Isn't there a Ferengi Rule for acquisition that says 'The goal is not to stop the exploitation but to become the exploiter.'
As I read this thread, I really wonder why more people don't think in this vein. My response to seeing jobs going overseas, raises diminishing, or people taking pay cuts has always been "how do I escape that system?" And for me it means researching the viability of various businesses I can start on my own.
Rather than whining about how much others make, why don't people just take steps to protect themselves from poverty and job loss before it happens. Reading stuff like this thread I always get the impression of posters cowering in a corner hoping the axe doesn't hit them. People here complain that in IT they make so little while their marketing managers make loads of money for doing (perceived) very little. Well if money is so important to you, take the steps necessary to become that marketing manager. The system isn't going to change anytime soon, so you may as well figure out how to get the most out of it.
In 1950, residents of Rome, NY could purchase (not morgage, purchase) a house for one to two months wages as a factory worker. Show me where, in this country or any other, where this is still possible.
I don't know the average wage of a factory worker, and like everything else, it would depend on your definition of "factory worker." But I can offer you that a friend of mine in Bemidji, MN lived until recently in a 2-bedroom house that she and her husband paid $15,000 for about 8-10 years ago.
Anecdotes aside, there is cheap housing available, but often in areas where jobs are low-paying or practically nonexistent. Some people get around this by buying land and building their own homes to save money(I wish I could remember where I read the story of the couple who built their house bit by bit themselves on weekends over a 2-year span). Here in MN, I know of people who commute almost 2 hours each way to work in order to "enjoy" an inexpensive house on a few acres of land 100 miles outside the metro area.
Food in this country is cheap. Housing, on the other hand, I agree is for the most part insanely expensive. But I wonder how much this has to do with what the builders are willing to build. Are people really willing to buy tiny, simple houses or are their prospective owners preferring to spend their money on rent?
So here's my proposal: We should have something where a group of people can get together to build houses for everyone in the group, providing their own money and sharing labor, and the government offers training and free inspection and streamlines the permitting processes. You end up with a group of homeowners that can build a stable community, a bunch of people who understand how their house works and can fix it themselves and who may now be motivated to start businesses doing just that for others. I'm not sure how much this differs from Habitat for Humanity, but I believe HfH is completely charity sponsored (I give to them every year), while my idea is funded by the people needing the housing.
I never understood the concept of inheritance. Why should somebody be entitled to a better start in life simply because of who their parents are?
You just answered your own question. I was raised by a single mom who didn't even get a high school diploma until just before I got mine. I understand fully what it's like to not have much financially. But my mom gave me " a better start" than others by drilling into my head the need for education in order to get ahead. I still remember her testing me on my multiplication tables while she did housework. Now that I am pretty comfortable, I will do everything I can to give my son a leg up. Why? Because I'm his parent and I can. I'm sorry for all the kids who can't get a good start in life, but they're not my responsibility; my own son is.
However, if you are actually using your SUV for offroading, then I apologize for my ranting.
I respect that you are willing to correct your assumptions, but the quoted sentence indicates the point I'm really getting at: only the owner, who fully understands the compromises he made, can justify the vehicle. This because it supposedly fits his needs. Anyone else's opinion is irrelevant. Any reason you can come up with to justify an SUV, a pickup, or a '69 Firebird with a 12mpg V8, someone else can point at and say is no justification.
Your complaint seems to be based on what you consider inappropriate use of resources. The problem is that what is inappropriate is highly subjective so the argument will never be won. If you really want to fight for clean air, go pick on people mowing their lawn with gas-powered mowers.
You are consuming more than your share of fossil fuels...(edit)... Given that you don't drive over large obstacles, you would be much better off in a minivan
Let's ignore for a minute the aftermarket items like 33"x12.5" BFG All Terrain tires, the auto-locking rear differential, suspension and body lifts necessary to fit such tires, and the higher-ratio gears for low-end torque for a minute and just ask how you know that my vehicles aren't used to "drive over large obstacles?" Actually, that's not too important, after all you could just say I could find a way around said obstacles, and you'd be right -- it's just fun.
