It's a goddamn PC for christsakes. There's no difference. Except the price tag. All part of the nifty little "market segmentation" thingie Intel dreamed up. Basically a scam to artificially constrain supplies in the market, while not suffering from the constraint in manufacturing, and exploiting that constraint for maximum profit.
Again though, if you want your 32 bit apps to run, you'll have to run them in SLOOOOW software emulation.
Unless, of course you pay even MORE $$$ so intel can set a jumper somewhere and enable the built-in hardware emulation. Just more bit-crunching goodness from Intel.
on the "authority front" - a common failing, where MY company fails, is when a customer is having a licensing issue, or when an upgrade fixes a problem, but it's not a free upgrade, the tech can't give the customer a license number. They invariably have to pass it on to sales, through a not very well established channel. So customers often get lost in the hand-off, and hassled about not paying for the upgrade, so it gets bounced back, and we have to get a support manager to sign off. Mucho suckage. In my opinion, people who hit bugs that are fixed in a paid upgrade should get the upgrade free. Period. That's the price the software company pays for bundling bug fixes with features. If it's a deal where it's a major upgrade, and the customer is several versions behind, THEN maybe pull teeth. but otherwise, techs should be allowed to do their jobs. Fix customer's problems. It's not like huge percentage of your install base is going to get free upgrades. If they do, then that bug fix should have been split-out as a separate free patch. What's worth more? The lost revenue from the upgrades, or the cost of assigning a developer to split out bugfixes?
On the other hand, you gotta admit, on those occasions where you can solve the customer's problems, when they send your boss a letter of compliment, or gifts (I have a coffee-mug collection), that often makes it all worthwhile.
And as for dealing with idiots - I'll admit, I've been fortunate to do support for a software company that writes primarily business software, you talk to a higher-grade of moron than home/desktop software support does: BUT - you do have to learn some skills about sizing up your customer BEFORE you start making assumptions that he knows what electricity is. The tough part is learning NOT to offend the ones that do know their stuff, but it's easily explained when you do screw that up. Most understand.
The most difficult problems are the ones you are not allowed to solve; the ones that are caused by third-party products, the ones that are caused by your own product, which are obscured by crappy relations with R&D, and the worst ones are problems you KNOW the answer to - problems you told R&D about two years ago, and told them to fix, and they said they fixed it, but in reality, they screwed it up worse by using some lame workaround that was less labor intensive to code or test. Those are the most frustrating for me, and the real reason I hate doing support. Not the irate customers. As a support person, you gotta learn the fine art of making even the most irate customer your friend. It's you and him against the world. It's a psychological game, but it works, and it's really the most honest and satisfying approach.
I think they're making a big push to get as many seats on DSL as possible before TimeWarner/AOl merge, and the rest of the world is sucked into the Cable black-hole.
When I started in Tech Support, 8 years ago, I was told:
"You either learn out, or you burn out."
He was talking about front-line support. I still to this day don't understand people who can survive more than 6 months in a front-line position without losing it and gunning folks down. I learned out. The rest of my career has been as a 2nd line, 3rd line, or QA.
I can say one thing about this PacBell story. First of all, you've got to make your customers happy. If some guy's got a problem, and it's not YOUR problem, you tell him, right away. If your contract with the Telco won't permit it, then that's bullshit. If it's their problem, then they should be taking the heat. And the calls. #1, tell the customer the truth. If you give them a lie about what the problem is, then they're going to get more and more irate, and as they get more irate, they become more EXPENSIVE (make more support calls, go higher and higher up the chain of authority, etc.).
If your company has made a deal with a third party where their problem is not one you can fix, but you can't send the customer to them, then it's fiscally a bad deal - your company is expected to bear the expense of taking calls on problems that are beyond the "support boundry"? That's major suckage. The management chain, if they're worth anything, will come to recogize the problem, and ask their seniors to resolve it. You can make a clear-cut loss analysis based on it; "these types of calls account for X dollars of our budget." If the managers can't or wont do this, they're worthless.
For the front line guys who are treated like the ones in this story, I feel very sorry for you. When I was on front line, we weren't watched that closely. We did our jobs, we were treated like adults. The people in this story are being treated like prison inmates. The lesson to the managers should be: employee turnover is bad. Treat employees like dirt, and you'll have high turnover - man, especially in a labor environment like the bay area. People will walk, and go somewhere where they can get paid twice that and be treated like a human being. Maybe they're not qualified for that at the time you hired them - but they will in six months. You can mitigate that by hiring lower quality people, but in the end, it will translate to dissatisfied customers.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. If some guy has no service for two weeks, then the support guy should be able to credit the guy's account. Otherwise why bother, you're just wasting time answering the customer's call. Of course with my PacBell DSL problem, I was out for two weeks, phone line problems which ultimately were a combination of CO wiring problems, and problems INSIDE my house. The tech they sent to my house found that my phone lines were distributed too much - so what we did was use the black/yellow pair for the DSL signal and put a filter on the red/green pair at the NID. Black/yellow were connected to my primary line ahead of the filter, so there was a straight signal run to my office that was connected to the black/yellow pair, and the rest of the phones in my house were on red/green, and didn't need the little filters, because of the filter at the NID. They credited my account for two weeks because the service was down due to the CO switching problem. Now it works great.
