My favorite encounter (on behalf of the M.I.L. whose phone they called) was about 45 minutes. The pattern from previous calls is they want you to type "(win)+R" to then launch event viewer, because OMG all the errors they'll show you.
So I stymied them for over five minutes when I explained my keyboard didn't have that little windows key on it. Oh, yes, I know what it looks like, my neighbor's PC has one, but I don't.
Then after some mention of "this thing is awfully slow, I'll have to restart it" (setting the phone down) was more minutes of his life gone. Then accidentally hung up half way through a sentence. They actually called back. Then allegedly the kid was having a meltdown, very sorry sir I have to check, but I'll be right back, and I do want these problems taken care of. Et cetera.
The jig was up after I "tried" to download their remote control software, but my (IE, allegedly) said site could not be found. (I was instead googling the error message to simulate a 'dialup modem not connected' scenario that they'd have to walk me through. You know, stay a step ahead.)
Finally Dave's "manager" cursed at me and said that I had ample time to get this to work and that I was wasting their time. A realization that was honestly 30 minutes too late. (Oh, no calls since.)
Was cold-called by someone from Google, so I entertained the invite to interview, partially on a whim. I agreed I would not discuss specifics of interview process or questions, which I'll abide by, by suffice to the theoretical "design a system that..." questions and "how would you..." questions I did fairly well on and felt rather confident about. The detail coding component ended up drawing a question I wasn't all that prepped for (not being something that for me has ever come up in long years of working). So feedback was that due to the coding question performance, it was a no-offer. Which was fine -- after finally seeing SV area in comparison to where I'm happy with in fly-over territory (partly the area, especially cost-of-housing), I probably wouldn't have accepted anyway. No harm, no foul; just not my thing. Still, it wasn't a terribly great assessment of what I know and bring to the table. Local market does the same thing./shrug
My own team here, we tend to assign a homework question with semi-vague requirements, and then grade on what their experience taught them to also include, in addition to implementation specifics, with a follow-up Q&A... this seems to work.
One rather minor thing Oracle tells us they'll add to a future update of MySQL is to capture an important piece of data missing in the binary log files. BInlogs currently don't track which db user is issuing DDL or DML statements, so filtering out changes against this is not currently possible. Admittedly not a large use case scenario, but for us it is an "almost-blocker" for some replication work. (Our source systems need to occasionally purge material, and we don't want the purges replicated to the destination. Oracle sales sold us on doing filtering by the db user before we found out the binlogs don't even have that info.) Hopefully any open source fork (MariaDB or otherwise) picks this up or stays compatible.
I mentioned elsewhere (AC, alas) that our company, when it came time to re-license, found it cheaper to [decide to] move a couple/few hundred commercial MySQL installations to Oracle SE instead. This may be a "win" for us in the long term since the central data warehouse is itself Oracle EE. Maybe it speaks to a cash grab for the existing MySQL installs... but maybe it speaks to a desire to push all our installs to their flagship DB.
And we're generally aware of MariaDB, but it didn't get much consideration.
Something that contributed heavily to my PVE guild (which did casual 10-man raids for lulz) and my standing raid crew (25-man, progression-minded) was the raid lockout system change they made going just prior to launching Cata. Those two groups of raiders overlapped by about 6 people -- people who enjoyed playing the same toon in both settings. The "flexible" lockout system killed this arrangement: any toon could only kill one boss -- be it in 10-man or 25-man groups -- one time per week. (Fail.) So our powerhouse players could not also help out in the casual guild runs. That the progression raids sometimes opted to extend lock outs into the next week to keep working a particular boss also contributed. So with players feeling like they were being forced to choose which groups of friends they wanted to raid with in any given week... they chose neither. With the writing on the wall, the guild fell apart, cannibalized by Rift and LOTRO. And the same story happened with some of the remaining 19/25ths of the progression raid crew, leaving stragglers like me with no team to run 10's or 25's with in Cata. I cancelled my account as much by attrition as disinterest in 30+ minute queues to re-run the same couple dungeons each day as a filler. (But we expect we'll regroup as soon as SW:TOR comes out, if it's even half decent.)
