I can explain the whole problem really easily. There's two parts of qwest: Qwest the ISP, and Qwest the DSL line provider. If you are another ISP's customer, and are talking to qwest the ISP, you are screwed. They will either switch you to qwest for your ISP, or tell you to go screw yourself.
I worked at qwest for a year and a half doing tech. Sucks, but that's what they do. you would think they'd give you the number to call qwest the line provider, but no, they want to do it the hard way.
Re:Tech Support Nightmare Site for Compaq Computer
on
Orwellian Tech Support
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Corporate support vs. user support is a whole different ball game. Corpies usually have several things going for them:
It's an IT tech calling, not joe user.
When they call, they have their corp support contract info in front of them.
They didn't do something stupid to the machine, like, say, jam a pen in the power supply fan to get it to stop buzzing.
This makes it real easy to go "oh, ok, it broke, you need an RMA, did you do anything like drop it kick it spill water on it etc" they say "nope, just died", you go, ok rma. Thanks!
That's corp support, in a nutshell. Every once in a while you get a big issue, but it usually affects a lot more people than just one, so you fix 50 computers at once, not just joe user's screwed up mouse port.
Because in my 7 years of doing tech, I can tell you that ~15% of the generic home users who buy a new sound card go home, pop open the case, and jam the card in with the machine turned on. Opps. Not the manufacturer's fault.
another ~10% don't plug it all the way in, and then expect you to fix it for them.
Another ~5% snap some component off the motherboard, or break the motherboard while jamming the card in. They expect you to replace the board for free.
How are ANY of these scenarios the fault of the people who made the computer?
Well, the question here is not whether it's been fixed in IE 6, it's whether it's been fixed in IE 5.5. Anyone with Windows 98SE down cannot upgrade to IE6. It won't run on 98SE or below, where IE 5.5 can.
I'm sorry, you seem to be under the missaprehension that it's your hardware that is having software installed on it. Take a look at the paperwork you got with your xbox. If it says you actually bought the hardware, not just the use thereof, I'll be amazed. You bought a license to use microsoft's xbox hardware, just like you are buying a license to use microsoft's xbox games, in the manner of their choosing, not however you feel like. If you bought the hardware, then modding it would not be illegal. it would be you modifying your own hardware for personal use. Instead, it's you modifying someone else's hardware to circumvent their protection methods. Think about it....
You don't own windows, you don't own office, you don't own your xbox, and you don't own the games you play on it.
While I agree with you, the ISP has nothing to do with the packets, either. They provide a mail server, and maybe a news server. They lease the ports for people to dialup with from a large data services provider, and do the accounting. That's it.
I used to work for a large ISP, and that's all they did. Accounting.
FYI: Most ISPS lease their access through providers throughout the united states, including (but not limited to) the following: Broadwing Flexpops PSInet UUNET Sp rint Level3 ELI USPOPS These are just a few of the many companies that allow you to lease their banks of dialup terminal servers. You can lease as many ports as you need in the area, and if service expands, you can just lease more ports. If service declines, lease less. You would have to work with the company to setup two types of ports, unfiltered and filtered, and then have two seperate dialup numbers for each area so that people could choose which they wanted. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe most of the providers in that list won't allow you to do that, because if you setup filtering for a specific netblock, it means anyone who dialed in with a different isp and got that netblock would be filtered as well. You could statically assign the netblock to that series of ports, but that's more expensive, since you are now leasing static IP space as well.
my personal fav about this article is the part about rob banging a donkey. Please don't modify article text if you are going to post it, that way when they decide their copyright has been voilated it doesn't get into a "how much we modified it" argument.
Someone mod the parent up. He's 100% right... I just finished reading the article, and it states quite clearly that the author of the document can decide whether or not to use DRM, expiration, etc. All they are doing is adding features. Sure, if someone decided to be a moron, they could make a document that dies 3 days after sending and won't work if you are using openoffice, but for the most part, if you want to distribute it, you are going to make it non-drm and expiration free. I can see this being useful for companies that have a lot of IP theft, though. Perhaps the open office group needs to look into that.
I would say that having to have a DRM server on the lan is a bad idea. It means that if your server goes down, opps, no more documents.
So what happens in the Court trial? The SCO lawyers parade up and state clearly that the GPL is invalid because it gives permission to copy, which copyright law doesn't, and then the other lawyers show the judge the law, and the judge does terrible things to sco's lawyers? I just don't see them being that stupid. There must be more to this than what we are seeing.
Hm. Well, I just took a look, and the New York Public Library has over 50 million volumes in catalog, so it'll take a while before the ebook people manage to make a dent.