Why was my service down for two weeks? Support hold-times were very high (1-2 hours), so I couldn't get through, and when I did, nobody could figure out what the problem was (I tried not to involve them in my individual computer setup, because it had nothing to do with the problem, I was sure. I have Macs, and I know Macs scare people - but Macs had nothing to do with it, because I was using a LinkSys router - it was the modem that failed to connect.) but the big time waster was, waiting for a tech to be assigned to come out. Actually, originally getting set up took 2 months to schedule, after many phone calls and emails asking them to set it up, nobody could tell me if I was in the 11k' radius of the CO or not.
The bottom line is - it sounds like PacBell has a product with a high demand, so they and their partners who provide the service have little incentive to provide good service, because the alternative is the Cable monopoly, and they have no competition either. So basically, at a high level, nobody gives a shit if you sign up for DSL or not. So they hire idiots to man the phones, provide them with no tools or pathways to do their jobs, and audit the labor so tightly that it looks good on paper.
From reading I've been doing, not *everyone* thinks that the Apple Menu was a big loss. Most people who don't - cite that it quickly becomes a huge disorganized mess.
Well - this illustrates two sets of people, in my mind. One set appreciates, and benefits from the Apple Menu - and you hit the nail on the head, it's for relieving the pain of finding and launching applications. The deal is, it isn't going to work unless the user has the ultimate power to configure it. This is where Windows' Start menu fails. There's too much crap in Start menu that you can't configure, and when you do try to configure it, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Apple Menu is very simple, because it's a Finder folder/directory. You click on a folder, instead of drilling into it's contents menu, and that folder pops up, and you can instantly change the aliases within to whatever you like, through the familliar interface of the Finder's file-management. Windows' Start Menu works roughly the same way, but they reserve the top level for, basically advertisements. (AIM launcher, Netscape SmartUpdate, New Office Document - why the hell can't I put my own things there?) Then the lower levels, are not easily accessible, unless you open Expolorer, separately, and drill down through obscure hierarchies to where your profile's menu folder is. And you cannot control sorting (as you CAN in Apple Menu). Windows fails - because it's not configurable to the degree the power user expects it to be. Apple Menu SUCCEEDS because it is very configurable (plus BeHierarchic kicks ass too). The Dock fails miserably, because it is not configurable, or hierarchical. Damn dock.
The other type of user, is "less of a power user" - they don't see that going through the trouble of keeping Apple Menu organized themselves is worth it for simply having a quick convenient popup tray for launching apps. They use "tabbed folders". Also a pretty nice feature, but I never saw any use for it myself. But this is a significant subset of the users out there.
Personally, I think tabbed folders requires too many clicks for the access you get to your apps. It's purely the mechanical difference between the tabbed folders and the menu. However, tabbed folders are probably much easier to keep organized.
The Launcher fails, because it is not as configurable, and is not hierarchical, and uses too much screen real-estate. Apple learned this, I know they did, because the Launcher was installed by default back in the System 7.x timeframe, and then they decided to make it optional later. Someone made that decision based on the information that people thought it sucked.
Now Apple makes the Launcher mistake again, with OS X's Dock, only they make it so that there's no alternative (you can't simply deactivate the dock).
People who LIKE the dock, are probably the majority of users, who use one or two apps at a time, and don't have trouble distinguishing between the big-blue-"E" icon, and the control panel icon, and the mail icon. But add any reasonable amount of RAM to a system, and your user is going to have the capability of launching 5, 6, 7, or more apps simultaneously, and past that point, the Dock does become totally useless. You're entering power-user territory here, and that's why the majority of testers haven't complained, because A). most people aren't power-users, and B), there really aren't enough apps available for OS X yet that get people into situations where they need to run 10-15 apps simultaneously. But I'll tell you one thing. With OS X's stability, it now makes it POSSIBLE to run that many apps. People will be doing it. And with OS X's Unix roots, and the Unix philosophy being - many small discreet apps, each great at one little task, people will be needing a much better method of managing application launching and document windows. The Dock ain't it.
I agree with you about the NeXT dock. That would be a much better solution.
Actually, this is the ONLY thing I like about the Dock. Put it in hide-mode, and having the trash handily pop up when you drag a file to the edge of the screen is great. It saves you the hassle of having to minimize a window that may be covering the trash icon on the desktop. However, minimizing the window wouldn't be one tenth the hassle it is, if they'd eliminate the dock and bring back windowshades.
Don't kid yourself into thinking it's some cabal of marketroids in Apple.
The Human Interface group was gutted by Steve, and most of Aqua's ideas are strictly Steve. The things that have changed are things that had very good irrefutable reasons; the monochrome scheme was to prevent losing the graphic designers, etc.
Stuff like useability of the Dock, and loss of good features like Apple Menua and spring loaded folders, just isn't going to fly with Steve, especially when it's at the expense of his baby "The Dock". (actually, I preferred the old NeXT dock, myself).
I'm personally not very hopeful that Apple is going to make any changes to OS X PB. Especially when I hear brain-dead comments like "most of the people who don't like it are just a very vocal minority". That's total bullshit, and if you've been on any public message board about OS X in the past three months, you'd know that. But nobody who likes their job at Apple questions Steve. At least we'll have our hacks and 3rd Party Tweaks.
um - special hardware IS needed - unless you've had that special experience of disassembling a slot-loading CD ROM drive to get one of these little motherfuckers out.
