When did I say outsurcing is GOOD for the US? You just need to face the truth: whereas it's NOT good for the US, it's only expected for companies to seek lower costs elsewhere. Forcing them to come back to US will actually force them to move away altogether.
Gas prices in Europe: http://www.energy.eu/#prices
Bullshit. Unless you live in a tree and eat once a month then either you make more than you claim or stuff is a lot cheaper where you are. Average US male full-time income is $~44k; cut that to $7.5k (your ratio, 1/6th; about half full-time minimum wage, in other words) and you're homeless.
At 44k you might have basic cable and pay a small mortgage but that's about it. No asset accumulation or substantive savings; basically hand-to-mouth in the US.
At 7.5k you live in your parents basement and they feed you. Never mind 1/8th.
I've found that foreign workers suffer a lot of delusions about life in the US.
Well guess what. I don't own a house, I rent (shared with others). A simple 2-rooms apartment in a pretty bad neighborhood costs 60K USD (cheapest), that's over 200 RO average salaries.
Your assumptions:
1. I own a house or have a mortgage; well I can't afford either.
2. Asset accumulation or savings: I have none. Today, now, my "savings" are 26 USD, with 8 days left till next salary.
3. I've found that foreign workers don't have a clue on how we live and what the cost of life is here - quote sounds familiar?
Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Romania#Growing_middle_class - you will be surprised. Net average in RO was 560 USD a month in 2009 - that's 6.7K per year.
Who paid for the Excel licenses, if anyone? I suspect you've failed to compute the cost of 100+ excel licenses in your $200 cost.
No, I haven't. The licenses were already there and used for various other things. And it's not me who should estimate those costs, I only did what I was told. As I mentioned before, the decision is taken by US-based employees, I only did the grunt work.
Since no actual rates have been discussed your 'outrageous' characterization seems a bit premature. In any case, what is clear is that the US voter is increasingly aware of the damage caused to the nation by outsourcing and will be considering what might be done to change the balance.
You'll have to get used to that. Enjoy.
Funny thing is that you can't really do anything. Welcome to globalization. Potent minds in developing countries are used (and sometimes abused), fact which becomes detrimental to you. I know it sucks for this to happen, but lemme tell you, me being paid by an US-based company didn't make me rich, didn't make me happier, didn't "save my soul" - more like took it away from me. The only difference is that *you* would cost the company a helluva lot more than *me* for doing the same tasks I do. Nothing else.
I work in the US. You seem to have some misconceptions.
Maybe I do. Nobody is perfect...
You only work 45 hours a week? Slacker! I work more than that.
No, I sometimes work during week-ends (3 week-ends a month on average). Have you look at the times? 5 PM to 2 AM. Hardly meet my wife. We are almost living separate lives.
Already disproven. If companies could raise the prices they would have done so already. Raise the price "a LOT" and their volume goes through the floor.
You are missing an important point here. Companies keep prices low because some of their workforce is dirt cheap. Make the workforce expensive, they will be forced to up prices. And THEN their volume will go through the floor, and THEN they will go bankrupt, and THEN all the hardly-earned US jobs will get lost, 100% lost.
I feel you. But how about how much we're paid for the same knowledge and the same amount of work? Would you willingly accept 20% or even 15% of your current salary and do the same work? It all boils down to this: entire divisions are off-shored BECAUSE of money. Imposing TAXATION over off-shoring will make you pay MORE for the same product you used to buy. Maybe not 5x more, but definitely double the price.
That's the whole issue: you pay your lifestyle by having less jobs to occupy. You want US-based companies to move divisions back to US? No problem. But then their products will become more expensive, and so the Chinese or Taiwanese or [insert country here] based companies will flood your very own market with cheap products, so you'll buy those (because they are cheaper). And then your US-based companies will go bankrupt. And then you will have no jobs (not even those which are there), will produce less, will consume the same (old habits die hard) and will find yourselves in a worse situation.
Of course, this would happen gradually, because it's a lengthy process, but it will be overlooked until its going to be impossible to pull out of.
It's all connected, you know:)
This means we're equal in all means, except you are paid more than I am. Way more. At least 5x times more, that if you're heavily underpaid, with or without compensations. It's not that I am complaining, it's just that I want to show what exactly is happening from both sides of the fence.
