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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?"
As a former tech i've had to make up some pretty lame ones for people who were too dim or uninterested enough to comprehend the real explanation.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Mine was sometimes the DFU drive or line was down...but that it would be back up soon, it always worked, I tried the I-d-10-t but someone caught it..that was fun explaining that to my boss.
Hacker rule #1: never run out of beer
At issue is the level of training provided.
All this is not to say that don't find the horror stories, from a tech's and customer's point of view, funny. Speaking for myself, half the people I speak to assume I can see their monitor and the other half think you can't open Outlook Express without connecting to the internet, despite the big 'work offline' button in front of them...
Don't mention 3rd party software. No matter what, it's ALWAYSthe 3rd party's software vendor's fault.
This guy is way out there
"If you are an advanced user, i.e. you know more than our flunkie tech support people, please press 6. We will connect you to an intelligent person on this side of the ocean. Please hold."
I hate trying to boot a machine (or convincing the guy on the other end that I'm trying to boot a machine) 10 different times when I know the hard-drive has failed.
It's bad. It's under warranty. Come replace it.
their classic first question "do you have a firewall?" Answer "yes," and that IMMEDIATELY becomes the problem
The best part is that if you say "no" then *that* can be the problem... "if you don't run a firewall, you leave your computer more open to attacks"
Fun stuff. "Damned if you do..."
Having worked on a tech support line, and managed tech support people, I can tell you that you should be really damn happy when your tech admits they don't know something. It's a lot easier for a newb to give an answer they *think* is correct than to admit they don't know everything off the top of their heads.
Honestly, what would you prefer?.. someone saying, I'm not sure, let me find out for sure.. or someone making shit up that can get you into more trouble?
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
My idiot roommate tried splitting the line to the modem without telling anybody first, then when we hooked it back up it wouldn't hold a connection for more than about 3 minutes.
When we got the Rogers guy to come he couldn't figure out why it was hooked to that outlet, and couldn't even figure out how the cable got to that point in the wall (it had been that way since I moved in about 3 years before). He put in a new wire, closer to where it came in the house, and we were fine from then on.
"Mechanics charge upwards of $50 just to take a look at your car to see what's wrong, and this has been standard industry practice for a long period of time."
No they don't. Any Mechanic I've even seen will look at a car for Free and try to tell you what's wrong. If its something which requires hours of diagnosing then yes they will usually charge a fee but its by no means automatic. I've been taking cars to dealers and private mechanics for estimates and second estimateas for years and I've only been charged a few times.
If tech support worked that way they would at least listen to your problem for Free and notify you if a quick fix is available. I'm not against charging for tech support if a problem involved lots of trouble shooting and hand holding on the Software makers part, but they should be making a determination if that's really necessary before they start charging you money or taking your credit card number. Asking for the card up front is just a scare tatic to try to get consumers to not call in. Personally I don't care for the pratice.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You are correct that there is 8 bits to a byte, but the parent is correct in saying that it should have been 'bits/sec = bytes/sec * 8'
Think about it...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
I can't recall the exact events. But back in 98, I had to RMA an Iomega ZIP drive for the IT department. When I gave them a call, I got an automated answer on how to trouble shoot the problem. But, if I wanted to speak with a "live technical support specialist" I had to provide a credit card account first.
WTF!!? The damn thing was under warranty. I'm sure they wouldn't have charged the card. But still, I didn't have access to a corporate card nor would I have used my personal one. After I told my boss (Admin of the department) he agreed with me. From that point one, we took the loss and vowed never to purchase another Iomega product. Fuck em, never again!
Life is not for the lazy.
And yet you always have the option of hitting the back button in your browser instead of submit.
If only this choice was made more often....
I would have asked for the one port hub just to see what they would have sold you...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The problem is simple: you have a fixed budget which is universally too little to hire a lot of good people. You have a fixed (or increasing) call volume. So, what to do?