But I would really be interested in knowing just how you computed my "share of fossil fuels."
Don't misconstrue anything I say here as attempting to justify my purchases; I don't need to justify anything I spend money on to anyone on/. I really want to know how you people come up with this stuff.
Manual transmissions aren't prevalent in the US becuase drivers here are too stupid to use them.
I'm always amused when I see a comment like this on/. Did it ever occur to you that people simply don't want them? Not everyone is concerned with squeezing the last 0.1mpg out of a chassis/body/engine configuration, or with ultimate driveability. Some of us like convenience. I have owned to date 3 cars and 2 trucks, one of which is an SUV. All except the SUV were manual transmissions. I just wanted an automatic this time and I never regretted it.
People are not idiots. Mileage is conspicuously displayed on the spec. sheet of the car. I fill up my SUV about once a week, a lot more if we go on long trips (and in MN everything is far away). It gets about 30% less mileage than my last car. Don't care. I can afford the gas: it's just a part of paying for what I want.
Oh, and just for the record: I went to high school in NYC, so I didn't get driver's ed. Like many New Yorkers, I never even drove a car until I was in my 20's and then I paid a driving school to teach me. Try learning to drive in NYC rush hour traffic -- ingrains those survival skills pretty deep:-)
And this is called flex time?? No, it is not normal for a programmer/software engineer type job by any stretch of the imagination.
I come in to work any time between oh, 8am and 10am and leave approx. 8 hours later. No one bothers me as long as I get my work done on time. I regularly eat lunch at my desk, and don't spend much time chatting, so I'm fairly productive. I've always thought this to be more or less normal in the work environments I have been in. Sure, some employees raise an eyebrow if they see me walking in at 10am when they came in at 7 (that's nuts!!), but they're not signing my paycheck, so I don't give it a second thought.
I do think that my basic assumption that the system should not be a net energy user after the initial lift of mass is correct.
Try this experiment:
Suspend a 5lb weight from the ceiling with fishing line or something.
Stand with your back against the wall and pull the weight until it just touches your nose. You've just lifted the elevator up to geosynch. orbit.
Let go of the weight, being careful not to give it any thrust. Swinging out, it's your "down elevator", swinging back in it's your "up elevator." What should happen?
Well your "basic physics" will tell you that it will swing out, and then back, stopping about 1mm from your nose. So far, so good. Now wait 5 minutes. Why isn't it swinging near your nose anymore? Figure out the answer to this and you'll see why your "basic assumption" is wrong.
I really think there will be a market for Computers As Art someday. Like a woodcarving with a server in it, for some establishment that wants an ultra-fancy kiosk.
This was modded Funny(?) but I think you're onto something. I have been thinking of this for a while. I make small art boxes/miniature books and silly sculptures from bits of wood, stone and metal and I have been thinking of incorporating technology into some of them for a CPU controlled kinetic sculpture. That, and it's interesting to find other ways of expressing ideas, or decorating custom hardware (e.g., MP3 player in an enclosure milled from a solid block of aluminum). Look at some of the handwork that goes into overpriced tube amplifiers these days. William Gibson wrote a short story that reminds me of this ("All the time in the world" or something like that) where the main character had a hand built game console in a custom enclosure.
Think of it as another form of case modding.
Re:Java's not exactly pining for the fields just n
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
This is insightful? How do you go from
it's very possible to create full-featured applications in assembly in just a couple of kB
to
I'm not sure if I'd trust someone who can't master assembly to write code
When the poster hasn't said anything about assembly?
In any event, embedded applications do not have to be any faster than desktop ones, for the most part. In fact, considering that often those apps are controlling physical hardware with response times measured in tens of milliseconds, they can afford to be a lot slower. But perhaps you meant specifically real time embedded applications? Again, speed is not the issue; predictability of response times is. Bash Java if you must, but at least be somewhat rational in your bashing.