It's always a good thing to be informed of all the facets of a story before judging someone's statements. Like in TFA.
One more thing that I forgot to add: usually, high-profile people (CEOs, VPs, Directors) have a skewed view of the world. They choose to live disconnected from the average people, and that's fine, but unfortunately they make statements that refer to the very people they don't know, or statements that refer to situations they've not been in for a long time. As an example, I heard politicians wondering why do people complain of traffic; that's because when they travel, there's always police cars making way and pushing everyone aside. They're disconnected from the world, they live in their own little cozy places and make statements we know are not true.
So whenever someone comes and makes statements, ask yourself: "does this guy really know ine ins and outs of this? Was he in such situations lately? Had he recently lived like the people he's criticizing?" If the answers are "no", then that opinion is misinformed, by all means.
I have American colleagues, American managers and have been to America more than once, for business purposes. I said "probably" because of course there are situations and situations. I didn't really want this to be interpreted in the wrong sense. I apologize. I just found out that, in this particular company (100+K employees), it's a fact.
Well, this debate is kind of one-sided, with a (probably) all-American current of opinion streaming here as I read the comments.
Just to make things clear from start: I am one of the so-called "offshore" employees. I got hired by a large USA-based corporation as a call center analyst; basically I took calls for 9 months in a row.
I am not located in India, but in Eastern Europe (Romania, to be more precise). My English is very good, and although I do have an accent, I sound just fine on the phone. I got a shitload of praises from callers during my time spent taking calls. Some got to as high as my LOB VP.
Then I got promoted to a Team Lead position in the same Help desk organization. I didn't take calls anymore but had to practically manage the whole Romania team. I have been acting as a manager, with manager's responsibilities, except for setting wages and approving leaves. Then I got promoted again as a Service Delivery Manager within the same organization, and now I am expecting yet another promotion. Until now, that's the background. Now on with some things you should consider...
My salary is 6 to 8 times less than an US-based employee gets for a similar position. My compensations practically don't exist (except for health insurance). I've had 0% raise ever since I got hired and I can't do anything about it (there's a huge competition here as well). And by all means, I do more than an US-based employee is willing to do, because I'm not inclined to yell "murder!" whenever my manager tasks me with something extra. I do large amounts of coding (although I shouldn't), I design processes (although I shouldn't), I create trainings and documentations (although I shouldn't) and the list can go on. Prices here are similar to prices in the US (for clothes, houses, electronics, computers, cell phones) and higher for certain commodities(e.g. a gallon of gas costs 8 dollars). I work from 5 PM to 2 AM local time to be in sync with US business hours.
But Andy complains that off-shoring takes jobs away from the US. Guess what, it doesn't. Off-shoring generally finds the most economically-competitive people to do things that are usually frowned upon by people from other countries.
Simply put: you would love to talk to an American dude when calling for support, but you would hate working in phone support yourself.
Now I can also compare my approach towards work to an US-based citizen's. I often find myself having an idea but get slowed down to a halt by people from the US (such as my direct manager and his peers), because they need enormous amounts of time to have meetings, come to an agreement, provide approvals, analyze, digest the idea, think about it, think some more, forget about it, remember it, talk some more, discuss a bit more... until times change and they figure that, if everything used to work OK (translated: no major disaster occured because that idea wasn't implemented), the idea doesn't really need to be implemented anymore.
There are many examples to be given, but I'll just stick to one. An application was in the process of being decommissioned. We used that application but didn't own it, so we (2 off-shored guys) were asked to identify a replacement. We needed 5 days to identify 4 solutions, out of which 2 were external, one was an application built by the corporation itself and the least desirable one was using spreadsheets as a workaround (bah! spreadsheets! we stuck this in to show how worse it can get if we don't act soon). We presented this list to higher management together with comparison charts, some Powerpoint presentations they use to love, live demos (we installed all the demo apps, etc). They said thank you and were never heard from again. Our attempts to get this going to one direction or another were answered with "wait, the decision is to be made soon". Six months later, the application went offline (the fact that it stayed up for this long shows that even app decommissioning is as slow as tectonic plates movement). All of a sudden, everybody panicked. They swiftly
You take one sparrow. It tweets and at times it might sound soothing, even if you don't understand what's it saying.