Well, in most places today they construct scripts and then hire peons to read them. They figure that most people will be deterred by this. They spend their nut on a theoretical third level person or people who are going to take care of the insurmountable issues. The rest of the people are there to obstruct the majority of people from the people who actually have a shot at fixing problems.
I've never worked that kind of desk. I actually know what i'm doing and if I don't, I find out fast. I hire people who are either tabula rasa, whom I can turn into something decent, or who have worked in service industries (I don't hire other people's help desk people, in other words). I prefer ex-military people. They are used to being treated like mushrooms and still solving problems. I also like to hire bright young women fresh out of college (or even those who didn't finish). Besides the obvious improvement in the surroundings, they tend to be pretty good at first level support if you give them a solid grounding. They're better at settling customers down in many cases. Then, garnish with one or two talented techs to sit in the middle and start spreading knowledge around. No scripts. Keep a team together for 6 months and everyone pretty much rises to the level of the 2nd level people.
The funny thing is that I can't keep employees very well (heh). They leave me and go make more money elsewhere with the skills they gain. Good money, too. I'm glad to see so many of them succeed. At my current job they have budget, and we've had the same team for 2.5 years. That's an all time record for me.
Even in 1994, imagine being told in NYC to hire 6 techs at salaries between $25k and $35k (preferred under 30). Even getting people to show up for that money in Manhattan is a pain in the ass.
As for problem solving skills, you tend to like those who worked in service industries. I personally worked at an appliance store for my parents from when I was 11 on. Me and my brother used to go out on a truck and fix refrigerators, washers, dryers, etc. It wasn't all that dissimilar to fixing up computers - there was a user interface, and a good portion of the time the problem was that the people were using the interface wrong. Say, not knowing how to use the washer timer or overloading the dryer or letting crap melt in the dishwasher and foul things up, or failing to clean the condenser coil at the bottom of the fridge (this is important). The rest of the time it was hardware issues. The hardware was modular and easily replaceable. Sound familiar?
Good support isn't unattainable. The sucky help desks have thrown in the towel though and basically don't care.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
And I don't know about your flat panel, but all of my analog flat panels support several refresh rates, including 60 and... 72, if memory serves, and occasionally higher, depending on resolution. That has nothing to do with the way the image is displayed, and is strictly a factor of what clock speeds the VGA decoder hardware happens to support at a given resolution. However, you still have to feed it a sync rate that the decoder can handle.
If you really don't want to care about refresh, you'd better be using a digital flat panel (DVI or ADC-digital).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
CompUSA Realy screwed me over a few times too. The first time was when I bought a Ti 4600 Card, I took it home only to find out that it was faulty. I took it right back (Same day I might add) with the repset and tried to exchange it. The cahser and the one manager gave a hard time about how the card wasn't faulty and it was my own dam fault. After about 125 minutes of arguing a second manger, came over to address the problem. She said it sounded like the card was faulty, and proably was as they had 3 other people come in throught out the week with simlir proablems with the card. I ended up with an excange and this one works fine, but I still can't get over the hassle they put me through.
The most resent encounter occured during Crismass, when my mother thought it would be a good idea to buy me some compute hardwear. She ended up buying an AMD 64 FX @ +3000, a K8T Mother board, and 2GB DDR2 ram. Total cost of $3100. I wake up crismass morning to find all these wounderful gifes under the tree (I still think my mother spent WAY to much, even after all I did for her this year it was still TOO MUCH!). I pull out the new ATI 9800 card out of my main computer, and plug it and everything into the MB. Turn it on and nothing hapens. I check the PSU works perfictly, I check the powerswich no problem. I then check the post LED's... there all lite wich means the BIOS Never gave the CPU control. My conclusion the CPU if faulty. So I wate untill compUSA opens again and I try to take it back. The guy at Tech desk says it's proably the MB, Wich I know it's not. After arguing with him for 20 minutes or so I give up and let him exchange the MB. with a promise that once this dosen't work I'll be back.
