You do realize that one reason most techs at call centers come off as dumb is because they're not allowed to solve problems that they know how to solve, or they don't have the tools to solve the problems ("You might break something, now go play with something else like a good little boy") and because they're constantly pushed to handle more calls, right?
Guess what will get a tech employed by a call center fired, is it A) Not properly helping a user, or B) Repeatedly exceeding the AHT. The answer is, of course, exceeding the AHT repeatedly, they don't care if you get pissed about poor service, they're so desensitized to your anger that all your yelling will accomplish is to trigger an urge within them to fuck you over by doing everything by the book (because it will take you ages to get proper help and no one will give them shit for treating you that way).
Basically, what you called a productivity risk is exactly what is the problem with call center productivity. It's all about easily quantifiable data, and "calls handled per day" is a lot easier to quantify than "customer satisfaction". Besides, who cares if your employees are bitter and turnover for 1st line techs is over 100% per year? That just means you don't have to give out so many raises (yes, the head HR guy for a previous employer of mine actually said that).
That's strange, my iPhone's screen isn't "a mess of finger prints", but then OTOH I don't eat greasy food while using it, and I wipe it off if it does become messy (about every 2-3 days, takes around 10 seconds).
As for the plastic in consumer Macs, I've had no problem with discoloration, but then I don't blow smoke on them, smear various substances on them or expose them to other hostile environmental factors.
Maybe you should either a) actually use Apple hardware before trolling, or b) treat your hardware a bit better?
Actually, what the previous poster meant was that if two incomes are required then the risk of having one of the two providers losing his/her job, becoming ill and unable to work or whatever is twice that of a single provider suffering the same fate.
Or in geek terms, you're looking at it as RAID1 but since the "storage needs" are greater than that of a single disk then it magically becomes something closer to RAID0, and if you lose one disk in RAID0....
You're talking out of your ass. NAT is a horrible kludge of a workaround for a problem that IPv6 solves. I have no idea what your ramblings about ATM are supposed to prove...
What you want is a firewall then, something that does packet filtering, not NAT. I really can't be bothered arguing about this for the millionth time, as the kids say "LAERN 2 NETWURKS".
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
Waaah Waaah! We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around! Waaah!
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
True, this is partly because a lot of ISPs will simply say NO to customers asking about IPv6. The ISP I'm using at home basically told me they are officially "testing" IPv6 for residential users but that this testing is very very limited and that business customers who want IPv6 get to pay extra for it. So I'm using a Sixxs tunnel for now.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.
The main problem IPv6 is supposed to solve is the same problem that the original IP protocol was supposed to solve, the lack of end-to-end addressing on the internet.
4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.
NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.
Compared to the video I'd say audio tracks are pretty much nothing, this seems to me to be the same reasoning as when release groups rip some movie, transcode the video to 720p high bitrate h.264 and the proceed to strip out all the subtitles and transcode the audio to 96 kbps mp3 to "save space". And yes, I hate it like hell, you can barely hear what people are saying.
Could it be that you're talking about MS Windows 3.1 instead of Windows NT 3.1 that the parent seems to be talking about? Because NT 3.x was a completely different beast from regular Win 3.1.
That said, once you reach the interview stage, your employment history doesn't matter all that much, so you're probably also failing to impress at the interview or applying with the wrong types of companies.
This caught my eye as I'm also currently in tech support, tier 1 + 2 +3 (for different clients of the company I work for) and what I've noticed when interviewing for "real" IT jobs is that even if my resumé impresses them enough to get to an interview the tech support part of it seems to make them very cautious. I suppose you could say it seems like they're thinking "Well, he might be good enough but considering that tech support bit he'd better impress our pants off..." and I suspect the OP might be getting a similar response; he/she might have to impress the interviewer to a greater degree than someone coming from a sysadmin or development background.
Unlike the OP I have been offered a couple of jobs but they have essentially been Tier 2 support jobs at 10-25% higher pay than my current job and I would've been forced to move several hundred kilometers so I've said no simply because it would have been more of what I'm doing now with the inconvenience of uprooting myself without really getting much for it.
I suppose my only suggestion for the OP (if he/she gets this far down in the comments) is to do his/her best to impress the hell out of the interviewer as he/she is probably being judged more harshly than other candidates.
