I once worked in a Directv call center and I'd never work another call center job ever again. You get screamed at by frustrated customers all day long and abused by companies that run these thing - National Electronics Warranty or NEW ran the one I worked in. They are horrible human beings insisting that you can deal with the elderly, uncooperative and technologically incompetent in an average of 700 seconds or less. Which is impossible, but achieved by most CSRs by telling customers to do something that typically doesn't work, like hit the red reset button and giving them the bums rush off the phone. The whole thing is structured with tedious grading systems and spreadsheets and monitoring tracking your every second inside these buildings. The place I worked was like a high-school study hall left in the charge of the most viciously cliquish kids in the class.
Don't get me totally wrong though, some of it was entertaining. Constant visits to the parking lot of trailer trash spouses and lovers that resulted in the police being called to break up these domestic violence away from home incidents. The best was the original manager's wife causing an eruption of screaming, throwing & breaking everything in reach tantrums when she caught the 50-something manager was screwing around with a 20 something CSR. Or the day some chick decided to leave the job in spectacular fashion by writing obscenities on the ladies room wall in her on feces. It was like working in the monkey house of a zoo. The hell of "Office Space" looked tame compared to my call center.
Bottom line, most of the people that work in a call center aren't smart enough to want a labor union and corporations that run these junk job centers are sufficiently evil that they are confident that they can keep it that way.
What judge and jury thinks some everyday person could ever pay this sort of damages fine in their lifetimes? I mean really? Hey you owe record company a million dollars! Really, good luck with collecting that.
Maybe the accused can get a loan from China...
Instead of those pointless commercials they ran for Vista it probably would have been funnier if they had truly geeked out, having Seinfeld and Gates say take a tour of sci-fi movie sets, like go on the old Enterprise from the original Star Trek by Forrest Gumping them into old footage. Gates and Seinfeld could be sneaking around, Gates in a blue science tunic with really fake looking Vulcan ears and Jerry in red. Jerry:"Hey, why do I have to wear the red shirt? I know what happens to the guys wearing red shirts!" Gates:"Ssh!" and the trubolift doors open and they nervously sneak out onto the bridge and Gates could point out that old hooded viewer of Spock's on the bridge.
Jerry:(whispering)"You know, I always wondered what he saw when he looked in that thing!" Gates:"Take a look." Jerry sidles over and peers in and sees the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death, "Uh, Houston we have a problem!" Gates looks in, sees the BSOD. "Oh no, they're still running Windows98!" and hits a button and there's the sound of MS reboot.
Cut to a shot where the whole bridge crew turns to look in their direction. Gates and Seinfeld smile lamely and nervously and Gates says "Well it's not completely perfect, Hey nothing is. Besides they're still running Windows98." Stock shots of Nimoy raising an eyebrow in disapproval, Kirk doing the worried chin rub, Chekov and Sulu look at one another smiling, Uhura tweaking some buttons and hearing the AOL sound "You've got mail!" Gates:"Come on, we have to get to Engineering." One last trick matte shot of them exiting while we see the original cast in a wide shot as they leave.
Of course they'd probably have had to pay through the nose for the rights to something like that, but it would have been far funnier and some self-effacement to acknowledge that Windows isn't perfect
Cobble some stock shots of them in Engineering, Gates with a Vista box and Gates inserting an installer disk in the old Engineering monitor console. Jerry:"We're gonna get caught!" Gates:"Relax, it's an upgrade, they'll love it." Shot of the old engineering core, lights flicker, sputtering sounds, shot of Scotty looking alarmed or annoyed, then everything goes back to normal. Jerry scowls that they've almost been caught again. Gates:"Well this hardware is over 40 years old." Jerry:"So now what? We go install Vista on the Death Star too?" Gates:"Why would I do that? They're the bad guys." Jerry:"Oh yeah, right." Gates:"Besides, the Death Star is incompatible." Jerry:"Incompatible?" Gates:"It runs on an old Macintosh." Jerry:"Oooh!" Vista logo, fade to black.
Of course I'd rather see Apple do this commercial the other way round. Or Ubuntu frankly, I'm just saying what would be funnier.
I finally broke down and installed ubuntu a little over a week ago and I love it. I've barely had a reason to boot back into Windows for most of the stuff I do, certainly not for browsing, email or word processing. I was a longtime Mac user, added a Windows XP laptop and desktop about 2 years ago and had a smattering of IRIX experience working with a friend on animation projects over a decade ago so the command line stuff doesn't intimidate me.