I try it and it dosen't work, so I take it all back again. This time the Guy at the Tech desk wount take it back, and tells me to go to costmer service where they try and tell me that I'm to blame and they wount take and of it back. After arguing for litteraly and hour and a half, I gave up an told him I was going to call CompUSA main head quirters. He finaly says fine I'll take it in back and try the CPU on another MB. He takes the CPU off the MB. and gose in back I sit there at the Costmer Sirveice desk wating when he finaly comes back and tells me that the pins are bent on CPU and he will not take it back. After some very loud shouting at him he threteans to call the COPs if I don't leave imditly. So as I'm leaving in the one sales girl there gives me a note with a number and name. She told me it was for the distric manger of this CompUSA and to call.
To finish up this story I call him he basicly says theres nothing he can do, and he sorry for any inconvinec. The moral of this stroy don't go to CompUSA Unless you fell like being Roaly @$$ #^@#.
It is however still true that bytes/sec != bits/sec * 8 :-)
*runs for cover*
Now, why does that sound familar to this:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
As someone who has worked in tech support, I have to speak up and say that when I was doing it; 90% of problems, were user problems, and not problems on our side.
And the whole point of troubleshooting is to isolte points to failure- REset the modem, reset your computer, disconnect the router, still not working, next step, try a ping to the internet, try a ping to the server, try a ping to yourself, reset the modem again (just in case you ignored the tech the first time he sugested it, reset the computer again.
That above scenario will solve somewhere around 70% of all network problems, and if you take out the request to reset the modem and computer the second time the rate drops sharply, because peopel have a tendancy to assume that tech support people have no idea what there doing and can safely be ignored. We've been given a script to follow that says to do exactly that, and we get in trouble if we don't do that scenario first; so sit tight, let us establish that it is not your firewall, your computer, or your modem, and then we can get to some real tech support- or hell, do it yourself, first, before you call in, and be sure to say that you did it yourself, first, how you did it when you get connected and save time.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
Were you really abusive like that? If so why is this marked as funny, you're just so idiot who thinks they are cool.
And what will a 2 port hub do for you that a wire won't?
Not necessarily. He may have just assumed the caller was a moron and was either having some fun or trying to get rid of him ASAP.
I always give the correct answer to any question given. Yes, it takes longer, and yes, you pretty much have to explain everything involved, at a really basic level.
Why do I do this?
Because educated users make less work for me than ignorant ones. This is a long term strategy, and I am telling you now that it pays off. Of course, if you are a temp or something, don't bother. Just fix and go.
Even then though, it's kind of fun teaching people who are about as technical as celery about the history of peripheral connectivity, and then getting the impression that they actually picked up something that would be useful to them in the future.
Maybe he accidentally pressed 'u' instead of 'i', they are right next to each other. (On Big American Keyboard.)
In the 1960's, yes. Now, no, not really- and your linking to a dictionary doesn't prove it. That dictionary definition is decades old.
For over almost 30 years, a byte is 8 bits, a nibble (no, I'm not making that up) is four. A word contains four nibbles or two bytes. Insisting otherwise is anal retentive at best.
Please help metamoderate.
as someone who had the unfortunate job of working tech support for a DSL ISP I can tell you first hand that most of the stupidity comes from the customer NOT the tech. and usually, if we give you a BS answer it is because we think you are a moron who we just want you off our phone/away from us and will probably belive whatever we say. its really not a personal thing. its after about the 1000th "my modem don't work." "sir, is it plugged in?" or something similar conversion you start to hate all of humanity who would dare ask your help.
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
The difference is that the mechanic that's charging you to look at your car isn't the company that made your car. I see a large difference in ethics between these two practices:
1- Charge someone money to diagnose what is faulty with someone ELSE's product.
