But if he's just the same old guy doing the same old job, he wouldn't have posted his question.
Well, we don't know that. We wouldn't know that for a fact even if he wrote a book about it.
I think we can just take as a given that he's somehow, someway worth more than he's currently being paid.
That is hard to believe, considering that the USA is in an endless string of recessions. The only good way to test this hypothesis is to replace him with someone else of equal abilities, and then see how much the new guy charges. My personal belief would be that he is overvaluing himself because it's such a comforting thought...
1) I'm making significant contributions now, beyond the scope of what I was hired to do. (And be able to back the claim up.
Yes, if he does that - above and beyond his contractor's duties - then he may have something to discuss. However not many contractors fail to bill every single hour spent on the job, in 15 minute increments. He writes: and of course get paid contractor rates for this - that little "of course" raises a couple of flags in my mind.
The scope of work doesn't matter as long as he was paid for all that work - and he says that he was. Contractors aren't getting brownie points for that - not any more than a taxi driver who delivers you to any location in the city. I can understand if he was hired to work on MS SQL server but later spent weeks cleaning sewage pipes - that is something outside of his contract, and if he did that it should be appreciated. But if in addition to the MS SQL server he spent time on MySQL, and then coded an access program in VB, it's all the same job.
Others in the industry with this kind of responsibility get compensation package A, but I only get package B.
That won't fly. He is not hired based on an average rate; each contract is an individual deal. He, however (as I said earlier) can always quit if he doesn't like his contract. He can try to renegotiate, but as I mentioned this is often equivalent to quitting and then immediately reapplying:-)
So yes, he is free to be unhappy about his pay. If he asks for a raise then indeed he can take it in any form that is mutually agreed upon. Other people suggested that he can become a full time employee with stock options - if the company even has a plan set up. Perhaps that possibility could be carefully researched, but it must be sold to the business owners as an option, not as something that they must do or else. Most importantly, he must be seen not as a guy who rocks the boat but as the guy who rows.
However, the premise of the scenario is the guy thinks he has become indispensable.
That's what he thinks. But every [successful] business owner who hires employees always has plan B for the case if the employee "gets hit by a bus" - departures of key people for all kinds of reasons are the norm, not an exception. I'm pretty sure that owners of the business took care of that possibility just as they took care of all other problems that they were facing since day zero. It's just the contractor doesn't know it yet.
So, he is in a position of forcing the owners' hands.
I don't think so. Blackmail may work with a Japanese super-giant corporation where nobody feels any particular attachment to anything, and everything is simply weighted on scales of practicality.
However owners of a small startup will not take it kindly. You need to consider that meek weaklings don't start companies. This is a risky business. Unless they are really facing an insurmountable problem they will not yield to blackmail - and the contractor's demand of stock under threat of leaving is nothing but blackmail. You can't pay the blackmailer because tomorrow he will be back, demanding even more.
Moreover, once the "proposal" is voiced in these terms, the only reasonable answer to that can be "you are fired, effective right now." Why? Because you can't trust this person anymore. If he is an IT guy you can't let him continue running your systems. It is just a mere suspicion, of course, that he will become disgruntled, but why to take the risk? Besides, he could have left for a myriad of other reasons, starting with the bus and ending with family problems; no stock offer will resurrect your IT guy who became very flat under that bus.
If I were in this contractor's shoes and that desperate for stock, I would announce that I'm leaving for a greener pasture, but if they want they can match that offer and then I will gladly stay. You have to have a real offer, of course, from another company; bluff is likely to be insufficient. Contractors are so safe in their little niches, they often don't have the business sense that many business owners pick up early on. Anyway, then if the company wants to pay him more they will do that without fear, and if they don't then the guy departs as promised, all on good terms.
However the amount of stock I would get this way would be ridiculously small. It may be easier to just buy that stock, if you can (sometimes you have to be an accredited investor; startups often fall under that law.)
Those bureaucrats are not elected, and we have a tall building full of them. They are also unfireable. Elected officials don't know them, don't care about them, and they don't care about your problems either.
I agree that if the municipality seriously impedes issuance of building permits to majority of applicants then there will be a backlash, the mayor will be forced to do something about it, and there will be something done. But it requires a lot of wrongdoing; the corruption of the police in New Orleans is one such example.
If you are just one person, and you can't wait for the next election because you need to repair your house right now, or else it will be condemned for a cause, this question moves from being a philosophical issue to being an issue of physical survival. Any man who has that much power over you must be seen as such, and dealt with as such.
Actually, if you are talking *local* government, they would probably be *more* answerable to their customers than the huge telecom conglomerates.
My experience shows that the local government is not answerable to anyone. Ever tried to get a building permit? They tell you to jump and you only can ask how high. This is because if you displease them and they become picky, your only recourse is... no, not even the court. You have no recourse. It is not against the law for a clerk to get back at you by requiring documents that are issued on third Friday of a century. You can get mired in health department's approvals, in geology approvals, in grading approvals... or the clerk can just look at your plan and say "Well, I could have asked for @foo but I see that you are doing everything right, so here is your stamp and you may be on your way to start building."
If that happens with a private company (and it does, occasionally, when they aren't cooperating) you simply walk away, into another company in the same market, just across the street, and forget that the first company even exists.
The problem with the government is that there is only one government that is in charge of your property, and within that government there are just a few specific employees (you know them by name) that can make or break your project, and they are legally entitled to go either way, just as they please (officially it is "based on my expert knowledge, skills, training, etc.") They better be your friends, or else your activities will be seriously curtailed. I know more than one sad story about all that. Messing with a police officer is safer than messing with a government clerk - clerk's duties are not clearly described in laws, so bureaucrats have a lot of leeway.
So should the internet division have its own revenue collection department and its own call center rather than adding a line item to the existing tax bill? That's adding inefficiency... why?