I say there should be mandatory warning labels on these non-circular CDs.
I know they don't fit into slot loading drives,
You know they don't fit into slot loading drives.
But my #$)%*)(@#$!!! mother-in-law doesn't know. Well, she knows now. ..
Well, the other problem is, as the disk degrades, reads will go from - good, to slightly bad (ecc compensates), to possibly read errors that don't get caught by ecc (I know that's theoretically impossible, right? but who has never hit one? nobody), where you think you've got good data, but the files are corrupt.
This could lead to execution of bad code which causes - well, just about anything. But mainly crashes, freezes, hangs, dumps, chorks, hiccups, dr watsons, bluescreens, abends, and kernel panics. If you're lucky, you'll only lose non-critical data.
If there's going to be an intentional time limit on the reading of a disk, it is computationally irresponsible to do it this way. It has to read fine, then just plain not read at all, preferably with an error message that states the reason (Your evaluation period has ended, please bend over for more time). And the failure has to not just be friendly to the user, it has to be friendly to the OS as well.
English is a cultural meme, language is a virus from outer space, so it is perfectly legitimate to refer to it as "creeping" or "spreading" or "seeking world domination".
Whether or not you believe in memetics the bare basics of that science do apply.
And I'm not going to agree that English is dominating the world because English is what people want to speak. People want to speak their mother tongues. Period. US Content providers want to provide a product to the biggest market. Does biggest=most people? No. biggest=most money. As America is the richest country in the world, it's THE #1 target market for content providers. Because English-language products are the most lucrative. As a side benefit, you can also hit all the European bilinguals. Biggest bang for the buck.
The way my company decides which languages to release a product in, is they have a chart which tells them how much it will cost to translate a given product (manuals, dialogs, etc.) to a given language. Then the marketing guys come in with sales-estimates in these languages. Not how many French Speaking customers there are, but how many Non-English Speaking French Speaking customers there are - and cost-benefit compare the two figures. So as you can imagine, there are a lot of French who also speak English. For a critical killer-app, a French customer might even hire an English speaking admin just to work that product. So why should we bother to translate that? For a product whose sales threshold is below a certain point, it will cost more to translate it to that language then they'll make selling to that market. So it doesn't get done. So it's not because the French are clamoring for products (content, software, whatever) that are exclusively English. It's that this environment does not favor the translation of products to French. (or whatever other language).
Your example of why cultural purity is a good thing is pretty irrefutable, but also, very limited.
Yes, if someone from another culture who has no concept of personal property comes to America and steals, then they need to be spanked or set straight or jailed or something. "Society must be protected" (-Dr. Scott), but there are issues with cultural purification which are pretty bogus, just listen to Pat Buchanan rant for a while (or George W Bush - "all religions are okay, (as long as they fit my definition of "religion)"). Religion is largely a cultural phenomenon, and there are some fairly deep differences there, with not insignificant ramifications (for instance, Moslem fundamentalists codes about women's rights, etc.) To a certain extent, those aliens with cultural values that don't fit within the "norm" of the new culture, need to be, well, made secondary, where there's friction. But to mean that because fundamentalist Moslem men believe that women must not wear makeup or leave the house unescorted - violates the general population's women's rights, does NOT mean that all Moslem worship and trappings and culture should be eradicated. That's just not justified. And it sets a very dangerous precedent. Yes, fundamentalist Moslem men are prohibited from discriminating against women in American society at large, just as the rest of us are. Fine and dandy. Until the majority of Americans are fundamentalist Moslems (or fundamentalist Southern Baptists), women will have equal rights in America - by law, *not* by culture. That doesn't say that these guys can't hate the law, or worship in a Mosque, or read the Koran, or pray facing Mecca five times a day. This culture, and every culture, has very crucial and necessary value to being a part of American culture, without it, American culture would be that much more bland and homogenized. When was the last time you heard a non-Jew call someone a putz? When was the last time you got an email from someone who wasn't a limey, and they closed it with "Cheers"? When was the last time you ate French Toast? Okay, Filet Mignon?
Cultural purification is not fine. Cultural normativation (establishing a baseline set of rules we all abide by - regardless of individual values) is the basis of civilization, and cultural diversification has thrived in spite of it since the beginning.
Well, in the sense that "Democracy" is a word that has a meaning that is different than most people believe: "Democracy" means, those with the most money decide what a thing is called.
For instance, the current Tax Code in the US, there is a thing, which states that when a person inherits money, if it's over a certain amount, they must pay taxes on it. Now, I'm not here to argue on whether it's a good thing or not, or whether the amounts and thresholds are right or wrong, but most sane, rational people would call this an "inheritance tax" - but opponents of this tax, the US Republicans, are people with deep pockets, making large campaign contributions, and expensive ads targeting broad population segments. These ads label this "thing" as a "Death Tax". That carries a lot of negative baggage. Who decided what to call this "thing"? The people? What a joke. That's just an example, maybe not even a good one,
How about the term "Liberal"? In US English, it means roughly, a person whose political beliefs are in favor of government oversight, intervention, and control, but in Europe, a "Liberal" -(now often referred to as Neoliberal) is a person who is in favor of Liberalization of laws constraining business - or basically, the opposite of what it means in America. I'm not sure how that arose, but the Republicans have successfully made "Liberal" a dirty word. How about Computer standards? Who decided what "DNS" stands for?
