Somehow I don't think that's what they meant to say...

I wonder how many of those they’ve just sent out…

The situation is that a year ago I changed my package and the new package includes a discount of £2.99 a month if you agree to be bound by a rolling one year contract. To date everything has been fine and they have deducted the discount from each quarterly bill.

In April they wrote to say that the first year was nearly up and that if I didn’t contact them they would assume I wanted to continue for a further year.  I was happy to continue so did nothing.

I was slightly surprised therefore when the latest bill showed no discount beyond 21st May when the first year ended. So I contacted them to ask what going on, and this is what I was told in response.

I can confirm that the reason the discount has not been applied to your recent bill is because BT wanted to make sure that you where happy to keep the service, therefore this will all be rectified on your next bill in August 19th 2010 and on this bill you will be able to see the adjustments, which will cover the billing period for the 20th May 2010 also.

So basically they are saying that they’re going to take bill me the full price now then refund me on the next bill – essentially they want to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months so they can earn the interest on it instead of me.

The bit about wanting to make sure I was happy to continue is, of course, complete nonsense. As soon as I allowed it roll over into the second year I was contractually bound to continue with it for that year and I’m sure they would have been very quick to bill me for the rest of the year if I had tried to cancel.

I guess maybe I should consider what interest rate I should apply to my loan to them…

Possibly not the impression BT would want to give

Yes, that’s right, the first discussion listed is titled “Am I really Unlucky or is BT Customer Services really this abysmal?”. From my experience I’d say the answer is yes, it really is that abysmal…

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

By way of comparison, here’s how the same area looks in OpenStreetMap at the moment:

The Isle of Dogs from OpenStreetMap

Obviously the maps in the book have had extra information added, and some things like stations changed a little, but the base map is clearly both OpenStreetMap data and OpenStreetMap cartography.

Naturally enough the first thing I did was to turn to the acknowledgements to see what nice things they would have to say about the project, and indeed we do get a mention, though more in passing than anything. What it says is:

All other maps by Steve Dew using base maps by Openstreetmap

More alarming however was what I found at the front of the book, among all the other copyright statements, where it has the following line:

Copyright © 2010 in maps New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd

Whilst it is probably true that there is some copyright (in the additional work done on top of the base map) which vests with them, there is also clearly a substantial amount of work whose copyright lies with members of the OpenStreetMap project.

As far as I can tell nowhere does it indicate that the maps carry a CC-BY-SA license, which they must do, by virtue of being derived from OpenStreetMap maps which carry that license.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that people are using our work (and my own work even – some of the area shown above was surveyed by me) in this way – that’s the whole point after all. I just wish they would spend five minutes to properly credit us and to point people at the license, both of which the license actually requires them to do.

For the record, the first map in this post is © OpenStreetMap and contributors and New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd and the second is © OpenStreetMap and contributors. Both are licensed under CC-BY-SA.

]]> http://compton.nu/2010/05/how-not-to-credit-openstreetmap/feed/ 6 http://compton.nu/2010/04/closed-with-my-agreemen/ http://compton.nu/2010/04/closed-with-my-agreemen/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:54:25 +0000 Tom http://compton.nu/?p=313 I think the following quotes from my email exchange with BT speaks for itself. First my email to BT last Thursday:

Whilst this clearly addresses the question of how the second call came to be made after I had been placed on the opt out list, and I am quite happy to accept that explanation, it appears to say nothing about how the first (or indeed the second) call came to be made when my number was registered with the Telephone Preference Service.

Equally it says nothing about why the Complaints Management team were failing to manage my complaint by not replying to my earlier letters.

and in reply from BT I get this:

Following your email, I am now pleased to confirm your complaint has been closed as fully resolved with your agreement.

Strangely enough I don’t remember agreeing to any such thing. I guess I was wrong when I said I was getting somewhere with them…

I few weeks later I got a letter from BT Complaints Managment saying that my complaint had been passed on to them and they had been unable to find any record of the call to me (hint – try looking in the logs of all those Indian subcontractors you hired) but that I had been added to their suppression list so should not receive any more calls.

Well today they went for the win by calling me again – this time to try and sell me Broadband. This time round I have a recording of the call so it will be interesting to see if they try and deny it again.

What’s more as their previous letter acknowledges that they are aware of my wish not to be called they are now in violation of regulation 21(1)(a) of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 as well as regulation 21(1)(b) which they breached last time.

A second complaint has been filed with the TPS and a letter will be winging it’s way to BT later on…

1. I was wondering if [project] has gone under any major restructuring/redesign initiative in its history. Restructuring/redesign initiative can be defined as a concerted effort during a time period in which major changes were applied to the code base to improve software architecture/design while little or no functional enhancement was made.

2. If the project has gone under such an initiative, then would it be possible for you to give the dates or revision/release numbers that are “right before” and “right after” this structuring effort? I would like to checkout the source code from the repository to compare structural measurements that belong to “before” and “after” snapshots. Note that the dates and revision/release numbers should be right before and right after the initiative because I would like to be able to isolate and observe the effects of this effort.

Both these questions, and the second one in particular, would call for a considerable amount of work to be done in order to answer them even if it were possible to get past the wooliness of the first question and decide which changes counted.

The real issue however, is that surely the point of being a research student is to do research to answer whatever question you have set yourself? Not just to email lots of other people and ask them to do the work for you…

In this case the originator in fact implied in a subsequent email (after he decided that my lack of reply meant he should ignore the fact that I had unsubscribed from his list and email me again and I had told him exactly what I thought of this) that he emailed somewhere in the region of 3000 people with this request.

The basic editing of roads and such doesn’t seem to be much improved from the (fairly dire) interface we saw in the previous alpha builds – trying to move nodes in a way is still way harder than it should be, working out how to start a new way is even harder, and it still seems to be impossible to end a way unless you remember that you want to do so before you add the last node. As to extending a way well I’d forget it if I were you as I’ve never found a way to do it, or to join a new way onto an existing one (which would be a workaround for not being able to extend a way).

Presumably there is some help somewhere, but there is no effort to promote it as far as I can see – no “you might want to read this before you start” type prompts. There is a “help” link but it just goes to a CloudMade wiki page showing how to connect Mapzen to your OpenStreetMap account.

One word of caution by the way – there doesn’t seem to be any indication whether or not you have any outstanding edits that need to be saved, and the “Close and Exit” button does exactly that, without any sort of warning if you have unsaved edits which will be lost.

Perhaps the most worrying thing however is the so called “Mapzen Dashboard” which provides the entry point to the editor. That isn’t the problem however – the problem is that it provides it’s own, CloudMade hosted, social environment with “friending”, “messaging” and “home locations”. Anybody familiar with OpenStreetMap will know that the core site already provides all those things (though not as slickly) so the obvious question is what exactly CloudMade are doing duplicating this? Is this an attempt to create some sort of parallel community to the main OpenStreetMap community?

Overall I think we have to class the editor as a fail for now, and the dashboard as something that needs more explanation.

Yes, that’s right, this site has invented a whole new idea – the secure username that has to contain both letters and numbers!

It’s latest massive fail in the “I know what you want better than you do” department is to decide that just because I already have an instance of OpenOffice running on my desktop what I really want when I type “oocalc foo.ods” is for it to open the document using the existing instance and, more problematically, on the same X display.

The only problem with which is that I’m now on my laptop and want this spreadsheet to appear there where I can actually edit it!

For Pete’s sake people – either launch it in a new process when the X display is different or teach it to support multiple X displays with different documents displayed on different X displays from the single process!

At the very least could you please do what Firefox does and provide a switch to force a new process to be started..