That's why they explicitly say FINANCIALLY separate, not just separate. This means that accounting records for this service should be maintained separately from the town's books. This allows to see all the revenue and expenses. The extra cost to the city is just a couple of dollars for the books themselves, or zero if the records are in computer. City accountants can work on them, so you don't need to hire new people. Look at outsourced accounting - those firms manage records of hundreds of customers, and each account is as financially separate (if not more) as this law requires.
The end effect may be that the citizens of a small community won't be able to get broadband because there is no company that want's to provide it and the municipalities are banned from doing it.
The citizens of a small community can easily set up a non-profit entity and go ahead with the project. The key here is that non-profit (or for-profit) entity will be working on the same terms as anyone else, on a level playing field; it will be competing on prices and quality of the service, not on the caliber of the gun that one side holds in its hands.
Why must it be mandated that some business B be able to make a profit?
To ensure availability of the service. If the municipality at some point decides to reduce the quality of the service or to cancel it outright (say, because of lack of tax money) then there will be nothing in place. It will take private businesses a long time to come in and offer their products. However if private companies are already in the market then there will be no downtime.
And of course there is that little problem with socialism. Everyone pays taxes, everyone subsidizes the network, but not everyone needs it.
If municipalities aren't allowed to use tax money to subsidize the network then the game is fair. The city is free to offer their network, and if I feel to it I can offer my network, and we will compete on terms of the service. If I offer you/64 on IPv6, and the city gives you one heavily firewalled dynamic IP, what will you choose? But note that if I am not in business then you are stuck with whatever the city offers you, whether you like it or not (the other way is highway.)
Why do governments love chasing what they can't catch?
Because you can do it for as long as you want, and no particular results are expected. See "war on drugs" - there is no metric that is commonly used to show that "the war" is successful or not.
For a cubicle dweller it would be equivalent to reporting to the boss every day that "I'm working on it" year after year, and still being paid in full for delivering nothing but appearance of effort.
I certainly can understand that you aren't very happy with what happened. But the magic word LRU rules the repair business everywhere. If the support personnel can't remove and replace the fan without some soldering then it is not an LRU; the whole motherboard becomes it. The whole criteria of designating an assembly an LRU is the ease of replacement. Soldering is not welcome; connectors and latches are preferred.
No. The question was never answered.
I answered the question for you, simply to illustrate that the answer is worthless whatever it may be - it doesn't bring you any closer to the functioning laptop.
The point I was making was that what's on the repair sheet may be the list of repairs which were *supposed* to occur, and that any other changes which occurred in the course of those changes are - as a matter of policy - not listed.
You may be right there; but from Sony's point of view, as long as the computer is repaired all is well. I suspect the *hardware* is just fine; what may have happened is that they gave you a newer version of the motherboard. Motherboards have half-life of a few months only; after that you can't even get the ICs to assemble them - you have to move on. Sony probably ran out of original motherboards many moons ago.
I am certain that they never checked if the mobo was changed
It's very likely that the agent on the phone doesn't know what was changed, has no access to repair records, or there may be no such records in the first place. Accounting has to know, but not the tech support.
Oh and third, they find my 3G SIM. They'll find it, I think, in my motherboard...
Yes, that's why I guessed that they replaced the m/b. However every RTM instructions that I ever read say that you should remove all your custom additions from the product before sending it in. The repair person probably didn't even notice it as he was throwing the old m/b into trash. It's not in his work instructions. They do not repair m/b at that level; I don't even know if they repair them at all, considering that it's cheaper to make them than to repair them (it takes an engineer or a high level tech to repair, but the assembly is done by machines.)
Sony will probably recommend that in this situation I send my laptop back to them for repair.
That would be probably the best way to deal with the situation at this point. However you should send the whole kit, with the SSD. If you are worried about the personal data, either remove it (if it can be done reliably) or, as I said earlier, make a backup, test the backup, and then restore the SSD to the factory condition (from a DVD or from the restore partition.) If you still need to send the box in after all that then I don't see a reason why not.
I agree, "having a training" != "knowing the stuff." But it's a step in the right direction. There is a chance of failure (or success) in anything that we do, and IMO if I want a competent mechanic then chances of finding it at the dealership are higher than at a generic garage. There are great mechanics, of course, that are not affiliated with a manufacturer, but they are rare.
There are many things at the dealership that work in your favor. First of all, they only service cars of that manufacturer. So they have more experience. Then they have parts and service manuals right there - no need to call and order a weird part; if it is common then it is in stock. (if not, then it's easier for them to order the part from Japan or wherever.) Then they have access to the service intranet (Toyota has one) where *everything* is published. Individuals can buy access on a daily basis, BTW, but dealerships subscribe for a flat fee. Dealerships are sent updates and advisories by the manufacturer; a generic garage learns about that from newspapers. And if they still screw up they will fix it for free.
So while your story is interesting and illustrative, it only highlights that people are not robots. Still, if I want an oil change I will not want to save $10, with the drawback that the mechanic screws a wrong filter into the engine, ruining the threads. There is no warranty on that, and their liability is limited to the cost of the job ($25.) Good luck having the engine lifted and the oil tray swapped for $25. You'd be lucky to do that if you add a couple of zeros to the right of this number.
I think they changed the motherboard, because the fan is pretty integral to the motherboard
Makes lots of sense. They were within their rights to replace the m/b. But since you haven't provided the HDD they had no way to test and/or fix the Windows installation. They probably plugged one of their own HDDs for the test, and it worked.
This is exactly the problem with "smart people" who come to a repair person and start telling him what is exactly wrong and how to fix this and that. The correct way to order repair is to provide the whole kit and say in most generic terms "it is noisy" or "it stops after 30 minutes" - they will figure out that the fan is dead, or if something else is wrong.
I wanted to get them to check was if the motherboard was actually changed.
Ok, the answer is "yes". Now what?
Their response was, I kid you not, "in this situation we recommend you reinstall Windows".
This is a correct response. Do you have a better alternative? Your old m/b is in the trash, and it could have ended up there because of a fan or because of a bad solder under a BGA or because of a million other reasons. Sony repaired the hardware. They can't be responsible for the software that you haven't provided to them.