(Domain Name Services - or Digital Nervous System?)
or "SMS"
(Storage Management Services - or System Management Services)-
Maybe there are more examples?
Yes, English language is probably one of the most rich and diverse (considering the elements of Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, it contains) in existence, and these elements from other languages have served mostly to enrich it further, in a Borg-like way, but without "purity" guidance, there is a great deal of potential for perversion.
Just as TCP/IP has become the "language" computers speak to communicate worldwide on the internet, those peripheral components that sit in front of the monitor (ie. YOU), will learn to communicate in a common language as well. Colloquialisms, as memes, will spread and homogenize. Ever visit Atlanta, Georgia? Orlando, Florida? Orlando has a LOT of former Northerners. To hear people talk, you'd think you were in Ohio. Of course, in Atlanta, it's a bit different.
What we're talking about is a STANDARD here, like TCP/IP. Let's all give thanks to whomever we give thanks to, that a corporation doesn't control it (like Java or MSHTML), otherwise, every sentance every person speaks would have to end with (TM). Wouldn't that suck?
Well, if you read just that first little book of the Bible, there's a story in there that languages were created (and splintered and fragmented) for a reason: to prevent us from all working together towards a common goal.
Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
Just the horrid image in my mind of a Domino's Pizza logo across the surface of the moon, makes me consider; gee, that God dude was a pretty smart guy.
What I think the "problem" is, is we are in a weird time in human history.
With this whole "internet" thing, and computers, and nanotechnology, and the space-race, we've had the unfortunate illusion that things in Science have to develop at an ever-accelerating pace. Certainly Moore's law was a huge contributor. (but is it even valid anymore? P IV anyone?)
But the reality is, maybe the pace does increase for certain fields, at certain points, but overall, we've only known about atoms for about 100 years. Until we, as a species, are financially robust enough to have the luxury to send a person to Mars, we have to make all of these indirect observations, and even when we have direct observations, the data are going to be interpreted differently by different people, and the scientific community is going to have to do as they traditionally have done, duke it out until the most likely theory based on the evidence is most generally accepted. And the crackpots, vitally important to this process, will accept the others, and continue to attempt to prove them. Yes, there's a bit of rivalry and competition, and spite going on, because people who only live 80 or so years are trying to get in and get their funding (either public or private) within their lifespans. That's to be expected. That's why we're getting all these questionable and contradictory press releases. But the reality is, until more and better observations come in, and more debate happens, it's going to go back and forth, and the truth isn't going to come next year with the Pentium 5, it's going to come in 50 years with the first manned Mars mission (I'm being very optimistic). Be patient. Maybe you'll be dead by then, but did poor Galileo live to see Voyager snap pictures of Jupiter's moons? It's a tough reality.
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The point is not indefensible, and the reason is known. I'm arguing the point because it's true. check out my user ID#. I've been a member of slashdot long enough to know that though there's a large Linux faction on Slashdot, I'm not stupid enough to believe that Slashdot is a Linux site, or even a Linux-focussed site. Since I've joined, user ID's have gone from 4-digit to 6-digit. Most of those are Linux users. I'm not arguing that. But there sure are a lot of Win/BSD/Mac people here - they are a minority, but not an insignificant one. Lots of news on Slashdot pertains to Linux, but certainly not the majority, and the majority of Linux articles certainly aren't strictly about Linux. They're mostly peripherally related.
Personally, I don't even run or like Linux, but I am interested in many of the topics Linux people find interesting, because they pertain to:
Unix
Computer Industry/Technology
Internet
and the ramifications of the ongoing computer revolution, whether they're business, social, political, or trivial. It's all neat stuff, stuff that matters. To all of us. Not just Linux-heads.
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hell, why bother with Linux at all then, why don't you just run Cygwin on NT, and get all the unix tools that way?
I'm sorry I unintentionally implied that ALL Win users were too stupid to use Linux. that wasn't my intention, I was making a demographic observation - that is MOST Win users. And by "technical fortitude" I don't mean ONLY smarts, I mean, ability to reconcile the problems they may encounter in their work environments (for instance, I CAN'T use Linux at work, because it's not a supported-by-IT platform for one, and two- many of the apps I need to use don't have clients on Linux (problem-tracking database, Outlook calendar for meetings, etc. ad nauseum).
But if I could, I would (or actually, I would probably use BSD). Because NT *does* crash and do weird things on me all the frickin time. It does get tiresome after 8 years.
"fiduciary duty" is just another way of saying: "I don't get paid to listen to my conscience."
Until people figure out that there's a difference between earning enough money for "survial" and "top of the line Lexus for my 16-year old daughter, only the best", stuff like this will just go on and on, not just in the chip industry.
Intel has a pretty good marketing department behind them, I can't figure out why the hell they don't try and spend
some money educating the masses on what really pushes chip performance
because an informed consumer is a monopolist's worst enemy.
If Intel educated the masses, they'd all buy Alphas, PPCs, or SPARC machines.
Slashdot Mirror
"High-end server configurations" ?!?!?!?
It's a goddamn PC for christsakes. There's no difference. Except the price tag. All part of the nifty little "market segmentation" thingie Intel dreamed up. Basically a scam to artificially constrain supplies in the market, while not suffering from the constraint in manufacturing, and exploiting that constraint for maximum profit.