Take two sparrows. They might sound even nicer if their tweets match to form music.
Take a thousand sparrows. They make such a horrible sound, you'd wish not being there at all.
Take a hundred thousand sparrows. You'll start to prefer vuvuzelas! ...And there are a few more iterations until you reach Twitter's real flock size.
Now I know what I am saying is offtopic, but why do I always read "British Pornographic Industry" when fast-reading through any website where it is mentioned?
It's not an intentional act; maybe I'm more used to one word than another:) - but it becomes annoying. You know, stopping dead in your tracks and thinking "Wait, WHAT?".
So Apple basically measured their 300 ppi by looking at a monitor from 4 feet away, then took the hard number, applied it on an iPhone and there you have, the "retina display". Don't take me wrong, I couldn't care less, iWhatever products are not interesting to me for many reasons. I just am curious what makes Marketing tick:)
Roughly 50K players a day, every day.
Right now, the player count shows 56556 players, with an all-time record of 56817 players.
Stats here: http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
...but then again, I'm on the other extreme. When I work, I'm all but relaxed, so this contraption would get me fired.
"But it wasn't me, the bloody machine doesn't let me work at all, always kicking me out!"
People like who?
Your expectations might not be appropriate. Of course, everybody would love getting the best support there is, instant replies, speedy resolutions and such. Welcome to real life, where you need to squirm quite a bit to obtain support. It's not outrageous, it's life.
All support organizations have different "values" assigned to a customer. There are Platinum customers, and if you are one of them, you probably have a dedicated team assigned only to you, they wait all day and don't do anything else than be ready to help you, because you are paying shitloads of money for support. But if you're a regular simple customer who gets free support for free, don't get your hopes high. There are support teams out there who consist of 2-3 people supporting literally millions. They weed out the support requests based on how desperate you are. And the measurement method? they simply count the number of e-mails received from you. if it's ten a day, they will prioritize your request. Otherwise, you are in the gutter.
Now you will obviously say "but-but-but Google makes billions! They should afford providing better support!" - and they do: to those actually paying them those billions.
I just tried obtaining support from Google related to Ad Sense - got an e-mail reply within 30 minutes, and it was a rather dumb question from my side. Of course, I also know how to get them galloping to answer, I thrown in there a mention of me being willing to spend about 30K Euro for ads. All it takes is to be a little smart and know how to obtain support.
Within my support organization, I often receive support requests saying "It doesn't work" or "I need access to the application" - nothing else. Of course, customers expect support to know what they are asking for. Guess what, we don't. And if the customer is unwilling or unable to properly explain what the issue is, well, tough luck. They will eventually come back and throw in some details.
In the end, the customer-support relationship is 2-sided. Each side has to put up. If someone comes and says "but I'm the customer, I need my ass wiped, kissed and sprayed with cologne", they better find someone else to do that for them. Unless, of course, they're a platinum customer. Then they will get it immediately.
Yeah, but think about this: the key (and only) thing that makes the story "worthwhile" is the time spent since the problem inception. Those three years that have passed ARE the key. If the guy would have said "...and three DAYS later I found this solution/method/workaround", nobody would have cared. That little blog entry wouldn't have made Slashdot news page. Ever.
So, since the whole hype is based on "took me 3 years to get this fixed", I felt like pointing out WHY it took three years. Now I don't say Google isn't to blame. It is, but not so much.
I work in support and I know that support mentality (especially towards US-based customers) for small issues such as "I can't log in" is somewhat similar: "don't answer that e-mail, wait until the customer squirms a bit, and then we'd know he tried whatever's in the documentation, followed the steps from self help tools, so we can use some resources to help him if he insists". Maybe it's the wrong approach, but when a support organization shows that a large amount of reported issues (76% in mine) could have been solved via self-help, just by reading the damn help pages, it kind of proves to be the correct one. Just sayin':)
I would have called my lawyer, first.I would provide him/her all the documentation which would prove: how am I impacted, the extent of my losses, the support requests, the lack of answers to those support requests, and so on.
And FYI, they DO have a phone number, probably a looong, winding IVR, but check it here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/index.html
At the bottom, there are some numbers that look like phone numbers. I found them in 2 minutes. ANd one more click away, tens of phone numbers for individual offices: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/address.html
The "you can't call them" whine doesn't work. If it burns, it burns. You don't just wait for 3 YEARS to get the issue fixed. Geez.
