This particular one has probably happened quite a few times. In fact, I've had customers call me during power outages demanding I as a representative of their ISP get someone to fix the power for them since we are obligated to keep their internet connection working and it can't work without power...
Let's just say people who have achieved that level of stupid are not fun to talk to. As they say, the dumber the angrier.
The problem is that they pay people in tech support to do just that, give customers technical support yet many times it seems like the customers have no interest in being helped which does create kind of a problem, a problem that is not in the job description but that you still have to deal with.
Seriously, if you've ever had to work tech support during a major two-day outage then you'd know what I'm talking about, clearly someone further up in the organisation is responsible, when calling in you get an automated message giving you all information tech support has avaiable about the outage and despite this everyone in tech support is tied down in calls from angry irrate customers demanding "Someone" do something NOW NOW NOW!
Good idea, I had not even considered using my microwave oven for veggies, I always use the regular oven or fry them in the frying pan (if I don't eat them raw). I'll have to try it...
Yeah, see the thing is that even though I'm not just some script-monkey I still need to check certain things with the customer and I can honestly say that any customer who knows what he/she is doing shouldn't need more than a few minutes to go through all the things I need him/her to check.
If I don't check these things before sending off a ticket then the 3rd line techs send it back to me with a note to contact the customer and get the necessary info (plus a comment about always getting all relevant info)...
Can't really type now, some guy has managed to mangle the settings for his DSL modem's built-in WAP and I need to guide him through setting everything up again... Somehow he thinks it's related to his browser proxy settings... *sigh*
I'd have to say that's not the worst entry-level job in tech by a long shot, ever since I started working in the wonderful area of, wait a minute some guy had to restart his DSL modem and needed me to hold his hand, tech support.
Seriously, working in tech support is about as low as it gets, you're expected to have college-level skills while everyone assumes you're some high school dropout who is barely capable of reading and writing, the pay is horrible and very few people really appreciate the work you do (most of the time the first thing you hear after helping someone fix a problem is "...and how are you going to compensate me for this?").
But if you have 16 free hours per day then you are either unemployed or you are some kind of alien that does not require sleep.
Let me explain my position, these are the hours of my day that are Not Free(tm):
Sleep, 8 hours - I don't care if some wannabe macho fucks think it's a sign of weakness, most guys I've met who have gone on about how they can make do on 5 or 6 hours of sleep per night have shown serious signs of sleep deprivation...
Work, 9 hours - Four hours in the morning, one hour unpaid lunch, four hours in the afternoon.
Travel to and from work, 1 hour - This is not time I can somehow save, I need to get to work and back.
Breakfast routine, 20 mins - This is the time I need in the morning to prepare for work, if I have the day off then this is spread out over several hours, no time for that when working.
So in total this is 18 hours and 20 minutes of every day that I can't really can't spend exercising, that leaves about 5 hours and 40 minutes for other activities, this includes entertainment, social life and exercise, a bit different from your claimed 16 hours.:)
I used to always eat fruits and vegetables because it was easy, this was when I lived with a roommate and right next to a supermarket which meant that nothing stayed in the kitchen long enough to go bad and buying more veggies took no effort (so I wasn't worried about running out either). Eating fruits and veggies was easy.
These days I'm a bit further from the nearest store and I don't have a roommate, this means that I've ended up switching to food that holds up for longer periods of time than fresh fruit/veggies since running out of food is a bit of a pain (I don't own a car) and I don't want a bunch of food going bad, thus I end up with a few frozen pizzas just in case I can't be bothered cooking on a particular day.
If you think "plexiglass siding and integrated LED lights" is stylish then you clearly have what a lot of people who have any experience working with design would call "horrible taste". Seriously, I can't understand how those "gamer" cases every became popular, I can see how they may appeal to a small subset of the "14 year-old male gamer" demographic but other than that I just don't get it...
