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Worst Explanation From Tech Support?
Disgruntled-with-Tech-Support asks: "Let's face it: At some point or another, we've had to deal with some form of tech support. Quite often, it's a hit-or-miss experience depending on the level of support required. Occasionally, strange, bizarre, or nonsensical explanations result from the problems reported, such as this one: I had just had DSL installed, only to find it much slower than the 56K line I was looking to get rid of. On calling the provider, I was told (by someone who likely reading off cue cards) to visit one of their internal websites for measuring bandwidth. While there, I observed that they had both bytes per second and bits per second listed, and that the number of bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8, rather a factor around 13 or 14. I pointed this out as a possible problem, and the guy's reasoning: 'Uh, it looks like the bytes are getting through to you ok, but the bits are getting stuck someplace.' What was your worst explanation from tech support?"
at the number of bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8, rather a factor around 13 or 14.
;)
Shouldn't it be bits/sec = bytes/sec * 8?
I almost went through the phone to choke the bastard.
Uh, only problem is, he was mostly right. While LCDs do in fact have scan rates and frequency settings, no one cares, since they're mostly fixed. Almost all LCDs (at least in the home user market) have a 60 Hz vertical refresh rate. And most LCDs have a fixed resolution, so the scan rate is fixed (it is derived from vertical refresh and resolution). So he mostly knew what he was talking about, assuming the question was "How do I configure XFree86".
Now, if the question was "Can I install Linux on a laptop?" and the answer was "No, because LCDs don't have scan rates", then that's pretty stupid. But that's not clear from the post. Also, how long ago was this? It wasn't that long ago that Linux on a laptop required a lot of kludging, especially to get X running.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
The canonical multiplier to go from bytes/sec to bits/sec is ten (10): One start bit, eight data bits, one stop bit. This is how things were over serial/modem connections not so very long ago.
I find it still remains a reasonable rule of thumb. DSL and Ethernet frame data packets differently, of course. There are no start or stop bits surrounding each byte, but there is a multi-byte packet header and trailer. IP framing, of course, adds more overhead, but I find the 10:1 rule is close enough for most purposes. Besides, it's really easy to calculate in your head.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I had that a while back - after a significant amount of time, a technician came out to the house. It turned out that a line filter was a bit corroded on the outside of the house, and a quick replacement fixed it.
After reading several cable installer manuals, I found that a lot of cable installers will staple the coax too close to the rain gutters, and the ensuing rain tends to saturate the filter. Asking the cable installer to staple (or place hook-snaps) near-flush against the eaves usually reduces the likelihood.
System 5, I think. . . Which SCO owns.
Claims to own. Novell has other opinions.
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You see, Fry's goes one step further than just having a horde of ill-trained customer service people roaming the store. They assign a person to each section, and go as far as to post a picture of them at the end of the aisles they're in charge of.
One day, upon needing some cable ends for some ethernet I was running, I decided to go to Fry's. They do have a good selection of networking hardware, so I figured I should have no problem getting the connectors. While I'm trying to find the RJ45s for rounded solid cable amongst the RJ11s, MMJs, and cable boots I get accosted by the salesdude, wanting to know if I need help. This is the same guy whose picture is pasted to the shelf. So I says to him, I says, "Could you help me find some RJ45s for plenum cable?" Reasonable request, right? I mean, there were routers to the left of me and telco racks to the right, and big spools of CAT5 behind me, so somewhere in that vicinity should be cable ends. His response: "I'm sorry, sir, I'm not sure what you are talking about."
I eventually found them on my own.
The moral of this story? Don't ask a customer if they need any help if you don't even know what products you sell!
YES they would charge the card. I had a Zip drive and had to call for tech support because Windows 95 wouldn't recognize it. I had to pay $14.95 just to speak to a person. A few years later I received a letter in the mail saying that I was able to join a class action lawsuit against Iomega.
l egacy=c net
Details here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-208214.html?
"had him cuss the tech support guy in Hindu"
Thank god it wasn't me, I would have cussed him out in Christianity.
Hindi is the language. Hindu is the religion.
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but, uhm... isn't that the case? On a hub, every device must "dumb down" to the slowest link, whereas on a switch, every port can have its own speed settings (duplex, 10 vs 100mbps, etc)
How is this not so?
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actually in asynch serial comms (such as your 56K) a byte is data bits, plus start, stop, parity bits
so the old standard 8,n,1
is really 1 start bit, plus 8 data bits, no parity bit, and 1 stop bit
so 10 bits in this case
the largest commmon byte would be something like
8,e,2 (1 start+8+1(for even)+2 stop bits, thus
12 bits in that byte as transmitted.
I'm glad that someone else noticed that the store reps explanation was fundamentally correct. Now it's not 100% correct, and it's not the answer that anyone who has taken a course in networking would answer, but it's correct enough that a customer would not have been misinformed by the rep's answer.