The reasons Java hasn't been widely adopted on embedded devices (although that was its original raison d'etre) have more to do with a) footprint b) unpredictable response time (although this is getting better) and c) programmer ignorance. I work on an embedded system that runs on a 1.2GHz Pentium SBC with 256Mb RAM and over 700kloc of C++ at last count. It definitely has the horsepower to run Java, and if the project were starting right now I'd seriously consider it as Java has features that would have let us get done much faster. Yes, these resources are unusual for embedded systems, but not unheard of. As complexity of such systems grows, there will be a bigger push for better development methods and higher level languages will be among them. C's only real advantages are small memory footprint and execution speed. Safety and programmer productivity suck. Assembly? Unless it's less than about 2k of code, or for a 1M+ units, low profit-margin device, you're probably wasting your time.
Personally, I prefer Atmel AVR devices these days. atmel.com and www.avrfreaks.com will give you all the info you need.
Z-80 is still around in different guises. Zilog has a few single board computers that can run C and other languages and they're pretty inexpensive for what you get. Can even get them with webserver code!
If you want to build another Z80 machine, get back to me. I have tubes of Z80s, Z80-CTC, Z80-PIO (I think) 32k EPROMS and 32k SRAMS sitting in my basement that I will probably never use. Considered packaging them up for eBay sale, but got too lazy. Give me $20 for the lot (50-100 chips) and you can build Z80 based computers to your hearts content:-)
While I applaud your attempt to do something like this, why on earth would you develop a product for a field that by your admission is flooded with competitive (and free at that!) products? How did you intend to differentiate yours from all the rest? I can understand if this was just something you were doing for your own use and later decided to sell it, but you said you developed this with the intention of marketing it.
I'm a bit puzzled by how you expected to make money doing this.
Re:Good Project
on
MIT Everyware
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From what I remember, you can learn everything you would *want* to know about a course just by reading a book
Only for the mind-numbingly boring classes. I'm not arguing with you: I realize that many of these exist. But there are courses taught by excellent professors that you need to be present to get most of, because the instructor brings his experience to bear on the class. It's one thing to read about noise and bandwidth issues in communications wiring in a book; it adds a considerable depth when the professor tells you why he used fiberoptic cables in his space shuttle project.
I'm not a support person, I'm a developer, but I agree with this. I've used it in the past and it works well. Tell the requester what it will cost in time and its impact on your existing workload. Try to estimate how long it will take you to get to the new task if you prioritize it appropriately. In development, it usually boils down to: do you want feature X to be late, or feature Y to wait? This assumes you are dealing with fairly reasonable people (my bosses tend to be pretty smart). I know there are some idiots who will just say "Find the time to do both." Happily, they don't work in my department.
Probably the FDA subcontract the testing to an agency that specialises in vehicle testing
The FDA does not test devices. The manufacturer develops the device using a documented process and then tests it. The results of the tests are submitted to the FDA for approval. The FDA can (and do: but we usually have warning) show up and audit any aspect of the development or testing that they feel like, so it behooves the mfr to not cut corners or say they do things that they actually don't.
One thing that's always struck me as odd is that most clerks don't look at the signature on my credit card because it has my photo on the front. I've gone through so many new cards that the picture has deteriorated quite a bit (I guess the first iterations were not recorded digitally), and the pic is 10 years old and barely looks like me, but still people just glance at the front of the card and hand it back. Contrast with my check card which only has a signature: that they usually turn over to look at.
While at first, having a photograph to compare to seems like a good idea, they really should look at both that and the signature.
One of hte benefits of living longer is that you could also be healthier and work longer.
You really think that working longer is a benefit of living longer? What ever happened to enjoying the time when you're not working? I would imagine the bigger issue is how to work the same amount of time and still support myself in 100+ years of retirement.