2- Charge someone money to diagnose what it faulty with your OWN product.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Actually, it's usually the native speakers of english who have terrible spelling, non-natives have to formally learn the language and learn how to spell the words -- most learning is done through reading/writing anyway, whereas natives hear and speak a lot, but never really consider how to write the words they use.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Any customer who tries to "tell" me there's a problem on our end is identified as a "Taco Bell Sysadmin" and goes on Penalty Hold while I count the number of geese on the lawn today.
If there really is a problem on our end, we either already know about it and I'm about to associate you to the outage, or I find it on the call and escalate it to get a trouble ticket opened. That's *my* job, not the end user's.
For every horror-story-generating Tier 1 agent, there are probably three more who gnash their teeth because they aren't ALLOWED to go off freelancing (good) solutions that deviate from company-prescribed troubleshooting.
I used to work as a grunt in a transmission shop and through that I've been to a good deal of different shops on business.
Standard at the shop I worked at was to only charge the fee when it was a bitchy customer or involved removing the transmission from the vehicle. Otherwise, a lot of diagnostic work was done free (You could argue it was made up for in what we charge for other services, but that's true for everything "free")
In my experience dealing with other shops, that's generally true of nearly the whole auto service industry. Take a look at their car, check for the obvious things, and if more extensive testing is needed you start charging the customer for it (letting them know before hand of course.)
Hmm, two posts about polite Fry's guys telling the truth. Maybe it's not such a bad place.
Consequences ensue.
In Switzerland all your tech support calls to Dell get rerouted depending on the language you speak/choose. French goes to France, Italian to Italy, German to Germany. So far, so good.
Now I don't doubt that the Germans have quite a high level of quality when it comes to manufacturing machines, optical components, AMD processors and the like, but their customer service is definitely one of the worst I've ever had to experience.
We had a Dell laptop with what we supposed was a damaged wireless LAN card. It would report "Network cable unplugged" even when the card's MAC was clearly allowed to get on the wireless LAN and had the correct SSID set. I'm a UNIX tech and don't know much about Windows, so I felt it might be nice to call Dell to find out what's wrong and get someone to send a replacement card if it really is the card's fault.
After waiting patiently through 10 minutes of pop music three times (their system kicks you off after 10 minutes) I finally managed to get a real, flesh-coloured human on the other end of the line.
Them: "Hello, Dell Inspiron support, how can I help you?"
Me: "Ah, well, we have a Dell Truemobile blah blah card here that is acting odd. How can I verify that it really is defective?"
He asks for the service tag, the usual details and I tell him the precise nature of the problem.
Them: "Oh. Well, I see that you have Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled there. Home Edition does not support networks. I'm sorry, we can't take that card back, you need to upgrade to Pro and try again."
I really hope he was fired afterwards, since as they say, "your call may be recorded for quality control". Swapping in the same model Dell TrueMobile card from a different shipment of notebooks worked just fine, by the way.
True story.
Back in 1995, my family had been using our first PC (whitebox 486 with Windows 3.1) for about a year. Our Microsoft mouse had been trouble from day 1. It kept sticking on screen as if the pointer hit something, even though the mouse itself was fine. I called MS, and over the course of the next few weeks they had us clean the mouse (several times), buy cleaning kits, change drivers, get a new mouse, nothing seemed to work. Finally, one tech (perfect English in those days) said, and I quote, "Well, I guess it's obviously your mouse pad. I guess you could always take your business elsewhere."
The next day we bought a Logitech mouse, and have used exclusively Logitech mice for the past decade without the slightest bit of trouble. I later went on to help found a Linux Users Group in college.
The moral: Dude, NEVER dare your customer to take their business elsewhere. Not even if you're Microsoft.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Best Buy is fun-- I needed a crossover ethernet cable, went to Best Buy and asked the sales drone where they were. After finding them I gawked at the $30 price tag for a 10' cable. I said something about how I could get a crimper, cable and do it myself for that price.
His response, "if you know how to use a crimper you shouldn't even be in Best Buy!"