The above was, IMO, incorrectly moderated "troll".
The guy waited for 3 YEARS to get an account issue resolved. He waited. He sent a couple e-mails, browsed a few pages, asked on a couple forums and that's pretty much it. Hell, I would've spammed support via e-mail 3 times a day and would have called EVERYONE all the time, if that issue would have been oh-so-important.
If you don't get a reply to a support request, send another. And another. And another. Go everywhere and tell everyone what happened to you. In 3 years you can learn legal stuff and sue their asses just to get the problem fixed.
Seems to me that his group/mailing list is a very sluggish thing going on, and he really didn't care what was happening. In 3 YEARS you can do an amazing amount of stuff to get your problem resolved. The above poster is 100% right. That guy was simply not trying. End of story.
...maybe because you didn't take the shit and demanded more speed, or maybe because ISPs didn't really make deals amongst themselves, such as "you take that neighborhood, I take the other one and we don't step on each other's toes"?
When ISPs cease to compete and are okay with having a monopoly over that piece of pie they own, investments aren't done and speed lags behind.
There's a rather simple explanation as to why USA is lagging behind some countries an Average Joe can't show on the map.
Internet implementation in the USA started up quite a few years ahead of other countries. And so, once the implementation kicked in, there was little incentive for ISPs (especially large ones) to further improve their infrastructure. They all just wanted for their investements to pay off and then obtain profit from their services with as little improvement as required. Now this is a global approach, every ISP in this world is thinking the same. But the difference is, other countries started up their Internet infrastructure later on, so they started with current equipment, so initial bandwidth was way higher and kept on improving because there was a large user base demanding Internet (ergo, ISPs needed to compete to get a larger piece of the fresh pie).
Example: Romania didn't really have broadband in 2001; people largely used dial-up to connect to the Internet; there were llike a couple large ISPs. Jumping to 2007-2008; Bucharest started seeing ISPs interconnect and offering brand new equipment implementations which offered 100 Mbit/s metropolitan access using LAN cables and/or optic fiber running straight to each building. All this time, USA ISPs didn't really have any incentive to push for bigger broadband because userbase was already shared, territory was already shared and nobody was really competing for those bits and pieces left here and there (not worth the effort and investment).
Present time: I get 100 Mbit broadband while downloading AND uploading to/from any connected machine within the Metropolitan area in Bucharest; and also from some select locations worldwide (eg nVidia.com, Linux distros FTPs, etc.). And I pay a monthly flat rate of roughly 13 bucks.
When I was in the States, it was kind of depressing to see downloads go ever so slow (compared to what I was used to), but as I said, the explanation is simple. Now I know it's difficult for a large ISP to invest in a complete overhaul of their infrastructure, but I think it should be done sooner than later, otherwise the gap would widen. It's the "neighbor paradox", where the lesser fortunate neighbor finally manages to buy a brand new car which is better than your 10-year old one.
You might want to check out some of those pictures before jumping in with speculations.
Craters are being lit from various dirns, depending on the latitude, longitude and Sun position. This sort of imagery needs a human mind to correctly process it. Furthermore, it's not only about "counting craters", but identifying other interesting features (such as crater bouldery, artificial structures, linear features, moulds and so on). Plus, images have varying degrees of clearness (I found some corrupt images as well, pity you can't report them). The "Boulder Wars" minigame itself is rather interesting too.
People with laptops can kiss 3 TB goodbye for a while, because laptops have 2.5" drives, and I bet a 3 TB drive would be 3.5" in size. New computers shipping with a single drive would have plenty of external connectivity (USB 3.0, Firewire) to allow large external drives to be plugged in. And if you want RAID1 with 2x 3 TB drives, you can certainly afford a SSD drive for the OS only.
The reason I prefer having my OS on a different drive is... performance:) - because when I copy large amounts of data I'd rather have my OS drive idling by so I can work with other applications without waiting for them to start because the copying process gulps all throughput.
Slashdot Mirror
When did I say outsurcing is GOOD for the US? You just need to face the truth: whereas it's NOT good for the US, it's only expected for companies to seek lower costs elsewhere. Forcing them to come back to US will actually force them to move away altogether.
