially unviable' to keep it open, and all its production was transferred to Poland. 400 jobs gone. The lying bastids never had the slightest intention of keeping it going.

[ricksterphil]

Been wracking my brains trying to think of a company/brand I dislike and then I remembered Ryan Air.

 

In a remote French airport I put my bag on the scales and was told it was overweight and the extra charge was 90 euros. Can I have my bag back to take some stuff out please, says I ? No, came the reply, it's already been checked in. 😡😡😡

 

Can't say I've never used Ryan Air since, but avoid them if at all possible.

[Lfalex v1.1]

1 hour ago, Rich said:

Speaking of Cadbury, here's another company that would be dead to me if they weren't so completely unavoidable: Kraft.

 

If ever proof were needed,  then here it is.

 

Mondeléz own both Cadbury and the Kraft/Jacobs/Suchard brands;

 

Hence the Toblerone debacle in which they put greater spaces between the triangles. May sound trivial,  but such was the uproar that they relented and went back to the old Toblerone form factor. 

[tauzero]

12 hours ago, Norris said:

Cadbury post-Kraft takeover

 

Take your Oreo cookies and shove them where they look like they came from, rather than crumbling them up into what used to be a nice chocolate bar! 

 

The Cadbury family for selling up to Kraft. Bastards.

[asingardenof]

21 hours ago, Jean-Luc Pickguard said:

The one built into my Ashdown ABM 600 EVO VI doesn't get any use at all.

Same, it's pretty much the only thing on it I don't like.