That's why you use "octet" when you want to be precise
He didn't seem to realise that the "Idle" entry isn't actually a process...
What would you call it instead? It is kind of a process. It just doesn't take part in the normal scheduling process as it is running at DPC/dispatch level. It also doesn't have a normal priority but is ranked as lowest-prio process just below the zero page thread (has priority of 0). Articles and tools saying that the idle thread runs at priority 0 are wrong. For a tad more information look at this explanation of its functionality.
from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
most technical problems I've experienced with users tends to be layer 8 of the OSI model...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've been doing support for close to 10 years, and this just makes all helpdesk techs look bad. It casts a stigma on us all who strive to fix problems as opposed to just "answering the phone". If you don't know the answer, find out from someone who does! Don't BS the user, if you do, the next time they may not call, and if that happens enough, no one calls and your out of a job.
Sounds like someone needs to call someone's supervisor and report someone for stealing on the job....
But actually, this is pretty common when multiple companies try to share a wiring room. At a company I worked at a couple years back, one of the T1 lines would get disconnected multiple times in the wire room when some other company was trying to either hook up a new tenant in the office complex or disconnect someone else's service. This despite the boss going in and labeling the lines. As the lines were used for Internet and long distance calls to download data off client modems, it was a direct hit to the company's bottom line every time it happened because either the clients couldn't access their webpages or the data division had to switch to using regular long distance for modem dialups (a heck of a lot more expensive per minute).
I'm not a pro-microsoft/anti-linux guy (heck, I'm using linux right now), but let's not ignore serious shortcomings in the OS we love... :)
I define "the out" to be the thing that "i" have done to make it so they dont have to help me.
The out can be that I have a "linux server" somewhere in the building. ie "Oh, no so we dont support Linux so I can not help you on any network issue you might have."
Comcast recently did this. For a real estate friend, I went over to look at what was wrong with her network and cable modem. I called up tech support and when I told the tech support person there was an internal network, i got "OH NO, no no. We can not give you any more support because you have an internal network. Thank you for calling though..." The tech support person had found his "out".
Next time you are on a call with tech support, watch them try to find their out, the piece of knowledge that will free them from the obligation of helping you.
no god is good
Kibibytes as word is a failure. Outside of a few pedagogues on the internet, noone even knows such a term exists. Those familiar with computers are resistant to using new terms. Those unfamiliar consider it all gibberish anyways. And the new term are even more nonsensical as at least kilo and mega are somewhat familiar terms.
Besides which, kilobyte and megabyte and gigabyte is not jargon. It is a computer term. Sorry but your attempt to revise history has failed.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I have a coworker who used to do phone support for people who really had no business doing router maintenance, but were stuck with the job anyway. Invariably, these people were highly defensive about their level of competence, and suggesting that they check the obvious - "Did you check to see that it's plugged in?" - met with an angry response. "Of course I did!"
So, coworker came up with a novel idea. Instead of asking them if the router was plugged in, he'd ask, "Can you unplug the power cord, and plug it back in upside down? Those cords are defective, sometimes you need to flip them."
Every once in a while, the guy at the other end would stutter nervously for a moment, then say, "Hey, that worked! Thanks!" Of course, the plugs in question were three-pronged, so there was no way they could have been plugged in "upside down," but they were grateful for the opportunity to save a little face.
The aspect ratio doesn't matter. No aspect ratio would require bars on all four sides.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's funny because that's how Americans really talk. Bet they didn't teach that line at the VPJ Acadamy of English.
... that's just ugly. George W Bush making up words to better express his point - that's funny. The word 'fucking' is in the language for a reason, both as an adverb and an adjective - and when used correctly adds significant value towards expressing a particular sentiment. I wouldn't use it as a verb in an office setting however, that would be wrong.
... say 'Because you fucking have to.' The caller will relate, will understand the reply, and will probably respect you more for expressing yourself in a manner that doesn't try to hide behind technical jargon - you will be talking their language. No joke.