Life (even if I live to be 300) is still too short to be spent working. Wine. Women. Song. That's worth living 300 years for.
But for most people, this is overkill. They want a computerized check book
And that's exactly the problem. Let me say first that I use GnuCash as my only checkbook accounting system -- only because a Linux box is my primary PC. But it took me a while when I started using GnuCash before I figured out it was only double entry acctg. Now, I have a basic understanding of accounting from learning double entry using the absolutely evil Pacioli 2000 for DOS back in my entrepreneurial days, but it was still annoying. I wanted to record the checks and check card transactions, not manage a small business. Once I got a bunch of accounts set up everything is fine (except a few bugs I come across during reconciliation), but most people probably wouldn't have bothered to go that far. In fact, I almost went back to Quicken (or Quickbooks, don't remember what I have), but what stopped me was having to turn on a separate computer just to do checkbook entries.
There should either be a wizard/tutorial to get people's accounts set up, or a selection to just make GnuCash act like a single entry checkbook register.
UIs can be badly designed, but if the user hasn't even made an attempt to check the manual or the help files, i know where i'd be placing the blame first.
You know what? Once I would have agreed with you. I remember getting a call I couldn't answer. So I opened the product manual, looked up the topic he wanted to know about in the table of contents and turned to that page. It was the first item, listed exactly where it should have been. I politely (but probably with a sarcastic tone) told him the page the info was on and hung up and went back to my circuit design or what ever I was doing (support was only one of my responsibilities) thinking "What an idiot!!"
But now I realize I was wrong. My job was to satisfy the customer. Period. To get him to use our product effectively and be happy with it. Not to just point him to a page in the manual and make him feel stupid. Yeah, he was lazy. That's beside the point. Someone spends his (or his employer's) hard earned cash on our product, then we have to take the time to make it usable for him. Either that, or take the product back for a full refund. There's no excuse for poor tech support. Either do it right, or don't offer support at all.
Your post shows the amount of experience you have. It's very low.
Excellent post! My secondary responsibility at my first job (very small co.) was customer support. It took me over 2 years to get to the point you described where I figured out that the users weren't idiots: it was just that I didn't have the patience and people skills to deal with them without either pissing us both off or making them feel stupid. Dangerous. These are paying customers, after all. Luckily those were things I could learn with time. I just wish more so-called "tech support" and sysadmin types here could say that they would handle it along the lines you described. Unfortunately, it's seen as a lot more fun to just laugh at the lusers.
The only way to get away from it is to travel hundreds of miles away
OR come live here in Minnesota:-) Seriously, I remember driving around in Ely (at the northern end of the road; at the beginning of true wilderness) one night looking for snack foods and the road just appeared to end. There were simply no lights beyond the end of town. None. And with an overcast winter sky, it was absolutely pitch black. Could have been the edge of the world for all I could tell.
Slashdot Mirror
As I read this thread, I really wonder why more people don't think in this vein. My response to seeing jobs going overseas, raises diminishing, or people taking pay cuts has always been "how do I escape that system?" And for me it means researching the viability of various businesses I can start on my own.
Rather than whining about how much others make, why don't people just take steps to protect themselves from poverty and job loss before it happens. Reading stuff like this thread I always get the impression of posters cowering in a corner hoping the axe doesn't hit them. People here complain that in IT they make so little while their marketing managers make loads of money for doing (perceived) very little. Well if money is so important to you, take the steps necessary to become that marketing manager. The system isn't going to change anytime soon, so you may as well figure out how to get the most out of it.
ROTFLMAO Oh, for mod points right now
I don't know the average wage of a factory worker, and like everything else, it would depend on your definition of "factory worker." But I can offer you that a friend of mine in Bemidji, MN lived until recently in a 2-bedroom house that she and her husband paid $15,000 for about 8-10 years ago.
