The best IVR is the one that
- doesn't ask any questions (i.e. recognises you by calling nr, and guesses why you are calling)
Agreed, from the perspective of a user, not a systems integrator. The most "friendly" systems I've ever had to deal with were the ones that used the calling number to discern information about who I was and only ask for other information to fill in gaps as necessary.
For example, I recently called Apple to check on the status of a repair. Their system determined that the number from which I was calling also appeared on an open work order, and told me the repair status. Simple and painless, and I didn't need to do any acrobatics like keying in my serial number or the work order number.
I owned a clamshell iBook that I bought launch weekend in October 1999. 4 months later, the flip-out handle was cracked (even though I rarely used the handle), and the screen housing was beginning to crack around the logo as well.
I called Apple and they told me that they weren't going to fix it because it was cosmetic. I responded that the very CEO of their company had promoted this product at launch as being made of virtually indestructible polycarbonate, so strong that you could toss it into a backpack. If that were the case, then this thing shouldn't start cracking after four months of being treated well. It's a $1500 computer, not a Frisbee.
After 30 minutes of driving that point home I got to someone who asked me "What would you like Apple to do to solve this," and opened a repair case. I had an iBook with a replaced housing a few days later.
I totally forgot about the old Quasar video camera my family had bought around 1983, which utilized a Newvicon tube.
I miss that camera -- with it being big enough to sit on your shoulder, your videos weren't nearly as shaky as they are with camcorders small enough to slip into your wallet.
A coworker of mine had this same problem, but with a different KVM switch. Plug it in and the Powerbook just dies.
He finally, after several tech, support calls found this out:
There's a particular pin you need to actually remove from the cable with a needlenose pliers, and then the Mac will no longer shut itself off. I can't remember exactly what pin it was, but I hope that could at least give you enough to start with.
I personally find it apalling that so many people are willing to swallow that, and then defend the very people restricting their rights.
If the terms of your apartment lease say no dogs, you won't take a dog in after you've signed that lease.
Anyone who bought content from iTunes accepted terms of use. These terms dictated where, how, and on how many machines that content could be played.
If people feel those terms are restrictive, perhaps they ought to have considered that before they made their purchase. If it's spelled out before purchasing that you can't play it under Linux, and you'd like to do so, then don't agree to those terms by buying that music.
This isn't a case of "OMGINFORMATIONWANTSTOBEFREE." It's a violation of an agreement made upon purchase.
eMusic, while not unlimited anymore, still sells VBR MP3's without any restrictions, and it was already pre-filtered from the likes of Nickelback and Avril Lavigne.
Anyway, how is unlocking something you've paid for being a vandal?
This serves up on a silver platter for the RIAA that consumers aren't deserving of even these incredibly unobtrusive forms of DRM, because they will crack it.
The iTunes store afforded consumers much more freedom with their purchases than any of the other online stores, and this software may well have a hand in taking that away.
4) Parking. You will probably have to pay to park on campus. Some universities charge a LOT of money to park there each month. Plus the waiting lists for parking lots can be long. Like three years long.
Damn right. I just looked at my pay stub now, because I never checked to see what my monthly payroll deduction for parking changed to on 1/1/04.
The damage?
$47/month, or $564 annually. It comes out of my paycheck before taxes are calculated, but still -- that's a lot of bank.
eMusic was great, until they dumped their unlimited download model.
They still are the only service that offers VBR MP3's, completely unencumbered by DRM. Dollar for dollar, they've still got the best deal, though, if you like music from indie and second-tier labels.
I was sold on how they carried a pretty vast selection of Metropolis and Cleopatra artists.
When I was sent to a conference in DC for the announcement of the completion of the human genome project, I decided to dye my bright blue hair down to something more normal. They probably wouldn't have even said anything otherwise, but I've got at least an iota of professionalism.
22 days of paid vacation annually is very nice. I take a 3 day weekend every month and still have plenty of vacation time stacked up that I could take a whole week off when I move to a new apartment this summer.