Customer asks : Why do I have to hit the Start button when I want to turn off the computer?
Not how Americans talk : I am very happily to be helping you with your problems. You see it says right here that for you to be shutting down your computer you must be pressing the Start button and then verily nicely selecting the shut down option. It was my pleasure to be helpingly assisting you.
How an American that didn't personally know the caller would reply : Because you have to.
How an American that knows the caller on a personal basis would answer : Because you fucking have to.
Once someone has mastered a particular instrument in music, they then enhance and personalize the music, make it -their- music, through improvisation. The English language is the same way - develop a mastery of the language and then extend it to better express yourself. A first year English student making up words and pronouncing them wrong, using the wrong tense and timber
To all the overseas Tier I tech support phone professionals : next time you get a call that is so blatantly obvious, something along the lines of 'Why do I have to (do something obvious)?'
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Perhaps not.
A 9600 baud serial link is only 960 characters per second. There are ten bits per byte, because you have a start bit and a stop bit for each character. That makes 10 bits per byte.
Things get even stranger over ethernet... When measuring bandwidth in terms of bytes/sec, if you use FTP to measure it, then your measurment throws out the ethernet headers, which results in a lower number.
So it all depends on how you measure.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Right. But parity and stop bits do. I usually pretend that a byte = 10 bits (and simplify my mental arithmetic) when looking at dial-up throughput rates.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Anyone who has dealt with tech support/customer service at a large company already knows why the "insecure user" doesn't want to hang up: they probably had to navigate through a 10-level automated system and wait on hold for 30 minutes to get support on the phone--and they know if they call back again, they'll have to repeat the explanation/troubleshooting of the problem from square 1.
This is an old argument first heard echoing around the halls of international translation.
A Table in English translates to "(a Table)" in German, but the germans have different cultural associations with the word, and thus the word Table in english in fact conjures up completely different connotations, emotions and sensibilities in the english speaker when compared to the word for the same objeect in germany.
(Not my argument - a paraphrase of classical translation pedogogy)
What we have here is a translation between base 10 for humans and base 2 for bounded arrays.
Most people use arabic notation, but in fact store and think of large numbers in base 10 scientific notation. We are essentially zero-counters when it comes to large numbers.
Computers on the other hand are first binary, and secondly store numbers in multidimentional arrays. They are not zero counters, and do not favor round numbers. Generally computers favor memory blocks which are bounded by n dimensions each of which is a exponent of 2.
All thiis to get back to the main point.
The limitations of translation ensures one will never be able to express computer number comfortable in english - and thus the attempt should be governed by the law of diminishing returns.
AIK
Actually, the good analogy would be 'some guy plowed into me with his car; he had a license. Therefore, having a drivers license isn't an indication of actual driving skill.'
Well, having your MCSE isn't an indication of your actual skill; it's an indication of your ability to pass a standarized test.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The warrenty is void. All we can do is exchange it for a new one.
Thats an incredible warranty.
not really Changing the spelling of a word is like changing one note in a chord it does look/sound wrong. music is made up of relations beetween notes that don't change, it's what notes are used in what order and rythm that makes your music just like it's what word's in what order make up your essay the notes and words should never change e is e c is c. this is true even for jazz. Improvisation doesn't meen hitting random notes you still have to play what has been composed to sound like the song your doing.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
That's the most likely answer, but another is taxiway restrictions. Not all taxiways are made to take every size and weight aircraft. They may be older or run next to buildings (You don't exactly want part of the wing sheared off by a wall.). Thus the plane would have needed to wait until a suitable taxi path was available before heading to the runway.
I can see it now. New guy shows up at the office, first day on the job. Starts talking and in the same breath utters the words 'kibibyte' and 'gibibyte'. Two of the guys on the team hold him down and start beating him senseless, two others start picking apart his resume and application paperwork to get him fired that same day on a technicality.