Anecdotes aside, there is cheap housing available, but often in areas where jobs are low-paying or practically nonexistent. Some people get around this by buying land and building their own homes to save money(I wish I could remember where I read the story of the couple who built their house bit by bit themselves on weekends over a 2-year span). Here in MN, I know of people who commute almost 2 hours each way to work in order to "enjoy" an inexpensive house on a few acres of land 100 miles outside the metro area.
Food in this country is cheap. Housing, on the other hand, I agree is for the most part insanely expensive. But I wonder how much this has to do with what the builders are willing to build. Are people really willing to buy tiny, simple houses or are their prospective owners preferring to spend their money on rent?
So here's my proposal: We should have something where a group of people can get together to build houses for everyone in the group, providing their own money and sharing labor, and the government offers training and free inspection and streamlines the permitting processes. You end up with a group of homeowners that can build a stable community, a bunch of people who understand how their house works and can fix it themselves and who may now be motivated to start businesses doing just that for others. I'm not sure how much this differs from Habitat for Humanity, but I believe HfH is completely charity sponsored (I give to them every year), while my idea is funded by the people needing the housing.
You just answered your own question. I was raised by a single mom who didn't even get a high school diploma until just before I got mine. I understand fully what it's like to not have much financially. But my mom gave me " a better start" than others by drilling into my head the need for education in order to get ahead. I still remember her testing me on my multiplication tables while she did housework. Now that I am pretty comfortable, I will do everything I can to give my son a leg up. Why? Because I'm his parent and I can. I'm sorry for all the kids who can't get a good start in life, but they're not my responsibility; my own son is.
I respect that you are willing to correct your assumptions, but the quoted sentence indicates the point I'm really getting at: only the owner, who fully understands the compromises he made, can justify the vehicle. This because it supposedly fits his needs. Anyone else's opinion is irrelevant. Any reason you can come up with to justify an SUV, a pickup, or a '69 Firebird with a 12mpg V8, someone else can point at and say is no justification.
Your complaint seems to be based on what you consider inappropriate use of resources. The problem is that what is inappropriate is highly subjective so the argument will never be won. If you really want to fight for clean air, go pick on people mowing their lawn with gas-powered mowers.
Let's ignore for a minute the aftermarket items like 33"x12.5" BFG All Terrain tires, the auto-locking rear differential, suspension and body lifts necessary to fit such tires, and the higher-ratio gears for low-end torque for a minute and just ask how you know that my vehicles aren't used to "drive over large obstacles?" Actually, that's not too important, after all you could just say I could find a way around said obstacles, and you'd be right -- it's just fun.
But I would really be interested in knowing just how you computed my "share of fossil fuels."
Don't misconstrue anything I say here as attempting to justify my purchases; I don't need to justify anything I spend money on to anyone on
I'm always amused when I see a comment like this on
People are not idiots. Mileage is conspicuously displayed on the spec. sheet of the car. I fill up my SUV about once a week, a lot more if we go on long trips (and in MN everything is far away). It gets about 30% less mileage than my last car. Don't care. I can afford the gas: it's just a part of paying for what I want.
Oh, and just for the record: I went to high school in NYC, so I didn't get driver's ed. Like many New Yorkers, I never even drove a car until I was in my 20's and then I paid a driving school to teach me. Try learning to drive in NYC rush hour traffic -- ingrains those survival skills pretty deep
And this is called flex time?? No, it is not normal for a programmer/software engineer type job by any stretch of the imagination.
I come in to work any time between oh, 8am and 10am and leave approx. 8 hours later. No one bothers me as long as I get my work done on time. I regularly eat lunch at my desk, and don't spend much time chatting, so I'm fairly productive. I've always thought this to be more or less normal in the work environments I have been in.
Sure, some employees raise an eyebrow if they see me walking in at 10am when they came in at 7 (that's nuts!!), but they're not signing my paycheck, so I don't give it a second thought.
Try this experiment:
Suspend a 5lb weight from the ceiling with fishing line or something.