One of my accounts also got a message from Brookstone a day or two ago.
Re:DocBook - like HTML 1.0, only dumber
on
DocBook 5
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· Score: 2, Informative
One of the big reasons is that HTML lacks semantic meaning beyond simple paragraph constructs. Documentation-oriented markup languages (of which I'm more familiar with DITA) and schemas can seem arbitrarily complicated to a casual observer, granted; but having an identifier that clarifies "this" paragraph being an instruction that should be executed by the user, and "that" paragraph being merely an example can allow for some rules-based (automated) processing to exist between authorship and production that wouldn't be possible lacking some notion of the semantic purposes of a random collection of raw paragraphs.
No he has a fair point, unless you only meant getting a console to work. I bailed out on Linux-at-home when I got tired of getting drivers/kernel modules/etc working for: full-hardware modems (let alone soft-modems), soundcards (creative-brand at that), network cards (various iterations of major brands over years), usb sockets, printers (at least doing more than 80x25 b&w), video cards (don't get ppl started), cd burners/combo drives, and on and on.
Interesting... considering I found playing WOW on a 1st gen PPC Mac Mini (w/ 512MB, granted) to be at least acceptable (not stellar, but acceptable) for anything except a major city zone.
I can't help but be amused at the thought of God, Newton, and Einstein sitting together "up there, somewhere" looking down on this little science experiment, chuckling at how we having it all wrong, and then thinking, just to fsck with us, they'll go along with our theory for a little while. *POIT!* (vacuum disappears and reappears), to which they have a long, hearty, teary-eyed laugh at our expense and dare us to make *that* make sense.;-)
While semi-OT to submission (Comcast here sucks as badly as anywhere -- just ask my co-worker whose triple-play install cost him a load of money and misery beyond what he expected) I had a recent run-in with Verizon's 'spectacular' customer service in the Houston/Clear Lake (TX) area myself. We had local phone + internet through them at an apartment. Then we bought a house (actually about a mile away, not that it matters a bit). We phoned them ahead of time and said we needed "all our services transferred to $new_address on $move_date" and they said fine. We move in and have local phone, but no internet. They screwed the pooch on it so badly that the reps all told me "we'll have to cancel the old service and re-order it. it'll take a couple of weeks to get the order to go through... no it cannot be expedited." No amount of being nice or being a jerk on the phone with them mattered. (My wife/I were on the phone over three hours total dealing with this, keeping track of names/and time on the clock.) Finally we gave in. They were just barely nice enough to comp us a free month of dialup (almost useless... I'd finally eliminated dialup modems from the computers) but of course we had to be sure to phone them back to cancel it. When "the package" came in a couple weeks later, they'd shipped and billed me for *ANOTHER* DSL modem, even though the one from just one year back worked just fine. (And if we happened to be using that old account for e-mail, we'd have had to do the usual song-and-dance with the whole family; thank God our primary access point was google mail.) I just didn't have the time or nerves left to deal with them, so I ate the cost of a new service + new modem... but I'll *NEVER* forget *OR* forgive them.
Since you sound like you're trying to buck the majority around here (and no problem with that) you mind sharing where in the country (city/state) you're in? Here in the Houston, TX area, people all generally loathe dealing with them in any form.
And that version will probably also (still) have the annoying dialogs as well:
"A spooky action has occurred. Cancel or allow?"
Re:still need human eyes
on
PMD Applied
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· Score: 1
agreed... and not only those sorts of things, but peers with more time invested into a non-trivial-sized project can also spot where you reinvented the wheel (due to unfamiliarity with the code base) and where, thinking down the road, a refactor now will save tons of time later. These are the sorts of things you do code/peer reviews for.
Counter-anecdote, then: I installed the iPod s/w on my own XP machine and things ran smoothly and flawlessly. Just as smoothly as it all runs on my Mac, in fact. No issues of any kind. Sorry you(r friend) had problems, but maybe -- just maybe -- there was more involved in your/his case.