ATTENTION NERD TOY COLLECTORS: A nice perk that offsets the lower salary: Educational employees are eligible for educational personal purchase discounts. This amounts to 10% off Apple hardware and software, and a comparable amount with Dell, etc.
Because my university has negotiated various discounts, I save money on rental cars and hotels when I travel, and get a break on my cell phone monthly charges, too. I saved about $100 on car rentals last time I traveled.
Use your employee ID badge to collect student discounts at the movies!
I believe the retirement plans are pretty generous, too. I know for mine, I was eligible for the university's contribution after a year and I was vested immediately.
I remember taking an undergrad engineering management course which involved writing a few group papers.
The final paper assignment was to write a 20-page paper on the given topic. The topic could easily be subdivided into four sections, and in a dramatic stroke of irony, the professor had put people into groups of four to complete the assignment.
Plan seems simple, right? Everyone writes five pages, we wrap on a nice little introduction and conclusion, and merge our references into one nice section at the end. I wrote my five pages early on and thought everything was in the bag.
No. The other group members contributed five badly-written pages, and the content on three of them overlapped with what someone else in the group wrote. Suddenly all the redundancies turn an easily-done 20 page paper into an 8 page paper which needs lots of work at the very last minute.
What scared me was how these people might write code later. There was a failure to analyze the problem, figure out what other people were doing, and fill in the gaps... just like every group-oriented software project I've ever taken part in.
I think it got to the point where ordering broadband became a whole lot cheaper than what you'd spend on computer time, drinks, and gratuity if you went out in search of faster net access. I would occasionally go out to a cybercafe here and there when I had dialup, but now that I can get 1.5/256 ADSL for $27/month, there's just no point
I frequent a little bar/sushi joint that's tucked away behind a popular street in my city. They've got a few computers there they rent out at 11 cents/minute, and in my going there once or twice a week I've not seen anyone using them.
At the same time, though, they've got wireless access there for free. I'll often come back from work, have sushi and a beer or two, all while working on a few personal projects on my laptop. Apparently it's still not all that popular, because every time I show up there with my laptop the owner asks me how I like it as if I'm the only one who ever uses it.
I like how more restaurants have decided instead to use free wireless as an added value, rather than something you go in and pay out the ass for.
I'm engineer for a college radio station, and just happened to have given a speech to my local unix users group on running smalltime radio with open source software a few months ago...
We're a 10 W station operating as a unit of a university. All of our servers run Linux, handling various things such as webcast encoding, playlist tracking (for FCC/royalty requirements), and our automated rotation.
Our autorotation runs 24/7 on a Linux box and simply feeds a channel on our air console, so when no DJ's in the studio, they simply switch that on and walk away. The S/PDIF output on the autorotation box feeds into our spiffy new digital mixing console.
The music rotation is run pretty much by a Perl script that simply runs in a loop, pulling songs off and enqueuing them into XMMS according to a genre-based schedule we've laid out. MP3::Info and XMMS::Remote on CPAN are your friends here. Plays are logged into MySQL.
We wrote our own in-house PHP scripts to run a web-based playlist tracker, backed my MySQL. I integrated this with some Perl/PHP-based stuff to talk to our Icecast server to print out on the playlist tracker screen just how many listeners there are.
We've got a Postnuke-based website, and so we've written a module to talk to the playlist tracker database to let people browse playlists online through the website. Pretty damned easy to implement.
I use RRDTool to also generate running graphs, so the DJ in the studio can see how many people were listening over the past two hours.
Icecast works great for audio, of course, and for running 128, 56, and 24 Kbps streams, Jamie Zawinski's got some scripts on DNALounge.com that handle encoding all three of these and makes it really easy.
We do have a few Windows workstations, and those are all managed through VNC.
I'm hoping that once I've got some of our software more ready for prime-time, I'd like to release it to the community for other people trying to do what I'm doing.
A significant majority of us still think that academic integrity is something that needs to be upheld, and that's enough to not do it.
For those that don't, the course website there says that people caught responding with a remote that isn't their own will lose course credit and will be referred to the dean of students.