I think my problem is that for regular *nix I don't use KDE or Gnome and thus I'm still using what I'm used to (mark + middle click to paste) from when I started using X11, and for macs I find myself either drag'n'dropping or using cmd+c which has become differentiated from ctrl+c in my mind (as I use ctrl+c to shut down processes, not copy data).
That's exactly the impression I used to have of touchscreens as well, all the public terminals that seemed to react so slowly, and if it wasn't the actual touchscreen then the rest of the system seemed to be horribly slow instead, taking several seconds to do things that should happen instantly.
And then there are the UI issues, every public terminal I saw prior to 2005 that was touchscreen-equipped had a UI that looked like it had been designed by someone who just didn't understand the technology they had at hand, not to mention that any graphics and icons involved would look like they were created by a team of 50 year-old IBM engineers, bonus points if the icons despite their combination of ugly and simple still didn't make the least bit of sense.
I don't think it was just a matter of patents expiring, it was most likely because the technology was finally ready for it. In the past most touchscreen-equipped systems I've seen seemed to be pretty weak in every area except the touchscreen, these days the machines equipped with touchscreens are powerful enough to actually take advantage of the touchscreen capabilities.
That said, I'm still waiting for a tablet mac with multitouch tech and a built-in wacom tablet (like the Cintiq) so that I can use my hands to drag stuff around on my desktop and the stylus for actually drawing stuff.
No hotkeys in Maya?! One of the first things I learned about Maya when I took a full semester-long course in 3D modelling and animation was that if you couldn't find a hotkey for some task (which was quite rare) then you created your own hotkey.
As others have said, you don't need the floppy but as a bare minimum you can install from floppy.
I haven't actually done a Slackware install from floppies since I think it was Slackware 3.6, installing A and N (base and network) and then grabbing everything else I needed over a 33.6kbps dialup connection
Imagine that! Video cameras more expensive than still cameras!
Of course the problem isn't that a decent video camera is more expensive than a decent still image camera, the problem is that a $50 webcam from six or seven years ago has the same max resolution and low framerate that a new webcam for $50 has, really. I was recently shopping around for a couple of webcams to set up home surveillance as I thought that by now surely they would have progressed beyond 640x480@15fps or 320x240@30fps but I found that almost all of the cameras available had those same limitations that my old webam from 2001 has (and it was by no means top of the line when I bought it). The only difference seems to be that the image quality is slightly less grainy these days, but the resolution is still horribly low, and there's still a lot more noise in the images produced by a new webcam than there is in the images produced by my parents' old digital camera from around 2000 when it's set to "low resolution mode".
What we need is for webcam manufacturers to stop marketing inferior products when everyone else has improved their products.
Of course, I'm in Sweden (which is in Europe) and where I work we have three guys who are very proc-mac and anti-windows with several others being "closet mac users" (meaning they don't talk about it but if someone asks what version of Windows they're running they answer "OS X"). Could it be you britons are a bit behind the times? Because I know seven or eight years ago the situation here was a lot more like you describe in your post, except in creative professions.
I agree with you that mathematics is something that is discovered. Like another poster said, mathematical language, the symbols we use, is something the we invented but fundamentally the math behind all of it is something we discover.
However, prior to actually studying mathematics I used to think that it was something invented, my reasons for this were what you might call quasi-philosophical, I associated mathematics with our mathematical language which is something we invented, but after I began studying mathematics I changed my view and "realized" that mathematics in itself is something which is discovered and not invented.
I've been there, several years ago when I lived in a dorm room my biggest bottleneck when downloading things using DC++ was the speed of my hard drives (and the speed of the hard drive in the machine sending the data). But back then I had a connection to SUNET through the university...
Aaah, but that is not how the police is supposed to be working. Their job is not "find evidence that supports the claims of the plaintiff", their job is "investigate the claims of the plaintiff and try to figure out what really happened". But from what I've seen of the US legal system I can understand that you're confused, after all, not calling a traffic cop "Sir" can land you in jail there...
Do you understand how your modern car works, with no user-servicable parts? It not, why do you drive it?