Well, then, boo-hoo to the retailers (and manufacturers?), but they're still too expensive for many people. I make above-median income in a median cost-of-living area, and I can't see paying four figures on a tv just to pay three figures for digital cable (etc) service... notably when I'm still *more* than happy with a three figure tv and two figure analog cable service.
I disagree. I already can think in rather generic, algorithmic terms. If I'm suddenly backed against the wall to get a code from language A into language B, I'd want to see how the language mechanics worked... whether its 'int' or 'integer', how functions get declared/called, how multidimensioned arrays are created/manipulated... etc. While it might be better to have a pocket reference for every language available on a desk somewhere, this sort of site means I might not have to bother even with a pocket reference: I look up a task close-ish to what I need and see how it maps from, say, Java to Perl. Kinda like how the rosetta stone itself worked.
... and some government agency tells people not to use MSIE either. That's all well and good in the theoretical world of perfect knowledge, education, and alternatives. But, when shopping around for a job, if some HR department flunky says they only accept Word formatted files, you either send them a Word file somehow (and offer something better in addition) or you miss out on what might be a great place to work simply on the account of some file-format principles. Some people are free to think the latter option is reasonable. I'm free to think that it's just moronic.
To the extent that it matters (and I'm nicely employed now) it is/was the general IT market in the Houston, TX area. Companies and/or headhunter agencies... all wanted *.doc exclusively. Some of the online job post boards tended to prefer *.doc as well. Thankfully its been over a year since I've had to bother -- hopefully things are improving.
Want some fun? Fire up writer, type in a several paragraphs of random stuff. Use various heading levels to keep things organized. Now then: generate a table of contents. For extra fun, only allow one or two heading levels in the TOC. Then try making the TOC entries be hyperlinks to the material. Throw in some google searches (but not right away! that'd be cheating) and you're in a fun afternoon.
My shop uses OO.o (very nearly) exclusively. I'm a big fan of the general concept, its usage of "styles", and the odt file format. However, Writer's interface sucks just as soon as you dig into even the first level of dialog(s). I couldn't care less if the toolbar icons are pngs.
I do care that it took a team of us a few hours pouring through google and forums trying to see how to get a hyperlinkable table of contents keyed off of custom paragraph styles. The interface and the procedure are abysmally *not* intuitive -- it took drilling into dialogs in two completely unrelated parts of the main menu to get it set up, and when we were finished, it ultimately failed to give us what we wanted. (We had a TOC, but only the built-in styles were hyperlinked. great.) Not to mention the procedure for link-i-fying the TOC elements themselves: click the cursor in some empty 1-char wide text field, then click on a button labelled "LS", then click in a different 1-char wide text field, then click a button labelled "LE". Amazing this didn't occur to us.
There was some page-related property we wanted to change... "obviously" we need to right-click in a paragraph on that page and select "paragraph..." to get to the page property we needed. Go look for it in the page properties area where we all reasonably expected it to be? Absent.
When a document gets non-trivial in size, writer sometimes hurls and dies if just the wrong list item is deleted from just the wrong spot on just the wrong page -- not in any really repeatable way except it seems to hit us when editing around list items.
I'm being somewhat harsh with Writer given my experience with it over just the last year. We still use it b/c the price is right. Now whether Word or anything else is straightforward is another question (Word's reliability and compatibility may be an issue, but the operations, menus, and dialogs seem to be logically organized). But, you just can't say OO writer is "straightforward."
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats. I've offered sending to PDF several times trying to appeal to the unreliability of word version X being able to properly render word version y in various cases. Could be partly the HR employee familiarity, and it could be tools that know how to scan word docs (though scanning an OO.o writer document is infinitely more easy, being, basically, zipped plain text -- can't speak one way or the other about pdf files, but the spec is open enough, so I hear).