If I were in your shoes I would backup my data, and then restore the factory image over the SSD. This way they get none of my private data, and I am safe knowing that my data is right here, in a format that I can easily access. And Sony would have to make sure that your computer is 100% functioning before they ship it back. Besides, it is a good idea once in a few years to start fresh, as long as your backups are safe and secure.
These fucks charged 20 bucks for a fan, 20 bucks for a fan install, 50 bucks for a hard drive install (Just labor, no parts) and $180 for OS reinstall.
$20 for a fan is a reasonable price. There are cheaper fans and more expensive fans, I don't know what computer your parents have. But $20 is not $200.
$20 is rather low for a fan replacement. On my notebook it takes about 30 minutes to swap a fan; the 27 screws are not quick to remove. This amounts to a measly rate of $40/hr, of which the employee sees only half.
$50 for HDD replacement - this is kind of high, given that laptops are designed for easy swappage of HDDs. If your parents have a desktop then it's not a big difference. I guess they charge based on the price of the part itself.
$180 for the OS reinstall. The reinstall takes about 2 hours, if you have to sit by the computer and wait until it finishes everything. Don't fail to include updates, service packs etc. This can be easily more than 2 hours. This is still on the high side, but I guess they have to make their money somewhere...
The ugly fact is that labor is so much more expensive compared to the cheap Chinese production that it hardly makes any sense to pay for repairs nowadays.
Well, it's not just Toshiba. Any laptop with a fan or two will fail after a couple of years. Fans wear out, get clogged with dust, and the cooling fails.
I have a Fujitsu LifeBook; its fans failed after about 3 years of use. I bought a new set of fans from China, replaced the old ones, and it works great again.
These things simply require periodic maintenance. However it's not in the manual, and common people don't expect it to be necessary, even though they religiously change oil in their cars every 5K miles. But all moving parts require service, especially when it's a race to the bottom with laptop prices.
many of the readers here pay money to have the oil in their car changed by the 15-minute shop down the street (or worse yet, the dealership).
I always do the oil change at the dealership. First of all, their mechanics are trained by the manufacturer (Toyota in my case.) It doesn't take much IQ to change the oil, but one needs to know where not to shove his fingers into, lest one wants to get a nice shock with a 200V DC. And I really like it when mechanics put oil into the engine, and not into the gas tank or into the washer fluid container. With random quick-lube places you never know - they work on all makes and models of cars; this dealership's mechanics work only on Toyotas.
Secondly, the dealership is very professional and well organized. They have a complete history of my car from the moment they sold it to me. There were a few recalls, and they did them at the same time - a quick lube place can't do that.
Thirdly, it is a secure place. Once you give your car to the mechanic it goes inside and stays inside until you pick it up. No strange people in mechanic's clothes driving your car who knows where.
Fourthly, you can see the work area, and when they start working on your car you know exactly what is being done.
Fifthly, if during the oil change they notice something askew they tell you and you can approve (or decline) additional work right away. Regardless of that, they give me a sheet with a bunch of check points and they mark what was measured and how good it is.
Sixthly, I can wait in a decent waiting area with coffee, TV, chairs, an accessories shop, restroom, WiFi and power outlets, etc. etc. Beats walking around a quick-lube place in circles, under the sun or rain. But if I can't wait the dealership has a shuttle van, and has cars for rent - invaluable if you absolutely have to be somewhere else. You can pick up your car the same night or next day or whenever, and the service is open - wait for it - from 7am to 9pm. Quick-lube places don't do any of that.
And price-wise, the dealership is reasonably good on prices. They are higher, but you know and see what you are paying for. Besides, oil change is just a tiny part of the cost of living.
He is not even a genius, he is just a common thief in the right place at the right time.
There were many companies at that time who were more or less at the same place. Sure, BG got a deal with IBM, that helped, but MS DOS was selling for just a few dollars.
What really helped BG is his (at that time) ability to look beyond MS DOS, start Windows development and not join the OS/2 club. In fact, his OS/2 actions were very profitable, and OS/2 never recovered (if it could otherwise.) Many other companies of the time had technologies just as good, if not better, but they screwed it up all on their own. Even Apple got eventually in trouble.
If we start with the [very valid on a PC] assumption that GUI is the future, and the old 80x25 CLI is the past, there were only two players in the market - Windows and OS/2. Windows was developed by a single small team. OS/2 was developed by a committee, in a huge company that never knew what it does and when. It was not even a fair competition. But why there weren't other GUIs for PCs? Apple decided (or couldn't) touch the PC. GEM was carefully ignored, with only a handful of good applications written for it. Why nobody else released anything similar? We have such things today, when advantage of GUIs is obvious. Why not then? Is it because people didn't want to take the risk? Whatever the reason, they quietly surrendered the market to Windows and OS/2, and out of that list OS/2 withered and died all on its own. iOS would rule the smartphone market, and it's largely luck that Google was around and decided to invest into Android. Other, earlier attempts (Symbian, Palm) were laughable compared to these two.
BG is not really a coder or a tech visionary. He is a businessman, and that means that he will use every underhanded tactic known to man to win. He did that early and often by using other people's ideas, buying and destroying competitors, announcing vaporware, buying biased studies... that's what he was good at. Technology-wise, he managed to get to Windows 95, and after that he had to hire a competent team to take it further. The original team, all millionaires by then, had other priorities anyway.
I don't think BG personally killed too many people; however his treatment of contractors and H1B's is well known - this is just yet another aspect of his "ruthless businessman" persona.
it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt.
99.999% of those "multimedia files" are proprietary, commercial materials. The archiver is probably the least concern here.
The hardware looks good, but the business case is shaky. I guess I'm not the target audience because I can't figure out what this box is for, even though I looked at Flickernoise. The build instructions are more complex than ones for Linux:-)
Hardware-wise, of course, you can make anything you want, but is it cost-effective? One could make a video synthesizer out of any old laptop with a VGA output. You don't need a high fidelity audio input if all you want is to convert it to squiggly lines. I'm sure a DJ can play audio *and* video all from his trusty MacBook Pro, and there will be plenty of CPU cycles free.