Gas prices in Europe: http://www.energy.eu/#prices
Bullshit. Unless you live in a tree and eat once a month then either you make more than you claim or stuff is a lot cheaper where you are. Average US male full-time income is $~44k; cut that to $7.5k (your ratio, 1/6th; about half full-time minimum wage, in other words) and you're homeless.
At 44k you might have basic cable and pay a small mortgage but that's about it. No asset accumulation or substantive savings; basically hand-to-mouth in the US.
At 7.5k you live in your parents basement and they feed you. Never mind 1/8th.
I've found that foreign workers suffer a lot of delusions about life in the US.
Well guess what. I don't own a house, I rent (shared with others). A simple 2-rooms apartment in a pretty bad neighborhood costs 60K USD (cheapest), that's over 200 RO average salaries.
Your assumptions:
1. I own a house or have a mortgage; well I can't afford either.
2. Asset accumulation or savings: I have none. Today, now, my "savings" are 26 USD, with 8 days left till next salary.
3. I've found that foreign workers don't have a clue on how we live and what the cost of life is here - quote sounds familiar?
Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Romania#Growing_middle_class - you will be surprised. Net average in RO was 560 USD a month in 2009 - that's 6.7K per year.
Who paid for the Excel licenses, if anyone? I suspect you've failed to compute the cost of 100+ excel licenses in your $200 cost.
No, I haven't. The licenses were already there and used for various other things. And it's not me who should estimate those costs, I only did what I was told. As I mentioned before, the decision is taken by US-based employees, I only did the grunt work.
Since no actual rates have been discussed your 'outrageous' characterization seems a bit premature. In any case, what is clear is that the US voter is increasingly aware of the damage caused to the nation by outsourcing and will be considering what might be done to change the balance.
You'll have to get used to that. Enjoy.
Funny thing is that you can't really do anything. Welcome to globalization. Potent minds in developing countries are used (and sometimes abused), fact which becomes detrimental to you. I know it sucks for this to happen, but lemme tell you, me being paid by an US-based company didn't make me rich, didn't make me happier, didn't "save my soul" - more like took it away from me. The only difference is that *you* would cost the company a helluva lot more than *me* for doing the same tasks I do. Nothing else.
I work in the US. You seem to have some misconceptions.
Maybe I do. Nobody is perfect...
You only work 45 hours a week? Slacker! I work more than that.
No, I sometimes work during week-ends (3 week-ends a month on average). Have you look at the times? 5 PM to 2 AM. Hardly meet my wife. We are almost living separate lives.
Already disproven. If companies could raise the prices they would have done so already. Raise the price "a LOT" and their volume goes through the floor.
You are missing an important point here. Companies keep prices low because some of their workforce is dirt cheap. Make the workforce expensive, they will be forced to up prices. And THEN their volume will go through the floor, and THEN they will go bankrupt, and THEN all the hardly-earned US jobs will get lost, 100% lost.
I feel you. But how about how much we're paid for the same knowledge and the same amount of work? Would you willingly accept 20% or even 15% of your current salary and do the same work? It all boils down to this: entire divisions are off-shored BECAUSE of money. Imposing TAXATION over off-shoring will make you pay MORE for the same product you used to buy. Maybe not 5x more, but definitely double the price. :)
That's the whole issue: you pay your lifestyle by having less jobs to occupy. You want US-based companies to move divisions back to US? No problem. But then their products will become more expensive, and so the Chinese or Taiwanese or [insert country here] based companies will flood your very own market with cheap products, so you'll buy those (because they are cheaper). And then your US-based companies will go bankrupt. And then you will have no jobs (not even those which are there), will produce less, will consume the same (old habits die hard) and will find yourselves in a worse situation.
Of course, this would happen gradually, because it's a lengthy process, but it will be overlooked until its going to be impossible to pull out of.
It's all connected, you know
This means we're equal in all means, except you are paid more than I am. Way more. At least 5x times more, that if you're heavily underpaid, with or without compensations. It's not that I am complaining, it's just that I want to show what exactly is happening from both sides of the fence.
It's always a good thing to be informed of all the facets of a story before judging someone's statements. Like in TFA.