I have to say without having ubuntuforums to browse for tutorials a lot of things might have been tricky, but the only thing I can't figure out yet is how to get my webcam to work, though I haven't really tried hard.
I still have my Macs, and a dedicated XP desktop machine for Adobe apps and sundry and can boot the old laptop here back into XP if I need it, But having played with Vista on my brother's laptop I have to say while it isn't horrible, I'm loving ubuntu despite the stuff I haven't figured out yet. My brother saw me switching workspaces with Compiz last night and went "Holy shit what is that? Can I get my machine to do that?"
I say if you're fed up with Windows, not able to pay the Macintax for insanely expensive hardware you should give ubuntu a spin. There is no be-all operating system, but I don't find the learning curve any steeper than most people seem to have with Windows boxes and lord knows how many times I've stayed on the phone with some friend on Windows or Mac who had tied their OS in a knot, can't set up their printer, internet, etc.../just saying...
A lot of posters have complained how far away and small the screens look in these pictures of home theaters.
Because these are relatively small rooms these pictures are being shot with very wide angle lenses. If you compare the width of chair backs nearest the camera and farthest away and realize in reality they are pretty much the same size you can see the distortion.
Wide angle lenses are going to make the tv screens look farther away and smaller than they actually are because of the wide angle distortion of the lens trying to include as much of the room as possible in one shot.
As to the decor, if it was me I'd just build a dark colored room with a ring of comfy sofa with foot rests rather than go all sci-fi wild like this. If you must, go for a nice TARDIS in the back yard and put all your rakes, tools and trash cans in it or something.
I got the new "Spiderman 3" Tuesday by mail from Netflix after having only thought to put at the top of my queue last Saturday.
I have found that putting new releases to the top of my queue a week or so before they are released and making sure I get a return timed so it gets back on Monday I almost always get the new release on Tuesday.
I know I've had better luck getting the latest release this way from Netflix than I ever seemed to by going to Blockbuster after work on Tuesdays when all the slackers had cleaned off the shelves on new movie Tuesday before 5pm.
I will forever hate Blockbuster with a holy passion for every time I had to pay $4 late fees for being late just a few minutes after the noon return deadline. They were way expensive to begin with, had crappy service, the long lines to check-out, never seeming to have enough copies of the latest movie- need I go on?
I can change my queue on Netflix and get a new movie the next day and I can get a hell of a lot more movies a month for the $20 that only got me 4 movies the Blockbuster way.
My only regret hearing of their impending demise is that I don't know where the corporate drones live so I can drive by and taunt them a second time...
...or isn't the sadder thing is that this NERD- and he is a huge, honking NERD I wouldn't want anywhere NEAR my kids -thinks THAT commercial is going to cause me to want elect him to be NEAR kids he's loonier than hell?
Hey, I liked Star Wars when I was 14, IN 1977! I still like it now, but I wouldn't make a commercial to ask other adults to elect me to anything welding a light saber or dressed up like Mr. Spock and expect anything but withering ridicule.
RTFM
They convicted SMC, who makes a Skype phone, of the GPL violation because they didn't include the source code with the phone. NOT skype Wait, what? SMC? Isn't that the company that Richie Cunningham's dad shills for on late night TV?
how can every slashdot mod and user be completely wrong? Because we don't care enough.
What's the best way to protect your docs when you send your PC off for a repair then? I'm not even sure I know how to reformat my XP machines.
The best way to protect your docs is to acquire knowledge about the machines you are operating, both from a hardware and a software perspective. Then you will be able to repair everything yourself and not surrender your machine to unprofessional technicians. That's all very good, and I'm sure most of us would like to know everything there is to know and McGyver our entire lives, but it's not really practical.
I have a craptacular Toshiba laptop for example I'm going to have to send back that's still under warranty which has a screen that's going crazy. It seems to be some sort of loose connection, but looking at the fragile wiring and searching online for information I sense I'd have to find a local technician still to keep me from making it a paperweight.
I'm at the mercy of whoever is going to work on this thing. And being at someone else's mercy is where no one wants to be. Especially when we know what other people can be like.
... when you send your PC off for a repair then? Backup your drives and reformat the machine?
I'm more concerned about protecting financial data like any sort of cache of credit card numbers or passwords and such stored on a machine.
I'm not even sure I know how to reformat my XP machines. Did it all the time with my Macs, but my WinXP machines.
The cry from Republicans has always been that socialized medicine is some slippery slope to communist rule because doctors won't be their own bosses anymore.