Well, what happened to me wasn't really that weird but it was kind of interesting...
I purchased a couple of old Indigo2s a few years back, paid something like $50 each for them, and when I tried booting the first one I found out that the root password was "root" and that it automatically mounted several NFS mounts belonging to the previous owner, a special effects company in California.
In retrospective I should probably have either alerted them of the problem or at least snooped around just a little more, but I had no sense of adventure so I just unmounted them NFS partitions and removed them from fstab.
CS gains by taking their money to fund operations. Since these parasites will probably not show up for class or turn in a complete homework assignment, less time is spent on their education. Less time=less money on losers; more money for real CS work.
Sadly a lot of these people will go to lectures and turn in homework assignments that are just complete enough to get a passing grade. They'll grind away, studying insane hours just to pass, and then they'll go out and get jobs in IT without really understanding what they did for the last three or four years. I went to college with a whole bunch of people like this, people who entered college just before the dot-bomb and chose CS/CE because they thought they'd be able to earn millions before turning 25.
And as someone who left college post-bomb I'd like to add that all these people who flock to a new field every few years because they're hoping for Big Bux(tm) really screw up the job market for the rest of us. It's not easy getting a job when 1) All the employers are scared shitless of anyone who doesn't have an "official" paper trail for every skill they claim to have because they themselves were dumb enough to hire lots of idiots that said "I know computarwebs an' junk", and 2) Lots of the idiots hired in point no. 1 are still working in the industry and competing for the jobs, and we all know that experience beats skills any day (even if your "experience" amount to replacing keyboards and sabotaged CD-ROM drives at some high school and maybe occasionally rebooting the Netware server).
Unfortunately I developed a passion for geeky things, especially computers, as a kid in the days when Amigas and Ataris still roamed the earth so it's not like I can just find something else that's interesting (my other hobbies/interests are things that can't easily be made profitable unless you're very very very good, and I'm not).
Put simply they have a socialist agenda, nothing wrong with that.
I probably shouldn't reply to trolls but it might be useful for someone reading this to know that Folkpartiet (abbreviated Fp) is a right-wing party and in many issues is further to the right than the "classic" swedish right-wing party, the moderate party (which isn't really such a moderate party but the name is catchy, isn't it?).
The "critics" who are now stating that the law is now acceptable to all critics are mainly members and supporters of the current government who in many cases voted for the original law because they didn't want to go against the party line (of their party Folkpartiet).
Now they feel that they can "compromise" and seem like they're against the original law while still not going against the party. If you check the websites of Piratpartiet (The pirate party) and StoppaFRAlagen.nu then you'll see that they, the chief critics of the law, are still against the revised law.
P.S. Now, if you said that your monitor had a native resolution of 1920x1080 or higher, I'd be impressed. Mine's native res is 1680x1050, and it's big. Real big.
My main machine at home has one monitor running at 1920x1200 and a second running at 1360x768 and I wouldn't mind getting something even more hi-res.
At work however, I have 1680x1050 and it feels really cramped, I'd love to get a second monitor or something with a higher native resolution. 1680x1050 isn't really that big if you multitask and don't run all your windows multitasked because you grew up on Win 3.x running at 640x480.
...so 25% is less than the average smoker spends outside every day.
I find all these comments about how smokers spend ungodly amounts of time at work smoking to be just a bit annoying. Your example was apparently 2 hours per workday spent smoking which is silly.
A while ago I actually tried to time how much "break time" smoking and non-smoking co-workers of mine took, the smokers actually took less break time since most of them seemed to take two 7-8 minute break before lunch and two 7-8 minute breaks after lunch, fetching coffee on their way back in.
The non-smokers OTOH would generally take one break before lunch where they'd chat a couple of minutes, get coffee, maybe some snacks from the machine and then head to the break room where they'd sit and chat for at least 15 minutes, return to the office, chat for a couple of minutes and then get back to work. All in all generally around 18-22 minutes.
I think part of why people see smokers as "lazy" is because 1) A handful of smokers will combine the "smoker ritual" with the "non-smoker ritual" and 2) Smokers tend to take shorter breaks more frequently so they are seen going in and out of the office more times per day.
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
Even back in college we'd use special workstations with high-end TVs hooked up to them whenever we were editing video, of course this was back in the days of oversaturated CRT TVs but there is still a difference between the image quality on a 32" LCD TV and a 24" LCD monitor (although in some cases there shouldn't be).