Stand with your back against the wall and pull the weight until it just touches your nose. You've just lifted the elevator up to geosynch. orbit.
Let go of the weight, being careful not to give it any thrust. Swinging out, it's your "down elevator", swinging back in it's your "up elevator."
What should happen?
Well your "basic physics" will tell you that it will swing out, and then back, stopping about 1mm from your nose. So far, so good.
Now wait 5 minutes. Why isn't it swinging near your nose anymore? Figure out the answer to this and you'll see why your "basic assumption" is wrong.
This was modded Funny(?) but I think you're onto something. I have been thinking of this for a while. I make small art boxes/miniature books and silly sculptures from bits of wood, stone and metal and I have been thinking of incorporating technology into some of them for a CPU controlled kinetic sculpture. That, and it's interesting to find other ways of expressing ideas, or decorating custom hardware (e.g., MP3 player in an enclosure milled from a solid block of aluminum). Look at some of the handwork that goes into overpriced tube amplifiers these days. William Gibson wrote a short story that reminds me of this ("All the time in the world" or something like that) where the main character had a hand built game console in a custom enclosure.
Think of it as another form of case modding.
to
When the poster hasn't said anything about assembly?
In any event, embedded applications do not have to be any faster than desktop ones, for the most part. In fact, considering that often those apps are controlling physical hardware with response times measured in tens of milliseconds, they can afford to be a lot slower. But perhaps you meant specifically real time embedded applications? Again, speed is not the issue; predictability of response times is.
Bash Java if you must, but at least be somewhat rational in your bashing.
The reasons Java hasn't been widely adopted on embedded devices (although that was its original raison d'etre) have more to do with a) footprint b) unpredictable response time (although this is getting better) and c) programmer ignorance. I work on an embedded system that runs on a 1.2GHz Pentium SBC with 256Mb RAM and over 700kloc of C++ at last count. It definitely has the horsepower to run Java, and if the project were starting right now I'd seriously consider it as Java has features that would have let us get done much faster. Yes, these resources are unusual for embedded systems, but not unheard of. As complexity of such systems grows, there will be a bigger push for better development methods and higher level languages will be among them. C's only real advantages are small memory footprint and execution speed. Safety and programmer productivity suck. Assembly? Unless it's less than about 2k of code, or for a 1M+ units, low profit-margin device, you're probably wasting your time.
Personally, I prefer Atmel AVR devices these days. atmel.com and www.avrfreaks.com will give you all the info you need. Z-80 is still around in different guises. Zilog has a few single board computers that can run C and other languages and they're pretty inexpensive for what you get. Can even get them with webserver code! If you want to build another Z80 machine, get back to me. I have tubes of Z80s, Z80-CTC, Z80-PIO (I think) 32k EPROMS and 32k SRAMS sitting in my basement that I will probably never use. Considered packaging them up for eBay sale, but got too lazy. Give me $20 for the lot (50-100 chips) and you can build Z80 based computers to your hearts content :-)
While I applaud your attempt to do something like this, why on earth would you develop a product for a field that by your admission is flooded with competitive (and free at that!) products? How did you intend to differentiate yours from all the rest? I can understand if this was just something you were doing for your own use and later decided to sell it, but you said you developed this with the intention of marketing it.
I'm a bit puzzled by how you expected to make money doing this.
Only for the mind-numbingly boring classes. I'm not arguing with you: I realize that many of these exist. But there are courses taught by excellent professors that you need to be present to get most of, because the instructor brings his experience to bear on the class. It's one thing to read about noise and bandwidth issues in communications wiring in a book; it adds a considerable depth when the professor tells you why he used fiberoptic cables in his space shuttle project.
When I'm proved wrong I like a good explanation. This works for me :-)
I know this is nitpicking, but if this was the Air Force, shouldn't the "ensign" have been a 2nd Lt?