The truth is though that you can't apply capitalism to medicine because if you're dying of a heart attack or some other emergency you can't choose between Macy's prices and Walmart's prices in ERs. You go where the ambulance will take you.
You can almost never pin doctors or hospitals down much with "What will this cost?"
You are at the mercy of the bill they will send and if you are uninsured you can be sure it will be approaching if not beyond what you can earn in a year to stay in the hospital a few days.
It's an unconscionable system in America.
Look at the effort to discredit Michael Moore's "Sicko".
The rich bastards running HMOs are stooping to outrageous levels to stop and discredit Moore. And they might succeed again with the FOX Noise crowd.
Well I don't exactly miss it because I still have it on my old iMac, but it has all sorts of stuff I liked like customizable email alerts so I could assign sounds to each email recipients much like custom ringtones. The filtering had so many wonderful options and I really liked the signature randomizer feature where I kept all those bon mots I gleamed from/.
I've gone to Firefox/Thunderbird on my PC laptop which I use more often but I miss all those old features when I'm away from my iMac. It sits idling with Entourage open and the sound on so I still get all the alerts, but I await such handy features in Thunderbird.
I think they'll come though. I love Firefox more than any browser I've ever seen and figure they'll get there.
The renal failure wont be changed by this. It's the result of actual physical damage to the kidneys, something that we have no cure for yet (beyond transplant), and are unlikely ever to unless we figure out a way to grow new ones.
Cloning?
The only thing this would help is reducing the progress of renal failure in those who are not end stage (i.e. those not on dialysis).
There's nothing about kidney failure and dialysis from type 2 diabetes though. My mom is on dialysis 3 times a week in a clinic here in Mississippi that bills Medicare around $18-22k per MONTH. There's like 300 patients in this place which must mean this place is raking in millions per year from Medicare.
What will happen if a shot dries up a money flow like that?
Wait... let's see if I got this straight. You want Firefox to come with a spyware-like function that reports back whenever it's installed?
Well, like on their site, not in the BROWSER. I'm just saying that Firefox users probably would take a second and say how many times they were going to install it which would give you a better idea of download to install ratio.
I downloaded it for my two desktops and laptop, plus for a friend on dial-up.
If there was a checkbox someplace that tallied up the download to install ratio like that Firefox would have a bigger market share.
I haven't used IE maybe three times on purpose in years.
Slashdot Mirror
I once worked in a Directv call center and I'd never work another call center job ever again. You get screamed at by frustrated customers all day long and abused by companies that run these thing - National Electronics Warranty or NEW ran the one I worked in. They are horrible human beings insisting that you can deal with the elderly, uncooperative and technologically incompetent in an average of 700 seconds or less. Which is impossible, but achieved by most CSRs by telling customers to do something that typically doesn't work, like hit the red reset button and giving them the bums rush off the phone. The whole thing is structured with tedious grading systems and spreadsheets and monitoring tracking your every second inside these buildings. The place I worked was like a high-school study hall left in the charge of the most viciously cliquish kids in the class. Don't get me totally wrong though, some of it was entertaining. Constant visits to the parking lot of trailer trash spouses and lovers that resulted in the police being called to break up these domestic violence away from home incidents. The best was the original manager's wife causing an eruption of screaming, throwing & breaking everything in reach tantrums when she caught the 50-something manager was screwing around with a 20 something CSR. Or the day some chick decided to leave the job in spectacular fashion by writing obscenities on the ladies room wall in her on feces. It was like working in the monkey house of a zoo. The hell of "Office Space" looked tame compared to my call center. Bottom line, most of the people that work in a call center aren't smart enough to want a labor union and corporations that run these junk job centers are sufficiently evil that they are confident that they can keep it that way.
What judge and jury thinks some everyday person could ever pay this sort of damages fine in their lifetimes? I mean really? Hey you owe record company a million dollars! Really, good luck with collecting that. Maybe the accused can get a loan from China...
Just remember to unclick "Shrink to fit page".
I just want to know, is that picture of Charles Nelson Reilly as a boy or what?