One more thing that I forgot to add: usually, high-profile people (CEOs, VPs, Directors) have a skewed view of the world. They choose to live disconnected from the average people, and that's fine, but unfortunately they make statements that refer to the very people they don't know, or statements that refer to situations they've not been in for a long time. As an example, I heard politicians wondering why do people complain of traffic; that's because when they travel, there's always police cars making way and pushing everyone aside. They're disconnected from the world, they live in their own little cozy places and make statements we know are not true.
So whenever someone comes and makes statements, ask yourself: "does this guy really know ine ins and outs of this? Was he in such situations lately? Had he recently lived like the people he's criticizing?" If the answers are "no", then that opinion is misinformed, by all means.
I have American colleagues, American managers and have been to America more than once, for business purposes. I said "probably" because of course there are situations and situations. I didn't really want this to be interpreted in the wrong sense. I apologize. I just found out that, in this particular company (100+K employees), it's a fact.
Well, this debate is kind of one-sided, with a (probably) all-American current of opinion streaming here as I read the comments.
Just to make things clear from start: I am one of the so-called "offshore" employees. I got hired by a large USA-based corporation as a call center analyst; basically I took calls for 9 months in a row.
I am not located in India, but in Eastern Europe (Romania, to be more precise). My English is very good, and although I do have an accent, I sound just fine on the phone. I got a shitload of praises from callers during my time spent taking calls. Some got to as high as my LOB VP.
Then I got promoted to a Team Lead position in the same Help desk organization. I didn't take calls anymore but had to practically manage the whole Romania team. I have been acting as a manager, with manager's responsibilities, except for setting wages and approving leaves. Then I got promoted again as a Service Delivery Manager within the same organization, and now I am expecting yet another promotion. Until now, that's the background. Now on with some things you should consider...
My salary is 6 to 8 times less than an US-based employee gets for a similar position. My compensations practically don't exist (except for health insurance). I've had 0% raise ever since I got hired and I can't do anything about it (there's a huge competition here as well). And by all means, I do more than an US-based employee is willing to do, because I'm not inclined to yell "murder!" whenever my manager tasks me with something extra. I do large amounts of coding (although I shouldn't), I design processes (although I shouldn't), I create trainings and documentations (although I shouldn't) and the list can go on. Prices here are similar to prices in the US (for clothes, houses, electronics, computers, cell phones) and higher for certain commodities(e.g. a gallon of gas costs 8 dollars). I work from 5 PM to 2 AM local time to be in sync with US business hours.
But Andy complains that off-shoring takes jobs away from the US. Guess what, it doesn't. Off-shoring generally finds the most economically-competitive people to do things that are usually frowned upon by people from other countries.
Simply put: you would love to talk to an American dude when calling for support, but you would hate working in phone support yourself.
Now I can also compare my approach towards work to an US-based citizen's. I often find myself having an idea but get slowed down to a halt by people from the US (such as my direct manager and his peers), because they need enormous amounts of time to have meetings, come to an agreement, provide approvals, analyze, digest the idea, think about it, think some more, forget about it, remember it, talk some more, discuss a bit more... until times change and they figure that, if everything used to work OK (translated: no major disaster occured because that idea wasn't implemented), the idea doesn't really need to be implemented anymore.
There are many examples to be given, but I'll just stick to one. An application was in the process of being decommissioned. We used that application but didn't own it, so we (2 off-shored guys) were asked to identify a replacement. We needed 5 days to identify 4 solutions, out of which 2 were external, one was an application built by the corporation itself and the least desirable one was using spreadsheets as a workaround (bah! spreadsheets! we stuck this in to show how worse it can get if we don't act soon). We presented this list to higher management together with comparison charts, some Powerpoint presentations they use to love, live demos (we installed all the demo apps, etc). They said thank you and were never heard from again. Our attempts to get this going to one direction or another were answered with "wait, the decision is to be made soon". Six months later, the application went offline (the fact that it stayed up for this long shows that even app decommissioning is as slow as tectonic plates movement). All of a sudden, everybody panicked. They swiftly
The problem with Twitter is that you don't get to choose. You're forced to eat goodies and crap alike.
You take one sparrow. It tweets and at times it might sound soothing, even if you don't understand what's it saying.
...And there are a few more iterations until you reach Twitter's real flock size.
Take two sparrows. They might sound even nicer if their tweets match to form music.