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite encounter (on behalf of the M.I.L. whose phone they called) was about 45 minutes. The pattern from previous calls is they want you to type "(win)+R" to then launch event viewer, because OMG all the errors they'll show you.
So I stymied them for over five minutes when I explained my keyboard didn't have that little windows key on it.
Oh, yes, I know what it looks like, my neighbor's PC has one, but I don't.
Then after some mention of "this thing is awfully slow, I'll have to restart it" (setting the phone down) was more minutes of his life gone. Then accidentally hung up half way through a sentence. They actually called back. Then allegedly the kid was having a meltdown, very sorry sir I have to check, but I'll be right back, and I do want these problems taken care of. Et cetera.
The jig was up after I "tried" to download their remote control software, but my (IE, allegedly) said site could not be found. (I was instead googling the error message to simulate a 'dialup modem not connected' scenario that they'd have to walk me through. You know, stay a step ahead.)
Finally Dave's "manager" cursed at me and said that I had ample time to get this to work and that I was wasting their time. A realization that was honestly 30 minutes too late. (Oh, no calls since.)
Was cold-called by someone from Google, so I entertained the invite to interview, partially on a whim. I agreed I would not discuss specifics of interview process or questions, which I'll abide by, by suffice to the theoretical "design a system that..." questions and "how would you..." questions I did fairly well on and felt rather confident about. The detail coding component ended up drawing a question I wasn't all that prepped for (not being something that for me has ever come up in long years of working). So feedback was that due to the coding question performance, it was a no-offer. Which was fine -- after finally seeing SV area in comparison to where I'm happy with in fly-over territory (partly the area, especially cost-of-housing), I probably wouldn't have accepted anyway. No harm, no foul; just not my thing. Still, it wasn't a terribly great assessment of what I know and bring to the table. Local market does the same thing. /shrug
My own team here, we tend to assign a homework question with semi-vague requirements, and then grade on what their experience taught them to also include, in addition to implementation specifics, with a follow-up Q&A ... this seems to work.
One rather minor thing Oracle tells us they'll add to a future update of MySQL is to capture an important piece of data missing in the binary log files. BInlogs currently don't track which db user is issuing DDL or DML statements, so filtering out changes against this is not currently possible. Admittedly not a large use case scenario, but for us it is an "almost-blocker" for some replication work. (Our source systems need to occasionally purge material, and we don't want the purges replicated to the destination. Oracle sales sold us on doing filtering by the db user before we found out the binlogs don't even have that info.) Hopefully any open source fork (MariaDB or otherwise) picks this up or stays compatible.
I mentioned elsewhere (AC, alas) that our company, when it came time to re-license, found it cheaper to [decide to] move a couple/few hundred commercial MySQL installations to Oracle SE instead. This may be a "win" for us in the long term since the central data warehouse is itself Oracle EE. Maybe it speaks to a cash grab for the existing MySQL installs ... but maybe it speaks to a desire to push all our installs to their flagship DB.
And we're generally aware of MariaDB, but it didn't get much consideration.
"Look at the irony settings in our cover song... they all go to eleven."
"Oh I see. And most cover songs only go up to ten."
"Exactly."
Something that contributed heavily to my PVE guild (which did casual 10-man raids for lulz) and my standing raid crew (25-man, progression-minded) was the raid lockout system change they made going just prior to launching Cata. Those two groups of raiders overlapped by about 6 people -- people who enjoyed playing the same toon in both settings. The "flexible" lockout system killed this arrangement: any toon could only kill one boss -- be it in 10-man or 25-man groups -- one time per week. (Fail.) So our powerhouse players could not also help out in the casual guild runs. That the progression raids sometimes opted to extend lock outs into the next week to keep working a particular boss also contributed. So with players feeling like they were being forced to choose which groups of friends they wanted to raid with in any given week ... they chose neither. With the writing on the wall, the guild fell apart, cannibalized by Rift and LOTRO. And the same story happened with some of the remaining 19/25ths of the progression raid crew, leaving stragglers like me with no team to run 10's or 25's with in Cata. I cancelled my account as much by attrition as disinterest in 30+ minute queues to re-run the same couple dungeons each day as a filler. (But we expect we'll regroup as soon as SW:TOR comes out, if it's even half decent.)