Again though, if you want your 32 bit apps to run, you'll have to run them in SLOOOOW software emulation.
Unless, of course you pay even MORE $$$ so intel can set a jumper somewhere and enable the built-in hardware emulation. Just more bit-crunching goodness from Intel.
"Fiduciary responsibility" is just another way of saying "I don't get paid to listen to my conscience".
Or to quote a Dilbert cartoon: "A big fat bonus today, is worth more than the entire company tomorrow."
even a BIOS password would not be safe.
on the "authority front" - a common failing, where MY company fails, is when a customer is having a licensing issue, or when an upgrade fixes a problem, but it's not a free upgrade, the tech can't give the customer a license number. They invariably have to pass it on to sales, through a not very well established channel. So customers often get lost in the hand-off, and hassled about not paying for the upgrade, so it gets bounced back, and we have to get a support manager to sign off. Mucho suckage. In my opinion, people who hit bugs that are fixed in a paid upgrade should get the upgrade free. Period. That's the price the software company pays for bundling bug fixes with features. If it's a deal where it's a major upgrade, and the customer is several versions behind, THEN maybe pull teeth. but otherwise, techs should be allowed to do their jobs. Fix customer's problems. It's not like huge percentage of your install base is going to get free upgrades. If they do, then that bug fix should have been split-out as a separate free patch. What's worth more? The lost revenue from the upgrades, or the cost of assigning a developer to split out bugfixes?
On the other hand, you gotta admit, on those occasions where you can solve the customer's problems, when they send your boss a letter of compliment, or gifts (I have a coffee-mug collection), that often makes it all worthwhile.
And as for dealing with idiots - I'll admit, I've been fortunate to do support for a software company that writes primarily business software, you talk to a higher-grade of moron than home/desktop software support does: BUT - you do have to learn some skills about sizing up your customer BEFORE you start making assumptions that he knows what electricity is. The tough part is learning NOT to offend the ones that do know their stuff, but it's easily explained when you do screw that up. Most understand.
The most difficult problems are the ones you are not allowed to solve; the ones that are caused by third-party products, the ones that are caused by your own product, which are obscured by crappy relations with R&D, and the worst ones are problems you KNOW the answer to - problems you told R&D about two years ago, and told them to fix, and they said they fixed it, but in reality, they screwed it up worse by using some lame workaround that was less labor intensive to code or test. Those are the most frustrating for me, and the real reason I hate doing support. Not the irate customers. As a support person, you gotta learn the fine art of making even the most irate customer your friend. It's you and him against the world. It's a psychological game, but it works, and it's really the most honest and satisfying approach.
I think they're making a big push to get as many seats on DSL as possible before TimeWarner/AOl merge, and the rest of the world is sucked into the Cable black-hole.
When I started in Tech Support, 8 years ago, I was told:
"You either learn out, or you burn out."
He was talking about front-line support. I still to this day don't understand people who can survive more than 6 months in a front-line position without losing it and gunning folks down. I learned out. The rest of my career has been as a 2nd line, 3rd line, or QA.
I can say one thing about this PacBell story. First of all, you've got to make your customers happy. If some guy's got a problem, and it's not YOUR problem, you tell him, right away. If your contract with the Telco won't permit it, then that's bullshit. If it's their problem, then they should be taking the heat. And the calls. #1, tell the customer the truth. If you give them a lie about what the problem is, then they're going to get more and more irate, and as they get more irate, they become more EXPENSIVE (make more support calls, go higher and higher up the chain of authority, etc.).
If your company has made a deal with a third party where their problem is not one you can fix, but you can't send the customer to them, then it's fiscally a bad deal - your company is expected to bear the expense of taking calls on problems that are beyond the "support boundry"? That's major suckage. The management chain, if they're worth anything, will come to recogize the problem, and ask their seniors to resolve it. You can make a clear-cut loss analysis based on it; "these types of calls account for X dollars of our budget." If the managers can't or wont do this, they're worthless.
For the front line guys who are treated like the ones in this story, I feel very sorry for you. When I was on front line, we weren't watched that closely. We did our jobs, we were treated like adults. The people in this story are being treated like prison inmates. The lesson to the managers should be: employee turnover is bad. Treat employees like dirt, and you'll have high turnover - man, especially in a labor environment like the bay area. People will walk, and go somewhere where they can get paid twice that and be treated like a human being. Maybe they're not qualified for that at the time you hired them - but they will in six months. You can mitigate that by hiring lower quality people, but in the end, it will translate to dissatisfied customers.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. If some guy has no service for two weeks, then the support guy should be able to credit the guy's account. Otherwise why bother, you're just wasting time answering the customer's call. Of course with my PacBell DSL problem, I was out for two weeks, phone line problems which ultimately were a combination of CO wiring problems, and problems INSIDE my house. The tech they sent to my house found that my phone lines were distributed too much - so what we did was use the black/yellow pair for the DSL signal and put a filter on the red/green pair at the NID. Black/yellow were connected to my primary line ahead of the filter, so there was a straight signal run to my office that was connected to the black/yellow pair, and the rest of the phones in my house were on red/green, and didn't need the little filters, because of the filter at the NID. They credited my account for two weeks because the service was down due to the CO switching problem. Now it works great.