Instead of those pointless commercials they ran for Vista it probably would have been funnier if they had truly geeked out, having Seinfeld and Gates say take a tour of sci-fi movie sets, like go on the old Enterprise from the original Star Trek by Forrest Gumping them into old footage. Gates and Seinfeld could be sneaking around, Gates in a blue science tunic with really fake looking Vulcan ears and Jerry in red. Jerry:"Hey, why do I have to wear the red shirt? I know what happens to the guys wearing red shirts!" Gates:"Ssh!" and the trubolift doors open and they nervously sneak out onto the bridge and Gates could point out that old hooded viewer of Spock's on the bridge. Jerry:(whispering)"You know, I always wondered what he saw when he looked in that thing!" Gates:"Take a look." Jerry sidles over and peers in and sees the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death, "Uh, Houston we have a problem!" Gates looks in, sees the BSOD. "Oh no, they're still running Windows98!" and hits a button and there's the sound of MS reboot. Cut to a shot where the whole bridge crew turns to look in their direction. Gates and Seinfeld smile lamely and nervously and Gates says "Well it's not completely perfect, Hey nothing is. Besides they're still running Windows98." Stock shots of Nimoy raising an eyebrow in disapproval, Kirk doing the worried chin rub, Chekov and Sulu look at one another smiling, Uhura tweaking some buttons and hearing the AOL sound "You've got mail!" Gates:"Come on, we have to get to Engineering." One last trick matte shot of them exiting while we see the original cast in a wide shot as they leave. Of course they'd probably have had to pay through the nose for the rights to something like that, but it would have been far funnier and some self-effacement to acknowledge that Windows isn't perfect Cobble some stock shots of them in Engineering, Gates with a Vista box and Gates inserting an installer disk in the old Engineering monitor console. Jerry:"We're gonna get caught!" Gates:"Relax, it's an upgrade, they'll love it." Shot of the old engineering core, lights flicker, sputtering sounds, shot of Scotty looking alarmed or annoyed, then everything goes back to normal. Jerry scowls that they've almost been caught again. Gates:"Well this hardware is over 40 years old." Jerry:"So now what? We go install Vista on the Death Star too?" Gates:"Why would I do that? They're the bad guys." Jerry:"Oh yeah, right." Gates:"Besides, the Death Star is incompatible." Jerry:"Incompatible?" Gates:"It runs on an old Macintosh." Jerry:"Oooh!" Vista logo, fade to black. Of course I'd rather see Apple do this commercial the other way round. Or Ubuntu frankly, I'm just saying what would be funnier.
I finally broke down and installed ubuntu a little over a week ago and I love it. I've barely had a reason to boot back into Windows for most of the stuff I do, certainly not for browsing, email or word processing. I was a longtime Mac user, added a Windows XP laptop and desktop about 2 years ago and had a smattering of IRIX experience working with a friend on animation projects over a decade ago so the command line stuff doesn't intimidate me.
/just saying...
I have to say without having ubuntuforums to browse for tutorials a lot of things might have been tricky, but the only thing I can't figure out yet is how to get my webcam to work, though I haven't really tried hard.
I still have my Macs, and a dedicated XP desktop machine for Adobe apps and sundry and can boot the old laptop here back into XP if I need it, But having played with Vista on my brother's laptop I have to say while it isn't horrible, I'm loving ubuntu despite the stuff I haven't figured out yet. My brother saw me switching workspaces with Compiz last night and went "Holy shit what is that? Can I get my machine to do that?"
I say if you're fed up with Windows, not able to pay the Macintax for insanely expensive hardware you should give ubuntu a spin. There is no be-all operating system, but I don't find the learning curve any steeper than most people seem to have with Windows boxes and lord knows how many times I've stayed on the phone with some friend on Windows or Mac who had tied their OS in a knot, can't set up their printer, internet, etc...
A lot of posters have complained how far away and small the screens look in these pictures of home theaters.
Because these are relatively small rooms these pictures are being shot with very wide angle lenses. If you compare the width of chair backs nearest the camera and farthest away and realize in reality they are pretty much the same size you can see the distortion.
Wide angle lenses are going to make the tv screens look farther away and smaller than they actually are because of the wide angle distortion of the lens trying to include as much of the room as possible in one shot.
As to the decor, if it was me I'd just build a dark colored room with a ring of comfy sofa with foot rests rather than go all sci-fi wild like this. If you must, go for a nice TARDIS in the back yard and put all your rakes, tools and trash cans in it or something.
I got the new "Spiderman 3" Tuesday by mail from Netflix after having only thought to put at the top of my queue last Saturday.
I have found that putting new releases to the top of my queue a week or so before they are released and making sure I get a return timed so it gets back on Monday I almost always get the new release on Tuesday.
I know I've had better luck getting the latest release this way from Netflix than I ever seemed to by going to Blockbuster after work on Tuesdays when all the slackers had cleaned off the shelves on new movie Tuesday before 5pm.