Currently available on the internet, if you know where to look: 32000 fiction novels (Non-pulp) 15000 pulp. over 10000 non-fiction books. Lots of romance, young adult. Many PG+ rated books. I can't even THINK of how many. I would estimate, and this is just a rough estimate, that there are over 100,000+ books scanned, OCR'd, or stolen from the publisher in PDF form and redistributed as ebooks. I dunno about you, but to me, 100k seems like a decent number. The local library district has a collection of 500k volumes, spread over 10 libraries throughout a 200 mile area. You can easily fit the entire 100k collection on 20 CD's, or about 4 dvds. in relative numbers, this means I can hold 1/5th the information capacity of 150k square feet of library space in my laptop. If they were available as e-books, I could have the total information available in all those libraries and carry it in my coat pocket.
I bought rayovac rechargeable alkalines when I was shopping for PDA batteries, and they worked great until about the 100th charge (which is what the package said they would do, in a rayovac charger) at which point performance dropped like a rock and they provided enough power to run my pda for about an hour. Please understand that unlike most PDAs, mine is an ebook reader, and I use it non-stop, not here and there to look up an address or IRDA a business card.
Then I bought NIMH rechargeables (1000 MAh) and they have been working flawlessly for about a year now (max 1000 charges) and I doubt I'll have to replace them until next year. I use triple A batteries.
Personally, I see more of a rise in CD-R media sales... in my little group of friends, we have diverse tastes, and if I download 700 mb of heavy metal, and 700 mb of jazz, and a buddy downloads 700 mb of new age, and someone else downloads 700 mb of country, we can pass it around on cd for way less than the cost per month of bandwith. Besides, most people download and share what's popular, so I could easily see people swapping 10-15 cds of mp3's back and forth to get around this minor inconvenience. Those who have 400 movies burned to cd would pass them (or at least copies) around, and the data would still flow, just not over the highly expensive internet connection.
Unless they make low-qual versions of the songs (I'm talking 56k, low enough that nobody would want it) available for free, then you still end up paying whatever (even if it's only a buck) for each song, and you have no idea if you'll like it or not.
In addition to this, everyone who says they want the songs DRM free, there's a problem with that.... you know that the first thing everyone who pays a buck a song would do is put it in their shared folder and let it fly. same songs, same quality, for free on kazaa, imesh, etc = low money for apple = goes out of business quickly.
I'm not saying DRM is good, I'm just saying that it may, in the long term, be necessary.
Netlux They have some decent laptops for cheap. For weight, I seriously doubt that in any way you are going to beat an ibook. You will have to decide, is the size and cost going to beat the weight and possibility of the MS tax. The netlux machines work well, my brother uses one on a constant basis, but it's really up to you.
The local theater here was only going to do 3, then the first day sold out a week before the movie started running. They VERY quickly boosted it to 3 theaters, 3 showings a day. The lines just for LOTR filled the entry way to overflowing.
Honestly, the best thing about this movie was that they didn't try to do the whole set of scenes. They did the ones that (at least I) would like to see on the big screen, and left out all the in-between stuff. This movie was REALLY for readers of the books, because honestly, without having read the book beforehand, this would have been a bunch of disjointed shorts that made very little sense. I liked it better than the first one. They tried to do everything, and failed to capture the magic. This one, they tried to do a few things right, and they did. of course (and I hate to say it) the end of the movie was pure cheese. A sequence of students clapping for hagrid? Most of them are scared of him, and the rest could fscking care less. That's all I have to say.
Here's "The Deal". I work at a technical support shop, and I have a few things that might help you make sense of tech support, as it is now.
First of all, 90-95% of the people who purchase or use our product never call us. It's the 5-10% who do who use up all of our time, and some of those people call us repeatedly, up to 5-10 times a day. These people may not be stupid, it may be that they have a computer they've used and abused until it doesn't work anymore. I notice it's been 7 years since windows 95 came out, which seems like a long time, and it is. There are a lot of people who've been running thier 95 machine since then, and have never restored it, upgraded it, or done ANYTHING to make sure it keeps running. They change thier oil every 3k miles, but assume something they paid 2000$ for 7 years ago will keep working like clockwork. That cuts out about 1/2 of the calls I take. The other half are the idiots who don't understand that you have to be able to click with the right mouse button, double click, click and drag, and copy-and-paste before getting on the internet, becoming a multimedia developer, or programming. Sounds harsh, right? Not at all. I deal with the same people 3-4 times a day, and call them back 3-4 times, just so that as I walk them through step-by-step, they feel like someone cares that they can't figure out how to dialup, then double click internet explorer.