Also, I don't know how that school in particular does it, but limiting the amount of time within which you must respond would probably lessen the chance of someone being able to put down and pick up more than one remote.
I'm typing on a 12" G4 right now. I've pounded on the CPU pretty hard, and the only time it seems to get hot is if I set it on a blanket or something rather than on a surface where the heat can actually efficiently dissipate. That's a problem with all notebooks, not just Apples.
The 12" G4 is no hotter, and in fact seems to feel a bit cooler, than the Dell Inspiron 5000 PIII notebook that it replaced.
The ACM Digital Library saved my ass several times during my undergrad for sure. It was nice being able to look at the actual paper published describing an algorithm or data structure, for example, when trying to complete a programming assignment that involved it.
Call me a nerd, but journal articles are still interesting reading just so you can keep up on what's the state of the art, as well as being able to look back on some of the more famous pieces of published work... take Dijkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful," for instance.
Granted, the ACM library may not be free, but I know that my university's entire/16 worth of IP address space was covered under a site license, so your school might also have such an arrangement.
I wish that wireless applications would get at least a little bit faster, first. The J2ME software for my cell phone runs like molasses in Fargo in February. I've tried three different phone models, and they all simply cannot run things well enough to be usable.
I don't know if it's strictly a hardware issue or what, but I know that I certainly have written off mobile apps for at least the near future until I can get a phone in my hands that can actually run things well.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, from the perspective of a user, not a systems integrator. The most "friendly" systems I've ever had to deal with were the ones that used the calling number to discern information about who I was and only ask for other information to fill in gaps as necessary.
For example, I recently called Apple to check on the status of a repair. Their system determined that the number from which I was calling also appeared on an open work order, and told me the repair status. Simple and painless, and I didn't need to do any acrobatics like keying in my serial number or the work order number.
I owned a clamshell iBook that I bought launch weekend in October 1999. 4 months later, the flip-out handle was cracked (even though I rarely used the handle), and the screen housing was beginning to crack around the logo as well.
I called Apple and they told me that they weren't going to fix it because it was cosmetic. I responded that the very CEO of their company had promoted this product at launch as being made of virtually indestructible polycarbonate, so strong that you could toss it into a backpack. If that were the case, then this thing shouldn't start cracking after four months of being treated well. It's a $1500 computer, not a Frisbee.
After 30 minutes of driving that point home I got to someone who asked me "What would you like Apple to do to solve this," and opened a repair case. I had an iBook with a replaced housing a few days later.
1.7 gigawatts. Made the decision even easier, I'm sure.
So they'll be able to go back in time to kill the founders of Yahoo, and still have 490 megawatts to spare to run their servers!
I totally forgot about the old Quasar video camera my family had bought around 1983, which utilized a Newvicon tube.
I miss that camera -- with it being big enough to sit on your shoulder, your videos weren't nearly as shaky as they are with camcorders small enough to slip into your wallet.
Adult film producers want the higher quality picture as well as extra space for creative expression--like giving viewers choice of camera angles.
"Creative Expression" in porn is a term I'm not going to touch with a 10-foot pole.
But damn if you're not going to be able to see it from six different angles.
At least posters here won't need to worry about renewing their domain names anymore.
Congratulations, you've stumbled upon the reason why this is purely a gimmick.
They won't know.
A coworker of mine had this same problem, but with a different KVM switch. Plug it in and the Powerbook just dies.
He finally, after several tech, support calls found this out:
There's a particular pin you need to actually remove from the cable with a needlenose pliers, and then the Mac will no longer shut itself off. I can't remember exactly what pin it was, but I hope that could at least give you enough to start with.
I personally find it apalling that so many people are willing to swallow that, and then defend the very people restricting their rights.
If the terms of your apartment lease say no dogs, you won't take a dog in after you've signed that lease.
Anyone who bought content from iTunes accepted terms of use. These terms dictated where, how, and on how many machines that content could be played.