I personally revisit ideas of universal devices every other month, and usually I reject them. The reason is that each and every customer is going to use the thing in one function only. This means that he'd be paying for hardware that he doesn't need. There are still reasons to do it this way, primarily manufacturing reasons, but the customer doesn't see a universal board as something useful. I don't even mention "open source" here; as laudable as it might be, it's not something that you print on the box in large yellow letters.
With regard to synthesized CPUs, I had my share of work done with MicroBlaze, and while it works you don't really want to use it as your main CPU. It makes sense only in small embedded systems, where RAM is fixed and limited. Such systems, in turn, are most useful not as universal computers but as appliances. Still, FPGA is often an expensive resource. Avnet sells XC6SLX45 for about $70 apiece. This, in a CPU, will buy you a lot of computing power. I don't know if *this* product is better off with an FPGA or without (or maybe with a smaller one, or a CPLD...) but as the size of the FPGA increases it gets more and more expensive. On the other hand, it helps fight obsolescence of parts.
I would be willing to drive to the post office a couple of times a week. Perhaps most people would.
A postal truck on a route, delivering to 100 residences, is far more efficient than 100 residents driving their cars to the post office every day and standing in line (which will be huge.)
Stamps should be RFID tags
Those tags are expensive and heavy, considering the volume of mail. Do you want to manufacture billions of one time use, disposable electronics and pollute the planet for no good reason? Stamps are very cheap, and though paper manufacturing is not the cleanest among all, it's a very small piece of paper.
I'd rather suggest single use barcodes that are created on a central server, for a fee, printed on an envelope and then act as the tracking code until your letter is delivered. Bits *are* free. Besides, that could automate sorting if you associate an address when you buy the "stamp" barcode. You wouldn't then even need to write an address. UPS and FedEx already allow you to print your own stickers.
if you really want social contact, then perhaps living in the middle of nowhere isn't ideal
Great advice! Farmers and ranchers better be sociophobes, or they must give up on their businesses and move to cities. Since there are no farms in cities they will be collecting some social security and buying food in grocery stores, where it is made, instead of growing it in fields. After all, benefits of civilization should be available only to city folks, not to some useless rednecks, isn't it so?
He3 production is not about mines, but rather a kind of harvester moving with the constant speed and heating top 15 to 60 cm of Lunar soil up to 600 degrees Celsius.
The harvester would consume a good part of the energy that it collects. It is not easy to heat the soil a meter deep to 600C.
The escaped He(3) has to be collected; how and with what losses? It's vacuum over there, and the gas is extremely light. Even if you cover the patch of soil with a hermetic lid, the pressure inside would be hard to measure.
The collected He(3) must be transported to the launch site. As the harvester moves farther and farther from the launch site these expenses will be increasing, especially when the harvester can't go in circles due to the landscape.
All in all, even in the setting of ST:TNG it would be a pretty complex operation - they didn't have self-healing machines. But that's what you need, otherwise the lunar dust will wear all moving parts out, and the machines stop.
As I see it, the best plan would be to leave He(3) on the Moon for the future colonists to use. This would make sense. Earth would be better served by orbital (or ground) solar arrays. They don't need so much effort to keep running.
How many Play Stations are up on eBay or Craigs List, or in the trash, because their owners were fed up with dealing with Sony? I'm guessing 3.
I have a PS3, but I have no plans to sell it or anything like that. I think I have a PSN account, but there is nothing in it other than a random username and a random password. I don't even recall why I set it up - probably to see the news and to browse the store. There is no credit card associated, no address, no nothing. I don't play online games; I'm quite satisfied with offline ones, played from a BlueRay disk. I think a bunch of PS3 owners are in the same position; they just use it as an appliance, not as a service that needs to be paid for every month. PSN doesn't even exist for those people.
If you say you have nothing to do you are implying you can't find any further progress you can make on what's on your plate.
I don't know what kind of work you do, but most of my work has a very well defined beginning and the end. Just like this comment -- I will type it up and post; I'm not going to contemplate improvements to it over the next month or two.
Even if we for a moment assume that the worker hasn't really finished his task well enough, it's the duty of the boss to understand what was and wasn't done and tell the employee how it should be done. In fact, it's the manager's duty to keep the door of his office open, listen to anyone who walks in, and talk to them. It's the only thing, really, that a manager is tasked with - to manage. Firing people because they reported that the assigned job is done and asked a very legitimate question what to do next is beyond stupid. The fired employee will be better off elsewhere.
But a worker complaining about a lack of work isn't necessarily a good worker
Only a good worker is necessarily a good worker. However a worker that does everything that the manager assigns to him and then asks for more... I just don't see how that could be bad.
So you're implying that the other people who kill themselves are models of well-adjusted sanity?
Wide brush doesn't work here; it is easy to find a good number of examples when suicide is sane. For example, a terminally ill patient may not want to pay all his life's savings for another month or two of excruciating pain. Or a soldier may commit suicide by voluntarily taking a necessary mission that has no chance of survival. Or a worker at a nuclear plant (say, Fukushima) may work in unhealthy, if not deadly, conditions to repair the damage.
On the other hand, a girl who eats a whole bottle of aspirin because someone dumped her is probably not thinking it through.
With regard to Foxconn suicides, if we look at the theory that suiciders did it for money, I have no idea if this theory is true, and secondly - assuming that it is true - I don't know what circumstances could possibly exist to make the suicide a sane, rational choice. How would you classify a man with no skills, low IQ and no hope in life that kills himself so that his ten smart and young brothers and sisters could study in best universities and be successful engineers, as opposed to staying lowly peasants? Is he a basket case? Is he a hero?
Then there's that just signing this thing is probably harmful. Somebody could find it to be an additional motivation to commit suicide out of spite.
People who commit suicide out of spite are, how do I say it, "unbalanced" ?