As to outsourcing: I used to work for a VERY large outsourcer. They hired just about anyone that could pass thier very easy tech test, and then trained them. They didn't train them to do troubleshooting, they trained them to follow scripts. They trained them to follow a flowchart designed by someone NOT in the tech support department, but in management. That's how they work, and make money. They spend a lot of time developing things that don't help, especially when, in a lot of cases, they don't even give the techs the product, and show them what ACTUALLY happens when some of the errors that they know about happen. Companies I'd stay away from include Qwest DSL, who, if you know what you are doing 100%, you'll be fine. Dell and AT&T Broadband, I'd stay away from. 100% scripts, and they don't know what they are doing. 3com: Good company, they let the techs use the products, but they've cut so much from support they are almost dangerous. Companies I've liked? HP. They give the products to the techs, and they make them LEARN the product, and be able to take it apart and put it together again. Adobe: They give thier techs all the software, and tell em to take it home to learn with. They aren't graphic artists, but they can usually figure out what you want if you need help. That's about it for now... If anyone has any questions about outsourcing or anything, I'd love to answer. Karth
since the water beneath the waves does not move, a tether far enough down with enough weight would keep it "in the area" afaik, but, inas. (I'm not a scientist.)
it looks like this lawyer from lawguru has a real answer: If you want to avoid all sorts of possible legal stupidity, stick to short, factual, and mostly useless information.
I used to work for a large (25k+ employees) company, and I can testify as to their management theory:
The first task for a manager is to delegate. They learn that they should delegate tasks to other people so they can get them completed in a shorter time. They end up delegating their managerial duties to other people. These other people then are managers, and learn the first rule of management.... Delegate, Delegate, Delegate. So it goes on. Everyone delegates, they end up creating more and more layers of management, and guess what? The people at the bottom get screwed into doing things that aren't thier job, or are forced to get 12 levels of approval just to get something small done.
Well, my parents raised me to be "sensible, good-natured, and morally secure", and so did the parents of many of the people that I no longer consider my friends.
The same "sensible, good-natured, and morally secure" people are the ones that snuck into theaters, got people they knew to buy them alcohol, and got in street fights in the neighboring cities.
Slashdot Mirror
I can explain the whole problem really easily. There's two parts of qwest: Qwest the ISP, and Qwest the DSL line provider. If you are another ISP's customer, and are talking to qwest the ISP, you are screwed. They will either switch you to qwest for your ISP, or tell you to go screw yourself.
I worked at qwest for a year and a half doing tech. Sucks, but that's what they do. you would think they'd give you the number to call qwest the line provider, but no, they want to do it the hard way.
Corporate support vs. user support is a whole different ball game. Corpies usually have several things going for them:
It's an IT tech calling, not joe user.
When they call, they have their corp support contract info in front of them.
They didn't do something stupid to the machine, like, say, jam a pen in the power supply fan to get it to stop buzzing.
This makes it real easy to go "oh, ok, it broke, you need an RMA, did you do anything like drop it kick it spill water on it etc" they say "nope, just died", you go, ok rma. Thanks!
That's corp support, in a nutshell. Every once in a while you get a big issue, but it usually affects a lot more people than just one, so you fix 50 computers at once, not just joe user's screwed up mouse port.
Because in my 7 years of doing tech, I can tell you that ~15% of the generic home users who buy a new sound card go home, pop open the case, and jam the card in with the machine turned on. Opps. Not the manufacturer's fault.
another ~10% don't plug it all the way in, and then expect you to fix it for them.
Another ~5% snap some component off the motherboard, or break the motherboard while jamming the card in. They expect you to replace the board for free.
How are ANY of these scenarios the fault of the people who made the computer?
agh. You're right. It's been a year since I took a technical support call, forgive me. Win95 through OSR4 cannot run IE 6. 98+ can.
Well, the question here is not whether it's been fixed in IE 6, it's whether it's been fixed in IE 5.5. Anyone with Windows 98SE down cannot upgrade to IE6. It won't run on 98SE or below, where IE 5.5 can.
I'm sorry, you seem to be under the missaprehension that it's your hardware that is having software installed on it. Take a look at the paperwork you got with your xbox. If it says you actually bought the hardware, not just the use thereof, I'll be amazed. You bought a license to use microsoft's xbox hardware, just like you are buying a license to use microsoft's xbox games, in the manner of their choosing, not however you feel like. If you bought the hardware, then modding it would not be illegal. it would be you modifying your own hardware for personal use. Instead, it's you modifying someone else's hardware to circumvent their protection methods. Think about it....