I've never been forced to do something like that, but I have spoken to those who have had to deal with situations where a service needs to run on more machines than there are public IP addresses. And this quickly gets ugly.
And what if you have two "HCC" units on the same connection (just pretend you have a pool house or something)? Do you use the standard HCC port (like say 1337) for the "main" HCC and something non-standard like 31337 for the secondary one? Wouldn't it be much easier with public v6 IPs + DNS so you have hcc1.yourhome.tld?
Hell, an ISP could pretty easily let a customer assign a subdomain like mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld with hosts like winputer.mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld and toaster.mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld to devices that are connected through a web interface (for those users who don't administer such things themselves).
While that's pretty much the solution that all the NAT-heads suggest, but how fun is this when you need a second $SERVICE server? All of a sudden we're stuck with web servers running on ports 8080, 8088, 8880, 8081 and other sillyness, or sshd running on 22, 2200, 2222, 2022. Well, you get the point, hopefully.
Oh yes, we could do something similar in HS to skip classes by taking an exam, unfortunately it was school "policy" to only give a passing grade, the equivalent of a "C" in the US.
The motivation for this was so that students wouldn't "just take the exam to get a good grade without having to attend class". This of course discouraged students from taking these exams, I myself spent many morning classes sleeping simply because sleeping in class plus acing the regular exams gave a great grade while simply taking the exam for the entire course gave only a passing grade.
Truthfully, it would probably have been more useful for me, and others, to simply take the exam but we didn't want to ruin our grades...
I hope you're aware of the following facts, 1) Gmail is no longer invite-only and 2) Even when it was invite-only they were giving away invites to pretty much anyone who wanted one.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that one reason most techs at call centers come off as dumb is because they're not allowed to solve problems that they know how to solve, or they don't have the tools to solve the problems ("You might break something, now go play with something else like a good little boy") and because they're constantly pushed to handle more calls, right?
Guess what will get a tech employed by a call center fired, is it A) Not properly helping a user, or B) Repeatedly exceeding the AHT. The answer is, of course, exceeding the AHT repeatedly, they don't care if you get pissed about poor service, they're so desensitized to your anger that all your yelling will accomplish is to trigger an urge within them to fuck you over by doing everything by the book (because it will take you ages to get proper help and no one will give them shit for treating you that way).
Basically, what you called a productivity risk is exactly what is the problem with call center productivity. It's all about easily quantifiable data, and "calls handled per day" is a lot easier to quantify than "customer satisfaction". Besides, who cares if your employees are bitter and turnover for 1st line techs is over 100% per year? That just means you don't have to give out so many raises (yes, the head HR guy for a previous employer of mine actually said that).
/Mikael
That's strange, my iPhone's screen isn't "a mess of finger prints", but then OTOH I don't eat greasy food while using it, and I wipe it off if it does become messy (about every 2-3 days, takes around 10 seconds).
As for the plastic in consumer Macs, I've had no problem with discoloration, but then I don't blow smoke on them, smear various substances on them or expose them to other hostile environmental factors.
Maybe you should either a) actually use Apple hardware before trolling, or b) treat your hardware a bit better?
/Mikael
Actually, what the previous poster meant was that if two incomes are required then the risk of having one of the two providers losing his/her job, becoming ill and unable to work or whatever is twice that of a single provider suffering the same fate.
Or in geek terms, you're looking at it as RAID1 but since the "storage needs" are greater than that of a single disk then it magically becomes something closer to RAID0, and if you lose one disk in RAID0....
/Mikael
Aah yes, but no. Technocracy was never actually tried, a few people were inspired in part by technocratic ideas but no one has ever tried technocracy.
/Mikael
You're talking out of your ass. NAT is a horrible kludge of a workaround for a problem that IPv6 solves. I have no idea what your ramblings about ATM are supposed to prove...
/Mikael
What you want is a firewall then, something that does packet filtering, not NAT. I really can't be bothered arguing about this for the millionth time, as the kids say "LAERN 2 NETWURKS".
/Mikael
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
Waaah Waaah! We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around! Waaah!