One belief is that Foxconn people commit suicide to earn a windfall for their family. I don't know how true or untrue this is, but such a document will remove this motivation. This can't be bad.
But of course if someone still wants to kill oneself, there isn't much that can be done to stop that. It is only possible to eliminate as many motives for such an act as possible. Unfortunately, dissatisfaction with the job can't be eliminated, unless the job is the President of the Universe (with benefits but without obligations.) Some USPS employees committed pretty elaborate suicides by "going postal", and USPS is probably the last place that you'd suspect in sweatshop-like, union-hostile practices.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe because there is a setting that just wipes the phone after 10 failed attempts
May I borrow your locked iPhone for a minute?
But if he's just the same old guy doing the same old job, he wouldn't have posted his question.
Well, we don't know that. We wouldn't know that for a fact even if he wrote a book about it.
I think we can just take as a given that he's somehow, someway worth more than he's currently being paid.
That is hard to believe, considering that the USA is in an endless string of recessions. The only good way to test this hypothesis is to replace him with someone else of equal abilities, and then see how much the new guy charges. My personal belief would be that he is overvaluing himself because it's such a comforting thought...
1) I'm making significant contributions now, beyond the scope of what I was hired to do. (And be able to back the claim up.
Yes, if he does that - above and beyond his contractor's duties - then he may have something to discuss. However not many contractors fail to bill every single hour spent on the job, in 15 minute increments. He writes: and of course get paid contractor rates for this - that little "of course" raises a couple of flags in my mind.
The scope of work doesn't matter as long as he was paid for all that work - and he says that he was. Contractors aren't getting brownie points for that - not any more than a taxi driver who delivers you to any location in the city. I can understand if he was hired to work on MS SQL server but later spent weeks cleaning sewage pipes - that is something outside of his contract, and if he did that it should be appreciated. But if in addition to the MS SQL server he spent time on MySQL, and then coded an access program in VB, it's all the same job.
Others in the industry with this kind of responsibility get compensation package A, but I only get package B.
That won't fly. He is not hired based on an average rate; each contract is an individual deal. He, however (as I said earlier) can always quit if he doesn't like his contract. He can try to renegotiate, but as I mentioned this is often equivalent to quitting and then immediately reapplying :-)
So yes, he is free to be unhappy about his pay. If he asks for a raise then indeed he can take it in any form that is mutually agreed upon. Other people suggested that he can become a full time employee with stock options - if the company even has a plan set up. Perhaps that possibility could be carefully researched, but it must be sold to the business owners as an option, not as something that they must do or else. Most importantly, he must be seen not as a guy who rocks the boat but as the guy who rows.
However, the premise of the scenario is the guy thinks he has become indispensable.
That's what he thinks. But every [successful] business owner who hires employees always has plan B for the case if the employee "gets hit by a bus" - departures of key people for all kinds of reasons are the norm, not an exception. I'm pretty sure that owners of the business took care of that possibility just as they took care of all other problems that they were facing since day zero. It's just the contractor doesn't know it yet.
So, he is in a position of forcing the owners' hands.
I don't think so. Blackmail may work with a Japanese super-giant corporation where nobody feels any particular attachment to anything, and everything is simply weighted on scales of practicality.
However owners of a small startup will not take it kindly. You need to consider that meek weaklings don't start companies. This is a risky business. Unless they are really facing an insurmountable problem they will not yield to blackmail - and the contractor's demand of stock under threat of leaving is nothing but blackmail. You can't pay the blackmailer because tomorrow he will be back, demanding even more.
Moreover, once the "proposal" is voiced in these terms, the only reasonable answer to that can be "you are fired, effective right now." Why? Because you can't trust this person anymore. If he is an IT guy you can't let him continue running your systems. It is just a mere suspicion, of course, that he will become disgruntled, but why to take the risk? Besides, he could have left for a myriad of other reasons, starting with the bus and ending with family problems; no stock offer will resurrect your IT guy who became very flat under that bus.
If I were in this contractor's shoes and that desperate for stock, I would announce that I'm leaving for a greener pasture, but if they want they can match that offer and then I will gladly stay. You have to have a real offer, of course, from another company; bluff is likely to be insufficient. Contractors are so safe in their little niches, they often don't have the business sense that many business owners pick up early on. Anyway, then if the company wants to pay him more they will do that without fear, and if they don't then the guy departs as promised, all on good terms.
However the amount of stock I would get this way would be ridiculously small. It may be easier to just buy that stock, if you can (sometimes you have to be an accredited investor; startups often fall under that law.)
Voting.
Those bureaucrats are not elected, and we have a tall building full of them. They are also unfireable. Elected officials don't know them, don't care about them, and they don't care about your problems either.
I agree that if the municipality seriously impedes issuance of building permits to majority of applicants then there will be a backlash, the mayor will be forced to do something about it, and there will be something done. But it requires a lot of wrongdoing; the corruption of the police in New Orleans is one such example.
If you are just one person, and you can't wait for the next election because you need to repair your house right now, or else it will be condemned for a cause, this question moves from being a philosophical issue to being an issue of physical survival. Any man who has that much power over you must be seen as such, and dealt with as such.
Actually, if you are talking *local* government, they would probably be *more* answerable to their customers than the huge telecom conglomerates.
My experience shows that the local government is not answerable to anyone. Ever tried to get a building permit? They tell you to jump and you only can ask how high. This is because if you displease them and they become picky, your only recourse is ... no, not even the court. You have no recourse. It is not against the law for a clerk to get back at you by requiring documents that are issued on third Friday of a century. You can get mired in health department's approvals, in geology approvals, in grading approvals ... or the clerk can just look at your plan and say "Well, I could have asked for @foo but I see that you are doing everything right, so here is your stamp and you may be on your way to start building."
If that happens with a private company (and it does, occasionally, when they aren't cooperating) you simply walk away, into another company in the same market, just across the street, and forget that the first company even exists.