Why was my service down for two weeks? Support hold-times were very high (1-2 hours), so I couldn't get through, and when I did, nobody could figure out what the problem was (I tried not to involve them in my individual computer setup, because it had nothing to do with the problem, I was sure. I have Macs, and I know Macs scare people - but Macs had nothing to do with it, because I was using a LinkSys router - it was the modem that failed to connect.) but the big time waster was, waiting for a tech to be assigned to come out. Actually, originally getting set up took 2 months to schedule, after many phone calls and emails asking them to set it up, nobody could tell me if I was in the 11k' radius of the CO or not.
The bottom line is - it sounds like PacBell has a product with a high demand, so they and their partners who provide the service have little incentive to provide good service, because the alternative is the Cable monopoly, and they have no competition either. So basically, at a high level, nobody gives a shit if you sign up for DSL or not. So they hire idiots to man the phones, provide them with no tools or pathways to do their jobs, and audit the labor so tightly that it looks good on paper.
I don't see any of this changing any time soon.
uh, yeah. 640k was just fine.
From reading I've been doing, not *everyone* thinks that the Apple Menu was a big loss. Most people who don't - cite that it quickly becomes a huge disorganized mess.
Well - this illustrates two sets of people, in my mind. One set appreciates, and benefits from the Apple Menu - and you hit the nail on the head, it's for relieving the pain of finding and launching applications. The deal is, it isn't going to work unless the user has the ultimate power to configure it. This is where Windows' Start menu fails. There's too much crap in Start menu that you can't configure, and when you do try to configure it, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Apple Menu is very simple, because it's a Finder folder/directory. You click on a folder, instead of drilling into it's contents menu, and that folder pops up, and you can instantly change the aliases within to whatever you like, through the familliar interface of the Finder's file-management. Windows' Start Menu works roughly the same way, but they reserve the top level for, basically advertisements. (AIM launcher, Netscape SmartUpdate, New Office Document - why the hell can't I put my own things there?) Then the lower levels, are not easily accessible, unless you open Expolorer, separately, and drill down through obscure hierarchies to where your profile's menu folder is. And you cannot control sorting (as you CAN in Apple Menu). Windows fails - because it's not configurable to the degree the power user expects it to be. Apple Menu SUCCEEDS because it is very configurable (plus BeHierarchic kicks ass too). The Dock fails miserably, because it is not configurable, or hierarchical. Damn dock.
The other type of user, is "less of a power user" - they don't see that going through the trouble of keeping Apple Menu organized themselves is worth it for simply having a quick convenient popup tray for launching apps. They use "tabbed folders". Also a pretty nice feature, but I never saw any use for it myself. But this is a significant subset of the users out there.
Personally, I think tabbed folders requires too many clicks for the access you get to your apps. It's purely the mechanical difference between the tabbed folders and the menu. However, tabbed folders are probably much easier to keep organized.
The Launcher fails, because it is not as configurable, and is not hierarchical, and uses too much screen real-estate. Apple learned this, I know they did, because the Launcher was installed by default back in the System 7.x timeframe, and then they decided to make it optional later. Someone made that decision based on the information that people thought it sucked.
Now Apple makes the Launcher mistake again, with OS X's Dock, only they make it so that there's no alternative (you can't simply deactivate the dock).
People who LIKE the dock, are probably the majority of users, who use one or two apps at a time, and don't have trouble distinguishing between the big-blue-"E" icon, and the control panel icon, and the mail icon. But add any reasonable amount of RAM to a system, and your user is going to have the capability of launching 5, 6, 7, or more apps simultaneously, and past that point, the Dock does become totally useless. You're entering power-user territory here, and that's why the majority of testers haven't complained, because A). most people aren't power-users, and B), there really aren't enough apps available for OS X yet that get people into situations where they need to run 10-15 apps simultaneously. But I'll tell you one thing. With OS X's stability, it now makes it POSSIBLE to run that many apps. People will be doing it. And with OS X's Unix roots, and the Unix philosophy being - many small discreet apps, each great at one little task, people will be needing a much better method of managing application launching and document windows. The Dock ain't it.
I agree with you about the NeXT dock. That would be a much better solution.
Actually, this is the ONLY thing I like about the Dock. Put it in hide-mode, and having the trash handily pop up when you drag a file to the edge of the screen is great. It saves you the hassle of having to minimize a window that may be covering the trash icon on the desktop. However, minimizing the window wouldn't be one tenth the hassle it is, if they'd eliminate the dock and bring back windowshades.
Don't kid yourself into thinking it's some cabal of marketroids in Apple.
The Human Interface group was gutted by Steve, and most of Aqua's ideas are strictly Steve. The things that have changed are things that had very good irrefutable reasons; the monochrome scheme was to prevent losing the graphic designers, etc.
Stuff like useability of the Dock, and loss of good features like Apple Menua and spring loaded folders, just isn't going to fly with Steve, especially when it's at the expense of his baby "The Dock". (actually, I preferred the old NeXT dock, myself).
I'm personally not very hopeful that Apple is going to make any changes to OS X PB. Especially when I hear brain-dead comments like "most of the people who don't like it are just a very vocal minority". That's total bullshit, and if you've been on any public message board about OS X in the past three months, you'd know that. But nobody who likes their job at Apple questions Steve. At least we'll have our hacks and 3rd Party Tweaks.
um - special hardware IS needed - unless you've had that special experience of disassembling a slot-loading CD ROM drive to get one of these little motherfuckers out.