Anybody that actually says either of those words in my presence is getting bitchslapped, no doubt, and probably sent packing during the next set of layoffs.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Nah, I'm saying if they want to change it, they have to change away from our terminology. KiloByte remains 1024 bytes. If they don't like our "kilo" being 1024 and want something to mean 1000, then they should use the Kibi to mean 1000, then they should also not use the term "byte" either, as it is a technical reference, so they should replace that with something else, thus, KiloByte = 1024 bytes, KibiFloople = 1000 Flooples.
As to the other comment, the tech language we use was derived in the context of our field. It'd be like a bunch of novices coming in and completely changing the jargon of the plumbing field or medicine based on their uninformed preconceptions. "That's not a crescent wrench! It looks nothing like a crescent. Let's call it a Variable Gap Bolt Loosener and require everyone else in the world to do the same."
Also... Kibi and Mebi are just very unprofessional sounding, like they belong in some Pokemon cartoon. I wonder how many person-hours in committee were required to come up with those terms. I know they preserve the K and the M but this is rediculous. As for me, I will refuse to use "Kibi" and "Mebi".
Let's be honest. You can usually tell within the first four sentences spoken - including the greetings and introductions - whether the caller is going to be capable of following instructions and perhaps even useful toward resolving the issue, or will be completely, utterly fucking worthless.
It's amazing how much you can learn just from hearing someone's voice. And I haven't been wrong yet.
+++ATH0
> Actually calling 1024 'kilo' and 1024^2 'mega' has always been insider jargon
All of the terms in question, "bit", "byte", "nybble", "word", "double word",
"quadword", "kilobyte", "megabyte", "gigabyte", "terabyte", and so on and
so forth, are *all* inherently jargon. End users don't have any clue what
any of them mean (and shouldn't have to, in this era of hard drives large
enough to store more documents than you have time to create before the sizes
have inflated so much that your drive is so hopelessly tiny it belongs in a
museum). Just because they're jargon terms is no reason to change their
meaning.
> What 1024 bytes are _really_ called now is a Kibibyte
*WAY* fewer people use that terminology than the traditional terminology.
The 1000-byte "kilobyte" and the million-byte "megabyte" were devised by hard
drive manufacturers who want to inflate their size numbers. No operating
system by *any* vendor uses this type of "kilobyte" or "megabyte", nor does
any bandwidth provider of which I'm aware, nor any common throughput-measuring
software or device, nor any popular application software I'm aware of. Pretty
much just the hard-drive manufacturers.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Ever since modems went higher than 2400 bps, with various protocols for compression and reliability built in, the actual data transmission (over the phone line) has not included start/stop bits. The transmission between the modem and the computer does, of course, when using asynch transmission modes. Combined with compression, that's why you want the data speed on the serial line to be higher than the transmission rate over the phone line, combined with a flow control mechanism (x-on/off or rts/dts).
Things would have been so much simpler if Hayes hadn't been so successful and modem control lines had been used. In particular, if synchronous transmission (specifically, SDLC) along with a variable clock rate, had become standardized, all of the garbage of trying to packetize frames over SLIP/PPP, all of the headaches (including patents) of +++, all of the hassle of trying to figure out interface speeds by looking at the bit pattern of A and T, and not noticing that a connection had dropped because the "CARRIER DROPPED" came out in the middle of a packet, would have been eliminated. Transmit clock, receive clock, RTS, CTS, DCD, and use DTR to signal between data and sending configuration commands. Combine with RS-422 signalling for better noise resistance and Ethernet might never have needed to be invented. Just using SDLC with a self-clocking protocol would have been a major win, as frames are checksummed and start/stop bits don't need to be sent (the overhead of flags and beginning/end of frame is irrelevant as when the amount of data goes up, the overhead drops as low as necessary). It works fine as an "asynchronous" protocol, i.e. interactive typing.