You don't own windows, you don't own office, you don't own your xbox, and you don't own the games you play on it.
While I agree with you, the ISP has nothing to do with the packets, either. They provide a mail server, and maybe a news server. They lease the ports for people to dialup with from a large data services provider, and do the accounting. That's it.
I used to work for a large ISP, and that's all they did. Accounting.
FYI: Most ISPS lease their access through providers throughout the united states, including (but not limited to) the following:p rint
Broadwing
Flexpops
PSInet
UUNET
S
Level3
ELI
USPOPS
These are just a few of the many companies that allow you to lease their banks of dialup terminal servers. You can lease as many ports as you need in the area, and if service expands, you can just lease more ports. If service declines, lease less. You would have to work with the company to setup two types of ports, unfiltered and filtered, and then have two seperate dialup numbers for each area so that people could choose which they wanted. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe most of the providers in that list won't allow you to do that, because if you setup filtering for a specific netblock, it means anyone who dialed in with a different isp and got that netblock would be filtered as well. You could statically assign the netblock to that series of ports, but that's more expensive, since you are now leasing static IP space as well.
my personal fav about this article is the part about rob banging a donkey. Please don't modify article text if you are going to post it, that way when they decide their copyright has been voilated it doesn't get into a "how much we modified it" argument.
Someone mod the parent up. He's 100% right... I just finished reading the article, and it states quite clearly that the author of the document can decide whether or not to use DRM, expiration, etc. All they are doing is adding features. Sure, if someone decided to be a moron, they could make a document that dies 3 days after sending and won't work if you are using openoffice, but for the most part, if you want to distribute it, you are going to make it non-drm and expiration free. I can see this being useful for companies that have a lot of IP theft, though. Perhaps the open office group needs to look into that.
I would say that having to have a DRM server on the lan is a bad idea. It means that if your server goes down, opps, no more documents.
So what happens in the Court trial? The SCO lawyers parade up and state clearly that the GPL is invalid because it gives permission to copy, which copyright law doesn't, and then the other lawyers show the judge the law, and the judge does terrible things to sco's lawyers? I just don't see them being that stupid. There must be more to this than what we are seeing.
Hm. Well, I just took a look, and the New York Public Library has over 50 million volumes in catalog, so it'll take a while before the ebook people manage to make a dent.
Currently available on the internet, if you know where to look: 32000 fiction novels (Non-pulp) 15000 pulp. over 10000 non-fiction books. Lots of romance, young adult. Many PG+ rated books. I can't even THINK of how many. I would estimate, and this is just a rough estimate, that there are over 100,000+ books scanned, OCR'd, or stolen from the publisher in PDF form and redistributed as ebooks. I dunno about you, but to me, 100k seems like a decent number. The local library district has a collection of 500k volumes, spread over 10 libraries throughout a 200 mile area. You can easily fit the entire 100k collection on 20 CD's, or about 4 dvds. in relative numbers, this means I can hold 1/5th the information capacity of 150k square feet of library space in my laptop. If they were available as e-books, I could have the total information available in all those libraries and carry it in my coat pocket.
I bought rayovac rechargeable alkalines when I was shopping for PDA batteries, and they worked great until about the 100th charge (which is what the package said they would do, in a rayovac charger) at which point performance dropped like a rock and they provided enough power to run my pda for about an hour. Please understand that unlike most PDAs, mine is an ebook reader, and I use it non-stop, not here and there to look up an address or IRDA a business card.
Then I bought NIMH rechargeables (1000 MAh) and they have been working flawlessly for about a year now (max 1000 charges) and I doubt I'll have to replace them until next year. I use triple A batteries.
Personally, I see more of a rise in CD-R media sales... in my little group of friends, we have diverse tastes, and if I download 700 mb of heavy metal, and 700 mb of jazz, and a buddy downloads 700 mb of new age, and someone else downloads 700 mb of country, we can pass it around on cd for way less than the cost per month of bandwith. Besides, most people download and share what's popular, so I could easily see people swapping 10-15 cds of mp3's back and forth to get around this minor inconvenience. Those who have 400 movies burned to cd would pass them (or at least copies) around, and the data would still flow, just not over the highly expensive internet connection.
Unless they make low-qual versions of the songs (I'm talking 56k, low enough that nobody would want it) available for free, then you still end up paying whatever (even if it's only a buck) for each song, and you have no idea if you'll like it or not.
In addition to this, everyone who says they want the songs DRM free, there's a problem with that.... you know that the first thing everyone who pays a buck a song would do is put it in their shared folder and let it fly. same songs, same quality, for free on kazaa, imesh, etc = low money for apple = goes out of business quickly.