The problem with the government is that there is only one government that is in charge of your property, and within that government there are just a few specific employees (you know them by name) that can make or break your project, and they are legally entitled to go either way, just as they please (officially it is "based on my expert knowledge, skills, training, etc.") They better be your friends, or else your activities will be seriously curtailed. I know more than one sad story about all that. Messing with a police officer is safer than messing with a government clerk - clerk's duties are not clearly described in laws, so bureaucrats have a lot of leeway.
So should the internet division have its own revenue collection department and its own call center rather than adding a line item to the existing tax bill? That's adding inefficiency... why?
That's why they explicitly say FINANCIALLY separate, not just separate. This means that accounting records for this service should be maintained separately from the town's books. This allows to see all the revenue and expenses. The extra cost to the city is just a couple of dollars for the books themselves, or zero if the records are in computer. City accountants can work on them, so you don't need to hire new people. Look at outsourced accounting - those firms manage records of hundreds of customers, and each account is as financially separate (if not more) as this law requires.
The end effect may be that the citizens of a small community won't be able to get broadband because there is no company that want's to provide it and the municipalities are banned from doing it.
The citizens of a small community can easily set up a non-profit entity and go ahead with the project. The key here is that non-profit (or for-profit) entity will be working on the same terms as anyone else, on a level playing field; it will be competing on prices and quality of the service, not on the caliber of the gun that one side holds in its hands.
Why must it be mandated that some business B be able to make a profit?
To ensure availability of the service. If the municipality at some point decides to reduce the quality of the service or to cancel it outright (say, because of lack of tax money) then there will be nothing in place. It will take private businesses a long time to come in and offer their products. However if private companies are already in the market then there will be no downtime.
And of course there is that little problem with socialism. Everyone pays taxes, everyone subsidizes the network, but not everyone needs it.
If municipalities aren't allowed to use tax money to subsidize the network then the game is fair. The city is free to offer their network, and if I feel to it I can offer my network, and we will compete on terms of the service. If I offer you /64 on IPv6, and the city gives you one heavily firewalled dynamic IP, what will you choose? But note that if I am not in business then you are stuck with whatever the city offers you, whether you like it or not (the other way is highway.)
Why do governments love chasing what they can't catch?
Because you can do it for as long as you want, and no particular results are expected. See "war on drugs" - there is no metric that is commonly used to show that "the war" is successful or not.
For a cubicle dweller it would be equivalent to reporting to the boss every day that "I'm working on it" year after year, and still being paid in full for delivering nothing but appearance of effort.
I certainly can understand that you aren't very happy with what happened. But the magic word LRU rules the repair business everywhere. If the support personnel can't remove and replace the fan without some soldering then it is not an LRU; the whole motherboard becomes it. The whole criteria of designating an assembly an LRU is the ease of replacement. Soldering is not welcome; connectors and latches are preferred.
No. The question was never answered.
I answered the question for you, simply to illustrate that the answer is worthless whatever it may be - it doesn't bring you any closer to the functioning laptop.
The point I was making was that what's on the repair sheet may be the list of repairs which were *supposed* to occur, and that any other changes which occurred in the course of those changes are - as a matter of policy - not listed.
You may be right there; but from Sony's point of view, as long as the computer is repaired all is well. I suspect the *hardware* is just fine; what may have happened is that they gave you a newer version of the motherboard. Motherboards have half-life of a few months only; after that you can't even get the ICs to assemble them - you have to move on. Sony probably ran out of original motherboards many moons ago.
I am certain that they never checked if the mobo was changed
It's very likely that the agent on the phone doesn't know what was changed, has no access to repair records, or there may be no such records in the first place. Accounting has to know, but not the tech support.
Oh and third, they find my 3G SIM. They'll find it, I think, in my motherboard...
Yes, that's why I guessed that they replaced the m/b. However every RTM instructions that I ever read say that you should remove all your custom additions from the product before sending it in. The repair person probably didn't even notice it as he was throwing the old m/b into trash. It's not in his work instructions. They do not repair m/b at that level; I don't even know if they repair them at all, considering that it's cheaper to make them than to repair them (it takes an engineer or a high level tech to repair, but the assembly is done by machines.)
Sony will probably recommend that in this situation I send my laptop back to them for repair.
That would be probably the best way to deal with the situation at this point. However you should send the whole kit, with the SSD. If you are worried about the personal data, either remove it (if it can be done reliably) or, as I said earlier, make a backup, test the backup, and then restore the SSD to the factory condition (from a DVD or from the restore partition.) If you still need to send the box in after all that then I don't see a reason why not.
I agree, "having a training" != "knowing the stuff." But it's a step in the right direction. There is a chance of failure (or success) in anything that we do, and IMO if I want a competent mechanic then chances of finding it at the dealership are higher than at a generic garage. There are great mechanics, of course, that are not affiliated with a manufacturer, but they are rare.
There are many things at the dealership that work in your favor. First of all, they only service cars of that manufacturer. So they have more experience. Then they have parts and service manuals right there - no need to call and order a weird part; if it is common then it is in stock. (if not, then it's easier for them to order the part from Japan or wherever.) Then they have access to the service intranet (Toyota has one) where *everything* is published. Individuals can buy access on a daily basis, BTW, but dealerships subscribe for a flat fee. Dealerships are sent updates and advisories by the manufacturer; a generic garage learns about that from newspapers. And if they still screw up they will fix it for free.
So while your story is interesting and illustrative, it only highlights that people are not robots. Still, if I want an oil change I will not want to save $10, with the drawback that the mechanic screws a wrong filter into the engine, ruining the threads. There is no warranty on that, and their liability is limited to the cost of the job ($25.) Good luck having the engine lifted and the oil tray swapped for $25. You'd be lucky to do that if you add a couple of zeros to the right of this number.
I think they changed the motherboard, because the fan is pretty integral to the motherboard
Makes lots of sense. They were within their rights to replace the m/b. But since you haven't provided the HDD they had no way to test and/or fix the Windows installation. They probably plugged one of their own HDDs for the test, and it worked.