Take a thousand sparrows. They make such a horrible sound, you'd wish not being there at all.
Take a hundred thousand sparrows. You'll start to prefer vuvuzelas!
Now I know what I am saying is offtopic, but why do I always read "British Pornographic Industry" when fast-reading through any website where it is mentioned? :) - but it becomes annoying. You know, stopping dead in your tracks and thinking "Wait, WHAT?".
It's not an intentional act; maybe I'm more used to one word than another
Have you been living under a rock? Future will end in 2012. The Mayans said it. Nevermind they are extinct now.
So Apple basically measured their 300 ppi by looking at a monitor from 4 feet away, then took the hard number, applied it on an iPhone and there you have, the "retina display". Don't take me wrong, I couldn't care less, iWhatever products are not interesting to me for many reasons. I just am curious what makes Marketing tick :)
In one single shard? You'd wish.
Keep in mind this is a single-universe game, where everyone can interact with everyone else.
Well I didn't say unique players :)
Roughly 50K players a day, every day.
Right now, the player count shows 56556 players, with an all-time record of 56817 players.
Stats here: http://www.eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility
...but then again, I'm on the other extreme. When I work, I'm all but relaxed, so this contraption would get me fired.
"But it wasn't me, the bloody machine doesn't let me work at all, always kicking me out!"
People like who?
Your expectations might not be appropriate. Of course, everybody would love getting the best support there is, instant replies, speedy resolutions and such. Welcome to real life, where you need to squirm quite a bit to obtain support. It's not outrageous, it's life.
All support organizations have different "values" assigned to a customer. There are Platinum customers, and if you are one of them, you probably have a dedicated team assigned only to you, they wait all day and don't do anything else than be ready to help you, because you are paying shitloads of money for support. But if you're a regular simple customer who gets free support for free, don't get your hopes high. There are support teams out there who consist of 2-3 people supporting literally millions. They weed out the support requests based on how desperate you are. And the measurement method? they simply count the number of e-mails received from you. if it's ten a day, they will prioritize your request. Otherwise, you are in the gutter.
Now you will obviously say "but-but-but Google makes billions! They should afford providing better support!" - and they do: to those actually paying them those billions.
I just tried obtaining support from Google related to Ad Sense - got an e-mail reply within 30 minutes, and it was a rather dumb question from my side. Of course, I also know how to get them galloping to answer, I thrown in there a mention of me being willing to spend about 30K Euro for ads. All it takes is to be a little smart and know how to obtain support.
Within my support organization, I often receive support requests saying "It doesn't work" or "I need access to the application" - nothing else. Of course, customers expect support to know what they are asking for. Guess what, we don't. And if the customer is unwilling or unable to properly explain what the issue is, well, tough luck. They will eventually come back and throw in some details.
In the end, the customer-support relationship is 2-sided. Each side has to put up. If someone comes and says "but I'm the customer, I need my ass wiped, kissed and sprayed with cologne", they better find someone else to do that for them. Unless, of course, they're a platinum customer. Then they will get it immediately.
Yeah, but think about this: the key (and only) thing that makes the story "worthwhile" is the time spent since the problem inception. Those three years that have passed ARE the key. If the guy would have said "...and three DAYS later I found this solution/method/workaround", nobody would have cared. That little blog entry wouldn't have made Slashdot news page. Ever. :)
So, since the whole hype is based on "took me 3 years to get this fixed", I felt like pointing out WHY it took three years. Now I don't say Google isn't to blame. It is, but not so much.
I work in support and I know that support mentality (especially towards US-based customers) for small issues such as "I can't log in" is somewhat similar: "don't answer that e-mail, wait until the customer squirms a bit, and then we'd know he tried whatever's in the documentation, followed the steps from self help tools, so we can use some resources to help him if he insists". Maybe it's the wrong approach, but when a support organization shows that a large amount of reported issues (76% in mine) could have been solved via self-help, just by reading the damn help pages, it kind of proves to be the correct one. Just sayin'
I might be redundant. Not sure about my post though :)
I would have called my lawyer, first.I would provide him/her all the documentation which would prove: how am I impacted, the extent of my losses, the support requests, the lack of answers to those support requests, and so on.