I don't own a car anymore but I do understand the theory behind combustion engines, fuel injection systems, how a gearbox works and most other essential parts of a car. Just like I can't rebuild my motherboard I still have a working knowledge of how it works even if the complexity of the system makes it impossible for me to know every detail.
What about DVDs? Or do you just buy a machine, put the disk in, and expect it to work?
Yes, before I stopped buying DVDs completely I did understand the basics of lossy compression and the Content Scrambling System.
For that matter what about the optimization and pipelining your CPU is doing right now?
No, but in High school I was, like all of my classmates, tasked with building various gates out of NAND gates, experimenting with registers and ALUs to replicate the basic functions of a CPU and many other electronics experiments. So once again, I have a knowledge of the basic theory even though I'm not designing CPUs at Intel or AMD.
Too many complex things exist in our modern society to expect people to have even a basic understanding of everything. It is arrogant to assume that the aspect of it which you happen to understand is the most important, and people who do not have an understandng of it are fools.
The problem is that lots of people have chosen, out of their own free will, to use computers on a daily basis yet they refuse to understand even the most basic computing concepts.
Well, if you're getting better speeds with cable then you probably don't want to switch, my point was merely that ADSL should work at those distances, if the lines are of good quality ("normal" line attentuation of about 35-40 dB) you should be able to get up to 12 Mbps or so with ADSL2+ at that distance.
1.5 miles is about 2.4 km, right? You should have no problem getting DSL at those distances unless the phone lines are of seriously poor quality. Admittedly you won't be getting 24/3 ADSL2+ Annex M but 2/0.8 shouldn't be a problem.
But the rules of the game are pretty simple, no matter what your first choice is you always end up with a choice between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize. Thus no matter what your first choice you will always have a 50% chance of winning with your second choice.
Basically, the first choice and the removal of one of the doors is just for dramatic effect, your choice is really always between two doors with an equal chance of winning.
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This particular one has probably happened quite a few times. In fact, I've had customers call me during power outages demanding I as a representative of their ISP get someone to fix the power for them since we are obligated to keep their internet connection working and it can't work without power...
Let's just say people who have achieved that level of stupid are not fun to talk to. As they say, the dumber the angrier.
/Mikael
The problem is that they pay people in tech support to do just that, give customers technical support yet many times it seems like the customers have no interest in being helped which does create kind of a problem, a problem that is not in the job description but that you still have to deal with.
Seriously, if you've ever had to work tech support during a major two-day outage then you'd know what I'm talking about, clearly someone further up in the organisation is responsible, when calling in you get an automated message giving you all information tech support has avaiable about the outage and despite this everyone in tech support is tied down in calls from angry irrate customers demanding "Someone" do something NOW NOW NOW!
/Mikael
Good idea, I had not even considered using my microwave oven for veggies, I always use the regular oven or fry them in the frying pan (if I don't eat them raw). I'll have to try it...
/Mikael
Yeah, see the thing is that even though I'm not just some script-monkey I still need to check certain things with the customer and I can honestly say that any customer who knows what he/she is doing shouldn't need more than a few minutes to go through all the things I need him/her to check.
If I don't check these things before sending off a ticket then the 3rd line techs send it back to me with a note to contact the customer and get the necessary info (plus a comment about always getting all relevant info)...
Can't really type now, some guy has managed to mangle the settings for his DSL modem's built-in WAP and I need to guide him through setting everything up again... Somehow he thinks it's related to his browser proxy settings... *sigh*
/Mikael
I'd have to say that's not the worst entry-level job in tech by a long shot, ever since I started working in the wonderful area of, wait a minute some guy had to restart his DSL modem and needed me to hold his hand, tech support.
Seriously, working in tech support is about as low as it gets, you're expected to have college-level skills while everyone assumes you're some high school dropout who is barely capable of reading and writing, the pay is horrible and very few people really appreciate the work you do (most of the time the first thing you hear after helping someone fix a problem is "...and how are you going to compensate me for this?").