This is exactly the problem with "smart people" who come to a repair person and start telling him what is exactly wrong and how to fix this and that. The correct way to order repair is to provide the whole kit and say in most generic terms "it is noisy" or "it stops after 30 minutes" - they will figure out that the fan is dead, or if something else is wrong.
I wanted to get them to check was if the motherboard was actually changed.
Ok, the answer is "yes". Now what?
Their response was, I kid you not, "in this situation we recommend you reinstall Windows".
This is a correct response. Do you have a better alternative? Your old m/b is in the trash, and it could have ended up there because of a fan or because of a bad solder under a BGA or because of a million other reasons. Sony repaired the hardware. They can't be responsible for the software that you haven't provided to them.
If I were in your shoes I would backup my data, and then restore the factory image over the SSD. This way they get none of my private data, and I am safe knowing that my data is right here, in a format that I can easily access. And Sony would have to make sure that your computer is 100% functioning before they ship it back. Besides, it is a good idea once in a few years to start fresh, as long as your backups are safe and secure.
These fucks charged 20 bucks for a fan, 20 bucks for a fan install, 50 bucks for a hard drive install (Just labor, no parts) and $180 for OS reinstall.
The ugly fact is that labor is so much more expensive compared to the cheap Chinese production that it hardly makes any sense to pay for repairs nowadays.
Thanks a lot Toshiba. Your laptop sucks!
Well, it's not just Toshiba. Any laptop with a fan or two will fail after a couple of years. Fans wear out, get clogged with dust, and the cooling fails.
I have a Fujitsu LifeBook; its fans failed after about 3 years of use. I bought a new set of fans from China, replaced the old ones, and it works great again.
These things simply require periodic maintenance. However it's not in the manual, and common people don't expect it to be necessary, even though they religiously change oil in their cars every 5K miles. But all moving parts require service, especially when it's a race to the bottom with laptop prices.
many of the readers here pay money to have the oil in their car changed by the 15-minute shop down the street (or worse yet, the dealership).
I always do the oil change at the dealership. First of all, their mechanics are trained by the manufacturer (Toyota in my case.) It doesn't take much IQ to change the oil, but one needs to know where not to shove his fingers into, lest one wants to get a nice shock with a 200V DC. And I really like it when mechanics put oil into the engine, and not into the gas tank or into the washer fluid container. With random quick-lube places you never know - they work on all makes and models of cars; this dealership's mechanics work only on Toyotas.
Secondly, the dealership is very professional and well organized. They have a complete history of my car from the moment they sold it to me. There were a few recalls, and they did them at the same time - a quick lube place can't do that.
Thirdly, it is a secure place. Once you give your car to the mechanic it goes inside and stays inside until you pick it up. No strange people in mechanic's clothes driving your car who knows where.
Fourthly, you can see the work area, and when they start working on your car you know exactly what is being done.
Fifthly, if during the oil change they notice something askew they tell you and you can approve (or decline) additional work right away. Regardless of that, they give me a sheet with a bunch of check points and they mark what was measured and how good it is.
Sixthly, I can wait in a decent waiting area with coffee, TV, chairs, an accessories shop, restroom, WiFi and power outlets, etc. etc. Beats walking around a quick-lube place in circles, under the sun or rain. But if I can't wait the dealership has a shuttle van, and has cars for rent - invaluable if you absolutely have to be somewhere else. You can pick up your car the same night or next day or whenever, and the service is open - wait for it - from 7am to 9pm. Quick-lube places don't do any of that.
And price-wise, the dealership is reasonably good on prices. They are higher, but you know and see what you are paying for. Besides, oil change is just a tiny part of the cost of living.
He is not even a genius, he is just a common thief in the right place at the right time.
There were many companies at that time who were more or less at the same place. Sure, BG got a deal with IBM, that helped, but MS DOS was selling for just a few dollars.
What really helped BG is his (at that time) ability to look beyond MS DOS, start Windows development and not join the OS/2 club. In fact, his OS/2 actions were very profitable, and OS/2 never recovered (if it could otherwise.) Many other companies of the time had technologies just as good, if not better, but they screwed it up all on their own. Even Apple got eventually in trouble.
If we start with the [very valid on a PC] assumption that GUI is the future, and the old 80x25 CLI is the past, there were only two players in the market - Windows and OS/2. Windows was developed by a single small team. OS/2 was developed by a committee, in a huge company that never knew what it does and when. It was not even a fair competition. But why there weren't other GUIs for PCs? Apple decided (or couldn't) touch the PC. GEM was carefully ignored, with only a handful of good applications written for it. Why nobody else released anything similar? We have such things today, when advantage of GUIs is obvious. Why not then? Is it because people didn't want to take the risk? Whatever the reason, they quietly surrendered the market to Windows and OS/2, and out of that list OS/2 withered and died all on its own. iOS would rule the smartphone market, and it's largely luck that Google was around and decided to invest into Android. Other, earlier attempts (Symbian, Palm) were laughable compared to these two.
BG is not really a coder or a tech visionary. He is a businessman, and that means that he will use every underhanded tactic known to man to win. He did that early and often by using other people's ideas, buying and destroying competitors, announcing vaporware, buying biased studies... that's what he was good at. Technology-wise, he managed to get to Windows 95, and after that he had to hire a competent team to take it further. The original team, all millionaires by then, had other priorities anyway.
I don't think BG personally killed too many people; however his treatment of contractors and H1B's is well known - this is just yet another aspect of his "ruthless businessman" persona.
it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt.
99.999% of those "multimedia files" are proprietary, commercial materials. The archiver is probably the least concern here.
The hardware looks good, but the business case is shaky. I guess I'm not the target audience because I can't figure out what this box is for, even though I looked at Flickernoise. The build instructions are more complex than ones for Linux :-)
Hardware-wise, of course, you can make anything you want, but is it cost-effective? One could make a video synthesizer out of any old laptop with a VGA output. You don't need a high fidelity audio input if all you want is to convert it to squiggly lines. I'm sure a DJ can play audio *and* video all from his trusty MacBook Pro, and there will be plenty of CPU cycles free.