And FYI, they DO have a phone number, probably a looong, winding IVR, but check it here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/index.html
At the bottom, there are some numbers that look like phone numbers. I found them in 2 minutes. ANd one more click away, tens of phone numbers for individual offices: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/address.html
The "you can't call them" whine doesn't work. If it burns, it burns. You don't just wait for 3 YEARS to get the issue fixed. Geez.
The above was, IMO, incorrectly moderated "troll".
The guy waited for 3 YEARS to get an account issue resolved. He waited. He sent a couple e-mails, browsed a few pages, asked on a couple forums and that's pretty much it. Hell, I would've spammed support via e-mail 3 times a day and would have called EVERYONE all the time, if that issue would have been oh-so-important.
If you don't get a reply to a support request, send another. And another. And another. Go everywhere and tell everyone what happened to you. In 3 years you can learn legal stuff and sue their asses just to get the problem fixed.
Seems to me that his group/mailing list is a very sluggish thing going on, and he really didn't care what was happening. In 3 YEARS you can do an amazing amount of stuff to get your problem resolved. The above poster is 100% right. That guy was simply not trying. End of story.
...maybe because you didn't take the shit and demanded more speed, or maybe because ISPs didn't really make deals amongst themselves, such as "you take that neighborhood, I take the other one and we don't step on each other's toes"?
When ISPs cease to compete and are okay with having a monopoly over that piece of pie they own, investments aren't done and speed lags behind.
There's a rather simple explanation as to why USA is lagging behind some countries an Average Joe can't show on the map.
Internet implementation in the USA started up quite a few years ahead of other countries. And so, once the implementation kicked in, there was little incentive for ISPs (especially large ones) to further improve their infrastructure. They all just wanted for their investements to pay off and then obtain profit from their services with as little improvement as required. Now this is a global approach, every ISP in this world is thinking the same. But the difference is, other countries started up their Internet infrastructure later on, so they started with current equipment, so initial bandwidth was way higher and kept on improving because there was a large user base demanding Internet (ergo, ISPs needed to compete to get a larger piece of the fresh pie).
Example: Romania didn't really have broadband in 2001; people largely used dial-up to connect to the Internet; there were llike a couple large ISPs. Jumping to 2007-2008; Bucharest started seeing ISPs interconnect and offering brand new equipment implementations which offered 100 Mbit/s metropolitan access using LAN cables and/or optic fiber running straight to each building. All this time, USA ISPs didn't really have any incentive to push for bigger broadband because userbase was already shared, territory was already shared and nobody was really competing for those bits and pieces left here and there (not worth the effort and investment).
Present time: I get 100 Mbit broadband while downloading AND uploading to/from any connected machine within the Metropolitan area in Bucharest; and also from some select locations worldwide (eg nVidia.com, Linux distros FTPs, etc.). And I pay a monthly flat rate of roughly 13 bucks.
When I was in the States, it was kind of depressing to see downloads go ever so slow (compared to what I was used to), but as I said, the explanation is simple. Now I know it's difficult for a large ISP to invest in a complete overhaul of their infrastructure, but I think it should be done sooner than later, otherwise the gap would widen. It's the "neighbor paradox", where the lesser fortunate neighbor finally manages to buy a brand new car which is better than your 10-year old one.
You might want to check out some of those pictures before jumping in with speculations.
Craters are being lit from various dirns, depending on the latitude, longitude and Sun position. This sort of imagery needs a human mind to correctly process it. Furthermore, it's not only about "counting craters", but identifying other interesting features (such as crater bouldery, artificial structures, linear features, moulds and so on). Plus, images have varying degrees of clearness (I found some corrupt images as well, pity you can't report them). The "Boulder Wars" minigame itself is rather interesting too.
People with laptops can kiss 3 TB goodbye for a while, because laptops have 2.5" drives, and I bet a 3 TB drive would be 3.5" in size. New computers shipping with a single drive would have plenty of external connectivity (USB 3.0, Firewire) to allow large external drives to be plugged in. And if you want RAID1 with 2x 3 TB drives, you can certainly afford a SSD drive for the OS only. :) - because when I copy large amounts of data I'd rather have my OS drive idling by so I can work with other applications without waiting for them to start because the copying process gulps all throughput.
The reason I prefer having my OS on a different drive is... performance