/Mikael
Excuse me? I just pointed out that to anyone with a working sense of esthetics those "gamer" cases are ugly as hell.
/Mikael
But if you have 16 free hours per day then you are either unemployed or you are some kind of alien that does not require sleep.
Let me explain my position, these are the hours of my day that are Not Free(tm):
So in total this is 18 hours and 20 minutes of every day that I can't really can't spend exercising, that leaves about 5 hours and 40 minutes for other activities, this includes entertainment, social life and exercise, a bit different from your claimed 16 hours. :)
/Mikael
I used to always eat fruits and vegetables because it was easy, this was when I lived with a roommate and right next to a supermarket which meant that nothing stayed in the kitchen long enough to go bad and buying more veggies took no effort (so I wasn't worried about running out either). Eating fruits and veggies was easy.
These days I'm a bit further from the nearest store and I don't have a roommate, this means that I've ended up switching to food that holds up for longer periods of time than fresh fruit/veggies since running out of food is a bit of a pain (I don't own a car) and I don't want a bunch of food going bad, thus I end up with a few frozen pizzas just in case I can't be bothered cooking on a particular day.
/Mikael
If you think "plexiglass siding and integrated LED lights" is stylish then you clearly have what a lot of people who have any experience working with design would call "horrible taste". Seriously, I can't understand how those "gamer" cases every became popular, I can see how they may appeal to a small subset of the "14 year-old male gamer" demographic but other than that I just don't get it...
/Mikael
I think my problem is that for regular *nix I don't use KDE or Gnome and thus I'm still using what I'm used to (mark + middle click to paste) from when I started using X11, and for macs I find myself either drag'n'dropping or using cmd+c which has become differentiated from ctrl+c in my mind (as I use ctrl+c to shut down processes, not copy data).
/Mikael
The headline and summary made took a minute for me to grasp, I just couldn't understand how you could get data out of something by halting execution.
Then my brain woke up and I realized they were thinking of the Windows command Ctrl+C which copies the marked text..
/Mikael
That's exactly the impression I used to have of touchscreens as well, all the public terminals that seemed to react so slowly, and if it wasn't the actual touchscreen then the rest of the system seemed to be horribly slow instead, taking several seconds to do things that should happen instantly.
And then there are the UI issues, every public terminal I saw prior to 2005 that was touchscreen-equipped had a UI that looked like it had been designed by someone who just didn't understand the technology they had at hand, not to mention that any graphics and icons involved would look like they were created by a team of 50 year-old IBM engineers, bonus points if the icons despite their combination of ugly and simple still didn't make the least bit of sense.
/Mikael
I don't think it was just a matter of patents expiring, it was most likely because the technology was finally ready for it. In the past most touchscreen-equipped systems I've seen seemed to be pretty weak in every area except the touchscreen, these days the machines equipped with touchscreens are powerful enough to actually take advantage of the touchscreen capabilities.
That said, I'm still waiting for a tablet mac with multitouch tech and a built-in wacom tablet (like the Cintiq) so that I can use my hands to drag stuff around on my desktop and the stylus for actually drawing stuff.
/Mikael
No hotkeys in Maya?! One of the first things I learned about Maya when I took a full semester-long course in 3D modelling and animation was that if you couldn't find a hotkey for some task (which was quite rare) then you created your own hotkey.
/Mikael
You can also go to System Preferences, Accounts and turn on fast user switching.
/Mikael
As others have said, you don't need the floppy but as a bare minimum you can install from floppy.