One of my accounts also got a message from Brookstone a day or two ago.
One of the big reasons is that HTML lacks semantic meaning beyond simple paragraph constructs. Documentation-oriented markup languages (of which I'm more familiar with DITA) and schemas can seem arbitrarily complicated to a casual observer, granted; but having an identifier that clarifies "this" paragraph being an instruction that should be executed by the user, and "that" paragraph being merely an example can allow for some rules-based (automated) processing to exist between authorship and production that wouldn't be possible lacking some notion of the semantic purposes of a random collection of raw paragraphs.
No he has a fair point, unless you only meant getting a console to work. I bailed out on Linux-at-home when I got tired of getting drivers/kernel modules/etc working for: full-hardware modems (let alone soft-modems), soundcards (creative-brand at that), network cards (various iterations of major brands over years), usb sockets, printers (at least doing more than 80x25 b&w), video cards (don't get ppl started), cd burners/combo drives, and on and on.
Interesting... considering I found playing WOW on a 1st gen PPC Mac Mini (w/ 512MB, granted) to be at least acceptable (not stellar, but acceptable) for anything except a major city zone.
I can't help but be amused at the thought of God, Newton, and Einstein sitting together "up there, somewhere" looking down on this little science experiment, chuckling at how we having it all wrong, and then thinking, just to fsck with us, they'll go along with our theory for a little while. *POIT!* (vacuum disappears and reappears), to which they have a long, hearty, teary-eyed laugh at our expense and dare us to make *that* make sense. ;-)
While semi-OT to submission (Comcast here sucks as badly as anywhere -- just ask my co-worker whose triple-play install cost him a load of money and misery beyond what he expected) I had a recent run-in with Verizon's 'spectacular' customer service in the Houston/Clear Lake (TX) area myself. We had local phone + internet through them at an apartment. Then we bought a house (actually about a mile away, not that it matters a bit). We phoned them ahead of time and said we needed "all our services transferred to $new_address on $move_date" and they said fine. We move in and have local phone, but no internet. They screwed the pooch on it so badly that the reps all told me "we'll have to cancel the old service and re-order it. it'll take a couple of weeks to get the order to go through ... no it cannot be expedited." No amount of being nice or being a jerk on the phone with them mattered. (My wife/I were on the phone over three hours total dealing with this, keeping track of names/and time on the clock.) Finally we gave in. They were just barely nice enough to comp us a free month of dialup (almost useless ... I'd finally eliminated dialup modems from the computers) but of course we had to be sure to phone them back to cancel it. When "the package" came in a couple weeks later, they'd shipped and billed me for *ANOTHER* DSL modem, even though the one from just one year back worked just fine. (And if we happened to be using that old account for e-mail, we'd have had to do the usual song-and-dance with the whole family; thank God our primary access point was google mail.) I just didn't have the time or nerves left to deal with them, so I ate the cost of a new service + new modem ... but I'll *NEVER* forget *OR* forgive them.
Since you sound like you're trying to buck the majority around here (and no problem with that) you mind sharing where in the country (city/state) you're in? Here in the Houston, TX area, people all generally loathe dealing with them in any form.
I may be biased here, but I completely concur.
And that version will probably also (still) have the annoying dialogs as well:
"A spooky action has occurred. Cancel or allow?"
agreed... and not only those sorts of things, but peers with more time invested into a non-trivial-sized project can also spot where you reinvented the wheel (due to unfamiliarity with the code base) and where, thinking down the road, a refactor now will save tons of time later. These are the sorts of things you do code/peer reviews for.
Guess that depends on whether you're paying the mortgage for the basement, or just living in it.