I personally revisit ideas of universal devices every other month, and usually I reject them. The reason is that each and every customer is going to use the thing in one function only. This means that he'd be paying for hardware that he doesn't need. There are still reasons to do it this way, primarily manufacturing reasons, but the customer doesn't see a universal board as something useful. I don't even mention "open source" here; as laudable as it might be, it's not something that you print on the box in large yellow letters.
With regard to synthesized CPUs, I had my share of work done with MicroBlaze, and while it works you don't really want to use it as your main CPU. It makes sense only in small embedded systems, where RAM is fixed and limited. Such systems, in turn, are most useful not as universal computers but as appliances. Still, FPGA is often an expensive resource. Avnet sells XC6SLX45 for about $70 apiece. This, in a CPU, will buy you a lot of computing power. I don't know if *this* product is better off with an FPGA or without (or maybe with a smaller one, or a CPLD...) but as the size of the FPGA increases it gets more and more expensive. On the other hand, it helps fight obsolescence of parts.
I would be willing to drive to the post office a couple of times a week. Perhaps most people would.
A postal truck on a route, delivering to 100 residences, is far more efficient than 100 residents driving their cars to the post office every day and standing in line (which will be huge.)
Stamps should be RFID tags
Those tags are expensive and heavy, considering the volume of mail. Do you want to manufacture billions of one time use, disposable electronics and pollute the planet for no good reason? Stamps are very cheap, and though paper manufacturing is not the cleanest among all, it's a very small piece of paper.
I'd rather suggest single use barcodes that are created on a central server, for a fee, printed on an envelope and then act as the tracking code until your letter is delivered. Bits *are* free. Besides, that could automate sorting if you associate an address when you buy the "stamp" barcode. You wouldn't then even need to write an address. UPS and FedEx already allow you to print your own stickers.
if you really want social contact, then perhaps living in the middle of nowhere isn't ideal
Great advice! Farmers and ranchers better be sociophobes, or they must give up on their businesses and move to cities. Since there are no farms in cities they will be collecting some social security and buying food in grocery stores, where it is made, instead of growing it in fields. After all, benefits of civilization should be available only to city folks, not to some useless rednecks, isn't it so?
He3 production is not about mines, but rather a kind of harvester moving with the constant speed and heating top 15 to 60 cm of Lunar soil up to 600 degrees Celsius.
All in all, even in the setting of ST:TNG it would be a pretty complex operation - they didn't have self-healing machines. But that's what you need, otherwise the lunar dust will wear all moving parts out, and the machines stop.
As I see it, the best plan would be to leave He(3) on the Moon for the future colonists to use. This would make sense. Earth would be better served by orbital (or ground) solar arrays. They don't need so much effort to keep running.
How many Play Stations are up on eBay or Craigs List, or in the trash, because their owners were fed up with dealing with Sony? I'm guessing 3.
I have a PS3, but I have no plans to sell it or anything like that. I think I have a PSN account, but there is nothing in it other than a random username and a random password. I don't even recall why I set it up - probably to see the news and to browse the store. There is no credit card associated, no address, no nothing. I don't play online games; I'm quite satisfied with offline ones, played from a BlueRay disk. I think a bunch of PS3 owners are in the same position; they just use it as an appliance, not as a service that needs to be paid for every month. PSN doesn't even exist for those people.
If you say you have nothing to do you are implying you can't find any further progress you can make on what's on your plate.
I don't know what kind of work you do, but most of my work has a very well defined beginning and the end. Just like this comment -- I will type it up and post; I'm not going to contemplate improvements to it over the next month or two.
Even if we for a moment assume that the worker hasn't really finished his task well enough, it's the duty of the boss to understand what was and wasn't done and tell the employee how it should be done. In fact, it's the manager's duty to keep the door of his office open, listen to anyone who walks in, and talk to them. It's the only thing, really, that a manager is tasked with - to manage. Firing people because they reported that the assigned job is done and asked a very legitimate question what to do next is beyond stupid. The fired employee will be better off elsewhere.
But a worker complaining about a lack of work isn't necessarily a good worker
Only a good worker is necessarily a good worker. However a worker that does everything that the manager assigns to him and then asks for more ... I just don't see how that could be bad.
So you're implying that the other people who kill themselves are models of well-adjusted sanity?
Wide brush doesn't work here; it is easy to find a good number of examples when suicide is sane. For example, a terminally ill patient may not want to pay all his life's savings for another month or two of excruciating pain. Or a soldier may commit suicide by voluntarily taking a necessary mission that has no chance of survival. Or a worker at a nuclear plant (say, Fukushima) may work in unhealthy, if not deadly, conditions to repair the damage.
On the other hand, a girl who eats a whole bottle of aspirin because someone dumped her is probably not thinking it through.
With regard to Foxconn suicides, if we look at the theory that suiciders did it for money, I have no idea if this theory is true, and secondly - assuming that it is true - I don't know what circumstances could possibly exist to make the suicide a sane, rational choice. How would you classify a man with no skills, low IQ and no hope in life that kills himself so that his ten smart and young brothers and sisters could study in best universities and be successful engineers, as opposed to staying lowly peasants? Is he a basket case? Is he a hero?
Then there's that just signing this thing is probably harmful. Somebody could find it to be an additional motivation to commit suicide out of spite.
People who commit suicide out of spite are, how do I say it, "unbalanced" ?
One belief is that Foxconn people commit suicide to earn a windfall for their family. I don't know how true or untrue this is, but such a document will remove this motivation. This can't be bad.
But of course if someone still wants to kill oneself, there isn't much that can be done to stop that. It is only possible to eliminate as many motives for such an act as possible. Unfortunately, dissatisfaction with the job can't be eliminated, unless the job is the President of the Universe (with benefits but without obligations.) Some USPS employees committed pretty elaborate suicides by "going postal", and USPS is probably the last place that you'd suspect in sweatshop-like, union-hostile practices.