I haven't actually done a Slackware install from floppies since I think it was Slackware 3.6, installing A and N (base and network) and then grabbing everything else I needed over a 33.6kbps dialup connection
/Mikael
Of course the problem isn't that a decent video camera is more expensive than a decent still image camera, the problem is that a $50 webcam from six or seven years ago has the same max resolution and low framerate that a new webcam for $50 has, really. I was recently shopping around for a couple of webcams to set up home surveillance as I thought that by now surely they would have progressed beyond 640x480@15fps or 320x240@30fps but I found that almost all of the cameras available had those same limitations that my old webam from 2001 has (and it was by no means top of the line when I bought it). The only difference seems to be that the image quality is slightly less grainy these days, but the resolution is still horribly low, and there's still a lot more noise in the images produced by a new webcam than there is in the images produced by my parents' old digital camera from around 2000 when it's set to "low resolution mode".
What we need is for webcam manufacturers to stop marketing inferior products when everyone else has improved their products.
/Mikael
Of course, I'm in Sweden (which is in Europe) and where I work we have three guys who are very proc-mac and anti-windows with several others being "closet mac users" (meaning they don't talk about it but if someone asks what version of Windows they're running they answer "OS X"). Could it be you britons are a bit behind the times? Because I know seven or eight years ago the situation here was a lot more like you describe in your post, except in creative professions.
/Mikael
I agree with you that mathematics is something that is discovered. Like another poster said, mathematical language, the symbols we use, is something the we invented but fundamentally the math behind all of it is something we discover.
However, prior to actually studying mathematics I used to think that it was something invented, my reasons for this were what you might call quasi-philosophical, I associated mathematics with our mathematical language which is something we invented, but after I began studying mathematics I changed my view and "realized" that mathematics in itself is something which is discovered and not invented.
/Mikael
I've been there, several years ago when I lived in a dorm room my biggest bottleneck when downloading things using DC++ was the speed of my hard drives (and the speed of the hard drive in the machine sending the data). But back then I had a connection to SUNET through the university...
/Mikael
Aaah, but that is not how the police is supposed to be working. Their job is not "find evidence that supports the claims of the plaintiff", their job is "investigate the claims of the plaintiff and try to figure out what really happened". But from what I've seen of the US legal system I can understand that you're confused, after all, not calling a traffic cop "Sir" can land you in jail there...
/Mikael
I don't own a car anymore but I do understand the theory behind combustion engines, fuel injection systems, how a gearbox works and most other essential parts of a car. Just like I can't rebuild my motherboard I still have a working knowledge of how it works even if the complexity of the system makes it impossible for me to know every detail.
What about DVDs? Or do you just buy a machine, put the disk in, and expect it to work?Yes, before I stopped buying DVDs completely I did understand the basics of lossy compression and the Content Scrambling System.
For that matter what about the optimization and pipelining your CPU is doing right now?No, but in High school I was, like all of my classmates, tasked with building various gates out of NAND gates, experimenting with registers and ALUs to replicate the basic functions of a CPU and many other electronics experiments. So once again, I have a knowledge of the basic theory even though I'm not designing CPUs at Intel or AMD.
Too many complex things exist in our modern society to expect people to have even a basic understanding of everything. It is arrogant to assume that the aspect of it which you happen to understand is the most important, and people who do not have an understandng of it are fools.The problem is that lots of people have chosen, out of their own free will, to use computers on a daily basis yet they refuse to understand even the most basic computing concepts.
/Mikael
Well, if you're getting better speeds with cable then you probably don't want to switch, my point was merely that ADSL should work at those distances, if the lines are of good quality ("normal" line attentuation of about 35-40 dB) you should be able to get up to 12 Mbps or so with ADSL2+ at that distance.
/Mikael
1.5 miles is about 2.4 km, right? You should have no problem getting DSL at those distances unless the phone lines are of seriously poor quality. Admittedly you won't be getting 24/3 ADSL2+ Annex M but 2/0.8 shouldn't be a problem.
/Mikael
But the rules of the game are pretty simple, no matter what your first choice is you always end up with a choice between two doors, one with a prize and one without a prize. Thus no matter what your first choice you will always have a 50% chance of winning with your second choice.
Basically, the first choice and the removal of one of the doors is just for dramatic effect, your choice is really always between two doors with an equal chance of winning.
/Mikael