If people feel those terms are restrictive, perhaps they ought to have considered that before they made their purchase. If it's spelled out before purchasing that you can't play it under Linux, and you'd like to do so, then don't agree to those terms by buying that music.
This isn't a case of "OMGINFORMATIONWANTSTOBEFREE." It's a violation of an agreement made upon purchase.
eMusic, while not unlimited anymore, still sells VBR MP3's without any restrictions, and it was already pre-filtered from the likes of Nickelback and Avril Lavigne.
Anyway, how is unlocking something you've paid for being a vandal?
This serves up on a silver platter for the RIAA that consumers aren't deserving of even these incredibly unobtrusive forms of DRM, because they will crack it.
The iTunes store afforded consumers much more freedom with their purchases than any of the other online stores, and this software may well have a hand in taking that away.
4) Parking. You will probably have to pay to park on campus. Some universities charge a LOT of money to park there each month. Plus the waiting lists for parking lots can be long. Like three years long.
Damn right. I just looked at my pay stub now, because I never checked to see what my monthly payroll deduction for parking changed to on 1/1/04.
The damage?
$47/month, or $564 annually. It comes out of my paycheck before taxes are calculated, but still -- that's a lot of bank.
eMusic was great, until they dumped their unlimited download model.
They still are the only service that offers VBR MP3's, completely unencumbered by DRM. Dollar for dollar, they've still got the best deal, though, if you like music from indie and second-tier labels.
I was sold on how they carried a pretty vast selection of Metropolis and Cleopatra artists.
When I was sent to a conference in DC for the announcement of the completion of the human genome project, I decided to dye my bright blue hair down to something more normal. They probably wouldn't have even said anything otherwise, but I've got at least an iota of professionalism.
22 days of paid vacation annually is very nice. I take a 3 day weekend every month and still have plenty of vacation time stacked up that I could take a whole week off when I move to a new apartment this summer.
ATTENTION NERD TOY COLLECTORS: A nice perk that offsets the lower salary: Educational employees are eligible for educational personal purchase discounts. This amounts to 10% off Apple hardware and software, and a comparable amount with Dell, etc.
Because my university has negotiated various discounts, I save money on rental cars and hotels when I travel, and get a break on my cell phone monthly charges, too. I saved about $100 on car rentals last time I traveled.
Use your employee ID badge to collect student discounts at the movies!
I believe the retirement plans are pretty generous, too. I know for mine, I was eligible for the university's contribution after a year and I was vested immediately.
I remember taking an undergrad engineering management course which involved writing a few group papers.
The final paper assignment was to write a 20-page paper on the given topic. The topic could easily be subdivided into four sections, and in a dramatic stroke of irony, the professor had put people into groups of four to complete the assignment.
Plan seems simple, right? Everyone writes five pages, we wrap on a nice little introduction and conclusion, and merge our references into one nice section at the end. I wrote my five pages early on and thought everything was in the bag.
No. The other group members contributed five badly-written pages, and the content on three of them overlapped with what someone else in the group wrote. Suddenly all the redundancies turn an easily-done 20 page paper into an 8 page paper which needs lots of work at the very last minute.
What scared me was how these people might write code later. There was a failure to analyze the problem, figure out what other people were doing, and fill in the gaps... just like every group-oriented software project I've ever taken part in.
I think it got to the point where ordering broadband became a whole lot cheaper than what you'd spend on computer time, drinks, and gratuity if you went out in search of faster net access. I would occasionally go out to a cybercafe here and there when I had dialup, but now that I can get 1.5/256 ADSL for $27/month, there's just no point
I frequent a little bar/sushi joint that's tucked away behind a popular street in my city. They've got a few computers there they rent out at 11 cents/minute, and in my going there once or twice a week I've not seen anyone using them.
At the same time, though, they've got wireless access there for free. I'll often come back from work, have sushi and a beer or two, all while working on a few personal projects on my laptop. Apparently it's still not all that popular, because every time I show up there with my laptop the owner asks me how I like it as if I'm the only one who ever uses it.