Counter-anecdote, then: I installed the iPod s/w on my own XP machine and things ran smoothly and flawlessly. Just as smoothly as it all runs on my Mac, in fact. No issues of any kind. Sorry you(r friend) had problems, but maybe -- just maybe -- there was more involved in your/his case.
Well, then, boo-hoo to the retailers (and manufacturers?), but they're still too expensive for many people. I make above-median income in a median cost-of-living area, and I can't see paying four figures on a tv just to pay three figures for digital cable (etc) service ... notably when I'm still *more* than happy with a three figure tv and two figure analog cable service.
I disagree. I already can think in rather generic, algorithmic terms. If I'm suddenly backed against the wall to get a code from language A into language B, I'd want to see how the language mechanics worked ... whether its 'int' or 'integer', how functions get declared/called, how multidimensioned arrays are created/manipulated... etc. While it might be better to have a pocket reference for every language available on a desk somewhere, this sort of site means I might not have to bother even with a pocket reference: I look up a task close-ish to what I need and see how it maps from, say, Java to Perl. Kinda like how the rosetta stone itself worked.
... and some government agency tells people not to use MSIE either. That's all well and good in the theoretical world of perfect knowledge, education, and alternatives. But, when shopping around for a job, if some HR department flunky says they only accept Word formatted files, you either send them a Word file somehow (and offer something better in addition) or you miss out on what might be a great place to work simply on the account of some file-format principles. Some people are free to think the latter option is reasonable. I'm free to think that it's just moronic.
To the extent that it matters (and I'm nicely employed now) it is/was the general IT market in the Houston, TX area. Companies and/or headhunter agencies ... all wanted *.doc exclusively. Some of the online job post boards tended to prefer *.doc as well. Thankfully its been over a year since I've had to bother -- hopefully things are improving.
Want some fun? Fire up writer, type in a several paragraphs of random stuff. Use various heading levels to keep things organized. Now then: generate a table of contents. For extra fun, only allow one or two heading levels in the TOC. Then try making the TOC entries be hyperlinks to the material. Throw in some google searches (but not right away! that'd be cheating) and you're in a fun afternoon.
My shop uses OO.o (very nearly) exclusively. I'm a big fan of the general concept, its usage of "styles", and the odt file format. However, Writer's interface sucks just as soon as you dig into even the first level of dialog(s). I couldn't care less if the toolbar icons are pngs.
... "obviously" we need to right-click in a paragraph on that page and select "paragraph..." to get to the page property we needed. Go look for it in the page properties area where we all reasonably expected it to be? Absent.
I do care that it took a team of us a few hours pouring through google and forums trying to see how to get a hyperlinkable table of contents keyed off of custom paragraph styles. The interface and the procedure are abysmally *not* intuitive -- it took drilling into dialogs in two completely unrelated parts of the main menu to get it set up, and when we were finished, it ultimately failed to give us what we wanted. (We had a TOC, but only the built-in styles were hyperlinked. great.) Not to mention the procedure for link-i-fying the TOC elements themselves: click the cursor in some empty 1-char wide text field, then click on a button labelled "LS", then click in a different 1-char wide text field, then click a button labelled "LE". Amazing this didn't occur to us.
There was some page-related property we wanted to change
When a document gets non-trivial in size, writer sometimes hurls and dies if just the wrong list item is deleted from just the wrong spot on just the wrong page -- not in any really repeatable way except it seems to hit us when editing around list items.
I'm being somewhat harsh with Writer given my experience with it over just the last year. We still use it b/c the price is right. Now whether Word or anything else is straightforward is another question (Word's reliability and compatibility may be an issue, but the operations, menus, and dialogs seem to be logically organized). But, you just can't say OO writer is "straightforward."
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats. I've offered sending to PDF several times trying to appeal to the unreliability of word version X being able to properly render word version y in various cases. Could be partly the HR employee familiarity, and it could be tools that know how to scan word docs (though scanning an OO.o writer document is infinitely more easy, being, basically, zipped plain text -- can't speak one way or the other about pdf files, but the spec is open enough, so I hear).