.
I say there should be mandatory warning labels on these non-circular CDs.
I know they don't fit into slot loading drives,
You know they don't fit into slot loading drives.
But my #$)%*)(@#$!!! mother-in-law doesn't know. Well, she knows now. .
Well, the other problem is, as the disk degrades, reads will go from - good, to slightly bad (ecc compensates), to possibly read errors that don't get caught by ecc (I know that's theoretically impossible, right? but who has never hit one? nobody), where you think you've got good data, but the files are corrupt.
This could lead to execution of bad code which causes - well, just about anything. But mainly crashes, freezes, hangs, dumps, chorks, hiccups, dr watsons, bluescreens, abends, and kernel panics. If you're lucky, you'll only lose non-critical data.
If there's going to be an intentional time limit on the reading of a disk, it is computationally irresponsible to do it this way. It has to read fine, then just plain not read at all, preferably with an error message that states the reason (Your evaluation period has ended, please bend over for more time). And the failure has to not just be friendly to the user, it has to be friendly to the OS as well.
English is a cultural meme, language is a virus from outer space, so it is perfectly legitimate to refer to it as "creeping" or "spreading" or "seeking world domination".
Whether or not you believe in memetics the bare basics of that science do apply.
And I'm not going to agree that English is dominating the world because English is what people want to speak. People want to speak their mother tongues. Period. US Content providers want to provide a product to the biggest market. Does biggest=most people? No. biggest=most money. As America is the richest country in the world, it's THE #1 target market for content providers. Because English-language products are the most lucrative. As a side benefit, you can also hit all the European bilinguals. Biggest bang for the buck.
The way my company decides which languages to release a product in, is they have a chart which tells them how much it will cost to translate a given product (manuals, dialogs, etc.) to a given language. Then the marketing guys come in with sales-estimates in these languages. Not how many French Speaking customers there are, but how many Non-English Speaking French Speaking customers there are - and cost-benefit compare the two figures. So as you can imagine, there are a lot of French who also speak English. For a critical killer-app, a French customer might even hire an English speaking admin just to work that product. So why should we bother to translate that? For a product whose sales threshold is below a certain point, it will cost more to translate it to that language then they'll make selling to that market. So it doesn't get done. So it's not because the French are clamoring for products (content, software, whatever) that are exclusively English. It's that this environment does not favor the translation of products to French. (or whatever other language).
Your example of why cultural purity is a good thing is pretty irrefutable, but also, very limited.
Yes, if someone from another culture who has no concept of personal property comes to America and steals, then they need to be spanked or set straight or jailed or something. "Society must be protected" (-Dr. Scott), but there are issues with cultural purification which are pretty bogus, just listen to Pat Buchanan rant for a while (or George W Bush - "all religions are okay, (as long as they fit my definition of "religion)"). Religion is largely a cultural phenomenon, and there are some fairly deep differences there, with not insignificant ramifications (for instance, Moslem fundamentalists codes about women's rights, etc.) To a certain extent, those aliens with cultural values that don't fit within the "norm" of the new culture, need to be, well, made secondary, where there's friction. But to mean that because fundamentalist Moslem men believe that women must not wear makeup or leave the house unescorted - violates the general population's women's rights, does NOT mean that all Moslem worship and trappings and culture should be eradicated. That's just not justified. And it sets a very dangerous precedent. Yes, fundamentalist Moslem men are prohibited from discriminating against women in American society at large, just as the rest of us are. Fine and dandy. Until the majority of Americans are fundamentalist Moslems (or fundamentalist Southern Baptists), women will have equal rights in America - by law, *not* by culture. That doesn't say that these guys can't hate the law, or worship in a Mosque, or read the Koran, or pray facing Mecca five times a day. This culture, and every culture, has very crucial and necessary value to being a part of American culture, without it, American culture would be that much more bland and homogenized. When was the last time you heard a non-Jew call someone a putz? When was the last time you got an email from someone who wasn't a limey, and they closed it with "Cheers"? When was the last time you ate French Toast? Okay, Filet Mignon?
Cultural purification is not fine. Cultural normativation (establishing a baseline set of rules we all abide by - regardless of individual values) is the basis of civilization, and cultural diversification has thrived in spite of it since the beginning.
Not true!
Well, in the sense that "Democracy" is a word that has a meaning that is different than most people believe: "Democracy" means, those with the most money decide what a thing is called.
For instance, the current Tax Code in the US, there is a thing, which states that when a person inherits money, if it's over a certain amount, they must pay taxes on it. Now, I'm not here to argue on whether it's a good thing or not, or whether the amounts and thresholds are right or wrong, but most sane, rational people would call this an "inheritance tax" - but opponents of this tax, the US Republicans, are people with deep pockets, making large campaign contributions, and expensive ads targeting broad population segments. These ads label this "thing" as a "Death Tax". That carries a lot of negative baggage. Who decided what to call this "thing"? The people? What a joke. That's just an example, maybe not even a good one,
How about the term "Liberal"? In US English, it means roughly, a person whose political beliefs are in favor of government oversight, intervention, and control, but in Europe, a "Liberal" -(now often referred to as Neoliberal) is a person who is in favor of Liberalization of laws constraining business - or basically, the opposite of what it means in America. I'm not sure how that arose, but the Republicans have successfully made "Liberal" a dirty word. How about Computer standards? Who decided what "DNS" stands for?