I like how more restaurants have decided instead to use free wireless as an added value, rather than something you go in and pay out the ass for.
I'm engineer for a college radio station, and just happened to have given a speech to my local unix users group on running smalltime radio with open source software a few months ago...
We're a 10 W station operating as a unit of a university. All of our servers run Linux, handling various things such as webcast encoding, playlist tracking (for FCC/royalty requirements), and our automated rotation.
Our autorotation runs 24/7 on a Linux box and simply feeds a channel on our air console, so when no DJ's in the studio, they simply switch that on and walk away. The S/PDIF output on the autorotation box feeds into our spiffy new digital mixing console.
The music rotation is run pretty much by a Perl script that simply runs in a loop, pulling songs off and enqueuing them into XMMS according to a genre-based schedule we've laid out. MP3::Info and XMMS::Remote on CPAN are your friends here. Plays are logged into MySQL.
We wrote our own in-house PHP scripts to run a web-based playlist tracker, backed my MySQL. I integrated this with some Perl/PHP-based stuff to talk to our Icecast server to print out on the playlist tracker screen just how many listeners there are.
We've got a Postnuke-based website, and so we've written a module to talk to the playlist tracker database to let people browse playlists online through the website. Pretty damned easy to implement.
I use RRDTool to also generate running graphs, so the DJ in the studio can see how many people were listening over the past two hours.
Icecast works great for audio, of course, and for running 128, 56, and 24 Kbps streams, Jamie Zawinski's got some scripts on DNALounge.com that handle encoding all three of these and makes it really easy.
We do have a few Windows workstations, and those are all managed through VNC.
I'm hoping that once I've got some of our software more ready for prime-time, I'd like to release it to the community for other people trying to do what I'm doing.
Hope this helps!
Kazaa offers a quick way to get software needed for class.
I've got my doubts about MathWorks using Kazaa to distribute the latest version of their flagship product, dude.
That service exists for helping deaf people make phone calls.
Please don't tie up their staff and resources.
A significant majority of us still think that academic integrity is something that needs to be upheld, and that's enough to not do it.
For those that don't, the course website there says that people caught responding with a remote that isn't their own will lose course credit and will be referred to the dean of students.
Also, I don't know how that school in particular does it, but limiting the amount of time within which you must respond would probably lessen the chance of someone being able to put down and pick up more than one remote.
This has finally jumped out of the UK now, too.
Here in St. Louis, during TV time-outs during baseball games, you can use SMS to "vote" for what stupid top-40 hit you want them to play over the PA.
It's actually kind of an interesting idea to get people to throw their money away, given that Cingular has sponsored it all.
Agreed.
I'm typing on a 12" G4 right now. I've pounded on the CPU pretty hard, and the only time it seems to get hot is if I set it on a blanket or something rather than on a surface where the heat can actually efficiently dissipate. That's a problem with all notebooks, not just Apples.
The 12" G4 is no hotter, and in fact seems to feel a bit cooler, than the Dell Inspiron 5000 PIII notebook that it replaced.
The ACM Digital Library saved my ass several times during my undergrad for sure. It was nice being able to look at the actual paper published describing an algorithm or data structure, for example, when trying to complete a programming assignment that involved it.
/16 worth of IP address space was covered under a site license, so your school might also have such an arrangement.
Call me a nerd, but journal articles are still interesting reading just so you can keep up on what's the state of the art, as well as being able to look back on some of the more famous pieces of published work... take Dijkstra's "Goto Considered Harmful," for instance.
Granted, the ACM library may not be free, but I know that my university's entire
I wish that wireless applications would get at least a little bit faster, first. The J2ME software for my cell phone runs like molasses in Fargo in February. I've tried three different phone models, and they all simply cannot run things well enough to be usable.
I don't know if it's strictly a hardware issue or what, but I know that I certainly have written off mobile apps for at least the near future until I can get a phone in my hands that can actually run things well.
I'll be first in line to get my Betty Crocker brand Bleach & Ammonia Brownies.