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I had this EXACT same problem with my ISP. It turned out that the LISA daemon that comes standard with Mandrake (dunno about other distros...) burps out ICMP pings over your network. My ISP took his ICMP ping traffic to be port scanning and/or some MS-Blast virus, and disconnected my connection. The bastards finally turned it back on once I tracked down exactly what was generating this (very minor) ping traffic.
They are more commmonly called repeaters, but they do exist. They regenerate the signal to allow a longer run. Much like you can find a two port switch. Usually they are called a bridge and are used for media conversion or monitoring (and are quire rare these days) but they are really 2-port switches.
A 1-port on the other hand...
Plenums are defined to be any compartment or chamber which is connected to or a part of the air distribution system of a structure. Think things like ducts, flow shafts, and sometimes even the void above a dropped ceiling. The outer PVC jacket on normal Cat5 cable burns at a relatively low temperature and produces large quantities of highly toxic black smoke. Plenum rated Cat5 has a much higher combustion temperature and produces smaller quantites of smoke. The National Electric Code specifies that only Plenum Rated Cat5 can be run through any space connected to the air distribution system. Since air ducts are handy ways to run cable, a lot of Plenum Rated gets sold.
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Sometimes you have to do things like that because the caller wouldn't understand you if you tried to explain. Sometimes, it's not worth your while to try. If you really want to see what it's like "on the other side of the phone," check out this book of tech support horror stories. You'll have a little more sympathy for the techs once you've finished.
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In the 1960's, yes. Now, no, not really
Tell that to Unisys. Their mainframes (at least the ones I have to use) still have their 36 bit architecture, hence a 9 bit byte. Unusual? Yep.
There's a self-defeating statment if I've ever seen one. Regardless, a quick search reveals that many mechanic services do indeed bill for diagnostics. Those who don't either pay their technicians less or charge you a higher hourly rate. The general reason why diagnositc fees are either all or nothing is because it is common to spend differing amounts of time diagnosing the same symptoms. Even a doctor will tell you that (who do, in fact, charge for s/office visits/diagnostic fees/).
Well, a former professional mechanic (me) says different. 99% of problems people have with cars can be diagnosed in 5 minutes or less, usually less. Building a relationship with a customer is worth spending those 5 minutes working for *free* to diagnose their car. I can't even think of how many stupid GM AC pressure sensors I sold just because they always looked the same on the gauges, and it literally took 2 seconds to hook up the gauges.
IN some specific areas, like exhaust and brakes, the free-looky is standard practice.
Besides the dealer (you know, the greediest little fuck on the block), most mechanics will only charge for diagnostics when they can't tell within 3-5 minutes what's wrong. That's the rule of thumb generally applied, actually. In the meantime, though, *every* mechanic shop posts something somewhere that says "We charge *this whole ton of money* for diagnostics", knowing that 99% of their diagnostics will be done for free.
Think about it. You're a customer, and you see a sign that says "Pay us $60 to tell us why your car is fucked up" and the mechanic just walks out and does it without billing you. Now how do you feel? How much does it increase the likelihood that you'll buy from these people who are obviously dedicated to serving the customer rather than bleeding him?
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Serious answer: they probably had a number of small planes in the queue and your plane would have caused too much wake turbulence for them. They could hold you and let a bunch of small guys take off, or let you go and hold up a half dozen planes.
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Even on a 64-bit machine such as the Alpha, a WORD is DEFINEd as 16 bits, a LONGword is 32, and a QUADword is 64. Your way would force redefinitions when a 32-bit or 16-bit program is ported to a 64-bit platform, making the port even more tedious. Because DEC maintained the deinition of LONG and WORD, porting from VAX to Alpha was that much easier.
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They have no idea what they are talking about. Bytes/sec and Bits/sec do not have any special meaning beyond the number of bits or bytes that can be passed in a given second. .00015 seconds!
First, it's totally and completely moronic to strip the TCP Header off for one measurement but not for the other, it's not some sort of standard practice.
Second, the story says that instead of Bytes = 8*Bits, it was mroe like Bytes=13 or 14*Bits. That means that by their logic the BYTES were getting stuck as it was taking more bits to make a single byte, not the BITS.
Third, the speed test is probably hosted on a simple webserver with a moderately sized file, whose download is timed, because this makes sense, it's how everyone does it. With that being said, why and how would they see the TCP headers from that layer?
Fourth, in order to code a working speed test, you couldn't use packets small enough for a TCP header to matter it to matter, and I've never seen a speed test that tried. A standard TCP header is 120bits (15 Bytes) IIRC. Let's figure out how small it would have to be: (x*13)-(x*8)=15, solve for X and find that the packet would have to be 3, do the same for 14 and you'll find that it's between 2.5Bytes and 3Bytes of data in order for the difference to be the size of the TCP header. What kind of a speed tests measures accurately to anywhere near modern DSL line abilities (let's say 100,000Bytes/sec to 400,000Bytes/sec) with just 2.5Bytes? Even for just 100K/sec DSL that's a 400,000th of one second of bandwidth. That's like checking someone's hearbeat by touching their wrist for
Parent posts with this theory are merely flamebait and should be ignored.
Jamon
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.