(Domain Name Services - or Digital Nervous System?)
or "SMS"
(Storage Management Services - or System Management Services)-
Maybe there are more examples?
Yes, English language is probably one of the most rich and diverse (considering the elements of Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, it contains) in existence, and these elements from other languages have served mostly to enrich it further, in a Borg-like way, but without "purity" guidance, there is a great deal of potential for perversion.
Exactly.
Just as TCP/IP has become the "language" computers speak to communicate worldwide on the internet, those peripheral components that sit in front of the monitor (ie. YOU), will learn to communicate in a common language as well. Colloquialisms, as memes, will spread and homogenize. Ever visit Atlanta, Georgia? Orlando, Florida? Orlando has a LOT of former Northerners. To hear people talk, you'd think you were in Ohio. Of course, in Atlanta, it's a bit different.
What we're talking about is a STANDARD here, like TCP/IP. Let's all give thanks to whomever we give thanks to, that a corporation doesn't control it (like Java or MSHTML), otherwise, every sentance every person speaks would have to end with (TM). Wouldn't that suck?
Well, if you read just that first little book of the Bible, there's a story in there that languages were created (and splintered and fragmented) for a reason: to prevent us from all working together towards a common goal.
Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
Just the horrid image in my mind of a Domino's Pizza logo across the surface of the moon, makes me consider; gee, that God dude was a pretty smart guy.
Don Quixote
What I think the "problem" is, is we are in a weird time in human history.
With this whole "internet" thing, and computers, and nanotechnology, and the space-race, we've had the unfortunate illusion that things in Science have to develop at an ever-accelerating pace. Certainly Moore's law was a huge contributor. (but is it even valid anymore? P IV anyone?)
But the reality is, maybe the pace does increase for certain fields, at certain points, but overall, we've only known about atoms for about 100 years. Until we, as a species, are financially robust enough to have the luxury to send a person to Mars, we have to make all of these indirect observations, and even when we have direct observations, the data are going to be interpreted differently by different people, and the scientific community is going to have to do as they traditionally have done, duke it out until the most likely theory based on the evidence is most generally accepted. And the crackpots, vitally important to this process, will accept the others, and continue to attempt to prove them. Yes, there's a bit of rivalry and competition, and spite going on, because people who only live 80 or so years are trying to get in and get their funding (either public or private) within their lifespans. That's to be expected. That's why we're getting all these questionable and contradictory press releases. But the reality is, until more and better observations come in, and more debate happens, it's going to go back and forth, and the truth isn't going to come next year with the Pentium 5, it's going to come in 50 years with the first manned Mars mission (I'm being very optimistic). Be patient. Maybe you'll be dead by then, but did poor Galileo live to see Voyager snap pictures of Jupiter's moons? It's a tough reality.
The point is not indefensible, and the reason is known. I'm arguing the point because it's true. check out my user ID#. I've been a member of slashdot long enough to know that though there's a large Linux faction on Slashdot, I'm not stupid enough to believe that Slashdot is a Linux site, or even a Linux-focussed site. Since I've joined, user ID's have gone from 4-digit to 6-digit. Most of those are Linux users. I'm not arguing that. But there sure are a lot of Win/BSD/Mac people here - they are a minority, but not an insignificant one. Lots of news on Slashdot pertains to Linux, but certainly not the majority, and the majority of Linux articles certainly aren't strictly about Linux. They're mostly peripherally related.
Personally, I don't even run or like Linux, but I am interested in many of the topics Linux people find interesting, because they pertain to:
Unix
Computer Industry/Technology
Internet
and the ramifications of the ongoing computer revolution, whether they're business, social, political, or trivial. It's all neat stuff, stuff that matters. To all of us. Not just Linux-heads.
hell, why bother with Linux at all then, why don't you just run Cygwin on NT, and get all the unix tools that way?
I'm sorry I unintentionally implied that ALL Win users were too stupid to use Linux. that wasn't my intention, I was making a demographic observation - that is MOST Win users. And by "technical fortitude" I don't mean ONLY smarts, I mean, ability to reconcile the problems they may encounter in their work environments (for instance, I CAN'T use Linux at work, because it's not a supported-by-IT platform for one, and two- many of the apps I need to use don't have clients on Linux (problem-tracking database, Outlook calendar for meetings, etc. ad nauseum).
But if I could, I would (or actually, I would probably use BSD). Because NT *does* crash and do weird things on me all the frickin time. It does get tiresome after 8 years.
"fiduciary duty" is just another way of saying: "I don't get paid to listen to my conscience."
Until people figure out that there's a difference between earning enough money for "survial" and "top of the line Lexus for my 16-year old daughter, only the best", stuff like this will just go on and on, not just in the chip industry.
Intel has a pretty good marketing department behind them, I can't figure out why the hell they don't try and spend
some money educating the masses on what really pushes chip performance
because an informed consumer is a monopolist's worst enemy.
If Intel educated the masses, they'd all buy Alphas, PPCs, or SPARC machines.
hey, the bezel on my $20,000 Sun E250 sheared off out of the box.