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
True, this is partly because a lot of ISPs will simply say NO to customers asking about IPv6. The ISP I'm using at home basically told me they are officially "testing" IPv6 for residential users but that this testing is very very limited and that business customers who want IPv6 get to pay extra for it. So I'm using a Sixxs tunnel for now.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.
The main problem IPv6 is supposed to solve is the same problem that the original IP protocol was supposed to solve, the lack of end-to-end addressing on the internet.
4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.
NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.
/Mikael
Compared to the video I'd say audio tracks are pretty much nothing, this seems to me to be the same reasoning as when release groups rip some movie, transcode the video to 720p high bitrate h.264 and the proceed to strip out all the subtitles and transcode the audio to 96 kbps mp3 to "save space". And yes, I hate it like hell, you can barely hear what people are saying.
/Mikael
Before, actually. But I've been checking out the site every now and then just to see if they plan on ever getting it up and running.
/Mikael
Except the project is not yet up and running, so it's quite useless even for those of us who do have IPv6 connectivity...
/Mikael
Could it be that you're talking about MS Windows 3.1 instead of Windows NT 3.1 that the parent seems to be talking about? Because NT 3.x was a completely different beast from regular Win 3.1.
/Mikael
That said, once you reach the interview stage, your employment history doesn't matter all that much, so you're probably also failing to impress at the interview or applying with the wrong types of companies.
This caught my eye as I'm also currently in tech support, tier 1 + 2 +3 (for different clients of the company I work for) and what I've noticed when interviewing for "real" IT jobs is that even if my resumé impresses them enough to get to an interview the tech support part of it seems to make them very cautious. I suppose you could say it seems like they're thinking "Well, he might be good enough but considering that tech support bit he'd better impress our pants off..." and I suspect the OP might be getting a similar response; he/she might have to impress the interviewer to a greater degree than someone coming from a sysadmin or development background.
Unlike the OP I have been offered a couple of jobs but they have essentially been Tier 2 support jobs at 10-25% higher pay than my current job and I would've been forced to move several hundred kilometers so I've said no simply because it would have been more of what I'm doing now with the inconvenience of uprooting myself without really getting much for it.
I suppose my only suggestion for the OP (if he/she gets this far down in the comments) is to do his/her best to impress the hell out of the interviewer as he/she is probably being judged more harshly than other candidates.
/Mikael
Well, what happened to me wasn't really that weird but it was kind of interesting...
I purchased a couple of old Indigo2s a few years back, paid something like $50 each for them, and when I tried booting the first one I found out that the root password was "root" and that it automatically mounted several NFS mounts belonging to the previous owner, a special effects company in California.
In retrospective I should probably have either alerted them of the problem or at least snooped around just a little more, but I had no sense of adventure so I just unmounted them NFS partitions and removed them from fstab.
/Mikael
CS gains by taking their money to fund operations. Since these parasites will probably not show up for class or turn in a complete homework assignment, less time is spent on their education. Less time=less money on losers; more money for real CS work.
Sadly a lot of these people will go to lectures and turn in homework assignments that are just complete enough to get a passing grade. They'll grind away, studying insane hours just to pass, and then they'll go out and get jobs in IT without really understanding what they did for the last three or four years. I went to college with a whole bunch of people like this, people who entered college just before the dot-bomb and chose CS/CE because they thought they'd be able to earn millions before turning 25.
/Mikael
And as someone who left college post-bomb I'd like to add that all these people who flock to a new field every few years because they're hoping for Big Bux(tm) really screw up the job market for the rest of us. It's not easy getting a job when 1) All the employers are scared shitless of anyone who doesn't have an "official" paper trail for every skill they claim to have because they themselves were dumb enough to hire lots of idiots that said "I know computarwebs an' junk", and 2) Lots of the idiots hired in point no. 1 are still working in the industry and competing for the jobs, and we all know that experience beats skills any day (even if your "experience" amount to replacing keyboards and sabotaged CD-ROM drives at some high school and maybe occasionally rebooting the Netware server).
Unfortunately I developed a passion for geeky things, especially computers, as a kid in the days when Amigas and Ataris still roamed the earth so it's not like I can just find something else that's interesting (my other hobbies/interests are things that can't easily be made profitable unless you're very very very good, and I'm not).
/Mikael
Put simply they have a socialist agenda, nothing wrong with that.