I'm not saying DRM is good, I'm just saying that it may, in the long term, be necessary.
Netlux
They have some decent laptops for cheap. For weight, I seriously doubt that in any way you are going to beat an ibook. You will have to decide, is the size and cost going to beat the weight and possibility of the MS tax.
The netlux machines work well, my brother uses one on a constant basis, but it's really up to you.
The local theater here was only going to do 3, then the first day sold out a week before the movie started running. They VERY quickly boosted it to 3 theaters, 3 showings a day. The lines just for LOTR filled the entry way to overflowing.
Honestly, the best thing about this movie was that they didn't try to do the whole set of scenes. They did the ones that (at least I) would like to see on the big screen, and left out all the in-between stuff. This movie was REALLY for readers of the books, because honestly, without having read the book beforehand, this would have been a bunch of disjointed shorts that made very little sense.
I liked it better than the first one. They tried to do everything, and failed to capture the magic. This one, they tried to do a few things right, and they did. of course (and I hate to say it) the end of the movie was pure cheese. A sequence of students clapping for hagrid? Most of them are scared of him, and the rest could fscking care less.
That's all I have to say.
heh, it's called USENET. do a quick search for mame.
Here's "The Deal". I work at a technical support shop, and I have a few things that might help you make sense of tech support, as it is now.
First of all, 90-95% of the people who purchase or use our product never call us. It's the 5-10% who do who use up all of our time, and some of those people call us repeatedly, up to 5-10 times a day. These people may not be stupid, it may be that they have a computer they've used and abused until it doesn't work anymore. I notice it's been 7 years since windows 95 came out, which seems like a long time, and it is. There are a lot of people who've been running thier 95 machine since then, and have never restored it, upgraded it, or done ANYTHING to make sure it keeps running. They change thier oil every 3k miles, but assume something they paid 2000$ for 7 years ago will keep working like clockwork. That cuts out about 1/2 of the calls I take. The other half are the idiots who don't understand that you have to be able to click with the right mouse button, double click, click and drag, and copy-and-paste before getting on the internet, becoming a multimedia developer, or programming. Sounds harsh, right? Not at all. I deal with the same people 3-4 times a day, and call them back 3-4 times, just so that as I walk them through step-by-step, they feel like someone cares that they can't figure out how to dialup, then double click internet explorer.
As to outsourcing:
I used to work for a VERY large outsourcer. They hired just about anyone that could pass thier very easy tech test, and then trained them. They didn't train them to do troubleshooting, they trained them to follow scripts. They trained them to follow a flowchart designed by someone NOT in the tech support department, but in management. That's how they work, and make money. They spend a lot of time developing things that don't help, especially when, in a lot of cases, they don't even give the techs the product, and show them what ACTUALLY happens when some of the errors that they know about happen. Companies I'd stay away from include Qwest DSL, who, if you know what you are doing 100%, you'll be fine. Dell and AT&T Broadband, I'd stay away from. 100% scripts, and they don't know what they are doing. 3com: Good company, they let the techs use the products, but they've cut so much from support they are almost dangerous. Companies I've liked?
HP. They give the products to the techs, and they make them LEARN the product, and be able to take it apart and put it together again. Adobe: They give thier techs all the software, and tell em to take it home to learn with. They aren't graphic artists, but they can usually figure out what you want if you need help. That's about it for now... If anyone has any questions about outsourcing or anything, I'd love to answer.
Karth
since the water beneath the waves does not move, a tether far enough down with enough weight would keep it "in the area" afaik, but, inas. (I'm not a scientist.)
it looks like this lawyer from lawguru has a real answer: If you want to avoid all sorts of possible legal stupidity, stick to short, factual, and mostly useless information.
7 01 8
http://www.lawguru.com/cgi/bbs/mesg.cgi?i=77816
I used to work for a large (25k+ employees) company, and I can testify as to their management theory:
The first task for a manager is to delegate. They learn that they should delegate tasks to other people so they can get them completed in a shorter time. They end up delegating their managerial duties to other people. These other people then are managers, and learn the first rule of management.... Delegate, Delegate, Delegate. So it goes on. Everyone delegates, they end up creating more and more layers of management, and guess what? The people at the bottom get screwed into doing things that aren't thier job, or are forced to get 12 levels of approval just to get something small done.
Karth
Well, my parents raised me to be "sensible, good-natured, and morally secure", and so did the parents of many of the people that I no longer consider my friends.
The same "sensible, good-natured, and morally secure" people are the ones that snuck into theaters, got people they knew to buy them alcohol, and got in street fights in the neighboring cities.