I will forever hate Blockbuster with a holy passion for every time I had to pay $4 late fees for being late just a few minutes after the noon return deadline. They were way expensive to begin with, had crappy service, the long lines to check-out, never seeming to have enough copies of the latest movie- need I go on?
I can change my queue on Netflix and get a new movie the next day and I can get a hell of a lot more movies a month for the $20 that only got me 4 movies the Blockbuster way.
My only regret hearing of their impending demise is that I don't know where the corporate drones live so I can drive by and taunt them a second time...
...or isn't the sadder thing is that this NERD- and he is a huge, honking NERD I wouldn't want anywhere NEAR my kids -thinks THAT commercial is going to cause me to want elect him to be NEAR kids he's loonier than hell?
Hey, I liked Star Wars when I was 14, IN 1977! I still like it now, but I wouldn't make a commercial to ask other adults to elect me to anything welding a light saber or dressed up like Mr. Spock and expect anything but withering ridicule.
This dude creeps me out. Seriously.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Perl Harbor?
HELL NO! When the going gets tough, the tough get going!
WHO'S WITH ME?!!1!
These comments make so glad I'm self-employeed and not some cubicle Dibert...
"Office Space" was a MOVIE for chrissakes people, not the model for a lifestyle!
When are you gonna rise up, brandish those red Swinglines and get medieval on middle-management?
... when you send your PC off for a repair then? Backup your drives and reformat the machine? I'm more concerned about protecting financial data like any sort of cache of credit card numbers or passwords and such stored on a machine. I'm not even sure I know how to reformat my XP machines. Did it all the time with my Macs, but my WinXP machines.
The cry from Republicans has always been that socialized medicine is some slippery slope to communist rule because doctors won't be their own bosses anymore.
The truth is though that you can't apply capitalism to medicine because if you're dying of a heart attack or some other emergency you can't choose between Macy's prices and Walmart's prices in ERs. You go where the ambulance will take you.
You can almost never pin doctors or hospitals down much with "What will this cost?"
You are at the mercy of the bill they will send and if you are uninsured you can be sure it will be approaching if not beyond what you can earn in a year to stay in the hospital a few days.
It's an unconscionable system in America.
Look at the effort to discredit Michael Moore's "Sicko".
The rich bastards running HMOs are stooping to outrageous levels to stop and discredit Moore. And they might succeed again with the FOX Noise crowd.
I have it from a reliable source that those egg shaped alien craft handle like a pig when you try to fly low and slow.
Well I don't exactly miss it because I still have it on my old iMac, but it has all sorts of stuff I liked like customizable email alerts so I could assign sounds to each email recipients much like custom ringtones. The filtering had so many wonderful options and I really liked the signature randomizer feature where I kept all those bon mots I gleamed from /.
I've gone to Firefox/Thunderbird on my PC laptop which I use more often but I miss all those old features when I'm away from my iMac. It sits idling with Entourage open and the sound on so I still get all the alerts, but I await such handy features in Thunderbird.
I think they'll come though. I love Firefox more than any browser I've ever seen and figure they'll get there.
Netflix + RipIt4Me (or DVDFabPlatinum) and problem solved.
I stupidly bought several Sony Trinitrons, Betamaxs, VCRs, and stereos over the last 25 years, but no more. Never again will I buy Sony.
That'll learn 'em.
Why is Google anti-septic?
The renal failure wont be changed by this. It's the result of actual physical damage to the kidneys, something that we have no cure for yet (beyond transplant), and are unlikely ever to unless we figure out a way to grow new ones.
n day/main2251487.shtml
Cloning?
The only thing this would help is reducing the progress of renal failure in those who are not end stage (i.e. those not on dialysis).
I guess we'd have to ask Art Buchwald about how accurate such diagnosis is...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/12/su
There's nothing about kidney failure and dialysis from type 2 diabetes though. My mom is on dialysis 3 times a week in a clinic here in Mississippi that bills Medicare around $18-22k per MONTH. There's like 300 patients in this place which must mean this place is raking in millions per year from Medicare. What will happen if a shot dries up a money flow like that?
Wait... let's see if I got this straight. You want Firefox to come with a spyware-like function that reports back whenever it's installed?
Well, like on their site, not in the BROWSER. I'm just saying that Firefox users probably would take a second and say how many times they were going to install it which would give you a better idea of download to install ratio.
I downloaded it for my two desktops and laptop, plus for a friend on dial-up. If there was a checkbox someplace that tallied up the download to install ratio like that Firefox would have a bigger market share. I haven't used IE maybe three times on purpose in years.