I probably shouldn't reply to trolls but it might be useful for someone reading this to know that Folkpartiet (abbreviated Fp) is a right-wing party and in many issues is further to the right than the "classic" swedish right-wing party, the moderate party (which isn't really such a moderate party but the name is catchy, isn't it?).
/Mikael
The "critics" who are now stating that the law is now acceptable to all critics are mainly members and supporters of the current government who in many cases voted for the original law because they didn't want to go against the party line (of their party Folkpartiet).
Now they feel that they can "compromise" and seem like they're against the original law while still not going against the party. If you check the websites of Piratpartiet (The pirate party) and StoppaFRAlagen.nu then you'll see that they, the chief critics of the law, are still against the revised law.
/Mikael
P.S. Now, if you said that your monitor had a native resolution of 1920x1080 or higher, I'd be impressed. Mine's native res is 1680x1050, and it's big. Real big.
My main machine at home has one monitor running at 1920x1200 and a second running at 1360x768 and I wouldn't mind getting something even more hi-res.
At work however, I have 1680x1050 and it feels really cramped, I'd love to get a second monitor or something with a higher native resolution. 1680x1050 isn't really that big if you multitask and don't run all your windows multitasked because you grew up on Win 3.x running at 640x480.
/Mikael
...so 25% is less than the average smoker spends outside every day.
I find all these comments about how smokers spend ungodly amounts of time at work smoking to be just a bit annoying. Your example was apparently 2 hours per workday spent smoking which is silly.
A while ago I actually tried to time how much "break time" smoking and non-smoking co-workers of mine took, the smokers actually took less break time since most of them seemed to take two 7-8 minute break before lunch and two 7-8 minute breaks after lunch, fetching coffee on their way back in.
The non-smokers OTOH would generally take one break before lunch where they'd chat a couple of minutes, get coffee, maybe some snacks from the machine and then head to the break room where they'd sit and chat for at least 15 minutes, return to the office, chat for a couple of minutes and then get back to work. All in all generally around 18-22 minutes.
I think part of why people see smokers as "lazy" is because 1) A handful of smokers will combine the "smoker ritual" with the "non-smoker ritual" and 2) Smokers tend to take shorter breaks more frequently so they are seen going in and out of the office more times per day.
/Mikael
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
Even back in college we'd use special workstations with high-end TVs hooked up to them whenever we were editing video, of course this was back in the days of oversaturated CRT TVs but there is still a difference between the image quality on a 32" LCD TV and a 24" LCD monitor (although in some cases there shouldn't be).
/Mikael
I've never been forced to do something like that, but I have spoken to those who have had to deal with situations where a service needs to run on more machines than there are public IP addresses. And this quickly gets ugly.
/Mikael
And what if you have two "HCC" units on the same connection (just pretend you have a pool house or something)? Do you use the standard HCC port (like say 1337) for the "main" HCC and something non-standard like 31337 for the secondary one? Wouldn't it be much easier with public v6 IPs + DNS so you have hcc1.yourhome.tld?
Hell, an ISP could pretty easily let a customer assign a subdomain like mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld with hosts like winputer.mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld and toaster.mycoolsubdomain.ISP.tld to devices that are connected through a web interface (for those users who don't administer such things themselves).
/Mikael
While that's pretty much the solution that all the NAT-heads suggest, but how fun is this when you need a second $SERVICE server? All of a sudden we're stuck with web servers running on ports 8080, 8088, 8880, 8081 and other sillyness, or sshd running on 22, 2200, 2222, 2022. Well, you get the point, hopefully.
/Mikael
Oh yes, we could do something similar in HS to skip classes by taking an exam, unfortunately it was school "policy" to only give a passing grade, the equivalent of a "C" in the US.
The motivation for this was so that students wouldn't "just take the exam to get a good grade without having to attend class". This of course discouraged students from taking these exams, I myself spent many morning classes sleeping simply because sleeping in class plus acing the regular exams gave a great grade while simply taking the exam for the entire course gave only a passing grade.
Truthfully, it would probably have been more useful for me, and others, to simply take the exam but we didn't want to ruin our grades...
/Mikael
I hope you're aware of the following facts, 1) Gmail is no longer invite-only and 2) Even when it was invite-only they were giving away invites to pretty much anyone who wanted one.
/Mikael