I'm not a support person, I'm a developer, but I agree with this. I've used it in the past and it works well. Tell the requester what it will cost in time and its impact on your existing workload. Try to estimate how long it will take you to get to the new task if you prioritize it appropriately. In development, it usually boils down to: do you want feature X to be late, or feature Y to wait?
This assumes you are dealing with fairly reasonable people (my bosses tend to be pretty smart). I know there are some idiots who will just say "Find the time to do both." Happily, they don't work in my department.
The FDA does not test devices. The manufacturer develops the device using a documented process and then tests it. The results of the tests are submitted to the FDA for approval. The FDA can (and do: but we usually have warning) show up and audit any aspect of the development or testing that they feel like, so it behooves the mfr to not cut corners or say they do things that they actually don't.
One thing that's always struck me as odd is that most clerks don't look at the signature on my credit card because it has my photo on the front. I've gone through so many new cards that the picture has deteriorated quite a bit (I guess the first iterations were not recorded digitally), and the pic is 10 years old and barely looks like me, but still people just glance at the front of the card and hand it back. Contrast with my check card which only has a signature: that they usually turn over to look at.
While at first, having a photograph to compare to seems like a good idea, they really should look at both that and the signature.
You really think that working longer is a benefit of living longer? What ever happened to enjoying the time when you're not working? I would imagine the bigger issue is how to work the same amount of time and still support myself in 100+ years of retirement.
Life (even if I live to be 300) is still too short to be spent working. Wine. Women. Song. That's worth living 300 years for.
I just re-read your post and realized that you said pretty much the same thing I did. So just forget what I wrote :-)
And that's exactly the problem. Let me say first that I use GnuCash as my only checkbook accounting system -- only because a Linux box is my primary PC. But it took me a while when I started using GnuCash before I figured out it was only double entry acctg. Now, I have a basic understanding of accounting from learning double entry using the absolutely evil Pacioli 2000 for DOS back in my entrepreneurial days, but it was still annoying. I wanted to record the checks and check card transactions, not manage a small business.
Once I got a bunch of accounts set up everything is fine (except a few bugs I come across during reconciliation), but most people probably wouldn't have bothered to go that far. In fact, I almost went back to Quicken (or Quickbooks, don't remember what I have), but what stopped me was having to turn on a separate computer just to do checkbook entries.
There should either be a wizard/tutorial to get people's accounts set up, or a selection to just make GnuCash act like a single entry checkbook register.
You know what? Once I would have agreed with you. I remember getting a call I couldn't answer. So I opened the product manual, looked up the topic he wanted to know about in the table of contents and turned to that page. It was the first item, listed exactly where it should have been. I politely (but probably with a sarcastic tone) told him the page the info was on and hung up and went back to my circuit design or what ever I was doing (support was only one of my responsibilities) thinking "What an idiot!!"
But now I realize I was wrong. My job was to satisfy the customer. Period. To get him to use our product effectively and be happy with it. Not to just point him to a page in the manual and make him feel stupid. Yeah, he was lazy. That's beside the point. Someone spends his (or his employer's) hard earned cash on our product, then we have to take the time to make it usable for him. Either that, or take the product back for a full refund. There's no excuse for poor tech support. Either do it right, or don't offer support at all.
Excellent post!
My secondary responsibility at my first job (very small co.) was customer support. It took me over 2 years to get to the point you described where I figured out that the users weren't idiots: it was just that I didn't have the patience and people skills to deal with them without either pissing us both off or making them feel stupid. Dangerous. These are paying customers, after all.
Luckily those were things I could learn with time. I just wish more so-called "tech support" and sysadmin types here could say that they would handle it along the lines you described. Unfortunately, it's seen as a lot more fun to just laugh at the lusers.
OR come live here in Minnesota
Seriously, I remember driving around in Ely (at the northern end of the road; at the beginning of true wilderness) one night looking for snack foods and the road just appeared to end. There were simply no lights beyond the end of town. None. And with an overcast winter sky, it was absolutely pitch black. Could have been the edge of the world for all I could tell.